Why Start a Book Blog?

 It seems strange in this day and age, when nearly everything has pivoted to audiovisual content platforms, to do something as seemingly backwards as starting a new blog. Who even reads blogs anymore, after all? Who would do that, when Tiktok and Youtube exist, to make content more easily consumed, digestible, and easy to create? Why bother starting an old-school book blog in 2026?

Maybe I'm just old-school.

After all, it's not like book blogs aren't still around. Lots of people have them. But most of the ones I encounter are run by people or groups of people and have been ongoing for years. They have an established place within a community. People know and trust them. But that's different from starting a new one and trying to carve out a space in that community, and in a way that's increasingly seen as behind the times.

But for me, blogging felt like the only way to go.

I read a lot. Not as much as I used to sometimes, thanks to my health not always cooperating (do you know how frustrating it can be to have such trouble concentrating that you can't even read a book you've read before and know the story of?), but still enough that it feels like a significant personality trait.

"What do you do?"
"Oh, well, I read a lot, you see."

I want to be able to connect with others like myself. I want to read a book and then write down my thoughts and find other people who liked the book for the same reasons I did. I want to find people with similar tastes who recommend books that I might have otherwise overlooked. I want to be part of that book-loving community.

I could do all that without doing it via a blog, though. Why not something like Youtube or Tiktok?

First, I hate how I look. Disability hasn't been kind to me, and I'm not even a little bit happy with my appearance anymore. I've grown self-conscious and very critical, and so even if I coaxed my aging phone to recording a video of myself talking about a good book, I'd hate every second of it. I don't want people seeing me. I don't want my image online, where, even if nobody mocked my appearance, I'd still feel awful about myself for knowing that somebody out there knows what I look like.

Second, I find it a lot easier to type than to talk. My disability comes with speech problems. Some days, I can talk well and be understood. Other days, my mouth and throat refuse to cooperate and I can't speak clearly at all. So I've also gotten very self-conscious about how I sound.

Writing is easier for me than being seen or being heard. So while it may seem like I'm under the delusion that it's 2006 instead of 2026, I know exactly what I'm doing.

I don't expect this blog to grow to be massive and influential. That's not my goal. I just want to be part of a community, however I can. Being disabled makes me feel like the world accessible to me shrinks a little bit smaller every day. I can't do a lot of the things I used to. I don't know where the progression of my illness will stop. So being part of a community is important. I felt like at least it couldn't hurt to try to put my thoughts out there and maybe find a place within a community of people who share one of my biggest interests.

Roses and Rot - Kat Howard

 

About the Book

Imogen and her sister Marin have escaped their cruel mother to attend a prestigious artists’ retreat, but soon learn that living in a fairy tale requires sacrifices, be it art or love.

What would you sacrifice in the name of success? How much does an artist need to give up to create great art?

Imogen has grown up reading fairy tales about mothers who die and make way for cruel stepmothers. As a child, she used to lie in bed wishing that her life would become one of these tragic fairy tales because she couldn’t imagine how a stepmother could be worse than her mother now. As adults, Imogen and her sister Marin are accepted to an elite post-grad arts program—Imogen as a writer and Marin as a dancer. Soon enough, though, they realize that there’s more to the school than meets the eye. Imogen might be living in the fairy tale she’s dreamed about as a child, but it’s one that will pit her against Marin if she decides to escape her past to find her heart’s desire.

268 pages
Published May 17, 2016

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This is a novel that, if you go into it expecting a happily-ever-after sort of fairy tale just because the story involves fairies, you're going to not only be disappointed, but absolutely gutted. The ending is a tremendously satisfying thing, don't get me wrong, but there's some bitter mixed in with the sweet, and it comes after a couple of hundred pages of trauma and stress and difficult circumstances that I feel readers might need some content warnings for.

Roses and Rot's story focuses on Imogen, a writer who, along with her sister Marin, gained entrance to a prestigious artist retreat, a place where they could spend months surrounded by beauty and creativity and be mentored as they try to push their art to a higher place. For many artists, this alone would be worth doing, even if they got nothing out of it beyond a few months with a strong mentor who helped them enhance their art. But the retreat, Melete, holds a strange secret, a fantastical element that will pit Imogen and Marin against each other in a struggle for a prize that both of them desperately crave.

As for content warnings... Imogen and Marin's mother abused them both, mentally and physically, though saved her worst punishments for Imogen because Imogen wrote and that wasn't seen as "good enough" by her mother. Too much potential for stories with bad mothers that made people ask questions. But she doted on Marin to a degree, always being supportive of her choice to dance... so long as she could shine the limelight on herself. "Look at me, I'm the mother of that prodigy onstage, it's all thanks to me than she's so talented." People with a history of parental abuse should be forewarned before reading Roses and Rot, as the back of the book saying, "she couldn’t imagine how a stepmother could be worse than her mother now," really doesn't convey just how terrible, how terrifying, their mother was to them. Reading what they went through, I felt such revulsion over that woman's actions to her children that I wanted to both praise the author for writing such horrors with the proper emotional flavour, and also to just put the book down and back away for a while. It's so well-done, but people with backgrounds filled with parental trauma might find it a bit too well-done.

That being said, sometimes people need to be aware that others, especially parents, are capable of that sort of behaviour. How many times have fellow child-free folks heard, "It's fine, you'll be a good parent when you have kids." Not everybody is a good parent. Nobody can guarantee that anyone will be a good parent. Some people are horrible, cruel and abusive, and while I'm more than passingly aware of how traumatic that could be for readers, I still have to commend the author for shining a light on an issue that many would prefer remained behind closed doors.

It's not what a lot of people would think of as a "modern fairy tale," but for me it checks the boxes. A character with a cruel mother figure. A place in the woods that feels like magic and salvation. A problem to be solved, taking the form of a quest. Fairy rules and bargains. Nearly everything you'd expect to see from a fairy tale is there, so long as you don't expect the whole thing to be about knights and princesses.

I was going to talk about how the main way it diverges from a lot of fairy tales is that it doesn't really have a moral message to give to readers. I was going to say that grey-and-grey morality is all over the place in Roses and Rot, with characters having to judge things for themselves and all coming to different understandings of the situation and no character is really portrayed as making "the right choice." Just the right choice for them. Sometimes even if it hurts others. But in writing that, I changed my mind. Roses and Rot does have a moral to it. The moral is, "Don't treat others like they're only here for your convenience."

It's clear to see how that connects to Imogen and Marin's mother seeing her daughters as either routes to her own fame and accolades, or nuisances to be disposed of when they become inconvenient. But that's not the only way this message appears in the novel. Helena's mother viewing her daughter as a stepping-stone to getting her old lover back. Evan letting his fame go to his head and doing whatever he wanted, heedless of who got hurt in the process.

It should be said that I don't think this is the same thing as, "Don't be selfish." Imogen is selfish in wanting to become to tithe to the fairies in exchange for success and thus being able to provide herself and Marin safety from their mother. Marin is selfish for wanting to become the tithe for very similar reasons. Gavin could be seen as selfish for wanting Marin to not become the tithe, because despite her wanting it, he thinks the risk to her would be too great and conspires to prevent her from attaining her goals. Even the concept of Melete itself is selfishly motivated, gaining a reputation for boosting artists so that it can attract the sort of person who can feed the fairies throughout the period of the tithe. Selfishness is all over the place here. But even most of the selfishness is cut heavily with being selfish for selfless reasons. (I think that makes sense.) Imogen and Marin both want success so they can help the other. Gavin doesn't want Marin to die. Melete still serves a wonderful purpose for helping artists with contacts and mentoring and everything else you typically get from a residency. The difference between the two concepts being how one treats others during this selfishness. 

It's fine to want things. It's fine to want things for yourself even if that means other people might not get those same things. That's not inherently wrong. What matters in the end is how you treat other people along the way. If you see your chance at success coming only at the cost of someone else's lack of success, and you think to yourself, "I could make myself look better by making them look worse," or, "I could pretend to help them while secretly sabotaging them," then you're a garbage person. "I do my absolute personal best to win this contest, even if that means someone else loses," is different. That doesn't mean it's not a painful choice to make, or doesn't mean there are no drawbacks to your success. But using others as stepping stones to your own greatness is where the line gets drawn. I think the novel is pretty clear about that, as the underlying morality.

Roses and Rot offers a wonderful look at the bonds of sisterhood, and how they can hold or break in dire circumstance. It asks readers to ponder what they themselves might trade in exchange for success and safety. It gives a classic fairy tale experience, the darker non-Disney kind of secret trades and the unknown in every shadow and the strange wonder of heartbreak and possibility. Imogen's perspective is raw and emotional, full of the kind of poetry you'd expect from a character who's literally spending a significant amount of the novel writing about fairy tales. You get a full physical sense of the scenery of Melete's grounds, and the emotional depth of Imogen's fears and hopes. Conflict and dreams tug at your heart with every turn of the page.

(I wrote more about this book than I expected to.)

Dragon Mage - ML Spencer

 

About the Book

Aram Raythe has the power to challenge the gods. He just doesn't know it yet.

Aram thinks he's nothing but a misfit from a small fishing village in a dark corner of the world. As far as Aram knows, he has nothing, with hardly a possession to his name other than a desire to make friends and be accepted by those around him, which is something he's never known. But Aram is more.

Much, much more.

Unknown to him, Aram bears within him a gift so old and rare that many people would kill him for it, and there are others who would twist him to use for their own sinister purposes. These magics are so potent that Aram earns a place at an academy for warrior mages training to earn for themselves the greatest place of honor among the armies of men: dragon riders.

Aram will have to fight for respect by becoming not just a dragon rider, but a Champion, the caliber of mage that hasn't existed in the world for hundreds of years. And the land needs a Champion. Because when a dark god out of ancient myth arises to threaten the world of magic, it is Aram the world will turn to in its hour of need.

828 pages
Published December 19, 2020

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I want to start off by saying that Dragon Mage surprised me in so many ways, all of them good. And it's rare to find a book which does that, especially a good solid old-fashioned coming-of-age fantasy story like this was. That's one of the points in its favour, I think. Dragon Mage was the start of an adventure that felt very similar to The Eye of the World (book 1 of the Wheel of Time series). You know, that way first books in a series do, with the adventure feeling fresh and new and there are all the wonders and perils of the world to experience, and even if there's danger involved, the story has become bloated or too dark. The characters haven't become so world-weary that their stories start to feel like a jade slog to get through. Dragon Mage captures that start-of-the-adventure feel perfectly, and I love it for that.

The second thing I love it for is that every time I thought I knew where the story was going, it shifted directions, keeping me on my toes the whole time. But it was never something that felt contrived. No plot twists for the sake of plot twists, but a proper tale with characters having multiple developmental arcs within it. First I thought the story was going to be about Aram and Markus being on the run from people who seek to drain Aram of all his magic, but no, then it switches to an uneasy alliance where Aram and Markus are semi-unwilling trainees in a place that would just as soon torture Aram as they would treat him decently. Then it switches again to that all going horribly wrong. Then another switch to another plane of reality, connected to the main world but separate from it, where Aram's quest changes entirely while Markus is still tied down to what he was doing before. And on and on. Just when I thought, "Surely most of the rest of the book will follow this storyline," it would change to something new, keeping the feeling of a new adventure even when there was no action to propel the plot forward. Characters are growing up, years are passing, and I ended the book feeling like everything was fresh throughout. Aram and Markus growing up from young lads to men could have resulted in them presenting world-weary faces to whatever came their way, a stolid stoic attitude of, "Well, guess I have to deal with this problem now."

But none of that happened. And it was incredibly refreshing to read an 800+ page book where it felt new and exciting throughout like that.

Markus and Aram even had occasional times where they fell out, one doing something the other disagreed with that strained their friendship. It wasn't some perfect unbreakable bond between them; neither character is infallible and they can and do make mistakes, lapses in judgment, even things they just felt was the right thing to do even if it was dangerous. Which brings me to another great thing about Dragon Mage: Markus and Aram's friendship was never in question, and they would always have each others' backs when push came to shove, but that didn't mean their relationship was absolutely perfect and nothing could ever come between them. Friendships are complicated. Sometimes the strength of a friendship isn't based on how little two people argue. Sometimes it's based on how willing a person is to stand by you even when they're angry at you. This is another thing that ML Spencer did really well when it came to characterization. Their friendship being strained at times, or even the two of them existing in different worlds, never felt like it was done just to increase tension in the story. I didn't get that feeling here. I got the feeling it was a complicated relationship between two people who, by necessity, had to walk parallel paths that sometimes diverged, but when they met up again, they would still be friends.

More of that in books, please. More representations of healthy friendships. I think we all need that in our lives now and again.

Speaking of representation, that brings me to my final point that I really loved about Dragon Mage. Aram isn't neurotypical. If I had to give it a name, I'd say he's somewhere on the autism spectrum. Some of that was behaviour based on the inherent traits that made him entirely different from Markus, so there was a touch of, "He's autistic because he's really magic," and that can be a harmful presentation, but despite knowing Aram could easily fall into that trope, I don't think it was done with any malice, nor even ignorance about autism. Some of Aram's neurodiverse traits had nothing to do with his connection to magic, after all, so his obsessive nature and tendency to hyperfocus when stressed may have come from his heritage, but him struggling to communicate and understand people, or being really socially awkward? Those are traits commonly connected to neurodiversity, which had nothing to do with Aram's heritage and everything to do with who he was as a person. So if you're looking for a good fantasy novel with neurodiverse representation, Dragon Mage is full of potential!

I want to gush more about the plot and how it had me hooked the whole way through, but I don't think I can do that without inadvertently spoiling anything for those who may read it later, and I don't want to ruin anyone's enjoyment of this novel. I already risked enough by talking about the way the story kept switching up what seemed like the main focus. Just know that I loved the story, loved how it progressed, loved the battle between what's good and what's corrupt, and the differentiation between what is corrupt and what has been corrupted. It's honestly fantastic, and I'm sorry I can't do it true justice here.

If, like me, you love the first books in a series because of how new the adventure feels, and if you love good neurodiverse representation in fantasy, and you're seeking a novel that will keep you engaged through the whole story, all the storms and calms, then I whole-heartedly recommend Dragon Mage. It was a true delight to read, the sort of book that has to be experienced rather than described, and the story will stick with you in the same way that great epic fantasy stories often do. Which, for my part, means that this book is a great epic fantasy, on par with some of the greats. ML Spencer is an author to keep an eye on. Like Aram, like Markus, I think she's going to do some more amazing things.

Among Others - Jo Walton

 

About the Book

Raised by a half-mad mother who dabbled in magic, Morwenna Phelps found refuge in two worlds. As a child growing up in Wales, she played among the spirits who made their homes in industrial ruins. But her mind found freedom and promise in the science fiction novels that were her closest companions. Then her mother tried to bend the spirits to dark ends, and Mori was forced to confront her in a magical battle that left her crippled--and her twin sister dead.

Fleeing to her father whom she barely knew, Mori was sent to boarding school in England-a place all but devoid of true magic. There, outcast and alone, she tempted fate by doing magic herself, in an attempt to find a circle of like-minded friends. But her magic also drew the attention of her mother, bringing about a reckoning that could no longer be put off...

298 pages
Published January 18, 2011

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If there's something I've learned about myself over the years, it's that I really enjoy stories that centre around the concept of magical realism. The smooth blending of mundane reality with the fantastical in such a way that the supernatural elements don't feel like invaders of realism's space, nor like some hidden subculture filled with vampires and werewolves and nightclubs where mages meet up or any such thing. When I encounter stories where people have to deal not only with the unreal but also keeping their grades up in school or managing to not get fired from their office job, it gets my attention.

I also have a weakness for stories involving boarding schools, and where characters love books as much as I do. So with all of that in mind, I was already prepared to really enjoy Among Others. It has all the right elements to make me love it.

While I can't say anything about the accuracy of the setting - I wasn't a teen in 1970s Wales, for a start - I can say that the way this story was told brought everything to life for me, and made me feel like I was looking at an actual snapshot in time. Among Others is told through Mori's journal entries, giving readers insight into not just her circumstances but also her inner monologue, without the awkwardness that I find often comes with first-person narratives. We don't have scenes of Mori describing her appearance while standing in front of a mirror, for instance, though we do get a sense of what she looks like when she muses on how she thinks others see her. Scenes aren't written in a way that would translate easily to a visual medium, but are just descriptions of what happens during her days, from the books she's reading to the magic she uses to keep herself safe to how uncomfortable she finds her family situation or her disability. It makes even the novel's few action scenes feel both subtle and understated while also being portentous. I really love the balance that was struck here.

I also really like the system of magic that Among Others employs. It's sympathetic magic in the way that it uses connections (turning the pages of books back into trees, as paper comes from wood and still holds the memory, so to speak, of being in that form), but it also employs chains of coincidence that transcend the linearity of time. Mori once gives the example of using magic to make a bus come a bit sooner, but hesitates because what seems like a small act could have ripple effects going back in time, changing the bus timetable, which might mean changing the comings and goings of who knows how many people since that timetable was established. It's a fantastic thought experiment even when you don't bring magic into the equation. Pick an event in your life, change one element of it, and try to figure out what else might have needed to change in order to bring about that difference. It's a system of magic that fits so well into the real world, because it's so easily deniable to anyone who doesn't want to see it, but also because it acts on reality itself, making small changes that bring about big changes, but everything is still so grounded in reality that it seems strange to think that this isn't how the world really works.

Good books get you thinking.

Mori isn't some perfect protagonist, either. True to the manner of most teens, she's startling ignorant about some things but believes herself to be right more often than not. She's arrogant, and sometimes that arrogance is earned, but other times it's just that she's convinced nobody could know something better than she does. I will give some leniency in this, since it's not like she could just hop online and learn about things, as we can today. Comparative ignorance is just part of historical fiction. Doesn't make it less frustrating to read, though, however realistic it may be.

I still can't fully get over how much I loved Among Others. It's so believable and tightly written that even Mori talking about things that happen in school or chatting with her father about books they both enjoy feels essential to the story. Nothing feels like filler. At worst, some more mundane bits feel like a short break from heavier story elements. It's a coming-of-age story mixed with historical fiction and magical realism, and it's absolutely brilliant. There's a magic to this story that makes me sad I hadn't read it before, because yes, it really is that good. No fan of speculative fiction should pass it by.

Into the West - Mercedes Lackey

 

About the Book

Baron Valdemar and his people have found a temporary haven, but it cannot hold all of them, or for long. Trouble could follow on their heels at any moment, and there are too many people for Crescent Lake to support. Those who are willing to make a further trek by barge on into the West will follow him into a wilderness depopulated by war and scarred by the terrible magics of a thousand years ago and the Mage Wars. But the wilderness is not as "empty" as it seems. There are potential friends and rapacious foes...
 
...and someone is watching them.

496 pages
Published December 13, 2022

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I've read Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar novels since I was a teen, and at this point, I've read every mainline novel in the series. They're far from perfect, but they've been a part of my life for so long that it would been strange to not read any of the new novels that release. So I'm very used to the author's style of storytelling. Often there's a lot of slow build-up for the vast majority of the novel, culminating in an intense action scene right at the end, possibly ending with a bit of a cliff-hanger depending on whether there's more story to be told later.

And Into the West stays true to that storytelling style. If you know that in advance, what you get here doesn't come as any sort of surprise. But that doesn't necessarily mean the book is that great. Into the West isn't the worst Valdemar novel I've read, but it's far from the best.

Following on from the conclusion of Beyond, the previous novel in the Founding of Valdemar series (which will probably be a trilogy, but at the moment I can't say that for certain), where Baron Valdemar is in wild uncharted lands and is responsible for thousands of people, but still has to find places for everyone to settle. Thus, a significant portion of the book is just about people moving from place to place, trying to find a new home. Complete with all the details that act as a great aid to imagination but in text come across as a lot of filler. It was actually quite frustrating at times, to read so many pages and to realise that absolutely nothing happened in them.

Really, most of the story was fine, if nothing special. What I mostly will remember about this book are the parts that were bad, rather than the few that were good. Tayledras telling Valdemar that their name for a nearby river was "Ter'i'le'e," which fans of the series as a whole will recognize as the Terilee River, which I think all of us assumed was named after a future Valdemaran monarch, Queen Terilee. Instead, I guess we're supposed to assume the queen was named after a river, which was named by another culture, in a style that actually doesn't match other examples of the Tayledras language that Mercedes Lackey has given us over the years. Or the reference to Moonmoon, an Internet meme from 10 years ago. After the awkwardness of Beyond using terms like "doggo" and "pupper," it all gets difficult to take seriously.

I think the most egregious problem, though, is the timeline. For well over a decade now, the Valdemar books have included a timeline that established the founding of Valdemar to be 1000 years after a disaster known as the Cataclysm. Into the West, however, suddenly changes that and declares the Cataclysm to have taken place a mere 500 years prior to the founding. Even the book's description states that the Cataclysm was 1000 years ago, for crying out loud! The author is well-known to have made errors with the timeline before, but never one of this magnitude. Combined with other odd issues and errors, Into the West comes across as poorly done in many respects, filled with clumsy attempts to appeal to today's youth while also messing with aspects of the world of Velgarth in ways that could have easily been prevented had the author checked any wiki devoted to her writings. It's a shame, so many of the myriad small problems I had (and the gigantic one) could have been easily prevented, but more and more when it comes to Valdemar, it feels like the author just writes what she wants to write without considering how that fits into the world she's already established.

Into the West isn't bad, but it felt wholly unnecessary, a small section of a larger story that contained so little of note that it may as well have been boiled down to a few chapters in another novel instead of stretching it out to fill and entire book. It's one that, as a long-time fan, I find difficult to recommend to anyone who has even passing knowledge and affection for the series. While I definitely don't think that Mercedes Lackey should stop writing, I do wish she'd take more time and care to make sure that what she does write actually works in context. As I said earlier, this isn't the worst Valdemar novel I've read, but it's unfortunately pretty close.

Lonely Castle in the Mirror - Mizuki Tsujimura

 

About the Book

Seven students find unusual common ground in this warm, puzzle-like Japanese bestseller laced with gentle fantasy and compassionate insight.

Bullied to the point of dropping out of school, Kokoro’s days blur together as she hides in her bedroom, unable to face her family or friends. As she spirals into despair, her mirror begins to shine; with a touch, Kokoro is pulled from her lonely life into a resplendent, bizarre fairytale castle guarded by a strange girl in a wolf mask. Six other students have been brought to the castle, and soon this marvelous refuge becomes their playground. 

The castle has a hidden room that can grant a single wish, but there are rules to be followed, and breaking them will have dire consequences. As Kokoro and her new acquaintances spend more time in their new sanctuary, they begin to unlock the castle’s secrets and, tentatively, each other’s. 

Lonely Castle in the Mirror is a mesmerizing, heart-warming novel about the unexpected rewards of embracing human connection.

384 pages
Published July 5, 2022

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The premise of Lonely Castle in the Mirror is one that I think a lot of bullied kids have thought about at some point in their lives. Escaping the struggles of day-to-day life with a little magic, finding people who are pretty different from you but you all generally become friends because you all understand what it's like to be different, to be misunderstood and outcast. They understand you, even if they don't always agree with you. As someone who was bullied to the point of school refusal myself, I can relate very easily to the setup this book provides.

Of course, the book might be cathartic but dull if this was all there was to the story. The sanctuary for the protagonist, Kokoro, and the other misfits who have also made their way to this strange castle, slowly becomes less of a sanctuary over time, with the strange rules that must be followed, and the threat of danger if they poke their nose where it doesn't belong. And yet, poking around is exactly what they must do to solve the mystery of the castle. They are only allowed to be in the castle between 9 AM and 5 PM, and anyone remaining in the castle after that point will be hunted and eaten by a giant wolf monster. They only have that time span, every day for a year, to find a magical key that will grant the finder a wish. And all of them, every single person who found the strange glowing doorway that allowed them access to the castle, has a deep wish that they want fulfilled.

Lonely Castle in the Mirror is 1 half fairy tale and 1 half magical realism, combining to a deeply emotional look at the way mental illness is treated. Or specifically, not treated. Mental health services in this part of the world aren't great a lot of the time, but they're still a lot better than in Japan, where it seems like a lot of it boils down to, "Just try to not have a mental illness." The onus is placed on the individual to not be sick, rather than placed on the community to understand and help people who are sick. But even when some resources are in place, there can be a social barrier in place that prevents people from getting the help they need, or even recognizing that they need help. When we aren't taught good ways to express ourselves, a question of, "Why not try just leaving the house for half an hour?" can easily be met with a panicked shutdown when the person in question can't properly articulate why leaving the house is such a scary thing.

Growing awareness exists both in Japan and in the wider world about the issue of hikikomori, usually translated as shut-ins, adults who forsake the outside world and stay in their rooms or apartments indefinitely. Often supported by parents who feel that they have no choice but to care for their child, even if societally, that child "should" have gotten a job and be supporting themselves now. It's a multifaceted problem that has no quick fix. Maybe bullying at school or work has caused the problem. Maybe being on the spectrum made things worse. Maybe it's depression, anxiety, or a combination of the two. But very often, they and we see "the problem" as the person, not their circumstance. "The problem: is that they're not conforming to social norms, they're acting strange, they're a burden on their loved ones. Rarely do we ask or seek to understand what's happening from that person's perspective, rather than the perspective of those external to the situation.

Kokoro's school refusal stems from bullying, but because she's young, and the situation is complicated and emotionally-charged, she struggles to explain it to her parents, until everything spirals inward and not only can she not go to school where her bullies will be, but has difficulties even thinking about attending a different school, or going outside where she might run into people who know her. It's a relief for her, then, when she steps through that glowing mirror and into a new place where there are people who don't know her, don't pre-judge her, and who accept her as one of them. Flawed, struggling, and worthy.

I went into Lonely Castle in the Mirror expecting a particular kind of story. I expected a story of someone struggling to overcome anxiety, and then eventually doing so with the help of some new-found friend beyond the mirror. And that did happen, yes, but the story is so much more than merely that. It's complex and nuanced and compassionate. It understands, and it seeks to help readers understand, what it's like to experience that degree of anxiety, to feel disconnected from everything that's supposed to connect you.

And I definitely didn't expect to end the story nearly in tears from the raw emotion written onto every page, the story's conclusion bringing a bittersweet but hopeful ending. An ending only to this story, mind you. Not to the stories of nearly all the characters whose lives we learn about, whose struggles we see painful glimpses of.

I can't write a review that does this book justice. I really can't. You can't begin to understand the number of times I tried to do so and ended up erasing whole paragraphs because what I wrote felt either overblown or inadequate. Lonely Castle in the Mirror is an outstretched hand to those who feel unseen and unloved, a hand that comforts them and tells them, "Yes, it can get better. Not just for you, but for others. Especially if you try to help them." The ending was beautiful, the mystery of the castle, and the children who were called to it, was satisfying and emotional. Even through the sections that painfully resonated with me, I loved every moment I spent with Lonely Castle in the Mirror, and I hope you will too. From one bullied anxiety-riddled outcast to another, I hope a mirror starts shining for you, and you find everything you need within.

Episode Thirteen - Craig DiLouie

 

About the Book

Fade to Black is the newest hit ghost hunting reality TV show. Led by husband and wife team Matt and Claire Kirklin, it delivers weekly hauntings investigated by a dedicated team of ghost hunting experts.

Episode Thirteen takes them to every ghost hunter's holy grail: the Paranormal Research Foundation. This brooding, derelict mansion holds secrets and clues about bizarre experiments that took place there in the 1970s. It's also famously haunted, and the team hopes their scientific techniques and high tech gear will prove it. But as the house begins to reveal itself to them, proof of an afterlife might not be everything Matt dreamed of. A story told in broken pieces, in tapes, journals, and correspondence, this is the story of Episode Thirteen—and how everything went terribly, horribly wrong.

464 pages
Published January 24, 2023

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Ghost-hunting TV shows are a guilty pleasure of mine. Most of them are too sensational for my liking, but I'll still watch them sometimes. My favourite ones, though, are ones that attempt to approach ghost-hunting reasonably scientifically. It's one thing to bring along a ouija board and claim that the movements are due to spirits, but it's another thing entirely to regularly measure electromagnetic fields and notice a correlation between EMF spikes and strange potentially supernatural activity. Whether you believe in ghosts or not, adherence to the scientific method is still respectable.

Episode Thirteen presents us with one such show, Fade to Black, where the research team is comprised of people who believe, people who don't, and people who just kind of need a job. It's not enough to investigate potentially haunted locations, though. With Fade to Black being a TV show, the crew needs to consider not just what interests them, but also what might interest viewers. Keeping the ratings up and the show fresh means more funding to do what they love, so they have to walk that fine line of compromise. So it seems like a bit of a dream come true when Fade to Black gets the opportunity to investigate a very famous location, one with a history of strange paranormal experiments done in the 70s, one that the show's head, Matt Kirklin, has had his eye on for some time. They hope to find answers to the mysteries of the building's past, but what they find turns out to be so much darker than they expected.

That last statement isn't exactly surprising. Most books have a, "And then they get in over their heads," plot at some point. In a bit of a meta twist, it keeps the book's "ratings" fresh. It keeps people reading, to see the twists and turns.

Episode Thirteen tells its story through journal entries, text message threads, and transcribed audio, a full documentation of the crew's experiences in Foundation House. While DiLouie could have employed third-person omniscient, or third-person limited while switching character perspectives, and still given the reader access to the thoughts and emotions of each character as well as the story beats, using epistolary storytelling gives everything an extra layer of connection. You read Episode Thirteen feeling like you're actually reading the files and records of real people who participated in the show during its final episode. Complete with all the conflict and drama you'd expect. The characters don't always get along, and even the husband-and-wife team of Matt and Claire has a lot of friction, as their approaches to the show and what they want from their lives. It also echoes the found-footage horror genre and brings it to the page instead of the screen, which I can appreciate. (I'm also a fan of bad found-footage horror movies. They're a different sort of guilty pleasure.)

For my part, I found Matt and Claire to be the most interesting characters. Fade to Black is their show, for the most part, and they each have a different role to play that's complementary while also being contradictory. Matt's a true believer, he goes into things hoping to find evidence of ghosts due to a childhood incident he couldn't explain. Claire is a skeptic, and uses her science background to debunk things as much as she can. This sounds like it would make for a lot of back-and-forth arguing, and sometimes that does happen, but it also serves to strengthen the show and the investigations, ensuring that every potential explanation for an event is investigated scientifically. If science can't explain something, then it's assumed to be paranormal in origin. And I liked that dynamic, even when it led to personal friction, because I love seeing science in my ghost-hunting.

It's not that the other characters were uninteresting, though. But I found Claire and Matt the most compelling. There were times when it seemed like other characters were primarily there to provide extra conflict and drama, as they didn't really contribute much else to the story.

At a certain point, Episode Thirteen goes from exciting and surprising to being bleak and claustrophobic and full of dread, where the characters are absolutely in over their heads and the full weight of what they've uncovered begins to take a toll. DiLouie did a really good job of conveying this atmosphere; I've read other books that feel like they're trying to do that but don't quite stick the landing. It was good to see it so well done here, and I appreciate the kind of effort it must have taken to not only build that tension but also to do it in a way that still worked within the confines of epistolary storytelling. I'm strangely a fan of bleak endings in horror fiction, though I can see how that tonal shift might not work well for all readers.

If you enjoy ghost-hunting shows and haunted house stories, then Episode Thirteen is probably going to be a book you enjoy. It might be over 400 pages, but the story goes so quickly that it feels like a much shorter book, while still cramming in a lot of character development and plot. The combination of modern technology and psychedelic 1970s experiments works quite well, and I was impressed enough with DiLouie's storytelling that I now want to find more of his books to read. If they're anything like Episode Thirteen, I'll be in for a flawed but overall enjoyable experience.

The Girl With No Face - M H Boroson

 

About the Book

It’s the end of the Nineteenth Century. San Francisco’s cobblestone streets are haunted, but Chinatown has an unlikely protector in a young Daoist priestess named Li-lin. Using only her martial arts training, spiritual magic, a sword made from peachwood, and the walking, talking spirit of a human eye, Li-lin stands alone to defend her immigrant community from supernatural threats.

But when the body of a young girl is brought to the deadhouse Li-lin oversees for a local group of gangsters, she faces her most bewildering—and potentially dangerous—assignment yet. The nine-year-old has died from suffocation . . . specifically by flowers growing out of her nose and mouth. Li-lin suspects Gong Tau, a dirty and primitive form of dark magic. But who is behind the spell, and why, will take her on a perilous journey deep into a dangerous world of ghosts and spirits.

With hard historical realism and meticulously researched depictions of Chinese monsters and magic that have never been written about in the English language, The Girl with No Face draws from the action-packed cinema of Hong Kong to create a compelling and unforgettable tale of historical fantasy and Chinese lore.

383 pages
Published October 22, 2019

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It had been a while since I read the first book in the Daoshi Chronicles, but as I read The Girl with no Face, the previous book's story came rushing back to me, which is a good thing since I'd long since returned that first book to the library and couldn't just pick it up and read it again. The Girl with no Face picks up very shortly after The Girl with Ghost Eyes, following the story of Li-lin, disgraced from her family for not following tradition, able to see spirits where others cannot. She's getting by, working for people who might not be the best to work for, but it's better than some alternatives. Much like last time, Li-lin has a mystery to solve in 19th century San Francisco's Chinatown, a mystery with consequences large enough to change the fate of the city.

I love historical fantasy, and I love books that take into account the fact that not all of history was white. The author himself may not be Chinese, but he's done extensive research into Chinese mythology and folklore, as well as the history of Chinese people in America, and woven all of that into a powerful tale that drives home not just the social aspects of that time and place, but also the spiritual history of the people. Some concessions have been made for storytelling, of course, but from what I've read, he's done his best to preserve authenticity while bringing things to Western eyes in an accessible way.

Here, Li-lin is asked to investigate the death of a girl who died due to flowers sprouting from her nose and mouth, a death which is decidedly unnatural. Her investigations lead her to her father, who seems to have played some role in the girl's life, and eventually to a much larger mystery wherein somebody is trying to influence the direction of San Francisco's development by way of turning a spirit into a god in a way that is definitely not the normal way of things. Honestly, it's a bit difficult to go into much detail about the book's story, as a lot of it relies on knowledge of Chinese folklore and mythology. You don't need to know all that before starting this series, as the books do a very good job of explaining things in a way that doesn't feel like characters just sitting down and putting on an exposition hat, but it does make recapping some of the plot feel very vague without information that would definitely be a spoiler for how some events play out. I don't want to ruin the story for anyone who hasn't read it yet.

I have to admire Boroson's ability to take seemingly random unconnected events in Li-lin's story and eventually connect them all together into a cohesive whole. Early mysteries like why the dead girl brought to Li-lin didn't seem to have a soul turned out to not be a huge part of the larger mystery but did lead her to the right place to find the next step in the larger mystery, and it wasn't some flimsy excuse to move the plot along so much as it was relevant but not game-changing, if that makes sense. Very frequently in the early sections of the book I wondered to myself, "Is the story going to go this way?" "Is this going to be the main focus?" only to be surprised when the story shifted directions subtly, like water flowing down a rocky stream. It's all part of the same whole, and the rocks may change the flow of the water, but it never stops being part of the stream.

I love seeing mysteries written like this. People encounter things every day that are relevant but not necessarily a driving force in something, so those little mini-mysteries felt very realistic. 

Couched in historical fantasy and Chinese history and mythology, The Girl with no Face is, at its heart, a book about confronting and overcoming trauma. Every character has some trauma in their past, even the antagonist. Characters you disagree with are fighting similar internal battles as ones who you're meant to root for. Trauma doesn't excuse someone becoming a villain, but it can go a long way to explaining why someone does what they do. Li-lin has to work to overcome the trauma of feeling responsible for her mother's death, and the struggle of trying to be true to herself while also knowing that she deeply disappointed her father by doing so, to the point where he disowned her. Li-lin's father struggles to not connect strong women with the same strength of the female demon that took his wife from him. Characters struggle with being the last of their people after cultural genocide, with being former slaves, with secrets that might tear their family apart if they ever came to light. There is some very heavy material in this book, which is entirely how it should be when you're writing about overcoming trauma during a very traumatic time and situation.

It also deals heavily with prejudice. Not just the expected prejudice of white people treating Chinese people like garbage, but men being prejudiced against women, or Chinese people being prejudiced against any practices that aren't their own. Early on in the book, Li-lin suspects that Gong Tau, a sort of dark folk magic, might be behind the mystery of the flower-suffocated girl, but quickly comes to realize that the rituals of non-Chinese folk can be just as valid as the rituals she herself follows, and that Gong Tau is often just a sort of catch-all term for "spiritual stuff that isn't like ours and so we say it's bad." Nobody is exempt from accusations and presentations of prejudice; the protagonist isn't exempt from this and just automatically good and accepting simple because she's the protagonist. She has to confront and overcome her own misconceptions about other people, a personal struggle I think that many of us can relate to at some point in our lives.

I wouldn't recommend using this book as a completely authentic source of knowledge, because again, this is a work of fiction, but it is a great book to get ideas from about things you may want to learn more. I knew that Chinese workers often died building the railroads that spanned North America, and the incredible amount of racism they faced, but I didn't know about Chinese immigrants being essentially kidnapped and forced to work on plantations in South America. And now I want to learn more about that aspect of history. It's a good jumping-off point for future research, and also a good introduction to some cultural atrocities that many people may know nothing about. Some of this book's historical inspirations are downright horrifying, and I have to praise Boroson for bringing them to light in a way that may prompt readers to learn more later.

At least, I know it did that to me. I can only hope it did the same for others.

The Girl with no Face is an excellent follow-up to The Girl with Ghost Eyes, and I was really glad to see that the series was continued. As a standalone, The Girl with Ghost Eyes was good, but so much was left unresolved that it was wonderful to see a continuation of Li-lin's story. Fans of Chinese mythology will likely enjoy this whole series, as will fans of historical fantasy. It's got surprising depth to it, and was a bit of an intense read at times, but it was well worth it.