AFlockOfFuries

she/they • 🌱 🚩 🏳️‍🌈 / Writer & art director for games 🎮 / Support libraries! 📚 / Litfic • Horror • Specfic • Sci-fi • Historical fiction

5563 points

0% overlap

My Taste

Reading...

Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower

AFlockOfFuries commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

SamPlatinum

Midyear Check-in!

Halfway through! Time for a midyear check-in! Some fun categories for everyone to share their reading year so far.

Books Read: 143 Pages Read: 35,417

Best Book: 200 Monas Worst Book: Femme Feral (for using AI) Murder Bimbo (for content) Best Debut: 200 Monas Best Sequel: Villain Best Cover: Headlights UK Worst Cover: Female Fantasy Best Audiobook: Lost Lambs Best Retelling: For Human Use (Gatsby)

Biggest Surprise: 200 Monas Biggest Disappointment: Where No Shadow Stays Biggest Cliffhanger: The Gravewood

Longest Book: Innamorta 537 Shortest Book: Winter Breakage 36

Happiest Book: Pot Shot Saddest Book: The Natural Way of Things Scariest Book: Headlights (for gore) The Natural Way of Things (for plausibility) Smuttiest Book: Dom-Com Most Romantic: 200 Monas Most Unhinged: 200 Monas or Lost Lambs Favorite Character(s): Arvy, Harper, Lili Lowe (200 Monas, Lost Lambs, The Lowe Job) Favorite Book Boyfriend(s): Wolf, Grant, Julian, Caleb (200 Monas, Dom-Com, Pot Shot, The Antiquarian’s Object of Desire.) Favorite Villain(s): Marozia, The Auditor (Innamorata, Villain)

5 Most Anticipated:

The Exquisite Torture of Loving Your Enemy
I Punched an Alien and Now We’re in Couples Therapy
Full Moon Frenzy
Dreamland
Deadbeat
The Knave and the Moon
Sunsplitter

AFlockOfFuries commented on AFlockOfFuries's update

AFlockOfFuries started reading...

Yesteryear

Caro Claire Burke

A traditional American woman, a beautiful wife and mother who sells her pioneer lifestyle of raw milk and farm-fresh eggs to her millions of social media followers, suddenly awakens cold, filthy, and terrified in the brutal reality of 1805—where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister in this sensational debut novel. My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive. Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the Republican equivalent of a Kennedy? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it. Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a brutal reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible. A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, Yesteryear is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood.

AFlockOfFuries started reading...

Yesteryear

Caro Claire Burke

AFlockOfFuries commented on a post from the Founder Announcements forum

lucyPagebound

Voting for community Quests, inspired by Lists NOW OPEN! (6/24/2026)

For the past week, Pagebound Royalty members have submitted nominations for Lists to inspire Quests. Jennifer and I have gone through and ensured all the Lists you'll be voting on meet our Quest guidelines. There are 95 Lists eligible for you to vote on, and you can find them in this spreadsheet.

There will be 3 winning Lists selected. You can vote for up to 3 unique lists (across any genre). Submit your votes via this form through end of day June 30th. Take note of the Quest type when voting (Column C in the spreadsheet)! Many nominated Lists share a theme but vary in length. Preference for a Side vs Main Quest could help you decide which to vote for. Most Lists will be Side Quests, but Lists with many books (~60+) will be Main Quests.

The creators of the winning Lists will be able to accept/reject. If they accept, we will create a Quest inspired by their List, adapting the title & book list as necessary to fit Quest constraints. If they decline, we'll ask the runner-up!

Thanks for voting! Jennifer & Lucy

725

252

AFlockOfFuries wrote a review...

23h

AFlockOfFuries

Jun 30, 2026

Great Granny Webster

4.0

Enjoyment: 4.0Quality: 4.0Characters: 4.0Plot:

🏚️

So much funnier than I expected! I think I'll have to think about the book for a while to arrive at a proper reading of it, but it was tons of fun. A genteel family line of the kookiest, overdramatic people you could imagine that's ultimately haunted by serious mental illness and the decline of their way of life, but overwhelmingly told in such an over-the-top way that you can't help but chuckle at times. Such an entertaining little novella!

AFlockOfFuries finished a book

23h

Great Granny Webster

Caroline Blackwood

Great Granny Webster is Caroline Blackwood's masterpiece. Heiress to the Guinness fortune, Blackwood was celebrated as a great beauty and dazzling raconteur long before she made her name as a strikingly original writer. This macabre, mordantly funny, partly autobiographical novel reveals the gothic craziness behind the scenes in the great houses of the aristocracy, as witnessed through the unsparing eyes of an orphaned teenage girl. Great Granny Webster herself is a fabulous monster, the chilliest of matriarchs, presiding with steely self-regard over a landscape of ruined lives.

AFlockOfFuries made progress on...

Great Granny Webster

Caroline Blackwood

58%

AFlockOfFuries commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

vulpecula

Edited

Never Have I Ever: Book Edition

Check off the things you have and haven't done and give us your total score!

Read a book in one sitting
Owned multiple copies of one book
Spent hours in a bookshop
Gone to a book signing
Cried over a book
Pre-ordered a book
Skipped ahead to the ending
Hated a book everyone else loved
Bought a book for its cover
Stayed up all night reading
Met a friend in a book club
Had a book hangover
Read an entire book series
Damaged a library book
Thrown a book across the room
Binged on reading all day
Fallen asleep reading a book
Ruined a book in a bath

114

181

AFlockOfFuries TBR'd a book

Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

Mark Dunn

Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal pangram,* "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island's Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop. As the letters progressively drop from the statue they also disappear from the novel. The result is both a hilarious and moving story of one girl's fight for freedom of expression, as well as a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere.*pangram: a sentence or phrase that includes all the letters of the alphabet

AFlockOfFuries TBR'd a book

Taiwan Travelogue

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ

A bittersweet story of love between two women, nested in an artful exploration of language, history, and power May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She’s been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste as much of its authentic cuisine as her famously monstrous appetite can bear. Soon a Taiwanese woman―who is younger even than she is, and who shares the characters of her name―is hired as her interpreter and makes her dreams come true. The charming, erudite, meticulous Chizuru arranges Chizuko’s travels all over the Land of the South and also proves to be an exceptional cook. Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, lively banter and winter melon tea, Chizuko grows infatuated with her companion and intent on drawing her closer. But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance. It’s only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what the “something” is. Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan’s highest literary honor, the Golden Tripod Award. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.

AFlockOfFuries TBR'd a book

Penance

Eliza Clark

Do you know what happened already? Did you know her? Did you see it on the internet? Did you listen to a podcast? Did the hosts make jokes? Did you see the pictures of the body? Did you look for them? It's been nearly a decade since the horrifying murder of sixteen-year-old Joan Wilson rocked Crow-on-Sea, and the events of that terrible night are now being published for the first time. That story is Penance, a dizzying feat of masterful storytelling, where Eliza Clark manoeuvres us through accounts from the inhabitants of this small seaside town. Placing us in the capable hands of journalist Alec Z. Carelli, Clark allows him to construct what he claims is the 'definitive account' of the murder - and what led up to it. Built on hours of interviews with witnesses and family members, painstaking historical research, and most notably, correspondence with the killers themselves, the result is a riveting snapshot of lives rocked by tragedy, and a town left in turmoil. The only question is: how much of it is true?

AFlockOfFuries TBR'd a book

little scratch

Rebecca Watson

In the formally experimental tradition of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers and Ducks, Newburyport comes a dazzlingly original shot-in-the-arm of a novel that reveals one young woman's every thought over the course of twenty-four hours. little scratch tells the story of an unnamed woman living in a world of office politics, clock-watching and emoji-texting as she relays what it takes to get through mundanity in the wake of a recent sexual assault.Formatted in continuously interweaving columns that chart the feedback loop of memory, the senses, and modern distractions with witty precision, our narrator becomes increasingly anxious as the day moves on; and increasingly intent on distracting herself. Must she really drink eight glasses of water a day to stay hydrated? Does the word "rape" apply to what happened to her? Why is the etiquette of the women's bathroom so fraught? Does the colleague who keeps offering to make her tea know something? And why can't she stop scratching?Fiercely moving and slyly profound, little scratch is a fearless and defiantly playful look at how our minds function in-- and survive--the darkest moments.

AFlockOfFuries made progress on...

Great Granny Webster

Caroline Blackwood

58%

AFlockOfFuries started reading...

Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower

Tamsyn Muir

When the witch built the forty-flight tower, she made very sure to do the whole thing properly. Each flight contains a dreadful monster, ranging from a diamond-scaled dragon to a pack of slavering goblins. Should a prince battle his way to the top, he will be rewarded with a golden sword—and the lovely Princess Floralinda. But no prince has managed to conquer the first flight yet, let alone get to the fortieth. In fact, the supply of fresh princes seems to have quite dried up. And winter is closing in on Floralinda…

AFlockOfFuries finished a book

Monstress, Vol. 1: Awakening

Marjorie M. Liu

Set in an alternate matriarchal 1900's Asia, in a richly imagined world of art deco-inflected steam punk, MONSTRESS tells the story of a teenage girl who is struggling to survive the trauma of war, and who shares a mysterious psychic link with a monster of tremendous power, a connection that will transform them both and make them the target of both human and otherworldly powers. Collects MONSTRESS #1-6

AFlockOfFuries commented on AFlockOfFuries's review of The Will of the Many (Hierarchy, #1)

AFlockOfFuries

Jun 11, 2026

The Will of the Many (Hierarchy, #1)

2.5

Enjoyment: 3.0Quality: 2.5Characters: 2.5Plot: 2.5

🐺

🔺

The Will of the Many is entertaining. That's the good part.

No, for real, it was a nice plot-heavy palate cleanser (albeit a good 100 pages too long). My frustrations largely stem from it not being marketed as YA, which it largely falls into imo.

The worldbuilding lacks specificity at every turn, which is so weird because the protagonist attends the Academy and mulls over a thousand supposedly academic problems, but none of them are ever explained to us? "We're calculating how Causal and sub-Harmonic imbuing can be combined to reduce the amount of Will needed" - okay, what is it? James Islington throws all these terms around to create the illusion of an intricately built world informed by a complex magic system, but that's simply not what is actually in the book. The magic (or, Will) system is super vague, the supposed mechanics of it are never explained nor do they make sense. Same with Birthright, which apparently dictates that all life is valuable - makes sense based on the name - but also seems to forbid same-sex marriage? So it seems to basically mean "the law" in general but it's never explained? Plus, homosexual relations seem to be generally frowned upon in the society as far as I understand? In a book inspired by the fucking Greeks/Romans? Lmao

This lack of proper worldbuilding is honestly pretty frustrating for a fantasy book. The Will of the Many also tries to deliver some very basic commentary on exploitation, imperialism and corruption that goes very wrong at times (the revolutionaries are uber violent, "no system is perfect, it's just people that are wrong"), but hey, B for effort I guess. I also feel like some plot points would've worked much better in a sci-fi book (e.g., the Amotus and this whole Luceum, Obiteum, Res stuff at the very end) and seemed a little out of place for that reason. Also also, can you tell I was annoyed by the Incessant Capitalization of Everything?

ANYWAY, I had a fairly good time and was actually surprised by a few twists and turns here and there. It was okay.

AFlockOfFuries wrote a review...

Carl's Doomsday Scenario (Dungeon Crawler Carl, #2)

AFlockOfFuries

Jun 26, 2026

Carl's Doomsday Scenario (Dungeon Crawler Carl, #2)

2.0

Enjoyment: 2.5Quality: 1.5Characters: 2.0Plot: 2.0Audiobook: 4.5

🎪

🐦

💣

Worse than the first one. Very disjointed and long-winded imo, and the misogyny still bleeds through A LOT, but it was okayishly entertaining. I wish Dinniman had sticked to one storyline, or two that were more interconnected. I expected more from an urban level with multiple cities, but honesty, that's on me lol

AFlockOfFuries finished a book

Carl's Doomsday Scenario (Dungeon Crawler Carl, #2)

Matt Dinniman

"The training levels have concluded. Now the games may truly begin." The ratings and views are off the chart. The fans just can't get enough. The dungeon gets more dangerous each day. But in a grinder designed to chew up and spit out crawlers by the millions, Carl and Princess Donut need to work harder than ever just to survive. They call it the Over City. A sprawling, once-thriving metropolis devastated by a mysterious calamity. But these streets are far from abandoned. An undead circus trawls the ruins. Murdered prostitutes rain from the sky. An ancient spell is finally ready to reveal its dark purpose. Carl still has no pants. They call it Dungeon Crawler World. For Carl and Donut, it's anything but a game.

AFlockOfFuries made progress on...

Carl's Doomsday Scenario (Dungeon Crawler Carl, #2)

Matt Dinniman

91%

AFlockOfFuries commented on a post from the Founder Announcements forum

lucyPagebound

Voting for community Quests, inspired by Lists NOW OPEN! (6/24/2026)

Thanks for voting! Jennifer & Lucy