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I'm honestly really conflicted about this book: so much so that I've put off this review for months after reading it. The ideas are great and the writing is good, too - there's a five- or at least four-and-a-half star book in here, and I came very close to genuinely loving it. But - the proofreading is bad enough that it seriously interferes with readability. I don't mean occasional typos; I mean "you have to fight your way through syntax errors several times per chapter".

(So knock a star off for that and this book that I honestly liked very much is suddenly a three-and-a-half star book, which feels awfully low for a book with such truly excellent ideas in it! This is why the delay. I've ended up averaging those out for a solid 4, which... feels kind of high for a book with this many errors in it, but still kind of low for the book it could have very nearly been?)

So, verdict: if you're willing to put up with having to rearrange punctuation in your head a whole bunch, it's very much worth the read. If not - it honestly depends on how unwilling you are. It's worth reiterating that the writing style is good and the prose is fluid, post mental rearranging; it just takes that extra bit of effort that means this very good book is anything but relaxing, and not in a good way.

I've loved R.B. Lemberg's Birdverse stories, so I went into this expecting to like it; and like it I did, very much. Deep worldbuilding and immersive prose, and a sort of pacing that just lets me breathe, and settle a little bit deeper in with every breath. And the characters, and the world, and the way it highlights beauty in everything while simultaneously acknowledging pain and drudgery and horrors, and...

If you're not familiar with Birdverse, that's no reason to hold off on this. If anything, it errs on the side of too much explanation, and it (and Birdverse stories in general) are not written with a rigid reading chronology in mind.

Selling points: worldbuilding; magic system; immersive prose; both protagonists are trans; both protagonists are in their sixties; nonbinary rep; two trans elders defeating a dictator through art.

Warnings: transmisia (not in the narrative, but in characters), including deadnaming and misgendering.

Collections are hard to review! The first half-or-so of this book is short stories, ranging from short flash to longer stories, and for the most part these don't stand alone very well: they're excellent as supplemental reading for devoted Machineries of Empire fans (which, apparently, I am) but probably wouldn't hold up if you hadn't read the series. Snippets of extra worldbuilding lore, fun character moments without much arc, that sort of thing; generally more fun than deep.

The second half is taken up with a novella, The Glass Cannon, which serves as a sequel to the trilogy. It didn't need a sequel - Revenant Gun ended very satisfactorily - but all the same, The Glass Cannon doesn't feel tacked-on. It honours the ending of the trilogy, and it plucks at existing loose ends rather than inventing new ones.

Also it is awesome, and I gave the collection five stars pretty much on the basis of The Glass Cannon. (I wouldn't have known how to rate the rest anyway.)

Selling points: more Machinieries of Empire content! Lots of Jedao! Child Jedao! Teenaged Jedao! Child Cheris! Cheris and Jedao having adventures together! Cute robots! Worldbuilding! Beautiful prose!

Warnings: "Gloves" is sexually explicit, but is easily skipped if you have a problem with that; all the usual Machineries of Empire warnings apply, but if you've gotten through the trilogy okay you should be fine with this collection as well. If you haven't, don't even try to read this. Most of it will only disappoint and/or confuse you without context.

I think I expected this book to be speculative! It is not speculative. Rather, it's one of those books where a speculative thing and a mundane thing are going on at the same time and you can't be sure to what extent, if any, the speculative thing is real, because someone's psychotic.

That's something that deserves significant dissection, but as a person who has never, to their knowledge, hallucinated, I'm not the person to dissect it. An interesting point is that the rules of the purported hallucination are extremely consistent, and that interacting with them produces the expected result. However, there's also a clinical explanation with no chance of misdiagnosis, so: either it is an actual hallucination, or it's both an actual hallucination and an actual other world at the same time. Neither the hallucinator nor the narrator seem to have a strong and consistent opinion as to which it is.

On a story level, I kind of like this effect. On a psychosis-is-severely-misunderstood-and-stigmatised level, I'm morally bound to withhold judgement until I've seen what someone who's experienced a similar kind of hallucination has to say about it. (I've actually seen no discussion of this whatsoever, though also: I haven't gone looking.)

I can judge the codependency, which is possibly even more important to the book as a whole, better. It's portrayed well, and it's unusual among self-aware codependency narratives in the way it ends. I find this... more hopeful than the usual, but verging on too hopeful. It edges onto wish-fulfillment territory, which isn't always a bad thing - I'm just not positive it's a wish that should usually be fulfilled, though in this case all parties involved appear tentatively willing to put in the necessary work, so... this isn't really a complaint about the book, just a thing I kind of wish I could discuss with someone.

Selling points: cool mixed-media & printing effects; mostly good portrayal of mental illnesses, with caveats that I can't judge anything to do with hallucination; bi rep; poly rep (though it's subtle, not an established or establishing poly relationship so much as people figuring themselves out); teens being fucked-up messes.

Warnings: mixed media & super-short chapters (almost a series of flashfics rather than a novel in parts) make for an unusual effect, takes a bit of reading to get into; high school bullshit; people make bad decisions; people are in bad situations with no good decisions to make; not sure on the portrayal of hallucinations.

I was expecting a human perspective on a relationship with some sort of forest entity. Instead, I got a forest entity's perspective on a human, which was a very pleasant surprise. Tobias' narration is slow, atmospheric, and deeply rooted - the forest is a part of him and he of the forest, and that bleeds out of the prose. Very much my vessel of beverage, despite the romance plot (not bad, just not usually my thing - though as far as that goes, the romance itself is treated with a fairly light touch).

There's a bit of tropeyness in here - though I haven't read much in the way of "there was only one bed" stuff myself, I've read of it often enough to half-wince at the reference when it came up - but some might consider that a selling point, and I'd personally be willing to forgive a lot more in the way of tropey rough edges given the fact that it also gave me a paragraph on the clean smell of rot and the healing power of decay. Hands-down the best book I've ever read in terms of foresty atmospheric prose alone.

Selling points: gay romance, cute cat (nothing bad happens to her!), folklore, foresty narration.

Warnings: generally slow pacing, and the romance is light enough that if that's your reason for reading this it may come up wanting. The slow atmospheric foresty-ness of this whole book is enough of its substance that whether you like or dislike that sort of thing should be the biggest factor in deciding whether to read it.

This is one of those everyone-should-read-it books. Profound, important, and left me feeling significantly changed.

That said, it's hard to put anything about it into specifics. It's hard and raw and easy and gentle all at the same time, and while there's some cool character stuff and speculative stuff and whatnot, everything is in service of the theme - which is so huge that a one- or two-sentence summary feels like doing it a disservice. But though it's a theme book, it's still a very easy read with in-the-moment stakes.

There are about two specifics I think I can point out about this book:

1. One of the best handlings I've ever seen of the child-hides-big-important-supernatural-thing-from-parents trope. Jam doesn't try to involve her parents (tries not to, in fact), but they do become involved and aware from the beginning; the reason she ends up hiding from them instead of pulling in their support is not an abstract fear or absence of trust, but because they refuse to accept that something needs to be done. (Theme, again.)

2. While there's direct handling of traumatic subject matter, it's abstracted and off-screen to the point where I'd be surprised if it was much of a trigger for anyone. I'm honestly pretty impressed at how much it's... made readable without being made palatable, or in any way diminished, even while the plot revolves directly around it.

3. ...Okay, one more thing: there's about one thing that bothers and confuses me about this book, and it's the inconsistent handling of Jam's relationship with honesty towards her parents. From the moment her mother Bitter is introduced it seems as though honesty is always the best choice with her, and yet Jam instinctively tries to hide from her from the very start of plot, even before anything supernatural happens; later, when she's forced by her parents' actions to hide from them, she feels it as a huge emotional weight; later still, even though only a day or two have passed in-universe ("what felt like forever"), she's so used to hiding that we get the sentence "She knew how to keep things from them." Especially in a theme book that deals heavily with what's seen and unseen and hidden, this feels... weird? Really weird? So weird that I feel like I must be missing something?

Regardless of that, though, it's a book well worth reading.

Selling points: sensible portrayal and questioning/flaw-finding of a genuine utopia; biblical-style angels, but, like, without the religion though; trans girl protagonist; entirely Black cast; no romance (!) even though the protagonist, who is a girl, has a best friend who is a boy (!!); strong non-romantic relationships; queer (poly, bi/pan, trans) representation; disability (wheelchair user + Jam's unnamed neurodivergency (leaning more towards autism than selective mutism myself, but she's certainly in the general category of sometimes-speaking)) representation; somehow both science fiction and fantasy without being science fantasy.

Warnings: child abuse (but, again, so heavily abstracted I'm not even sure if it merits a warning); more profanity and dark subject matter than one might first expect from the simple writing style.

I gave Ninefox Gambit five stars, which means by rights I should be giving Revenant Gun six or seven. This book was an absolute delight to read, and I'm at something of a loss as to how to review it without just gushing. All the stuff I loved about the two books that came before it is still there, but it ramps up some of the more fun elements - cute robots! A servitor is one of the main perspective characters! We have a teenage version of Jedao feeling completely out of his depth! Even characters who are opposed to each other are awesome and loveable and worth rooting for! We finally learn about voidmoths, which I guess hovers sort of between "fun" and "horrifying in a dystopian way", but either way: awesome!

I did a lot of complaining about the sociopathic villain trope embodied in Nirai Kujen in the earlier books, and... I feel a lot better about it now. The language surrounding it is not optimal, but in Revenant Gun we learn Kujen's history and, critically, how he came to be the way he is - and it's both chilling and tragic, because (given the available in-universe technology and all that) it's thoroughly realistic and has an all-too human origin. At the same time, his evil (a word I do not like to use very much, but I am comfortable applying it to him) is not at all downplayed. Nirai Kujen is an absolutely horrible person, in a way that many people might become if they had the chance, and for entirely understandable - if not necessarily sympathetic - reasons. It also helps that he has a foil in Shuos Mikodez, who has the same sort of language used around him and is purportedly without scruples, but throughout all of it remains, fundamentally, not evil. It's a low bar to cross, especially in comparison to Kujen, but Mikodez manages it admirably.

So I feel better about that, and there's a lot of fun in here, but there's a lot of depth too; themes of humanity and autonomy and rights (and who deserves them) continue, and the series ends with a focus on healing and reparations, and it's all just very satisfying. Love this book, love this series, and am deeply glad that I read it.

Selling points: queer cast; non-white cast; magic space battles; cute robots; teenage Jedao feeling out of his depth; excellent worldbuilding; weird alien stuff from an excellent angle.

Warnings: suicidal ideation; also something very complicated that amounts to a rape warning.

Raven Strategem is a bit more space-operatic than Ninefox Gambit: broader in scope, with more focus on political intrigue rather than military tactics. For the most part, all the stuff I liked about Ninefox Gambit (super nifty worldbuilding, beautiful prose, thorough characterisation) is still there. And I liked it a lot! But I did like it slightly less than Ninefox Gambit, and that's mainly down to the shift in perspective.

The high-stakes story is continued seamlessly. The low-stakes, personal story of Cheris and Jedao feels more repeated than continued, and repeated in a way I like less: rather than continuing from Cheris' perspective as in Ninefox Gambit, we once again see Jedao from the outside, from a number of other perspectives, and the whole manipulation/loyalty/&c. thing plays out again in a slightly different way. There's something frustrating in it, too, since the reader-who-has-Ninefox-Gambit-fresh-in-their-mind has important information which literally none of the perspective characters do for the majority of the book. Dramatic irony! (Probably do not take a long break between reading Ninefox Gambit and Raven Strategem.)

And the characterisation is great, as always, and many of the characters are likeable in their ways (I took a particular liking to Shuos Mikodez, this time) - but none of them is Cheris, and, well, I got pretty attached to her. I was more interested in seeing her story continue than the larger story of the Hexarchate. And her story does continue; just, not from within.

Which is all to say: the book is fine, the book is great, I enjoyed it a lot, but I couldn't help feeling slightly disappointed by it anyways. The problem here is more on my end than the book's.

I think it's worth making an extra note of the treatment of disability. I don't recall any instances of physical disability being shown, but neurodivergence is: in-universe things like crashhawks for whom formation instinct doesn't work, and less speculatively Jedao's dyscalculia and whatever's going on with Mikodez (I'm leaning heavily towards ADHD; it's not named in the book). It's enough to say that when disability is actually shown, it's shown well. Mikodez is dependent on his medication and support systems, brilliant at his job, and a complex character in all sorts of ways; his disability neither defines him, nor is it minimised; it's simply a part of him. Jedao's disability is severe in the context of his world and career, but he gets by with hard work and computer accommodations. Crashhawks have a harder time, but can get by on actual obedience. And so on - actual depictions of disability are nuanced and excellent.

Less great is the way various ableist slurs and actual-medical-terminology-but-used-as-slurs are casually thrown around by just about every character. Poorly defined madness/insanity/craziness; the word "psychotic" used interchangeably with this poorly defined madness/insanity/craziness; the word "sociopath" used as a character trait, admiringly by some and dispassionately by others, treated as common among certain demographics, and generally... just used so casually that I actually can't tell if they mean "this person has ASPD or DPD or an in-universe equivalent" or "this person is good at compartmentalising and will not allow personal feelings to get in the way of doing their job", or even if a given character uses the word consistently; the word "paranoid" used essentially to describe a lifestyle, in fact a very sensible lifestyle if assassinations are a serious risk associated with one's career, with no relation whatsoever to psychosis. These are all that I remember (I wasn't keeping a list or anything), but these sorts of terms are used with such frequency that if you're really sensitive to this sort of misuse of words, you might honestly want to skip these books even though they are great.

(I do realise that this sort of language used by characters can be a worldbuilding/characterisation thing, especially when it's accompanied by actually really good depictions of disability outside of the language used; it also didn't even disrupt my own enjoyment of the book very much; still, the warning stands.)

Anyway! The book was really good, though, and I'm looking forwards to reading the next one.

Selling points: super cool worldbuilding; magic space battles; cute robots; wide variety of queer representation, notably including a trans man as a major perspective character and an ace character who has correctly-nuanced ace sex (!); very nice characterisation.

Warning points: genocide; physical torture (slightly abstracted but essentially on-screen); fraternal incest (consensual); psychological torture; spaceships powered by sacrificed children; general disregard for life and autonomy and whatnot (by characters and society, not the narrative).

I went into this book hoping to like it, of course, but not expecting to like it quite as much as I did: I wouldn't have thought military sci-fi was quite my thing, especially when it's for the most part pushing the perspective of a fascist space empire from someone so thoroughly ingrained in it that everything it does seems reasonable and fair. But I really, really like this book.

The worldbuilding: really cool. The prose: both beautiful and immersive. The aesthetic: not what you'd first expect when you hear "military sci-fi". It may be window dressing, but it's a hell of a lot more fun to read about birdform servitors than it would be to read about avian-style robots, or voidmoths rather than spaceships. It's that sort of thing that carries through the prose: there's more of an eye to elegance than grittiness, and even the highly detailed descriptions of gore are pretty. I mean, they're disturbing, obviously; they're no less real for their prettiness; but the effect is more to fascinate the reader than to repulse them.

But it's the characters that are really this book's strong point. Kel Cheris is an immersive and relateable protagonist. Shuos Jedao, the second-most important character, is... well. He can't be quickly summed up, but he's incredibly fascinating and damnably likeable, despite being demonstrably a manipulative fuck who will not allow scruples to get in the way of his goals. As to what those goals actually are, that's a question that will keep Cheris - and the reader - guessing throughout much of the book. And even minor characters are well-drawn; a few times, the perspective switches to what could be considered throwaway characters, but for all that they feel complex and real.

(Aside: there are some really cool things done with perspective near the end of the book. It must be read to be known, but it's very well done and a really cool effect.)

The worldbuilding, as I've said, is really cool. It's complex and detailed and lends itself really well to nerdy analyses, but better to read it yourself than to watch me infodump a befuddled summary. A few notes on it, though: 1: the mechanics of exotic technology provide a concrete reason for the evil fascist empire to be as cruel and exacting as it is; 2: most aspects of the worldbuilding are not only cool or fun or interesting but also thematically relevant; 3: although the entire society is built up on mathematics, few actual numbers are included, and it never gets lost in detailed technological specs.

Overall: Very good, very worth reading; personally I loved this book and am very much looking forwards to reading the other two books in the trilogy.

Selling points: really cool worldbuilding; Jedao; approaches the well-worn concept of an evil fascist space empire from a novel angle; casually queer; hugely successful character with dyscalculia, even in a math-based society; non-white cast; neat (or, well, dystopian) transhumanist stuff; space ghosts; even when large swathes of people are killed as a "necessary sacrifice" (military tactics book!), their lives and deaths are treated as real and important by the narrative.

Warnings: statutory rape (once, fairly brief; on-screen, but through a layer of abstraction and treated as neither trauma porn nor regular porn, without the actual trauma associated with it being minimised); suicidal ideation, usually (but not always) abstracted from the narration; a general devaluing of life, autonomy, and selfhood, not by the book as a whole, but by specific narration and certainly by the society it depicts; very detailed descriptions of gore; casual use of "crazy" and "sociopath", the latter of which has a tropey sociopathic villain thing going on.

(Disclaimer: Jae Waller has been an internet acquaintance of mine since before I began to read this series.)

This was a great book - I may even have liked it more than Flight, overall - but before I get into any of that, I need to preface this with a massive warning. If you're seriously depressed or vulnerable to depression or self-destructive tendencies, read this book only with extreme caution. Wait until you're in a halfway stable place emotionally and have coping skills available. In fact, if you've a severe case, you might want to wait until the next book comes out so you can continue straight on with it. Details in as general of terms as I can manage:

In the latter quarter or so of the book, Kateiko falls into a severe depression that's described as spiritual/magical in origin but is probably compounded by the circumstances of her life. Her depression is well-written, pervasive, and immersive. She isolates herself, pushes away loved ones - whose love she no longer feels, nor does she feel her own love for them - lashes out at others, turns to alcoholism as a coping mechanism, and generally has the sort of depression-based positive feedback loop thing going on that's usually described as a downwards spiral: her depression causes behaviour that actively serves to make her environment worse and remove healthy support systems, which in turn worsens her depression and lowers the chance of eventual recovery, &c. Kateiko is an immersive first-person narrator, and depression threads itself through every part of her voice. If you're at all vulnerable to this, there's a very good chance you'll feel it with her.

This is worsened, also, by two things. One: the only thing which ends up helping at all, very late in the book, is the use of blood. This is also described as being for magical/spiritual reasons - blood is sacred to the Aikoto and holds the memories of one's ancestors - but it rings very true to the (temporary) relief brought by cutting. Which means: if you're a cutter in recovery or otherwise, the danger that it'll awaken the urge is extremely real. I cannot recommend strongly enough that you have alternative, healthier coping mechanisms directly available as you read the last several chapters.

Two: While the thing with the blood gets her out of the absolute worst of it, perhaps temporarily, the magical/spiritual depression itself is not actually cured by the end of the book - in fact, it's the inciting motivation leading into the next in the series. It's for this reason that I recommend you wait for that next one if you're extremely vulnerable. While you can read on, there's hope; ending on that note is not exactly hopeful, despite Kateiko's own resolve to get it fixed.

All right, all that over with: I did love this book. All the things I liked about Flight are just as present: fluid prose, excellent characterisation, natural-feeling dialogue, incredible worldbuilding. Cultural diversity - even greater cultural diversity than in Flight, in fact, as we're introduced to two additional cultures - with each culture depicted with nuance and depth, and each character's culture influencing them but not defining them. I cannot stress enough the extent to which the cultural worldbuilding in this series is absolutely top-notch.

I should also mention that Kateiko has sex-related trauma stemming from Flight, and it's handled really well: respectful, realistic, complicated, and neither is the trauma downplayed nor is Kateiko stripped of her sexuality. It's beautifully done.

Even better, there's improvement over Flight in a couple of respects. We have explicit queer representation! Two major characters are explicitly bisexual, from opposite ends of the bi spectrum, which already puts it a notch above a great deal of bi rep I've seen which treats it as a toggle rather than a spectrum; a third character makes a bi joke which doesn't make it 100% clear whether he actually is or not, but does make it clear that even if he is not, he'd be fine with it if he was (and/or if people thought he was). Queer-friendliness is not the same thing as queer representation, but in a different way it's worth at least as much. Both at once is gold.

The treatment of disability is not perfect, but it's still an improvement over Flight, in which I noted that there were no disabled characters - even in the background - despite a large cast and a lot of background characters. Disability exists in Veil. Several characters, including some who are quite major, developed physical disabilities from battle wounds; plus points for wounds received in battle having realistic, long-lasting consequences. I was extremely excited to see what at first seemed to be a deaf background character! My excitement was tempered when more was revealed about her: she turned out to be a villain; also, her deafness was also a result of battle-related injury, meaning that disabilities not caused by battle are still effectively non-existent in this world. These things cancel each other out just enough that I'm not putting this down as Bad Disability Representation, but I'm not going to recommend the series so far on the strength of its disability rep, either.

Overall: I really liked it and am very much looking forwards to more in this series.

Selling points: cultural diversity; seriously excellent worldbuilding; a sex scene featuring clear and honest communication; bi rep; realistic depiction of trauma and gentle recovery from the same; likeable characters; serious handling of fantasy violence; excellent voice.

Warnings: extended, highly immersive depiction of depression; alcoholism; character death; one instance of "psychotic" as a slur.

First things first: the back cover summary is full of lies. Loxley does not suffer from crippling anxiety by any stretch of the imagination; in fact, she's barely even anxious at all (though she is sometimes justifiably afraid).

What she actually is: autistic. Also she presumably has Down syndrome, though the only real indication of that is in the particular flavour of slurs hurled at her. That this is marketed as anxiety is honestly shameful. Not a flaw in the book, certainly, but a definite flaw in the publisher.

Loxley pretty much carries the book, in my opinion. The setting is a gritty capitalist dystopia, the plot is a fairly standard murder-revenge sort of thing, there's some cool stuff going on with ghosts and one entity that's more than a ghost; but in the end, the real appeal of the book is seeing Loxley navigate it.

Loxley is clearly, visibly disabled. Other characters react to her with bigotry, pity, and occasionally fear, and she has serious difficulties with communication and sensory overload. Her disability is in no way minimised. And yet... she has a ton of agency, she's assertive, determined, bold, successful. She's allowed to be aggressive, even violent, in a way that's usually reserved for abled white male action heroes in similar narratives. She's allowed to be sexual, which doesn't do much for me personally but I nonetheless recognise as deeply important. And it's beautifully done: the narration fits perfectly into her perspective, making no concessions for allistic readers. For Loxley alone, Every Mountain Made Low was a delight to read.

(Honestly, it reads a bit like a wish fulfillment fantasy - which, because it's handled with nuance and care, is absolutely something we need more of. First time I've read something that reads like an obvious wish fulfillment fantasy and actually applies, this well anyway.)

Selling points: awesome autistic representation in the protagonist, presumably coupled with Down syndrome; lesbian protagonist; bisexual representation; excellent voice; some cool stuff with ghosts and perspectives and suchlike; Loxley is super awesome.

Warning points: heavy use of ableist slurs; sexual assault / attempted rape; sex scenes (consensual); really not great on the race front (Loxley begins the book with racism inherited from her mother, and ends the book significantly less racist, but her racism feels a bit gratuitous and is never really addressed - certainly not to the extent that it should be - while sympathetic black characters take on supporting roles and make sacrifices to help her out).

I have a lot of very complicated feelings about this book, which I'd very much like to discuss with someone before considering them worthy of mentioning in a review; unfortunately, my ideal discussion partner doesn't exist. This leaves me a bit unsure of where to start with this - it's a complex book that could be reviewed on several levels: the thematic ableism/capitalism stuff; the horror; the content; the style; the characters; the way these things interact with one another... seriously, I don't even know where to start. In fact, without having properly worked out the more complicated of my feelings with someone who shares enough of my background to get it, I feel like I can't even touch most of these things in a review. In order that I do more than nothing, I'm going to evaluate this book on the most shallow of surface levels available.

For the first several chapters I found the book extremely dry. For the most part, it consisted of a doubtless fictionalised depiction of the Canadian film industry (complete with technical terms and many, many names), something I'm neither inherently interested in nor familiar enough with to recognise as fictionalised or not; nor could I recognise when a name or detail would wind up being important (several of them do). There's just enough there, at the beginning, to promise that it'll get interesting later on.

Which, thankfully, it does - in the extreme - as it starts to get into folkloric horror, with Lois' narration occasionally broken up by various epistolary-type sources. Folklore is something I both find inherently interesting and am somewhat familiar with, so that I recognised the figure who dominates the book: and it's perfectly done, really, with nothing I'd known before being at all contradicted, and everything I didn't know before fitting in so perfectly that even there, I can't say what, or how much, was invented by Gemma Files.

And this is where the horror really shines. Lady Midday is real, insomuch as any folkloric entity is real. Everything about Her resonates. And a major part of the horror in Experimental Film is based around perceiving - and, thus, also being perceived by - Her; She is unknowable, never seen directly, but the book still comes really close to describing Her closely enough that one might be said to perceive Her just by reading it; and basically what this all works out to is that reading this book, especially right before bedtime, leaves one with the super spooky feeling of maybe very nearly having attracted the attention of an ancient god (whose very worshippers worship mainly by praying that She turns Her attention elsewhere, even). It's incredibly effective, and also it hits all my buttons - this more than makes up for the dry beginning.

(I did feel that this effect was weakened a bit by the ending, wherein theme seemed to supersede horror; [in the climactic ending scene She was too well-defined to feel properly unknowable, and She didn't visit divine vengeance upon Lois only because She... missed, essentially, in a way that would be completely plausible if She were mortal but kind of cheapens Her as a deity (hide spoiler)]. But horror is often allegorical, and in terms of theme a [victory (hide spoiler)] against her was incredibly important.)

So: overall very good, very much worth reading. This is a surface reading, though, and there's a lot more going on in there; just not much more that I'm able to properly put into words at this point. It may have planted the seeds of a friggin' essay.

Selling points: excellent horror; VERY GOOD FOLKLORE; autistic narrator, 4(+?) autistic characters; overall nuanced representation; highly immersive, at least once the first few chapters are past; have I mentioned how truly excellent the folklore is yet? It is very good.

Warnings: lots and lots of internalised ableism; severe depression in the narrator; some fairly traumatic things happen to various characters; there's a magical disabilities thing going on here that I should at least mention, though I'm not up to dissecting it for this review; some fairly caustic relationships.

This is a book for nerds, about nerds, and clearly written by an absolute nerd. To be clear, that's not a complaint: but it is something of warning. Princess Holy Aura is so thoroughly suffused with memes and allusions that a person without at least a requisite minimum of nerdiness would almost certainly enjoy it far less. At the very least, you should have seen a magical girl anime before and have at least a basic understanding of what tabletop RPGs even are.

The most important thing to understand about Princess Holy Aura is that it is not a comedy, or a parody, or a satire. The premise - anime-style magical girl sentai story set in the US, in which the protagonist begins as a burly 35-year-old man, everyone's genre-savvy, the monsters are (literally) Lovecraftian horrors, and everything is influenced by and filtered through memes - might sound risible, but there are serious themes at work here, and (critically) the 35-year-old-man-turns-into-14-year-old-girl thing is never once played for laughs: rather, it's used as a lens to examine identity, privilege, relative age, gender both as identity and as it is perceived by others, and the ethical consequences of the magical girl formula. (The latter is an important theme, but self-scrutinising magical girl shows aren't at all uncommon, so it's as much a part of the formula as it examines it. The identity themes are more unique to Princess Holy Aura.)

It's also important to note that this is not, in any way, a trans story. Stephen Russ begins as a cis man; when he becomes Princess Holy Aura, and then - as a secret identity - Holly Owen, she takes on not only the body but the entire identity of a teenaged cis girl. It is trans-adjacent, and trans readers may see something of themselves reflected in Holly's struggles to come to terms with her identity and later dysphoria as Steve, but readers who are drawn to it for these reasons should also be warned of occasional transmisic phrases: while some of the characters are clearly aware of trans people existing, they also clearly have never actually met one, and something along the lines of "a woman who doesn't want to be a woman" comes up in dialogue twice in the book.

These identity issues aren't just side-content, either. In many ways, they're the main conflict of the book: familiarity with magical girl shows in general leaves little doubt as to the team's eventual victory, but what will happen to Holly/Stephen when it's all over is a significant source of tension.

The anime vibe isn't just in the content and story: it carries over to the writing style, which has a distinctly cartoonish feeling to it at times. It's a very visuals-oriented book, to the point where it almost feels Ryk E. Spoor was transcribing an anime as it played in their head, and it makes very heavy use of italics. A bit too heavy, to my mind, and I say this as a person who tends towards overusing italics themself. If you're a person who a) enjoys anime and b) can visualise easily, this may be a point in its favour; if not, it's definitely a weakness. Many things which would look really cool on-screen don't carry over as well to text, and little use is made of the strengths inherent to prose.

In the end, it was a good book - better than I expected at first - and I'd gladly recommend it. (But only to nerds.)

Selling points: Stephen/Holly is a genuinely good person; all the nerdy references; strong focus on ethics; intelligent examination of identity, privilege, perspective, gender both felt and perceived, sacrifice &c.; fourteen-year-old girls beating the shit out of eldritch horrors; racial diversity; Sikh representation; sensible overturning of tropes.

Warnings: occasional casual transmisia; cartoonish writing style; lesser focus on psychological problems than was implied, esp. considering potentially traumatising situations and overall lack of neurodivergent and/or disabled representation; also this is clearly a book for nerds and if you're not nerdy enough you probably won't like it very much.