Review: Dark Goddess by Sarwat Chadda

Last January I read Devil's Kiss and really liked it - while it glossed over some things I wanted more explanation on, I really enjoyed it as an excellent work of urban fantasy with a kick ass protagonist who just happened to be bi-racial. In Dark Goddess, Billi is back and tougher than ever - this time tackling Amazon werewolves and Baba Yaga.

It's so cool, guys.

While Billi is still mourning the loss of her best friend Kay, the supernatural creatures refuse to take a break to let her properly grieve. Last time Billi faced the Angel of Death - now she's up against the polenitsy, a pack of werewolves descended from the Amazons. They are searching for the Spring Child, an Oracle like Kay was, that they plan to sacrifice to their goddess, the infamous Baba Yaga. It's a mission that will uproot Billi from her familiar home in London and take her and her fellow Templars to Moscow and the wilds of Russia to team up with the Bogatyrs, the Templars' Russian counterparts, led by Ivan, the handsome descendant of the mysterious Anastasia Romanov. As the full moon approaches, Billi and Ivan will have to overcome their instinctive distrust of others to fight together for the common good.

One thing I really like about the supernatural creatures Chadda creates: they are the bad guys. Sure there are some shades of gray, but the polenitsy are not "kissing werewolves." No one is going to fall in love with these creatures because they are lean, mean, fighting machines, who are more likely to eat you than kiss you, if you were dumb enough to get that close. Additionally, Chadda puts some great twists on traditional folklore - there's the Amazon werewolf connection, which is awesome because Amazons are awesome, and then whole mythos of Baba Yaga. This isn't the scary little witch who runs around in a house on chicken legs; she wields unbelievable power as the physical embodiment of Russia herself. Scary. And awesome, like the werewolves that worship her. With a bunch of women in the roles of both adversary and ally, Dark Goddess has no problem passing the Bechdel Test. Yay!

The action is absolutely nonstop, which some can see as a good thing, but actually ended up undermining a bit of Chadda's worldbuilding for me. It's established early on that werewolves are bad news. As in, two fully-trained Templars could take on one werewolf and probably win - but their chances of survival decrease exponentially if a second werewolf is added to the equation. Yet Billi repeatedly tackles the werewolves, almost always with the odds against her, and she rarely even gets a full night's sleep, let alone a chance to really heal. Since she keeps coming out on top, it takes away the feeling that she's ever really in danger, thus dramatically decreasing the tension.

If you haven't read Devil's Kiss yet, I highly recommend you read that before Dark Goddess. Chadda throws us right into the action in chapter one and spends little to no time rehashing people or events from Devil's Kiss - so even if you have read the first book, you might want to re-read it as a refresher. These are the sort of fantasy books I want to see more of - women who know how to handle themselves and know what they want primarily, and the action is more important than the romance. And in the case of Billi SanGreal, you get all that, plus a bi-racial  heroine!

Review: Stolen by Lucy Christopher

Found via: Publisher's Weekly 4/12

I think I'm just a contrarian, whether I mean to be or not. It's been a few weeks since I read this and didn't make any notes on it, so now I'm looking at the original Publisher's Weekly review (it's starred even!) that made me get this book, and I an't figure out what drew me to it in the first place, since I found it to be a rather underwhelming read.

Gemma isn't happy with her parents - but that doesn't mean she ever wanted to be drugged and kidnapped from the Bangkok airport in the middle of a trip with her parents and whisked away to the Australian outback by a guy who's been stalking her for 6 years.

Ty first saw Gemma in the park in London when she was ten years old, and has spent his life since then preparing to bring her to the beautiful outback. He's convinced her parents don't actually love her, certainly not the way he loves her, and he's sure she'll come to love the wild outback the same way he has.

Lucy recounts her life in captivity in a diary or letter addressed to Ty, detailing her frustrations, anxieties, and even the occasional moment of exhilaration so far from civilization, even as she desperately want to return home.

While the story itself is solid, I felt the pacing was way off throughout the story, as Gemma's captivity only lasts a couple of months, and we never see the complications in Gemma's emotions that she claims to feel at the end. She's diagnosed with Stockholm syndrome, but while she's in captivity Gemma feels no ambivalence, let alone affection, for Ty. Not to mention her escape from captivity feels like a big deus ex machina, coming out of nowhere even after she and Ty have negotiated terms for bringing her back to civilization. I would much rather have followed the story for six months, which would have allowed Gemma more time with her captor with the promise of release and thus more opportunities for complicated emotions to arise.

Ty was a creepy yet oddly sanitized villain and I never felt I really understood his motivations for kidnapping Gemma in the first place. I say sanitized because let's face it, how many real life kidnappings of teenage girls lack physical or sexual violence. Ty maintains he's a gentleman (despite taking a girl against her will) and even shows embarrassment when he has to see Gemma in a state of undress (she messes herself up a couple of times, requiring changes of clothes or even nudity in order to heal from things like extreme sunburn and dehydration).

There are a few brilliant moments of writing. Gemma's interactions with the camel Ty captures and tries to domesticate are heartbreaking, as she confides in the camel how they're both captives and Ty will try to break both of them. It's an absolutely tragic and apt parallel.

Sci-Fi Friday Review: Pastworld by Ian Beck

Found via: Eating YA Books

In middle school, one of my favorite books was Margaret Peterson Haddix's Running Out of Time. The day that the librarians (Cindy and Lynn) book talked it, someone else grabbed it first, so I begged my parents to buy me a copy.

Yeah, I really wanted that book.

So when I first read Jan's review of Pastworld, I looked past everything that had bothered her and focused on the parts that sounded like a more grown up Running Out of Time - a girl who has grown up in a theme park she believes really is Victorian-era London, living under the terror of a Jack the Ripper style serial killer.

Pastworld is the world's most successful theme park, recreating the darkness and danger of 19th century London in the middle of London in 2048, courtesy of the Buckland Corporation. The rich and powerful pay for the privilege to dress up and become part of the scenery, experiencing life outside of the very sanitized 21st century - often taking grisly delight in the unofficial "murder tours," gawking at the crime scenes of murders committed by the Fantom, a mysterious masked criminal who started as a petty thief, but has escalated to committing heinous murders, decapitating his victims and removing their hearts.

Oblivious to most of this is Eve, who is one of the few who believes that Pastworld is real. Sheltered by her guardian, blind Jack, Eve feels stifled. She gathers her courage one day and runs away to join the circus, where she discovers she has quite the talent for walking the tight rope, and is immediately adopted by the circus folk.

At the same time, Lucius Brown and his son, Caleb, have come to visit Pastworld, summoned by a curious letter from Jack after Eve disappeared. The Fantom sets his sights on Lucius and his old friend, leaving Caleb to fend for himself in the unfamiliar city. Luckily, a petty thief with a heart of gold, Bible J, picks up Caleb, trying to shield him from the Fantom and the authorities.

The ongoing threat of the Fantom soon brings Eve, Bible J and Caleb together, all looking to save themselves, or the ones they love, from the end of his razor, even as the police themselves are closing in in an attempt to solve the mystery of where the Fantom comes from.

This book was a chore to get through most of the time. On Sunday evening I found myself 30 pages from the end, in the middle of the climax, and really not caring about how it ended. I forced myself to finish, but reaching that final page was a relief - it was all over!

The narration was all over the place, which made it hard to connect with any of the characters. Most of the book is told from a third person narrative perspective, with occasional first person insights from Eve's journal. However, each of these parts were so short that it was often hard to keep track of one narrative thread. For the first half of the book I was motivated to keep reading because I really wanted to learn how all of these different characters - an amnesiac girl, a blind man, a petty thief, a spiritualist fraud, a rich scientist and his son, a sergeant and inspector in Scotland Yard, and the criminal Fantom to name, well, most of them - were connected. I figured out some, but others were a mystery until close to the end, and quite frankly I just didn't care after awhile because it became so convoluted.

Eve's character also annoyed me a lot because she was written to be so passive. It turns out there's a reason for that in the end...but the scene in which that revelation is made isn't entirely satisfactory, either. To avoid giving too many spoilers, I'll just say that Eve is continually defined by her relationships with men. There's a short time where she seems to break free of that mold while working in the circus, until her love interest comes along and she is reclaimed.

Caleb, our other protagonist, isn't that well developed, either. He rarely acts, choosing instead to react to the madness around him. This makes sense initially, as he's clearly out of his element in Pastworld, but eventually kept me from ever becoming involved with his character.

Ultimately it became difficult for me to believe that Pastworld would be allowed to continue to exist the way it did. All of the citizens are essentially actors with permits to be allowed to live out their roles. This seems to be common knowledge, yet it's also common knowledge that people are routinely murdered while inside Pastworld. How could that be considered a tourist attraction? I never had a real moral qualm with people visiting the historical village in Running Out of Time because the visitors were told only the youngest children were unaware of the outside world and no one knew  vaccines were purposefully being withheld. Compare this with something like the titular prison in Incarceron, another instance of one society living inside another, unaware or unsure if there's another world outside. It makes sense that the prison exists as a circle of hell because the outside world is willfully ignorant. I'm pretty sure that if there were a serial killer in Colonial Williamsburg, the place would be shut down ASAP until the killer was apprehended. Unless the place is run by the mayor from Jaws.

So while the initial premise excited me, ultimately the story was bogged down by apparent implausibility and too many shallow characters. Also? You're going to have to work really hard to get me to really enjoy a book with only one major female characters, and among the other three, only one gets a regularly used name (the other two are the bearded lady and the cat lady). Was there a reason why everyone else had to be a dude?

Sci Fi Friday Review: The Enemy by Charlie Higson

Found via: Teacozy

I love books that mashup some of my favorite tropes. Here we've got zombies (which implies postapocalyptic) and no grown ups because whatever makes you a zombie only affects adults. Awesome.

A year and a half ago, a virus swept the world, affecting everyone over the age of 16. No one died, but their brain functions weakened to the point where speech was impossible, motor functions impaired, and they suddenly had a taste for human flesh.

The survivors - all children - have holed up in various places, trying to survive. Our main protagonists have found refuge in a giant grocery store, but after a year and a half even that bountiful food supply is running low. Even worse, morale is plummeting as the grown-ups seem to be getting bolder and more children have been taken (presumably for dinner) in the last few months.

Hope springs anew, however, when a new boy enters the compound, telling stories of a new society being set up in Buckingham Palace. He promises the zombie threat is actually less the farther towards the city you go, and at the Palace they have all the space they need to raise food, and it will be the start of a new civilization. It almost sounds too good to be true, but even if it is, the store doesn't hold much hope any more, so the ragtag band of kids set off

This is a sprawling, old fashioned, zombie story (but not old-fashion-zombies, because as a kid points out in the story, no one died and came back from the dead. These are zombies like 28 Days Later has zombies). There is a huge cast of characters and several distinct plot lines going on at any one time (not only do you have the main group of kids going off to Buckingham Palace, but there's a lone straggler who ends up wandering through the Tube system). Normally I love big sprawling stories, but in this one I felt like there was just too much going on sometimes, which made it hard to be invested in many of the characters. I couldn't even keep names straight for the longest time, even though each kid we're introduced to has a distinct personality.

I do, however, love that Higson leaves us at the end of the story with just as many questions as answers. For example, no one knows how this virus is going to affect growing kids. This isn't like the FAYZ where you turn as soon as you hit your 16th birthday. Also, we get hints that the zombies may not all be soulless, flesh eating monsters. Are they learning, a la Day of the Dead? Evolving? Or were they never all so evil to begin with?

While sometimes it's hard to remember what name goes with what kid, I love the essence of this story. This is a zombie survival adventure. There's no real romance to complicate matters, none of the kids have superpowers, and the zombies aren't used as an absurd comic device. They are terrifying monsters and the kids have one mission: to survive. Just the way I like my zombie stories!

What SF have you read this week?

Review: Fever Crumb by Philip Reeve

Found via: Publisher's Weekly 2/15

When I saw this reviewed for Publisher's Weely, I vaguely recognized the author's name, but was more fixated on the description of "future steampunk" and happily put this on my TBR list. It wasn't until I saw Lynn & Cindy's review that I realized this was a prequel to another series that I've never read. Their review was published the day I started reading, coincidentally, so I was quite excited to dive in.

Fever Crumb was abandoned as an infant and discovered by the always-rational Dr. Crumb of the Order of Engineers. Dr. Crumb (quite reasonably) decided he couldn't leave the tiny babe bearing just the note HER NAME IS FEVER out in the wilds amidst the social unrest of the time, so he chose to raise her and make her the first female to join the ranks of the Order.

As a teenager, Fever is assigned to be a field apprentice to archeologist Kit Solent, a former Engineer who has specifically requested Fever's help in uncovering a major find related to the Scriven, the former overlords of London who believed they were the next step in human evolution but were overthrown around the time Dr. Crumb found Fever. Unfortunately for Fever, once she steps outside the safety of the Order, her differently colored eyes are considered the mark of a Scriven and a bounty is put on her head. While Kit tries to protect her, she's also troubled by the memories their work seems to be uncovering - memories that aren't her own and leave her with more questions than answers. Who are Fever's parents? Could she really be part Scriven? And where have these mysterious memories come from?

I have to say, Reeve has a way with words. His descriptions are totally unique, and he's filled the dialogue with excellent bits of slang. I have to admit, I was very amused to see that in this future "blog" is a four-letter word. The world is filled with steampunk-ish creations, only instead of Victorians developing technology well ahead of schedule, this is a future where all of our technology has fallen to ruin and people are trying to reverse-engineer it to work on alternate power sources or with alternate materials as oil and the like are no longer an option.

No where on the book is it described as a prequel to the Mortal Engines quartet, so it's clearly intended to be able to stand alone, however once I knew it was a prequel, I found myself questioning everything and wondering what was going to turn out to be important in the other series. I think because I didn't have the knowledge of the other series I can't count this as one of the best of the year, as Lynn and Cindy do. While the story definitely holds up on its own, I bet knowing the other books makes this for a much richer read. As it is, it's a wholly enjoyable science fiction title, and I'm definitely interested in reading more of Fever's adventures.

Review: City of Cannibals by Ricki Thompson

Found via: Publisher's Weekly 1/18

I'll admit, I picked this one up thinking it was going to be some creepy science fiction-y thing (potentially where cannibals=zombies). Spoiler alert: this is not the case. In fact, it's kind of the opposite - historical fiction. But despite the lack of zombies, it's still an enjoyable read.

Dell lives an isolated like in the hills with her father, brother and aunt. They eke out a meager existence with the help of "the Brown Boy" who drops off goods for the family on a monthly basis. With her mother long dead, Dell's father abuses and berates her, apparently for the crime of reminding him too much of her mother. But she stays with her family out of fear of the cannibals she has been told live in the city below. But after one episode of cruelty too many, Dell finally strikes out on her own, determined to find the Brown Boy who she is sure will protect her.

The city Dell lives above is London, which isn't populated by cannibals, but is filled with more people, stink, and filth than Dell has ever imagined. With the help of a few friendly folks, Dell finds places to sleep, earns a few coins for food, and finds the Brown Boy. She also learns that her family was once well known in the city - until her mother's tragic death forced her father to take the family into the hills.

The setting is an interesting one - it's 1536, right when King Henry VIII was breaking his ties with the Catholic church. The Brown Boy Dell is searching for is actually a novice monk, which periodically brings the church schism to the forefront, as the monks refuse to pledge their loyalty to the king and would rather risk death than turn their backs on their religion. So the danger in this story is on two levels - the inherent danger of being all alone in unfamiliar territory on one, and then the institutional danger of a society in upheaval.

There's naturally a love story element to this book, but I wasn't that fond of it. Ronaldo the monk seems a bit too quick to drop his vows to the church, specifically that chastity one, if you know what I mean. And then there's an infuriating period where Dell is convinced she's led Ronaldo to sin. It takes two to tango, sweetie, and while Dell is the pursuer in the beginning of the relationship, by the time it turns physical that's all Ronaldo's idea. Of course, this just proves that sexual double standards are at least older than steam.

But that's really a minor quibble with an overall interesting work. I enjoy reading historical fiction that's set somewhere or sometime different than a lot of other books. The only other historical fiction I know of set during Henry VIII's reign is The Other Boleyn Girl, and while the time period is roughly the same, they might as well take place in two different world's since City of Cannibals is never near the intrigues of the court. (Also, City of Cannibals appears to be more historically accurate)

Review: Carbon Diaries 2017 by Saci Lloyd

Sequel to Carbon Diaries 2015

I could have sworn I reviewed Carbon Diaries 2015 somewhere, either here or at Goodreads. Apparently my review was a figment of my imagination. I hate it when that happens.

Carbon Diaries 2017 picks up a year after the first one ended. Carbon rationing has been in place for Great Britain for two years now, and the rest of Europe is planning on following suit. Water riots are breaking out around the world: Africa is still held in the stranglehold of drought, and in the US, states are threatening to dam their rivers so that their precious water won't travel out of state (especially to places like Arizona where it's felt that people have no reason to be living in the middle of the desert).

Laura, our diarist from the first book, is now in college, still dating Adi, and rocking out with the dirty angels with dreams of a European tour about to be realized. While in 2015 the main focus was on survival in a radically altered society, now Laura and her family and friends must deal with the political fallout. A neo-Nazi-esque group the United Front is gaining traction in London, claiming that the foreigners and immigrants are taking the few jobs that are left, leaving the white populace to starve. Fighting against the tide is 2, a radical and potentially terroristic group that is determined to prevent the United Front from gaining any ground. Somewhere in the middle is the government, who will go to any extremes necessary to keep the peace, even if it means severely abridging personal freedoms.

In the last book we got a few glimpses of what the rest of the world was like through e-mails with family members in different countries, but when the dirty angels go on tour we get to see first hand the political unrest caused by the destabilization of the environment.

I vaguely recall that I wasn't a huge fan of the first book, though since I can't find my thoughts on that one ANYWHERE I can't confirm that. Clearly I wasn't put off enough to want to avoid the sequel, which I did mostly enjoy. Books written in diary format often require me to suspend my disbelief a bit, because how likely is a person to be able to accurately recall whole conversations after the fact? Also, it's a paper diary and there's a resource shortage, so is Laura really printing out pictures and texts she receives on her phone to paste into her diary? She's squatting in an abandoned building at one point - I highly doubt there were printers nearby. So while I like the multi-media aspect of the book, it doesn't really make logical sense.

One thing I did enjoy about this one was the wide variety of view points on the political scene afforded to us by the multiple band members. Two band members grow increasingly radical, though not always for the same cause, which brings about some tension. Another band member seems to care about nothing other than music and wants to avoid thinking about anything even slightly political. Laura is still caught in the middle - she recognizes there are a lot of things wrong in the world, but will her contributions to any one cause actually bring about change? Or will it just get her into trouble and further hinder her dreams of punk rock stardom? There are tons of debates in this book; it's certainly not a light read, but it is a good one!

Review: Heist Society by Ally Carter

Found via: Liz B. at Teacozy

Kat Bishop comes from a family of thieves. Her father expects her to continue in the family business, but Kat wants out. So she puts all of her skills to work in order to gain entry to a prestigious boarding school where she can have a nice, normal life.

Until her father gets in trouble, and it's up to Kat to save him.

Kat's father is the only suspect in an elaborate art heist, that has all the earmarks of previous heists he's committed. He has the perfect alibi: if he was doing a small job in Paris that night, how could he have done a big job in Italy? But the Italian billionaire whose paintings were stolen is convinced Kat's dad is guilty, and coerces Kat to convince her father to return them.

Kat believes her father's alibi, but also knows he's in incredible danger unless she can get those paintings back. She has two weeks to figure out where the paintings are hidden, and, if necessary, figure out how to steal them back.

Of course, no heist like this could be pulled off by one person. Kat pulls together a group of young criminals, including several childhood friends who grew up in the con business; her friend Hale, who's been practically adopted into the family; her often-obnoxious cousin Gabrielle; and Nick, the new guy who got Kat's attention by picking her pocket (at the same time that she picked his). As the clock keeps ticking, the pressure keeps mounting as Kat and her team try to pull off what may be the greatest heist in history.

First, I need to get this out of the way: this is a slickly designed book. Check out the cover:


It's big and bold and while I don't think the model quite looks like Kat (she's described often as being hopelessly unfashionable) it captures the mood of the book well. The smirk makes the model look a little cheeky, which is definitely a way to describe Kat. If the movie gets made, the poster's already done, just replace the model here with the actor and you've got a slick poster. It's also so refreshingly different from the covers of Carter's Gallagher Girls series (see the covers of all of Carter's books here), which all chop the face off of the models, which is a trend I just can't stand. Also the book keeps a clear countdown so we know exactly how many days Kat has left to pull off her heist, and where she's at now, as she crisscrosses Europe in her search for the paintings. The countdown pages are filled with old-looking maps and every time I came to one I got the theme from Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? stuck in my head.



However, slick design doesn't make up for the fact that this book hit one of my major pet peeves: seeming to go out of its way to fail the Bechdel Test.

Heist Society has exactly two female characters who get more than a page of screen time: Kat and Gabrielle. There's also a female Interpol agent who is in charge of tracking Kat's father, but we hardly see her, and certainly don't see her talking to Kat or Gabrielle. There are no women in Kat's extended thief family (her mother died years ago for no reason other than to make another character sympathetic towards Kat). No women work in museums or are art historians, or even serve hot chocolate in the Alps. When Kat and Gabrielle talk, they're usually being bitchy to each other (I never figured out if there was an actual reason for this animosity), and often being passive aggressive about a boy.

The point where I got absolutely furious about this, however, is when Kat and Gabrielle go to confront the man who's blackmailing Kat and her father. Gabrielle accompanies Kat as "the muscle" so this guy can't just kidnap Kat or whatever. Gabrielle doesn't say a word for the entire scene. It's all about Kat. What the hell was the point of sending Gabrielle along? It was epically disappointing.

The ending clearly sets this up to be the first in a series (though it's not a ridiculous cliffhanger - the story is 99% self contained, with one major element to be picked up as a plot point in another book), and I might even pick up the second one, but I can't guarantee I'll finish it if the gender disparity continues the way this one did.

Review: Devil's Kiss by Sarwat Chadda

Found via: BBYA 2010 nominations

My friend Rachel once predicted in a conversation that once vampires ran their course as the supernatural creatures of note, they would be followed by werewolves and finally angels. Personally, I haven't seen any surge in werewolves, but over the past year or so, the TV show Supernatural has been overrun by angels, there's a movie coming out later this month, and Devil's Kiss is at least the second YA book to prominently feature angels.

Billi is a modern member of the ancient order of the Knights Templar. While popular mythology says the order was wiped out after the Crusades, in truth they have survived, turning their focus from protecting Christianity to protecting humankind from a variety of supernatural terrors, including werewolves, vampires, and rogue angels. Today the Knights are composed of 9 members, including young Billi, who was recruited by her father.

As the Templars make more and more demands on Billi's time, interfering with her schoolwork and her sleep, she finds herself wanting to rebel. She never asked for this life, after all - it was thrust upon her by her cold and ruthless father. So when a chance encounter introduces her to Mike, a mysterious boy who seems to understand Billi better than anyone else, she's tempted to reorganize her priorities. Of course she wants to save the children, but does that mean she's not allowed to have any sort of social life?

Shortly after being officially initiated into the order, a strange variety of illnesses begin affecting the children of London. Parents are terrified, bringing ill children into the hospitals, but the doctors can't find a cause for the various symptoms, and before long the children die. Billi and her friend Kay, an Oracle with psychic powers who works with the Knights, discover that the deaths are connected by supernatural means. These deaths aren't random, but rather are the Tenth Plague: the death of the firstborn, as was done in Egypt in the time of Moses. The return of the Tenth Plague can mean only one thing: the Angel of Death has returned to Earth, and only the Knights Templar, including Billi, have any chance of stopping him.

With all due respect to Rachel, I don't know if angels are ever going to be able to get the foothold into popular culture that vampires have. The angel narrative seems rather one note: angels are far from cute and cuddly; they're actually kind of dicks. I don't know how long that's going to be able to hold its appeal. I for one have mostly stopped watching Supernatural and their angels vs. demons storyline, partly because I prefer the monster hunting story lines and partly because the angels are all jerks and that's not the most interesting attempt at character development.

I also don't know how I feel about Billi being the token female member of the Knights Templar. On the one hand, woo hoo girl power, teenage girl proving she can kick ass just as the men do. On the other hand, we know from real life that a woman stepping into a role traditionally held by men faces all sorts of backlash. I'm sure Billi would be protected from some because her father is the leader of the Templars and apparently the only thing the Devil fears, but the only backlash Billi seems to face is due mostly to her age, followed by her apparent lack of commitment to the Templars, and then finally her sex.

I did, however, enjoy Billi as a character and found her multi-faceted. What I thought was particularly interesting is she's a bi-racial character in a story that isn't about racial identity - it's mentioned several times that her mother is Pakistani and in fact Billi is short for her Muslim name, Bilqis. Just as I want there to be more gay characters in stories that aren't about being gay, characters of color should be present in a variety of stories that aren't just about their racial or cultural identity.

I also enjoyed how much the London setting was woven into the story - Chadda is obviously a London resident, as the British setting and slang is a fully realized part of the story. Too often stories that are set in places other than the US feel like the setting is simply slapped on top of the story - definitely not the case here!