BOOK REVIEWS

52 IN 52, Book #50: The Nightmare Before Kissmas by Sara Raasch

From the same brilliant mind that brought us The Entanglement of Rival Wizards comes another equally campy yet equally delightful fantasy book about a well-meaning but anxiety-ridden young man and his hot goth boyfriend who’s secretly just as anxious as our protagonist. (Listen, Sara Raasch has a type and it works for me, okay?) Actually, The Nightmare Before Kissmas almost certainly came before Entanglement, but roll with me for a second.

Our protagonist, Coal (short for Nicholas, which he thinks is hilarious) is the somewhat wayward Prince of Christmas, at least in title if not in deed. He’s always been a bit of a troublemaker despite his well-intentioned heart, always a disappointment to his father, the King of Christmas, especially after his mother up and left when he and his younger brother Kris were kids. Now Nicholas has become an unwilling pawn in his father’s grasp at power, pitted against the dark, handsome, and brooding Prince of Halloween in a bid to win the hand of the Easter Princess… except, maybe he’s going to fall for the Halloween Prince instead!?

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Listen. Here’s the thing, okay? Objectively this book series is insane. Like we have a fictionalized ultra-violent version of lacrosse that somehow has a robust NCAA network of teams as well as an Olympic team despite having been invented like 18 years ago. We have so much mafia violence it makes Goodfellas look like Saturday morning cartoons. The justice system doesn’t work that way, psychiatric medications don’t work that way, so much in these books just straight up doesn’t work that way… and yet!!!

I will say that in comparison to the original All For the Game trilogy, which started its self-publication journey in 2013 and lowkey you can tell, this second series—which focuses on fallen Raven Jean Moreau and his transfer into the care of sunshiney USC team captain Jeremy Knox—is considerably less grimdark. It’s also pretty clear to me that Nora has taken a lot of the feedback on the original series (there aren’t that many women, for example, and most of them aren’t treated super well by the narrative; there is a lot of language in the prose that’s reflective of the times) and is actively working to correct those things in these new books. I personally really appreciate that, and I think that attention is what makes The Sunshine Court so much more enjoyable to me than the original trilogy (and that’s saying something because I really love the original series).

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As much as I really wanted to like this, for me this was a book that had crazy vibes but didn’t fully deliver on them in a way that satisfied me as a reader.

I want to start by saying that the premise is fascinating—we have an amnesiac protagonist who wakes up in some unknown woods with a cultlike group of cannibalistic individuals he doesn’t seem to know, and is immediately drawn into their plot to reach the top of a sacred mountain and resurrect the old gods of the world. The language and word choices that create setting are gorgeous, and they paint a vivid picture of the stark, claustrophobic, unfamiliar landscape through which the characters are moving. The way the cannibalism scenes (of which there are many) are described in a way that genuinely turned my stomach a couple of times, and I’m a pretty unflinching reader in general.

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I admit I’m kind of struggling to figure out how to rate this book, because while it was beautifully written and experimental in very fun and engaging ways, it was also fucking devastating and I don’t think I’m likely to reread again because my heart can only handle so much!

I feel like the best word I can use to describe this book is “messy.” I don’t mean that in a negative way, in fact quite the opposite — the messiness of the interpersonal relationships, the politics of the world, and the characters’ internal motivations is actually really compelling, and I think that messiness does a lot to drive the story forward. Hammer is so jaded that she’s completely unable to be optimistic or hopeful about the world or her place in it; Naias is so blinded by her ambition that she doesn’t realize that it’s not possible for the oppressed to gain their liberation by convincing the oppressor to like them. And in the end, none of them are able to escape the yoke of empire.

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I picked this book up genuinely at random off the recommendation of a stranger in a TikTok comment section and then I read the whole thing in 4 hours. This book was genuinely so much fun? Once again, I love a concept that really makes me go “How did you even think of this?” and in this case, an iteration of 1969 Madison, WI but with magic and demigods really made me ask that question.

My likes: The magic in this world was interesting and complex but also not fully explained, which somehow just made it feel even more realistic, like the characters have no need to mull on how magic works because it’s just such a normal part of their lives.

I also was a little worried, based on the time period, that there would be quite a bit more overt homophobia, and I was pleased to be wrong about that—there are some oblique intimations that maybe someone else out there might care about two men in a relationship, but none of that ever shows up from a key character, not even the ones with whom the MCs have tense relationships. As someone who generally prefers not to run into much homophobia in my fantasy (because there’s enough of it in the real world) that was really refreshing for me.

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I want to start with the things I liked about this book, beginning with the magic system. This review does contain spoilers so please read cautiously! Thank you to Netgalley and Macmillan for the ARC, which I received in exchange for an honest review.

I was talking to my roommate about how much we struggle with manga like My Hero Academia and Bleach (walk with me, I swear it’s relevant) because it seems that the creator’s solution for writing themselves into a corner is to give the protagonist a new skill out of nowhere that will somehow miraculously aid them in escaping their current circumstances. Aside from the classifications of magic, which were already interesting enough, the thing I liked the most about the magic system is how the skill tree is sort of built in, so there’s an in-world mechanism for leveling up existing skills through practice and circumstance–which in turn makes it much less jarring when those skills do develop! I also like that the magic school isn’t set up as some kind of egalitarian paradise, but rather that it’s acknowledged and wrestled with in the text that there’s privilege in being able to attend Paragon, and that not everyone has an equal shot at acceptance.

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I have no idea what I was expecting from this book, but it sure wasn’t that!

I guess a part of me kind of thought that a book by a Nobel prize-winning author would be very serious and heavy. And that’s not to say that this book isn’t serious and heavy in places, but I was really surprised by how genuinely funny it was for most of the time. Janina, the narrator, is a weird as hell old woman living in the remote Polish woods–she studies astrology, translates poetry, cares deeply about animals, and gives largely unflattering nicknames to her neighbors. When a neighbor turns up dead and suspicions start to grow, Janina gets herself involved in the investigation, convinced she knows what’s going on.

There were a lot of parts of this book that made me laugh out loud. In fact, I’m going to quote one of them here because I liked it so much I screenshotted it to save on my phone and send to my dad:

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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I fuck so heavy with this series… what an absolutely masterful weaving together of stories. This review contains spoilers so be warned!

I appreciate so much about this whole series but in particular I want to highlight that Fonda Lee is an absolute craft master of echoes—Chekov’s gun, the way she plants things that pay off 200 pages later, and also how she creates these little moments that mirror each other in different ways across the story. In particular, the way she has Hilo learn how to use his jade abilities to deflect a car bomb and then like half the book later, just when we’ve forgotten about him learning how to do that, he gets blown up by a bomb and ends up protecting himself from it?! She had me a nervous wreck waiting to find out if Hilo would still be alive and I didn’t even remember that he probably had the skills to handle an attack in that way!

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This was such fun read and I loved it!

The base premise of “what if grad school but for D&D classes” is absolutely delightful, and although I could absolutely see the Critical Role influence a mile away I thought this was such a fun and fresh interpretation! As an avid D&D player myself I am hugely in favor of stories set in that kind of universe, particularly if they have a new and modern twist, so this book was a perfect fit into that niche for me.

I also really like the type of storytelling where you can tell that there’s something major in a character’s past, but the character themselves doesn’t reveal it until later on and mostly thinks about whatever it was in little glimpses—I find that much more realistic than a big info dump at the beginning of the story, because after a certain amount of time I think a lot of us don’t consider our traumas to be a narrative, rather we think about the bits and ways it affects our daily lives but don’t necessarily reflect on the whole. Getting to learn about Sebastian’s past in little bits, seeing how it impacts the development of his relationship with Elethior, and yet not really getting to put the entire picture together until the very end was a really interesting tactic and I felt that it paid off well here.

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This was another audiobook listen for me as I was on my road trip this summer. I’d heard of Piranesi before, but had sort of avoided it, mostly because I have a problem where the more hyped up something is the more worried I get that I won’t enjoy it–but when I saw that the audiobook narrator is Chiwetel Ejiofor, I knew I had to give it a try. And I’m so glad I did! I thought this book was absolutely gorgeously written–the prose is so lush and the worldbuilding so rich and complex, and Susanna Clarke does a really masterful job of creating intrigue without being heavy-handed about the mystery of it all.

In a true masterwork of avoidance, I actually knew nothing about Piranesi before I started the audiobook, which meant that the things being revealed were indeed revelatory for me. It took quite a number of chapters before I began to realize that there were hints being dropped, and even more chapters after that before I started to piece the hints together into a coherent picture. I enjoyed being able to kind of play detective as a listener, even while Piranesi himself as a character still wasn’t picking up on what was going on.

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52 IN 52, Book #8: Project V by Park Seolyeon (tr. Gene Png)

52 IN 52, Book #7: The Ruin of a Rake by Cat Sebastian

52 IN 52, Book #6: The Lawrence Browne Affair by Cat Sebastian

52 IN 52, Book #5: Not Dating Material by Saxon James

52 IN 52, Book #4: I Am Agatha by Nancy Foley

52 IN 52, Book #3: Graverobber Whiskey by AM Kelly

52 IN 52, Book #50: The Nightmare Before Kissmas by Sara Raasch

52 IN 52, Book #49: The Sunshine Court by Nora Sakavic

52 IN 52, Book #48: Hinterland by Logan Spurgeon

52 IN 52, Book #44: Cry, Voidbringer by Elaine Ho

52 IN 52, Book #43: Dionysus in Wisconsin by E.H. Lupton

52 IN 52, Book #42: Queen of Faces by Petra Lord

52 IN 52, Book #40: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

52 IN 52, Book #39: Jade Legacy by Fonda Lee

52 IN 52, Book #38: The Entanglement of Rival Wizards by Sara Raasch

52 IN 52, Book #37: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke