REVIEWED BY REBECCA

Rating: 4 Stars

Eleven lesbian/bisexual paranormal short stories…

Reborn by Brooklyn Ray – Dark magic, mystical bloodlines, a living forest, and two women fighting to reclaim a love they lost.

Zero Hour by J.C. Long – She can’t outrun the full moon.

Dove in the Window by Kara Race-Moore – As if the Great Depression wasn’t bad enough, Cissy’s first love is back from the dead.

Bottom of the River by Samantha Kate – The demon isn’t always the monster.

If You Want to Walk by Nicole Field – Follow Chess into the Underneath and meet the strange creatures she finds there.

A Tended Garden by J.P. Jackson – Immortality or humanity—which one will win out in the end?

Romancing the Healer by Caitlin Ricci – In a deadly snowstorm a werewolf needs all the help she can get, and the werebear coming to her aid is more than she appears to be.

Midnight Kisses by L.J. Hamlin – A local witch, a new-to-town werewolf, and a mystery to be solved.

Like a Bell through the Night by Kayla Bashe – Guarding a faerie princess? All in a day’s work for a werewolf bodyguard. Avoiding falling in love with said princess? The hardest mission of Jaffa’s life.

The Imp in the Rock by Charli Coty – The cure for a bad breakup might be magic.

Smile Like You Mean It by Tay LaRoi – Ingrid meets a terrifying Japanese legend, but the stories are all wrong.

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I must admit, I wasn't entirely sure how to go about reviewing an anthology, so this may be a little different from my usual reviews. 

Like any anthology, this collection has a lot to do with personal taste. A story that one person loves won't quite hit the spot for someone else. There were a couple of stories that were a firm 3 stars for me, but I can see on Goodreads that other people really connected with those stories. I think it's safe to say that Into the Mystic will have something for everyone. And geez it's good to see more genre fiction out there!

While all stories are F/F, you'll find a range of representation, with gender neutral characters, bisexual, lesbian, and pansexual characters as well. It was great to see one story that included a F/F story featuring a trans character who is 100% accepted as a woman by her lesbian love interest. Our community is diverse, as are our experiences of identity and self. Diverse stories, as such, are wonderful.

My personal favourites in the collection were 'Dove in the Window' by Kara Race-Moore, and 'A Tended Garden' by J.P. Jackson.

Race-Moore's story is a peculiar combination of realism and fantasy, set during the Depression but with the protagonist exploring magical elements of the world around her as though they're completely normal. Loss is one of the key themes and ultimately hope is what helps our protagonist find a way to move forward despite the trauma she's experienced. It's a story with a tinge of sweetness about it, mixed in with lovely 1930s ambience. 

Jackson's story lives up the wonderful fantasy descriptions I've come to expect from him after reading his novel, Daimonion. This story centres on a well-established witches coven harbouring a dark secret. At first I thought this tale might get into "stereotypical evil witches" territory, but that wasn't the case. As with any group of people in society, it only takes one twisted heart to taint what ought to be a loving community. I especially loved the creativity of the magic in the story. My heart ached for the wood nymphs in this story and I thoroughly enjoyed their overall representation.

You get great return for your investment with an anthology like this. The stories are long enough to be interesting and complex, yet short enough to be devoured at whatever pace you prefer. 

REVIEWED BY ANONYMOUS​
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Genre: epic fantasy
Pairings: f/f, f/m, m/m, poly, references made to various enby pairings as well
Queer Representation: lesbian, gay, gender fluid, transgender, bisexual, intersex (sort of)
Warnings: rape, cannibalism, a ridiculous amount of death
Rating: 3.75 stars. Is that a thing? It should be a thing




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Review
On the eve of a recurring catastrophic event known to extinguish nations and reshape continents, a troubled orphan evades death and slavery to uncover her own bloody past.
There’s more to the back blurb, but the above is the A plot line, and the one with the most depth, IMO. As with most modern epic fantasy, we are exposed to a staggering number of POVs. While I delighted in every moment of the worldbuilding in this book, especially in the queer representation, the volume of characters and their (general) lack of significant growth had this book feeling more like the wanderings of George R.R. Martin than the dynamic head hopping of the Mistborn books (well the first three, anyway).

So let’s start with what I loved.

Queer Representation

I had no idea how to even process the start of this book. Queer characters are everywhere. In fact, I’m not certain anyone is straight in this book. Lilia, our orphan girl from the blurb, has two romantic arcs with women. Roh, a minor POV character, has relations with men. There’s an assassin, another minor POV character, who is an interesting variety of intersex in which his sex actually changes by season. Some countries have five genders (assertive male, passive male, assertive female, passive female, other, although these aren’t the titles they’re given), and people are allowed to pick which fits them best. Some people are flat out gender fluid, some have ambiguous genitalia (I think? There’s some vagueness here). Queer relationships are onscreen everywhere, and no one thinks its weird at all.

How refreshing.
 
Worldbuilding

The concept of the mirrors and alternate dimensions is pretty standard across portal fantasy, but this takes the genre into high fantasy and wow, does it do it well. The viciousness of the landscape, the colors of the sky, the hopelessness of some of the people, the rage of others, it all blends perfectly into a world you could drown in.

I was engaged as well by how smoothly the author transformed standard fantasy tropes on their head. The saturation of females over males in the narrative, especially in the backdrop characters, the casual in-world rapes and power struggles, the sort of casualness of it all, the this is just how it is, served as a poignant reminder of how ridiculous epic fantasy often is. By turning the gender ratios around, Hurley manages to make an effective example why gender ratios matter, especially with background characters. Where were all the men in these worlds? Don’t know, don’t care, this isn’t their story. Don’t like it? Maybe you should look at why that is.

With all that praise out of the way, let’s get to issues.

Character development

At it’s most basic level, the characters developed. They grew up, they learned, they met new people and engaged in battles and magic and whatnot. At a more interpersonal level, we never spent enough time with any one character, never got enough real internal monologue or motivation from any one character, to really see substantive growth. The only character I ever got emotionally attached to was a minor POV character–Zezili’s husband–and his entire purpose in the narrative appeared to be titilation and social commentary. He was the only character with real emotions though. Even Lilia, our primary protagonist, failed to really engage throughout the book. Her early chapters are a reasonable hook, but the middle of the book has so much, so much POV shift that not only is it hard to keep track of who is who, but it’s hard to stay connected to any character long enough for a POV chapter of them to come back around.

Names, Places, Things

Reading this book reminded me of the first time I picked up an Anne McCaffery Pern book. I didn’t know where to start so I just grabbed one and started reading. There were so many words I didn’t know, like klah, and I thought I’d never sort everything out. I did though, by about halfway through the book. Mirror Empire has to be, what, five times as long as that first McCaffery novel I read, and by the end of it there were still words I didn’t know the meaning of, and character names I had to go…wait, who is this again? There’s a glossary at the back, which includes a dramatis personae, but I hated going back to it every fourth word. There was just too much in terms of names for me to keep straight. I’d probably have been fine if I took notes, but I hate taking notes.
 
In general, this book really scratched my ‘epic fantasy’ itch for the year, and I’ve got no complaints as far as queer rep goes. I wish I could have connected with one of the primary protagonists more. Of the main three–orphan girl Lilia, ruthless killer and domestic rapist Zezili, and Ahkio, the dead kai’s brother–Lilia was the most interesting. Her later chapters moved her into the same sort of hard emotion of Zezili though, and I lost interest. Zezili herself seemed human only when thinking of her husband (which is all sort of messed up, since she kept him basically as a sex slave), and Ahkio I never cared for.
Lovers of large cast epic fantasy, dark epic fantasy, and anything even remotely similar to Game of Thrones, will enjoy Mirror Empire. The book is a lot darker than the epic fantasy written by Sanderson, however, so those wanting cleaner, lighter epic fantasy should probably pass.

You can buy THE MIRROR EMPIRE in paperback here and ebook here.

REVIEWED BY J.S. FIELDS

UPDATE - AUGUST, 2020: 

Please note that, as a sole operator with full time work and kids, I am currently sitting on a backlog of books awaiting review. As such, I am unable to accept any books for review at this time.

WHAT DO I  REVIEW?

This blog was initially established to address a gap in the LGBTIQ+ book review world. There seemed to be a huge number of blogs completing reviews for M/M novels compared to those willing and interested in reading F/F stories (or those that don't neatly fit in either category). 

Many of the blogs that do review F/F fiction focus on romance over genre stories, or heavily emphasis speculative fiction that is essentially romance or erotica based. As such, the primary focus here is to review sci-fi and fantasy featuring women and/or LGBTQI+ people as the leading characters and, better yet, women who are part of the LGBTQI+ community. If you send me a romantic comedy, you've sadly sent your book to the wrong place to be considered for a review. There are plenty of amazing sites that will review these kinds of stories.

The exciting thing is that, since I started this blog, there's also been ever-growing acceptance and interest in a wider variety of SFF at a lot of the larger women-loving-women review sites. It's definitely a good time to be a reader!

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If your book is a romance, romantic comedy, or contains graphic scenes, it likely will not be reviewed. But never fear, loads of other sites love your type of story!