Review – Brimstone Slipstream

Posted September 14, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Brimstone Slipstream

by Matt Weber

Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 65
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
It's the eve of the biggest dragon race in the city of Yemareir. Zaya Shearwater and her wife, Kiriki, have spent the year shooting up the rankings, and now they're favored to win. But how did a team of women from Yemareir's roughest precincts become the favorites in a sport where most winners buy their victories?

Doctor of Journalism Shenireen Agama wants to know. Through interviews with Zaya, Kiriki, and the ground crew that's become their family, she begins to weave a story. Its threads are love, desperation, biology, and magic – all bound together with the early history of Yemareir, where Zaya and Kiriki's ancestors fled centuries ago to escape the pogroms of a mad king, and where the colonists resettling the ruins of an ancient city have just discovered that it is home to dragons…

Matt Weber’s Brimstone Slipstream is a short story which sets the scene for a full length novel (or possibly a series), but offers in itself quite a lot of world and character building, giving us a picture of one family of racers in a world of semi-illegal underground dragon racing that’s rife with racism and people who try to pay to win.

The format is basically that of a magazine article by a journalist digging into the scene and following a pair of upstart riders who are working together to use a trait normally considered intrinsic to their people, “empathy” (which is sort of… telepathy-ish communication with animals) to give them an advantage at dragon racing. We get the journalist’s-eye view of the subjects of the article, with all their evasions, prickly edges, and the things they won’t say.

I wouldn’t say no to reading more in this world, but it’s also a fairly satisfying story just for its own sake, despite the relatively low page count, with quite a bit of world-building and a good sense of a wider world around the story. You can kinda sense the ending coming (the note “after publication” of the article), because the foreboding is wound through it: they’re doing a dangerous job.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Matt Weber, SF/F

Fantasy with Friends: Fantasy and Tech

Posted September 14, 2026 by Nicky in General / 0 Comments

Monday means Fantasy with Friends time! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about technology in fantasy:

What role do you think technology should play in fantasy? Some authors try to avoid it (ex. worlds set in an imagined past before modernization or worlds where wizards simply do not use telephones or television even though they have been invented). Yet other authors try to imagine what a world with both technology and magic would look like (ex. The Legend of Korra, Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series). Can magic and technology work well together? What questions does an author have to address to make it work?

In the end, it very much depends on the world and whether things feel like they fit. There are definitely worlds where the two can sit side by side, or where magic and technology are in conflict or synergy in an interesting way — saying that makes me think of Ilona Andrews’ Kate Daniels books, for instance, which features the world flipping between magic and technology regularly. It can be a very fertile way to add depth to the world, introduce obstacles to the plot, and give neat ways to mix the two up together.

Sometimes the two can just co-exist because it’s a fantasy world of the author’s own creation rather than historical fantasy or something. The problem is that it can be tricky to get that to “feel right” to the reader: it’s a regular complaint in Final Fantasy XIV, to talk about a gaming example for a moment. Even though Allagan and magitek technology has always sat alongside magic in that world, sometimes the whiplash is really strong to players, even though I don’t think it’s actually badly done. The expectation that a fantasy world won’t have certain types of technology is strong, and aside from pure plausibility about how elements fit together, authors have to think about whether reader expectations will trip them up.

As with other stuff people feel strongly about like anachronisms, I’m pretty loosey-goosey myself. Put together something that feels coherent, and I’m fine with it!

Tags: discussion, Fantasy with Friends, SF/F

Review – Cat + Gamer, vol 6

Posted September 13, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Cat + Gamer

by Wataru Nadatani

Genres: Manga
Pages: 168
Series: Cat + Gamer #6
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
Office worker Riko Kozakura has successfully expanded to a two-cat party at home, and she continues to level up in pet ownership!

Living with cats Musubi and Soboro every day is an adventure, and in her daily quests, Riko couldn’t ask for a better team! “Leveling up” in skills, surprises, and adventures, Riko discovers what it’s like living with two cats!

Wataru Nadatani’s hilarious manga series is translated by Zack Davisson (Demon Days, Kaibyo: The Supernatural Cats of Japan) and lettered by Susie Lee of Studio Cutie. Nominated for the “Best Manga” Harvey Award in 2022 and 2023!

Wataru Nadatani’s Cat + Gamer series continues to be really cute in volume 6, with Soboro and Musubi’s adventures with baths (Soboro doesn’t like them nearly as much as Musubi, surprise, surprise), their floofy winter coats, and adventures with mirrors. It’s all low-key and relatable if you’ve had pets (probably especially if you’ve had cats, but experience with bunnies is similar, honestly).

I continue to be less of a fan of the fact that Soboro and Musubi are now openly given dialogue — for me, it was fun seeing Musubi be a little alien trying to understand human weirdness, without getting anything so anthropomorphic as dialogue.

Like I said, though, still super cute, and this series makes for excellent light reading.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, manga, Wataru Nadatani

Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted September 12, 2026 by Nicky in General / 28 Comments

Happy weekend! Another busy week, but my weekend should be nice and chill.

Books acquired this week

The “this week” part is very theoretical by now, since this is the remainder of my holiday spree! Here follow the birthday presents I got myself, ahaha. For my indie bookshop buys, check out part one and part two: this one covers my finds in Waterstones in Cardiff and Bristol. I love to support indies, but Waterstones also has an important part to play, with different stores curating their stock differently, and their ability to stock such a broad range of books that indies might not be able to take on.

Also, shoutout to the kind staff member in Bristol’s location in the Galleries who spotted me near-crying at the desk and realised my phone and cards had been lost, connected it with something handed in by another customer, and unearthed them to return to me. Heart attack averted… and without further ado, here are the books I bought once I had my card again, starting with the non-fiction:

I’d known about With My Own Hand and If This Be Magic before, so I’d half-intended to snag those two: I know nothing about Marie Maitland, but her story sounds fascinating, while someone else recommended If This Be Magic. I couldn’t resist Illumino, I’m a sucker for anything about manuscripts, and Unsuitable speaks to my fascination with fashion history.

But I got some more fiction books too!

I’ve been reading the Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint manhua a while, and this is the new volume, while Enchanting the Fae Queen is the next in a series I found a fun distraction. The Second Death of Locke comes highly recommended, too. The Library After Dark is more of a random choice, though, because the scenario sounds fun.

The birthday book haul is almost over, but I did have one last hurrah in the gift shop at the St Fagans National Museum of History, which is an open-air museum recreating buildings from Wales’ history. Many are the originals, dismantled and transferred to St Fagans for preservation and display. The first book is a biography of the man behind the original version of the museum, and the second a book about the history of the Welsh language.

Both are available on Kobo Plus, as it happens, so if you’re curious… well, that might be an option!

Finally, I spent the week looking for these, but sadly they weren’t stocked in any brick-and-mortar bookshops, so I ordered them once I got home — the remaining volumes of The Villain’s White Halo, the first volume of which I read while on holiday and really liked.

Whew! There we go — that’s the full birthday haul.

Posts from this week

Since I post quite a bit, I figure these roundups are useful even for regulars — and maybe more so for people who only pop in once a week. Let’s take a look at my posts since last week, reviews first:

Non-fiction: Welsh Food Stories, by Carwyn Graves (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Poetry: Flowers of a Moment, by Ko Un (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Fantasy manhwa: Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, vol 1, by Umi, Sleepy-C and singNsong (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Fantasy romance: The Wife Comes First, vol 2, by Lv Ye Qian He (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
SF: Ode to the Half-Broken, by Suzanne Palmer (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
History: City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish, by Peter Parsons (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Poetry: Impossible Paradise, by Chen Yuhong (3/5 stars, “liked it”)

As ever, 3/5 stars isn’t a bad rating, and these books are for the most part not very recent reads, due to my backlog of written but unposted reviews. For the books I’ve been reading this week, check out the last section of this post!

Now for the other posts!

What I’m reading

As I mentioned at the start, it’s been a kind of busy week, so I haven’t read as much as I’d have liked, and it’s mostly been classic mysteries! Which is always fun, and if it’s what’s grabbing me at the moment, I’m definitely not going to argue. So here’s a peek at the books I finished:

When it comes to weekend reading, I’m really not sure. I’m partway through Illumino, the history of Britain through illuminated manuscripts, and volume two of The Villain’s White Halo… but I might just continue to lean into the classic mysteries thing, and maybe read more by Haynes or van Gulik… or some of the others I’ve been trying recently.

Whatever it is, I’m going to try to follow my whims, as usual, and not kick myself about not reading something specific or not reading enough. I’ve been doing a bit too much of that lately.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Linking up with Reading Reality’s Stacking the Shelves, Caffeinated Reviewer’s The Sunday Post, the Sunday Salon over at Readerbuzz, and It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? at The Book Date.

Tags: books, Stacking the Shelves, weekly roundup

Review – Impossible Paradise

Posted September 11, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Impossible Paradise

by Chen Yuhong

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 152
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
One of Taiwan’s most celebrated poets, Chen Yuhong draws on both Western and Asian literary traditions, inflected by her work as a translator of contemporary English-language women poets (Glück, Oswald, Duffy). This selection makes her art widely available in English for the first time.

Her award-winning translators, George O’Connell and Diana Shi, carry across the richly metaphorical lexicon of her poems and their uncanny inhabitation of places both real and imagined, conjuring mood, angles of thought or light, animal presence, and the tides of the seasons.

In a world where much that seemed united has frayed, Chen Yuhong’s finely balanced poems bring us news of other imagined worlds, and acknowledge the unexpected, its capacity to terrify or astonish.

I decided recently to try a bit more poetry in translation, and this collection of Chen Yuhong’s poetry, Impossible Paradise, is one of the picks that came out of that urge. The translations are collaborations between Diana Shi and George O’Connell, and there’s a translators’ note about the poems they picked and their methods of going about translation, which is pretty interesting.

There are also some brief notes on individual poems, but they’re presented after all the poems, which is kind of unhelpful. Luckily I didn’t find them too necessary to understand the poems.

I enjoyed Chen Yuhong’s work, all in all; I connected better with some poems than others, but I didn’t get impatient or immediately mentally disengage from any of them (which I always find myself wanting to do with certain poetic styles, e.g. poems full of apparent non-sequiturs, chained together like nonsense). There were a few I liked a lot, or sections of longer poems I liked — this one, for example:

You imagine
a seagull poetics,
each breaking wave
its turbulent poem,
a seagull theology
Solomon’s wisdom,
ceaseless Song of Songs.

I think the poem ‘Pharaoh’ was a favourite, pretty unsurprisingly from me.

So overall a good experience, I’d say!

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Chen Yuhong, poetry

Book Blogger Hop: The Influence of Reviews

Posted September 11, 2026 by Nicky in General / 8 Comments

It’s Friday, so it’s time for the Book Blogger Hop again, hosted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer. I’ve made my own image from a stock photo (credit: Anna Shvets) to avoid adding images created via generative AI to my blog. Feel free to use it too if you would like!

This week’s prompt is about online reviews:

How much do online reviews shape what you pick up next?

I mostly find new books in two ways: other bloggers talking about them, and random browsing in a bookshop.

When it comes to other bloggers talking about books, sometimes that’s just seeing people mention upcoming books they’re interested in, and sometimes it’s based on their reviews — a book I semi-recently picked up that I might not have if it weren’t for reviews was Jarod K. Anderson’s Strange Animals (which was reviewed by Mogsy and Tammy), for instance. If people pick out details that intrigue me, or if certain bloggers whose taste I know well are enthusiastic, that’s usually a good sign.

Sometimes when I’m trying to decide whether to get a book, I look at reviews on StoryGraph, and then I don’t just count on the reviews of people I know; I tend to seek out both very high and very low rated reviews, to get a sense of what people who feel passionately about it (one way or the other) are saying. It’s a pretty good way to quickly root out when a book is actually super racist or something, which helps.

That said, when it comes to books I find by randomly browsing in a bookshop, often I don’t look up anything at all, and just go based on the back cover and a random flip through the pages. I’ve found some real gems that way, and it’s fun sometimes to just throw aside caution and try something solely because it looked interesting and new. It’s also sometimes a terrible idea, of course, but I don’t mind taking that risk, especially since I know the fact that I do also post neutral and negative reviews sometimes helps people find books more to their taste than mine, or avoid books that they wouldn’t like either.

So the answer’s ultimately another “it depends”, I suppose!

Tags: Book Blogger Hop, books, discussion

Review – City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish

Posted September 11, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: The Lives of the Greeks in Roman Egypt

by Peter Parsons

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 258
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
In 1897 two Oxford archaeologists began digging in a sand-covered mound 100 miles south of Cairo. When they finished ten years later, they had uncovered 500,000 fragments of papyri from the ruins of the city of Oxyrhynchus. The work of deciphering these fragments is still ongoing.

Peter Parsons’ City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish paints a vivid picture of the Greek-Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus, using as evidence a wealth of papyri found by digging in the rubbish heaps of the ancient city. His introduction paints a vivid picture of the sheer amount of material, explaining that the first finds were made in 1896 by Grenfell and Hunt — and have yet to be fully published, and not for want of work on it!

That said, most of the book focuses not on the papyri themselves, but the kind of details they offer us, and this wasn’t quite what I’d hoped for, I must admit. I’d have loved to hear more about the process of piecing together the papyri for this kind of information, and a bit about the specific work to identify and preserve the papyri.

It’s not that the history of Oxyrhynchus is boring, though! It’s surprising how personal it can all feel, even when the scraps are equally often the remnants of literature, simple lists, court summons, etc. There’s a letter from the mother (?) of a child who is dying, urging the father (?) to come and see the child, because if it dies before the letter’s recipient arrives, “I swear you’ll find me hanging.” The desperation is so real, compared to the stiff formulaic letters I think even those with an interest know better.

Ultimately the sheer amount of detail makes it a slow read and sometimes a bit overwhelming, but a lot of it is fascinating — and to add to the credibility, there’s a bibliography, numbered footnotes, and an index, so often lacking from popular history books.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, history, non-fiction, Peter Parsons

Let’s Talk Bookish: Decluttering

Posted September 10, 2026 by Nicky in General / 10 Comments

Let’s Talk Bookish is a monthly bookish discussion meme created by Rukky @ Eternity Books and co-hosted by Aria @ Book Nook Bits and Dini @ Dinipandareads! It’s recently moved to this lower-frequency posting schedule which you can check out here. I’m posting a day early since I have a Book Blogger Hop post and a review for tomorrow!

September’s prompt is about decluttering ebooks and physical books:

How do you manage your digital library (Kindle, Kobo, etc.)—do you delete books you won’t read, or do you let them pile up? Do you feel less guilty about owning too many digital books versus physical ones? Which is harder to let go of: a well-loved physical book or a purchased e-book?

My physical library is reasonably well-curated. I have a backlog from years prior to 2025, but in 2025 I came up with a method that kept me reading the majority of the books I’d bought, and I’ve always got rid of books I knew I wouldn’t read again (sometimes by donating them to the local library, sometimes by donating them to charity shops, sometimes by selling them via programs like World of Books). People regularly think of me as a weird hoarder of books and it’s the silliest accusation, because boxes of books depart the household pretty much monthly. I only keep books I expect I’ll want to reread.

When it comes to my digital books, though, I do pretty much no curation at all. I just trust to the storage space on my Kobo that I have plenty, and never delete books. When ereaders had smaller amounts of memory, I had to shuffle things a lot more (though my approach tended to be “expand the memory if possible”, which used to be possible with Kobo Minis: I had a special set of tiny screwdrivers to get in, and copied the original SD card onto bigger SD cards for several of my friends, ahaha).

I know when I first had an ereader, a Sony, I organised things obsessively into folders, in part to help with browsing since it was a bit of a weird system with a lot of different buttons and no touch screen (I was an early adopter!)… but again, nope, now I just tend to use the search to pull up the book I want, or filter by “Kobo Plus” to see the books I’ve added from my Kobo Plus subscription to pick something from there. Sometimes the randomness of the sort is what sparks the urge to read a particular book, even!

I feel maybe a little guilty about books that I totally forget about in the depths of my Kobo, but I don’t feel guilty about having plenty of books at all, neither physical nor digital. It’s a joy! I’m very privileged to have such access to books and ability to keep a lot of books around me, and sometimes I’ll feel bad about not getting to a specific book I planned to read sooner or something like that, but in general, nah, no guilt or shame about books.

So yeah… in summary, I think this might be surprising to people who know how generally organised I like to be, but… I’m a gremlin when it comes to my digital library. Oops!

Tags: books, discussion, Let's Talk Bookish

Review – Ode to the Half-Broken

Posted September 10, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 6 Comments

Ode to the Half-Broken

by Suzanne Palmer

Genres: Science Fiction
Pages: 406
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
Forty years ago, the world nearly ended.

Be is an old robot who was there, and doesn’t want to think about what happened, or what role they played in that conflict. They have settled into a life of isolation in the abandoned ruins of an old mill in the former New York Botanical Gardens, disinterested in what has happened in the outside world since they stepped away from the war. Someone out there, though, has not forgotten about them, and when they are attacked, their person vandalized, and one of their leg stolen, they set out to find the thief accompanied by a cyborg dog and a human mechanic.

The world has changed, but the recovery from the war is uneven and faltering, and Be begins to suspect a malicious hand trying to rekindle the old conflict and finish what was started. In order to stop them, Be needs to come to terms with both their own past and who they have become, and how everything and everyone else they knew has changed in their absence. Being left alone is no longer an option, and peace may be impossible.

This is a story about coming to terms with your past, with who you’ve become and who you still want to be: a tale of resilence and hope, an ode to those struggling to become whole in a world half-broken.

I really really liked Suzanne Palmer’s Ode to the Half-Broken; it was very close to being a five-star read for me, but something just holds me back — I think it’s the fact that it feels like it could’ve been juuuust a little tighter, and would’ve felt stronger for it. I really liked the way it’s set post-apocalypse and people are still trying to survive, that people and mecha are trying to be good to each other despite everything, and that maybe even the holdouts could eventually be persuaded of that. For something set in a pretty post-apocalyptic landscape, it’s surprisingly hopeful.

It starts with a nameless protagonist, an old war mecha who redefined their own purpose and withdrew to live in their own quiet way. Dragged back out into the world by the theft of their leg, they end up teaming up with a surprisingly diverse crew of sentients, and travelling all over the place to try to understand exactly what happened and what’s going wrong with the increasing number of weirdly, uncharacteristically belligerent mecha.

There are quite a few twists and turns, and I’ll admit I saw most of them coming from varying distances: I almost immediately clocked why the protagonist’s leg was stolen, and figured out something relating to the protagonist’s sibling-mecha before they did. That said, the fact that they don’t see it coming makes sense: they don’t know they’re in a story, and aren’t suspiciously watching for twists!

I loved our nameless protagonist, the meditations about personhood and culpability, and the ragtag band of friends and allies they build up. The bits of worldbuilding — railmechs! drone society! the “ecology” of mecha and humans that they briefly travel with! — are all a lot of fun.

So yeah… I think I could wish it had just been a little tighter, here and there, but I did really really enjoy it. Comparisons to Murderbot and the Monk & Robot stories are fairly apt, I’d say, though there’s also more to it (of course).

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, SF/F, Suzanne Palmer

WWW Wednesday

Posted September 9, 2026 by Nicky in General / 5 Comments

What have you recently finished reading?

I haven’t finished anything in a couple of days, but the last thing I finished would’ve been J.J. Connington’s Murder in the Maze. I didn’t like it as much as the other book by him I’ve read (The Ha-Ha Case), in part because it fell back on the ol’ exotic poisons thing (curare in this case), and also I just don’t think it was well structured as a mystery.

Before that was also a classic mystery, Annie Haynes’ The Abbey Court Murder — a bit melodramatic, but satisfying enough.

What are you currently reading?

I haven’t been reading a lot in the last couple of days due to getting busy, so I’m still working on Michelle P. Brown’s Illumino, which should really admit that it wants to talk about far more than just twelve manuscripts and far more of the historical context, and the second volume of The Villain’s White Halo, which has taken a fascinating turn in a couple of respects (Duan Chongxian’s adventures, and the truth[?] of Luo Mingchuan’s whole thing).

I have also started another classic mystery, Robert van Gulik’s The Chinese Maze Murders. It’s apparently based on classic Chinese detective stories, and was originally written in English but first published in Japanese and Chinese. I’m not far into it, and I don’t know a lot about van Gulik’s background and how respectful it’s likely to be, but it’s definitely going to be an interesting product of that period of detective fiction in English from my perspective!

What will you be reading next?

No idea, honestly. I might pick out some shorter reads while I’m so busy, or continue on the classic crime binge — there are a couple more writers I noted to look into, or I could read more of the authors I’ve tried recently, since there are some more of those on Kobo Plus.

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday