Skip to main content

Featured

The Graceview Patient by Caitlin Starling

Margaret lives with a rare autoimmune condition that has destroyed her life, leaving her isolated. It has no cure, but she’s making do as best she can—until she’s offered a fully paid-for spot in an experimental medical trial at Graceview Memorial. The conditions are simple, if grueling: she will live at the hospital as a full-time patient, subjecting herself to the near-total destruction of her immune system and its subsequent regeneration. The trial will essentially kill most of, but not all of her. But as the treatment progresses and her body begins to fail, she stumbles upon something sinister living and spreading within the hospital. Unsure of what's real and what is just medication-induced delusion, Margaret struggles to find a way out as her body and mind succumb further to the darkness lurking throughout Graceview's halls. PUBLISHER: St. Martin's Press YEAR: 2025 LENGTH: 320 pages AGE: Adult GENRE: Horror RECOMMENDED: Highly Queer Rep Summary: No canon queer rep. *I...
Post a Comment
Read more
Labels

The Ruin of Kings by Jenn Lyons (A Chorus of Dragons, #1)

Kihrin is a bastard orphan who grew up on storybook tales of long-lost princes and grand quests. When he is claimed against his will as the long-lost son of a treasonous prince, Kihrin finds that being a long-lost prince isn't what the storybooks promised.

Far from living the dream, Kihrin finds himself practically a prisoner, at the mercy of his new family's power plays and ambitions. He also discovers that the storybooks have lied about a lot of other things things, too: dragons, demons, gods, prophecies, true love, and how the hero always wins.

Then again, maybe he’s not the hero, for Kihrin isn’t destined to save the empire.

He’s destined to destroy it . . .

TITLE: The Ruin of Kings
AUTHOR: Jenn Lyons
PUBLISHER: Tor Books
YEAR: 2019
LENGTH: 560 pages
AGE: Adult
GENRE: Fantasy
RECOMMENDED: N/A

Queer Rep Summary: Not far enough to assess, the book is shelved as LQBTQ+.

*I received a review copy as part of the 2021 Hugo voters packet. 

DNF 12%.

I was having trouble following the story across points in time, as the narrators didn't feel different enough to be distinctive. The perspectives are labeled at the start of each chapter, but I felt adrift, bored, and uninterested. I did not like whatever character is writing the footnotes, I know the point is that the main narrator had different information from whoever is providing the commentary, but it felt like I was being jerked around since the main narrator would say one piece of information then the footnote narrator would immediately contradict them with yet more worldbuilding I didn't yet have the context to care about.

CW for slavery, body horror, blood, sexual assault (not depicted), gore (graphic), torture, death (graphic).

Bookshop Affiliate Buy Link

Add this on TheStoryGraph

A metal sculpture of a dragon's head and neck against a red background.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment