The Unicorn Hunters, Katherine Arden. I previously very much enjoyed Arden’s Winternight Trilogy, so I was eager to pick this one up. Replace frozen Russia and its folklore with rainy Brittany and same, and they’re very much alike! Arden has a lovely writing style and a very good ability to find the numinous; here that particularly manifests in the way that inconsistencies of light and shadow can signal something out of place. She takes some liberties with the timeline of Anne of Brittany’s life even before we get to the part where Anne tries to use the faerie realm to maintain the independence of Brittany against France and the Holy Roman Empire, but once I sorted out what those were, I was very much along for the ride.

The Secret Market of the Dead, Giovanni de Feo. This is an odd little Italian-set fantasy that feels a bit like a couple of different short stories glued together — though not quite that, either; I wouldn’t say this reads like a fix-up. It’s similar to The Unicorn Hunters in its historical setting and concern with the heroine trying to find her own path through the restrictions around her via a faerie-like realm, but in this case that’s playing out on the much smaller scale of a girl who wants to follow in her father’s footsteps as a blacksmith. If you don’t mind the odd pacing, it’s a pleasant read with some great angles on the faerie-type thing.

Psychopomp and Circumstance, Eden Royce. Continuing the historical and finding-your-path theme, this novella (I think) also has a much smaller focus: Phee has decided to “pomp” for her estranged and recently-deceased aunt in the Reconstruction-era South, meaning that she’s handling the funeral arrangements. But in this version of things, a great deal of weight is placed on that task — as in, there are references to Phee going to jail if she does poorly, which I found a little boggling and inadequately explained. If you lay that aside, though, this is a gently alternate world with magic woven into it, and I very much liked the “easing” scene that persuades Phee to hire a certain person to manage the mortuary duties.

Saints of Storm and Sorrow, Gabriella Buba. We’re not quite historical again here, but we’re adjacent, as the setting for this duology is based on the Spanish colonization of the Philippines.

I really liked a lot of this, particularly the aspect it shares with Tasha Suri’s Burning Kingdoms trilogy, which is that just because a god is your own doesn’t make them nice. Lunurin has spent her life trying to ignore and deny the storm goddess she’s linked to, because Anitun Tabu is perfectly ready to drown her own people in the course of getting revenge on the invaders. As the grip of colonial control tightens over the islands, though, that may be the only way out of the trap — making for a very good core conflict. And I really liked the worldbuilding around the deities, their chosen champions, and how those things fit into society.

The part of this that worked much less well for me is the love triangle, specifically the Lunurin/Catalina leg of it. I know there’s a big audience out there for toxic yuri/screwed-up sapphic relationships, but I am not that audience. While the male love interest (Lunurin is bi) has a recognizable bond with Lunurin, the relationship to Catalina kind of has to be fiatted into place as backstory, because the on-page interactions with Lunurin are almost universally unhealthy, with Catalina having embraced the colonizer mindset and constantly encouraging Lunurin to abandon everything about their birth culture as bad and wrong.

Interestingly, I think what could have fixed that for me, at least somewhat, would be shoring up the other weak angle here, which is the Codicían religion, a very close Catholicism analogue. Lunurin and Catalina are both novice nuns, with Catalina wanting to take full vows and getting refused because of her ethnicity, but . . . where’s the actual religion in the story? We never once see the nuns going to prayer, attending confession, or anything else in that vein. They spend a lot of their time on educating children and other such beneficial acts, but none of it on doing religion, apart from one plot-relevant procession that goes wrong. Which makes Catalina’s zeal against everything indigenously pagan feel like it’s floating in a void, rather than being born out of a present, lived-in faith. If that side had been built up more, and if we’d seen it tempting Lunurin more realistically away from Anitun Tabu, I suspect that would have also made me feel better about the Catalina/Lunurin relationship.

Song of the Six Realms, Judy I. Lin. Man do I feel like this should have been a duology. I was enjoying the story of a musician taken to serve in the household of a nobleman who turns out to rule the dream realm of a xianxia-esque world and the investigation of secret information left for her by her uncle . . . but then in the last twenty percent, a metric ton of cosmological backstory and new characters came crashing in to be pivotal to the climax, and it was just all too sudden. Those things needed to be set up more earlier in the story and have more time to breathe. The ideas here are fine, but the ending fell down for me because there was too much introduced all at once.

Goblin Market, A.J. Hackwith. Disclosure: I was sent this book for blurbing. However, it showed up at my house the day before blurbs were due (in the words of the person who sent to to me, “Oh dear, how very publishing”), so uhhhh that didn’t happen. Since the book is coming out next week, though, I guess my fallback timing is good!

More faerie realm stuff, but this time not historical at all: Toast is a goblin sent to live as a changeling for a while (common among her kind), then hauled back to the Market at a much later age than usual, meaning that she’s traumatized by losing the people she thought were her real family. She’s found a place for herself in the Market, but not a comfortable one — and then things start going wrong. The Market begins changing, some high-fey types visit and interfere, and a girl she recognizes shows up hunting for her lost sister: in other words, Toast, but not recognizing her even when they come face to face, because surely the lost sister was human?

So admittedly, I was primed to like this because of the way Hackwith’s Goblin Market chimes with what Alyc and I are doing with the Goblin Armada in the Sea Beyond books. 😛 But I would have enjoyed it anyway, because Hackwith strikes a great balance between acknowledging the starting lore (faerie fruit etc.) and taking it in new and interesting directions. The faerie realms are layered and different from one another, not everything is what it initially appears to be, and I’m charmed by the fact that goblins are named for whatever they got out of their first trade. (Toast was hungry, okay?) What you want vs. what you need and figuring out your place in a community all play a big role here, in satisfying ways.

The Secrets Below, Camilla Sten and Viveca Sten, trans. A.A. Prime. My mother has really enjoyed Viveca Sten’s mystery novels, so she bought this one not realizing that 1) it’s a fantasy and 2) it’s a middle-grade book. A bit of a change of pace! But she passed it along to me, and though I read extremely limited amounts of middle-grade fantasy, I enjoyed this one. It helps that it’s set in the Stockholm Archipelago, so there’s a great deal of incidental setting detail which is intriguingly different from what I’m used to: everybody takes boats everywhere (and thinks nothing of the twelve-year-old driving off on her own in one), the weather is much more extreme, etc.

Having said that, it is a touch on the nose with its preaching. There is a section at the back of the book which explains the horrible pollution problems in the Baltic Sea and what you can do about them; the plot is very much driven by the effects of that pollution on the supernatural population of the archipelago. The unsubtlety isn’t too surprising, given the target age group, and it doesn’t derail the story, which has a rather intriguingly dark under-layer to it. So if you don’t mind a dose of preaching (or you know a kid of appropriate age who wouldn’t mind it), this is a quick and fun read!