Author: Nicky

Review – The Disabled Tyrant’s Beloved Pet Fish, vol 3

Posted January 4, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Disabled Tyrant's Beloved Pet Fish

by Xue Shan Fei Hu

Genres: Fantasy, Light Novels, Romance
Pages: 404
Series: The Disabled Tyrant's Beloved Pet Fish #3
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
A FINE KETTLE OF FISH

When Prince Jing is sent to quell the disturbance at the western border, there’s no question that Li Yu will accompany him—as his boyfriend and as his pet fish! Li Yu’s mission is to help Prince Jing secure his position as heir to the throne. However, the new couple is in for a surprise when Li Yu makes a much bigger splash in the imperial line of succession: even male fish can lay eggs now!

With four bouncing baby fish in tow, Li Yu and Prince Jing must work extra hard to dam the trouble brewing at the border. Despite the challenges, Prince Jing is determined to make Li Yu his official consort. Will the emperor approve of this unusual union? And how will Li Yu and Prince Jing protect their new family from the treacherous machinations of the imperial court?

Volume three of Xue Shan Fei Hu’s The Disabled Tyrant’s Beloved Pet Fish gives us Li Yu and Prince Jing’s trip to the borders — ostensibly out of the emperor’s favour, but ready to prove themselves and (in Prince Jing’s case, anyway) ready to make a good case that they should be given official sanction to marry. Plus, the system’s tricked Li Yu, and now there are babies on the way!

How this volume hits depends on how you feel about Li Yu and Prince Jing having kids, basically. There’s some other politicking, and some development in their relationship (including their marriage), but the babies are a pretty major feature, especially in the second half of the book.

For me, I thought it was adorable. I love the emperor’s reaction to them, I love Li Yu and Prince Jing’s growing excitement about and love for the babies, and I had so much fun with the babies’ silly hijinks as well. And I loved that Prince Jing and Li Yu are growing into themselves and maturing as a couple as well (though Li Yi remains a precious cinnamon roll).

I know a little about how the story ends, and I’m looking forward to volume four very much. It’s silly and a ridiculous concept and satisfying as heck.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, danmei, light novels, romance, SF/F, Xue Shan Fei Hu

Review – Love in the Palm of His Hand, vol 2

Posted January 3, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Love in the Palm of His Hand

by Rinteku

Genres: Manga, Romance
Pages: 224
Series: Love in the Palm of His Hand #2
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
Through sign language and acting, two young men seeking their places in the world discover a connection that transcends the spoken word.

"I could only return to acting because there's someone who believes in me."

Fujinaga is determined to give acting one last try as he performs in a stage play adaptation of a manga series, but his nerves get the better of him when he realizes that Keito will be there in the audience. While Fujinaga's talent is finally garnering him some public recognition, his worries and loneliness begin to eat him up from the inside. Can the special language he and Keito share form a bridge between them and help him resolve his frustrations?

For Keito and Fujinaga, sign language will light the way along their journey of self-discovery and bind them together as nothing else can.

Like the first volume, the second volume of Rinteku’s Love in the Palm of His Hand is really cute, though it focuses a bit less on the relationship between Keito and Fujinaga, and a bit less on sign language as a result, and spotlights Fujinaga’s acting career.

Fujinaga has a pretty amazing opportunity, and he spends a lot of it figuring out how to bring across the play for the whole audience, but his relationship with Keito isn’t forgotten — even if they don’t seem to be 100% on the same page about it (there’s a weird mismatch in expectations about kissing, for instance).

I actually liked the art better in this volume, or maybe I was just used to it? And I still love the way sign language is portrayed, and the various ways Keito manages to communicate.

I’d love to see them get a bit more comfortable with being in a relationship in the next volume, but I was glad to spend more time with them in this one, too!

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, manga, Rinteku, romance

Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted January 3, 2026 by Nicky in General / 21 Comments

Happy New Year! And happy weekend, too.

Books acquired this week

Time for more of my Christmas haul! Part one (with the light novels and some non-fiction) was last week’s post here. I’ll go for the fiction now — and there’s a lot of that too!

So that’s really exciting… and that’s still not all! I also got some more miscellaneous non-fiction:

Aaaaand as if all that wasn’t enough, I’ve used my trade-in credits to get myself the remainder of the Solo Leveling series (light novel version) and the first two volumes of the Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint manhwa.

Right! That’s everything caught up, so my posts will be back to a more usual number of books, ahaha.

Posts from this week

As usual, let’s do a bit of a roundup of reviews:

Fantasy: The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Classic crime: Death in Ambush, by Susan Gilruth (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Non-fiction: Fabulous Frocks, by Jane Eastoe and Sarah Gristwood (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Poetry: Finding My Elegy, by Ursula Le Guin (3/5 stars, “liked it”)

Plus these non-review posts:

Top Ten Tuesday: Recent Additions (with some commentary, so not just a repeat of my STS posts!)
What Are You Reading Wednesday

What I’m reading

I was a busy reader this last week, making sure to reach my goal of reading 400 books in 2025! Here’s a sneak peek at what I’ve been reading and plan to review on the blog sometime soon (eventually):

For this weekend, I’m planning to read more of the Solo Leveling light novel, get a bit further with Adam Aleksic’s Algospeak and… who knows what else!?

Linking up with Reading Reality’s Stacking the Shelves, Caffeinated Reviewer’s The Sunday Post, and the Sunday Salon over at Readerbuzz.

Tags: books, Stacking the Shelves, weekly roundup

Review – Finding My Elegy

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

Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems

by Ursula Le Guin

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 196
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
Though internationally known and honored for her imaginative fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin started out as a poet, and since 1959 has never ceased to publish poems. Finding My Elegy distills her life's work, offering a selection of the best from her six earlier volumes of poetry and introducing a powerful group of poems, at once earthy and transcendent, written in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

The fruit of over a half century of writing, the seventy selected and seventy-seven new poems consider war and creativity, motherhood and the natural world, and glint with humor and vivid beauty. These moving works of art are a reckoning with a whole life.

Because it’s a collection containing both selected older poems and newer poems, Ursula Le Guin’s Finding My Elegy is kind of difficult to evaluate. It’s not quite simply an overview of her poetry over the decades, nor a new collection; themes and evolution of style are all mingled.

So I’ll stick with my gut reaction, which was that I wouldn’t always have chosen those particular poems over others of hers, but they all have an essential “Le Guin”-ness in the choice of themes and images. I’m not sure I’d identify them all as Le Guin’s work if unlabelled, but being told they’re Le Guin’s makes absolute sense. Her concerns in her poetry are similar to her concerns in her writing, and I wonder if you can match them up, poetry-to-fiction, watching her think through the same things at the same time in two different media…

Anyway, I don’t love Le Guin as a poet, compared to how I feel about her fiction; not all of the poems really speak to me. Sometimes it’s just three lines here or there, a stanza, more rarely a whole poem (and often the shortish ones).

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, poetry, Ursula Le Guin

Review – Fabulous Frocks

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

Fabulous Frocks

by Jane Eastoe, Sarah Gristwood

Genres: Fashion, History, Non-fiction
Pages: 200
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
No item of clothing has endured for longer than the dress. Yet the last century alone has seen the most radical changes of style—hemlines swinging from ankle to thigh, outlines alternating between the body-hugging and the bell—and our fascination with the frock has not gone away. From Gres’ draping to Dior’s New Look, from Mary Quant’s mini to Hussein Chalayan’s mechanical marvels, this book looks at the dress in 20th-century fashion. Thematic chapters—Changes, Feminine, Sex, Must-Haves, Fantasy, Classical, and Art—set out the inspirations and implications for each new change alongside the stunning photography. It has been more than 80 years since Coco Chanel invented the little black dress, but most women still have one in their wardrobes today. It’s been decades since women discovered trousers and separates, but many women dream of wearing a glorious, glamorous gown at least once, whether it’s on a Hollywood red carpet, or on her wedding day.

Jane Eastoe and Sarah Gristwood’s Fabulous Frocks is lovely, covering roughly 100 years of famous and fabulous dresses. Photos of many of them are included, and the text explains their significance well… though it also mentions many dresses that aren’t pictured, which I sometimes found frustrating because I don’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge of what dresses look like. It also doesn’t signpost which dresses are pictured, so sometimes I found myself turning back a few pages to reread what they said about a specific dress, to give it a bit more context.

Still, that’s quibbling. I found it an accessible and interesting history of the dress, touching on different themes and inspirations, and highlighting the cyclical nature of some fashions (“classical” inspirations come back again and again). The photos are great, usually not of the dresses on their own but the dresses as they were worn, e.g. by Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, etc, etc. I find that a bit more helpful than the same dresses preserved and posed on a mannequin.

Those who are fans of the Great British Sewing Bee might enjoy this to fill in some of the gaps, and learn a bit more about some of the designers that get mentioned (such as the perennial favourite when discussing bias-cut gowns, Madeleine Vionnet).

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, fashion, history, Jane Eastoe, non-fiction, Sarah Gristwood

WWW Wednesday

Posted December 31, 2025 by Nicky in General / 0 Comments

What have you recently finished reading?

I’ve been reading some graphic novels/manga to close out the year: the last thing I finished was Our Not-So-Lonely Planet Travel Guide vol 1, by Mone Sorai, which was okay. I didn’t absolutely love the style, and Asahi’s internalised homophobia makes it a bit less quirky and fun than it might be, but the bond between the two leads is cute.

What are you currently reading?

I’m most of the way through the third volume of the Solo Leveling light novel, which is such a fun, fast read. I’m having a whale of a time with the series. It’s kinda lacking in tension since you know that Jinwoo is gonna be able to beat anything (especially since I’ve read the manhwa), and that’s fiiiine. It’s just fun to be along for the ride.

I’m also partway through Algospeak (Adam Aleksic), which is interesting. I try not to be prescriptivist about language, and just approach it with curiosity, so steam isn’t coming out of my ears at the way words are being used “improperly”. (I do dislike “unalive”, though, which is the subject of the first chapter.)

What are you going to read next?

To meet my reading goal of 400 books in 2025, I’m going to finish out the year with the first two volumes of the Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint manhwa. I’ve enjoyed the two volumes of the light novel I’ve read, so I’m looking forward to digging in. Hopefully my parents and sister will be chill and let me read a bit in the run-up to midnight, once dinner (and the lemon drizzle cake baked today by my wife) have been consumed.

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Top Ten Tuesday: Recent Additions

Posted December 30, 2025 by Nicky in General / 13 Comments

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday theme is all about new books added to your bookshelf. Obviously I talk about those in my Stacking the Shelves post, but I thought I’d highlight some of the ones I’m most excited to get round to — some of which I didn’t showcase yet in my last post, since I split my Christmas haul into two posts!

Without further ado and in no special order, let’s go…

Solo Leveling (light novel), by Chugong. I’ve actually got all eight volumes, between Christmas presents and using my trade-in credit at Bookshop.org. I’ve started on these already (I’m onto volume three today), and I’m tearing through them. I know the story from reading the manhwa, but it’s fun to see it fleshed out a bit and presented in a different format.
The Wolf and His King, by Finn Longman. This is a retelling of the lai ‘Bisclaveret’, by Marie de France. I studied it during my first undergraduate degree, so I’m really excited to see someone playing with it. Maybe I’ll even try to email the lecturer who introduced me to Marie de France’s work and ask if he’s checked it out! It sounds like it should be great fun for fantasy fans in general, as well.
Craft Land: In Search of Lost Crafts and Disappearing Trades, by James Fox. I happened across this and was curious about it, and then saw someone else’s review on Litsy, so I ended up adding it to my wishlist, and someone got me it for Christmas. I’m pretty eager to dig in, it looks like fun.
The Isle in the Silver Sea, by Tasha Suri. This is getting great reviews, and promises a Sapphic Arthurian story? I’m in, in, in. Funnily enough, I bought this for my sister for Christmas, while my wife bought it for me. We even unwrapped them at pretty much the same time.
After Hours at Dooryard Books, by Cat Sebastian. I love Cat Sebastian’s work in general, and seeing the enthusiasm of several friends about this one makes me think I should jump in sooner rather than later.
Like: A History of te World’s Most Hated (and Misunderstood) Word, by Megan C. Reynolds. Linguistics isn’t necessarily my thing, but I’ve enjoyed books like Because Internet, and this one sounds interesting. I try not to be prescriptivist about it, even while I find some of our verbal tics pretty lazy.
Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It, by Cory Doctorow. It’s been a while since I read anything by Doctorow, but this seems like an important one right now, with enshittification hitting so many of the apps and services people use.
The Keeper of Magical Things, by Julie Leong. I loved the other book in this world — it was one of my highest rated books of last year — so I’m eager to get to this soon as well. I hope it’s magical in just the same small sort of ways…
Brigands & Breadknives, by Travis Baldree. I could’ve got a review copy, but I knew I wouldn’t get round to it in time. Now I can hopefully dig in guilt-free when the right moment arrives! I’ve loved the other two in this series, though Legends & Lattes was the favourite.
Cat Tales: a History, by Jerry D. Moore. Digging into the history of the relationships between cats and humans sounds like a lot of fun. It was a bit of an impulse add to my wishlist, but I’m glad I got a copy, I’m really curious now!

That’s just a taster, of course — I was really spoiled this Christmas. Looking forward to see what other people have been snagging for their shelves!

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday

Review – Death in Ambush

Posted December 29, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Death in Ambush

by Susan Gilruth

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 288
Series: British Library Crime Classics
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
In a tranquil Kentish village, Dr Sandys and his wife are preparing for Christmas with their guest, Liane ‘Lee’ Crauford. Festivities start badly when their party is spoiled by an enigmatic widow new to the village, and the atmosphere hits rock bottom when the pompous local nobleman and ceramic-collector Sir Henry Metcalfe unexpectedly dies. Sensing potential villains among Metcalfe’s circle, Lee teams up with Detective-Inspector Hugh Gordon to discover the killer playing merry hell with her holiday in this lost vintage mystery, republished for the first time since 1952.

Susan Gilruth is a new-to-me author not previously published in the British Library Crime Classics series, and Death in Ambush is their Christmas-themed entry for the year. It’s set at Christmas, and there’s some Christmas presents and such at the end, but it doesn’t feel that festive, really; it’s mostly a mystery that happens to be set at Christmas.

Overall, I didn’t fall in love with it, especially because I found it kind of obvious after a certain point, but it was fun enough. The introduction notes a rather weird aspect of it: a fair bit of flirting and romantic tension between the police detective and the POV character, who is married (and whose husband does not appear). Not an element I’ve seen a lot!

It was fun enough, but reminded me more of modern stuff like the Daisy Dalrymple books somehow. I’d read more of Gilruth’s books if they get reissued in this series, but probably not seek them out otherwise.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, British Library Crime Classics, crime, mystery, Susan Gilruth

Review – The Incandescent

Posted December 28, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 6 Comments

The Incandescent

by Emily Tesh

Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 416
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
Dr Walden is the Director of Magic at Chetwood School and one of the most powerful magicians in England. Her days consist of meetings, teaching A-Level Invocation to four talented, chaotic sixth formers, more meetings and securing the school's boundaries from demonic incursions.

Walden is good at her job - no, Walden is great at her job. But demons are masters of manipulation. It's her responsibility to keep her school with its six hundred students and centuries-old legacy safe. But it's possible the entity Walden most needs to keep her school safe from... is herself.

Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent features an old and storied boarding school for magic in Britain, from the point of view of the teachers. While “British magic school” calls up certain associations, it’s more rooted in the modern British school system, and plagued by familiar British problems (like part of the student housing being built from now-crumbling concrete). It accepts the fact that you can’t only teach magic, with the school being staffed by teachers of maths and English as well. All in all, it’s better thought through than the books you might be comparing it to.

I did love seeing it all through the eyes of a teacher, and it’s fascinating how we clearly see that Walden’s a good teacher who cares deeply about her pupils, and has a deep flaw of arrogance and snobbery running through her that gives her a weakness at certain critical moments, and with certain characters. It doesn’t mean she can’t be a good teacher to a motherless child of poor background, but we see her having to work for it, and it makes the character building all the richer (even as it is sometimes not very likeable).

There was however one aspect of this which made me literally put the book down in disgust, and that’s when Walden misses something staggeringly obvious. Even with all her human flaws, even if she wasn’t going to jump right away to “the guy I’m sleeping with has an agenda, and that agenda is directly served by sleeping with me”, she should’ve done some basic obvious security checks right after discovering a certain breach. The way the “twist” unfolded threw me out of the story in a way I found it almost impossible to forgive.

Until that point, I’d have given it a 5/5 rating, but I was honestly tempted to drop it down to 3/5 for that alone. People can be blind, susceptible to flattery, yes. But Walden’s not supposed to be stupid, and she should have already been on her guard given other events.

I did figure out other things ahead of time as well, but none that felt so baldly obvious and infuriating; mostly, I thought it was well put together and a world I enjoyed spending time in. But just that one aspect — arrghhhhh!

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Emily Tesh, SF/F

Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted December 27, 2025 by Nicky in General / 28 Comments

Happy weekend! I hope everyone who was celebrating had a good Christmas, or indeed any other holiday you might’ve been celebrating!

Books acquired this week

As in previous years, I’m going to split my Christmas haul into a couple of different posts, because it’s a lot! First up, a bunch of light novels (some danmei, some not):

A couple of those are the special editions, too! I got Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint vol 2 for myself, actually, and promptly devoured it.

Also, I was very pleased to get those two volumes of Solo Leveling — I started the first volume on Christmas Morning, and was absolutely tearing through it, and already beginning to pout about the idea of having to wait to get my hands on the next volumes (if only due to shipping being delayed over Christmas/New Year, since I do have some Bookshop.org credit from trade-ins). Welp, my sister-in-law to be had me covered!

Aaand of course I got a bunch of new non-fiction to read!

Looking forward to digging in. It’s a mix of different themes, as you can see!

Posts from this week

I kept it light this week, in part just to chill out, and in part because I was quite busy with Christmas prep. (I did mostly manage to stay chill with the Christmas prep, due to being quite organised, but Christmas Eve was a bit packed.) Still, there are a couple of reviews to highlight:

Non-fiction: The Secret Life of Clothes, by Shahidha Bari (1/5 stars, “didn’t like it”)
History: City of Ravens: London, the Tower, and its Famous Birds, by Boria Sax (2/5 stars, “it was okay”)
Fantasy manhwa: Solo Leveling, vol 10, by Dubu (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)

Plus a quick What Are You Reading Wednesday post!

What I’m reading

Since I had time off this week, I did manage to fit in quite a bit of reading around Christmas stuff! Here’s a peek at the books I plan to review on the blog:

As for this weekend… I have a lot of new books to choose from, it’s hard to pick! I’ll at least start by finishing the first volume of the Solo Leveling light novel, I think, and then go from there, but I expect I’ll pick up some new non-fiction.

Linking up with Reading Reality’s Stacking the Shelves, Caffeinated Reviewer’s The Sunday Post, and the Sunday Salon over at Readerbuzz.

Tags: books, Stacking the Shelves, weekly roundup