REVIEW: The Beauty's Blade: Mei Ren Jian (book) by Feng Ren Zuo Shu, translated by Yu, illustrations by Gravity Dusty

The Beauty's Blade is a Chinese baihe (f/f) fantasy book. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Fu Wanqing is both a great beauty and a formidable fighter. Although she is considered the heir of the House of Valor, she causes nothing but trouble for her father and behaves as if nothing in the world has anything to do with her. There is only one person she considers her true rival: Yu Shengyan, the cold and indifferent high priestess of the demonic Jadewater Guild, which opposes the House of Valor and other members of the Lightpath Alliance.

Seemingly, all Fu Wanqing wants is to challenge Yu Shengyan to a duel, but for some reason Yu Shengyan refuses to even draw her blade, despite the fact that Fu Wanqing crippled her shijie. Fu Wanqing does at least extract a promise from Yu Shengyan to stay by her side for three months, giving her more opportunities to get her to agree to a duel, in exchange for a rare medicine that will allow Yu Shengyan's shijie to walk again.

It's a risky agreement for the both of them, with the Jadewater Guild and the House of Valor so at odds, but neither of them cares. As they spend more time with each other, their rivalry begins to morph into something more, but Fu Wanqing still has her own secret goals to accomplish.

REVIEW: Cute Animals That Could Kill You Dead (nonfiction picture book) words by Brooke Hartman, pictures by María Garcia

Cute Animals That Could Kill You Dead is a children's nonfiction picture book. I bought my copy new.

Review:

This covers a lot more animals than I expected, giving each one two pages, the first of which provides some basic information and the animal's "cuteness factor," and the second of which explains what they can do that makes them so fearsome and/or deadly. The animals covered include: Tarsier, Slow Loris, Grasshopper Mouse, Hedgehog, Northern Pygmy Owl, Bumblebee Bat, Sea Otter, Platypus, Ladybug, Jumping Spider, Bottlenose Dolphin, Sea Bunny, Poison Dart Frog, Flying Gecko, Black-footed Cat, Fennec Fox, and Honey Badger.

REVIEW: Daughter of a Thousand Faces (graphic novel, vol. 1) by Velinxi

Daughter of a Thousand Faces is a fantasy series. I bought my copy of this volume new.

Review:

Shen Yuhua is the disgrace of her clan. Her mother was executed for treason, she didn't inherit any of her immortal father's powers, and she's been rejected by twenty suitors. Her twenty-first suitor is it - there won't be any more chances after this one...and unfortunately this meeting goes badly as well. In a moment of despair, she falls into the Abyssal Well, the same place her mother was sent to die. Supposedly, anyone who makes it out of there will become stronger than they were before, but no one has ever made it out.

Until Yuhua, that is. But she has a secret she doesn't dare reveal to anyone: she only made it out with the help of Chu Tian, the Demon with a Thousand Faces. The two of them are now bound to each other by a blood pact that makes Yuhua Chu Tian's disciple.

REVIEW: Flip the Script (book) by Lyla Lee

Flip the Script is YA f/f romance. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Hana is a lifelong K-drama fan who's just achieved her dream of being cast as the lead in a new K-drama. It feels like all her hard work and the stress of her family moving to Seoul is finally paying off. Even better, she's dating her costar, Bryan Yoon, a K-pop heartthrob who's shifting his career into acting.

Except that the show isn't doing as well as hoped, and Hana's relationship with Bryan is actually just a marketing stunt designed to increase ratings. Hana isn't the slightest bit interested in Bryan and, at least initially, the disinterest is mutual.

In yet another attempt to help the struggling show, a second lead actress is brought in - none other than Minjee Park, Hana's acting rival and former best friend. Even as their characters face off in a messy love triangle with Bryan, Hana and Minjee reconnect and renew their friendship in real life...and Hana comes to the realization that she has a crush on Minjee. 

REVIEW: Cabin Head and Tree Head (graphic novel) by Scott Campbell

Cabin Head and Tree Head is a children's graphic novel. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Cabin Head and Tree Head are two friends who live in a world where everyone has a little piece of a world on their head. Together, they get a case of the hellos and go around saying "hello" to everyone they come across. They dig for treasure, find a hiding spot, and more. The volume ends with some miscellaneous stuff, including a Head-style version of "Jack & the Beanstalk."

Reading this book is like meeting the nicest person you'll ever know and watching them refuse to let life's little annoyances ever get them down. It's warm fuzzies all around.

My favorite of the stories, hands down, was "Holes." Cabin Head and Tree Head were delightful, and Automobile Head's reaction at the end had me laughing.

REVIEW: Ninefox Gambit (book) by Yoon Ha Lee

Ninefox Gambit is sci-fi. I bought my copy new.

Review:

This takes place in a far future world where people's belief systems and the calendars they agree upon can somehow affect the physics behind how everything works. All the action is centered around a place called the Fortress of Scattered Needles, which has been taken over by rebels following a heretical calendar.

Captain Kel Cheris of the hexarchate has recently fallen into disgrace for her unconventional tactics. The situation at the Fortress of Scattered Needles gives her a chance to redeem herself, although she almost immediately comes to regret her proposed solution, which involves allying herself with the long-dead tactician Shuos Jedao. Jedao was widely regarded as brilliant, but he was also a madman who, in the end, killed both friend and foe alike, and Cheris had no idea that his "resurrection" would involve tying him to her mind and body. It's not a comfortable position to be in, to say the least.

REVIEW: Lucky Day (book) by Chuck Tingle

Lucky Day is horror. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Vera, her mother, and her friends are celebrating the upcoming publication of Vera's book. Vera has finally gotten the courage to come out to her mother as bisexual and tell her that she and Annie are engaged. It's going badly, and then the disaster that's later known as the Low-Probability Event begins. 

All over the world, but particularly in the US for some reason, horrible and statistically unlikely things happen, killing millions. Fish fall from the sky, causing an accident that results in Vera's mother's death. Vera witnesses one of her friends get beaten to death by a chimpanzee with a typewriter. All around her there is bewildering death and destruction, and in the end all Vera can do is run and keep running. 

Four years later, Vera is a shadow of her old self, limping along on the checks she gets as one of the survivors of the Low-Probability Event. She barely has the willpower to exist, and yet she also can't bring herself to commit suicide. Caring about anything seems utterly futile. 

Then Special Agent Layne, from the Low-Probability Event Commission (LPEC), shows up at her door. He's investigating a statistically impossibly lucky casino, the exact casino Vera wrote about in her book. The LPEC thinks it has some sort of connection to the Low-Probability Event and, in spite of herself and her determination not to care about anything, Vera finds herself drawn in. 

REVIEW: We Had to Remove This Post (novella) by Hanna Bervoets, translated by Emma Rault

We Had to Remove This Post is literary fiction. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Kayleigh, in desperate need of money after getting out of a toxic relationship with one of her coworkers at the call center she used to work for, answers a vague job ad for a position as a "quality assurance worker" at Hexa. She has no idea what to expect, but the pay is better than at the call center. She soon learns that Hexa is a subcontractor for a large and powerful tech company that she and her other new coworkers must agree to never mention by name.

Kayleigh's new job involves being a content moderator for this tech company. It turns out to be a job that she's very good at - it soon becomes second nature for her to apply the constantly changing moderator guidelines to whatever hundreds of pieces of media she's supposed to evaluate each day. Yes, some of what she sees is horrible, but she'd had pretty horrible abuse hurled at her when she was at the call center, and at least none of this stuff is aimed at her personally.

While working at Hexa, Kayleigh makes several friends and even finds herself in a long-term relationship with one of her coworkers, Sigrid. The bulk of this story is focused on Kayleigh and Sigrid's relationship and how things change the longer they're at Hexa.

REVIEW: Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape, Revised & Updated (nonfiction book) by Brian Hayes

Infrastructure is nonfiction. I bought my copy used.

Review: 

This is organized into thirteen chapters: "Out of the Earth" (mining), "Waterworks," "Food and Farming," "Oil and Gas," "Power Plants," "The Power Grid," "Communications," "On the Road" (roads, highways), "The Railway," "Bridges and Tunnels," "Aviation," "Shipping," and "Wastes and Recycling."

Of the infrastructure books I've read so far, this one uses probably the broadest definition of "infrastructure" - I didn't disagree with it, but it meant that there were areas that were covered that I hadn't encountered before, at least not in this way. It made me wish that Hayes had occasionally stopped and provided "big picture" diagrams of how things worked, rather than just photographs of particular examples. Particularly for the things that were entirely new to me, diagrams probably would have made more sense than photographs.

REVIEW: Simply AI (nonfiction book) by DK editorial staff, with contributions by Claire Quigley and consulting with Hilary Lamb and Joel Levy

Simply AI is nonfiction. I bought my copy new.

Review:

This starts with the history of artificial intelligence, then explains the difference between classical and statistical artificial intelligence and how they work, then goes into the various ways AI has been and may in the future be used, and finally wraps up with some philosophical quandaries and the benefits and drawbacks of AI's usage in the real world.

This was a frustrating read. While actual real-life ethical concerns about AI were brought up, mostly in the final section, there seemed to be far more random mentions of concerns about and the implications of AI achieving sentience. In fact, when I got to page 140's declaration that "In reality, AI applications have, at best, limited and specific abilities, and cannot think for themselves," I found myself wondering if whichever editor or consultant who wrote that text had paid attention to the many prior pages speculating about AI sentience.

When you've got a book that's, let's say, about half graphics and half text, 155 pages doesn't provide a lot of space for explaining things. I really wish the classical and statistical AI sections had been a bit less simplistic. 

REVIEW: The Essential Anime Guide: 50 Iconic Films, Standout Series, and Cult Masterpieces (nonfiction book) by Patrick Macias and Samuel Sattin, illustrated by DenQ

The Essential Anime Guide is nonfiction. I bought my copy new.

Review:

While there are works that most people with a broad knowledge of anime would agree should probably be listed or at least mentioned in a book about "essential" anime, there will always be disagreements. And different people have different areas of expertise and blind spots - in their introduction, Macias and Sattin mention bringing in some additional writers who could speak with more authority about various movies and series than they could. Even with other authors handling those chapters, Macias and Sattin were presumably still the people choosing the 50 works the books would be focusing on. As someone who's been a big shoujo and slice-of-life fan, there were works I'd have picked that didn't match up with what the authors chose, although in many cases, works I might have featured were at least mentioned in passing in info boxes or during chapters focused primarily on other works.

So yeah, I figured, going in, that I'd find myself questioning some of the authors' choices. I don't recall wildly disagreeing with any of the inclusions (except maybe the choice of Naruto Shippuden rather than Naruto), and all of it made for interesting reading. And boy did the nostalgia occasionally hit me strongly. It's been ages since I last thought about Tekkonkinkreet.

There are no screenshots of anything, so you do miss out on the visual aspect of these series/movies, but overall I thought this was a pretty good read. 

REVIEW: Nefertiti the Spidernaut: The Jumping Spider Who Learned to Hunt in Space (nonfiction picture book) written by Darcy Pattison, illustrated by Valeria Tisnés

Nefertiti the Spidernaut is a nonfiction children's book. I bought my copy new.

Review:

I think I might have found out about this book during a period of time when Facebook's algorithms decided that posts about jumping spiders might interest me. Or maybe someone mentioned Nefertiti and I found this book while looking for more information about her? Children's nonfiction is great for interesting little niche nonfiction topics.

This starts with Stefanie Countryman receiving a Johnson jumping spider egg sac in February 2012. Four spiders from that egg sac survive, and Nefertiti is the one selected to go to the International Space Station in order to test a hypothesis that jumping spiders wouldn't be able to hunt in microgravity. There are details about how Nefertiti's suitability for space was tested, what her habitat on the space station was like, how the experiment went, etc. The book continues until Nefertiti's eventual death a few months after returning to Earth.

This was an interesting read that got across all the necessary basic information. The end of the book included slightly more detailed sections about Johnson jumping spiders and the work that went into creating Nefertiti's space station habitat. I particularly liked reading more about the creation of Nefertiti's habitat, since I'd wondered how her fruit fly supply worked. 

REVIEW: How to Survive as a Maid in a Horror Game (manhwa, vol. 1) art by SINcere, adapted by SUCH, original story by Kim Yom Yum, translated by KRM

How to Survive as a Maid in a Horror Game is marked as "romance fantasy" on Tapas and other places I've checked, although in this first volume it's more of a fantasy comedy. I bought my copy new.

Review:

The main character of this story is an ordinary woman who's started playing a new horror game, "The Murderer of Pfaltzgraff Manor," one evening while drunk. She'd heard that it was horrible and ridiculously difficult, and now that she's trying it herself, she's kind of considering returning it. She decides to give it one last go but ends up drifting off to sleep...and waking up as Hilda, one of the maids in the game.

In the original game, you play as Adrian, the sickly young master of the manor. Adrian is actually the reincarnation of the devil, cursed to inhabit a sickly mortal body unless he can secretly kill off enough people. Especially at the start of the game, his most accessible and easiest victims are his maids. Like Hilda.

And she can't even avoid Adrian, because she's the maid assigned to bring him his daily medication. Somehow, though, she's determined to survive and escape the manor.

REVIEW: Orbital (book) by Samantha Harvey

Orbital is literary fiction with a very light tint of science fiction. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Orbital follows six astronauts and cosmonauts as they go about one day, 16 orbits of the Earth, in their space station. We get little glimpses of their thoughts and lives, as well as a few glimpses of how things are going on Earth, where a typhoon is developing. The science fiction aspect is very light - as these people on the space station are going about their day, other astronauts are about to land on the Moon a second time (I think? it was either that or a Mars mission - I didn't note down the details).

REVIEW: Science Comics: Crows: Genius Birds (graphic novel) by Kyla Vanderklugt

Crows: Genius Birds is an entry in the Science Comics series, which presents educational content in an entertaining way. I checked my copy out from the library.

Review:

A mischievous and very intelligent crow convinces Buddy the dog to leave his yard (thereby allowing all the crow's crow friends an opportunity to get in the house and eat Buddy's food) and join him on a snack-finding adventure. Together, the find food in various places as the crow teaches Buddy about crows and the research that's been done on their cognitive abilities.

There wasn't a lot here that I hadn't already read or heard about elsewhere, but I was expecting that, considering this is aimed at a younger audience. This was a delightful read regardless - the street-smart crow was a good teacher, and Buddy was an adorable, sweet cinnamon roll of a student. The information about crows was presented in a clear, easy-to-digest way, and the art was great.

Sensitive readers might be bothered by a few moments - the crow snacks on a dead pigeon in one bit, and there are some panels depicting dead crows during the part about crow "funerals" - but it's all handled in a matter-of-fact way.