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Yours Celestially by Al Hess

After divorce, death, and having his reformatted soul uploaded into a new body, Sasha expected resurrection to be a fresh start. His time spent in digital Limbo with the program's cheeky AI guardian angel, Metatron, was cathartic, but what good is a second life when he only sees his daughter on the weekends, he has all the same problems he had before he died, and he can't seem to shake the ache for the married life he lost? If that weren't frustrating enough, a glitch in the program has given Sasha the ability to sense Metatron even outside of Limbo. And Metatron is in love. The angel's sickly-sweet yearning for one of the souls still in Limbo has turned Sasha's stomach into caramelized lead. It's hard enough to move on without someone else's feelings making the emptiness in his own life even more acute. He didn't have playing wingman to an actual winged being on his bingo card, but he's determined to help Metatron make a move on their crush so he ca...
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Rhapsody: Child of Blood by Elizabeth Haydon (Symphony of Ages, #1)

Rhapsody is a slowly burning epic where the stakes are deeply personal, with friendships tense though absolute, the battles scarce but vivid. Frequently dark, refusing to despair. I'm glad to be on the side of time where I don't have to wait for the sequel. 

In high fantasy I'm used to grand stories where the actions of a few protagonists somehow shift the fate of nations... and this book relentlessly bucks that trend. What change they are able to effect is in scale with their efforts, and the disaster whose resolution might have consumed whole books in some other series is instead revealed through tales after it's all over. The journey through the Root in more mesmerizing than monotonous, it has a lot to carry when they make it out and if any less of the narrative had been devoted to that phase of their journey it would have spoiled everything after. 

If you read this book and like it you will be driven to read the sequel, this is is a fairly complete story but it definitely is a "to be continued" situation. The story is grander than this volume, almost so much that it can't quite stand alone in terms of emotional resolution, but the main plot threads are tied off where they need to be.

This book does contain a lot of derisive language about sex workers and sex work, as well as racism in a fantasy setting. It's consistently handled well, and it's clear that the author disagrees with the disparaging views of the characters in question (they are immediately rebuffed almost every time), but that language is present, so please take care of yourselves.

CWs for murder, mass death, child death.

A woman in armor, a Firbold, and a figure in a dark cloak stand in front of a mountain
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