Note to self: don’t soft announce a silly pride project, a poetry project, AND let the Steam Next Fest consume your brain all at once.
A week and some ago I reviewed Autumn Wolff’s The Mermaid from Frigid Harbor, which just so happened to be included in Maria Ying’s (Benjanun ‘Bee’ Sriduangkaew and Devi Lacroix) Queer Lights in the Darkness bundle on itch. It gave me this silly idea to check through the bundle for any books I meant to review but hadn’t.
While there weren’t as many as I expected (66 books in this bundle and almost all of them were new to me or already in my to read pile, fuck yes), a few I have read recently and was already working on reviews for, or are short enough to quickly refresh; so, let’s start with the biggest one!
The Hades Calculous was my first introduction to Maria Ying’s enthralling prose and resonant characters. I love it, but The Grace of Sorcerers is closer to my preferred wheelhouse, and DAMN does she make that house HERS!
I’m an urban fantasy girlie. Could you not tell from the way my last, well shit, counting this one, three reviews have been of urban fantasy stories? (The other will get published after the gay reviews) Understand that when I say, reading The Grace of Sorcerers for the first time in late 2024 was one of the most refreshingly unexpected experiences of my literary existence.
I know why it was so refreshing. Problem is, it will take WAY too many words to explain why in detail (though the summarization is lesbians written by lesbians improve everything).
First and foremost, lesbians, thank fuck for cool lesbians.
Second, non-human characters with vivid interiority.
Third, the supernatural isn’t a secret.
That last one… bares a lot of unpacking now that I think about it, but for the purposes of this review I’ll just say it was refreshing to be immersed in a modern world where magic is blended with the every-day grit and grime of a modern existence. It’s by no means a pleasant world, it’s far too much like the real world for that. It is, however, a fun world to experience.
The Hua sisters, Viveca, the warlock of her age, and Olesya, a sorceress and assassin, have such an interesting dynamic. While their overarching goals align, their methods, boundaries, skills, and allies don’t always.
Their relationship felt very similar to the one I personally have with my sister. We both grew up in the same house, same parents, we’d both take a bullet for the other; but we each came away with very different traumas. We approach and evaluate situations very differently. We’re also both messy enough bitches that we would 100% end up dating girls who were themselves exes (there’s a reason we live in separate states, if you read this, I love you, and I dare you to tell me I’m wrong)!
And those exes, oh boy those exes. Yves is a personal favorite (surprise surprise Phenn is here for the hot butch shaped hole in reality), and that’s even before you get to her being The, capital T, Leviathan while in her home reality. And before you get to her ridiculously hot sex scenes.
I’d read The Hades Calculous before The Grace of Sorcerers. I knew Maria Ying writes beautifully lurid sex scenes which interrogate many of the same ideas Talia Bhatt directly addresses in her essay on penetrability. What I didn’t expect was for Yves to be such a catalyst for those ideas in my own skull before I’d even read Talia’s essay. The scene where Yves is pleasured by Viveca in particular is one of the most surreally beautiful and interrogative scenes I’ve ever read.
I don’t think I can speak to Dallas’s character to the same degree; not because it’s not present. Rather, a lot of the plot is tied up in Dallas’s past as well as how her feelings on that past change through her time with the Hua sisters and Yves, and I’m trying to avoid spoilers. Without spoiling, I can say Dallas is a weretiger, in that particular style I’ve been enjoying seeing more often lately, a sapient animal who learned to shape shift rather than a human.
What do you mean I’m 700 words in and haven’t mentioned the villain?! Cecilie Kristiansen is so fucking awful and I love her!
She strikes a delicate balance, managing to be a villain with comprehensible motivations while utilizing utterly alien means. Plus, I’m a sucker for bug based magic; doubly so when it’s only sometimes about using swarms of realistic scale insects. Gimme more big, weird bug magic!
If you’re still reading this review, just go get the bundle. It’s $30 for 66 books including this and the second book in the series, The Demon of the House of Hua, aka next on my reading list after Autumn Wolff’s The Postman Becomes A Bunny Goddess In Another World… assuming I can get reading time before That Night I Got Dragged Home By A Werewolf‘s sequel drops.
