Tag Archives: exes

A Wacky Adventure Through Working Retail and the Multiverse: Finna by Nino Cipri

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the cover of Finna

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Ava just broke up with her partner, Jules. They both work at an Ikea-like furniture store, but they’ve been managing to work different shifts after the breakup… until today. That’s already awkward enough before they discover a portal and are tasked with going through it together to retrieve a customer’s grandmother who wandered into it and is now lost in the multiverse. Don’t worry: in exchange for risking their lives, they will receive a gift card from corporate.

This was exactly what I was hoping it would be. Finna is a novella, and it feels almost like a montage as they run through different multiverses, including ones with carnivorous armchairs and hivemind employees. It’s a zany adventure that reminded me a bit of Doctor Who, especially the episodes that don’t take themselves too seriously.

Grounding the wackiness of the setting is the dynamic between Ava and Jules. You can see how much they care about each other and why they were together for so long—and why they broke up. Ava has anxiety and depression, and Jules is neurodivergent. Often their different ways of thinking end up with them clashing: Jules rushes into things and can be a bit erratic, which is hard for Ava to plan for and stresses her out. This isn’t really a second-chance romance story: there’s good reason they broke up, and because it’s so fresh, they have a lot of anger and hurt around it still. It’s more like a second-chance friendship, trying to recover any sort of friendship from the rubble of their breakup.

I thought the balance between the over-the-top adventure story and the very human main characters worked well. Jules is nonbinary and Black, and we also see how they have difficulty being accepted and fitting in, especially in combination with their neurodivergence. It creates layers of conflict: the life-or-death, sci-fi, world-jumping stakes of the plot with the complicated, painful complexities of their relationship as they’re forced to work together to survive. As you’d expect from the premise, it’s also an anti-capitalist story that explores the horrors of working retail.

If you’re a fan of books that use an out-there premise to explore characterization and relationship dynamics, I highly recommend this one. It was the perfect book to read in one sitting during a readathon.

Gory Bisexual Horror/Fantasy: The Dead Take the A Train by Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey

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One thing about a Cassandra Khaw book: I never know what I’m getting into. Even two-thirds of the way through this, completely invested in the story, I still kept thinking, “What genre is this? And also, what’s the plot?”

Julie is a 30-year-old exorcist for hire, not quite scraping by in New York City by taking on the deadliest and most gruesome jobs carving monsters out of people and going head to head with demons. Her arms are wrapped with barbed wire magic, which she tears from her flesh in order to use those spells. She keeps a suitcase full of fresh organs in case she needs to swap any of hers out on a mission gone wrong. She also is not making enough to pay her rent, never mind support her drug habit.

She just broke up with her ex-boyfriend, Tyler, who works for an investment company that is mostly invested in souls, body parts, curses, and making deals with unfathomable gods. It’s a dog-eat-dog environment where you’re more likely to be killed gruesomely than be promoted, but Tyler loves it there, and he sometimes hires Julie for the jobs he doesn’t want to get his hands dirty for. When Julie doesn’t go along with one job, though, he plots revenge.

Just as Julie is beginning to wonder how she can possibly scavenge up any cash, her high school friend Sarah shows up suddenly at her door. She’s been secretly in love with her for years. Side note, my favourite bisexual woman stories are the ones that name a bunch of faceless ex-boyfriends, and then there’s ✨ her ✨. This is definitely one of those books. After a lot of prodding, Sarah finally admits that she’s here because she’s running from her abusive ex, Dan… and then has to make Julie promise not to torture and kill him.

And that’s sort of the plot. Two bisexual girls falling for each other while their ex-boyfriends try to ruin their lives. It’s probably the goriest book I’ve ever read—the descriptions are truly skin-crawling—but it doesn’t feel like horror to me. It doesn’t feel like I’m supposed to be afraid. If you’re the kind of person who needs to understand the magic system of a fantasy world, this is not for you. It’s a mess of different types of magic, demons, curses, Eldritch gods, and other inexplicable weirdness. It’s dense with world building, without any one structure weaving it together. This totally worked for me, but you need to just let it was over you.

In fact, I think that complements the setting well, because New York City—as the title suggests—plays a major role in this story. And this tangle of different kinds of magic felt like a reflection of many different worlds all living in parallel inside of NYC. Also, did I mention that lay people have no idea magic is real? Despite the unending encounters Julie has with possessed brides-to-be, foxes puppeting zombie bodies, and so much more, it somehow goes completely unnoticed; she can walk onto the A Train covered in blood and viscera, and no one looks twice.

In some way, it actually reminded me of a noir story. Julie is trying to track down Dan, and she is constantly getting injured. That dogged pursuit in a gritty environment while getting beaten down and somehow surviving felt like it would be at home in that genre… just with a lot more tentacles than usual.

Then, just to keep things interesting, at the heart of this gritty, gruesome, often gross story is a ridiculously cute bisexual F/F pining love story. I love a sapphic friends to lovers story. I won’t spoil it and say whether they get together in the end—also, this is only the first in a duology—but I will say the pining is not one-sided. I’m also annoyed that I had such trouble finding out if this was a queer book before I read it, because so much of the book is about Julie and Sarah’s relationship.

I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of this big, sprawling book. I haven’t mentioned the angel, or what the plot turned out actually to be about, or Tyler’s point of view chapters, or how about halfway through the book we start to get one-off POVs from other characters. And I have to squeeze in the fact that there’s a character who is cursed to not be able to die until he has sold every book in the bookstore to the Right Customer, and as a former employee of a used bookstore, I felt that in my bones. I’m pretty sure I’ve met someone with that same curse before.

If you can stomach gore and a whole lot of weirdness, I really recommend this one. It kind of reminded me of Welcome to Night Vale, with a lot more blood. So if that’s your vibe, you need to pick this up.

Content warning: gore, blood, violence, body horror, relationship abuse (not described in detail), drug use.

A Cozy Sapphic Sci-Fi Mystery: The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older

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In The Mimicking of Known Successes, Malka Older creates a cozy murder mystery in humanity’s distant future on Jupiter. I found this novella to be a delightful, satisfying read. The action clicked along nicely, the world-building was intriguing, and Mossa and Pleiti were great characters.

Mossa, an Investigator, is summoned to the furthest reaches of the network of floating platforms humanity has created to settle Jupiter in order to investigate a disappearance. The victim is a university man, and Mossa’s initial cursory investigation can find no supporting evidence of a supposed suicide, nor why the man would come to such a distant platform in the first place.  Seeking more insight into his politics and motivations, Mossa enlists the help of Pleiti, her ex-girlfriend.  Pleiti is part of a team of Classical scholars who study ecosystems and environments as part of a larger movement to eventually rehabilitate and return to Earth. Together they explore university politics, Jupiter’s largest tourist attraction, and their re-kindling romantic tension with each other.

I found The Mimicking of Known Successes to be an excellent cozy mystery and perfectly novella-paced. It was balanced between intriguing glimpses of world-building and the rising action. I adored how it had traditional mystery elements – a man has vanished! People are acting mysterious! Inter-departmental friction! – and at the same time, a lot of great sci-fi details. I was in love with the rail system and the descriptions of little businesses and industries that came about on Jupiter. But nothing overwhelmed the length of the novella, which is, in my opinion, a problem a lot of novellas have. I would love to read half a dozen more novellas set on this same world, but I don’t necessarily wish this one had been longer. It felt perfectly self-contained.

Mossa and Pleiti were also great characters. Mossa is intensely focused and not great with her interpersonal skills, but I liked how she was aware of her faults, and made efforts to correct them, even if she didn’t always succeed. I loved that Pleiti understood her though, and that Mossa valued and sought out Pleiti’s contributions to the case, even though Pleiti is trained as a scholar not an investigator. The tension of their past feelings for each other and the slow re-kindling of their relationship was great. I felt like there was a lot of romantic tension here for a novella but that it was well established and grounded, which was excellent.

In conclusion, if you’re looking for a quick but engaging read, The Mimicking of Known Successes is a great choice. Whether you’re a sci-fi fan who thinks you could use a little mystery or a mystery fan who thinks you could possibly branch into sci-fi, I think you could come into this book from either angle and be satisfied.