Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

The Great Lab Escape by Perry Kirkpatrick. A very cute but very short story. The story opened in a lab with a bunch of cats and mice being tested on to try to make them more intelligent. Mia, being a typical cat, didn't pass the tests because she didn't want to, not because she wasn't smart enough to. (Which leads to the question: Why didn't the scientists use dogs?) Eventually she escaped and came up with a way to find a good human to live with.

This was a short story prequel to the author's book series (The Kitten Files). It took me about 30 minutes to read, so I feel bad counting it as a book read for the year, but I have no other way to track it. Plus I've blown my 50 books/year goal out of the water, so I guess one more book in my count doesn't matter.

Silver Beasts: Book One in the Mapmaking Magicians Series by Emma Sterner-Radley.

Set in a fantasy world (that part is important), some magical creatures (silver beasts) were making it impossible for humans to live. They ate all the food and killed all animals (and young/old people). So the king of the land decided to take four teenagers and train them to go sail off and find a new land.

While the story was fine, it was the characters that made me really enjoy this book. But the issue was the author.

The book started out with the author listing the editors (good on her! multiple editors!) and then mentioning that because one of the characters was a PoC, that she had a sensitivity reader as well. That made me stop and check again that this was a fantasy book, one not set on Earth. I really don't think you need a sensitivity reader when it's not a race that exists on this planet or issues that this planet deals with?

Or so I thought. The author was really, really heavy handed with elements of racism, slavery, and colonialism in the book. It didn't feel very fantasy-ish, it felt like just a stand-in for our world.

Still, I enjoyed it enough to go on to book two...

DNF #175: Golden Sea: Book Two in the Mapmaking Magicians Series by Emma Sterner-Radley.

The author is a romance/fantasy writer, and that shows so much. Book 1 was really heavy on the "OMG I love her/him so much I'd die for her/him!" I wanted more story, but instead I got teenagers spending chapters pining away for each other.

I pushed through to 60%, but couldn't force myself to keep going, so DNF.