what i've finished: "all the crooked saints" by maggie stiefvater, "an unkindness of magicians" by kat howard, "an unseen attraction" by kj charles, all of them rereads, and two merthur fanfics: one on recommendation from my partner, where arthur is trapped in a deadly arranged marriage and merlin is part of cenred's court [c], and one from my nephew, where uther knows merlin is a sorcerer and merlin just won't die [c].

kat howard's novel is by far the darkest of the lot. despite having everything from sarah j maas to xiran jay zhao in my collection, an unkindness of magicians is unarguably the most brutal book in my collection, where mages battle to the death in a pointless tournament designed only to decide who'll have more power and who less in the unseen world, firstborn children are sacrified to be tortured in order to ease the use of everyone else's magic, and those who survive that sacrifice are indebted to their enslavers, pieces of their shadows cut off to pay their debt until they go free.

by contrast, all the crooked saints feels like sitting on the back porch on the prairie with your favorite relative, watching a thunderstorm in the distance that's moving away from you, relishing the still, petrichor-clung air and the knowledge that if a tornado hits it won't be near your house. it brims with heat lightning and wonder and reviving life: a story of a family that can perform miracles, those upon whom those miracles have been visited (now trapped by their inability to grapple and understand the miracle themselves, and the family's curse that prevents them from interfering to help), and a young man caught in the middle, who just wants a summer job and a truck and to not be killed by the hole in his heart.

and an unseen attraction has no magic at all, save for that which happens between friends and lovers: it's a murder mystery and dickensian intrigue set among the skilled working class of 1870s london, when a lodging-house keeper and his taxidermist lover become entangled in a mess of killings, arsons, attacks, and worse all thanks to a crime committed upwards of twenty years ago.

what i'm reading right now: book two of kj's "sins of the cities" trilogy, an unnatural vice. the book picks up with different characters tangled in the same plot, a spiritualist charlatan and a lawyer turned journalist who hate each other and want each other at the same time . . . and it doesn't help that they're both being hunted by people who want information they never consented to knowing. on the whole, as usual, kj's plots and schemes are very tasty.

what's next: more merthur fanfic (people keep reccommending it to me dammit!), sins of the cities book three (enter pen starling, my beloved), and then i don't know. my brain is itching for perilous courts again.

frustrated because as much as i don't like this character it's easier to find playlist anthems for him than anyone else in the book

i love giving away the whole plot at the very beginning of something but so subtly you'll never figure out the foreshadowing until after it happens and then you're like "oh. fuck"

this is about the siabh fic for those who know