rowyn

I read T. Kingfisher’s Clockwork Boys in early December, mostly on the plane flight to and from my parents’ house. I then struggled through The Wonder Engine at a snail’s pace through the rest of December and January. The most surprising part of this is that it’s really one book split into two chunks because it’d be longish for a single book. No plot arcs are resolved in the first book.

But I enjoyed the first one more. The first book mostly takes place while traveling, and I felt like Kingfisher had an interesting take on the standard Long Fantasy Trek. The second book, which is more ‘the Seedy Underbelly of Fantasy City’, did not interest me to the same degree. The conclusion was ... fine, I guess? I found it unsatisfying. There’s an M/F romantic arc where the female protagonist constantly insults the male protagonist. I suspect a lot of people find it endearing, but it grated on me badly by the end of the second book. I expect it didn’t bother me as much in the first book because I thought the relationship would grow out of it instead of entrenching it.

Also, I have become the sort of person who finds using “stupid” and “crazy” as insults to be a bad habit, and that’s ... like ... every page. I try not to get too hung up on this because I still use this language myself, but there is so much of it. o_o

Anyway, there’s lots to recommend these books. I am fond of Caliban as a character. I liked the way he would treat the assassin who hated him with the same consideration as the woman he was in love with, when it was important. I enjoyed how Edmund evolved over the course of the story, both in his own attitudes and the way others perceived him, but remained a nerd at heart. Just some other stuff was a complete miss for me.

This is the M/M romance I started back in July. It is not one of those books that took me three months to read despite my enjoying it. I think I picked it up as a Bookbub deal.

Spoilery review, because I can't really explain why I disliked this book so much without spoilers. Tl;dr: BOOK IS NOT RECOMMENDED.

Early in the book, Craig meets Alex at Craig’s usual bar in Seattle. Alex is drunk and just broke up with his boyfriend. Craig’s general impression of Alex is ‘a hot mess but maybe I can help him.’ Craig himself appeared to be aware that you should not take in people like stray puppies, so I thought “hopefully this will not be about Character A Saving Character B.”

Craig takes Alex home for a one night stand. This immediately turns into a relationship where they see each other often, but they do not talk about being in a relationship or romance or anything. They are pretty cute together. Some other side characters are thrown in for flavor, some of whom have known Alex for a long time and give the perspective that he used to be a jerk but he’s doing well with Craig. Alex also ghosted all of his existing friends and family while he was with previous jerk ex, and now reconciles with said friends/family.

At around the halfway mark, Craig and Alex start to grapple with the idea that they’re in love with each other and this is probably a real relationship (after, y’know, months of recurring dates and regular sex.)

Then Alex & Craig run into his jerk ex, who is now married. Alex dumps Craig, runs away, and ghosts everyone in his life. Again. For weeks.

It was at this point that I lost all sympathy for Alex. I no longer wanted Craig and Alex to have a happy ending. I wanted Craig to find a partner who could treat him with the barest minimum of decency. Fine, dude, you’ve got self-esteem issues and trauma and whatever, but your mental health problems do not excuse you for treating all the people around you like complete garbage.

I hate-read my way to the end. Near the end, I got to watch Alex’s purported best friend lecture Craig for not trying hard enough to reach out to Alex. Alex, who has not answered email, texts, phone calls, or his door for weeks. CRAIG is somehow at fault in this. ‘Why are you not an actual stalker, Craig?!? Why have you not broken into your ex’s house???’

...

I should’ve DNF’d it.

At the end, Craig and Alex get back together. My only feelings were “Craig deserves so much better than this absolute toaster.” I found the idea that these two were going to live happily-ever-after laughable. Alex’s entire approach to life is ‘ghost everyone whenever you’ve got a problem’ and there’s nothing to indicate that he won’t continue to treat people like disposable objects that only exist for his convenience. Dude needs professional help, not a partner he will treat like a doormat. x_x

Anyway. First part was competent and entertaining, and the only reason I stuck with it, hoping the author would find a way to rescue it. Last half was “I would throw this across the room if it was a paperback; I hate this and everything about it.” Author did not find a way to rescue the ending, but did manage to make it worse with "You should be a stalker!" friend. If you are OK with romance protagonists ghosting their loved ones, I expect you'd be fine with this book. It super did not work for me. -_-

I finished Spells, Snow and Sky by CoffeeQuills a few weeks ago. It’s a polyamorous paranormal romance novella, between a human woman, a yuki-onna (“snow woman”, a Japanese spirit), and a witch.

For the most part, it’s a fluffy, low-stakes story, with a single PoV character: Sky, the human. I’ve thought about writing a paranormal romance on occasion, and one of the things that deterred is that, while I like the dramatic, angst-filled background full of adventure, actually writing the adventure takes a tedious amount of time away from the romance. Spells, Snow and Sky addresses this by supplying occasional hints about past drama and adventure, and skipping the whole part where you write it all out. It’s original fiction, but it reminded me of fanfic in this respect; I felt like I was reading a romance about characters that had their adventures in a different book. I thought this was an extremely clever way of getting right to the romance!

As is often the case with me and single-POV-romance, the romance didn’t engage me that much. But it was a delightfully atmospheric story, immersive and wintery.

After reading that, I remembered that I’d never finished O. Westin’s Micro Science Fiction, a collection of tweet-length (144 characters, from before Twitter’s doubling of the character limit) micro fics. So I finished it finally. If you use Twitter, you’ve probably seen O. Westin’s work before, as microsff. These are bite-sized and delightful as individual works. I preferred to read them slowly, because I found devouring several dozen at a time made them lose their individual weight. It’s a good collection and I recommend it.

Next, I bounced off of three different books, which I am going to complain about here because I want to whinge and also I don’t want to pick up these books again because I’ve forgotten what they’re about. But I’ll put DNF in the titles and author names so they won’t come up in vanity searches.

Also, important note: I bounced off all three for reasons that had nothing to do with the skill of the author. It was purely an “I am not having fun because this book is Not For Me” reaction.

I have a huge number of books on my Kindle where I have no recollection of why I got them or what I was thinking when I did. Many of them were free or cheap from Bookbub deals, and others were recommended.

CytheraDNF by JoDNFGraham: I think this is SF erotica/romance, with the main pairing being M/F. Which is to say “the first chapter had an M/F pair and the blurb implied the book would be about them.” The female protagonist is a “sacred courtesan” and the male protagonist is a ship’s captain in a military fleet.

If you want to read erotica and you like the “happy prostitute” trope in erotica, I imagine this book would work for you. I expect that I picked it up because SF romance that isn’t “alien warlord” style is hard to find. I do not care for “happy prostitute” as a trope. It’s not that I object to sex work so much as to the depiction of sex work as a fun sexy romp where every client is young and conventionally attractive. I feel like fiction about sex work is mostly moralizing in one direction or another -- either sex work is cruel, brutal, and soul-destroying, or it’s beautiful and sexy and uplifiting. Neither depiction feels convincing or interesting to me.

Anyway, I made it through the sex and BDSM in the first chapter, found the second chapter started with the female protagonist “testing” candidates by groping them while asking questions, went “yeah, not in the mood for this much erotica” and put it down.

LordDNFof the LastDNFHeartbeat by MayDNFPeterson

I know why I picked up this one! An author I follow on Twitter tweeted excitedly about the third book in the series being released. So I followed the link, discovered that it was the third book, went to look for the first book, and discovered I’d already bought it.

So I opened the book, and remembered that I’d already bounced off it once.

Oh.

I gave it another try. It did not work out.

It’s an M/M romance where one male protagonist, Mio, is very femme, to the point of “mistaken for a girl by rando dude who proceeds to sexually harass him.” The other male protagonist, Rhodry, is a tall strong alpha lord with magical powers. Mio is also poor, oppressed by his family, forced into crime against his will, and begs Rhodry to rescue him from his family/life of crime.

So the setup comes across as “exactly like a stereotypical M/F romance except I changed the pronouns for the female character.” I hate this trope SO MUCH. It manages to feel simultaneously misogynistic (“I’ll write an M/M romance because vaginas are gross, ew”) and queerphobic (“but I want to keep every single heteronormative quality in my characters so one protagonist is stereotypically feminine in EVERY WAY and the other protagonist is stereotypically masculine in EVERY WAY.”)

It’s the “every way” that really gets to me. If any of the qualities were swapped -- made the femme man be the alpha lord, or made the super-masculine guy short, or SOMETHING to indicate that the author didn’t think one’s physical qualities absolutely determined one’s status, standing, identity, psychology, and preferences, it would help.

Anyway, the author is trans and I am confident she is neither queerphobic nor misogynistic. She just has the misfortune of liking tropes that make my skin crawl. I tried to persevere.

Then Mio’s mother coerced him into mind-raping a random man for political power, and Rhodry came home to find a dead boy on his driveway and his reaction was along the lines of “this is so tiresome and inconvenient,” and I deleted the book from my phone.

If you don’t mind some grimdark (it’s a romance, it has an HEA/HFN, so presumably they rise above the grimdark eventually) and enjoy the above tropes, I think this would be a good book. What I saw of the dynamic between the two protagonists was good, and it’s well-written. I feel like some interesting stuff was going to happen later in the book. There was a suggestion that Mio might be intersex, which could be cool -- I seldom read intersex protagonists. But I don’t think I’m ever going to be in the mood for the tropes involved here.

NiceDNFDragons FinishDNFLast by RachelDNFAaron

No idea why I got this book. It’s fantasy + SF in the Shadowrun style: Earth several decades in the future, plus “magic returned to the world.” The main character is an unambitious young dragon whose mother got mad at him because he’s not sufficiently cruel and ambitious. She locked him into a human form and exiled him to the “Detroit Free Zone”, where dragons are killed on sight.

I got through the first fourteen pages. There was a prologue that engaged me, and then I met the exiled dragon and his sister and his mother and kind of just hated everything. There was a letter from his uncle that was amusing, though.

The mother is physically and emotionally abusive, and at some point I may be like “sure, I can put up with the protagonist being tortured periodically by his mom” and be able to read this. But. Not in the mood. NEXT.

The Fall of Lord Drayson, by Rachel Anderson

An M/F Regency romance. No idea why I picked it up. But I actually finished this one! It was short and mediocre.

So it started off with the male protagonist, an earl, evicting the female protagonist, the impoverished teenage daughter of a vicar and a seamstress. I don’t usually like hate-at-first-sight books, but I was entertained by the banter between the two as the earl tells the girl that she and her widowed mother have to find some other place to live because he’s selling the property where they presently reside.

The earl then rides off in the rain, falls from his horse, and knocks himself senseless.

At this point, I thought “oh no, he’s gonna wake up with amnesia and she’s gonna lie to him about how he promised she and her mother would never have to move, or something like that. Ugh.” But I kept going.

The female protagonist rescued him, somewhat unwillingly, from the road. When he regains consciousness, he has amnesia, and the female protagonist somehow or other decides to tell him “you are my servant!”

...

This premise is so mind-bogglingly repugnant that I don’t know how it managed to get on my Kindle. I can only assume it was free on Bookbub and that I only read the 20 word Bookbub blurb before downloading it, and the Bookbub blurb didn’t manage to encompass the awful premise.

But the premise was so terrible that I decided to keep reading just to see if the author could manage to justify a romance ensuing from this.

Short answer: no, not really.

The romance requires copious amounts of suspension of disbelief, not only for the ridiculous amnesia subplot and for the earl deciding not to hold it against her, but for the complete lack of objection by literally anyone else in the story to the eventual marriage of the two. The characters never feel like a plausible part of their period. The first half of the book has the amnesia subplot, and if you suspend disbelief it’s still cringe-inducing but more-or-less works. The last half of the book is tedious, saved only by the too-briefly-sketched subplot of a romance between the girl’s mother and a wealthy friend of the family. (The latter two would’ve been made far more appealing romance protagonists than the actual protagonists.) The earl’s mother and sister make every effort to promote a romance between the two protagonists, with no explanation whatsoever as to why they think this is a good match. The male protagonist stops being a POV character for the second half, for no reason except, I guess, to promote suspense about what’s going to happen next? When this is a romance and we all know how it ends? So tedious.

Granted, I did finish the book; it had good qualities. The characters were endearing except when they were doing the asinine things required by the plot. There are some nice romantic scenes. It’s mercifully short.

It did not make me want to throw it across the room?

I think mostly it hit the increasingly small spot on me between “awful stuff is happening and I don’t want to endure this” and “everything is fine, so I’m bored.” I am an extremely difficult audience. -_-

Shadeslinger is a LitRPG novel, and the first book I’ve read in this genre (although I’ve read a couple of fics by Terrycloth that are LitRPG-adjacent, if not squarely in the genre.) The vast majority of Shadeslinger takes place inside Earth Bound Online, a VR MMO in a future where virtual reality is fully immersive, and gamers use pods that provide full life support, so they never have to log out.

I decided to read Shadeslinger based on this review on “All the Spoilers”. The blurb for the book makes it sound like it’s about PVP, but there’s no actual PVP in it; I expect subsequent books will be centered on PVP, however.

I found the story and the characters engaging, especially the AI characters. The AI “guide” to the game, a talking axe named Frank, has the strongest character arc in the book. Because the story takes place entirely inside an MMO, the worst possible outcome is always along the lines of “the protagonist might lose his in-game progress and perhaps become so dispirited with the game that he quits playing.” The author does a great job of selling these stakes as meaningful, and that suffering major in-game setbacks would be harrowing. In fact, for me, he did too good a job of selling it. I began the book on April 6, read the first third in a few days, but didn’t finish it until last night, April 23. Much of that slowdown was “the story went from ‘fun romp’ to ‘nerve-wracking because of the obstacles in place.’”

This is an observation about my reading habits, not a criticism of the book. I have a few actual quibbles with the book -- a few times where the protagonist took so long to figure something out that I wanted to shake him, and one case where there was a glaringly obvious “why don’t you do [thing]” and no one even mentions the possibility of [thing] and I was just like “if you are not going to use this Chekov’s gun to shoot anyone would you AT LEAST tell people you have no bullets or something???”

But overall, it’s a great book. Lots of learning a new game and figuring out how to best apply one’s abilities in it, and with interesting combat setups where the AI has unexpected tricks to use and the players need to improvise counters to them on the fly. Plus the joy of finding phat lewt and watching one’s powers advance. I tended to skim over the character-sheet dumps and other stat blocks, but it didn’t hamper my enjoyment and it’s there for the people who like it. Also, while this is prominently marketed as "BOOK ONE", it ends on a satisfying note, with a solid climax and some significant plot points resolved. There's plenty of room for sequels, but it doesn't feel like a cliffhanger ending. If you like the LitRPG genre, or are interested in trying it, I’d recommend this book.

I read a book! In, like, a normal amount of time for reading a book instead of my usual “multiple months.” (I have been reading India After Gandhi since September. I'm still reading it. I read a little bit more of it every day. It's possible I'll finish it before this September.)

Several people on a discord channel I frequent have been on an Alexis Hall binge recently, set off by one person, Eseme, giving a long and enthusiastic recommendation for his entire oeuvre. I’d read two Alexis Hall books already -- There will Be Phlogiston and Pansies, and they were solid if not favorites. I decided to try another, and picked Boyfriend Material because it was available from Hoopla, and Eseme’s favorite.

There is a lot to like about Boyfriend Material. The main protagonists are engaging and the writing is witty and compelling. I put down pretty much everything I pick up these days, so just “I got through an entire book in under 24 hours without ever wanting to give up on it” says a great deal. There’s an eclectic supporting cast of friends, relatives, and co-workers, and if they’re not necessarily plausible, they are at least entertaining. The protagonists walk the line of “lovable but still flawed.”

The characters don’t have sex until over halfway through the book and after they’ve established a serious emotional bond, which I loved. The sex scenes were less explicit than I’m used to, and focused on the narrator’s mental state more than the physical details, which I also adored. (I never write sex scenes like this, but I’d like to.)

Some of the scenes are heartbreakingly sweet and tender, the kind I like to re-read when I finish a romance novel. I’ve re-read several of my favorite parts already.

On the other hand, I was sad pretty much the entire time I read the book, which is a weird way to feel about a romance. Part of why I kept reading was that romances are guaranteed a happy ending and I hoped that I would stop being sad about the book when I got to the end.

I got to the end and I’m still sad, so that part didn’t work.

I can’t tell whether I am sad about the story or just depressed in general, since I have been depressed for most of February. But the thing about the story that I found saddest was that the protagonist, Luc, had zero self-esteem, self-sabotaged regularly, and for most of the book he was depressed, miserable, or panicking about the looming threat of things going wrong (usually because he would make them go wrong.) His self-sabotage mode was “treat the people around you abominably.” So, uh, content note for that.

Luc is extremely aware of his assortment of problems. He’s not cognizant of his good qualities, and I kept wanting to see him through the eyes of his love interest, Oliver. I wanted to know what Oliver found loveable about him. But Luc is the only narrator. ( cut for spoilery bit )

Anyway, I have now discovered my ability to be sad about a romance with a happy ending and where no one dies or gets seriously injured or anything else, so I feel like I’ve achieved a new depth of “just can’t feel good about anything, can you.”

I am pretty sure this is on me and not the book. It’s a good book. I recommend it.

I’ve thought about trying another book since I successfully read one, but also I’m like “I’m already sad and I don’t want to read another book that lets me discover new ways to be EVEN SADDER” so I dunno.

Oh hey I finished reading a book! 

It's amazing!

That I finished reading a book, I mean, the book was good but "amazing" would be an overstatement. The Duke Who Didn't is Courtney Milan's newest release, a historical romance about a mixed-race (British & Chinese) English duke, and his Chinese-British love from the working class. Like most Milan romances, the pair is incredibly unlikely -- how do these two even meet, much less fall in love? Milan spends much of the book selling the premise; it takes a lot to establish. I almost gave up on the book early on, after the reveal of one of the devices intended to keep the lovers from resolving the romance too soon. It was a cringe-inducing device and I did not want to spend the rest of the book cringing.

Fortunately, she didn't devote too much of the book to this particular point.  Milan said on Twitter that one of her inspirations was non-Western story structures that don't center around conflict. I would not describe this as a "book without conflict" -- it's got a lot of conflicts between characters, and the standard central conflict that is resolved before the end of the book. But it is atypical of Milan's romances; it doesn't have the Mandatory Third Act Breakup, which I hate*. (I don't care that it's considered mandatory, and very few of my romances use the device.) And overall, it's lower conflict and the stakes do not feel as high as Milan's other romances. 

All in all, I enjoyed it and hope she continues to explore alternative story structures because this was a great change of pace. I'd give it an 8 on my "enjoyment" scale, due to miscellaneous nitpicks.

*To be clear, I hate that it's regarded as mandatory. In some stories, it makes sense and it works. But as a required element, it is incredibly grating.

I'd been planning to buy Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened since, I don't know, 2011 or so? Back when Allie Brosh first announced that she was writing a book. The book took longer to release than she'd anticipated -- late 2013 instead of late 2012. I did hear about it when it came out, and I planned to buy it, and put it in my Amazon cart, and then didn't buy it.

For six years.

This year, I went to order snow boots from Amazon, because I had been meaning to buy snow boots in person for three months and still hadn't managed to and decided I'd better order some before the next snowstorm hit since it was already too late for the current one. While I was buying the snow boots, I saw Hyperbole and a Half sitting in that forlorn "saved to cart" part of the shopping cart where Amazon puts things that you added to the cart and never removed from it but also never actually bought, either.

All right. Let's finally buy this book.

I am perfectly content to have waited 6 years to get Hyperbole and a Half because it means that 2020 Me got to read it for the first time, and it is wonderful. Sorry you missed out, Past Rowyn, but Present Rowyn gets to benefit from your loss!

Some of the essays in the book are on her blog, also called Hyperbole and a Half, while many are new. Some of my favorite blog posts didn't make the cut, to my surprise. The Alot isn't in the book! Clean All the Things is, though. The publisher focused on Brosh's illustrated autobiographical essays more than on anything else.

You don't need me to tell you this book is great: it was wildly successful and has over 4,000 Amazon reviews. It is an extraordinarily funny book: by page 13, I was laughing too hard to keep reading. Every time I caught my breath, I would look at the same page and start wheezing again.

Lut: "Are you okay?"
Me: "This may take me a while to read."
Lut: "Yes. Because you can't breathe."

This book does need content notes, though: some of the essays address mental illness, and not all of the ones that are about mental illness discuss it by name. She talks frankly about depression and about coping methods and the problems with her coping methods. Often, the way she writes about herself, or her past self, uses brutal or cruel language. It's clear that one of Brosh's coping mechanisms is "humor" and she wields it with extraordinary skill. But I'd find myself going D: at her own self-condemnation. I found her essays sometimes enlightening -- she does a fantastic job of explaining her depression -- and sometimes painful to see her being so hard on herself.

Did you ever have one of those teachers who had a great sense of humor and was also really sarcastic, and if they mocked a kid the whole class would laugh because the teacher was so funny? And you'd laugh too, but you also knew that the teacher was mean and abusive and you wished they would stop making fun of students? Brosh is kind of like that, except the only person she mocks is herself. It's much easier to take than the abusive teacher but I do wish she would be nicer to herself. o_o

Oh, and her dogs. She mocks them too. I'm okay with that, the dogs can't read.

The essays are illustrated by Brosh's own cartoons, which are colorful and childlike and perfect for her subject. The book layout is excellent: I'd wondered how her style would translate from web to book form, but it's put together beautifully. One nice touch is that the background color for the pages changes between essays, so it's easy to tell when essays begin and end from just looking at the fore edge. There's also plenty of contrast between text and background colors.

Anyway, there are a bunch of different essays and many of them are not about mental illness or being unkind to anything -- I don't want to give the impression that it's all self-flagellation by any means. This is a solid 9.5 book, I loved reading it and highly recommend it. I am a little melancholy that she's not written anything else, at least under her own name, since.

I finished reading a book! Shadows of Self, by Brandon Sanderson, is the sequel to The Alloy of Law and part of the new Mistborn series. I should read summaries of the earlier Mistborn books, because I only half-remember a lot of stuff. Having the characters from the original trilogy be mythological figures that occasionally show up in the current trilogy is fun, though. I read too slowly to re-read the actual books.

I did not love Shadows of Self; it actually took me something like two months to finish it, and I ended up reading most of it on the plane to and from Seattle. There is nothing especially wrong with the book, but the only character I love is Steris, who (a) has a tiny part and (b) nobody else loves. I've mentioned this before, but Alloy of Law was the book at inspired A Rational Arrangement, and in particular Steris inspired Wisteria. I wrote ARA specifically because I was like "Steris is great! Why can no one around her see how great she is? Okay, fine, I'm writing my own book and I'm gonna have a neurodiverse woman in it and she will have people who understand how wonderful she is." All the other characters were just kind of there. They have personalities but not ones that I care about.

Anyway, I stuck it out on the strength of "the plot will be cool even if it is wasted on me" and "maybe there will be more Steris." I just want someone to appreciate Steris as much as I do. 

I thought I was okay with the resolution but the more I think about it, the more I am annoyed by it. Like some of the antagonist's actions make sense in retrospect but I am seriously side-eyeing other aspects and BLAH. Also, I don't love the way everything in this setting revolves around the one male protagonist. Like there are other viewpoint characters but you feel like they only exist in relation to the protagonist. This is particularly irritating with the female characters whose most important emotion is "how do they feel about male protagonist?" This is not usually a problem that I have in Sanderson's work; it's specific to these two books.

To be clear: I don't think Shadows of Self was objectively bad; it's mostly just ... not for me. Sanderson's choice to make Steris both great and underappreciated is perfectly valid. He's allowed. I'm allowed to whinge about it. That's how these things go. n_n

Anyway, I didn't enjoy it very much. A 7, I guess, mostly rescued from a 6 by the small bits of Steris here and there.

I actually read a book! This is 100% not the book I would've expected to pick up and read in a weekend, yet Here We Are.

Marie Kondo is a Japanese decluttering consultant, and she's recently become much more visible after doing a Netflix reality show. But I first heard about her a couple of years ago from my friend Ciel on Twitter/Mastodon; Ciel has mentioned using the KonMari method for some time now. He remarked that a lot of the book is Marie saying "I did [X] once [or many times]! It turned out to be a terrible idea. Don't do that yourself." This approach -- that frankness in speaking of one's own missteps along the path -- sounded endearing and I decided to put the book on reserve at the library.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up is a surprisingly fun, quick read. Props to the author and her translator for taking the boring topic of "how to make your home a better place to live" and making it entertaining.

It's also way more persuasive than I expected. What makes the book special to me is less its tips on process and more "Marie Kondo will now give you permission to get rid of all that stuff you own and don't like and don't use but feel guilty about throwing away." Halfway through the book, I started laundry. As soon as my clothes were clean, I put the book down to dump the clean laundry, all the clothing from my drawers, and a chunk of clothes from my closet onto the couch and proceeded to weed out two-thirds of it. Felt great!

I don't know if I will have my life changed by this book -- it's a lot of stuff to go through, and a lot of the things in my house are Lut's and not mine. One of the charming things about the book, however, is the way it tells you to handle living with other people. "Don't worry about their things. Just take care of your own stuff and your own possessions. That's probably the real source of your clutter-related anxiety anyway." So I can separate out what's mine and go through it and if the place is still cluttered afterwards, that's okay.

Also, it made me realize that almost all the stuff in the bedroom is mine. Trask has his side of the headboard and a few things stored under the bed, but almost everything in their is mine to declutter. MWAHAHA.

If nothing else, I will have 3 fewer bags full of clothing I don't like and don't wear.

Anyway, fun book, recommended if you have a cluttered home and wish you didn't. Especially if you feel guilty for throwing things out. MARIE KONDO WILL ABSOLVE YOUR GUILT. It's great.

Briarley is not so much a Beauty and the Beast re-telling as a fix-it fic. It's a short but lovely M/M romance with no sex, no Stockholm syndrome, and a father who refuses to trade his daughter for his freedom.

One of the protagonists is a bisexual Christian parson in WW II England, and the story treats his faith and his vocation seriously, which I particularly loved. With the parson's stance being "I don't believe homosexuality is sinful and here is my reasoning, but I am a flawed human like everyone else and I could be wrong." It felt authentic and respectful.

The dragon (ie, the Beast) protagonist wasn't as well-developed as the parson, which would've made the romance more endearing. But this was still a quick, fun read, with lots of good detail relevant to the setting. And not the standard "Nazis bad" stuff: bits about wartime rationing and German bombings of England and not using lights at night so the bombers wouldn't be inadvertently guided by them.

It's a good story. Check it out!