From Newsgroup: rec.arts.sf.written

Way behind again!

As usual the links are Amazon affiliate ones.

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Weird Magic (Lia de Croissets Book 2)
by Karen Chance
https://amzn.to/4smHiCS

Lia de Croissets is a trained warmage and new werewolf.
After spending her life werewolf adjacent, afflicted with a
condition that left her unable to change, she is finally
cured. Logically, being a were & a mage should give her
credibility in both communities, but as is usually the case,
it makes her suspect in both instead. Still, she is using
the opportunity offered by the ongoing vampire/mage/witch war
against the gods & fae to hammer away at the broken were social
order. She and her mate have started a new clan of outcast
wolves *and* outcast mages, and if they can make it work
it may force a rift in the corrupt old order. Unfortunately,
events are not waiting for Lia, and along with the ongoing
attacks from reactionary elements, there is a new drug on
the street causing were throwbacks, Las Vegas's magical
underclass is being preyed on, and Lia may be possessed.

I did not find this one as strong as a usual Chance book.
There was less of her trademark "farce, but you care" and
too much of her trademark "characters can't walk five feet
without being swept into some kind of vision". Even Lia's
meeting with Cassie got derailed instead of developing as
I had hoped. If you need some Chance, catch up on all the
Cassie & Dorina books before checking in here. It's not
bad -- I'll read the next one, but definitely not top tier.

Goblin Gigs (Dungeon Dasher Book 1)
by Daniel Kensington
https://amzn.to/4cfB7ux

Well, apparently J.A. Sutherland aka Daniel Kensington has worked
out his life issues and writer's block as he has had several books
recently, most of them as far away from his best known character,
Alexis Carew, as you could imagine.

This book starts another harem series, albeit less "serious" than
his "Warlock" setting.

Alex Mercer is not living his best life. It's not awful: he makes
enough as an Uber driver to afford his own apartment, but it's
grinding, and definitely not ideal. The bright spot in his life
is spending time with his best friend's sister despite the constant
"Hand's off 'best friend's sister!" dynamic he takes care to enforce.
His life takes a dramatic change when the lawyers for his eccentric
& long missing, but beloved, Uncle contact him. According to his
uncle's instructions, should he go ten years without contact, they
are to take steps to declare him dead, and bequeath his estate on
Alex. There's not that much money involved, but there is a mansion.
The catch is that to fulfill his uncle's conditions, Alex has to
spend the night there, like now, tonight. Inconvenient to be sure,
but after that he can sell the place so it's hardly a life-shaking
condition. Well, to be fair Alex doesn't know he's in a fantasy
book...

I found this pretty entertaining. There's some real peril, but
it's mostly light-hearted and pretty funny in places. The fantasy
world portaled into from the mansion sort of is and sort of isn't
an RPG. Certainly it seems the locals are not NPCs, despite having
some resistance to taking up out-world concepts, and while the
system or gods or whatever tend to parcel out oddball quests, you
don't have to take them, and if there's a lot of sex, who's going
to complain? I'm glad Kensington didn't drag out Alex's obliviousness
to where his relation with said best friend's sister was going to
go, and the scene is nicely set with some mysteries on the table
(including the fate of Alex's uncle who is almost surely not dead).

Tear Down Heaven: Urban Fantasy Action with Witches and Demons
by Rachel Aaron
https://amzn.to/3QnclkA

This is the climax of Sumerian demon Queen Bex and her witch boyfriend
Adrian's battle against Gilgamesh as they storm heaven itself. As
usual, Gilgamesh always seems to be a move ahead of the pair and
they will be having the final battle *he* wants. However, neither
Bex nor Adrian are quite who they started as while Gilgamesh is
unchanging, and where he has minions, they have allies. Still,
even if they win, can the world survive it?

This was a pretty satisfying final book. Aaron convincingly took Bex
180 degrees away from her initial worldview and we got some nice character development from one of Adrian's long-lost brothers which humanized him
without making him a milquetoast. All in all, a well-earned, mostly happy, ending.

It Devours!: A Welcome to Night Vale Novel
by Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor
https://amzn.to/48uj968

This is the second Night Vale novel, and while entertaining, was
not in my opinion as good as the first. Here we meet Nilanjana
Sikdar, a scientist on Carlos's team, and an outsider in Night Vale,
a town which is notoriously hard to get to, and even harder to leave.
There is always some awful crisis in Night Vale, and this time it
is deadly sinkholes, and possibly deadly giant centipedes. Despite
Carlos's determination to get to the bottom of the situation, it
just keeps getting worse.

Notwithstanding her admiration for Carlos, Nilanjana thinks he is
on the wrong track, and that the manifestations have something to do
with the local branch of the Church Of The Smiling God, one of the
long-time sinister organizations in the Night Vale setting. Trying
to infiltrate the church, Nilanjana becomes involved with one of
the believers, a seemingly nice guy who thinks the more awful aspects
of the Smiling God's theology are simply metaphors. But could the
literal, non-metaphorical, Smiling God be about to put in an appearance?
And is that related to the ongoing crisis? A good scientist always has
a hypothesis...

As I said I did not like this book as well as the first. First,
and this will not be a problem for people who don't follow the
podcast, the events described in this book regarding Carlos's exile
in the Desert Otherworld do not mesh well with the details in the
podcast. In particular, we know he met many people in the Desert
Otherworld and after a certain point was almost tempted to stay
there. Cecil even visited once. In this book he apparently met
no one there. We also know that in the podcast Kevin ended up
there, and was working on very sinister Smiling God projects in his
refounded Desert Bluffs. None of that figures here either (although
Kevin is namechecked). Second, it was clear pretty early on that
Carlos was the (unintentional) villain of this book, and I did not
like that. Third, the authors worked too hard to give Nilanjana a
twist happy ending rather than a straight-forward one. As usual,
there were some good funny/horrible byplay and turns but it just
did not work together as well as in the first book. I like
the Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In You House who is the
protagonist of the next book, so I will probably pick that one up,
and I continue to listen to the podcast on long drives, so
the series is still fine, this outing was just a bit subpar..

Wives and Wands: Book One
by Emily Sinfall
https://amzn.to/4bWdSGX

Wives and Wands: Book Two
by Emily Sinfall
https://amzn.to/48lBAdh

Got to admire that pseudonym! This is an uninspired and frustrating magic-school/harem series. There's a bit of a different dynamic
in that the MC is already married (with a daughter: A really bad & inappropriate plot idea) when he goes off to be the only commoner
in wizard school. He then does a lot of unconvincing "I would never
betray my wife" posturing as he is pursued by several high status
women at the school. I didn't like how wishy-washy he was about
that, while also being on a high horse and clearly leading several
of them on.

The world is also very vague. I'm not sure if this is intentional
or not, but we don't learn until well into book two that multiple
marriage is a thing in the setting -- a pretty important detail.
The whole "commoner at magic school" aspect is never cleared up
either. We are never told that he is the first such. If he's not,
how it went down before should be mentioned. If he is, that should
definitely be stated. Likewise the technology level is unclear.
I was thinking renaissance level and then he goes into a building
with an elevator.

The characterization is odd as well. Since the MC is a commoner
in a mass of nobles, and a commoner with a vulnerable family, he
takes care to be a pushover and not make waves. Maybe this makes
sense, but it's not what we want from a protagonist. If he can't
retaliate directly for the bullying he gets, we want some sort of
covert and clever revenge which never comes. Finally, there's his relationships: He ends up with three women in his harem (so far),
and if one is fairly sane, the other two seem like psychos, one of
them a really dangerous one that nobody would want around a child.

I don't believe I will be following this up.

Ashes of the Sun (Burningblade & Silvereye Book 1)
by Django Wexler
https://amzn.to/3Qo3P4N

Blood of the Chosen (Burningblade & Silvereye Book 2)
by Django Wexler
https://amzn.to/4sZvkAm

Emperor of Ruin (Burningblade & Silvereye Book 3)
by Django Wexler
https://amzn.to/47P8tPs

Four hundred years ago, the Van Vogtian supermen, The Chosen, led
a continental empire. Their direct access to the power of the
universe, known as "deiat" allowed them to build wonders of technology
and guide the mere humans they ruled to a better life. Or so they
said, and so it went until it all came crashing down in a ruinous
war with the cave dwelling Ghouls and their heretical "Dhaka" magic.
It was a hard fought battle with the Chosen finally wiping out the
Ghouls' last stronghold with a deadly sunfire bomb. It was a Pyrrhic
victory though, as just before their destructions, the Ghouls had
unleashed a plague which wiped out the Chosen while leaving their
human subjects untouched. As they left the stage, the Chosen laid
out plans for a human successor state to carry on their legacy if
such a thing were possible...

Maya & Gyre are farm kids, growing up in the borderlands of the
Republic. It's low-tech & not an easy life, but it's not awful.
The Order keeps the monsters largely away, and the family has enough
illicit Dhaka to deal with pest infestations and the like, with the
local regime turning a blind eye to such minor transgressions. The
simple rhythms of their life are disrupted however with the Twilight
Order comes for Maya because she has deiat. Young Gyre refuses to
bow to the arrogant centarch who has come to take his little sister
away and is nearly blinded and killed by the prideful man, and loses
Maya anyway. It's an incident that will change both siblings' lives
and set them on a collision course that may change the world.

Fifteen years finds Maya a candidate centarch, knight-erranting
across the Republic with her mentor, and Gyre a bitter revolutionary
scheming to tear the whole thing down, both for what it did to Maya
and because he has come to believe the restrictive and gradually
crumbling rump-state is stifling humanity. Apart in space and outlook
events are however conspiring to crash the siblings lives together
again: Maya and her mentor are finding evidence that the monsters
are not as directionless as assumed, and in the chasms around the sunfire crater, Gyre comes to think that perhaps the Ghouls are not as extinct
as advertised...

I quite enjoyed these books as I have all of Wexler's that I have
read so far. This series is a little lighter than "The Thousand
Names", but not nearly as manic (mostly!) as "Dark Lord Davi". He
says it started as a Star Wars saga, and you can see a bit of that
in the Jedi/Padawan dynamic of Maya and her centarch, but if he had
not said that, I would not have picked up on it. The setting is a
second world with features that raise a lot of questions. For
instance, people have anime hair, and while some familiar animals
are mentioned, the bulk of them are odd and unfamiliar. (Some,
though not all, answers are eventually forthcoming). It's a bit
woke in that its just assumed that women & men are equally likely
to be, say, calvary lancers, and there don't really seem to be
preferred sleeping arrangements, but it's all low-key.

The story is told in alternating chapters from Maya & Gyre's
viewpoints. I prefer Maya's earnestness to Gyre's cynicism, though
his storyline does pick up when he gets a partner with a bit of Davi's
manic spark. The ending is fairly satisfying, but does leave some
unanswered questions.

I will continue to seek out Wexler in the future.
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