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The podcast is Books That Burn because the original idea was "books that burn you", discussing fictional depictions of trauma. It's also an intentional reminder of the pile of burning books, you know the photo I mean, the one from WWII. It's a pile of books about queerness, gender, and sexuality. Just in case you don't know, the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) was headed by Magnus Hirschfeld.  It was a resource for gay, intersex, and transgender people, both of knowledge and medical help. It also helped the community with addiction treatment and contraception. It wasn't perfect and some of the ideas they had seem out of date now, the ones we know about anyway. But they were trying to make queer people's lives better, and they were a community resource at a time when people really needed it. Which is all the time, we always need these accesses. And the Nazis burned the whole library. It took days, they had to drag the books ou
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Catch Lili Too by Sophie Whittemore

Lili is a Mesopotamian siren, and life as an immortal being is hard enough as it is. She’s asexual (which is incredibly difficult to reconcile if your entire point as a mythical being is to seduce people to death). She’s also struggling with depression from being alive for so long.

Lili is an absolutely shoddy improv-detective trying to track down a serial killer so ruthless that it makes even her murderous soul uneasy. However, there’s something larger at work than just one serial killer. A small town is hiding an even deadlier, global-scale secret. Forget Area 51 conspiracies. This one beats them all. With magic.

So, what better way to spice up her eternal life than being hired as a vigilante detective to stop a serial killer? Anything, literally anything. She’d trade her left lung to get out of this. Or, perhaps, somebody else’s.

TITLE: Catch Lili Too
AUTHOR: Sophie Whittemore
PUBLISHER: NineStar Press
YEAR: 2020
LENGTH: 321 pages
AGE: Adult
GENRE: Fantasy, Mystery, Mythology
RECOMMENDED: Highly

Queer Rep Summary: Gay/Achillean Secondary Character(s), Bi/Pan Main Character(s), Trans Secondary Character(s), Ace/Aro Main Character(s).

*I received a free review copy in exchange for an honest review of this book. 

Catch Lili Too is a magical murder mystery concerned with mythology, memory, and mortality. It has a respect for death, a complicated relationship with life, and just the right amount of gore.

The way this book centers the so-called "monstrous" characters and others the humans by default was really well done. It centers the MC's perspective by showing how she thinks with a minimum of translation between her perspective and a human one. I know it's not a new idea to hypothesize that humans are the monsters after all, or some variation on that idea, but this does it in a way that brings everyone, magical, mythical, monstrous, and mundane alike into a middle zone where they all could be capable of anything (including the murders) but are choosing to work together. 

I loved the characterization, both of the MC and the secondary characters, it was so good. There was space for characters to assert things about themselves, then figure out something new and grow a little without it wholly throwing off their characterization up until then. The pace at which new secondary characters were added felt really good, just as I got a handle on the dynamics between the current cast there would be a new person or two in a way that made the whole ensemble feel better.  The tension of having a mostly reliable narrator who is convinced she’s an unreliable narrator was an unexpected treat. The MC knows she can’t remember everything, and while she doesn’t actually lie to the reader, there’s a continual worry that we might be missing information or misled because she doesn’t know something she ought to know. This was especially welcome in a murder mystery novel.

The ending made me want more, which is good since this is the first in a series, but at first it felt a little rushed. As I was getting towards the 90% mark in the book I was wondering how everything was going to wrap up because I felt like there was a lot to explain, and then it happened kind of abruptly and everything was clear in very short order. Given what the ending is I think it worked, but it's definitely a slow burn that just needed one final piece of info to make sense and resolve everything, rather than a book with a lot of loose ends to tie up. It made me feel like I need to re-read the whole thing and look for clues I missed earlier, but not in a confusing way. 

CW for gore, blood, graphic violence, the death of a secondary character, suicide, suicidal ideation, murder, cancer, references to mental illness.

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The title reads “Catch Lili Too” by author Sophie Whittemore. Above the title, blue mist with stars scattered around it. Rising from the mist is the silhouette of a figure from the back with long, dark hair, wearing a brown pea coat tied at the waist. The figure stares at a darkened tree rising from the mist in the background, on a rural, empty hill surrounded by more fog and thick, thunderous clouds. A star logo reading the publisher’s name “NSP”, short for NineStar Press, sits in the top left corner.


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