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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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The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho

The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water explores faith, sacrilege, and reverence in the midst of a silent war. Beginning slowly with a truly fantastic second half that ties everything together, make some room for this novella on your TBR.

The tone is very light and the story feels fun at first, laughing in the face of danger in a dark time. The dynamic of a tightly-knit group hesitantly absorbing a newcomer works really well. It’s short but it packs a lot of story and excellent character work into a small volume. As the reader becomes more comfortable with the characters the tone gets more serious. It's also possible that I missed some of the ways in which it was more serious from the start, and really I was getting more comfortable with the story and gradually realizing what it was doing. It lingered in some uncomfortable moments in a good way, a lot of the tension is due to interpersonal drama that is somewhere between joking and deadly at any moment. The focus gradually narrowed to being about two members of the group finding an equilibrium with one another while still managing the macguffin. 

For the first third or so of the book I thought it was good, but I wasn't sure yet why a friend of mine had recommended it so highly. Then, just before the halfway mark, something clicked and the story went from pretty good to really amazing (I know exactly what did it, I just can't say because of spoilers). The second half is just so satisfying and this book is great. A quick read and a very good one.

CW for brief misgendering/deadnaming, sexism, massacre, death.

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A leaping figure in black swings a sword, at their back a figure in white holds an enormous pink flower.

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