It’s pretty obvious that I’ve let this backlog get out of hand; I’ve still got more books to go, but let’s thin this out with quick hits on some books about which I don’t have a whole lot to say.

C.L. Polk’s Even Though I Knew the End is a novella, which means it’s a slight work, but it’s also a good one. It’s a supernatural quasi-noir, set in 1920s Chicago (but with magic) with a sapphic romance. If that sounds like something you’d like, you’d like it.

Fonda Lee’s The Jade Setter of Janloon is, as you might guess, a short work set in her Jadiverse (a word that I hated as soon as I typed it, but now won’t delete so that you can hate it too). This is another slight-but-good novella; I really just love this world so much.

Fonda Lee’s Untethered Sky, on the other hand, is a novella that’s slight but also bland. It’s not like bad or anything, it’s just nothing special. Extremely skippable.

Lois McMaster Bujold’s Knot of Shadows, Demon Daughter, and Penric and the Bandit are the three latest novellas in her Penric and Desdemona series, and that’s about all there is to say about them — if you’ve been reading the series, this is more of what you’ve been reading, and presumably you’ll like them as much as you liked the earlier ones. The same applies to Travis Baldree’s Bookshops and Bonedust, a prequel featuring an orc who really wants to get into working retail. For that matter, it also applies to Martha Wells’ System Collapse, the latest Murderbot thing — it’s a direct sequel to the previous Murderbot, so even more than usual, you’ll want to keep reading if you’ve been reading (But Murderbot’s voice, and the presence of ART, are enough to make me at least eagerly want to). Let’s also throw Nghi Vo’s The Brides of High Hill into the “another one of those (and they’re good)” pile, as we get another story of a monk and a bird stumbling onto something interesting.

But while we’re talking about her, Nghi Vo’s Siren Queen is a standalone novel about old Hollywood, except it’s a fantastical version where magic is real. It’s a good book, and it feels like it has a lot to say about fame, and what people will give up for their dreams, and the power of movies… but it’s also subtle enough that I’m not quite sure exactly what it is saying. This is probably the single book in this round-up that most deserves to be broken out into its own entry, only I don’t know what more I’d say. I do recommend it, though.

Julia Seales’ A Most Agreeable Murder is billed as Jane Austen x Agatha Christie, and it got a whole bunch of rave reviews, but… it was decent at best. The tone was all over the place, a weird mix of normalcy and absurdity that didn’t really gel into anything. It was a pleasant read, but I don’t have any particular desire to read the upcoming sequel (though it’d probably be good for a long flight).

Heather Rose Jones’ Daughter of Mystery is another sapphic romance that I mostly remember because I kept trying to figure out if it was actually YA or not. Nothing on Amazon indicates that it is, but it’s so weirdly chaste that it seems like it must be. It’s inoffensive, but also slow and a bit dull. Not particularly recommended.

Leigh Bardugo’s Hell Bent is the sequel to The Ninth House, which I liked a great deal. This one isn’t quite as good — it’s the nature of a sequel that what’s new and interesting about the first one is old hat in the second — but it’s still a good urban fantasy mystery, and if you liked the first, you’re good to keep reading. My only critique was that it went too heavy on the YA-style self-loathing; this series isn’t YA, but Bardugo’s other stuff is, and I think she carried it over.