booksthatburn's reviews
1463 reviews

THE FALL THAT SAVED US is a heartfelt and tender sapphic romance between a nephilim and a succubus, dealing with toxic family and how hard it is to start over when pain is familiar.

This is set up to get at least one sequel, but the story told here is very satisfying even if nothing else follows it. Cassiel and Avitue are a great couple, figuring out how to get past the baggage of their pasts and the demands of their present in order to have any shot at building a future. 

The main storyline deals with the romance between Cass and Avitue. Their relationship has several outside forces who would detest their relationship and try to destroy them if they're discovered to be colluding instead of in opposition. Learning to love one another advances both storylines, putting Cass against her family and Avitue against her fellow demons, though Cass's family are more relevant to this particular story. There's also a strong and complicated bond between Cass and one of her siblings, complicating her willingness to entirely sever ties with her family, if it's even possible.

I enjoyed this and I'm interested in reading the promised sequel.

Not interested in ex-CIA MC’s.

A TASTE OF HONEY seems more like a stand-alone story in the same world as THE SORCERER OF THE WILDEEPS, not really a direct sequel. Because of that, it doesn’t seem to matter in which order to read both books. The whole storyline in A TASTE OF HONEY is completely new. If it specifically relied on any information only obtained from the first book, I completely missed the connection. They’re clearly in the same world, but I don’t think they’re in the same country based on some of the linguistic differences. So much of the worldbuilding is conveyed through language and how the characters discuss language. For a long time, I didn’t quite know where the story was going, but I enjoyed it. The ending really pulls everything together, explaining in the final chapter of the structure something that had been hinted at from the beginning.

This does really cool things with gender and language in a way that enhances the story, but turns out pretty badly for some of the characters. I enjoyed this and would be interested in more stories in this setting.

*I received a free review copy in exchange for an honest review of this book. 

One of the wonderful things about queernorm worlds is not needing to endlessly explain every little thing. This means that there's emotional room to dig into nuances which otherwise would likely be subsumed through navigating prejudices. In SOULTAMING THE SERPENT, Jun is aromantic, and while she cares deeply for Casey, she knows she doesn't love him the way he loves her. When Aurel enters her life, she feels like there has to be some kind of choice between the two of them, even though neither of them is a romantic possibility for her. What could have been a frustrating love triangle instead blossoms into a story of queer love and companionship in the face of antagonistic forces. 

The worldbuilding is explained at the level of information that the people within the world have. They don't know the details of the cycle, or why a dragon is required for rain, but they deal with the shape of how things are even when they don't know the underlying reasons. This style of storytelling means that information gaps are between characters, each trying to sort through legends and conflicting information in order to figure out what actually happens in the cycle with the Chosen One, Serpent, and Dragon. 

Things I love, in no particular order: Having so much lavender referenced in the story; the relationships between Jun, Casey, and Aurel; the way the cycle resolves; trying to deal with prophecies and fated things without an instruction manual.

This is a delightfully moving story, well worth reading.

*I received a free review copy in exchange for an honest review of this book. 

A CASE OF MADNESS opens with Andrew, Sherlock Holmes scholar, losing his job. This news would probably have hit him harder if he weren't already ignoring the possibility that he might have cancer. Soon after, he disrupts a gaybashing and is disoriented to find that the man he rescued wants to keep seeing him, despite having his own romantic complications. Tangling things further, the whole time Andrew is hallucinating Sherlock Holmes, unsure where this apparition lies along the possibilities of complete figment to plural alter. 

Haltingly, Andrew tilts from panic to panic, coming out as gay for the first time and starting to deal with things left unsaid from his past. While this is a romance, much of it focuses on Andrew trying to get his shit together so that he can be in a relationship at all. This happens by way of solving a case with the Sherlock Holmes in his head, where one crucial step is figuring out what the focus of the case actually is. 

While I would not want this level of stress from every book I read, I am very glad I read this one. My stress was largely from deeply relating to Andrew, even though his overlap with myself is small. When things go awry in real life, they can dissolve into stress and chaos through a series of unrelated terrible things that aren't causally connected, but happen all at once through terrible coincidences of timing. This is a feeling that good books rarely achieve, because of narrative constraints to keep all the bad things connected to the plot and maintaining some kind of purpose. A CASE OF MADNESS engenders a feeling of overwhelm in the reader, mimicking that which is felt by the protagonist in a way that feels closer to real life than most stories tend to manage, all without losing the plot.