Books and comics read in December 2022

The Scratch Daughters - HA Clarke
Slippery Creatures - KJ Charles
On the Come Up - Angie Thomas
The Stardust Thief - Chelsea Abdullah
NW - Zadie Smith
Children of Memory - Adrian Tchaikovsky
Rivers of London: The Fey and the Furious
Penric and the Shaman - Lois McMaster Bujold
The Language of Roses - Heather Rose Jones
Monk's Hood - Ellis Peters
A Tip for the Hangman - Allison Epstein
Going Postal - Terry Pratchett
Nothing But the Truth: A Memoir - The Secret Barrister

(Let's just all agree to politely ignore the fact that it's almost February, shall we?)

The Scratch Daughters (five stars), Children of Memory (four stars), The Language of Roses (five stars), A Tip for the Hangman (four stars)

The Scratch Daughters
This is the sequel to The Scapegracers, which I reviewed last month and loved. Everything I loved about that one is still true of this one, but even more so.

Children of Memory
I find Tchaikovsky's writing a little bit hit and miss, and I thought this was going to be more of a miss, until we hit the twist around the halfway point and just like that, it had me. The rollercoaster from hope to tragedy and back again was so beautifully done, it was wonderful. And the truly alien aliens in this series are excellent.

The Language of Roses
This aromantic take on Beauty and the Beast was really wonderful. It captures the feel of the original story whilst taking a whole different angle to examine love and compulsion, and it manages to follow the beats while not feeling like it's being forced or contorted to fit them. Just excellent all round.

A Tip for the Hangman
I really enjoyed this fictionalised version of Kit Marlowe's life: it's a really solid historical novel, with occasional flashes of excellence. I was particularly impressed with how Epstein handled the ending, it hit the perfect note of feeling both avoidable and yet also inevitable, which is a testament to how carefully the characters and the world had been established.

Didn't finish:

The Final Strife - Saara El-Arifi

The Final Strife - Saara El-Arifi
This should have been a solid 3.5 stars (pretty good overall, some slightly stilted prose/exposition balanced by some excellent ideas), but the fatphobia really killed it for me. About a fifth of the way in the book introduces a fat pov character, but even while we're in her point of view, we're immediately hit with a ton of fatphobic clichés (which I'm cutting for anyone who doesn't want to know the details):

she's clumsy, she's messy (specifically her dress is stained because she's stashed some fried food in her pocket), she's self indulgent and she's over privileged (the aforementioned stained dress she justs drops onto her bedroom floor for her servant to dispose of). Although her body shape gets some positive comments, there's also a lot of negative stuff, including a scene of the thin main character trying on her clothes and thinking about how huge they are on her. She's unfit and she eats a lot, especially fried food - so here comes the thin main character to change her diet and force her to exercise, how novel. (There should definitely be space for fat characters to be clumsy or messy or unfit, of course, but context matters! As far as I can tell, she's the only fat character, and, although she has other stuff going, on a lot of her personality is dominated by these fatphobic tropes.)

I did really like her, and I'm given to understand she becomes the main character's love interest later on, which isn't nothing, but I just couldn't get beyond how much of a stereotype her portrayal starts out as.