This one’s been on my TBR for a while and I could not remember what this was about at all. But I am still waiting on some physical books, so I figured it was about time to check it out.

We follow two aliens, Jahir and Vasiht’h as they become roommates at a university specializing in psychology for aliens. The story is a slice of life, following the daily lives as the two of them get to know one another and become very close, as well as trying to figure out what they are going to pursue for their majors.

I generally like actual stakes and have trouble with the slice of life stuff, but I think this came at a really good time for me. It centers the story almost entirely on the characters, their troubles with internal and external struggles, and they play off of one another really nicely. While Vasiht’h is combating an internal struggle to pursue something where he won’t ultimately get hurt ((Psychology is a rough field, dealing with other people’s difficulties)) , Jahir is dealing with being the strangest alien on campus, being from a race that does not leave their corner of the universe, and dealing with the fascination and prejudice from the people around him.

The relationship between the pair of them developed really naturally. There were a few parts where it felt like it was contrived, but not so much that it took me out of the story. It doesn’t rely on misunderstandings and watching characters actually talk things out, even with cultural differences, is really refreshing.

Overall it’s really good. I had a lot of fun with it, even if there was no world ending or looming dread over the plot. If you’re looking for a sci-fi where the world building is pretty secondary to the characters, and want to see aliens in med school, this is your book.

My journey to this book was a bit of a strange one. I attended a panel at a UX conference called This is How You Win the Time War that I really liked, and the speaker talked about this book and the concept behind it. The idea of two rival time travelers gently manipulating time in small ways that cause ripples into the future and competing with one another to create different futures was interesting, so I picked it up!

That’s not really what the book is about. The story does follow two time travelers, both on different sides of the time war as they gently manipulate the strands of time to create the future their separate sides want. But that is more of a framing device for the actual story. The crux of the story is that these two rival time travelers are very secretly communicating via letters to one another. It starts out as taunting one another, but gradually it turns into the two of them finding their soulmates in one another. 

And I loved it! I normally tolerate-to-hate romance narratives because most of them are written in that “You know what this is like, we’re so relatable” kind of way. In this, the relationship grows and is very much about the characters, who are both very alien at first and grow familiar over the course of the narrative. Watching them open up to one another with increasingly strange methods of delivering letters and grow close was a delight and emotionally satisfying. ((Also I cried.))

It is weird, though. The time travel aspects are done in a very European manner, which is to say it exists without explanation. Besides knowing that Red and Blue are female, you don’t really know what they are, and the explanations are sparse and scattered. Red seems to be some kind of cyborg that has been rebuilt with technology, whereas Blue is an organic shapeshifting creature, I think? Both are creations of their factions, and what they are doesn’t really matter as much in the grand scheme of the narrative. 

Overall, if you’re looking for a time travel book, this is not the one for you. The time travel is very secondary. But if you want a very weird story about two people finding one another and keeping their relationship a secret from their rival factions for fear of persecution, then this is definitely worth a read. It’s light, it’s quick, and it reads like reading poetry. Check it out. 

For some reason, I went on a spree of ordering a bunch of books that weren’t out yet. Pre-orders! Pre-orders and their campaigns! ((It’s because I’m thinking about doing one myself, tbh)) And this one was one I actually just missed the campaign for, but I still got the book. Let’s check out some more middle grade, right?

Curse of the Night Witch is the story of Tor, a boy who was born with an emblem marking his as a leader. He wants nothing more than to escape this fate and pursue his actual dreams, and so wishes for something else. What he gets instead is a curse that will kill him and, along with his friends, he must find the Night Witch to lift the curse.

This is a middle grade quest book, two things I kept forgetting while I was reading it but two things that it is good at. The main characters are twelve, and Tor in particular does act like it. He starts out only caring about himself and his problems, but gradually comes to think about other people as well. And, given that they’re moving to a new location every chapter or two, he has a lot of opportunities to grow and change.

Given that I haven’t read a lot of quest narratives in recent years, so I kept expecting some of the events to come back around somehow. When it didn’t, I had to remind myself that these are different genre conventions I’m working with and I needed to by a bit more flexible with what was happening.

Overall, it was an entertaining read! I would probably recommend it for a younger audience than myself, which is always great to say about a book intended for a young audience. Definitely check it out, or get it for that younger person in your life!

Another week another attempt at reading more Canadian books! Unlike last week, this one is not, as far as I know, something that won awards, so I went into it pretty hopeful that I’d like it a lot more. And I did!

Strangers follows Cole, a teenager who had moved away from Wounded Sky First Nation to live in Winnipeg some time after a school fire killed a lot of people. He’s tricked back by Coyote, calling himself Choch, to come back to find out that the small town still resents him for not saving more people from the fire when he was seven years old. ((This is not a superhero universe, these people are all assholes.)) With an illness spreading through the community and several of his old classmates being murdered one by one, Cole has to figure out what’s going on.

The story is a lot of fun. It’s complicated in that there are a lot of moving parts that get revealed slowly throughout the story, but I was never lost at any point and enjoyed finding out what was coming next and trying to put together what was going along with the leads. And in the end, I found that there were enough loose ends that I was intrigued by to consider continuing the trilogy.

I particularly liked the representation of anxiety and mental health. It felt accurate to my own experience, and it was nice to see it acting up at not-plot-relevant moments as well.

Although. This paperback. I need to make some mention of the way the pages are cut on the paperback because I hate it. If your pages look like this:

/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\

then just don’t. It’s so annoying to flip. Not only that, but they shed little bits of paper, which makes this all so unnecessary.

Overall, though, the story is a lot of fun and it’s definitely worth checking out. It’s Canadian, got some queer content, mental health representation, and fantasy elements that aren’t incredibly western, which is really nice to see.