The rise of ebooks has made talking about doorstop books obsolete, and it’s not clear to me whether the term “epic fantasy” is even internally coherent anymore, as it increasingly seems to mean “not urban fantasy.”
This is a book fundamentally about women, but when I got to the end, I still wasn’t sure if trans women were included. I reread and tried to find them in the narrative, but I was left with their looming absence.
Margins and Murmurations underscores the fact that self-publishing can no longer be dismissed, as sadly still happens—and which is in itself a mechanism of marginalizing trans literatures.
Reading The Crow Garden is not like reading Dracula or The Moonstone), or any other literature of the era it is apeing, because that is exactly what it is doing: apeing, not being.
If Paris Adrift were merely about a lost girl nearly taking a supernatural escape hatch out of her life, it would be a satisfying—if perhaps rather slight—affair. It's the political aspect of the novel that leaves me unsatisfied and also a little troubled.
Middle-school me would be pleased that adult me still has access to books and worlds in which I can easily imagine myself. With Senlin Ascends, though, I find myself groping for any significance beyond the spectacle.
