Legendborn tries to do a few too many things at the same time, and as a result is a bit messy and inconsistent when it could have been great. Bree Matthews is a gifted high-school student who gets accepted to an “Early College” program at UNC Chapel Hill along with her best friend Alice. She’s excited to attend, but everything changes when her mom dies in a car accident the day after she receives her acceptance. When she arrives at UNC, she’s dealing with her grief, being a Black girl in a mostly white campus - and a secret society of demon hunters called the Legendborn.

What would happen if, in the not-to-distant-future, a benevolent AI who likes cat pictures were unleashed upon the Internet? And what would happen if it became the administrator of an online chat forum with a bunch of high school students looking for a community? Catfishing on CatNet tells the story of Steph, a lonely teenager who lives with her mom, the two of them constantly on the run from her dad and always moving from small midwestern town to small midwestern town. Steph’s one constant is her “Clowder,” an online community administrated by CheshireCat - who happens to be a benevolent AI who likes cat pictures.

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.

Iron Widow is not a subtle story. Wu Zetian seeks revenge for her sister’s death at the hands of war hero Yang Guang, a Chrysalis pilot who regularly kills female concubine copilots during battle. Only her sister wasn’t killed during battle; instead, he killed her for some unknown reason outside of combat, and her family wasn’t given any monetary compensation as a result. Her family isn’t upset about the death, they’re just upset about the lack of money. Wu Zetian’s upset about the treatment of women in society.

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.

Technically this is a DNF review; I only read the first five stories, to complete non-hard-mode Bingo, but I wasn’t intending to read the entire anthology unless I really enjoyed the first five stores that I read, and I didn’t. I’m not really a fan of short stories in general, and these weren’t particularly captivating.

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.

The premise is compelling - A “Peter Pan” retelling with an adult Wendy whose brothers never returned from Neverland with her - but the execution is anything but. The majority of Lost in the Never Woods takes place in the “real world,” a quiet, boring town that was disrupted several years ago when Wendy and her brothers disappeared for several months and only Wendy returned. The rest takes place in the nearby woods. None of it takes place in, you know, Neverland.

My first reaction to The House in the Cerulean Sea was that it was an overly-sweet story that was objectively pretty good but just not for me. I would have rated it 4/5 or so with a personal enjoyment of maybe 2/5. But then I read this review on Goodreads about how according to the author it’s directly inspired by Canada’s Sixties Scoop, and both my overall and personal ratings changed to 1/5, in agreement with that rating.