Review: Wicked Problems by Max Gladstone

Gladstone’s world counts, in my mind, as urban fantasy despite being wholly a secondary world. This book particularly highlights the cities themselves and the use of magitech. And it feels a bit like it might be California.

The young woman from the first book, Dawn, is about to steal something from a disaster zone. The book jumps between POV characters a lot…in a few places too quickly for me. But it also features such delights as cosmic squid and serpents, a massive necromantic battle, and doomed lesbians.

Gotta love the doomed lesbians. Hopefully that will all be resolved in book three. This is a high magic world, and Gladstone raises the magic even further in this volume.

Sure, the powerful characters have limitations, but it almost feels like Amber in that those limitations don’t…always come up.

In fact, the only way to defeat a god is by grabbing the people they care about. Always figured that’s how you get Superman too…

Oh, and lots of tentacles both on the cover and in the book itself. We don’t see much of Tara in this one.

Well worth reading as long as you can keep up with the POV switches.

I received a copy of this book for award consideration purposes.

Review: Office of the Lost by J. Scott Coatsworth and Kim Fielding

This book is a duet – Scott writes Crispin and Kim writes Leopold. It fits together seamlessly, though.

The down side is that this book involves one of my least favorite romance tropes, Fated Mates, with a side of the kind of Forced Proximity I’m not fond of.

Fortunately, Coatsworth’s overall goofiness makes it much more palatable, and Fielding plays along nicely. Crispin is a desk fae working for the Office of the Lost, where the Oracles send Curators out to collect objects that might be useful later. Some of those objects are animate.

But when Crispin is sent to collect a person, from the worst world of all (Earth, natch), things get interesting.

Crispin and Leopold are absolutely adorable together, which is another reason I forgive the Bad Tropes <tm>. If you happen to like those tropes, you’ll probably enjoy this book a lot more than I did…and even not liking them it was still a romp.

I received a free copy of this book.