Muse of Nightmares
I was not expecting that. I was not expecting the call-backs to the Daughter of Smoke & Bone trilogy, and that was so cool. This was already a book I was loving, and that bumped it right on up to 5 stars for me. This isn’t a spin-off or sequel, so you don’t have to have read that trilogy to enjoy this one, but I loved the sense of mild continuity.
Muse of Nightmares picks up where Strange the Dreamer left off. Minya is willing to exert control over Sarai to get what she wants, leaving the rest of the group feeling helpless. The steps they take to deal with this lead to some new discoveries, and Lazlo’s ability to control misarthium leads to some a new source of conflict. Taylor also introduces a couple of new, relevant characters with sympathetic histories.
Laini Taylor writes compelling stories with nuanced characters and beautiful prose. I’ve just ordered her debut novel because at this point, I think I want to read anything she’s written. I’m looking forward to her future work.
The Cat Who Taught Zen
My husband got this for the holidays, and I happened to pick it up. It’s a short, beautifully illustrated book that teaches some basic concepts of Zen. The book follows a cat who has been on a path of seeking wisdom and hears about a tree that will impart wisdom if you sit under it. During his journey to this tree, he encounters a variety of animals with whom he shares stories or advice that they find helpful. As he nears the end of his journey, he comes across a kitten and becomes impatient with it, which ultimately helps him learn even more. The book is a bit heavy-handed in the concepts that it’s teaching, making it sometimes feel more like nonfiction than fiction, but it was helpful to have reminders of important ways to live life, such as making changes even if you don’t feel you’re fully ready and recognizing the hidden gifts that can come with life’s challenges.
I loved the artwork in the book. Some of it is in color, as shown below. Some of it is in black and white, and the author has some notes about how he did the artwork at the back; I think there was a particular technique used for the black and white pictures. The images are cute and peaceful.
A Spindle Splintered and A Mirror Mended
These two novellas make up Alix E. Harrow’s Fractured Fables book. Harrow was inspired by a particular Spiderman movie and describes these novellas a “spider-versed.” They are modern-day, meta fairy tale retellings. A Spindle Splintered is a Sleeping Beauty retelling. Protagonist Zinnia Gray has a terminal illness, and no one with this illness has lived past the age of 22. As the novella begins, she is celebrating her 21st birthday. Sleeping Beauty is her favorite fairy tale, and she intentionally (rather jokingly) pricks her finger on a spindle and is transported into a Sleeping Beauty tale. There she meets Princess Primrose, the titular Sleeping Beauty who is desperately trying to avoid the curse of sleeping for 100 years.
Zinnia and Primrose journey to find the witch who cursed her to see if they can reverse it, and not everything is quite as it seems. Zinnia also realizes that there are lots of other Sleeping Beauties out here in various time periods and universes, including a space version. She enlists the help of some of them in tackling Primrose’s curse.
A Mirror Mended is a direct sequel to A Spindle Splintered. Zinnia has spend the last several years hopping through various universes to try to fix the curses on different Sleeping Beauties and help them find their happily ever afters. As she is wrapping up one of those excursions, she is suddenly sucked into a Snow White world. It’s the first time she’s ever been in a world that wasn’t about Sleeping Beauty, and she doesn’t know how it happened. Not only, that but she was brought to the world by the Evil Queen (whom Zinnia eventually names Eva . . . for Evil Queen). Eva wants to find a way out of her own story. During this journey, Zinnia also discovers that all of her story-hopping may actually be having some negative effects on the various worlds, including her own.
While I enjoyed both novellas, I liked A Mirror Mended quite a bit more. There was something about having a supposed villain as one of the main characters, only is she actually a villain? I’m not going to say. But it was fun to watch Zinnia and Eva interact with each other. The ending was a bit open-ended, which is unusual for a fairy tale (well, current fairy tales, at any rate), and it was bittersweet. I loved it.
This Fatal Kiss
Onto the first book I read in 2025, and it’s one that made me a little mad. I enjoyed it all the way through, until I got to the end. Inspired by Slavic folklore, it focuses primarily on Gisela, who died at age 16 a year before the book begins and has become a water nymph. She wants to become human again and needs a kiss from a human to achieve that. She blackmails local exorcist Kazik into helping her. There are some chapters from the POV of Kazik and a couple from that of the other love interest.
What I loved:
- The cover art is beautiful.
- The LGBTQ representation: the 3 main characters/love interests are bisexual, a minor character is trans, another minor characters appears to be nonbinary, and there are some allusions to Gisela sometimes having some gender dysphoria.
- The slow burn and grumpy x sunshine tropes (slow burn for all 3 characters and grumpy x sunshine particularly for Gisela and Kazik
- The storyline in general was enjoyable to read.
What I didn’t like (first bullet could be considered a little spoilery):
- The author makes a couple of claims that I don’t feel she substantiates. There’s supposed to be found family, and while the water goblin serves as a father figure to Gisela, she has limited interactions with the other water nymphs for most of the book, and I didn’t learn enough about most of them to really care what happened to them. This book is also supposed to have a polyamorous relationship, but it mostly seems to be a love triangle until the end, where there are some discussions about it but we don’t actually get to a poly relationship because of – see next bullet.
- The ending. The book felt unfinished. I don’t mean it was an ambiguous ending or an unhappy ending or I didn’t understand the ending. It felt like the author finished a chapter and forgot to write the next one. It was nearly a cliffhanger. This would be fine if it was supposed to be a duology, but it’s unclear whether we will get a sequel, and my interpretation, which admittedly could be wrong, from reading a couple of comments by the author is that while she is working on a sequel, it doesn’t seem like she thinks it needs one, but it does. If this gets a sequel, my rating will go up to 4 stars. As it stands, it’s about a 3.25.
The Empress of Salt and Fortune
In this story within a story, we learn about the Empress In-yo’s exile and eventual return. The outer frame of the story follows Cleric Chih (they/them pronouns) from the Singing Hills Abbey. It is a year after In-yo’s death, and information that has been locked down during her life is now being declassified. When Chih gets to the compound where In-yo spent her exile, they encounter Rabbit, who was In-yo’s trusted and loyal handmaiden. Each chapter starts with objects Chih finds around the compound that they are cataloging (e.g., a game, clothing, shrine tokens), and Rabbit shares stories prompted by each of these objects. These vignettes add up to the larger patchwork story of In-yo’s arrival from a northern kingdom, her time in the palace as wife and empress, her exile, and her efforts to return.
Considering that this is a novella, there’s an excellent amount of world-building that Nghi Vo manages to include. While we don’t get anything approaching a complete history or fully-formed world, we get enough to feel that it is fully formed even if we aren’t seeing it all. Vo does this with evocative but spare writing, such as with how much she manages to convey in this quote: “Ghosts were part and parcel of life in Anh, more worrisome than rats, less worrisome than the warrior-locusts that swarmed out every twelve years.”
While this book is the first in a series, the books are all standalones connected by Chih and can be read in any order. I really enjoyed the first book and plan to eventually seek out the others.