Books I Read: January 2019

The Red Threads of Fortune and The Black Tides of Heaven by J.Y. Yang (Tor.com, 2017)

★★☆☆☆

I liked the treatment of gender and sexuality in this pair of novellas, but otherwise found them hard to get into, with stilted writing, romances that developed out of nowhere, and themes that generally didn’t move me. I found Red Threads slightly more enjoyable than Black Tides. I still can’t get over “the Slack,” but I did enjoy all the Cantonese inflections, like the Tiegui and Siew Tiegui rivers and the one innkeep saying things like “Don’t need.”

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The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison (Tor Books, 2014)

★★☆☆☆

It’s refreshing to read a novel where the main conflict revolves around a protagonist trying to maintain his integrity and kindness against the rest of the world’s cruelty and politicking, but I started to lose track of characters and stopped caring. In particular, the children and their sudden love for Maia felt forced/unearned. The last third was mostly anticlimactic.