Review – Iyanu: Child of Wonder, vol 1

Posted March 2, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Iyanu: Child of Wonder, vol 1

Iyanu: Child of Wonder

by Roye Okupe, Godwin Akpan

Genres: Fantasy, Graphic Novels
Pages: 120
Series: Iyanu: Child of Wonder #1
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

Iyanu, a teenage orphan with no recollection of her past, suddenly discovers that she has abilities that rival the ancient deities told in the folklore of her people.

It is these abilities that are the key to bringing back an age of wonders, as Iyanu begins her journey to save a world on the brink of destruction! The Corrupt--cursed wildlife and strange, divine beasts--are determined to destroy humanity, unless Iyanu can stop them.

I really liked the colours in volume one of Roye Okupe’s Iyanu: Child of Wonder, and I like the character designs too, but something about the art doesn’t work for me — kind of an uncanny valley sort of thing, I think? There are some pages where it really threw me somehow.

The story itself is fairly familiar/unsurprising, with a chosen one and an in-group protecting themselves by high walls, oppression, etc. What I got fascinated by was the backstory, partly based on Yoruba customs, which is given in snippets between the chapters and then discussed in quite a bit of detail at the end of the book. It’s an interesting set-up.

I don’t think I’ll be continuing with this series, but I’m glad I gave it a shot. It’s probably for a younger audience, mostly; I can imagine an eleven year old eating it up and loving Iyanu.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

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Fantasy with Friends: Magical Schools

Posted March 2, 2026 by Nicky in General / 4 Comments

Fantasy With Friends: A Disccusion Meme hosted by Pages UnboundThis week’s question from Fantasy with Friends is all about magical schools:

Do you enjoy books about schools of magic, or do you think they are overdone? Do you have any favorite magical schools or magical school books?

Which obviously immediately presents the massive Scottish castle in the room, hanging over the discussion. It was a hugely popular school story when I was younger, and it still is, and its fingerprints are inevitably all over a lot of the more recent magical school stories. Given the anti-trans views of the author, the frankly racist worldbuilding and character-naming, and the fact that the author uses her money to fund anti-trans lobbying, needless to say I hold no remaining affection for it. Generally I try to avoid interacting with people who continue to support the author and boost the books, because I don’t feel safe with them.

It gets more complicated when it comes to books that feel informed by the existence of that series. There are several published books lately that are apparently serial-numbers-filed-off fanfics, and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that. I think… broadly supportive, because I appreciate people taking back their investment and turning it into something of their own. It really depends on how much work has been done to differentiate it from the original source text, and whether it’s fixed some of the underlying issues with it rather than just importing them.

(I’ve also undoubtedly read some without knowing, or at least without knowing before I actually bought it, because I didn’t actually read most of that series, and was never part of the fandom. Some stuff just sails over my head. I wish people would stop assuming the cultural supremacy of that series is so complete that everyone else must be able to recognise it!)

Anyway, to turn the discussion away from That Magic School, I do still enjoy the concept of a magical school story, both the ones that feel informed by the Enid Blyton genre of school story, and the ones that are more American like The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association. I’ve been especially enjoying ones that are told from a more adult point of view, like The Grimoire Grammar School and Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent: it brings a bit of realism to the genre — and frankly, updates it out of the early 1900s nostalgia fest.

It’s also worth remembering that there have always been other wizarding schools, like the school on Roke in A Wizard of Earthsea. That feels to me like it springs from different roots, and I definitely don’t feel like that kind of otherworldly wizarding school is played out as a story, nor so beholden to That Series.

So yeah, ultimately I feel like the subgenre got over-dominated by That Series and responses to it, and I’d love to see more fantasy schools that aren’t essentially based on British boarding schools of the early to mid 1900s… but I’m not averse to the subgenre automatically. Bonus points if you manage to be queer-inclusive!

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Review – Seasonal Disturbances

Posted March 1, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Seasonal Disturbances

Seasonal Disturbances

by Karen McCarthy Woolf

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 84
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

A 2017 Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Following her groundbreaking 2014 debut An Aviary of Small Birds ("technically perfect poems of winged heartbreak" - Observer), Karen McCarthy Woolf returns with Seasonal Disturbances. Set against a backdrop of ecological and emotional turbulence, these poems are charged yet meditative explorations of nature, the city, and the self. A sinister CEO presides over a dystopian hinterland where private detectives investigate crimes against hollyhocks; Halcyon is discovered as a dead kingfisher, washed up on an Italian beach. Lyrical and inventive, McCarthy Woolf's poems test classic and contemporary forms, from a disrupted zuihitsu that considers her relationship with water, to the landay, golden shovel, and gram of &. As a fifth-generation Londoner and daughter of a Jamaican emigre, McCarthy Woolf makes a variety of linguistic subversions that critique the rhetoric of the British class system. Political as they may be, these poems are not reportage: they aim to inspire what the author describes as an "activism of the heart, where we connect to and express forces of renewal and love."

Karen McCarthy Woolf’s Seasonal Disturbances had a few poems or bits of poems that I found interesting and enjoyed, but overall it wasn’t a favourite. It might be partly the fault of the ebook format (I read it from the National Poetry Library’s Overdrive offerings, and Overdrive seems to not always display things the way they’re meant to be read), because there was eventually an explanation for what seemed like random unrelated lines at the end of a poem.

That said, I can only review based on the experience I actually had, and that was pretty confusing. It felt at times like the different stanzas of poems had no relationship to one another at all (and I don’t just mean the one about water that was definitely deliberate, which taught me a new term, “zuihitsu”). Maybe I’m not clever enough for this! Though, clever or not, I have two degrees in English literature, did study poetry within that, and did get good grades, so take that for what that’s worth — partly personal taste, partly not knowing what a “zuihitsu” is in advance, etc.

There was a bit from ‘Ars Poetica 101’ that I did like and wanted to save for myself for later (excerpted below), so it wasn’t a wholly bad experience — but definitely not a great success for me.

Poetry is
what the sea sings to the
last insatiable human
who thinks he’s the only one with a voice
to flood the dark with music and
dance or wonder who we are
and why we’re here or how we
became I, so exclusively…

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

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February Reading Wrap-Up

Posted March 1, 2026 by Nicky in General / 4 Comments

Field of daffodils

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus — Happy St David’s Day! I can’t believe it’s 1st March already, and time for month #2 of my reading wrap-up. For now it’s mostly the same stats and format as last month, but still excited to hear if anyone has any fun ideas for additions.

February in general:

February involved quite a bit of gaming, so a quick shoutout for the new-to-me games I was really loving: Loophole (a fun puzzle game with time travel and tricky paradoxes) and The Chef’s Shift (a typing game that’s also a restaurant management sim). I’ve been trying to do better at getting 100% achievements in the games I pick up and not consigning games to oblivion half played, so I really got stuck into those and got 100% on both, plus a few games I’d been neglecting for a while, like Fossil Corner (a game where you sort fossils, and find fossils matching people’s requests).

My wrist was pretty painful and stiff early in the month, but I kinda figured out why and gave myself a bit of a break, and was able to get back to physio without too many problems. I don’t know if it’s helping, but I’m giving it a bit more time before I go back to the GP, since I know I was (accidentally) doing some stuff that hurt my wrist in the last couple weeks.

I also sorted out my attendance at both my graduations: I’ll be graduating with an MSc in Infectious Diseases from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine at the end of March, and then from the University of London at the end of April. I’m in one of the last few cohorts to do so, since University of London shut down the course and LSHTM decided to keep it going by themselves. It’s kinda nice that I still get to graduate from both, as it means I’m graduating from the same university as my mum did (albeit in different subjects/from different schools, as she’s a doctor).

Alright, now let’s talk about the really important stuff: books!

Reading stats:

StoryGraph reading stats for February 2026: 37 books, 8,660 pages, average rating of 3.61. My top rated reads included Catherine Clarke's A History of England in 25 Poems, Julie Leong's The Keeper of Magical Things, and Amy Coombe's Stay for a Spell. The number of pages I read per day varied all month, but was always 100+. There was a massive uptick on the last day! More reading stats for February 2026: I read 72% fiction, 28% non-fiction, and 76% of my books were under 300 pages long, with 24% between 300 and 500 pages. I read 81% in print and 19% in digital editions, and my top genres were fantasy (21), LGBT (14), manga (12), romance (12) and poetry (10).

Total books read: 37
Total pages read: 8,660
Rereads: 1
ARCs: 6
Series finished/up to date: 2
Books owned pre-2026: 8
Books owned from 2026: 18
Borrowed books: 10

Fiction: 24
Non-fiction: 4
Poetry: 9
Comics, manga, manhwa, etc: 12

I’m ending the month ahead on my yearly reading goal, wooo. One major cause of that was mainlining the manhua adaptation of Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation. I read the light novel recently, but reading an adaptation is always a little different, and I found it helped bits and pieces of the story come together for me that hadn’t really clicked before. Volume 13 should finish off the story, and is out in March, so I’m looking forward to finishing the series.

I read less non-fiction than I expected, but more poetry. I’m still enjoying exploring more poetry!

Progress on reading goals:

Overall total books read: 68/400 (2 books ahead)
Overall total pages read: 15,966/100,000 (472 pages behind)
Books read from backlog: 21/100
Books owned since 2026 and not yet started: 12/20

Good progress here, really! I was a few books behind (and further behind on pages) until I did a marathon of reading yesterday to finish off my BookSpinBingo card. I actually managed it, finishing nine books in a single day, which was a lot of fun but not something I want to do often, ahaha.

I need to work more on getting the number of books I’ve bought this year and not started doooown, since my graduation this month means a trip to London and therefore to a bunch of bookshops.

Blogging stats:

Views: 13.7k
Visitors: 11.9k
Likes: 353
Comments: 389
Reviews: 28
Other posts: 16

A busy month! I’m not entirely sure why, though I’m sure bots are a part of it. Still, all the numbers are up, including likes and comments, so I don’t think it’s just bots. It’s probably also the fact that I took part in Top Ten Tuesday and added a new weekly meme I participate in (Fantasy with Friends), plus trying to be generally active and add fun blogs to my own RSS feed.

Most viewed posts:

I continue to get a fair bit of traffic to reviews of The Other World’s Books Depend on the Bean Counter, which I guess is due to the anime. I wonder if I’ll see more for Heaven Official’s Blessing, given the release of the new short film, though I think the audience for the short films are already pretty locked in and don’t need to read book reviews to know that Hualian invented love…

My own favourite posts:

Posts I loved from elsewhere:

Alright, that’s me for February! Time to go and start on that March reading.

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Review – The Hungry Empire

Posted February 28, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – The Hungry Empire

The Hungry Empire: How Britain's Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World

by Lizzie Collingham

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 367
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

The glamorous daughter of an African chief shares a pineapple with a slave trader ... Surveyors in British Columbia eat tinned Australian rabbit ... Diamond prospectors in Guyana prepare an iguana curry ... In twenty meals The Hungry Empire tells the story of how the British created a global network of commerce and trade in foodstuffs that moved people and plants from one continent to another, re-shaping landscapes and culinary tastes. To be British was to eat the world. The Empire allowed Britain to harness the globe's edible resources from cod fish and salt beef to spices, tea and sugar. By the twentieth century the wheat to make the working man's loaf of bread was supplied by Canada and his Sunday leg of lamb had been fattened on New Zealand's grasslands. Lizzie Collingham takes us on a wide-ranging culinary journey, charting the rise of sugar to its dominant position in our diets and locating the origins of the food industry in the imperial trade in provisions. Her innovative approach brings a fresh perspective to the making of the Empire, uncovering its decisive role in the shaping of the modern diet and revealing how virtually every meal we eat still contains a taste of empire.

Lizzie Collingham’s The Hungry Empire takes two different tacks in addressing the subtitle, “How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World”. One is to discuss the food the British Empire imported to Britain, the adoption of new spices, of sugar, of tea — a fairly well-worn story, but nonetheless part of understanding imperialist expansion, and sometimes even the explicit cause of it.

The other is to discuss the less intentional way that food travelled with immigrants and slaves, especially the slaves, or was shipped around the world to cope with the needs of slaves and indentured people, and how these diets affected health. The latter part was a bit more interesting to me because I’d read less about it elsewhere. As a note, it’s fairly dispassionate about all this, rather than outraged at the casual treatment of people as chattel; it does comment about stuff like horrible conditions on slave ships and the high mortality rates, but it mostly just gives the facts… aside from when discussing opium and China, at which point it gets very defensive about Britain’s role in that and argues that the impact of opium on China is over-exaggerated. It’s hard to say how to take that without more context.

I did find the book fairly slow/long-winded, personally; there was something about the author’s writing that I really couldn’t keep my attention on for long, unfortunately. I found the inclusion of the recipes an interesting idea but intrusive — they aren’t always positioned at the ends of chapters, and sometimes just break in mid-paragraph. Weird choice.

It’s an interesting book and I am glad I read it, but it was definitely slow-going.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

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Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted February 28, 2026 by Nicky in General / 18 Comments

Woooo, weekend time! And I have plans. Reading plans.

Books acquired this week

First up, some poetry via the library:

Cover of Southernmost: Sonnets by Leo Boix

It seems to be really popular — I had to put a hold on it (and I was third in the queue), and there’s one person after me, so I should get to this soon. From my (short) experience of being a National Poetry Library member, it’s rare to need to put a hold on books (even award winners), much less see multiple holds on it, so I’m very curious about why. My hopes are high!

I did also get a review copy this week; I hesitated over accepting it because it’s a PDF, and because I don’t always get on with modern crime/mystery stories… but I figured I’d give it a shot.

Cover of Murder Like Clockwork by Nicola Whyte

Though I don’t know when I’ll get to it, ahaha.

Posts from this week

Let’s start with the review roundup, as usual:

Aaand the other posts:

What I’m reading

I’ve read quite a bit this week, but I haven’t finished many books (I expect that to happen in a marathon this weekend, ahaha). So it’s a short round-up of books I’ve finished this week:

Cover of Domination by Alice Roberts Cover of Stay for a Spell by Amy Coombe Cover of The Keeper of Magical Things by Julie Leong

If I want to get a blackout on my BookSpinBingo card (and I do!) then today will be spent reading a lot. I first plan to finish up reading the new Murderbot, Platform Decay, and (finally) Heather Fawcett’s Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter, but I have a few books close to finished, so they won’t be the only ones.

I’m rather looking forward to my marathon reading today, but probably tomorrow I’ll chill with video games a bit more, ahaha.

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.

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Review – The Beauty’s Blade

Posted February 28, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – The Beauty’s Blade

The Beauty's Blade

by Feng Ren Zuo Shu

Genres: Fantasy, Light Novels, Romance
Pages: 394
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Two powerful swordswomen face off in this enemies-to-lovers historical tale.

Ruthless and mercurial, Fu Wanqing is hardly the type of woman anyone expected to be heir to the jianghu’s preeminent righteous cultivation sect. Yet she’s famous for more than just her attitude: her raw power and beauty are renowned, rivaled only by those of demonic sect leader Yu Shengyan.

As such, Fu Wanqing is determined to face her in battle; after all, she must prove herself not just worthy of her station, but superior beyond the rest!

Unfortunately, the ice-cold Yu Shengyan couldn’t be less interested in her challenge. Yet when Fu Wanqing offers the rare medicine Yu Shengyan needs to cure one of her comrades, she relents. The catch? Yu Shengyan must agree to stay by Fu Wanqing’s side for three months. Fu Wanqing is certain that by the end of their deal, she’ll get her duel—but will her fascination with Yu Shengyan come to encompass more than just her sword?

I really wanted to be absolutely in love with Feng Ren Zuo Shi’s The Beauty’s Blade, the first baihe I’ve read. I love the cover, the inside art’s nice too, and I love that it flips various things on their heads (the fiery, impetuous, red-robed light-aligned cultivator, and the cool and virtuous head priestess of the demonic guild), and the whole presentation of the book is really pretty.

In the end, I did enjoy the book, but not as much as I hoped to. The story is a bit all over the place, with (at least to an English audience) lots of similar-looking names and unfamiliar terms. Some of the context I knew or could quickly work out from reading danmei, but terms like “jianghu” and “wulin” were new. There is a glossary in the back, at least, but still, it can be a lot to juggle. It did all come together for me in the end, given some time, but I can understand readers finding it a bit much — especially if they don’t have the context of reading other cultivation novels.

The two main characters are a lot of fun, though: Fan Wanqing and Yu Shengyan have a lot more in common than it appears at first, and their growing obsession with each other is quite fun. Unhealthy! But fun nonetheless. Fu Wanqing is less of a meathead than she appears at first, and Yu Shengyan has a lot more passion than it appears at first, and they both end up murderously possessive of one another.

I think at times certain parts of this felt rushed, or were maybe just underexplained for this audience (which it wasn’t written for, so that’s fair, but could maybe have been fixed with a bit of localisation), but overall I had fun. And though Fu Wanqing at the end indicates she’s no longer interested in the jianghu… I think they had fun wandering around messing things up together, and I expect they’ll continue, really.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

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Review – Longer

Posted February 26, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Longer

Longer

by Michael Blumlein

Genres: Science Fiction
Pages: 240
Rating: one-star
Synopsis:

In Longer, Michael Blumlein explores dauntingly epic topics--love, the expanse of the human lifespan, mortality--with a beautifully sharp story that glows with grace and good humor even as it forces us to confront deep, universal fears.

Gunjita and Cav are in orbit.

R&D scientists for pharmaceutical giant Gleem Galactic, they are wealthy enough to participate in rejuvenation: rebooting themselves from old age to jump their bodies back to their twenties. You get two chances. There can never be a third.

After Gunjita has juved for the second and final time and Cav has not, questions of life, death, morality, and test their relationship. Up among the stars, the research possibilities are infinite and first contact is possible, but their marriage may not survive the challenge.

I received a copy of this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

I remember trying Michael Blumlein’s Longer previously and bouncing off it, but I couldn’t really remember why (and what I did seem to remember didn’t really match what I read now, so maybe I’m mistaken). So I figured now I’d give it a proper shot. There are some interesting ideas here — the consequences of a (limited, but extended) long life, the possibility of some kind of extraterrestrial life (with, in the background, the aftermath of a hoax about the same), a developing mismatch between people who’ve lived together for a long time.

Buuut it reaches way too hard for profundity, trying to write in a stripped-back way to give it gravity, and thus stripping it also of personality and emotion. For something that’s really heavy on dialogue (multiple exchanges without any inquits to note who is speaking, what they’re doing as they speak, their tone, etc) it’s really bad at differentiating the characters from one another. In one exchange I carefully counted it out so I could figure out who was saying what, and one character must have had two lines in a row at one point (which is something you have to be really careful of when you do that).

The footnotes didn’t really add anything either; it didn’t feel like it was meant to be an in-world document, so why in-world footnotes? Did the author just fail to think of a way to get vital information into the narrative? But the footnotes didn’t really give vital information in any way, just extra flavour (such as it was).

Overall, kinda bland and boring, unfortunately. It isn’t really digging into the sci-fi concepts for the cool sci-fi nature, but more a philosophic take on the potential impact of longevity treatments. There’s a place for that, but I didn’t find this effort at it particularly interesting or fun to read.

Rating: 1/5 (“didn’t like it”)

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Review – The Chromatic Fantasy

Posted February 25, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – The Chromatic Fantasy

The Chromatic Fantasy

by H.A.

Genres: Fantasy, Romance
Pages: 300
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

A Faustian bargain kicks off in this gorgeously drawn graphic novel reminiscent of stained glass and illuminated manuscripts, telling the story of queer transmasc romance, daring adventure, and (literally) fighting your demons. Jules is a trans man trapped in his life as a nun. The devil that the convent guards against offers him a deal to escape: an illicit tryst and lifelong possession. Jules takes the deal, and begins his new life as a criminal who's impervious to harm. He soon meets Casper, another trans man and a poetic thief, and together they steal, lie, and cheat their way through bewildering adventures, and develop feelings for each other along the way. But as Jules and Casper's relationship deepens, so does the devil's jealous grasp...

H.A.’s The Chromatic Fantasy is a pretty mad book, with beautiful colours and fun character designs, which seems mostly designed to satisfy the artist’s desire to show transmasculine characters having fun, falling in love, having sex in a variety of fun ways, and getting into trouble. It’s a weird mix of medieval-esque and modern elements, all jumbled together very energetically.

There’s minimal dysphoria in the story, to be clear, but it’s worth knowing that the characters are portrayed naked and as not having had surgery. There’s a reference or two to the possibility of surgery, but very minor.

It’s hard to explain exactly what happens in this book, it’s pretty nuts, but I enjoyed the artist’s enthusiasm.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

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WWW Wednesday

Posted February 25, 2026 by Nicky in General / 4 Comments

Cover of The Keeper of Magical Things by Julie LeongWhat have you recently finished reading?

I finished up The Keeper of Magical Things the day before yesterday; I didn’t love it as much as I loved Julie Leong’s previous book, because I felt the magic was a little less interesting (or a bit less of a unique angle, anyway). Still, it was cute and fun, and I’m glad I finally settled in and got round to it!

Cover of Agnes Aubert's Mystical Cat Shelter by Heather FawcettWhat are you currently reading?

A few books at once, as always. I’ve finally got back to Heather Fawcett’s Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter; I’d actually hoped to finish it yesterday, but I didn’t manage to settle down into quiet reading time early enough to have a chance. I still think it has such Howl’s Moving Castle vibes.

I’m also now reading Selena Wisnom’s The Library of Ancient Wisdom, which I started a while back and then stalled on because it was quite dense and I was in the middle of exams. It’s really interesting, because working from the starting point of discussing the library of Ashurbanipal means the author is able to dig into various aspects of ancient Mesopotamian beliefs and knowledge. I didn’t know (for instance) that they were actually really good on hygiene and quarantining the sick: it might sound a little patronising to be surprised that they washed their hands with soap and had good hygiene around sick people, but when you consider that in the 1800s Ignaz Semmelweis was treated as a literal madman for suggesting washing your hands between doing autopsies and delivering babies… welp.

Cover of Night Shade & Oak, by Molly O'NeillWhat will you be reading next?

Definitely Molly O’Neill’s Nightshade and Oak, and probably also Martha Wells’ Platform Decay, since they’re both on my BookSpinBingo list! I’ve been more into reading again in the last couple of days, so I’m still hopeful of finishing most of it.

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