Mermaid Fins, Winds & Rolling Pins

by Erin Johnson

Bingo squares: small scale, self-published, (the other books in the series feature a vampire pretty prominently), audiobook, ocean setting H, would be hard mode, long title

I got this series through a giveaway on r/audiobooks. It’s a cosy mystery series involving a lot of cooking. This volume took place in the mermaid kingdom, it was very sweet, short and lovely. 

These are not the usual pretty and prim mermaids. They are drop dead gorgeous, true, but also petty, and involved with drug trafficking. And the princess is set to marry the pirate king, who is as shady as is to be expected. Imogen once again finds herself having to make delicious baked good and clear her name of murder accusations, on all a tight schedule. The main character is lovely and the narration is so bubbly and cheerful. I also really like the focus on good friendships, and the series’ romance takes an interesting turn in a positive direction. 

Spinning Silver

by Naomi Novik

Bingo squares: retelling, audiobook, 

Audiobook note: there are two narrator versions, I didn’t like the Katy Sobey version at all, just seemed all around weird, the voices flat. I listened to the Lisa Flanagan version after realizing there are two and it was very nice and atmospheric. 

I liked Spinning Silver, but didn’t love it, I much prefer the Bear and The Nightingale for my wintery slavic fairy tale inspired reads. My main complaint is with the ending, I’ve just had enough of that sort of thing and could’ve gone for a much more friendship oriented ending, I liked the atmosphere and the worldbuilding, especially the antagonists and their world. I liked how MC got ahead on her cleverness, and the whole  making something from nothing theme. I also really liked how it was framed as a retelling with the MC telling us how we don’t know the whole story. 

Adventures in New America

Bingo squares: Afrofuturism H, Own Voices H, audiobook

I really wanted to try an audiodrama for bingo after I’ve seen a couple of people shilling them so much. I loved the story, world and characters, but for this specific one there were things about the format that made it hard to follow. 

Adventures in New America is a frame narrative where the frame overlaps the story, the line between them is fuzzy at best. It’s like a radio show set in the world where the events take place. What annoyed me is that the story is often broken up by in-world ads, which end up being relevant to the plot, but between intros, ads, outros and actual ads for other podcasts I struggled to stay focussed. I much prefer a nice linear audiobook. The performance of all the actors was great though. 

The story itself is cool, described as “sci-fi, political satire, Afrofuturistic buddy comedy” and the characters are fun to be around and clever. The social critique, MC is a black man trying to get arrested so he can get healthcare, mixes very well with the absurd  Tetchy Terrorist Vampire Zombies from outer space. 

Binti trilogy

by Nnedi Okorafor 

Bingo squares: africanfuturism, own voices

I really enjoyed the Binti trilogy, but for some reason I don’t have a lot of words about it. Maybe it’s because I read the novellas with pretty big breaks between them. I really liked how the worldbuilding blended earthly and alien.  I wanted to go with familiar and foreign, but the Himba culture is pretty foreign to me to start with. At same time a group of people being set in their ways and rejecting everything “outside”, even if they are otherwise very smart and capable, is familiar. 

In Binti I liked the wonder of the university and how the MC deals with her trauma. Home was probably my favorite because I loved the theme of identity changing and growing in Home. The Night Masquerade brings a very dramatic end to the trilogy.  

Gideon The Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir 

Bingo squares: twins, audiobook, published in 2019 H

I’m sure I would have gotten along better with this book if I hadn’t listened to the audiobook. The narration was fine, that’s  not the problem, but the names, the bloody names! Gah! Tamsyn Muir knew what she was doing with these names and helpfully provided a glossary at the beginning, except in the audiobook I couldn’t easily scroll back to it as needed, until I caved and printed it out from the amazon sample. 

The book starts out alright, I didn’t like Gideon but that’s fine, it’s just me being fed up with edgy characters and Gideon is all edges. But then Gideon and Harrow, the two characters with distinct memorable names, together with a million (closer to 13) other characters, with complicated names, get sucked into a murder mystery party uhh event thing. And I spent far more time than is in any way reasonable trying to figure out who tf is who. Because of this I’m sure I missed a lot of characterisation, I just genuinely perceived it all as a jumbled mess. It got a lot easier once they started getting killed off, but I don’t think “oh yes! character dying! I can keep up with the story” is a good look for a book. 

Harrowhark Nonnagesimus, reverend daughter of Drearburh, is fucking amazing though. She turned the book around for me. She has a heart to heart with Gideon pretty late in the book and that’s when I started liking the book and decided I’d read the second one in the series as well. There’s a big reveal about her and it’s so good and changes everything and I loved it. 

I heard this book is funny, but I think I was just too angry at it to catch the humor. And maybe the language reads better on page than audio. There were lots of cases of Gideon trying to be snarky and clever, and using language artisitcally, that might be funny, just fell very flat with me. 

Even Tree Nymphs Get the Blues

by Molly  Harper

Bingo squares: novella, long title, audiobook

This was a free audible original, short Paranormal Romance novella about a tree nymph moving to a town where humans and supernaturals live together. I really enjoyed it, I have a pretty strong new found love for novellas, I love the focus on just one or two characters, and how far they can come in just a few pages. In this case it’s a scandinavian tree nymph who’d moved to New York after having her trust and heart broken by a man. Now she’s moving again, to Mystic Bayou, where she relearns to make friends, open up, and even trust and find love. The love interest is very sweet, he does one of my favorite things, which is try to pursue her respectfully and give her space, even when, through a misunderstanding, her fucks it up pretty bad, he steps back rather than doubling down. 

Carmilla

by J. Sheridan Le Fanu 

Bingo squares: novella, audiobook

I didn’t know before my friend told me but Carmilla predates Dracula by 25 years. With it being the inspiration for many of the familiar tropes, the “twist” isn’t so much a twist as what was obvious from the very start, but I enjoyed it a lot, it was so gothic and romantic. It was great seeing lesbians exist in the days of yore, even if the portrayal is far from flattering, and maybe at the time it would have read more like lesbians= evil monsters rather than lesbians= sexy af vampires.  

The narration was great, so atmospheric and creepy. Was thinking there’d be a bit more of David Tenanant but the other actors did such a great job I didn’t mind at all. 

Omul fluture

by Lucian Dragoş Bogdan, Teodora Matei

Bingo squares:cyberpunk, local to me

I read this and Alif The Unseen for my cyberpunk squares, and I think I can say it’s not you, it’s me, I just don’t like cyberpunk. I get enough depressing dystopian shit on the news and thinking about the future without wanting to read about it in my free time. 

So, I didn’t like Omul Fluture, it’s got a whole grotesque aesthetic that I’m never a fan of. I think it’s essentially an idea book, it tackles the concepts of identity and virtual vs reality from many different and interesting perspectives, exploring them thoroughly. I thought that part was very interesting and well done. I feel like the downside to that was having all the different characters, with different stories only touching on each other now and then, was that it didn’t make the story particularly cohesive or from my point of view engaging. It was a book I struggled to get through rather than looking forward to reading. The format, blog posts in between chapters from different character’s POV, also made it feel pretty disjointed, especially as there are long leaps between character’s events and important characters gets introduced pretty late. 

I thought the way it all tied in together was clever, and I’m sure a more attentive reader would have been able to pick up the clever hints for it, I was not attentive.