Witches, Kisses, & Fish Gods (Spring Reading Wrap-up)
march - may
I’m happy to say this spring was kind to me and that I am a lucky, lucky woman. I’ve made new friends, worked a job I actually liked, and landed a really exciting opportunity. I’ve finally found my creative streak again, too, and have started another fiction project!
I’m a sappy person who finds meaning in old wrappers and bird calls, so forgive me for saying I think that this is the magic of spring. There’s a reason this season represents romance and cleansing. I hope your spring felt like a new beginning, or the return to something like home.
In my free time, I sat by my windowsill with a cold soda and read books. I finished eight novels and four novellas this season and have read what is possibly one of my favorite books ever. Without further ado, here is my spring reading wrap-up!
Necrology by Meg Ripley ☆☆☆☆☆
dark fantasy / folklore (finished March 9th)
After the Salem witch trials, the Freemen agree to leave the witches alone so long as they swear off magic. Necrology takes place hundreds of years later when evidence of witchcraft is found at an orphanage, and a little girl named Rabbit becomes the star witness in a trial against her caretaker, Whitetail.
Necrology is a slow burn. Most of the action takes place in the last fifty pages, but the tension beforehand was enough to carry my interest. Since we’re mostly reading from the perspective of an eight year old, not everything is explained—but that mystery element seemed very intentional.
The adults around Rabbit manipulate and groom her into doubting her experiences and beliefs, which was done realistically and made the story more compelling. The book doesn’t hold back in its portrayals of misogyny and evangelicalism, so consider that your warning. I really liked this book and I’m excited for the release of the sequel, Woodfeast, coming later this year!
TW: child abuse and death, sexual assault, misogyny
The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood ☆☆☆☆
romance / comedy (finished March 14th)
I’ve already released a full-length review of this one, which you can find here. Overall, I thought it was a charming romance with believable chemistry and likable characters. Not all of the humor landed with me, and I thought some of the hijinks were far-fetched, but I was left feeling satisfied and warm and fuzzy. I can’t wait to read more from Hazelwood!
TW: sexual coercion
The Jasad Heir by Sara Hashem ☆☆☆
fantasy / romance (finished March 25th)
Sylvia is an heiress in hiding. With her kingdom of Jasad left in ruins and her people hunted, she takes a new name and tries to live a new life. But she ends up face to face with Arin, the son of the man who destroyed her kingdom, and is chosen as his champion in a series of deadly trials. She must hide her magic and her identity if she wants to live.
I really wanted to like The Jasad Heir. It was advertised as everything I love; a real enemies to lovers with cool world building and a badass heroine. While I did find the ‘enemies to lovers’ compelling, that was pretty much all this book had going for it. I think the author’s original idea centered on Sylvia and Arin’s relationship and everything else was built around them. They were the strongest characters, but everything else felt underbaked; the magic was messy, the rules were never clear, the other characters were lifeless and annoying (Sylvia’s two ‘best friends’ felt like cardboard cutouts), and there were hundreds of pages of unnecessary scenes that didn’t add any immersion and felt like filler.
I really liked Sylvia as a protagonist, and the book did have some really cool moments. But it lost me in the details, which I don’t think even the author had figured out, and it ended up being kind of a slog to read through. I will not be returning for the sequel.
TW: genocide, violence
There Is No Antimemetics Division by QNTM ☆☆☆☆
science fiction / cosmic horror (finished March 29th)
Antimemes are beings and ideas that affect our memory. They are all around us, and shape our societies without us even knowing it. Welcome to the Antimemetics Division. No, this is not your first day.
There is no Antimemetics Division is like if the Men in Black met Severance. This was a highly anticipated read for me, and it did not disappoint. I was worried that such a high concept premise like this would end up lost in the sauce as they say, but the author really pulled everything together in the end and kept my interest throughout the story.
This wasn’t a character-driven narrative. I liked the characters but didn’t love them, but I didn’t need to love them, because the plot was so complex there was always something making me root for them anyways. The monster design was especially top notch. I was genuinely creeped out.
I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys science fiction or out-of-this-world stories.
TW: gore & violence
She Waits Where Shadows Gather by Michelle Tang ☆☆☆☆☆
horror / drama (finished April 7th)
A young married couple moves back into the husband’s home in the Philippines, but he’s lying about the real reason they’re there. After a horrible accident, the husband starts to hear a voice that no one else seems to notice…
I really enjoyed this one. Haunted house stories usually don’t get me—I find the majority of them uninspired—but She Waits Where Shadows Gather wasn’t just entertaining, it was actually scary. At its core, it’s about a fractured marriage and a deeply flawed couple. The main pair felt like real people with realistic concerns, dialogue, and backstories. The drama moved the story along and wasn’t just entertaining filler. Plus, the plot twist at the end genuinely surprised me!
The Divine Farce by Michael S.A. Graziano ☆☆☆☆
horror (finished April 8th)
Three strangers wake up standing in a cylindrical hole in the ground. They don’t remember who they are or how they got there. There isn’t room to sit down, and their only food is pear nectar that seeps from holes in the ceiling.
This book was as gruesome as I expected it to be. I’m drawn to stories about horrible situations because they strip humanity of everything but our most primal instincts: this includes violence, yes, but humans are also social animals, and we want to work together. We seek companionship in the darkest corners. The Divine Farce is a gross, emotionally heavy novella that explores these exact themes. What do we search for when there’s nothing left? How can we make meaning when there’s no hope of a future?
I recommend this to anyone interested in philosophy or stories about the human condition, but be warned, there are lots of fluids.
TW: violence, torture, lots of fluids
A Plagued Sea by Kim Bo-Young ☆☆☆☆
cosmic horror / translation (finished April 13th)
Haewon Village is under lockdown. After an earthquake unleashes an ancient plague, bodyguard Mu-young is stuck inside Haewon Village, cut off from the rest of Korea. Years later, the plague has had unexpectedly dark consequences, and Mu-young learns that some of the residents are okay with it…
A Plagued Sea is a Korean retelling of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth, specifically from the residents’ perspectives. The central character in the original story is given a backseat role, and author Kim Bo-Young describes his story in a much different, more comical way. I really liked the protagonist, Mu-young. She was strong but with understandable doubts and fears.
The story makes readers feel grossed out while also having us empathize with the townsfolk. I understood the rationale behind their decisions and the defensiveness they felt towards outsiders. It was horror, but there was a nuance to it that I found refreshing. It’s a novella, so it’s a really quick read. I finished it in one day.
TW: violence
The Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio De Maria ☆☆☆
cosmic horror / translation (finished April 18th)
A young man decides to research what locals call the ‘twenty days of Turin,’ in which a library housing everyone’s diaries caused widespread madness and mysterious deaths—deaths that look to have been caused by inhuman hands.
While I understand that The Twenty Days of Turin is an important piece of the cosmic horror canon, it was kind of…forgettable? The protagonist is supposed to be a blank-slate-everyman, which is not usually my cup of tea. I think the eerie atmosphere and tension were done really well, and the ending was the best part, but otherwise I found it didn’t add anything new and I forgot about a lot of the plot points as soon as I set it down.
TW: violence
The Devil She Knows by Alexandria Bellefleur ☆☆
romance / dark comedy (finished May 5th)
After a proposal gone wrong, a young woman meets a feisty blonde in an elevator who claims to be a demon. She’ll give anything to get her ex girlfriend back, even making a deal with the devil.
The Devil She Knows did exactly what it set out to do; entertain, and nothing else. Neither member of our main pairing had much depth, the worldbuilding isn’t explored very much (you’d think a story with demons would have something more to say about Hell or religion), and I finished the book feeling unsatisfied—and a little annoyed.
Alexandria Bellefleur tried to write a comedy. Unfortunately, comedy is all about timing, and Bellefleur tried to cram a one-liner in every single paragraph, which had the opposite effect. I originally gave this book 3 stars for ‘average,’ but I think I’m changing my rating to 2 for ‘bad’ because the more I think about the failed comedy and flat romance the more grated I feel.
Great idea, bad execution.
Babel by R.F. Kuang ☆☆☆☆☆
historical fiction / dark academia (finished May 16th)
Robin Swift is taken from his home in Canton and trained to attend Babel, the magical translators institute at Oxford. The college is everything he’d dreamed it would be, but the Hermes Society—an underground group of anti-colonial scholars—shows him how Babel, and Oxford at large, are serving the British empire’s expansion and possible war with China. Robin is forced to choose between the only life he has ever known and the revolution of a lifetime.
I have so much to say about Babel and yet I’m at a loss for words. I’m still recovering from this book. I think this is easily one of my top 5 reads of all time, and my favorite book of this year so far. It’s just so beautifully written, and the characters are all given such depth, and the relationships between them were believable, and the tension and the themes and gahhhhh it’s everything I want from a book!
A lot of people have criticized Babel for thinking its readers are stupid. There are footnotes on every other page giving cultural/historical context or explaining more about the characters themselves. While I do think Babel really nails in its themes sometimes, I didn’t think this was a bad thing, nor did it take away from my experience. But if you prefer texts that don’t do that, maybe this one isn’t for you.
TW: violent racism, slurs, suicide
Dead Weight by Hildur Knutsdottir ☆☆☆
horror / drama (finished May 19th) - ADVANCED READER COPY
A woman and her new friend have to get rid of a body.
The book is so short I really can’t give more of a synopsis without getting into spoilers. I really enjoyed Hildur’s previous novel, The Night Guest, but Dead Weight fell a little flat for me. The action doesn’t happen until the last fifty pages, and it’s glossed over pretty quickly. The characters were interesting but I wasn’t given enough time to care about them.
Thank you to NetGalley for the advanced readers copy.
TW: animals in peril, gore
The Other by Annie Neugebauer ☆☆☆☆
horror (finished May 21st) - ADVANCED READER COPY
A couple on the verge of a divorce goes on a backpacking trip and meets their doppelgängers.
The Other is a standalone kind-of-sequel to The Extra, one of my favorite horror reads, and takes place in the same forest. It’s a genuinely creepy story that I had to put down when reading alone at night. Neugebauer really nails the feeling of the uncanny valley, or the idea that something is just a little off. I didn’t love every decision the main characters made, and the ending left much to be desired (which is how I felt about The Extra, too), but the tension and pacing were top notch. I can’t wait to read the last book in the Outsiders Sequence!
Thanks for reading as always! Have you read any of these books? Let me know in the comments below! <3
I loved Babel so much and the footnotes were epic! Have you read Blood Over Bright Haven? I associate the two because of the anti-colonial themes.