DIANA WYNNE JONES GIRLIES!!

DIANA WYNNE JONES GIRLIES!!

If you haven’t checked out Tamora Pierce, Margaret Owen, or Intisar Khanani yet, please do!!! I’m noticing a lot of fans of DWJ enjoying these authors and vice versa AND YOU COULD BE NEXT

Yes I just finished this one! I hope lots of people read it and it develops a thriving fandom. It DOES feel like a very tumblr-friendly work

If Found, Return to Hell by Em X. Liu

Loved, loved this fantasy novella! The protagonist works a soul-sucking corporate job at the call centre of One Wizard, redirecting customers whose spells have gone wrong. When they unexpectedly get to investigate a call, of course it turns out to be less routine than it seems...

The story uses Chinese mythology in a modern-with-magic setting: talismans, Courts of Hell, spirit possession...all the good stuff. It's set in a nameless city in China (I think).

Don't get put off by the second-person narrative ("you"). It's not gimmicky and you soon stop noticing. I think the author used it to avoid gendering the protagonist. They're nonbinary themself, and a number of characters have non-typical genders.

Despite the beginning, the book's tone is ultimately warm and hopeful. It's about opening yourself to caring for others, and the rewards that come from that.

Really, this book is so Tumblr: gender is irrelevant, love is real, found families support each other, and everything you learned from watching The Untamed et al. will come come to good use.

state of the bookshelf 7/29/23

Reading

The Archive Undying (Emma Mieko Candon)

At His Countess's Pleasure (Olivia Waite)

Mycroft and Sherlock (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse)

Mystery on the Blue Train (Agatha Christie)

The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows (Olivia Waite)

Carpe Juguluum, Maskerade, the Last Continent (Pratchett)

Recently finished

If Found Return to Hell (Em X Liu) - I liked it!

Ghost Talkers (Mary Robinette Kowal) - I loved it!

Death on the Nile (Agatha Christie) -> I watched part of the recent movie adaptation after finishing the book and I'm super interested in the changes that the movie makers made :O :D

Thief of Time

After the Wedding (Courtney Milan)

Have you read these books? Do you have book thoughts to share? Tell meeeeeeee

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Tortall - Tamora Pierce Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Additional Tags: Meta, Art, Fanart, Heraldry, reconstructing heraldry, Art History, Medieval History, Embedded Images Summary:

A meta dive into the heraldry of Tortall, including drawings from the given descriptions and an attempt to blazon any coat of arms that was described enough.

Includes an instruction to basic heraldry concepts and conclusions about Tortallan heraldic traditions as distinct from real-world ones.

As a sort of spiritual successor to my Castlevania heraldry meta, have a meta on Tortall’s heraldic tradition and the arms of various characters.

EXCUSE ME, That Is My Emotional Support Bodyguard

If Artemis Fowl was originally planned as a trilogy (and I have no idea, I was literally too emotionally distraught from rereading this book to Google that), then this book is a really lovely ending. It's also just a massive emotional roller coaster, especially for a middle-grade series! Let's talk Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code.

*Spoilers Below the Break. Be Warned*

This book could honestly also be titled Artemis Fowl: American Businessmen are Scum and I Will Personally Make them Pay, because one of the very, very few flat-out mistakes we see Artemis make occurs in the opening chapters of this book. Our boy attempts to extort American businessman Jon Spiro into paying him an exorbitant fee to keep his C-Cube (a peice of tech that integrates fairy technology to make literally everything else on the planet obsolete, with the added bonus that if anyone looks too hard at it, the fairy world could be exposed) off the market.

Butler--bless his bodyguard heart--spends this entire meeting with his instincts screaming "Something is seriously wrong," but Artemis is so damn sure that he has the high ground that he ignores a couple of fairly blatant red flags to bait the already pissed-off businessman. And then, of course, the angry American does the most predictably fucking American thing in the world and pulls a gun.

And Butler does his job. This man who we have grown to love through two books literally stands in front of the bullet and makes sure that Artemis is safe before literally using his dying breath to tell Artemis his name before dying in his principle's arms.

Guys, gals, and nonbinary pals: This scene is DEVASTATING.

We are intimately tangled up in the moment, with Artemis and Butler's reactions. As someone who has had life-threatening medical emergencies, Butler's calm in the moment is totally understandable, but when I read this book for the first time, that calm was scarier than him panicking would have been. Artemis is a normal human boy with normal human boy emotions in this scene, and because he is so rarely that in these books, that is perhaps more devastating than if he had also been calm in the scene. Basically, if this death scene hadn't been reversed in later chapters, it would be #1 on my list of book death scenes that scarred me for life.

But Artemis being Artemis, he finds his criminal mastermind instincts and stuffs Butler's body in a fish freezer, gets help from a professional cryogenicist, and then gets Holly on the line to pull off a hail-Mary four-minute healing. And the best part is that there are actual consequences. The healing takes about a decade off of Butler's life, and because some kevlar fibers got caught up in the wound, his breathing is less free than it was before. But the important thing is that Butler. Is. Alive.

Then, of course, Artemis has to come clean to the fairies that he came within a hair's breadth of exposing their entire civilization to humans and that he has left the door unlocked and cracked open for Jon Spiro to expose them. This is, of course, wholly beyond the pale, so the Council authorizes them fairy help to retrieve the cube, but for a price: All the humans involved get mind-wiped after the cube is successfully retrieved. Artemis agrees, because this kid has eaten enough humble pie today to kill a large horse.

Butler, despite being alive, is not in any shape to go heisting, so Juliet and Mulch Diggums round out the heist team. Jon Spiro is rich, paranoid, and quite frankly evil, so this heist is a CHALLENGE, but ultimately they do end up succeeding, and Artemis, Butler, and Juliet submit to mind wipes. That scene is weirdly touching, but it is not without the caveat that allowed the series to continue beyond book three: They're wearing mirrored contact lenses to beat the mesmer, and Artemis slips Mulch a computer disc full of files that will spark enough memories to reverse the mind wipe.

This isn't my favorite Artemis Fowl book by any stretch of the imagination, but it's arguably the best heist in the series and the scenework and the development of Artemis's character is strong as hell. Plus, watching Jon Spiro spiral into a hell that is largely of his own making after he had Butler shot was deeply satisfying.