Things I read in the first quarter of 2024

I meant to write this post in the beginning of April. It’s now the end of April. Am I surprised?

No.

What I am surprised about is how little I’ve read in 2024 so far. I thought it was way more than this! However, I am pretty good at updating my progress on StoryGraph, so if it says I’ve only read four books so far this year…

January

Nothing. Woo!

February

I read two books in February, one of which I had been waiting to read for a long time but was saving until I was in the right place to read it. February is when that happened! But let’s do this chronologically.

My first read in 2024 (though I might have been finishing a December read in January, who knows) was Rainbow Milk by Mendez. I became aware of Mendez thanks to one of the author events I bought tickets for from the British Library: Queer Fantasy, with a line-up consisting of TJ Klune, Tamsyn Muir, Samantha Shannon and Tasha Suri, with Mendez hosting. Seeing that Bernardine Evaristo had blurbed Mendez’ book intrigued me, so I gave it a go.

It’s a semi-autobiographical work that follows two timelines, one more closely than the other. Our main focus is on Jesse, a Black, gay Jehovah’s Witness who gets disfellowshipped by his community when his sexuality is discovered. We jump back and forth in time as we follow Jesse exploring his sexuality and witness the events that shaped him. This book is brutally honest and unflinching as it exposes the way that Black queers are both marginalised and fetishised within the queer community, and though I know a lot of details will have been changed to fictionalise Mendez’s story, I can’t imagine that the truth behind the fiction is any less hard-hitting.

Overall, I rated this four stars. The thing that knocked a star off for me was the phonetic dialogue used liberally throughout—I felt it was effective when highlighting Jesse’s Black Country accent because it was done sparingly, and when used in Norman’s sections because it differentiated his POV from Jesse’s and immersed us in his character, but everywhere else? An entire page of a French woman’s accent typed out for us?? Not a fan.

The second (and final) book I read in February was the one, the only…

The Spirit Bares Its Teeth by Andrew Joseph White.

I’d been wanting to read this for ages. I was also psyching myself up for it, knowing that an unanaesthetised C-section was a hallmark of this novel. As someone for whom the uterine reproductive system and all associated organs are a very uncomfortable thing (hello, dysphoria), I knew I had to enter the right headspace. Once I did, I was in for a treat.

From the moment I read the first few pages I was messaging my friends. I knew that White was a gifted writer from Hell Followed With Us, but TSBIT took that to the next level. As someone who’s writing a medically-obsessed character (who’s also a trans boy!), this was inspiration to gorge myself upon. Writing in first person is hard (for me, anyway) and White makes it look effortless. The setting, the characters, the situation—it all feels so real, and the story so compelling. The world-building is immaculate, with enough explained that you’re not scratching your head without destroying the magic of the mystery. White’s characters are messy, at times vicious, but still they compel you. I loved the intersection of Silas’ identities, how he found a mirror to himself not only in Daphne, the girl who is to be his husband, but the gardener also, finally meeting another autistic person.

This was an instant five-star read and a favourite. I’m trying to be more conservative with buying books in hard copy, but any and all of White’s releases will need to be physical copies for me. I can’t wait for his next releases, even if they’ll make me squirm while I’m reading them.

March

March started with another five-star read, once again thanks to one of the talks I virtually attended! This one was Dark Fantasy, with Olivie Blake, Elizabeth May and Lucy Holland. When talk turned to steamy scenes in fiction, Holland praised the work of Freya Marske, whom she claimed has perfected the art of writing sex scenes that are integral to the character’s arc.

She was not wrong.

Generally speaking, I do not read romance, and I have only dabbled in romantasy (which I enjoyed; thank you, Hannah Whitten’s Wilderwood duology). For Freya Marske, I will make an exception. A Marvellous Light is an INCREDIBLE book. The way Marske describes the magic system is genius; I’ve long thought that the best way to show a world is through the eyes of someone who doesn’t quite fit into it, and Edwin—the uptight, marginalised magician—is the perfect lens through which to do so. Having the complex hand motions of casting magic translated through Edwin needing to use a cat’s cradle, and having the other POV character, the unmagical Robin, marvel at something which Edwin finds so shameful, is incredibly clever. Similar to TSBIT, this is a fantastical reimagining of a real point in history that felt unbelievably real, with enough of the world shown to us for it to have depth without Marske feeling the need to spell it all out for us.

The building of the relationship between Edwin and Robin through increasingly intimate scenes is so effective, giving them both what they need to grow as very different people whilst supporting and slowly understanding one another. As I said above, I don’t read romance, so this was my first time encountering a third-act breakup in the wild, and WOW does that stuff hurt! I knew what was happening as I was reading it, but that didn’t make me want to yell at the characters to just talk to each other and figure this out! any less. Only, unlike the contrived third-act conflicts that I’ve heard book reviewers talk about, this one really did feel inevitable; all the pieces, so carefully positioned in the build-up, fell into place, and the dagger was driven through my heart…part of me wants to buy the rest of the books in this series immediately, whilst part of me is strangely hesitant to in the unlikely chance that they’re not as good.

I’m sure they will be, though.

The next and last book I read for March was another long-anticipated one, I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast is Me by Jamison Shea. I was a little thrown by this initially because for some reason I thought it was a historical novel (maybe because I’d just read two historical fantasies back to back) and then when the main character started playing a song to rehearse to on her phone I was like…wait, what?

(But I got over that pretty quickly.)

This is another immaculately-researched book, with the descriptions of ballet managing to be incredibly detailed without ever verging on being boring, and the Parisienne setting and the opulence of the world that Laure inhabits feeling so vivid and real. Laure, as a main character, is a force of nature. She is denied, time and time again, and she will be denied no longer. Her desire, her abandon, her hunger—it’s so refreshing. I feel like quite often with revenge fantasies we’re cautioned that we shouldn’t want revenge, actually; we should learn to rise above it, to become better people, to take the high road. Laure does not do that. She violently, bloodily takes what is rightfully hers simply because she wants it, and I was cheering her on the entire way.

This was a 4.5 star read for me, and I think that missing .5 was only because I ended up getting a bit frustrated with Laure for not figuring out who the killer was sooner. Obviously, you don’t want the big reveal to happen too soon, but some of Laure’s reasoning for why it must be other people should have applied to the killer also, imo; for me, she should have at least suspected them a tiny bit, even if she had her reasons for dismissing that suspicion. Still, this was a stellar book with a character who embraces the monster within instead of resisting it, and that makes it a winner for me.

So far in April, I’ve read one book and am currently reading another, so it looks like the two-books-a-month trend is set to continue (for now, anyway). The first one is another 5-star read, and an author whose backlist of books I am going to buy based on that read alone, it was that good. The second will also be 5 stars, even though I haven’t finished it, because it is blowing my mind and opening my eyes to truths that I could never quite articulate. I’ll probably do my next wrap-up in July, though, for consistency.

Because I’m, well. You know. So consistent.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯