Wen Spencer

(Before I start gushing about it, I should say: this book has a lot of potentially disturbing content, and basically a constant underlying threat of gendered violence/rape/etc towards male characters. It didn’t bother me, but I could easily see it bothering others.)

I remembered being HELLA sad when I was done reading this book (especially after discovering there were no sequels), and, yeah, very much the case again now. I could keep following these characters and this world basically show more forever. I love them so much! Beautiful, clever Jerin. Eldest Whistler, Ren, and Halley giving us so many different flavors of badass! Cullen being this world’s equivalent of a tomboy, but cleaning up so nicely.

The narrative voice is pretty straightforward but there’s something I really like about it? It’s so effortless to get sucked into. I love how protective everyone is of Jerin. I love the setting. I love that this is just a dumb, wonderful romance with a side of palace intrigue and military swashbuckling. I love how the gender flip plays into all this.

Most of all, I just love being able to, even briefly, live in a world where the expectation of AMAB people is that they’re pretty and soft and need to be protected and cherished. That you’re expected to be more nurturing, more gentle, more submissive. This book meant a lot to me when I read it early on in college. I was in the middle of questioning my gender identity and sexual orientation, so having something that played with gender the way this did as just a baked-in part of the setting was just so exactly what I needed. As I reread it now I do find myself at timmes wishing that it had been done differently. Specifically I don’t like the idea that men had to be more scarce to sort of justify why society developed the way it did? And the society presented here does not seem to have any room in it for transgender and nonbinary individuals, or even AMAB gay people. (Nor is there much room for lesbians, though lesbian sex does at least come up a few times.)

Oh, and there’s the fact that everything is based on procreation. Procreation is… not something I’ve ever been interested in. I’m ace, actually, so the whole scarcity of males and desperate need for the ones that exist to procreate would… really not work for me? So all the aforementioned is obviously not great for me in terms of wish fulfilment. But idk? Even taking it all into account, at times this book is just… perfect. I just want to slip right into Jerin’s shoes.

Yeah, it isn’t a perfect fit for me, because in this fictional society boys are still expected to eventually be comfortable being called “men,” and… yeah. That one will never really work for me? I’ve tried being a cis boy, a trans girl, an enby, an enby boy… that last one has stuck alright, even if it at times has seemed ironic that I found my way back to some kind of boyhood, but one thing I have never at any point been comfortable with is the word “man”?

And before you start worrying, I get that in actuality, it will be better for everyone (including me) to fight for a more egalitarian society, and I’m certainly never going to ADVOCATE for a society like this one, but… still… having had such a hard time carving out a gendered space for myself that makes any kind of sense, and having to explain and justify it all the time… it’s hard to read something like this and not wish that I could just wake up in a world where my kind of boyhood is the default assumption.

(... on the other hand, I kind of love being neutered, and that is VERY much something that world wouldn’t let boys do. Shrug.)

It’s a pity there wasn’t a sequel, and doesn’t seem to be any sign the author is considering one. Aside from my aforementioned misgivings about it, I really want more books in this setting. Or at least a similar setting. I’ve kind of scoured the internet for recommendations for similar books, and I’m gonna try reading a few that popped up in that search, but I’m not sure I’m gonna find anything that will quite hit this exact same spot.

There’s a flippant part of me that wants to say “maybe I’ll just write one!” but I’m not going to pretend for even a second that I could do so nearly as skillfully as Wen Spencer did. On top of all the wish fulfillment, this is just such a terrific read! I just really, really didn’t want it to end. show less

This story is a direct sequel to TINKER. It begins with a Prologue that catches up the reader on the main events in TINKER through the vehicle of Windwolf's participation in a ceremony of memory. Then the action begins...

Pittsburgh is stranded on Elfhome along with its 60,000 citizens who are mostly human but also include tengu and oni and half-oni. Windwolf and the Wind Clan need to root out the oni who are also immortal, breed like rabbits, and want to conquer Elfhome. It is too big a task show more and requires Windwolf to call in help from other clans. But this comes at a cost: the Stone Clan sees this as a weakness in Wind Clan and wants to institute a land grab and even assassinate Windwolf and Tinker and the Queen's representative also wants to gain a greater control in the Westernlands.

While Windwolf plays politics, Tinker is busy trying to clean up the mess left behind when she destroyed the interdimensional gate. Besides stranding Pittsburgh on Elfhome, it also left the ghost lands - a weird spatial discontinuity which seems to contain fractured pieces of various dimensions all jumbled together.

Tinker is also being plagued by dreams that seem to contain prophesy which are waking her screaming in the night and leaving her sleep deprived during the day. The dreams indicate that there is something she still needs to do to make things right. They contain elements from the Wizard of Oz which is odd because Tinker had not seen that movie. In it, she is the Scarecrow and is the one with the answers which she finds increasingly frustrating.

While helping xenobiologist Lain with a black willow - a mobile and dangerous tree, she needs to explore her grandfather's papers and discovers the family birth certificates but hers is missing and a strange file on a woman named Esme whose picture shows her to be one of the people who are starring in her dreams of Oz.

The story is action-packed and has great worldbuilding. I love that Tinker hasn't lost her human heart in her transformation to elf. I also like the look at Elven culture and the ways it is suited to a race that is potentially immortal.

This book was immensely engaging and entertaining. I do recommend reading TINKER before this one despite the information catch-up of the prologue. While this book can stand alone, much depth and richness would come from reading TINKER first. show less

A very poor showing in an otherwise fantastic series, this is less a novel, and more a collection of drabbles, short-stories and novellas.
Lacking any discernable plot and without a coherent storyline, it would have been much better of as another Project Elfhome book, filling in the cracks and humanizing the city.
Based on this, I am not sure the author even knows how to progress or end the series, so instead she is fiddling her thumbs, trying to shoehorn every character and story arch into show more the main plotline.
I adore most of the characters, and welcome a chance to learn more of them, but this haphazard drive-by inclusion does not serve them or the story. show less

Nikki Delany is on the run from her mother. She is currently in Japan. Nikki has OCD and a condition that forces her to write. Her mother has had her committed to mental institutions, medicated and under the care of a huge number of psychiatrists who all try to convince her that she is insane. Nikki's mother is a rich, powerful senator. The only way to keep from being institutionalized again is to run.

Nikki uses her compulsion to write in order to write horror novels. When she is telling show more her friend Miriam about a scene that she has recently written and shared to her blog, she is overheard by a police officer. The Japanese police arrest her because someone seems to be recreating Nikki's fictional murders in the real world.

It is at this point that the story takes a turn to the paranormal. Her writing leads her to a katana that holds a kami, a Japanese nature spirit, who takes control of her body and moves her around. She is attacked by a tanuki impersonating one of the police officers who interviewed her. She writes about and then meets a shapeshifter that she first calls Scary Cat Dude.

The Scary Cat Dude, actually named Leo, is searching for his adoptive father and finds Nikki because she wrote about him and hopes she can write more and find out where he is. Nikki learns that she writes the truth which is horrifying to her because everyone she writes about dies in gruesome ways. Now she has written herself and her friends into the story and has to find a way to change the ending.

I really enjoyed the writing and the details about Japanese mythology. I loved Nikki who wasn't at all sure, at first, that she wasn't going insane. I loved her courage and her determination to have a life free from her mother's control.

Fans of urban fantasy, anime and Japanese culture are the ideal audience for this one. show less