[Review] The Circus Rose by Betsy Cornwell

Cover image from the goodreads website.

Series or Stand Alone: Stand Alone

Release Date: 16 June, 2020

Publisher: Clarion Books

Genre: Young Adult Fiction/Fantasy and Folk Lore/Fairytell Retelling/LGBTQIA+ Fiction/Romance

ISBN: 9781328639509

Edition: Hardback (available in audiobook, eBook, and paperback)

Rating: ★★★★☆

Review Written: 9 September, 2020
Warnings: Magic, Queer relationships, Depictions of Humans being turned into animals

Summary:  

A queer retelling of “Snow White and Rose Red” in which teenage twins battle evil religious extremists to save their loves and their circus family.

Twins Rosie and Ivory have grown up at their ringmaster mother’s knee, and after years on the road, they’re returning to Port End, the closest place to home they know. Yet something has changed in the bustling city: fundamentalist flyers paper the walls and preachers fill the squares, warning of shadows falling over the land. The circus prepares a triumphant homecoming show, full of lights and spectacle that could chase away even the darkest shadow. But during Rosie’s tightrope act, disaster strikes.

In this lush, sensuous novel interwoven with themes of social justice and found family, it’s up to Ivory and her magician love—with the help of a dancing bear—to track down an evil priest and save their circus family before it’s too late.

See more by Betsy Cornwell at her website.

[Review] Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

Cover image from the goodreads website.

Series or Stand Alone: Terra Ignota #1

Release Date: 10 May, 2016

Publisher: Tor Books

Genre: Science Fiction/Futuristic/Political Science/Thriller/Suspense

ISBN: 9780765378002

Edition: Hardback (available in audiobook, eBook, and paperback)

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Review Written: 8 September, 2020
Warnings: Strong language, graphic description of violence and murder, cliffhanger

Summary:  

Mycroft Canner is a convict. For his crimes he is required, as is the custom of the 25th century, to wander the world being as useful as he can to all he meets. Carlyle Foster is a sensayer--a spiritual counselor in a world that has outlawed the public practice of religion, but which also knows that the inner lives of humans cannot be wished away.

The world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours would be to a native of the 1500s. It is a hard-won utopia built on technologically-generated abundance, and also on complex and mandatory systems of labeling all public writing and speech. What seem to us normal gender distinctions are now distinctly taboo in most social situations. And most of the world's population is affiliated with globe-girdling clans of the like-minded, whose endless economic and cultural competition is carefully managed by central planners of inestimable subtlety. To us it seems like a mad combination of heaven and hell. To them, it seems like normal life.

And in this world, Mycroft and Carlyle have stumbled on the wild card that may destablize the system: the boy Bridger, who can effortlessly make his wishes come true. Who can, it would seem, bring inanimate objects to life... 

See more by Ada Palmer at her website.