Books of the Month: April 2026
A good reading month! I had a pretty steady stream of enjoyable stuff to plow through (always nice as life gets busier for me in the spring to have my next 1-3 reads decided in advance). As noted in this post, a large chunk of what I read this month was because of seeing someone post about it on tumblr, which is always neat! But of course, some was because of my own odd whim, like the first book I read (no cover on StoryGraph), which was another obscure mystery book I got via university ILL (in the Inspector Macdonald series, by E. C. R. Lorac). Here are the books from April that took up the most brain space!
The Hands of the Emperor (Victoria Goddard): Of course I spent some time thinking about this book because it is quite long and therefore took a little longer than usual for me to read; but I enjoyed the process a lot. I really like the worldbuilding and cultural nuances in the Nine Worlds books. I like how, despite how much there is in this book, there's still stuff that Goddard definitely knows about her world(s) that I don't yet. I also like how you can see where in our real world she got the inspiration for various pieces of hers, but there's no heavy-handed one-to-one equivalence anywhere - something I strive for when I do fantasy worldbuilding. (Honorable mention to Whiskeyjack, which I also read and enjoyed a lot in April, just don't have anything extra to mention about it!)
The Incandescent (Emily Tesh): I wrote about this here (to be fair, I also wrote about HOTE in that post, as well as the next book on this list). I did like it! My thoughts on this were fairly meta, probably because I also would like to write a (fairly different) magic-school-book-from-the-adults'-perspectives someday. Also because of my own experience working with kids, maybe! The feeling of "I work with kids all the time and I'm good at it but also possibly bluffing through this whole interaction" is very relatable.
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (Isabel Wilkerson): Wrote about this in the post linked above, and I don't have a whole lot more to say, but I am overall glad I read it and I think I am internalizing some of the information into my worldview. (Was reading this for several months, but finished in April, so that's when it gets counted.)
Squire (Tamora Pierce): I read First Test and Page in April too, but I think this was my favorite of the 3. (Lady Knight is up sometime soon.) The first time (as a kid/adolescent) that I read this series, I expect I was still caught up in really loving the Daine series, and looking for glimpses of her and Numair. This time around, I think this is my favorite of the Tortall series. I really like Squire as Kel comes into her own, Joren et al. get their comeuppance, and because of the relationship between her and Raoul. (I almost wrote "Roald" - those two names are confusingly similar. I mean her knight-mentor, not the prince.) I also like that, as Alanna herself points out, Kel doesn't have the Gift or the attention of the gods (or of anything supernatural, maybe until the end of this book as the Chamber notices her). She is just a normal girl -> woman, trying to live her life in the way that technically she should be able to, while society sometimes thinks otherwise. And you have opposition ranging from the evilness of Joren all the way through to Wyldon, who is an overall good guy, and also sexist because he never thought about being any other way. Good stuff.
Cascade Failure and Gravity Lost (L. M. Sagas): As you can see by the graphic, I read the first of these mid-month and the second at the end, but they're very much linked so they're both going on here. Sci-fi found family action/adventure shenanigans. These read kind of like fanfiction but in a good way. There's a lot of focus on characters and character relationships (and a lot of both physical and emotional whump for everyone, including the AI character). But there's also enough outside plot and constant action for it to work. I have not read a whole lot of heist fiction but these are also heist-like at times, with the plot of "oh we need to go do x, break out y, and/or stop z" and then cut to the action when the plan is completed, so that we the audience can find out what the plan was and whether it works. The found family has the potential to be a little heavy-handed, but I think it works because 3 of the main 4-6 characters have been going on missions together forever, so the family has already been established; they're just adding a member or two. Also there's no forced family dynamics - no obvious romance (some relationships I feel could go either way), no "we're basically siblings" or "you're like a parent" or anything, so that's cool too.
