Features of Bluebird include a librarian girlfriend; strong anti-military, anti-colonial messages; a great reluctant partnership complete with nicknames and banter; and a very Firefly, space-western vibe. It’s written in a stylized third-person present-tense that works about 95% of the time. The character relationships are excellent and believable, the banter is well-written, and the factions' mythology sets a great backdrop for the story.

I didn’t love The Changeling Sea as much as I was hoping. It’s a sweet slice-of-life, fairytale, romance story set by the sea. Peri’s mother is swallowed by depression after her father dies, and so Peri goes to live with an old woman instead. When the old woman disappears, she lives alone. She decides to hex the sea because it has taken too many people from her, and she hates it, and the novel is about her learning to find connection to people around her again when strange events start to take place. I’m not sure if I would have liked it more if I’d read it when I was in a different mood, or if I was just never going to love it, but it just didn’t quite give me the feelings I knew it was trying to.

Piranesi is just a wonderful piece of literary fiction that I cannot recommend enough. Wait to read it until you’re in the mood for a patient read; it’s short, but it’s not fast. If you’re not enjoying it within the first few pages, put it down and pick it up again later. I’d encourage you to pick it up without reading anything else about it; the less you know going in, I think, the more you’ll enjoy it. If you’re convinced, then stop reading now.

Scales and Sensibility is a fun, cute, what-could-possibly-go-wrong case of mistaken identities. The plot revolves entirely around the fortunes of a couple families in 1800s England-but-with-dragons and takes place over the span of about a week, so it’s a very low-stakes, lighthearted comedy. Our heroic and sensible protagonist is one Elinor Tregarth, split off from her sisters and living with the insufferable Penelope after her family’s ruination by an investment scam and the subsequent death of her parents.

Fairy tale meets dungeon crawl meets queer romance in this bizarrely adorable novella by Tamsyn Muir. The witch wants to make art, and so she locks Princess Floralinda up at the top of a tower with forty flights. She does it all quite properly, with one challenge per flight, and any prince that wants to rescue Floralinda must face all forty challenges. Unfortunately, even the first challenge is too difficult for every prince who attempts it, and Floralinda remains unrescued. Upon discovering a quite concerning diary, Floralinda decides to take matters into her own hands and attempt to escape the tower. This task would seem insurmountable for a princess, but the fairy Cobweb shows up in a storm, and together they take on the tower’s obstacles.

And Then There Were (N-One) is a delightful, almost warm and fuzzy murder mystery novella. It was originally described to me as “cozy,” which is also a great adjective for it. Sarah Pinsker investigates the death of Sarah Pinsker. The suspects? All different versions of Sarah Pinsker from alternate realities, attendees of SarahCon. While investigating, Sarah is confronted by her “Divergence Points” and forced to question her life’s every decision, relationship, and mistake. But I promise, it’s all done in a delightful, warm, fuzzy, and cozy way! It was a joy to read, and I highly recommend it.

A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking is a delightful young-adult fantasy novel taking on serious, modern themes through the earnest eyes of fourteen-year-old Mona, a baker’s apprentice. She’s lived a somewhat sheltered but not pain-free life until now: her parents died several years ago, and she now lives above the glassblower’s shop, six doors down from her Aunt Tabitha’s bakery, where she spends all of her time, baking and doing magic to bread.

A pretty mediocre YA novel, The Witch Haven is set in the early 20th century in New York, but the historical setting is mostly irrelevant to the novel, and it may as well take place anywhere without cell phones or the internet.

Beneath the Citadel has a lot going on. From the very beginning, there’s a heist that goes south, then a backup heist, then more hijinks take place. It deals with several interesting themes: Prophecy and free will; memory, memory loss, and identity; power and corruption. There’s strong LGBT representation: a gay couple, a bi character, and an asexual character. There’s a bunch of different types of magic, most of them pretty well defined and worldbuilt. And due to characters' abilities to share, read, and erase memories, the plot is almost akin to that of a time travel novel in complexity (there’s no actual time travel) (although philosophically we could ask if having memories erased and restored is equivalent to time travel…). Unfortunately all of this is significantly crippled by characters who do irrational young-adult-novel things, and the novel is weakened a lot as a result.

Phoenix Extravagant is a novel about nonbinary artist Gyen Jebi, a relatively talented artist who’s not so good at being a sibling or adult (but they’re trying! really hard!). After getting into a fight with their sister Bongsunga, they find themselves offered a government job that seems too good to be true, but, not being so good at being an adult, they don’t really have any idea how to handle the situation and end up completely over their head.