Permanent Objects

A collection of miscellany

Archives for June 2025

52 IN 52, Book #34: The Brightness Between Us by Eliot Schrefer

You know, I just really did not think I was going to like this sequel as much as I did! Sequels are pretty risky in general especially when the first book concluded well, but because the release of The Brightness Between Us was actually my introduction to this series (when I spotted it at random on a shelf at B&N) I felt like I was obligated to give it a try.

And I am sure glad I did, because this was so very well done. Funnily enough I actually started out this book by thinking that the kids were annoying as hell, and then I realized that actually, I was also annoying as hell at that age — developmentally appropriate annoyingness? It was a small thing but really served to underline that really, no matter what planet you’re growing up on, humanity has certain things that are intrinsic. Like being a know-it-all as a young teenager.

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52 IN 52, Book #33: Sweat by Jonah Yorke

Once more with feeling: I love sports anime!

I thought this was a very enjoyable read. I’ll admit, out of habit I got a little nervous when we reached around the 30% mark and the main couple was already getting involved with each other–I’m too used to third-act breakups–but I’m pleased to say that my nerves were for nothing. Although there are real stakes for our main characters, there’s also good enough communication to get them through it. Things get tense for various reasons but never quite bad enough to actually tear them apart, which I appreciate as someone for whom “tiny misunderstanding gets blown up and breaks up the couple just for them to finally talk it out 20 pages before the end” is a least-favorite romance trope.

One thing I will say is that the “Note to Reader” page should have been more explicit that there would be mention of CSA, even if none is ever shown on page. Referring to it as “past childhood trauma” isn’t quite explicit enough in my opinion. There should also be a warning for terminal illness as this can be quite triggering to some.

However, those things stated, this was overall a really enjoyable read to me, with good pacing and fun dialogue, plus convincing intimacy between some pretty adventurous young dudes.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC!

52 IN 52, Book #32: Queen Demon by Martha Wells

“You need to stop thinking of me as the boy you abandoned, and remember I’m the monster the Hierarchs feared.” GO OFF KING!!!!

Okay, but seriously–

First of all, re-read Witch King before you read Queen Demon. Yes, even if you think you don’t need to. It will help a lot. (Me, 45 pages in, suddenly remembering that what Kai knows as “horse” is definitely not the same as what I know as “horse.”)

This is one of those rare cases where I almost feel like the second book is better than the first, not because the first was weak at all–it remains a five-star read for me–but because in Queen Demon we really get to expand upon the world that was built in Witch King. I feel that Witch King really drops you into the middle of things without much explanation, which can make the first third or so of the book feel like you’re just trying to figure out what’s going on, e.g. what is an expositor? What is an intention? This was absolutely not a problem for me, I love high fantasy that doesn’t condescend to me in terms of explaining the mechanics of the world, but it does mean your reading brain needs to do quite a bit of limbering up before you really can sink your teeth into the world.

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52 IN 52, Book #31: Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson

Yaa Gyasi’s cover blurb really says it all: “Tender poetry, a love song to Black art and thought.” What an absolutely beautiful love letter, what a gorgeous meditation on the challenge and struggle but also the irrepressible beauty and richness of Black culture.

I will say that if you’re looking for a plot-heavy book where A Lot of Things Happen, this might not be the book for you. This is more of a close, intimate exploration of one individual’s mindset and the way they move through the world around them, rather than being a novel that’s driven by plot beats and the forward motion of a story. But if you’re interested in that kind of introspective, deep character exploration, then I would absolutely recommend this book.

Maybe because the book is so short (only 160 pages!), this is a work where it feels like every single sentence is contributing equally to the story. As you read, you get not only an exploration of the artists and thinkers who shaped our narrator’s worldview, but also this incredibly vivid, lush world that’s build around him to the point where you can almost feel the heat of summer or the rain in winter and understand how those things contribute to the emotional state of the characters. 

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52 IN 52, Book #30: Diavola by Jennifer Marie Thorne

After I read Come Closer, my chief complaint was that I was tired of women protagonists in horror novels who are unable to recognize their own haunting or who, rather than fight against the entity, just accept their fate and let it do what it wants. I know that this is a common theme in horror for a reason but I guess at a certain point I’d just like the women to take a W, you know?

And for that reason I am super glad I read Diavola. While a lot of the plot beats are very classic for a haunting story — a big old house, a mysterious force, unexplained happenings that people around the protagonist are willing to write off — and there is an element of the entity following Anna home to haunt and attempt to consume her, there is also a huge thread of Anna being unwilling to just let that happen. Or rather, she does to an extent, enough to do some damage to her life before she gets her ass in gear and goes back to kick some ghost butt.

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52 IN 52, Book #29: Morning Glory Milking Farm by C.M. Nascosta

Okay, genuinely I picked this book up for the lols because it was randomly recommended on my Kindle Unlimited page, so tell me why this was actually weirdly thoughtful and introspective as well as being spicy? 🤪

In seriousness, I went into this expecting pretty much your standard human/non-human smut that focuses much more on the, er, intimate details than it does on the actual world that the characters exist in, but that’s not at all what you get out of this. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there is definitely smut, but there’s also quite a lot of detail about the world and society that make the whole narrative ring a lot more true. 

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52 IN 52, Book #28: Soraya Honei by V.A. Berry

I want to start by saying I absolutely see the vision of this book and I think the vision is good. I’m a huge sucker for a why-choose, fated mate type reverse harem story, especially when there’s supernatural hijinks afoot, and I thought the sex scenes were excellent! I appreciated the attention to detail in the descriptions, especially descriptions of setting, and all in all I think this series has a lot of potential to be a fascinating and fast-paced supernatural romance/thriller.

My chief hang-up here is that I felt like the book should have been maybe 2/3 the length it actually was. I got to 70% completion and Soraya hadn’t even started to clock that she was behaving weirdly, let alone started to confront the reality of her situation. I wish that part of the mystery had been tightened up a little, as I started to find myself frustrated with Soraya by that point. 

Without spoiling anything, there is a reason for why she’s not able to completely remember everything going on around her, but I still felt that either she needed to lose entire days (which would be freaky in itself) or the mechanic needed to be refined a little.

But that said, I still enjoyed the read and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who likes this genre of novel! And of course, thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC, which I got in exchange for my honest opinion!

52 IN 52, Book #27: The House of Illusionists by Vanessa Fogg

After spending quite a while trying to decide where to start with this one, I’m going to try to split this review up two ways, based on the style and the content.

Stylistically, I find the prose in this collection absolutely decadent. Vanessa Fogg is unbearably talented; her sentences are tight and often spare, but with every single verb and adjective seemingly chosen to be as incisive and exquisite as possible. Her stories full of fragmented sentences that help to buoy along a sense of otherworldliness in both the Closer and Farther sections of the collection. I also often felt that her choice of language was tailored closely to the setting of each story, so that at no point was there a sense of disconnect between the world and the words being used to describe it.

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52 IN 52, Book #26: Where There’s Room for Us by Hayley Kiyoko

For New York poet and heiress Ivy Yada-Lovell, being thrust unexpectedly into the English gentry when her brother inherits a title is like entering a new world entirely. Berkshire is a place steeped in tradition; although women can marry women and men can marry men, titles can be inherited only by blood-related sons and well-bred women are expected to follow well-bred paths. At first, Ivy thinks her only duties in her new home will be to learn how the upper class works and find her brother a wife, but when she finds herself falling for one of the daughters from the neighboring estate, Ivy will be forced to not only confront her own presuppositions, but to much better understand the society in which she now lives if she has any hope of keeping her new love.

Hayley Kiyoko’s new novel “Where There’s Room for Us” is set in a reimagined Victorian England where queer marriage is legal, but almost everything else is the same, right down to the paternalism that pervaded much of particularly upper-class society at the time. When I first heard the premise I was honestly a little skeptical; after all, misogyny and homophobia are extremely closely tied together, so I wondered how Kiyoko would handle writing a society where homophobia seems largely absent (or at least not enshrined in law the way it really was in Victorian times), but misogyny persists. As I read, though, I found myself pleasantly surprised by how the topic was addressed. Men who marry men and adopt male children are able to pass down titles, but women who marry women and adopt male children can’t do the same. Women are still unable to vote or manage their own accounts, and there is still a sense of the “proper place” for a woman in society, regardless of who she marries.

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52 IN 52, Book #25: Jade War by Fonda Lee

Unlike Jade City, the first novel in the series, this installation is less insularly focused on the clans of Janloon and much more interested in the way that Janloon interacts sociopolitically with the rest of the world around it. If you thought Fonda Lee’s worldbuilding was impressive when she was only focusing on one nation, just freaking wait until you see how she handles the global politics of an entire world. Like, genuinely the way she writes these countries interacting with each other and the delicacy of the meetings and politics made me Google to find out whether she holds a degree in international relations.

(In case you were curious, it doesn’t seem like she does — she does have an MBA though!) 

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