REVIEWED BY J.S.

Genre: portal fantasy
Pairings: none
Queer Representation: trans, ace
Warnings: potential tooth decay
Rating: four stars

Review
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This is the third book in the Wayward Children series, which started with Every Heart a Doorway, which won, in no particular order, the 2017 Hugo, the 2017 Alex Award, the 2016 Nebula Award, and was nominated for the 2017 World Fantasy Award, the 2017 British Fantasy Award, and was on the 2016 Tiptree Honor List.
I still need to write reviews for the first two, so when they’re done, you’ll find the review for Every Heart a Doorway here and Down Among the Sticks and Bones here.

In this third installation is told mostly from the perspective of new student Cora, former resident of the Trenches and former mermaid. Cora happens upon Rini, daughter of the deceased Sumi (remember, Sumi is from a nonsense world, so having a kid after you’re dead is totes legit). Rini has just found out her mother is dead, and so Rini is starting to disappear. A handful of students set out between realms to bring Sumi back to life, save Rini, and maybe, just maybe, find their own doors again in the process. In doing so they must journey through the Halls of the Dead to find Nancy, and eventually head to Sumi and Rini’s land of sugar and confection to defeat the Queen of Cakes.

Plot

This book lacked a lot of the magical whimsy of Every Heart a Doorway (EHaD), and had a lot less darkness than either EHaD or Down Among the Sticks and Bones (DAtSB). It’s possible that since it primarily dealt with a land of sweets that the author was trying for a lighter feel, but the story came off, well, sugary instead of heavy. More cotton candy than meat pie, which was how I felt after EHaD. Full. Content. This left me with that sort of high fructose corn syrup aftertaste. It wasn’t bad at all. It just wasn’t incredible, which is what I’ve come to expect from this series.

Still, the plot was well paced and the characters rounded. This was the first book in the series I didn’t wish was longer. This one was exactly the right length for the story that needed to be told. The plot, that Sumi needed to be brought back to life so she could create her daughter Rini (who is part of this Scooby Gang), was completely appropriate for both Sumi’s character, and the description of her nonsense world. It was great, too, to get to see Sumi again. Out of everyone who got offed in EHaD, Sumi was the one I was most attached to. It was great to get to see her not only alive again, but to know that she would one day find her door.

Worldbuilding

If you read this book for no other reason, read it for the worldbuilding. The descriptions of Sumi’s world are amazing. I’m not a big sweets fan but I appreciate the artistry that goes into things like gingerbread houses, and the descriptions in this book were like mind crack. I would kill to visit this world, if only for a few minutes, to see the gingerbread castles and candy corn fields, and soda pop oceans. What kid hasn’t dreamed of something like this? What child who has seen Willy Wonka (the trip 1970s version) hasn’t been obsessed with a world made entirely of sweets?

Characters

Cora makes a find addition to the crew and adds a dimension on body positivity to the otherwise very diverse and eclectic school kids. Kade gets a bit more backstory as well (nothing new, just some more intricate rehashing). Seeing Nancy happy in her home is worth the price of admission, and the real emotional punch comes at the end, as one of our students gets their long awaited door home.
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Overall, this was a worthy addition to the Wayward Children series, just not perhaps it’s strongest entry.

REVIEWED BY J.S. FIELDS

Genre: fantasy (romance fantasy)
Pairings: m/m, m/f, f/f
Queer Representation: cis gay male, cis lesbian, bisexual male, pansexual
Warnings: none
Rating: four stars





Review

A reimagining of the Perseus myth from Greek literature, with all the demigod action and adventure one expects, with a lot of teen angst and penis-on-penis action thrown in for flavor. 

Full disclaimer: I’m a lesbian. I don’t, as a rule, read M/M. I wouldn’t know what to do with a penis under any scenario, including but not limited to every single one presented in this book. As such, I’m not going to comment on the sex scenes, because other than clinical curiosity (Really? You can do that? Huh.), I don’t have too many thoughts on them. Well, I HAVE thoughts, but they’re probably not pertinent and they’re definitely juvenile. 

Plot

KING OF THE STORM (hereafter KotS) isn’t so much a coming of age tale as it is a road trip tale, told over the course of a single lifetime. We get to follow mythological Perseus from his boyhood at school and his first crush, to seeing his grandchildren being born. We get to live through some of his most famous exploits (killing Medusa, etc.) while getting a deep look at his familial relationships, desire for a ‘normal’ life, and romantic entanglements. 

If you look at the plot as more of a soul mate trope journey, instead of a hero’s journey, the book stands on its own a lot better. I was frustrated at first because the battle scenes seemed skimmed over, especially the more well known ones, in favor of romantic relationships and sex scenes, but I think the author might have been working off the assumption that we already know Perseus the hero, now it’s time to know Perseus the complex human. I can get behind that. 

Is it romance or is it fantasy?

This is the question I kept asking myself. The book sets itself up as romance during the first few chapters, but once Perseus leaves school we’re treated to much more of a hero journey. Perseus makes friends, dodges prophecy, and gets trailed by gods wherever he goes. He gets assigned a wife. He has kids. His kids have kids. He has adventures. A lot more gets packed into the middle and end of this story than I’d anticipated, and I think it made the book a much richer read because of that. Yes, there is romance, and yes, they’re soul mates, and yes, it’s HEA, but Perseus has to really struggle, people are lost along the way, and the author use a neat blend of Greek mythology and Greek history to get us there. 

Sexy time, sexy time

For those reading for this part, while Perseus is canonically bisexual, only the sex scenes with men are described. His relationship with his wife is fade to black throughout the book, which I was kind of grumpy about. After half a book of penis I was looking forward to a little muff action (even if there was a penis involved), but alas, twas not to be. We do get lesbians towards the end, but only innuendo action (though we do get a f/f wedding!). This book will do well with the m/m community of readers, especially those looking to get out of standard contemporary and into different worlds. 

As a final note, I appreciate seeing more m/m books written by male authors. There isn’t anything wrong, of course, with m/m being written by women, but I know gay male readers have been clamoring for more ownvoices m/m work. The sex in this book is not fetishized in any way, and I didn’t feel voyeristic reading it. There wasn’t an ‘alpha’ or any type of structured power play, and the sex scenes read, between the two main characters, very much like two people in love. ​

RATING: 3.75 stars

Special Agent Ryan O'Connor is starting to get her life back together in the aftermath of a shooting and her boss's arrest. Despite scheduling incompatibilities preventing them from seeing one another, she and Allison are doing great; she's preparing to return to full duty; and she's trying to block out the voices of those who've been doubting she still has what it takes to do her job.

Ryan should've known things were never that simple. When a ghost from her past reappears without warning, blindsiding her in a way she never could have expected, Ryan’s entire existence is badly shaken. She’d always believed that the best protection any woman could ever have—aside from a gun—was courage, but now she finds herself asking a question she never thought she’d need to answer: Who protects the Secret Service?


Cover Artist: Melody Pond  (Yes! This must surely be a pseudonym, but it's an AWESOME one. Gosh, I miss River Song so much). 
Genres: Intrigue & Thriller
Purchase link: Bold Stroke Books
Reviewed by Rebecca
​The great things that led to a high rating...

This was a rather good book, and that's coming from someone who doesn't often pick-up something that isn't sci-fi or literary fiction. The writer has a fabulous ability to convey and explore emotion. There are wonderful descriptions of our narrator's reactions to various events, many of which felt very real and believable. All of this kept me highly engaged for the majority of the story, which I finished in a couple of days. With little kids invading my space all the time, that's a quick read for me, and means I just felt myself needing to come back to the story. 

​Even though I hadn't read the first two books, it didn't take long to be quite familiar with the MC's personality. It isn't an easy feat to ease a totally new reader into a series in Book 3, but they've managed to do it!

The cast of characters are interesting and I enjoyed reading about most of them, including Ryan's father, and Claudia Quinn. Plus, is it just me or is there something between Quinn and the President's daughter ('Hurricane')? The characters really are a strong point, though. We get a strong sense of who everyone is, how they feel, how they react to things and why, and what tends to motivate their behaviour. 

The aspects that held me back from 5 stars...

MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD
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I found having nearly 30% of the book being dedicated to the running race at the start to be a little excessive for a novel presented as being about action, but the inter-agency event did a very good job of catching-up the new readers and establishing relationships and so it certainly wasn't wasted in any way. I absolutely love well-written descriptive passages, but it depends on the book's genre, cover, and blurb as to what the reader's expectations surrounding that will likely be. At times I felt their were too many metaphors on the back of one another, with some paragraphs being one metaphor about emotional state after another. BUT - they were good ones so I got over it fairly fast ;) The sex scene also went on a bit long for my taste, but plenty of other readers will appreciate the very thing I didn't particularly love.  That's one of the things with reviews, isn't it? Preference. If you like explicit love scenes, it'll work well. If you're like me and not really a fan of them, you may skip a few pages in the first half - not a big deal, though, and certainly not a reflection of the writing.

It was good to see a bisexual (or pansexual, perhaps?) character in the form of Allison. Though, I did wonder at the use of the phrase "fly her freak flag" when our main character, Ryan, was reflecting on how accepting she is of Allison's sexuality. I may be being too precious on this, but the phrase stood out to me as a little less than accepting. Sometimes though, colloquialisms that are common in the USA don't quite make sense to me as an Australian, just as some phrases in my book were flagged by American readers as grammatically incorrect or nonsensical, but they're Aussie idioms that are appropriate for the character's context. I'll leave that to others to reflect on. I could've lived with out it though.

The book has, for better or worse, a lot in common with Radclyffe's Honor series. Being original is incredibly hard to do, and the book is a really easy-going read. I wouldn't recommend it if you're looking for something less formulaic when compared to super popular lesfic, something different and unique - because it isn't. But if you LOVE the formula of many popular lesfic books, this is a really competent and interesting addition to the cop-drama trope. I enjoyed reading it. I actually read 35% of it whilst getting a painful tattoo done on my back, so thanks so much for keeping me distracted, Kara. A. McLeod! :)

MAJOR SPOILER AHEAD
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Okay. So here's the main thing I didn't like about the book. And I'm so sorry to the author because, you know what, this is my personal preference and something I've long disliked about lesfic.

Rape. Why does someone always have to get raped? If I were to hazard a guess, I think that a woman gets raped by a man in anywhere between 50-80% of the lesfic books I've read, especially those that fall into genre fiction like thriller/action/sci-fi action. I prefer genre fiction to romance, so that means I am working from a limited scope of books when I make this call.

I've discussed my problems with this plot device before, and so my little rant here isn't really about this book alone. But the last 15% of the story really lost me because I just thought 'Really? AGAIN?!' I want to see our writers find some other way to create drama, to explore a character's reactions to traumatic situations.  When the secondary health problem that came with the sexual assault in the book was introduced in the last 10% of the book, I think I really had just had enough - it's clear that the rape will probably be used as a huge point of conflict in subsequent books and I don't know if I have the emotional energy for it. Of course I know sexual assault is highly prevalent in society, and I don't need to tell the internet why this particular issue is one I'm so tired of reading about. I don't want the issue to be ignored in any way. Nope, nope, nope. But I do want to see a more reasonable number of occurrences of it in books.

​Just like some people (including me) are tired of our LGBTIQA+ characters (or their direct allies) being killed off, I'm tired of them being sexually abused in just disproportionate numbers, and for the same reasons that the Lesbian Death Trope is an issue. ​ 

But if you aren't an picky as I am about this particular plot device, please don't be deterred. For the other 85% of the book I was really enjoying it!