Just Ace Book Things

Bookish aesthetics for the ace-spec Tumblrite. A place of positivity and the occasional book rec. Submissions welcome.

[neverlearnedtoread]

An Enchantment of Ravens

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: sad love story? dude im about to jump on this sick faerie horse and slay an all-powerful fae king, i dont even remember what a tragic ending is

Oh?? 👌😉😏

cute fluffy love story - we need all the serotonin we can get in this society!!!

non-powered heroine who survives by being consistently level-headed and quick-thinking - isobel really said #galaxybrain rights

aloof but ultimately v loveable male love interest

nature spirit!fae and fun mashup of classic fae lore - you can tell the author really had fun doing her own take on fairytale tropes!

writing style - any style that remotely reminds me of dwj wins in my book

No.. ❌🤢🤮

a travelling story - which is apparently something people don’t like reading about? idk, if you’re not into smelling the roses, this isn’t your book

not enough fluff - even though this book is like eating cotton candy. but tbh there should’ve been more making out (just one more make out scene, margaret rogerson, please……..do it for the serotonin)

Summary: A portrait artist who lives in a small town called Whimsy gets commissioned by a faerie prince of the autumn court to paint his likeness. As is inevitable in all stories involving customer service, he gets mad at her for some misunderstanding that wasn’t her fault in the first place, and takes her away to the fairylands to stand trial for her despicable art crimes.

Concept: 💭💭💭💭💭

The cover looked gorgeous, so I was gonna pick it up eventually, but then I heard it was supposed to be pure tooth-rotting fluff so I bumped it up on my ‘to-read’ list. You can never read too much fluff! Plus I’d read the excerpt while browsing books, and the writing style was so atmospheric and beautiful and melodic….not too flowery, until I didn’t know my ass from my elbow, but not blunt either. It’s not often I find a writing style that makes me sit up and take notice. And I’m always game for more takes on fae lore.

Some spoilers under the cut!

Keep reading

[stardustreviews]

5 STARS

Summer of Salt by Katrina Leno

synopsis:

A magic passed down through generations … Georgina Fernweh waits with growing impatience for the tingle of magic in her fingers—magic that has been passed down through every woman in her family. Her twin sister, Mary, already shows an ability to defy gravity. But with their eighteenth birthday looming at the end of this summer, Georgina fears her gift will never come. An island where strange things happen … No one on the island of By-the-Sea would ever call the Fernwehs what they really are, but if you need the odd bit of help—say, a sleeping aid concocted by moonlight—they are the ones to ask. No one questions the weather, as moody and erratic as a summer storm. No one questions the (allegedly) three-hundred-year-old bird who comes to roost on the island every year. A summer that will become legend … When tragedy strikes, what made the Fernweh women special suddenly casts them in suspicion. Over the course of her last summer on the island—a summer of storms, of love, of salt—Georgina will learn the truth about magic, in all its many forms.

This beautiful, heartwrenching puzzle of a book is absolutely the weirdest thing I’ll read all year, and I absolutely loved it.

Sometimes you read a book so dazzling that you wish you could live in it– Hogwarts, Ketterdam, Red London, you name it. But sometimes you stumble upon a book and you swear you called this place home in another lifetime. It’s a strange combination of enchanting and comforting, a song your soul has sung since birth.

For me, Summer of Salt is that book.

There are so many comparisons I could draw up. The highly atmospheric By-The-Sea reminds me strongly of Thisby. The Fernwehs in all their magic and mundanity, as well as the sense of timelessness juxtaposed strongly with modern characters and modern social issues, call Wild Beauty to mind. Still, it feels wrong, reducing this book like that; it’s more than reminiscent of another author’s work, and its crisp, wry prose helps it stand on its own. Leno does a great job of settling you into the narrator’s head and home, of establishing Georgina’s everyday life without ever infodumping or turning her family’s quiet magic into an oddity.

The characters were all great. Georgina was too, too painfully relatable. A disaster lesbian who dislikes large parties and getting drunk but isn’t condescending about it? A small-town girl who never felt like her sexuality was much of a big deal? She’s amazing. Then there’s effusive, floating Mary, and non-threatening, charming Harrison, and Prue– Prue, who could easily have been an aloof and mysterious girl, but instead is so sweet.

And even though it’s not a book about the LGBT experience, the rep still makes my heart sing. Leno doesn’t make her characters suffer for being queer, nor does she have any qualms about saying the words “lesbian”, “bisexual”, and “aroace”. It absolutely improved my day.

TL;DR: I don’t know if I vibe really well with magical realism or if I keep picking good books, but Summer of Salt is a beautiful story that had me blinking back tears and pacing in the last quarter. Please, please read it.

The book More reviews My Goodreads

[bethkerring]

Book Review: The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy

I’ll be completely honest: a good part of the reason I decided to read Mackenzi Lee’s The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue is because I wanted to read the sequel. In the end, I adored Gentleman’s Guide and ranted on as such in my review, but still, the first thing I did when I finished it was to put in a hold at my library for The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy.

Warning: this review will inevitably contain spoilers for Gentleman’s Guide, but I’ll try to keep them to a minimum.

Keep reading

[ram-reads]

Bookoween

Fangs

Devils’ Line was an absolute amazing surprise when I picked it up back in 2017. I wasn’t expecting to enjoy it as much as I did! I like to pitch it as Tokyo Ghoul meets Psycho Pass where vampires are hired into the police force to capture other vampires who commit crimes. This is a pretty bloody manga that has a solid plot and truly complex characters. That isn’t even the best part though, this manga actually has a diverse cast! There are transgender characters, asexual characters, gay characters, and characters with varying body types. Honestly, I don’t know why this manga hasn’t gotten more attention just for that fact alone. This dark fantasy is a perfect fit for the season so if you’re looking for a new manga series give Devils’ Line a try!

[fuckyeahasexual]

📚 @minervacerridwen reminded me that today marks 4 years since her short story Match Sticks was published!

What a way to start @asexualawarenessweek‘s history theme. 

This collection features story stories in variety of time frames including works of @artoverchaos, @wrrrdnrrrdgrrrl, as well as a dozen other a-spec authors. This project was definitely a highlight to me. If you’re interested in getting a copy for yourself, 50% of the book’s proceeds are donated to the Trevor Project! 

Happy Ace Week! 💜

[theunseelielibrary]

Love shouldn’t hinge solely on exposing your physical body to another person. Love was intangible. Universal. It was whatever someone wanted it to be and should be respected as such.

Let’s Talk About Love, Claire Kann (via theautisticlibrary)

[demisexualnathanvuornos]

Canon AroAces 72/?: Keiko Furukura in Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman (2016)

[twelvemonkeyswere]

“Guardian of the Dead” Review

Here’s my first review of a book I’ve read recently. I’mma try and do this with someo of the books I’m reading, just to keep track of what lit I’ve liked and why. 

It’ll be as spoiler-free as possible. 

Summary. Guardian of the Dead by Karen Heaely is the story of a girl in New Zealand and how she finds out the Maori mythology (and any other mythology) are in fact real and how she, unknowingly as someone with magic powers, merges into this whole new world (pun intended) and prepares to fight against the menace of some magic creatures ready to kill thousands in order to live forever 

-I need some air after spitting out that summary-

What’s bad. Let’s start there. The plot is, of course, not that original at all. The idea is as old as time, and there are the usual elements of such YA fiction: a reluctant hero, a forbidden love story, and lots of action. Not that these are bad, but are very common tropes. Even though the bbok makes an effort to represent different kinds of people (ethnicities, sexual orientations, etc), the main character is still a white and straight person, which I don’t find particularly detrimental, but thought it could be mentioned. 

What’s good. Apart from those little minor details I’ve just mentioned, I find no fault in the book. Its universe and its rules are beautifully constructed, the writing flows wonderfully, and it keeps you quite interested throughout the story. Characters are, in general, very well constructed too, and almost all of them are very round in spite of not being that important to the plot either. None of them behave idiotically for the sake of the plot, and that’s something I’m always grateful for. The relationships between them feel organic enough, which is always a blessing. As I said, the main character is white, but she’s funny, mouthed, opinionated, and not at all qualified for the story at hand. She struggles against all these, and her flaws and mistakes are never forgotten and the consequences follow through. She’s also fat, as she herself states. And she happens to have a very beautiful and dark-skinned friend that happens to be asexual, for example, who isn’t a token at all. There are many kinds of people and races and religions and more in the story, and they all converge to build a wonderfully mixed reality that is, precisely, the premise of the book. All of these elements make a very strong and enjoyable read, because it teaches you a lot of cool and new stuff. This aspect is, in fact, what I enjoyed the most. In spite its flaws, the book works, and that’s what matters. Finally, the tropes used are common d’uh but generally subverted and that is like a breath of fresh air. 

Conclusion? 

And I really, really, recommend this book if you want something entertaining and educative. 

[aroaessidhe]

6/♠ of my asexual character drawings!

Emras, from Banner of the Damned.

I’m not sure if this is what she looks like? the only descriptions I can remember is light brown straight hair and roundish face? and that the Colendi have brown skin. I haven’t read the series that this is a sequel to so maybe there are more descriptions there idk. I tried?

[whenwerethrough]

Just wanted to be artsy and stuff 🙃

[everythingyaattlls]

Latinx Heritage Month 2020: Day 5 ~ Anna-Marie McLemore

[ID: five hardback copies of Anna-Marie McLemore’s novels are arranged in front of a bed of flowers. positioned vertically from left to right are Blanca & Roja, Wild Beauty, and When the Moon Was Ours. behind these books are flowers with vibrant green leaves and pink blossoms and one red spider lily. lying in front of the books on the grass are The Weight of Feathers and Dark and Deepest Red. ID Ends]

[ethelindawrites]

Review: The Dragonoak Trilogy by Sam Farren

I believe I came across this trilogy first here on Tumblr, and primarily because the author, Sam Farren, keeps ball/royal pythons, and I followed them for posts about their snakes. On seeing that Farren was also a self-published author, however, and being intrigued by the description of the first book, I decided to give it a try, and was glad I did; this is one of the more unique fantasy worlds that I have read in recent years.

(Some spoilers past this point.)

The series follows Rowan Northwood, a young woman from a rural village who has recently failed to hide the fact that she is a necromancer: someone with the power to snatch death away from or push death into other living beings. While her family stand with her and the local villagers are tolerating her presence as long she stays out on her family’s farm, life is not comfortable for Rowan. Taking a chance when one of her country’s famed Knights comes through the village, Rowan goes with her, following her to the neighboring country of Kastelir.

The title of the first book, The Complete History of Kastelir, struck me as a bit ambitious when I first read it, assuming that it was meant to be taken literally. The entire history of a country in a single book?

But the complete history of the country of Kastelir is exactly what I (and Rowan) learned through the course of the book. As a nation, Kastelir is relatively new, formed only a few decades previously out of a land of warring groups. By the end of the book, Rowan has (just barely) survived Kastelir’s fall, and has lost the woman whom she was beginning to love.

The Sky Beneath the Sun finds Rowan far to the south, in a completely different part of the world, along with the handful of friends and allies who escaped Kastelir at the end. Everything is new (and hot), and Rowan finds it mostly a welcome distraction from her grief. Unexpectedly, it also gives her a chance to learn more about herself, to learn that the commonly-used word “necromancer” does not at all begin to encompass the truth of her powers and the kind of being that she is. Through these revelations, a betrayal, and the eventual realization that their work in the land that was once Kastelir is not done, Rowan must decide where she will set the limits on her own power.

The final book in the series, Gall and Wormwood, sees Rowan and her friends returning north across the sea first to what remains of Kastelir, and then eventually back to her birth country of Felheim, where the heart of the conflict truly lies. It takes not just a better grasp of her own powers for Rowan and her allies to unravel the war that has been going on much longer than any of them realized, but also a rediscovery of their world’s more distant past.

The author of the Dragonoak trilogy created a truly unique world, that has breadth and depth enough that it is easy to feel the weight of its history even as the characters do. Farren’s take on what at first seems like a straightforward fantasy element like necromancy, turns into something unlike any other version of necromancy that I’ve seen. There are dragons and phoenixes, though even they are not quite what one might at first assume. This may be the first time that I have read a story in which the main character is dyslexic (though she does not use that particular term for it), and must work around her inability to read, though it is largely something that she just accepts about herself.

I enjoyed the whole trilogy, and would recommend these books to anyone who likes fantasy stories with original worldbuilding, queer characters, or a good story about the heroes fighting for (and winning) the right to live their lives in peace.

[demisexualnathanvuornos]

Non-Fictional Kissing [Technically, You Started It; demi!Haley Hancock/bi!Martin Nathaniel “M.” Munroe II] 661 words (3.7.2020)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/24522031

[bplteens451]

Lauri D reviews At the Edge of the Universe by Shaun David Hutchinson

[aspeccharactersoftheday]

Lefty from Kea’s Flight is asexual!

[gwydionmisha]

Banner of the Damned FTW

* I am suspecting I now have a secondary infection.  I got suddenly much sicker Sunday morning, after a slow upward trajectory towards improvement, and today was so much worse.  My lungs are not yet lacey, but they are definitely congested.  Apologies for the way this is likely to affect service.

* On the upside, Banner of the damned has turned out to be amazing.  Intelligent asexual protagonist in a really complex, well designed world with multiple climates and cultures.  Seriously, things are well thought out on the level of things like how waste is handled for major cities, and with an understanding of how the Monarch’s progress can be used as punishment.  The protagonist’s culture is somewhere between Heian Japan and early Modern Versailles in feel, but the other main culture they deal with is well thought out in an entirely different style, and thee is enough hints about some other cultures woven in to give a feel of a really rich world of which we’ve only scratched the surface.  exactly the sort of thing one wants when one is too ill to sleep easily or well, and forced to hide in the safety of cool filtered air in the bedroom until well after dark.

[write-like-a-freak-deactivated2]

LOOK WHAT CAME IN THE MAIL Y'ALL. YOU KNOW IMMA LIVEBLOG READING IT.

@thesylverlining