#piper cj

[fancylala7]

[clockwork-col]

This shitty book series is my guilty pleasure and I’m the only one that likes it I think

Like I’m not even exaggerating I haven’t seen a single positive commentary on it

Which sucks ass cause that series made me sob

Also I should reread it

[haveyoureadthisqueerbook]

Have you read The Night and Its Moon by Piper CJ (2022)?

YES

NO

Voting ended onApr 13, 2025

[reallivegeekgirl]

This author (Piper CJ) has the best book dedications.

[therobishow]

I really want people to flood my inbox with their rants about authors and books they just can't stand, especially YA because it's so gloriously and passionately unhinged and I love it. But I am aware that I'm a tiny little blog that no one knows or interacts with. And despite being on this site for over a decade, I still don't understand the dark alchemy that drives this place.

But, hey, if you do see this, feed me your hatred. Be as vitriolic as your heart desires. Be unreasonable, be irrational. I won't judge you. I won't argue with you. I will accept your rage as my own.

Hmm...maybe this will help: Sarah J. Maas Antis, come to me and offer me your hatred

You know what, I'm about to go somewhere without internet access for a few days, so I'm going to blaze this and see what happens when I come back. For fun.

[semper-legens]

18. The Night and Its Moon, by Piper CJ

Owned: No, library Page count: 574 My summary: Amaris and Nox were destined for each other. One girl dark as midnight, the other pale as starlight, both abandoned and alone in a child mill posing as an orphanage. They know that one day, they will be forced to leave; that they will be bought, and head out into the world beyond the mill. But there are secrets even these girls do not know, and truths written in the stars for them. When fate pulls them apart, can these girls ever find each other again? My rating: 2/5 My commentary:

Oh dear. I was so looking forward to this one. I thought I'd like it, I thought I'd read the whole series, I thought it was entirely up my street. There was a lot of promise in the premise! Two girls who have a deep and passionate bond to one another, torn apart by the world that sees them more as commodities than people - that's an interesting setup. And I'm always down for more LGBT+ fiction! But in practice…this was a first draft at best, and I had some very deep issues with a particular aspect of the way the story went in the later section of the book. I read somewhere that this was written in an absurdly short amount of time; if true, it definitely seems that way, and with no apparent editing to boot. It's a shame, is what it is. I'm gonna go over my two big concerns with this book under the cut.

(Also, warning for talk of sexual assault, sexual violence, and mutilation.)

Firstly, as I said, this feels like a very unpolished first draft. A lot of the narrative seems to happen in overview. We get a sort of montage of Aramis' reever training, but she keeps saying things like 'I'm bonded to my brothers, I trust them with my life' without us having seen much of a justification for it. Much of the narrative is telling us, not showing us, what's going on - it gets infuriating after a while. There were so many times when I was just thinking 'this should have been a scene'. Character development is made too brief - Aramis apparently becomes ride-or-die for the dark fae she meets very quickly and mostly off the page, and there's vital conversations that are just sort of related afterwards. Like Aramis' first real conversation with the dark fae, we just. Cut to after it's happened. It's such a weird choice, and really seems to show the lack of an editor.

And there's things sprinkled here and there that just take me out of the story. In your vaguely medieval fantasy setting that isn't modern Earth, why is one of your characters explicitly namechecking sexism? It was so jarring, I had to read the sentence a couple of times just to make sure I was reading it right. Aramis calls things 'sexist' and 'misogynistic', while Nox not only seems to know what adrenaline is (something I usually overlook in this sort of setting if the reference is only made in narration) but also oxytocin, dopamine, and seratonin? It's an awkward phrasing even from a modern world, and baffling in one where medicine is taken in the form of potions and tinctures. Again, an editor would have caught this! Was there no editor? Were they sleeping on the job?

But the thing that turned me right off this book is an incident that happens later on. Nox is going to seduce a man, a guard captain, and finds that he is luring her into some kind of horrible torture den where he's presumably raped and murdered other women before. Nox turns the tables, torturing him right back and binding him to her will. One of the means of torture that she enacts on him is to constrict his genitals in a way that will eventually castrating him. I…hate the trope of castrating men in order to punish them for sexual violence. It's seen as poetic justice, that the appendage used for the crime is severed as punishment, but it frames the penis as being an inherently abusive thing, and that people who have penises are always potential abusers who cannot be trusted.

You might say that this is a leap of logic, but consider this - this man is framed as being an irredeemable monster, and his role in the narrative is pretty much to have Nox control him and eventually sacrifice him to help Aramis. This is because he sexually assaults and murders women. And this is done by Nox…who has been sleeping with men, knowing that she will kill them (it's a power she has, she's a succubus) and then raising them from the dead as her puppets, essentially enslaving them. She's not exactly innocent of sexualised murder herself, is what I'm saying! And the narrative is seemingly okay with her…because she's a woman? Nox can sleep with Emily, another cis woman, with no consequences, but when she sleeps with men her powers activate. Nox has a good relationship with Emily, but sleeping with men is seen more as a trauma for her. The unfortunate framing is that penetration by a penis is always violating, whereas other forms of penetrative and non-penetrative sex are fine. Why did we need to have this guard captain character at all? This narrative function can be filled with something else, why have this act of mutilation being framed as #girlboss revenge fantasy here? I particularly hate this trope because of the transmisogynistic way that it can be used, always framing people with penises as inherently evil, inherently untrustworthy, inherently abusive no matter what.

Do I think CJ meant this, and carefully put this content in with a view to harming trans women and advancing ugly tropes? No. I don't. But it's the subtext nonetheless, and it really turned me away from this book. Sorry CJ, I'm not gonna be continuing this one.

Next, the children of the gods attempt to set right what they have unleashed.

[whobeyou444]

the dawn and its light - book review

author: piper cj

rating: 2/5

review tldr: my sapphic dreams are dead. and the loose ends are certainly...loose.

review (contains spoilers): This was an end to a series that I did...finish. Honestly, this book was pretty well paced and the plot, until its final moments, was solid. I would even call it a satisfying ending to the series were it not for several major flaws that will haunt me, leading me to my good good 2 star review.

I made it through 4 entire books of this series. On the back of EVERY installment it mentions our two iconic female protagonists, Nox and Amaris, and how they want nothing more than to be together and how their stories are intrinsically intertwined. Please let me know why Amaris and Gadriel's relationship feels so much more important to Amaris at the end of this series? I mean for the love of god, the final moments of the entire series don't even INCLUDE Amaris because she LEAVES with GADRIEL three pages into the epilogue! It just felt like such an unsatisfying end to a series that centers women and their relationships to have Amaris' attention suddenly center so heavily around her romance with a man. Nox and Amaris' relationship felt strangely awkward and ingenuine in this book, and overall perhaps unintentionally took a backseat, which was an unforgivably unsatisfying conclusion considering just how much buildup surrounded their union.

Additionally, the end of the book was so...anticlimactic. No final battle, no dramatic conclusion, just a march in and fix everything. Plot points were hinted at that were just completely unexplored and undeveloped, which was honestly just confusing. So Nox...can't really kill people in dreams. Ok great, I guess we don't need to dwell on or address that discovery. Also there is another all powerful manifester who creates demons and is populating the world with monsters, which has been a theme throughout the entire series, but we're not going to resolve any of that. Got it. The end just felt rushed, which was so deeply disappointing considering the heft of the series. I would not recommend it to friends or queer readers. It is what it is.

[reqencie]

bought “the night and its moon” before i saw tiktok reviews saying that it’s incredibly problematic. will report back on it