fantasy

Brave the Dreamer

I made my first tabletop game! 🎉

Brave the Dreamer is a collaborative storytelling game about estrangement and belonging for 1-4 players. You play as youths who were transported to an alternate world, returned here involuntarily, and found each other on a niche Internet forum about the experience. The game is played without a game master or facilitator—instead, like For the Queen (on which it’s based), you take turns drawing cards and answering questions about your characters’ experiences.

It’s inspired by media like I Saw the TV Glow (2024), Past Lives (2023), the self-aware portal fantasy of Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series, and hopepunk works in the style of Becky Chambers. A standard deck of cards, some writing implements, and a few hours are all that’s needed to spin a story about cherishing/forgiving/running toward all of your childhood fantasies, young adult disaffection, and adult actualization.

Available now on itch.io!

I made Brave the Dreamer for the (No) Strings Attached Game Jam, and over the coming days/weeks, I plan to post some design diaries to talk about my process of developing the game. (Spoiler alert: Possibly more fun than writing novel-length fiction, and almost certainly faster!)

In the meantime, check out Brave the Dreamer, and if you play it, I’d love to hear what you think!

Saint Death’s Daughter by C.S.E. Cooney

Saint Death’s Daughter by C.S.E. Cooney (Rebellion Publishing, 2023)

★★★☆☆

Necromancer with an allergy to violence becomes embroiled in political intrigues.

Told with glee and pizzazz, this story gave me a lot of what I love most about Lois McMaster Bujold’s World of the Five Gods or Megan Whalen Turner’s The Thief series, which is to say, sublime encounters with the numinous. The joys depicted here were gorgeous and glorious, and I appreciated the explorations of complex trauma and consent. It’s a long book, but I never found the style inaccessible or boring. (I did, however, have to start a vocabulary list* to keep track of all the unfamiliar words/archaisms I learned.)

Re-read: Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay

Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay (Roc, 1999)

★★☆☆☆

On a peninsula occupied by two sorcerous tyrants, a group of survivors from Tigana—a province whose name has been magically blighted out of everyone else’s minds—fights to regain what has been taken.

Originally read in 2016 and rated five stars, with the comment:

I read this because all the Amazon reviews said “best book I’ve ever read.” And it WAS really good. Complex characters, tons of action right off the bat, lovely exploration of dark themes about memory and identity. Agree with another review about the contrasting antagonists—very humanized and well done. Beautiful, lyrical writing. Kind of drags in the middle though, and the ending didn’t blow my mind quite as much as expected. I really liked the treatment of Erlein—my palms were sweaty while reading about the encounter with him, and the depiction of the ensuing complex, raw emotions was just on point.

Five years later, I still believe Tigana accomplishes what it sets out to do. But I’m a sharper reader now, and take more issues with it.

Books I Read: September 2020

Didn’t have a ton of energy to write full-fledged reviews for books this month, so here’s a quick roundup of some novellas I read alongside the Elemental Logic series.

Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children #1) by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com, 2016)

★★☆☆☆

Another one where I’m in agreement with the politics but the execution didn’t work for me. I’m especially here for the ace and trans representation, but, while I felt the trans character’s transness was revealed elegantly, the ace character going “I’m asexual; this is what that means” and providing a dictionary definition was exactly how I don’t like to see exposition done.

The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps (The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps #1) by Kai Ashante Wilson (Tor.com, 2015)

★★★★☆

For how plotless most of this novella is, I loved it! The vernacular surprised me in the beginning, but then I was in for the ride, and appreciated the tension between the narrative/dialogue voices. I also enjoyed the worldbuilding and vivid characters.

Annabel Scheme and the Adventure of the New Golden Gate (Annabel Scheme, #2) by Robin Sloan (via author’s website, 2020)

★★★★☆

Since I enjoyed the first Annabel Scheme novella more than either of the author’s novels, I was excited for this. Fun little romp, with some lines that are just *chef’s kiss* and an ending full of heart, though it kind of goes sideways in the middle.

Elemental Logic Series by Laurie J. Marks

Earth Logic (Elemental Logic #2) (Tor Books, 2005)
Water Logic (Elemental Logic #3) (Small Beer Press, 2007)
Air Logic (Elemental Logic #4) (Small Beer Press, 2019)

After falling deeply in love with Laurie J. Marks’s Fire Logic (which I reviewed last October), I dragged my feet on the rest of the series for fear of disappointment. But after discovering that the books were available from my local library via Hoopla, I decided to give them a go.

Earth Logic

★★★☆☆

If there was a problem with Fire Logic, it was the narrative that a colonized country should be expected to embrace its colonizers. Earth Logic reckons with that narrative and asks how to forge peace with a violent colonizer without resorting to the same tactics they used. The plot isn’t as gripping as the first book, since part of the answer is “decisive inaction,” and I didn’t fully believe some characters’ decision to kill [redacted] based on a reading of the glyph cards, which hadn’t been so blindly followed in the first book (IIRC). However, I enjoyed the introduction of two wonderfully complex new characters, Garland and Clement.

Water Logic

★★★★☆

The plot begins to pick up again: we learn of a rogue air witch out to assassinate Karis, and some time travel shenanigans occur. These hooks kept me intrigued while characters in the present day confronted issues of ethics and philosophy as well as the hard work of nation-building. I was SHOOK when [redacted] and [redacted] died, paving the way for a very compelling (and brutal) journey for Clement. And I loved how the time travel storyline exposed the complexities of past Shaftal—Zanja’s meeting with [redacted] gave me life!—and how those complexities tied into the larger reveal the characters come into at the end.

Air Logic

★★★★★

Unputdownable! The plot is GRIPPING, with an insidious villain and a couple turns that made me gasp in shock. I loved seeing the neurodiversity of the air children and how their inflexibility meant they had to systematize their ethics. Zanja, meanwhile, is gripped with grief and madness—and loses her most precious support system at the same time. (Her ending, and how the aforementioned time travel figures into it, is marvelous.) All the characters felt so real, including Tashar and Maxew, two disaffected young men who descend into extremism. A stunning conclusion to the series that gave me all the resolution I wanted.

The Tyrant Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson

The Tyrant Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade #3) by Seth Dickinson (Tor Books, 2020)

★★★★★

A double agent working to shatter the empire she serves finally obtains the power she covets, but its use will devastate millions of innocent people.

I was mega-hype about this book, and Dickinson does not disappoint in the least. We get a ton of plot and character development, and everything feels polished in a way The Monster Baru Cormorant sometimes did not. (I wrote a spoiler-y, tinfoil-y review of that entry here.)

Emergency Skin; The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin

Emergency Skin by N. K. Jemisin (Amazon Original Stories, 2019)

★★★★★

Cogent, precise, firmly hopeful novelette that uses the skin metaphor to perfect effect.

And yet…

The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin (Orbit, 2020)

DNF audiobook at 29%. I’m sure I’m in agreement with the politics, but I wasn’t as gripped by ~city magic~ (or Lovecraftian horror, even the good parts) as I needed to be to ride this one out.

The Old Guard, Book One: Opening Fire by Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernández

The Old Guard, Book One: Opening Fire (The Old Guard #1) by Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernández (Image Comics, 2017)

★★☆☆☆

Two women and three men are semi-immortal soldiers who have been covertly fighting in virtually every conflict over the last several millennia.

Only after finishing the recent Netflix adaptation and seeing that it was “based on a graphic novel” did I remember I actually had this book on my shelf! So this is not so much a review as a comparison.