a vintage year for scoundrels

The Midwinter Witch - Molly Knox Ostertag
The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek - ed Leimar Garcia-Siino, Sabrina Mittermeier and Stefan Rabitsch
Unraveller - Frances Hardinge
If Found, Return to Hell - Em X Liu
The Daughters of Izdihar - Hadeer Elsbai
Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society and the Meaning of Sex - Angela Chen
Inscape - Louise Carey
Still Just A Geek: An Annotated Memoir - Wil Wheaton
The Sun and the Void - Gabriela Romero Lacruz
A Mirror Mended - Alix E Harrow
Ravenfall - Kalyn Josephson

Unraveller (five stars), If Found, Return to Hell (four stars), The Daughters of Izdihar (four stars), Inscape (four stars)

Unraveller
Frances Hardinge's latest, and she really is just going from strength to strength. She writes such rich and intense worlds and such interestingly complicated characters, all with a kind of essential sympathy for people and the way that they can get tangled up in themselves and their situations - this one was at least partly about prison abolition, which I wasn't expecting and really liked.

(content note for spider-like creatures: mostly I think it's not too bad on that front, aside from one incident about 80% in)

If Found, Return to Hell
Low level intern at a corporate magic company gets in too deep helping a young man who's been possessed by a demon, shenanigans (and found family) ensue. I loved this a lot! I wish it had been just a little longer (the denouement needed a little bit more, I thought, plus the very concept of the corporate magic company could have run and run), but otherwise GREAT. Rebellion Publishing is really putting out some excellent work at the moment.

The Daughters of Izdihar
This fantasy novel uses a lot of tropes around patriarchal societies where women are forbidden to use magic, but the execution was very good, largely because of the strength of the characters. The two leads are particularly great - Nihal: spiky, privileged, good hearted bull in a china shop; Giorgina: desperately trying to balance the demands of society and family with her own heart - but I was impressed at how nuanced many of the supporting characters were too. I absolutely loved the moment where

(spoilers)

Giorgina realises that being good doesn't get her any more benefit of the doubt than being bad would have, and decides to just do what she wants.

And, being me, I loved Nihal's straightforward insistence that Giorgina, the woman her husband loves, is basically family to her. I really hope we see more of their relationship in the sequel.

Inscape
Solid SF thriller, set in a near future corporate controlled London. Very satisfying, and did a great job of making the main character's earnest naivety sympathetic rather than grating.

Didn't finish:

The First Bright Thing - JR Dawson, The Necessity of Rain - Sarah Chorn

The First Bright Thing - JR Dawson
This had a lot of great elements - magical circus, queer Jewish lead, queer found family, time travel - but overall just didn't quite land for me. The setting didn't quite feel lived in and the characters weren't quite there, despite how much I wanted to like it. The good guys also had very modern attitudes (which is fine and a choice I often like a lot!), expressed in very correct modern ways, which can also be fine, but in this case didn't help with the slight feeling of flatness. I feel like this had good bones and good potential, but needed a few more rounds of edits to make it sing.

spoilers

I will say that I felt like the villain's villainy was tied to his trauma in ways I didn't enjoy, but possibly this is challenged or complicated later in the book.

The Necessity of Rain - Sarah Chorn
I think this was just a bad fit for me - the prose was on the overwrought side, and I just wasn't really feeling it.