November featured not as much reading as I’m used to. That’s because I finished my rewrite as my NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) project, rather than writing the requisite 50,000 words. I did it! I completed the rewrite, and it is now sitting in beta readers’ inboxes. The work took a lot out of me, so much so that I’m still feeling vaguely hungover.
December will feature some more things. But also, what do you mean it’s December already?
ARCs
- A Spindle Splintered (Fractured Fables #1) by Alix E. Harrow (2021, adult, fantasy, queer)
- Boldly wonders about the multi-verse of Sleeping Beauties trying to find agency in their crappy endings
- There’s a bit of “magic solves the terminal illness” but this might be explored further in future volumes
Audiobooks
- Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Read (1974, adult, nonfiction)
- Story of the Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crash-landed on the side of a mountain and it took them three months to get rescued
- Due to being contemporary to the tragedy, nonfiction lacks some context
- The Burning Girls by C.J. Tudor (2021, adult, thriller)
- A lady pastor moves with her 15-year-old daughter to a new town with many, many secrets
- Compelling mother-daughter relationship
- Resorts to making the psychologically ill character the villain in addition to other problematic stereotypes and tropes
- Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder (2021, adult, horror)
- Motherhood is the real horror here
- A mother turns into something feral as the tension between who she was before and during stay-at-home child-rearing hits a boiling point
- If you like cats, skip this one
- Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand (2014, adult, horror)
- A band spends the summer in an estate and their lead singer goes missing
- The use of interviews and retrospective adds to the eeriness
Physical Copies
- House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland (2021, YA, horror)
- Three sisters went missing as children and returned as something else
- In the present, one of the sisters disappears and the other two search for her
- Biting prose with excellent use of the crossover between fairy tales and dark horror
Manga
- Hanger Vol. 1-3 by Hirotaka Kisaragi (2020, shounen-ai, science fiction)
- It takes a superhuman drug user to take down a superhuman drug use
- Boys kiss
- Angst and an interesting exploration of identity
- Mieruko-Chan Vol. 3 & 4 by Tomoki Izumi (2021, slice-of-life, horror)
- The hauntings continue with more world-building and concentrated tale of a boy healing from his trauma
- The ghosts continue to be horrifying
- I love seeing all the characters interact
Until next month,
Jo
Jo Writes Fantasy 
These are great! But now I’m super curious about Mieruko-chan!
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