Archives for January 2025

52 IN 52, Book #6: Little Secrets by Jennifer Hillier

After her son goes missing in the middle of the day at Seattle’s Pike Place Market, Marin’s life falls apart. The FBI search doesn’t take long to go cold, and Marin turns into a shadow of herself–unable to dedicate time to her business, herself, or anything other than her utter depression over the loss of her child. She and her husband hardly speak anymore, he’s spending longer and longer times away from her and their home, and when Marin hires a private investigator to pick up where the FBI left off, she finds out why–Derek is having an affair.

Oddly, this seems to be the spark Marin needs to bring herself back to life. She might not be able to find her son, but at least she can stop herself losing her husband, and his affair partner is a problem that she can take it upon herself to fix… permanently.

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A fun read, and I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t as brainless as I thought it was going to be! I think this has a good combination of character, plot, worldbuilding, and politics without being overwhelmingly skewed in one direction or another, which is how I prefer my fantasy reads.

Praise: I love a good enemies-to-lovers, and I also love a good human-fey romance, so we were already off to a good start. Also, a lot of the “high” or “second world” fantasy I’ve read tends to set up bigotry between, like, orcs because they’re ✨️so warlike✨️ versus the other ✨️more civilized✨️ species, so it was kind of fresh for me at least that in this book it seemed to be set up between high fey vs. humans based on their access to certain types of magic, with the “good” and “bad” magic being defined less by the actual results and more by one queen who was so pissed at her boyfriend she made his existence illegal.

(Side note, does anyone else feel that the terms high/low fantasy and second/first world fantasy are becoming increasingly meaningless as speculative fiction and specifically romantasy becomes more developed as a genre? Or is that just me?)

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Daunis is a child of two very different worlds, descended from both the historically French settlers of her Michigan town and the native Ojibwe people who live on a reservation nearby–and yet, she doesn’t quite fit into either place. After putting her dreams of university on hold to care for her mother following a family tragedy, Daunis doesn’t have too much going for her, except for Jamie–a new recruit on her brother’s hockey team, who’s kind and charming and very similar to Daunis in his relationship to his own Native family.

Soon thereafter, though, tragedy strikes Daunis’ community yet again, thrusting her into the heart of a criminal investigation that takes her undercover to investigate the very tribe that she grew up with. But the more death, betrayal, and deception she witnesses, the more it calls into question how far Daunis is willing to go to protect her community, and in fact who her community needs protection from.

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Having just moved to a new house backed up to a shared garden square in a neighborhood of London that seems to be all about family and community, newly single(?) mom Claire is hoping for a new start. She’s estranged from her husband, doesn’t know any of the neighbors, and is stressed about how to make ends meet when the insurance money runs out–but at least her daughters have new friends nearby, and the garden into which their back gate opens seems like an oasis for kids and adults alike.

But when preteen Pip finds her older sister Grace unconscious and bloodied in the corner of the shared rose garden one midsummer night’s evening, forcing Claire to reckon with how safe her girls really are and how well she actually knows the people around her.

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Jordan Baker has one foot each in two very different worlds. On the one hand, she’s well-educated, popular, rich, and runs in the high circles of 1920s American society; on the other hand, she’s a queer Vietnamese adoptee who’s often treated like an exotic sideshow pet more than she is a person. And the more time she spends in the company of Daisy Buchanan, Jay Gatsby, and Nick Carraway, the more Jordan comes to understand not only the mysterious powers at play around her, but also the power she has at her very own fingertips.

I enjoyed this book a lot. I think it’s a really interesting reframing of The Great Gatsby, and it plays with the themes of the original novel in a fresh way. While obviously the OG deals with things like race and gender relations and expectations in the Jazz Age, those themes take on a different light when viewed through this particular narrative lens. Jordan in this novel is a queer Vietnamese immigrant, yet she seems to strive toward being as un-Vietnamese as possible, even brushing aside the topic of the Manchester Act (the Immigration Act of 1924) as having “nothing to do with her” until the very last moment when it becomes apparent that it does, indeed, have quite a bit to do with her.

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Following a messy and way-too-public breakup with his ex-boyfriend, pop star Hunter and his group Kiss & Tell are making their way around the US and Canada, playing arenas and meeting fans. All Hunter wants is to focus on the band and start working on their next album, but unfortunately he can’t escape the press that’s dogging his heels–and as the only gay member of the group, he finds himself held to way higher standards than the other, straighter members of the group.

This leaves Hunter basically on his own as he tries to navigate what it means to be the perfect queer idol, whether that’s blindly following the expectations of his label (even down to what he eats and how he dresses) or getting involved with the drummer for Kiss & Tell’s tour opener. Wait a second, that last one might turn out not to be the best idea Hunter’s ever had…

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52 IN 52, Book #6: Little Secrets by Jennifer Hillier

52 IN 52, Book #5: Prince of the Sorrows by Kellen Graves

52 IN 52, Book #4: The Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley

52 IN 52, Book #3: The Girls in the Garden by Lisa Jewell

52 IN 52, Book #2: The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo

52 IN 52, Book #1: Kiss & Tell by Adib Khorram