This weekend is Peace Talks for Realmathon and I will be on reading sprints all weekend long! My plan is to read as many novellas as a can to rack up points for my team. A lot of these have been on my TBR for ages and I am excited to get to them. If you have read them, let me know your thoughts in the comments.
When the witch built the forty-flight tower, she made very sure to do the whole thing properly. Each flight contains a dreadful monster, ranging from a diamond-scaled dragon to a pack of slavering goblins. Should a prince battle his way to the top, he will be rewarded with a golden sword—and the lovely Princess Floralinda.
But no prince has managed to conquer the first flight yet, let alone get to the fortieth.
In fact, the supply of fresh princes seems to have quite dried up.
And winter is closing in on Floralinda…
I have read another short story by Tamsyn Muir and really liked it. I have been putting off reading Gideon the Ninth, so why not read everything else by her instead? Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower sounds right up my alley! For some reason I had it in my head that this would lean cozy, but I have been told it is surprisingly gruesome and I am so ready for it. I have also heard the audiobook is fantastic, so I have it downloaded and ready to go. It is the book I am going to start the weekend with!
The girl knows she has a destiny before she even knows her name. She grows up in the wild, in a cave with her mother, but visions of a faraway lake come to her on the spring breeze, and when she hears a traveler speak of Artos, king of Caer Leon, she knows that her future lies at his court.
And so, brimming with magic and eager to test her strength, she breaks her covenant with her mother and, with a broken hunting spear and mended armour, rides on a bony gelding to Caer Leon. On her adventures she will meet great knights and steal the hearts of beautiful women. She will fight warriors and sorcerers. And she will find her love, and the lake, and her fate.
Spear is an Arthurian retelling that I have heard good things about and have been saving for a weekend readathon! I don’t always love adventure stories or Arthurian retellings, but there is something about this was that intrigues me. It is the longest book on my TBR, but is still under 200 pages.
The water-breathing descendants of African slave women tossed overboard have built their own underwater society—and must reclaim the memories of their past to shape their future in this brilliantly imaginative novella inspired by the Hugo Award nominated song “The Deep” from Daveed Diggs’ rap group Clipping.
Yetu holds the memories for her people—water-dwelling descendants of pregnant African slave women thrown overboard by slave owners—who live idyllic lives in the deep. Their past, too traumatic to be remembered regularly, is forgotten by everyone, save one—the historian. This demanding role has been bestowed on Yetu.
Yetu remembers for everyone, and the memories, painful and wonderful, traumatic and terrible and miraculous, are destroying her. And so, she flees to the surface, escaping the memories, the expectations, and the responsibilities—and discovers a world her people left behind long ago.
Yetu will learn more than she ever expected to about her own past—and about the future of her people. If they are all to survive, they’ll need to reclaim the memories, reclaim their identity—and own who they really are.
I have had the audiobook for The Deep since it came out and I have been wanting to read something by Rivers Solomon for ages now! I have a feeling this will be the most difficult book in terms of themes that I read this weekend, but I am looking forward to it.
Lina Rather’s A Season of Monstrous Conceptions is an eldritch historical fantasy of midwifery, monstrosity, and the rending of the world, for fans of The Essex Serpent and The Death of Jane Lawrence.
“An entrancing and transformative queer tale of cosmic horror.”―Caitlin Starling
” A blood sacrifice of a novel. ” ― Meg Elison
In 17th-century London, unnatural babies are being born, with eyes made for the dark and webbed digits suited to the sea.
Sarah Davis is intimately familiar with such strangeness―having hidden her uncanny nature all her life and fled to London under suspicious circumstances, Sarah starts over as a midwife’s apprentice to a member of the illegal Worshipful Company of Midwives, hoping to carve out for herself an independent life. But with each new unnatural birth, the fear in London grows of the Devil’s work.
When the wealthy Lady Wren hires her to see her through her pregnancy, Sarah quickly becomes a favorite of her husband, the famous architect Lord Christopher Wren, whose interest in the uncanny borders on obsession. Sarah soon finds herself caught in a web of magic and intrigue created by those who want to use her power for themselves, and whose pursuits threaten to unmake the earth itself.
I randomly found A Season of Monstrous Conceptions on Everand and it has a blue cover and that wolf-like creation on the cover (perfect for my team for the readathon) so I added it to my list. I am truly going in to this one knowing nothing about it and I have never seen anyone talk about it, so we will see how it goes!
A world-weary woman races against the clock to rescue the children of a wrathful tyrant from a dangerous, otherworldly forest.
At the northern edge of a land ruled by a monstrous, foreign tyrant lies the wild forest known as the Elmever. The villagers know better than to let their children go near—once someone goes in, they never come back out.
No one knows the strange and terrifying traps of the Elmever better than Veris Thorn, the only person to ever rescue a child from the forest many years ago. When the Tyrant’s two young children go missing, Veris is commanded to enter the forest once more and bring them home safe. If Veris fails, the Tyrant will kill her; if she remains in the forest for longer than a day, she will be trapped forevermore.
So Veris will travel deep into the Elmever to face traps, riddles, and monsters at the behest of another monster. One misstep will cost everything.
I have two books by Premee Mohamed on my radar for this weekend! The first is her newest releases, The Butcher of the Forest. You know at this point that I will try anything that has an enchanted forest!
In a far future city, where you can fall to a government cull for a single mistake, And What Can We Offer You Tonight tells the story of Jewel, established courtesan in a luxurious House. Jewel’s world is shaken when her friend is murdered by a client, but somehow comes back to life. To get revenge, they will both have to confront the limits of loyalty, guilt, and justice.
A friend recommended I try And What Can We Offer You Tonight and it definitely intrigues me, and not just because the cover is stunning! It has mixed reviews on Goodreads but I trust my friend’s recommendation.
They say there is no water in the City of Lies. They say there are no heroes in the City of Lies. They say there are no friends beyond the City of Lies. But would you believe what they say in the City of Lies?
In the City of Lies, they cut out your tongue when you turn thirteen, to appease the terrifying Ajungo Empire and make sure it continues sending water. Tutu will be thirteen in three days, but his parched mother won’t last that long. So Tutu goes to his oba and makes a deal: she provides water for his mother, and in exchange he will travel out into the desert and bring back water for the city. Thus begins Tutu’s quest for the salvation of his mother, his city, and himself.
The Lies of the Ajungo opens the curtains on a tremendous world, and begins the epic fable of the Forever Desert. With every word, Moses Ose Utomi weaves magic.
The Lies of Ajungo has been on my radar since before it came out and I have been saving it for a readathon! It has incredible reviews and the sequel, which has a blue cover, just came out.
Robert R. McCammon’s Boy’s Life meets H. P. Lovecraft in Wild Spaces, a foreboding, sensual coming-of-age debut in which the corrosive nature of family secrets and toxic relatives assume eldritch proportions.
An eleven-year-old boy lives an idyllic childhood exploring the remote coastal plains and wetlands of South Carolina alongside his parents and his dog Teach. But when the boy’s eerie and estranged grandfather shows up one day with no warning, cracks begin to form as hidden secrets resurface that his parents refuse to explain.
The longer his grandfather outstays his welcome and the greater the tension between the adults grows, the more the boy feels something within him changing —physically—into something his grandfather welcomes and his mother fears. Something abyssal. Something monstrous.
Wild Spaces is the book on this list that scares me the most because I have not had much success with cosmic horror and whenever there is a dog on a book cover I get scared that something is going to happen to it! But I have the audiobook from Libro.fm, so if I don’t read it now I know I never will!
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