Tag Archives: science fiction

Cult Leader, Zealot, or Savior?: The Genesis of Misery by Neon Yang

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the cover of The Genesis of Misery by Neon Yang

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Misery Nomaki (she/they) wields the power to manipulate holystone, an ability only saints or those void-touched have. She believes she is void mad, while the angel that guides her, Ruin, tells her she is the next Messiah. But regardless of what is the truth, Misery only knows they want to get out of their small town and search for freedom. The powers that be have other plans for them though. As she continues to use her wits to find a way out of her predicament, Misery is led down a path that may reveal the truth about her true identity as Messiah.

Yang’s world-building is overwhelming for the first few chapters. The story drops you right in the middle of the action with jargon that, while it stems from English, makes zero sense if you don’t already know this world. And presumably, you don’t know this world, because it’s the first in what may be meant to be a series. Once you pick up the lingo, though, things start to roll.

A theocratic government rules Misery’s world, but it is at war with the Heretics, those who believe in science over religion. Misery couldn’t care less about either school of thought. Having grown up poor in the forgotten outskirts of the empire trapped by the Faith, no matter what, she wants a place in the world for herself. But every move they make brings them closer to their destiny.

Part of Yang’s world-building includes the normalization of sharing one’s pronouns. It’s part of everyone’s profile when a character downloads the information constantly coming in through a chip in their brains. If someone’s pronouns are not known, it simply states unknown. None of this is made a big deal and neopronouns are quite common. This gender fluidity leads to a standard of queer relationships.

When the throne wants to come after Misery, Lady Lee Alodia Lightning, the empire’s princess, takes it upon herself to capture them. Their relationship starts with contention, to say the least, as Lady Lee wants to kill Misery. But as the story unfolds, their paths come closer together, leading to a romantic relationship. However, there isn’t enough time spent on the page showing just how this comes to happen. Their dynamic never breaches the surface, so it’s hard to believe them coming together.

The story takes an interesting trajectory, as Misery’s character arc doesn’t follow a typical hero’s journey. At least, not the one readers may expect. As she dives further into her lie of being a Messiah, events and signs point to it being true. They become a zealot, making it hard as a reader to continue having compassion for them. I didn’t come to hate Misery, but she started to make me uncomfortable.

The end leaves readers with more questions than answers. It certainly made me intrigued and wanting another book to continue the story.

Meet Your New Favorite Sapphic Sci-Fi Book: The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson 

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The Space Between Worlds is one of the best stories I have ever read, and I’m not even exaggerating. This novel follows Cara, a poor girl from Ashtown who is trying to make it in rich Wiley City long enough to become a permanent citizen. Her job? To traverse through different worlds like her own, snagging information that the higher ups at Eldridge need to anticipate the disasters that happened on those worlds before they can happen on Earth 0. Cara is one of a select few who is able to traverse these different realities—because she is dead on most of them. Out of all the worlds open to traversing, Cara is only alive on eight, and if you’re alive on a world you jump to, you usually die because the world cannot handle it. Being alive on only eight worlds makes her a great asset. 

This is revealed pretty soon into the novel, so I’ll just say it: the Cara who narrates the novel is not actually the Cara that came from Earth 0. Caramenta, the original Cara, landed on a world where she thought she had died only for Caralee, that Earth’s Cara, to still be alive: close to dead, but not actually dead. Caralee took the chance when she saw Caramenta’s mangled corpse and assumed Caramenta’s identity, and she’s been the one traversing ever since. 

Johnson does a great job with the pacing of this novel. Every new bit of information came at the right time and with just the right amount of foreshadowing. Even when I knew what was coming next, Johnson still surprised me, because it happened so much faster than I expected it to. Reading this book was like getting punched in the gut over and over and over again in such a good way. There was never a moment or a plot point that I thought should have been cut or changed. Johnson never shied away from a surprise twist; instead, she went full throttle into it and simply expected the reader to catch up. The novel kept its pace until it ended, and I had to sit there for a moment after I was done and just figure out how to breathe again. 

As someone who loves stories with alternate timelines and dimensions, this is such a unique and refreshing way to read it. On Caralee’s Earth, she knew Emperor Nik Nik, and she was his plaything to do with as he pleased. She has seen the Emperor across different worlds, and he is the same on all of them…except for Earth 175, the newest Earth Caralee is tasked with traversing. Johnson did such a good job showing how different this Nik Nik is from the rest of them. Cara’s trauma follows her, and she assumes that this Nik Nik is the same as all the others, only for him to be likeable, and funny, and kind. Going with Caralee through that emotional minefield kept the pages turning, and I cared so deeply about Cara’s relationship with that Nik Nik that I wound up crying when he added her picture to a necklace that held pictures of his dead loved ones. He’s so different from the Nik Nik that Caralee remembers, and I don’t know that I’ve read a story that skips around timelines before this one that lets a character be that different from the other versions of himself. Earth 175 Nik Nik helps heal Caralee’s trauma, and it was so cathartic to read as she started to believe he really could be that much better than the one she left behind. The world of the story is also so large and detailed. Ashtown and Wiley City come to life on the page, no matter what timeline or Earth we are on. 

I’m not usually a slow burn kind of person, but Johnson might have changed my tune. The romance between Cara and Dell, the coworker who sends her to the other Earths, was a delightful mix of yearning and miscommunication that I found myself enjoying! Cara is head over heels for Dell from the start of the book, and she flirts with her every moment she can because she thinks Dell will never like her back. When the details of their relationship that Carelee has been missing finally come out, it hits like a train, and every interaction at the beginning of the book makes that much more sense. Cara never shies away from her feelings for Dell. Even when she spends time with Earth 175 Nik Nik, she always makes sure to separate her feelings for Nik Nik from her feelings for Dell. Nik Nik is her ex, but Dell is the love of her life. 

I am also a big fan of stories that explore relationships between siblings, and Johnson also did a great job with that. Caralee cares so much about Caramenta’s little sister Esther and about the other members of a family Caralee never got to have, and it is one of the best relationships in the entire novel. The relationship between Nik Nik and a brother who died in most worlds is also something Johnson explores more than once, and I found myself caring about them all so, so much. Johnson’s characters are so rich, no matter what Earth they are on, and I can see myself rereading this book soon just to get a glimpse of them again. 

Trigger warnings for: death, gore, domestic abuse, traumatic experiences/memories, and violence. 

A Brutal and Brilliant Space Opera: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

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I thought about reviewing Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory on here last month, right after I finished reading it, but I decided against it because I couldn’t figure out how to talk about in any sort of coherent way. My initial Goodreads review was mostly swearing and enthusiastic nonsense, because that is what this book did to my brain. But I thought about it more, and I decided that since I try to use my Lesbrary reviews to highlight sapphic books I love, it felt almost wrong not to talk about this one.

So what is this book about? To put it simply, it is a space opera that follows a teenage soldier who has spent her entire life training to avenge planet Earth’s destruction. After she is assigned not to fight but to instead spend her life bearing children, she ventures off the station she was raised on and discovers there is much more to the universe than she ever knew. This book is not simple at all, though—not even a little bit. This story almost never went where I expected it to go. I was hooked right from the beginning, but by the halfway point, I could not have put it down for anything. The best word I can think of to describe my experience is wild.

For all its wildness, however, nothing in this book felt random, or like it was only meant to shock the reader. Tightly plotted and visceral as hell, this book had me screaming because it went exactly where it needed to go, even if I never could have predicted it myself.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about this very impressive book, more than the world-building or the tight plot, is the protagonist’s journey. At the risk of saying too much, Emily Tesh managed to take Kyr from a head I could not stand being in, full of instilled prejudices and an utter unwillingness to believe she was wrong, to someone I was genuinely proud of in only 400 pages.

I’m leaving this review shorter and vaguer than I normally would because while I don’t think this is a book that can be ruined by talking about it too much, I do think the best way to experience it is knowing as little as possible going in (while being safe: this is a heavy one, and I highly recommend looking at trigger warnings beforehand).  Simply put, Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory is a masterpiece, and one that, for all its brutality, I know I will be reading again.

Who is Worthy of Survival at the End of the World? On the Edge of Gone by Corinne Duyvis

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I want to preface this with that I read this for my Bi Book Club and it turns out the bisexual character is a supporting one, not the main one. So I will focus this review on that relationship.

This was a really good look into who gets to survive the apocalypse. It follows the story of a young autistic girl, Denise, doing everything she can to help her family live while still dealing with her sensory issues and working through her social behaviors. It makes you question the value put on humanity when the only thing valued is productivity and how much you can offer.

As Denise navigates the end of the world as they know it with a mother who struggles with substance abuse, she seeks to find her sister, Iris, lost amid the chaos. Iris is a bisexual transgender woman who, for the first half of the book, appears mostly in flashbacks as Denise remembers key points of her childhood.

Even as the world unravels due to natural disasters, Denise always remembers her sister and her role in getting Denise to where she is now. Memories show that when Iris first began recognizing herself as a girl and wanted to transition, she trusted her sister Denise as her first confidante. As children, they played a game where she “pretended to be a girl.” Duyvis presents a nuanced dynamic, as Denise struggles at first to understand this because often with autism, she has difficulty grasping concepts that are not literal. But as Iris gets older and explains what it means to be a transgender person, Denise comes to accept her sibling as her sister.

Iris gravitated toward a queer community in their home city in Amsterdam that she invited Denise to join and take part in to help her make friends. It’s this very community Iris sought to help and protect when the meteor hit Earth, leaving her separated from her mother and sister. While many people got to leave on generation ships to populate another planet, most were left behind to live on a destroyed Earth. Iris knew her community would be among the majority left behind.

Iris’s efforts to help the queer community rebuild and prepare for survival through mutual aid are a reflection of Denise’s struggle to make herself “useful” so she can be accepted aboard a generation ship. Iris recognized early on as a transgender individual on hormones, she wouldn’t qualify as a priority to bring on board a generation ship. She knew that others like her would get left behind and so she chose to stay and help them.

On the surface, this novel is a slow-build apocalypse, but look a little deeper and you will find it’s more about who is deemed worthy of survival.

A Sapphic Sherlock Series in Space: The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles by Malka Older

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The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles is Malka Older’s second novella in the Mossa and Pleiti series, set in the far future, when the last of humanity is in a thriving colony on Jupiter amidst an expanding series of platforms and rails. Like the the first novella, The Mimicking of Known Successes, Unnecessary Obstacles is a murder mystery, with the inscrutable but brilliant detective Mossa taking the lead on investigating a series of disappearing persons cases and her girlfriend Pleiti filling in the vital gaps with her academic connections and slightly superior people skills.  

This novella series perfectly fits the cozy mystery niche. While there is a little danger for spice, Mossa and Pleiti spend most of their time hunting down leads and deciphering what they find, letting a reader sit back and enjoy the ride. As a second book, I really enjoyed that Mossa and Pleiti are working to settle into their relationship. I also like that this book fills out their characters a little more. There’s a fun field trip to Jupiter’s moon, where Mossa grew up, which fills out a little of Mossa’s character and a little of Jupiter’s society. It was interesting to see the sentiment towards a shuttle ride and driving their own vehicle versus the ubiquitous rail cars of the planet. And Pleiti, who in her role at the university is attempting to reconstruct an Earth-style garden, is dealing with the political fallout of the first novella. I enjoyed seeing them work together again, more deliberately this time, and I enjoyed that their search led them to different areas than the first book. They also take a long distance railcar trip, which I found a delightful idea and I can’t believe isn’t a romantic novelty trip on Jupiter.

Although I did ultimately enjoy this novella and have a fun time reading it, I did feel like this one was a little slower compared to the first—the mystery didn’t seem as urgent, and although we did get some new environments on the moon and in the student clubs, I found that this book had fewer of the really cozy world-building details from the first one—or maybe it’s that there were more locations but we passed through most of them fairly quickly. I also felt like, while Mossa had taken their new relationship status to heart and was intent on improving upon her own shortcomings, Pleiti felt stuck in her past mindsets. Mossa was strangely the one doing the best communication in this book, which Pleiti should really think about in my opinion. However, I still liked this book and would read several more in this series —hopefully with more world-building and relationship development each time. I think this Jupiter colony is so fascinating, and this is a series that could sustain an whole progression of mysteries without being too repetitive. 

In conclusion, this series is one of my favorite recent sci-fi developments. I love that the recent trend towards really developing novellas has given scope for amazing authors to present us with fun little stories that aren’t doorstops. Sci-fi and mystery is also a pairing of genres that I love. If you enjoyed The Mimicking of Known Successes, this book is a nice treat, and if you’re looking for a short cozy read, you should definitely add this to your list. 

Grief in Utopia: The Seep by Chana Porter

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This review contains spoilers.

The Seep might be one of the most refreshing takes on alien invasion I’ve ever read. This novel follows Trina FastHorse Goldberg-Oneka, a middle-aged trans woman, as she and her wife Deeba, along with almost everyone else in the world, are forced to live with something called the Seep. The Seep is an alien unattached to concepts like linear time and physicality that invades humanity and simply… makes life perfect. People can alter their appearances at will, ingesting the Seep feels like getting high, and there are restaurants that only give you good-tasting food that will help your body out, along with a bunch of other seemingly-awesome changes. After a few years of living under its power, Trina doesn’t love the Seep as much as her friends do anymore—and then her wife Deeba decides she wants to be turned back into a baby and give up the life they’ve built together.

Trina does what I think any of us would be tempted to do in that situation: she drinks herself half to death. Living under the Seep, though, means that her actions don’t go unnoticed, and what really kicks the story off is someone coming to Trina’s place and telling her that she’s hurting the entire community by not taking care of herself or her house. This sends her on a mission to hunt down an old friend of hers and to save a boy she meets along the way who comes from the Compound, one of the only places untouched by the Seep.

What I really liked about this story is how deep Trina is in her grief. It’s been about five years since Deeba left, but the way Porter writes Trina is like it happened yesterday. Deeba isn’t dead, not really; she is a small child being raised by a lovely couple far away from Trina. However, to Trina, it’s like she is, and that comes through spectacularly through Porter’s writing. Trina hasn’t moved on at all in those years after Deeba’s departure. She could move on: she could let the Seep erase her memory of Deeba, or she could let it change her feelings into something more manageable. But Trina is all about the old days and the old ways. She misses what art was back when humans still routinely felt things like pain and sadness, and she doesn’t get the appeal of having an all-knowing alien rooting around in her skull and changing her brain chemistry every second of every day of every week.

So when she meets this kid from the Compound who wants to know about the world outside and wants to join with the Seep, it’s like her brain finally has something to focus on that isn’t Deeba. It’s never really about the kid; in the end, Trina doesn’t really care about him, not like she tries to convince herself that she does. It’s a distraction from the pain she has carried with her since Deeba’s departure. All of it leads her to a friend (ex-friend) who goes around wearing his dead boyfriend’s face and pretending that he is a different race than he actually is. It takes Trina finding him again and confronting him for any real change to happen within her, and Porter goes exactly where you want her to go when Trina is shoved back into the past for a little while. She watches her wife from the same place she watches her in a scene from the beginning, caught in a memory, and the pain of losing that part of her wife hits Trina all over again. She’s been lost in her grief, and she has been for a while now. This is simply when she finally realizes it.

Trina’s conversations with the Seep are also a high point of the book. The Seep talks to Trina by changing the writing on a pamphlet she is given, then by changing the writing on a pamphlet that the boy drops, and then it actually speaks to her from the pamphlet cover and heats up in her hands when it wants to tell her something. Trina tries to get the Seep to understand that sometimes humans need to be able to choose bad things or things that hurt, but it takes the Seep a long time to grasp that point. If the Seep isn’t there to make life perfect and wonderful, then what is it for? The relationship between Trina and the entity known as the Seep is the thing that drives the story onward when Trina’s previous excuses and distractions run a little thin. In one of the most moving scenes of the book, Trina and the Seep talk to each other in a sort of talk show style set-up where every person in the audience is a different iteration of Deeba. Deeba left her because of the Seep; we know that, the story literally begins with that. Seeing it laid out so viscerally, though, with the Seep wearing somebody’s face and talking to Trina while every version of Deeba she ever knew laughs out at her from the background really made it hit home. That’s what this sort of grief is like, and Porter captures it so perfectly. I’ve been thinking about that scene for days since I put the book down. It takes having this conversation with the Seep for Trina to decide to try to move past everything with Deeba, and the story ends optimistically with Trina beginning to take care of herself and the house she used to share.

I know I’m a little late at finding this story (it was published in 2020), but I’m just glad I found it when I did. It’s moving, thought-provoking, and exactly the sort of thing I’m into. The only reason I’m not giving it five stars is because there are a couple plot issues it took me a minute to get past (she’s on a Do Not Admit list to her ex-friend’s shows, but she’s able to go in anyway?), but other than that, I really liked it. The way that the novel is bookended by “Tips for Throwing a Dinner Party at the End of the World” is really cool too and ties the story together. I would absolutely recommend this.

Triggers warnings for: death, slight suicidal ideation, loss of bodily autonomy, and drug use (kind of).

Identity Crisis via Teleportation: Star Splitter by Matthew J Kirby

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Content warnings: violence, death

A note: I listened to the audiobook of Star Splitter. It’s a good one, but may have led to misspellings in this review.

Let’s say you lost all memories of the past three days. You’re still you, right? You’re just you minus a few days. You’re still the same person in the same body.

But what if you weren’t?

What if a body died with those memories, but an older version of you remained—would you still be you? Would the dead body be you, and would you have died?

These sorts of questions define Star Splitter by Matthew J Kirby. To explore the universe, humanity uses a sort of teleportation that uploads a person’s data and sends it lightyears in a matter of days. The person’s data is stored, and they can be re-downloaded, or updated based on their new experiences. That person might have their data uploaded, live several years, and then have the data sent home.

Before I give too many spoilers, let me just say that this is a book well worth the read for any science fiction fan. It engages consistently with deep, thematic wonderings while telling a story of space travel and disaster. It has characters a reader can easily hate one moment and sympathize with the next. If you’re on the fence about reading this book, go and do it! Don’t let my review take any surprises away!

The book is about Jessica Mathers, a 16-year-old girl who doesn’t want to cross the universe and become her parents’ research assistant. She wakes up (Before) on a ship, but her parents are delayed. The ship’s crew is less than thrilled with a sulky teen. It’ll be okay when her parents arrive, though. Right?

The book is about Jessica Mathers, a 16-year-old girl who doesn’t want to cross the universe and become her parents’ research assistant. She wakes up (After) in a crashed lander on an alien planet. There are signs someone else is here. Graves, too. Someone else is better than being alone, though. Right?

I rarely encounter a book that so thoroughly uses its genre to explore a theme. Questions of identity, experience, and loss of one’s self are personal and universal at once. The book affected me while I read it; I cared deeply for the outcome of the story and the fate of the character(s). Throughout the dual timelines, I got to know Jessica twice. I started to ask myself which was “the real” Jessica, if there was one, if both could make it, and what outcome I could possibly hope for. It was an intense read!

When it comes to men writing queer women, I’ve seen mixed results. Some are honestly pretty awful, some well-intentioned but wide of the mark. This one is a bulls-eye. The society portrayed is queer-normative, with no coming out, and an adult lesbian couple is among the supporting cast. Jessica has an unrequited crush on a girl called Avery, someone with a wicked unicorn costume, a bit of an awkward streak, and not too much ego. Jessica is just the right amount of smitten. She thinks fondly of Avery, imagines telling her the truth, jokingly names a constellation after her. Jessica is a lot of things—she needs to be, for the themes to work. She’s proud, petty, determined, loving, childish… she’s a lot. Being queer is a piece of that complex identity.

I can see how this wouldn’t appeal to some readers—not everyone enjoys sci-fi, and Jessica is a realistic character, which means sometimes she’s hard to like, though that is the point in this case. If those are not deal-breakers for you, then I strongly recommend Star Splitter.

Murder by Crowdfunding: Crowded Vol. 1 by Christopher Sebela et al.

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The Crowded comic book series tells the satirical story of a dystopian world not too far in the future where the gig economy has become unhinged. In this world, everything has a price, including putting out hits on someone’s life through an app called Reapr. Anyone can be a target and anyone can crowdfund a kill, and loopholes in technology laws make it easy to get away with it while law enforcement and government officials look the other way.

Following the antics of Charlie, the hit in question, and her hired protector, Vita, the story unfolds into outrageous mayhem. It all seems so farfetched, yet in light of our reality, perhaps it’s not too far off target. Live streamers become famous for their Reapr kills and their followers can become patrons of their feeds for exclusive content and other rewards.

The vibrant and oversaturated artwork lends itself well to the story and characters. It creates a sense of inauthenticity and fabrication that makes everyone so fake. It feels fitting that the story takes place in Los Angeles, infamous for being filled with disingenuous people. It also adds to the fast-paced action as Charlie and Vita fight their way out of sticky situations (caused by Charlie’s reckless choices).

Neither Charlie nor Vita are likable characters, but Charlie especially makes it hard to root for her as a heroine. Despite her constant careless behavior and terrible treatment of others, including her bodyguard Vita, she has moments of humanity and vulnerability that make you not want to give up on her. But much like Vita, you also can’t trust her. Their bickering dynamic points the story toward these two possibly getting together. However, the shared moments in this first volume feel forced, so it doesn’t seem like that relationship has been earned yet.

Charlie is openly and unapologetically bisexual. She has no problem talking about her many conquests, man and woman alike. There’s even a sequence at a club called Bifurious where the artwork is entirely done in “bisexual lighting” in case it hasn’t been made clear until then. She flirts shamelessly with Vita, which Vita doesn’t directly engage in at first, but she doesn’t discourage it either.

Vita is revealed to have had an ex-girlfriend in the police force, making her solidly sapphic. However, it hasn’t been made clear or stated outright that she is a lesbian. As the story progresses, she gets close to Charlie, and it’s hard to tell if she flirts with her client to gain her trust or if she genuinely likes her.

Overall, this first volume is a fun and zany read. And the plot twist at the end (which I won’t spoil here) left me wanting to find out what happens next.

Content warning: extreme violence

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

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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.

A Blood-Drenched Queer Space Opera for the Ages: Redsight by Meredith Mooring

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the cover of Redsight by Meredith Moore

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Better buckle up your buttered biscuits, because you’re in for one hell of a ride. 

Meredith Mooring’s debut novel Redsight, freshly published February 27, 2024, arrived studded with blurbs. The two that ultimately pulled me were: “The heretical, genre-defying daughter of Killing Eve and Dune,” (Kemi Ashing-Giwa) and “A stellar debut, born from a collision between epic space opera and bewitching cosmic space horror” (Ren Hutchings). Sign me up. 

Fresh from having devoured all 394 pages in a single sitting, I have to agree with the comparisons. 

Our chosen one, Korinna, is a red witch thrust into the heart of an intergalactic conflict she doesn’t understand, haunted by the bloody memory of a massacre and her own complicity. Like all Redseer clerics, she relies on tactus—the tactile energy of all things—to sense her world, rather than sight. She’s raised with the knowledge drilled into her that she is the weakest of her cohort, fit only for duty in the ship’s gardens. Certainly not strong enough to navigate a ship, let alone a massive Imperium warship.

When Korinna’s path intersects with the buff and mysterious pirate captain Aster Haran, Korinna can’t deny her attraction to the other woman. As the stakes grow ever higher, Korinna has a choice to make: loyalty to her Order and the only life she’s ever known… or cutting a destructive swathe of vengeance across the universe beside a gorgeous outlaw with an ever-expanding array of secrets. 

Redsight is action-packed, occasionally to the detriment of its characters, who have a slightly unfinished quality. They easily accommodate belief-shattering concepts, reconciling multifaceted issues within the space of a single conversation. Maybe I’m a sadist, but I wanted to witness their internal struggles play out longer.

There is so much to love about this book and the sweeping universe Mooring created. There were passages that left me breathless, ravenous to know the outcome. Mooring has a talent for channeling visceral physical trauma, so there were other passages that had me gritting my teeth and begging for my favorites to just please, please make it through. 

Redsight also has one of the more unique magic systems I’ve read in awhile—and I do so love an epic mythos. You can never give me enough goddesses in locked tombs, and you can never give me enough queer space pirates and acolytes. Bring on the apostasy, baby.

However: a word of warning for my queasy friends re: Mooring’s gift for transcribing bodily harm. The blood, y’all. There’s so much blood, all the time. It is immensely disconcerting and I’m used to gore. Honestly, it’s impressive. 

Redsight might be one of my new favorites. Not because it’s perfect, but because it gets so much right.  Mooring offers truth and a way forward. She offers a sense of hope and belonging for perpetual outsiders. Despite the heavy content, there are glittering threads of optimism woven throughout. I wouldn’t call it a feel-good, but… the novel is a deliciously weird and delightful treat, and I’m going to be thinking about it for a long time. If you’re a fan of powerful queers in space, you’re going to enjoy Redsight.

Content warnings: blood, violence, gore, low self esteem, dubious consent (taking power)