Book Cosplays and Reviews – Xiran Jay Zhao

The Bone Shard Daughter Review + Cosplay

the bone shard daughter cosplay — *Cosplay of Lin Sukai, the emperor’s daughter*

The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart

An Asian-inspired epic fantasy set in an empire of drifting islands, out now from Orbit, available anywhere books are sold

Personal Rating: I’d give my bone shard to Lin to command as she wishes, except she wouldn’t take it because she’s too good for that 🥺

Reasons to Read: Asian-inspired queer-normalizing world, clever magic system that works like coding, sci-fi post-humanism tropes told in a fantasy way, determined protagonists, adorable animal companion

So, I never liked the strict division of sci-fi versus fantasy in publishing. My favorite works tend to be those that combine the tropes of both, especially sci-fi with grand, beautiful worldbuilding. This is the first epic fantasy I’ve read that borrows brilliantly from sci-fi tropes, though. Its magic system made me go WHOAAA OMG once I realized it worked like coding. Basically, the empire takes a bone shard from behind everyone’s ear when they’re 8, then if you carve the right commands on the shards in a special language, they can remotely drain the person’s lifeforce to power magical constructs made of animal parts. BUT, if the commands don’t work with each other, it can cause the whole construct to break down. (Where are the programmers out there…relatable content for you.)

Constructs weren’t people, even if a few bore human parts. The lives of the shards in their bodies powered them, and the commands written on them gave them purpose. But depending on how tightly those commands were written, well, they could be subverted. And despite the smooth work on this construct, it was a dockworker and would be lower-tier. Fewer commands, more loopholes.

The empire spans hundreds of drifting islands and was established by the Sukai family, who defeated the Alanga people that once ruled the islands with their supernatural powers. The Tithing Festival that gathers the bone shards necessary for magic is a painful and dangerous one, with one wrong move meaning the chisel could hit the brain and kill the kid, but the empire justifies it by constantly warning its citizens about how the Alanga might come back. Though by the start of the story, this fear of the Alanga isn’t strong enough to pacify people anymore, so revolutions are brewing in every corner of the empire. It doesn’t help that the emperor has holed up in his palace to focus on bone shard magic experiments instead of keeping the political system running.

But the constructs kept us all safe. They were as numerous as any army. My father always said the Alanga would one day come back, and when they did, they’d try to reclaim the Empire. All the Alanga had powers, but their rulers had more than most. When one island’s ruler fought with another, the clash of their magics had killed so many hapless bystanders. Enormous walls of water, windstorms that flattened cities. The greatest of them, Dione, could drown a city while saving all the flies, but most Alanga didn’t have that level of control.

The chief protagonist is the emperor’s daughter Lin, who was meant to be his heir but now faces intense competition from his adopted son Bayan because she lost all her memories 5 years ago. The emperor keeps most rooms in the palace locked and makes Lin and Bayan compete for the keys to unlock them and gain more knowledge. To prove herself worthy of the throne, Lin decides to pull off a string of heists to steal the emperor’s keys and secretly learn the bone shard magic he has kept from her. Determined, hard-working protagonists are my favorite, and she shines as exactly that from the very first chapter. As she claws for more power, she also grapples with the ethics of using this magic at the expense of other people’s lifeforces–is it justified if she’s trying to hold the empire together and save people from warfare everywhere? The direction her story takes is pretty surprising as she uncovers layer after layer of the mysteries behind what her father is really doing.

My father ruled his Empire by proxy, all his power and commands distributed to his four most complex constructs: Ilith, Construct of Spies; Uphilia, Construct of Trade; Mauga, Construct of Bureaucracy; and Tirang, Construct of War. It occurred to me that this must be why he guarded the secrets to his magic so zealously. If I were smart enough, if I were clever enough, if I were careful enough, I could rewrite the commands embedded into their shards. I could make them mine. Father didn’t think I was enough. My memory was lacking. But I knew who I was now. I was Lin. I was the Emperor’s daughter.
And I would show him that even broken daughters could wield power.

Another major protagonist is Jovis, a smuggler who has faced discrimination all his life because he is half Poyer, a minority people not native to the empire. He has spent the 7 years prior to the story searching for his abducted wife, even making deals with a notorious gang to get a boat to sail the islands. Early on, when an island he’s on sinks into the Endless Sea, he rescues the kitten / otter-like creature Mephi, who is utterly adorable and becomes his animal companion. To Jovis’ enormous surprise, Mephi turns out to be no ordinary animal. Not only does he slowly learn to talk, his presence starts giving Jovis superhuman powers to fight off the gang members chasing him across the islands to collect the debt he owes. Jovis finds himself rescuing a string of children from the Tithing Festivals, then as his notoriety grows, he gets roped into helping the underground resistance against the empire. He starts off very practical and cynical, only saving kids for money and not believing in the possibility of a revolution, but slowly comes into the responsibility of using his powers to help those who need it. He has a valid point in that most revolutionaries end up becoming tyrants themselves, though. I appreciated how the rebels in this book were not portrayed as selfless saviors, but possibly shady people who have their own agendas. It made the conflict less black and white and kept you guessing at how everything would resolve all the way until the end.

“I’m not a hero. I never set out to be a hero in the first place. Those children? Their parents paid me to rescue them.”
“The Empire was established to save those people from the Alanga. The Shardless Few is trying to save those people from the Empire. Who, after, will save the people from the Shardless?”

HOWEVER, the book does have one wide-eyed, idealistic revolutionary in the form of bookseller Ranami, who is in a relationship with the sword-bearing, armor-wearing Phalue, daughter of her island’s governor. Ranami and Phalue are an amazingly complex F/F couple who love each other very much, but struggle with sorting out their political differences. Ranami has tried many times to get Phalue to pay more attention to the issues on their island, but Phalue believes her father’s feudal system is a fair exchange and that those who starve just don’t work hard enough. Phalue thinks she’s qualified to make this judgment because she’s Not Like Other Aristocrats. She doesn’t care for luxuries, gives to the gutter orphans whenever she can, has a commoner mother, and interacts often with commoners.

“I know it bothers you,” Phalue continued, “but these things are this way for a reason. The farmers receive land from my father; they owe him their fealty. Yes, I think the way he spends the money is stupid, but it is still his right to send the caro nuts to the wealthier islands, where he can fetch the best price for them. He still pays the farmers their fair share. He keeps order and peace, and that deserves payment.”

I think we’ve all struggled with this type of “come on, it can’t be THAT bad!” people (or were one of them), so I found Phalue and Ranami’s plot thread to be the most compelling of the book. (It’s not just because they’re amazing F/F rep, I swear!!). It takes Phalue a realistically long time to truly understand what Ranami has been saying to her for years, though she still starts off as a decent and interesting person, so you don’t dislike her for what she initially believes. But the book’s point is that merely “being decent” is not acceptable when it comes to addressing oppression. If you have the power to change things for the better but you don’t choose to, you are still complacent in the exploitation of others.

“It’s hard to remake one’s view of the world, to admit to complacency. I thought remaking myself for you was hard enough, but doing that was something I wanted. I didn’t want to realize how much I’ve hurt the people around me, and that’s what confronting my beliefs meant. We all tell ourselves stories of who we are, and in my mind, I was always the hero. But I wasn’t. Not in all the ways I should have been.”

This timely theme of “you should do more” runs through the entire book. Ultimately, I find the Bone Shard Daughter to be a story about all the ways an authoritarian regime can go unchecked because of fear and acquiescence, and how those with the power to make even the slightest things better have the responsibility to do so. It actually reads like a cyberpunk tale, except it takes place on beautiful and fantastical islands instead of urban cities (though there IS constant rain too!). It’s definitely a very unique book, so I absolutely recommend checking it out.

Bonus Cosplay Shots:

Lin with her green-bound journal of memories

The First Sister Cosplay + Review

*Cosplay of the titular First Sister, nameless, voiceless*

The First Sister by Linden A. Lewis

A Red Rising meets The Handmaid’s Tale space opera, out now from Skybound

US Order Links

UK Order Links

Personal Rating: I’d betray any higher power to join Hemlock’s gang

Reasons to Read: Richly-realized worldbuilding, compelling characters, non-binary rep, multilayered tension, mindblowing plot twists

You know, despite literally being a sci-fi author, I’ve always had trouble connecting with space operas. I don’t know why. But I DEFINITELY didn’t have a problem with this book. The worldbuilding, character work, and unraveling plot threads were so perfectly balanced that I breezed through it without a single moment of boredom or confusion. Even though it was this far future space society with so much history, everything was presented in a very digestible way. The gist of the setup is that Earth and Mars originally fought a long war over resources, during which a bunch of scientists were like “aight, this is a lost cause” and flew out on a vessel called the Icarus to colonize Mercury. There, they found the fantastical substance hermium, which fulfilled all their nerdy scientist dreams and kicked their tech up to another level. By the time the war ended, with Earth and Mars’ combat AIs growing sentient and being like “aight, this is a lost cause” and peacing out to the outer planets, the Icarii were so much more technologically advanced and prosperous that they could afford to turn Venus into basically the Hollywood/Instagram planet, with a lavish entertainment industry. BUT they refused to share their resources, particularly hermium, so Earth and Mars joined forces as the Geans and entered a new war to scavenge tech from the Icarii. My favorite part of the worldbuilding was how a lot of it was conveyed via these excerpts from in-universe books or fliers or speeches, which gave it an extra sense of depth. I also found it interesting that the typical big sci-fi robot rebellion came BEFORE the start of the story, and it influenced the Gean society into becoming super religious and hung-up on being “natural,” as opposed to the Icarii, who readily embrace technology like neural implants and genetic engineering.

The Dead Century War was fought because Earth continued to demand resources from its child, Mars, while they were both suffering. Unable to help Earth any longer, Mars went to war. And afterward, when the war stopped because the Synthetics abandoned their makers on both sides, there was no choice but for the two planets to enter into a reluctant treaty and become the Geans. While the Dead Century War had raged, the Icarii built paradise and then refused to share it with the rest of the galaxy.

The story is told through 3 POVs on different sides of the conflict, 2 in real time and 1 through these cool voice message transcriptions, and they’re all easy to get invested in. The first, the First Sister, is literally nameless and voiceless, both having been taken from her when she was 12. She is a “priestess” of the Sisterhood, the chief religious organization of the Geans, but what her duties really entail is comforting soldiers on a starship by listening to their feelings, or “confessions,” and providing them with sexual relief (though no sexual assault happens in the book itself). This is clearly an allegory to how women are expected to listen to and comfort and serve everyone around them with a smile on her face, without troubling them with her own emotions in return. It’s like a male fantasy come true and codified into a system.

Somehow, at twelve years old, I had been forced to forget my name.
I was sent away then to my first assignment, a pleasure liner that brought soldiers home from deployment, with a dozen other Sisters who attended to passengers. And that was when I used all I had been taught, the taking of confession, the act of forgiveness, and, when I grew older, the comfort of the body. Yet I clung, ever so tightly, to the secret part of me. I wanted a home. I wanted a family. I wanted to be anything other than what I was.

On the surface, the First Sister acts like a loyal, demure servant of the system, but she secretly wants out badly. The only way she can avoid the advances of the entire starship of soldiers is if she has the captain’s exclusive favor, which she did before the start of the story. She thought she would soon be free from all this when that captain promises to take her off the ship with him as he retires, but she learns a painful lesson to never trust the promises a man makes in bed when he straight up leaves without her. Now, with a hardcore new captain Saito Ren on board, she has to fight for the white armband that marks the captain’s exclusive favor all over again. Except, this time, she receives a personal mission from the Mother, leader of her religion: spy on Captain Saito and report back any fishy details, despite their religious doctrine specifically forbidding this type of treacherous behaviour. She’s hesitant about this mission to begin with, and it only gets harder when she finds that Captain Saito wants to know more about her as a person instead of seeing her as an outlet for venting. They’re two lonely women who slowly get closer, but a sense of doom constantly presses down on their budding romance, and the biggest question of the book is how the hell they’re going to get out of this.

When I turned twelve years old, I woke to find my sheets covered in blood. I cried then, so sure was I that I had done something horrible. I did not fear for myself, never once considered that I was the source of the blood despite the pain in my stomach, but wondered who I had harmed or killed. Finally my dreams of violence had come to fruition, and I had become a monster.
My Auntie heard me crying and came to see what was the matter. She did not speak, but in the lines of her ecstatic face, I saw that she was pleased. She held me to her chest and hugged me, then slapped me across the face for making noise.

The second POV is Lito, a soldier on the other side of the war who worked his way up from the very bottom of Icarii society. He is a Duelist, a kind of elite Icarii soldier who fights in pairs with transforming hermium blades controlled by neural implants. He is a shining example of the Icarii equivalent of the “Pull Yourself Up By Your Bootstraps” doctrine, so much that he even got his sister out and funded her pursuit of a career in art. However, a major failed battle prior to the start of the story made him fall from grace and caused the Icarii to separate him from his partner Hiro, who he is basically soulmates with. Lito and his sister still live in the top rung of society, but there’s a lot he’s unhappy about, and he has a tendency of repressing all those emotions with commands from his neural implant. His big dilemma comes when the army sends him on a mission to kill Hiro, who apparently went rogue while on a deep uncover mission in Gean space. His struggle deepens when he discovers that Hiro may have betrayed the Icarii for very good reasons (because, despite living so close to the sun, the Icarii are SHADY AS HELL). But if Lito doesn’t complete the mission, his sister is still back home, and he doesn’t know what could happen to her if he goes rogue.

From the moment I earned the Val Roux Scholarship to the Academy, climbing the levels of Cytherea for my family, I was nothing more than a soldier. I went for the same reasons anyone on the bottom level would—no more cramped two-bedroom apartment for four people, no more bland slop called dinner, no more poorly recycled air that left you slightly out of breath—but I became exactly what the military wanted me to be. Strong. Courageous. Loyal. I never asked questions, even when I should have.

The third POV is a batch of voice messages that Hiro secretly ships to Lito, and it definitely has the strongest voice of the POVs, providing iconic non-binary rep. Hiro is a character that EXUDES personality, mainly because they grew up in a such a repressive picture-perfect home that they decided that they could not deal with being anything other than unapologetically themself. There’s not a lot I can say about them without going into spoiler territory, so I’ll leave it at this: you will be delighted and mindblown by how the mystery behind their motivations resolves.

My mother’s name was Mariko. She couldn’t stand the idea of her or my father living a lie for the rest of their lives.
Sometimes I wonder if this is why I am who I am: unabashedly me. And sometimes I think of how this must remind my father of the woman who walked away from him, and wonder if that’s why he hates me so much. Not for who I am, but for who I remind him of. For Mariko.
Because I also can’t stand the idea of living a lie for the rest of my life.

In fact, the entire last 1/3 of the book is a sequence of twists that will boggle your mind. Everything set up throughout the rest of the book collides in such a way that will leave you going OHH MAN WHY DIDN’T I SEE THAT COMING. Each character has reasons to stay loyal to their societal system and reasons to defy it, and things don’t necessarily play out the way you’d expect them to.

Overall, The First Sister is a tense, thrilling, emotional read that’s easy to get sucked into, and worth a try even if you’re not typically into space operas. It’s out NOW, so go check it out!

Bonus cosplay shots:

Fragile Remedy Cosplay + Review

Cosplay of Alden, morally gray genderqueer legend

Fragile Remedy by Maria Ingrande Mora

A YA queer dystopian fantasy for fans of the Fever King, Shipbreaker, and found families, out March 9, 2021 from Flux

Add it on Goodreads

Preorder It Now!

Personal Rating: I’d swim through the sludge channel to join Reed’s gang

Reasons to Read: The immersive prose, the queer found family, the plot that keeps you guessing, the hope among the bleakness

Is that a trope more heartwarming than queer found family? This book has such a grim and gritty setting (described so vividly that you’d never want to go there), but the story ends up surprisingly heartwarming. It takes place on the Withers, an island quarantined decades ago due to a since-eradicated “lung rot” epidemic (what’s with me and unintentionally reading epidemic books in 2020?!). The protagonist Nate is a GEM, Genetically Engineered Medi-tissue, a type of human created during the epidemic to be used as medical fodder. He was born in the high-tech and glamorous Gathos City, but was smuggled to the Withers for his own safety, because he would’ve been treated like an object if he didn’t get out.

“To the folk in those towers, you are not a person.” She’d spoken slowly, raising her voice over the whistle of the wind in their ears. “To them, you’re not a boy. You’re no one’s son. They made you to carve you up or bleed you dry.”

The blood of GEMs has a drug-like intoxicating quality and can heal even critical wounds, which makes them highly valuable and sought after on the gritty streets of the Withers. The biggest threat comes from the Breakers, a group on the hunt for GEMS with big money to pay. Here’s where Nate’s biggest dilemma comes in: the gang he runs with doesn’t know he’s a GEM, and though they’re a close-knit found family, some of them have shown a burning desire to find a GEM and turn them in for the cash reward, which would be enough that they’d stop having to worry about feeding themselves. If Nate keeps hiding his identity, he’s putting them all in unwitting danger. If he comes clean, they could report him out of desperation for the money.

Nate couldn’t force his friends to choose between loyalty to another street kid and the opportunity to rake in a huge bounty.
Guilt formed a knot in Nate’s throat. His gang was sitting on a fortune. And they had no idea.
Because he wasn’t brave enough to tell them the truth.

What’s worse, a GEM’s body starts deteriorating once they reach a certain age, and they need a medicine called Remedy to stop the process. The only person Nate can get Remedy from is Alden, a trinket shop owner / drug dealer who he has a very complicated relationship with. Alden had taken Nate in and given him a place to stay, but fed on his blood so intensely that Nate had to run away. But since Alden is the only one who knows how to cook Remedy, Nate has to keep returning for doses behind his gang’s back. Nate’s secrets are a wedge between him and Reed, the beefy, green-eyed leader of his gang–who he has fallen in love with.

He couldn’t imagine Reed wanting to be with someone who looked half dead, someone troublesome and secretive.
But sometimes, Nate woke up disoriented and hot, skin prickling with half-remembered dreams. He’d never touched anyone the way he touched Reed in those dreams—darting his tongue out to taste the soft skin at Reed’s throat, Reed rumbling deep in his chest and clutching him closer, hot and sweet at Nate’s mouth.

Nate and Reed’s relationship was very sweet, with Reed always being concerned for Nate’s health and Nate being too afraid to tell the truth, but my favorite dynamic was actually that of Nate and Alden. Alden is a character you genuinely don’t know if you can trust in any given scene. There are moments where he seems to care about Nate, but Nate also had to run away from him for a very good reason. There are so many layers to their relationship that I legit could not tell if Alden was manipulating Nate. I really appreciated this complex portrayal of a queer character, who are often unquestionably good people. Sure, it’s important to offset the villain coding of queer characters that have happened so often in the past, but it’s no fun to have them just be Good. Let them be morally gray too!!

“Tell me what you’re really asking. Tell me you want Remedy for free and want to give me nothing in return. Tell me you’re willing to put my shop, my life, and my grandmother’s life at risk just by being here. Just by being what you are.”
“Alden.”
“Tell me you’re lying to the people who shelter you. That your life is worth more than the rest of us.”
All of it was true. But Nate was a coward, and the words bubbled out of him softly, a wretched admission. “I don’t want to die.”

The various multilayered conflicts kept up a sense of doom, danger, and tension throughout the entire book. I literally had no idea how things would turn out. The writing itself was also very visceral, describing the grimness and filth of the Withers very efficiently. There’s one descriptor, “sun-ripe piss,” that is now one of my favourite descriptors of all time. But, as bleak as the situation is, the story is ultimately about queer people sticking together and supporting each other through the impossible. Preorder it if that sounds like your thing!

Alden had told him that hope was a fragile thing, but here they were with nothing left but hope.

(Finally, for you Yugioh fans out there, the setting gave me major 5D’s vibes. Nate is even a Tinker good at working with tech, just like Yusei. So if you’re a 5D’s fan, definitely check this out!)

Bonus Shots of My Alden Cosplay:

These Violent Delights Cosplay + Review

*Cosplay of the two sides of Juliette Cai, Chinese and American*

These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong

A retelling of Romeo and Juliet set in 1920s Shanghai.

Preorder Links: preordertheseviolentdelights.com

Personal Rating: Juliette Cai could backhand me right into the Huangpu River, and I’d thank her

Reasons to Read: The richly realized world of 1920s Shanghai, the poetry-like prose, the tense mystery, the meticulously developed characters, the delicious and scathing discourse against colonialism, the doomed LOOOONGING between Roma and Juliette

So this is one of those books that makes me angry. Angry because I cannot BELIEVE I never knew the extent of how interesting the situation in 1920s Shanghai was. I mean, I knew it was a world class city on par with Paris and New York, but the complexity of its political and societal dynamics wasn’t something taught to me, despite me being Chinese. Growing up, the 1920s Shanghai c-dramas I’ve watched were mostly about undercover Communists struggling against the Kuomingtang (so, very thinly veiled propaganda). This book presents a much more complicated and nuanced view of the city then. It has the best of what I love so much about historical fiction. It instantly comes with gripping tension and fascinating dynamics because of that element of Realness to its background, and everything is much cooler knowing you’re learning about a real setting. Nothing gets more intense than real life.

“This place rumbles on Western idealism and Eastern labor, hateful of its split and unable to function without it, multiple facets fighting and grappling in an ever-constant quarrel. Half Scarlet, half White Flower; half filthy rich, half dirt poor; half land, half water flowing in from the East China Sea. There is nothing more but water to the east of Shanghai. Perhaps that is why the Russians have come here, these flocks of exiles who fled the Bolshevik Revolution and even before that, when their home could no longer be a home. If you decided to run, you might as well keep running until you came to the edge of the world. That is what this city is. The party at the end of the world.”

In the story, Shanghai is a city controlled by Western colonizers and two gangs, the Scarlet Gang and the White Flowers. Juliette Cai and Roma Montagov are its respective heirs, but both face a multitude of pressures from inside and outside their gangs. Being heir to a gang is as precarious as being heir to a throne. They are doomed to command respect by continuing the blood feud between them, or they’d lose their positions and their ability to protect themselves and all that they love. The most interesting part of this retelling is that the expected forbidden romance actually happened four years before the start of the story, and it did not end well. So the tension between Juliette and Roma are that of jilted exes. It makes for a lot of hilarious, bickering dialogue and understandable angst as they’re forced to work together to save their city from a mysterious epidemic of madness (I can’t believe Chloe Gong invented 2020).

Juliette Cai is by far my favorite character, because she is the epitome of That Bitch. This ho speaks, like, 6 different languages and dialects (Mandarin, Shanghainese, English, French, Russian, Dutch). Before you call BS–no, this is indeed realistic for someone born into an elite family at the time. One endlessly entertaining part of the book was her and Roma switching between different languages depending on their surroundings, and the general exploration of language. She’s a breath of fresh air in that she’s an elite who fully embraces her elitism. There is nothing humble or awkward about her. She is better than you and KNOWS it, and you better know it as well.

“Juliette was the queen of socialites. She had had nothing but practice. If she wanted to, she could have turned her slight, polite smile into a megawatt grin within a second of her life. But she did not think she could get any information out of Paul, and associating with him seemed pointless.”

*Miss Cai’s Public Statement Regarding the Madness*

Part of her ruthlessness was honed by a massive, bloody betrayal by Roma that ended their young romance four years ago. It’s pretty clear early on that Roma’s hand was forced, though. He spends most of the book being Very Tired of all the BS around him, yet there’s an undeniable fire in him that drives him to fight to keep his position as heir, because he’d probably die the moment he lost it for good. There are no cinnamon rolls here. Once you find out the truth of what he did, it’s understandable, but you’re not sure he should be forgiven either, which makes for great tension in how this would all resolve.

“He ached with the knowledge that the softness of their youth was gone forever, that the Juliette he remembered was long dead. He ached even more to think that though he was the one who had dealt the killing blow, he had still dreamed of her in these four years, of the Juliette whose laughter had rung along the riverside. It was a haunting. He had buried Juliette like a corpse beneath the floorboards, content to live with the ghosts that whispered to him in his sleep. Seeing her again was like finding the corpse beneath the floorboards to not only have resurrected, but to be pointing a gun right at his head.”

Aside from Juliette and Roma, the side characters are pretty fantastic as well. There’s a trio on each side, Juliette/Kathleen/Rosalind vs Roma/Benedikt/Marshall. Benedikt and Marshall have got a Will They/Won’t They thing going on, and Kathleen provides !!trans rep!!, rare in historical fiction. Each is thoroughly fleshed out and play off each other well as the threat of the contagious madness forces them to interact.

“Rosalind’s lips thinned. Her volume dropped, until it was not loud but cold, not angry but accusatory. “Here I was, thinking you were the pacifist of the family.”
Pacifist. Kathleen almost laughed aloud. Of all the words to describe her, pacifist could not be farther from the truth. All because she did not care for bloodshed, and suddenly she was an almighty saint. She would pull a switch to instantly end all life in this city if it meant she herself could have some peace and quiet.”

What it means to “belong” versus how complicated actual identities can get is a big theme in the book. Even though Juliette is the heiress to half of Shanghai, she spent most of her life getting an American education. She’s actively identified by her American way of dressing. At one point, Roma remarks that he’s actually spent more time in Shanghai and China than her. And the discourse goes beyond East vs West–there’s also the Chinese cultural drama of how family names can arbitrarily mark you as forever an outsider, no matter how close you are to the seat of power.

Much as Kathleen hated it, her sister was right. It mattered little that they were more closely related to the beating core of the Cais than the other second, third, fourth cousins. So long as their last name was different, there would always be that doubt in the family over whether Rosalind and Kathleen truly belonged here. They came from Lady Cai’s side—the side that had been brought into this house rather than the side that had been raised in it for generations.

I see the “madness” in the book, which compels people to tear out their own throats, as a metaphor for the damage the Shanghainese are doing to themselves as they cling to collective feuds and fight among their own. Their casualties only make room for colonizers and Communists to move into the city, yet Juliette and Roma’s parental generations refuse to put down their pride and consider the bigger picture. When Juliette and Roma were younger, they dreamt innocently of being better than the blood feud they inherited, just like in the original play, but can they do it when there’s personal bad blood between them? Preorder to find out 😎

*Actual Portrait of Lord Montagov, Roma’s Father*

Bonus Cosplay Shots:

*Rare Photos of Juliette Cai, Infamous Scarlet Gang Heiress*

*This is me pretending like Juliette doesn’t only wear a qipao once in the whole book, and explicitly not with her usual finger waves*

*This is me trying my best to convince you this is a 1920s style dress 😂*

Spin the Dawn Cosplay + Review

cosplay of Maia, cover version
*cries because you can’t see the freckles i painted on but THEY WERE THERE*

Spin the Dawn by Elizabeth Lim, out now from Knopf Books for Young Readers

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound

Personal Rating: would absolutely sign my soul away to visit this world

Reasons to Read: Magical writing, fantastical descriptions and imagery, breathtaking story, likable and refreshing protagonist

THIS BOOK!! This was my absolute favorite kind of fantasy, one where the world is built with such stunning detail and described with such lyrical, magical prose that you can’t help but fall in love from page 1. They say insta love in YA is unrealistic. THEY’RE CLEARLY NOT COUNTING ME AND SPIN THE DAWN.

It read like one long fairytale, and I could just SEE it in my head as a gorgeous Disney movie. Yet, the writing never boggled itself down. Every description is so tightly controlled to paint a picture in your head with minimum words. It’s always hard to describe non-Western fantasy worlds because you can’t rely on many of the existing visual cues, and I was impressed with the efficiency with which the Asian-inspired world was articulated here.

“Sendo used to tell me fairy tales. How he’d love mine if he were still alive: the tale of a girl who’d sewn the sun, the moon, and the stars into three dresses.”
“It was the tale of a boy, too. A boy who could fly but not swim. A boy with the powers of the gods but the shackles of a slave. A boy who loved me.”

The story is about Maia Tamarin, the only daughter of a master tailor who’s much more keen than her 3 brothers to follow in her father’s career. However, this is a world where women are not allowed to be professionals and can only hope to marry well, so she has feared all her life that her talent and passion will never be put to use. But everything changes when a five-year-long civil war kicks off in her country of A’landi. Two of her brothers die on the frontlines, and the third comes home with a disability, leaving their father so emotionally shattered (on top of their mother dying a few years ago) that he can no longer continue his work. When he is summoned by the Emperor to partake in a competition to become the Imperial Tailor–and there ain’t no competition like a competition by Emperor Khanujin because a competition by Emperor Khanujin is MANDATORY–Maia then disguises herself as her younger brother and goes to represent their family instead, Mulan-style.

Maia may be a mild-mannered, family-focused girl, but she always demands respect in a very graceful way. I was pleasantly surprised by how she never let herself be pushed around, without resorting to being cold or unpleasant. It’s a refreshing take on the whole “girl has to fight for a place among men in a fantasy world” trope–we don’t all have to be badass warriors!

“My heart was for becoming a tailor: I learned to thread needles before I could walk, to make a line of perfect stitches before I could talk. I loved my needlework and was happy learning Baba’s trade instead of going out with my brothers. Besides, when Finlei taught me to spar and shoot arrows, I always missed the target. Even though I soaked up Sendo’s fairy tales and ghost stories, I could never tell one of my own. And I always fell for Keton’s pranks, no matter how often my older brothers warned me of them.
Baba proudly told me I was born with a needle in one hand, a pair of scissors in the other. That if I hadn’t been born a girl, I might have become the greatest tailor in A’landi, sought after by merchants from one coast of the continent to the other.”

This book is pitched as Mulan meets Project Runway, but the competition aspect is actually only the first 1/3 of the story. The ensuing 2/3rds, when Maia has to journey across A’landi to sew three gowns using “the laughter of the sun, the tears of the moon, and the blood of stars,” is when the magic of the book REALLY dials up. When I first read this in the summary, I was like “damn, how are you gonna represent those things??” I was not disappointed. Each manifestation of the sun, moon, and stars and the process of retrieving them was so perfect and mesmerizing. I won’t spoil how they were done, so you’re gonna have to read for yourself!

What I can tell you is that the story never fell in pacing, with tangible threats always chasing at Maia and her eventual travel companion. A certain twist near the end that has me going 👀👀👀 at the sequel, which will be coming out on July 7 of this year!

Shatter the Sky Cosplay + Review

*Cosplay of Maren ben Gao Vilna, bisexual icon*

Shatter the Sky by Rebecca Kim Wells, out now from Simon & Schuster

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop | Zeebra Books

Personal Rating: i’d follow Maren in an uprising against any tyrant. i don’t care which one. i’m down for any. hit me up.

Reasons to Read: Clever protagonist, unapologetic BI REP!!, unpredictable plot, transportive worldbuilding rich with detail

Are you one of those people sick of queerness always being portrayed as a subject of discrimination and struggle, even in fantasy settings? Well, HERE’S THE BOOK YOU’VE BEEN WAITING FOR. The world of Shatter the Sky has an imperialism problem, and a tyrant problem that’s packaged with that, but queer people are perfectly fine being themselves and no one gives a shit. The story, summarized succinctly as an “angry bisexual feminist dragon fantasy,” follows Maren, a mountain girl who gets so pissed when the imperialists snatch her girlfriend away for some mysterious and deadly training trials that she sets out to steal a dragon and get her back.

What gets me about Maren is that she’s one of those rare YA protagonists who’s clearly very intelligent, but you can actually see her streams of clever thoughts at work instead of just being told that she’s, idk, doing smart shit. She’s also very coolheaded, thinking through all of her decisions carefully and making almost none by impulse (unless she’s under high duress).

“I dug in my pocket and pulled out the coins I’d separated from my purse this morning. Father had warned me about how expensive things were likely to be. I’d set aside five feathers for the inn, knowing it was probably too much, but I hadn’t wanted the vulnerability of scrounging around in my pack after coming up short.”
“My stomach was growling fiercely by the time the sun set. I’d debated whether to go down for supper—it would be an opportunity for my façade to slip—but decided eventually that it would be more suspicious for an exhausted traveler not to take full advantage of a hearty meal.”

No matter how much she preps ahead, though, Maren’s plans don’t always work out when you expect them to, which keeps a constant thread of suspense through the book. You never get the sense that things are becoming too easy for her. Her character arc is very much about her pushing through her self-perceived inadequacies out of her love for her girlfriend and discovering along the way that, you know what? She is more That Bitch than she ever imagined.

“I am Maren ben Gao Vilna of the Verran mountain. I have left my home, and I have fought and bled for my quest. I have met Aurati and faced down dragons and matched wits with Zefedi invaders. What I have done, I have done to survive. Like Ciara, mother of dragons, I will soar. I have not failed. I will not give up. I am second to no one. I am worthy, and I will not be overtaken by you.”

One of my favourite aspects of the book is the system used in the world to tame dragons–scented oils! I don’t think I’ve ever read another book that went so in depth in exploring the power of scents. Smell is an underrated sensory cue in literature, y’all.

“Tell me what you smell. Be as specific as possible, no matter how strange it seems.”
Warmth. Sun. A sharp, sweet tang in the back of my mouth. It was on the tip of my tongue—Father had brought fruit that smelled like this to the mountain once, after a long trip to Kyseal. “Orange,” I said.

Overall, Shatter the Sky is a fun, fast, suspenseful read that relies very little on existing YA tropes and keeps you guessing what will happen next. Go check it out!

Not Even Bones Cosplay + Review

(Review originally posted on my old website that I accidentally let die…LOL)

Personal Rating: i’d let this book murder me and toss me to the bottom of the Amazon River

Recommended For: Those that go NOOOOOO WHYYYYYY whenever a protagonist chickens out of doing something seriously fucked up but would’ve been so! Juicy! To watch!

You’ll LOVE this book if you’re looking for something that plunges unapologetically into the darkest parts of humanity. No selective filter that only presents the “cool” sides of violence while protecting you from the others. No shying away from issues because it’s scared it’ll make you uncomfortable.

This book doesn’t give a shit if you’re disturbed.

SO, uhhh… think twice about reading this if you’d be unsettled by human trafficking, bodily mutilation, detailed dissection sequences, and general human depravity that makes you stare off into the distance thinking of how shitty the world can be. So don’t come complaining in horror when YOU’VE BEEN WARNED.

She imagined the feel of the spoon in her hand as she scooped the eyes out. She imagined the texture of the heart through her gloved hands, placing it gently in a jar. Slowly piece by piece, she went through the full dissection until there was nothing left unpackaged or unlabelled. Not even bones.

It’s too simple to describe this book as “dark”. Lemme tell you a big problem I have with a lot of books and media that get slapped with that label. In the end, they either 1. don’t actually let their protagonist get their hands dirty, 2. just has them do “badass” things to be ~ * COOL AND EDGY * ~, or 3. try to convince you the correct thing to do when all odds are against you is to hold on to your honor and never lose your “humanity”. Because falling to the level of your tormentors would make you no better than them. Or something.

Nah, FUCK THAT.

This book is about breaking the rules made by other people and living by your own. Because if those people are laughing and running around being comfortable with what they do while you’re sitting there doubting yourself at every turn, how are you supposed to win? Especially when you’re a person like our dear protagonist Nita, who secretly likes some of the fucked up shit she does. She just thought she wasn’t “supposed to”. Well, when she’s betrayed and thrown into a cage in a hidden black market in the rain forests of Peru, where there are “spiders that eat birds“, she has to determine what she’s willing or not willing to do real fast. You cannot hope for some made-up mystical force to punish those you hate. If you want them to pay, the only reliable way is doing it yourself.

At some point, the sounds changed, as though Mirella’s throat had been damaged from overuse, and the noises she made were closer to scratchy gasps than screams. Each time Nita heard one, she imagined the pressure of the scream ripping the skin of her throat until it bled. That was just what it sounded like.
Nita cried at one point. Not sobs, just sad tears that leaked out her eyes as she stared at the ceiling.

Not Even Bones is ultimately a story about a girl coming to terms with her true self. Not what other people want her to be, not what she thinks she should be, but the raw, complicated human under all the social constructs and expectations forced onto her by both others and herself. She faces the vilest parts of humanity and then grasps it within herself for power. Remember: morals are optional. They have no real binding power. If you make life-or-death choices expecting others will abide by the same principles you do, you’re gonna have a bad time.

The book is set in a world where the hottest pieces of news revolve around “unnaturals”, supernatural creatures inspired by real-life legends from cultures all over the planet. There are pain-eating zannies inspired by Thai krasue, organ-slurping kappa inspired by Japanese spirit legends, color-changing dolphin humans inspired by West Amazons legends, and all kinds of other cool shit. The tales are spun with unfortunately realistic detail that throws endless shade at how the world tends to freak out about minorities. There’s also a fictional organization, the International NonHuman Police (INHUP), that’s basically a giant sideeye @ pretty much all the incompetent global organizations out there tangled up in corruption and red tape.

The story takes place in Peru, though please don’t think black markets and corruption are part of Peruvian culture. Those things are hidden in plain sight all across the world–the book makes this very clear. It doesn’t hold back from directly exposing issues that have everything to do with the grim, realistic aspects of the book and nothing to do with the supernatural stuff. I admire this, because just because you’re talking about problems that pop up in your fantasy system, doesn’t mean you should ignore the 100% realistic ones.

But what gave Nita pause was that most people seemed to be speaking in English. She caught American accents as well as British. There was Spanish in there too, but the sea of faces throughout the market was more white than brown.
Of course it was. Nita had made the very stupid assumption that because she was in Peru, the dealers and the buyers would mostly be from Latin America.
They weren’t.
They were from everywhere, and the universal thing they had in common was money. It showed in their tailored clothes and bleached smiles. These were the exploiters, the people who felt like they could come into a country and do whatever they wanted.
Conquistadores in suits.

If all this sounds deathly intriguing to you, definitely give the book a try. It’s a quick, smooth read that starts at 100 and just never stops going. Seriously, I found no pacing issues. The tension is as omnipresent as the humidity over the Amazon–which you will feel, because the descriptions are detailed yet efficient enough that it always maintains a picture in your head while refusing to slow down.

As for the characters, I recommend admiring their shenanigans at a healthy distance. These are not characters meant for you to project onto or to step into their shoes. They are messed up, they are creepy, they will make choices that you will gasp at. Some protagonists seem like horrible people because of errors in writing. These ones are straight up…bad at being harmless, unassuming people. I don’t want to put things in terms of “good” or “bad”. As this book will show you, humanity is far too complicated for black-and-white divisions like that. It’s dangerous to dismiss anybody who horrifies you as “monsters”, as if the average person wouldn’t be capable of doing what they did when pushed into the same circumstances.

If you ever find yourself going “oh my god, did she just do that?”, the answer is “yes. yes, she did.” Nita is not here to be a noble, inspirational girl. And neither are any of the people she will struggle against.

Your know what though? One great thing about this book–NO PROBLEMATIC ROMANCE!! There was one that had me on high Iffy Romance Alert, but thankfully, their dynamic doesn’t stay creepy throughout the whole thing. As people, they’re both creepy as hell, but their relationship is, like, goals. Villains can have healthy romances too. You know what? They’d probably even have better romances. They wouldn’t take each other’s personas at face value and then end up shockingly disappointed when they find out otherwise. They’d probably, you know, ACTUALLY COMMUNICATE WITH EACH OTHER.

My one gripe with the book is that it left me wanting a lot more. More depth to other characters, more worldbuilding. But don’t worry, it’s not one of those first books that simply cut off with no climax or resolution to an actual plot arc. Since this is a series, I’m sure future books will give me more.

Bonus Cosplay Shots: