Fantasy

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

Graverobber Whiskey is the second book in this graverobber series by AM Kelly, following Graverobber Blues which I reviewed last week, and once again it follows Will Ashton and the motley crew of mages and mage-adjacents that comprise Ashland Investigations and associates. The book picks up less than a year after the events of Graverobber Blues, telling the story of an unexpected visit from a medium from overseas who seeks Ashton and Dirty Henry out for their assistance investigating the disappearance of her brother. The investigation, which feels like a bad idea from the start, ends up having unexpected consequences for all parties involved.

Thank you to the author, AM Kelly, who provided me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review!

This is where the spoilers start, beware!

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Graverobber Blues by AM Kelly is the first in a series that follows Will Ashton, a necromage (aka necromancer) in South Carolina who has a place at a magic school, a beautiful girlfriend, and a very big secret—that “Will” is secretly short for Wilhelmina. In order to prove to herself, her school, and her lover’s uncle that she is talented and worthy, Ashton attempts to undertake an audacious heist-slash-experiment that would elevate her reputation. Her plans are foiled by an even more audacious and talented necromage with ambitions that run counter to her own, and they go head-to-head against each other in a battle to see who can get there first that takes place entirely over the course of one South Carolina night.

This comment doesn’t really fit into the 5P structure below, but I do want to muse on it a little. Ashton is such an interesting character to me because despite being someone who is somewhat on the outskirts of society herself—in particular, being a woman who loves another woman, and being someone who has had to disguise herself as a man in order to achieve anything academically—she is so extremely dedicated to upholding and adhering to the social structures that have forced her into that position. She hates the way her lover, Rosheen, is spoken to and treated as a woman and a healer, but then turns around and admonishes Dirty Henry for behaving rudely to his social betters. Even when things start to really break bad in the story, Ashton seems convinced that she can just go to the dean of the university and tell him and he’ll take care of everything, seemingly without considering that the dean of the university represents the exact academic system that rewards the privilege of money and gender. Another character in the story, J.P., is a former Underground Railroad participant, and Dirty Henry’s wife is Black and his son is biracial, and Ashton does seem to understand that racism is a symptom of a fucked-up society. But also, Ashton is a white woman pretending to be a man in pursuit of academia, and because her race and her (assumed) gender grant her the privilege of chasing that goal, she seems unwilling to really do anything to challenge the status quo and in fact devotes quite a bit of time to trying to convince people who are decidedly below her on the social pecking order that they should fall in line too. This could honestly be a really interesting angle for Ashton’s character development, as it becomes increasingly apparent to her that continuing to adhere to these social mores is not only not going to have the outcome she wants, but will also be actively damaging to the people she’s growing to care about, so I’m interested in seeing where AM Kelly will take it in future books.

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I’m gonna be so real, I did not enjoy this!

The thing that frustrates me so much about this book is Rin’s stubborn refusal to have even the slightest amount of curiosity about the world around her. Throughout the entire book (or at least up to 88%, when I’m writing this), she’s so absolutely convinced that she knows everything that when people who have demonstrably more knowledge and better understanding than her try to offer her advice or guidance she rejects it out of hand if it conflicts even the slightest bit with what she wants: power.

She isn’t curious about who the Woman is or why she’s so determined to stop Rin from accessing the Phoenix’s power. She isn’t curious about why Jiang is so insistent that she learn control and restraint rather than to summon fire. She isn’t curious about anything and the result seems to be that people say “If you do this, bad things will happen,” Rin goes “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me,” and then the bad things happen and she gets mad about it like she could never have seen it coming.

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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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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’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 #3: Graverobber Whiskey by AM Kelly

52 IN 52, Book #2: Graverobber Blues by AM Kelly

52 IN 52, Book #52: The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang

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

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 #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