Arctic Light

This was an unexpected reading experience, because I bounced pretty hard off the Six of Crows duology, the only other books of hers that I've read. But I *loved* this. It's magical, lyrical, brutal, and thought-provoking. I cried at the end, which is very rare for me.

In Inquisition-era Spain, Luzia is a downtrodden kitchen scullion who can perform small magic to make her work easier - fixing burnt bread, multiplying eggs, and trying to hide her unusually educated status from the people she works with, and her magic as well as her Jewish heritage from anyone who might betray her to the Inquisition. Then her vain, selfish mistress Valentina (unhappy, struggling to maintain appearances despite debt, and trapped in a loveless marriage) finds out about Luzia's power and decides to use it to secure her own fortunes. Unfortunately this brings Luzia to the attention of the luckiest man in Renaissance Madrid, a man whose relentless and unbreakable luck is due to the magic power of his familiar - an immortal, magical monster bound to the service of his family. No one has ever told Victor de Paredes that he can't have what he wants. And now he wants to acquire Luzia and her magic as well. But his familiar has also figured something out - if his master is willing to accept Luzia as a trade, he can finally, after thousands of years, be free.

This book is a rough ride. It's very much a book about being trapped, and being angry, about power and morality and whether it's possible or desirable to be a good person in a society where everyone informs on everyone else and most of your choices are out of your control; sometimes it's just a choice between worse and worst, or whom to betray when not betraying anyone isn't an option. I love how raw and brutal Luzia's anger is, a whole lifetime's worth of anger bound up in her miserable life and the collapse of her dreams, leaving her bereft of the possibility of home and family that would have made her happy, reaching for power and admiration over safety and love because it's the only way to avoid a life of backbreaking labor and loneliness.

But it's not a hopeless book. One of the big surprises for me is how sympathetic most of the characters were. This is a book that's very empathetic to selfish, ambitious women - Luzia, Valentina, and Luzia's aunt Hualit (who changed her name, shunned her family and religion, and made her fortune as a rich man's courtesan) are all complicated, well-drawn characters whose ambition is a positive feature while they're also not allowed to avoid the consequences and the damage from it. Among other things, this is a book about holding onto scraps of magic and moments of happiness in a cruel world, clawing for what's yours, and carving out a space for yourself whether the world wants to make room or not.

And it's also simply - beautiful. The language is lovely, the imagery vivid, and the fairy-tale elements really work together with the brutal, earthly parts. And sometimes it's funny (Luzia in particular is utterly charming when she finally starts to get the chance to indulge her intellectual side and banter with people), or incredibly touching and sweet. The romance charmed me thoroughly, even when I can see doom bearing down on them.

I can't really talk about the familiar of the title because almost everything about him is a secret and we don't really start getting to know him until about halfway through the book, but I really loved him.

Nonspecific spoilers on whether the characters get a happy or hopeful ending

under here.

A lot more than I was expecting. The body count is pretty high towards the end. But the final ending is genuinely very hopeful: the worst of them get a poetically just comeuppance, and the final, happymaking twist with Luzia and her lover really lands hard - that was the point when I burst into tears. And a few other characters get pretty nice endings. I liked how many different shapes of lives there are in this book, and how influenced by their society they are; this is definitely a book that feels historical, if that makes sense - the characters are not modern people.

I could see myself having had the potential to become absolutely obsessed with this book in a formative-creative-influence kind of way if I'd read it at, say, age 17 or 20. Which of course I didn't, and at this age it doesn't hit like that. But there's a resonance to it, like it plucked a string in my brain - not at all in a fandom way, but in a kind of "oh, *that's* going on the bookshelf so I can reread it now and again for the rest of my life" kind of way. (But not too often, because it's much too harrowing to be a comfort reread. It's more like a book I might read now and then because I want to completely immerse myself in another world, a book you sink into and think a bit differently for a while.)

A lot of books promise circuses or carnivals with their cover/title/premise and then disappoint, but you definitely cannot say this book fails to deliver carnivals. This book is all carnival all the time.

I got it through Amazon Prime's first-reader program so it's still only for preorder (comes out on June 1). On the whole I really enjoyed it, aside from an abrupt and somewhat disappointing ending.

This is a historical fantasy set in a traveling carnival in the Southern US during the Great Depression. The performers are nearly all black; most have magic powers of one sort or another, and the carnival is a refuge from the hostile white world around them. But at the carnival's core is its terrible secret, which is that it's run by Ahiku, a demoness who feeds on children. In exchange for a few children's lives, the carnival remains a refuge for those who need it. But of course it can't stay that way forever, especially not when a Chosen One type shows up who is the fated enemy Ahiku has been using the carnival as a front to search for.

(On a side note, I suspect this is one of those books that wouldn't work if not being written by an #ownvoices author. There is a lot about the book that I could see going off the rails very easily or just being extremely troubling on its own in a white author's hands, but part of what makes the world feel so rich and deep is that the place of refuge is almost as flawed as the world the characters come from. Nothing is pure or perfect, but the characters are compellingly human in the middle of it, just trying to find safety and family and love.)

As far as leaning into the premise goes, this book does everything it promises. Nearly the entire book takes place in the carnival, with an interesting and compelling cast of carnival performers, following them from town to town as they practice their acts and fleece the locals and leave a trail of suspicious disappearances behind them. The victims are not all innocent; there is also an element of retribution to Ahiku's mischief, with the carnival being used to punish the wicked as well as to collect innocent souls to fuel the demon.

The characters are very shades-of-gray and I liked that. Even the best among them are shysters by trade. Some of the performers suspect what's going on and suppress that knowledge because they need what the carnival offers. Some are actively evil; some are innocent. But most of them are compelling, interesting, flawed and likable, even the ones who really deserve everything they have coming, like the former KKK member who serves as Ahiku's white frontman for dealing with the outside world and secures children for her to eat.

Essentially this book has the same quality that keeps drawing me back to Stephen King's books, which is that there is a lot of ugliness in the world and a lot of evil, none of the characters are without flaws and a lot of people die, but there's an underlying kindness and humanity that shows through everywhere.

Also, there are some excellent scenes with historical Harlem gangster Stephanie St. Clair, who I also wrote into Echo City as a supporting character and therefore have a soft spot for.

I would love to see a movie or Netflix miniseries version of this; it's visually rich and full of imagery that would be fun to see onscreen, as well as a nearly all-POC cast and a lot of African-derived magic and mythology.

The ending was the only part of the book that disappointed me, not to a "throw the book across the room" extent, but mostly because of lack of resolution.

( Vague spoilers under the cut )

Just as a content note, if you have any issues with animal harm, there's quite a bit of it in the book. The protagonist does an animal act using her innate ability to psychically connect to her animal charges; the problem is that she can't control it very well and more often than not causes them to drop dead when she tries to psychically communicate with them. (We first meet her killing an opossum while trying to learn to use her powers, so it's not like it comes out of nowhere, but if that bothers you, there's a lot more where that came from.)

Bacchanal on Amazon.

I don't remember where I saw a rec for this book (somewhere on DW, probably) but I finished it today and absolutely loved it. You know how sometimes you read a book and just want to start reading at the beginning immediately? This was one of those books.

Island of Ghosts is set in Britain towards the end of Roman rule. A detachment of Sarmatian cavalry -- effectively hostages from a conquered steppe tribe, considered dead by their own relatives -- arrive to reinforce the defenses at Hadrian's Wall. The Sarmatians are baffled by the settled farming people around them, struggling to cope with the idea of living in houses rather than wagons, chafing under Roman laws and trying to learn a foreign language; meanwhile the local Britons (who have only recently and very tenuously become Roman themselves) consider them incomprehensibly barbaric, these horse-riding people who wear coats made of their enemy's scalps and solve their differences through duels to the death, while the Roman provincial rulers and cavalry commanders can't see why everyone can't just peacefully assimilate and be part of the empire already.

I couldn't say how true to historical fact the broad strokes of the characters' attitudes and cultural details are, though the specific events of the book are obviously fictional. However, the general tone of the book is a lot less dark and grim than historical fiction frequently is, which I noticed a few reviewers on Amazon taking it to task for, along with the fact that it's tropey as hell (which for me is a feature, not a bug). I don't want to give the impression that dark stuff doesn't happen -- this is a book that includes ( Some dark/triggery stuff (no big spoilers) )

But on the whole, this is a book that's about picking up the pieces. It's about people looking beyond their differences and learning to lay aside old hurts in the aftermath of a war, putting themselves back together and making each other better. This book mashed down all my buttons for making friends with your enemies, found families, getting back up after you get kicked down, and soldiering on (literally) in the face of loss and pain. I adored the characters, and there's a side romance I really enjoyed, but there's also a strong focus on friendships, parents and children, and community as relationships of equal importance. It's a book about being torn away from your home and family, and then finding a new one.

I haven't read anything by this author before, or even heard of her, but I'm definitely going to be looking up her other books. (Looks like she has one that's about werewolves in the Crusades. I AM THERE.)

ETA: One thing I should mention is that the Kindle edition contains a lot of OCR errors, including a recurring problem getting the protagonist's name right. It's also fairly expensive. I don't regret having paid for it because I loved it Just That Much, but the print version is probably more readable; I assume it doesn't have the same issue.

Night Over Water by Ken Follett. My expectations weren't that high, but I really loved it.

This book falls squarely in the "group of strangers, each with their own agenda, trapped together by circumstances beyond their control" genre. In this case, circumstance is a fictional flight of a real plane, the amphibious Boeing 314 Clipper. Pan Am's first trans-Atlantic flights were luxury "sleeper" flights (the seats folded into bunks) and the book fictionally extends the extremely brief tenure of the commercial Boeing 314 flights into the early days of WWII. The passengers include a family of fascists fleeing the U.K., a German scientist escaping the Nazis, saboteurs, criminals, a runaway bride, etc etc. It's a lot of fun and seems to be pretty well researched as far as I can tell. I particularly enjoyed the way the characters' storylines wove in and out of each other, and that the female characters were as fleshed out and had as much agency and interesting backstory as the guys did.

The book also did something I really liked with sexual consent, although this is slightly spoilery and slightly NSFW, so I'll put it under a cut.

( Consent issues in the book - some spoilers )