Tales of a Librarian

Murderbot: I'm enjoying it. Some minor quibbles, but so far so good. Also, I made icons!



Intoabar: Got my intoabar assignment, and agh! My plan is to do (probably) the last in my SGA/Losers crossover series, and it'll be futurefic, set well after canon. Soooo, the mods gave me an SGA character who dies in season 5! But... I think I have a way around it. Good thing SGA is full of whacky plots!

Book recs:
Overgrowth by Mira Grant. Highly advanced sentient plants seed Earth (like they do with all viable planets) and their offspring/harbingers grow up exact mimics of humans, but tell everyone they're actually plants and the invasion is coming. No one believes them, of course. Then the armada arrives. Very gripping, highly engaging characters, explores issues about predatory sentients (like the plant aliens, and humans), and about found families and whether humanity en masse deserves saving. Although there was an ecological message (the plants aren't happy we've been terrible stewards of the planet), and the ending was happy in a limited way (but horrific in other ways), I felt the aliens were a bit too sweeping in their plans for the non-human parts of Earth's biosphere. And also, they weren't really alien enough for me; Tchaikovsky did that better. Very enjoyable, however, but it is horror, so CW for body-horror, explicit violence at times, and for carnivorous plant-aliens.

Death in the Spires by KJ Charles. Her first murder mystery - there's some romance as well, but it's mostly a mystery. Very well done: a nice complex plot, not too easy to guess the outcome, good pacing, and hard to put down. Set in 1905 England, focussing on a clique of gifted Oxford students (the Seven Wonders) who are haunted by the murder of one of their number at the college 10 years before. One of them, Jem, is driven to investigate, and it all gradually unravels. I liked it a lot. CW for some description of the original murder, and there's a past violation of one character but it's softened by period language and euphemisms. Also, lots of unthinking* period-appropriate slurs like 'cripple' (Jem has a club foot), and regarding the Black member of the clique.

* the author wasn't unthinking, but it's historically accurate so despite many of the characters being relatively enlightened for their times, there's some use of slurs.