My thanks go to Orbit Books and NetGalley for the advanced reader's copy!

When I saw this marketed as "corporate samurai in space" it immediately got my attention. Unfortunately, I was hoping for way more samurai and less corporate, but if I had to guess, this is 70% corporate, 25% space and 5% samurai.

The pacing is insanely slow, it took until 50% to get my attention and until ~75% in until I was fully hooked. Like you'd expect from a Fonda Lee story though, there's lots of world building. The focus this time was very much on corporate politics, which is unfortunate for me since that's like the one thing I couldn't care less about. Our two main characters are both samurai, here called atiers, the problem is that they are more so pawns to the capitalist corporations with a superiority complex. They aren't self-aware until the like 90% mark of the book where some character development happens but until there they follow this corporate code without questioning anything once and just try to climb the corporate ladders. This book is really densely packed with corporate talk about meetings, political scheming, bureaucratic details and so on. I really couldn't be bothered to care about any of it and therefore also couldn't connect to either of the two main characters, since they're so cold, emotionally detached and only focused on being a good slave to their clients.

What I did enjoy though was that the majority of the main characters were aged 50-70 and our female main character is 50 years old. Even if the themes of the book weren't up my alley, Lee excels at telling a story. There's a perspective and timeline shift halfway throughout the book which added layers to the story and which connected all the strands of the story in a masterful way. In the end I did like the plot, I just took a long time to get connected since there's so little going on, emotionally. I liked the ending but I know it won't be for everyone. It's quite realistic but if you expect the author to clearly resolve all the big problems in the book, this might not be for you. I also was happy about the disability and mental health rep in this book, without any spoilers, there's one mental disorder in this book that I rarely ever see represented in books but it makes perfect sense and was executed well.

In the modern age, witches are no more than fictional magical creatures, right? Wrong! They live in hiding, far away from human civilization, but they exist nonetheless. Humans didn't know that, until one day, a witch comes across a smartphone and finds out about all the pleasures of our modern times and decides she wants to show herself to humans and become like them.

The concept of this manga is so cool and I love it when old concepts like witches are combined with our modern technology. Our main character, Sada, learns about the modern age, about smartphones and social media and she decides to try and get out into society. The interaction between her outdated and somewhat alien mindset and the humans of today made for some fun dynamics. She's been living a secluded lifestyle for hundreds of years and all of a sudden she got all this attention.

Our second main character (and what I strongly assume to be Sada's future love interest), Hana, stumbles across Sada's social media account and feels connected to her. I like how a backstory is established for both main characters right away so you get some insight and understanding into their motives and ways of thinking. I also like how different they are from each other, while neither are the stereotypical meek girly type. Their relationship dynamic is quite playful, yet there's still depth to it!

So far the story is fast paced, I love the art style and character design and I like the way the antagonists were introduced, how there already was some action and how the story is set up. This is only the first volume of course so we're only getting started but I love the start already!

I was highly intrigued to read a collection of works from one of Japan's earliest successful female writers. She inspired some of my own favorite authors and wrote all of her works in classical Japanese, so I was excited to see how the translator would approach this collection.

My biggest struggle with the collection was definitely that the traditional structure of the works is vastly different from what I'm used to. This was to be expected but the lack of any kind of structure to differentiate between who is speaking and what's going on was quite disorienting at times.

My favorite thing about the writing was that it draws such a loving picture of the underprivileged people of the Meji era, it gives a voice to the people who usually aren't depicted in literature from this time period and it captures the social landscapes quite brilliantly. The writing style itself is reserved and gentle yet realistic, there's poetic descriptions that spoke to me a lot. This is a precious piece of literature since it gave me the chance to read from such an important writer and enrich my understanding of the Meji era so I can recommend it for those reasons!

Vile Lady Villains was one of my most anticipated releases of my year, so I want to thank NetGalley, Union Square & Co. as well as Danai Christopoulou for the advanced reader's copy! This book didn't only catch my attention because it's sapphic, but because of how inventive and refreshing the premise of this book is. Using two well known figures, Klytemnestra and Lady Macbeth, and giving them their own story that's filled with fantastical elements sounds brilliant to me.

This book felt very accesible to me, so while Klytemnestra's part felt much more familiar to me than that of Lady Macbeth, the characters get their own names, Claret and Anassa, and are introduced and characterised at the beginning. I also found the writing style to be accessible, it's one of my favorite aspects of the book as it's quite lyrical and descriptive in nature but it never felt overwhelming or purple, it kept a clear tone at all times. I especially liked Anassa's voice. Lastly, I do love fantasy, horror and historical stories and so I found this story to be refreshing and unique in all three aspects. While it uses aspects that have certainly been used in fantasy before, it tries to use them in novel ways and plays with the narrative which I liked. I really loved the way the author played with the perception of time and how meta it was at times.

Now to some points that I didn't enjoy. I love this idea of taking two already existing characters and retelling their story in a way that hasn't been done a lot before. It's not your typical feminist retelling of a greek myth, I have to say that. Though I feel like more could have been done with the premise. Klytemnestra is from Ancient Greece, while Lady Macbeth originated from the early 17th century. That's a huge difference in time and I feel like that could have been highlighted more. Their narrative voices were way too similar, and while there's a magical explanation given, I think it would have been cool if both characters would have been stylised more to sound more different from each other in the way they speak and think. For my taste, the characters were way too normal about going back and forth in time as much as they did.

Another major problem was the pacing. I really struggled multiple times throughout reading this and I think it didn't help that the chapters were so short and it always changed between the two POVs. I felt like I could never be deeply immersed in the story since I was just thrown around between the two.

The side characters also did absolutely nothing for me. There was a lot of potential there and while I knew them from their respective original stories, I don't feel like they had a lot of room to breathe and evolve on the page. While the main characters certainly developed on page, I also struggled with how their relationship was developed at times. It fell victim to telling instead of showing, even when they acted in a way that should show how much they love each other, it could feel stiff at times.