Seanan McGuire‘s Middlegame is a standalone story with no relation to any of her various series. It’s pretty remarkable for framing thematically dark fairy tale prose with time resets more commonly at home in science fiction. I had been avoiding her Wayward Children books, but may have to check them out after all just to see if they happen to resemble this in any way.
Kristin McTiernan’s Black Magic’s Prey is a very… raw story. It starts out well enough, only to very quickly escalate into magical mind rape, lots of crying, sudden lesbianism, casual racism, razorblade gargling, situational rape, satan worship, and small town vindictiveness. And that’s all just in the first half (a pretty impressive accomplishment considering the book’s only about half the standard length), which is where I had to stop; I’m not keen on continually victimized protagonists and the summary for the followup just raises all sorts of questions I think I’d be better off not knowing the answers to.
The Honors series is a sci-fi work co-authored by Rachel Caine and Ann Aguirre which (at least initially) brings to mind Aguirre’s earlier Sirantha Jax series. So, it’s more than a little odd that the ‘about the authors’ section make it seem like everything was Caine’s idea while going well out of the way to pretend that series doesn’t exist. Oddity aside, while the first book is quite engaging the second has a completely different atmosphere to it with: A forced focus on social justice issues, a bit of character assassination where the protagonist is concerned, an overall devolvement into battle shounen tropes, and a cliffhanger ending.
