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Druidan

Druidan@bookwyrm.social

Joined 1 year, 2 months ago

Just a simple queer skeleton sailing aboard a haunted pirate ship ☠️🏴‍☠️🏳️‍🌈

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Druidan's books

Currently Reading

Junji Itō: Uzumaki (Hardcover, 2013, VIZ Media) 4 stars

Kurôzu-cho, a small fogbound town on the coast of Japan, is cursed. According to Shuichi …

Review of Uzumaki

5 stars

What could I possibly say about Junji Ito’s works that have not already been said? He is a master at taking bizarre or mundane ideas and turning them into a creeping horror with his fantastic art style. This collection of stories about this doomed town and the people who live in it initially feels disconnected and disparate, but ultimately built up into a suitably Lovecraftian conclusion. If you are interested in horror manga and have not yet tried out this book, do yourself a favor and check it out.

Tanya Byrne: Afterlove (2021, Hachette Children's Group) 4 stars

Car headlights. The last thing Ash hears is the snap of breaking glass as the …

Review of Afterlove

4 stars

I enjoyed this one. I wanted something with a legitimate sapphic romance in it, and I got that. I liked the main character’s love interest. They were fun to watch together and I liked their personalities. The side characters were also good, though I didn’t really get enough time with any of them. That’s all right. The book is focused very heavily on the main pair and their story. There is a very clear three act structure and the first and third act are by far the strongest, in my opinion, and ends with a satisfying if bittersweet conclusion. It’s not that the second act is actually bad, per se. It’s more that, since I am really big on world building, I could see a lot of the cracks and thinness of some of the supernatural elements. By the time the third act came around, I was able to shrug …

Tamsyn Muir: Harrow the Ninth (Paperback, 2021, Tor.com) 4 stars

"She answered the Emperor's call.

She arrived with her arts, her wits, and her only …

Harrow the Ninth – Review

5 stars

This series does not give up its secrets easily. It holds them closely and tightly like a squirrel with its nuts. I was left at the end of the last book with a lot of questions, and really pressing plot developments that I needed answers to, and “Harrow the Ninth“ wasn’t going to give them to me lightly. The book does its best from the get-go to upend your sense of reality, attacking your memories of what exactly happened in the first book. It does this both in story content - it directly contradicts events as you remember them from book one - but also in the narration. style. I can’t say that I have ever read another book that spends this much time in the second person. It took me quite a while to get used to it, as I typically despise second person, but once I did it …

Lana Harper: Payback's a Witch (2021, Little, Brown Book Group Limited) 4 stars

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina meets The L Word in this fresh, sizzling rom-com by Lana …

Payback's a Witch - Review

4 stars

Let me start off by saying to all my fellow fantasy and urban fantasy fans out there, do not go into this one expecting strong world building or magic systems. The magic and the trials are used for instigation, and as basic plot tools to put characters into confrontation with one another. In that, it is used well enough, but it is definitely not the focus of the story.

The characters and relationships, as well as the core conflict inside the main protagonist, are the key to the book's successes. Much of the tension comes from the connection of he main character, Emmy Harlow, to her hometown, and the way she is torn between loving it, and not wanting to feel trapped in it. Will she return home to the place she loves but with all the responsibilities and past pain that entails, or will she stay away in the …

Heather Walter: Misrule (2022, Random House Publishing Group) 4 stars

Does true love break curses or begin them? The dark sorceress of “Sleeping Beauty” reclaims …

Misrule- Review

4 stars

True to its title, this follow-up to the first book, “Malice,” deals with themes of what it means to rule, to lead, and the ways cycles of abuse and violence result in misrule and bad leadership that further feeds those cycles. It asks the question, can these cycles be broken? Is reconciliation possible? Is forgiveness possible?

The misrule of leaders past and present on all sides fuel the chaos and tragedy that plagues the lives of everyone involved, as does systemic bigotry and abuse. All of this feels very pertinent to our times, while being broadly applicable at any time.

I don’t believe the novel nailed the conclusions the book arrives at in those themes, but I admire the attempt, and it’s far closer to the mark than every fairy tale perfect ending. The author recognizes that mistakes are not easily rectified, and forgiveness may or may not ever be …