What would Gamestorming 2.0 look like if you stripped away the “game” language and applied the underlying facilitation principles to a Zoom‑based graduate‑level Cybersecurity & Audit course?
Starting from three realities:
Anna came over for a slice of my chocolate–quince bundt cake and casually handed me a paper bag full of late‑spring Sierra morels that she and Rene had foraged. I haven’t met Rene yet, but he clearly did heroic work out there because the bag was packed. With that many morels, the direction of dinner was obvious: they were going to be the foundation of a farro‑based roast vegetable dish with plant‑based chicken folded in at the end.
This was also my first time cooking with “Just Meat” chicken, and it was a surprise in the best way. I browned it in a skillet with a little olive oil over medium‑high heat until the edges charred and crisped. The pieces stayed tender inside and the irregular shapes worked perfectly with the roasted vegetables and farro. The whole dish came together exactly the way I wanted: earthy, bright, textural, and built around the generosity of friends who show up with morels.
INGREDIENTS
Farro base (Instapot):
Roasted Veggies:
INSTRUCTIONS
Pre-heat the oven to 450°F for 10-15 minutes, then drop the oven to 400°F.
NOTE: Roast the carrots, cauliflower, and onions/garlic/chile separately. They all have different water contents and different shapes, and if you pile them together you’ll end up steaming instead of roasting.
Toast the pistachios in the toaster oven 1–2 minutes at a time, checking frequently. You can always toast more but not less, and burned pistachios will make you very sad. Coarsely chop once cooled.
Sautée the “Just Meat” chicken in a skillet with a little olive oil over medium‑high heat. Let it brown and char on the edges, then flip and cook until heated through and still tender.
When everything is done, fold the roasted vegetables and the cooked chicken into the farro and morels in the Instapot or large mixing bowl. Add the Bragg's aminos and dried herbs. Add the pistachios and drizzle with the Meyer lemon–mustard–maple vinaigrette.
Serve warm or at room temperature. It keeps beautifully and is even better the next day with the vinaigrette:
MEYER LEMON–MUSTARD–MAPLE VINAIGRETTE
I just finished the 2025 Wonder Woman Hugo nominee and, by Hecate, I’m still not sure how I feel about it. The artwork is fantastic and the portrait-style alternate covers scattered through the book are gorgeous. Visually it’s everything you’d expect from a Hugo finalist.
The story is basically Greek mythology with Diana pasted in. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s definitely not a traditional Wonder Woman narrative. Persephone shows up. Diana eats a single pomegranate seed “out of love,” which binds her to spend one month a year in the Underworld. I couldn’t quite tell if that was meant to be for her mother’s sake or just part of the general mythic logic the book is following.
They also changed her backstory so that she sacrificed her right arm to cast a spell. The reveal comes late, but it’s actually one of the more interesting choices. She’s an amputee, a witch, and still a powerful warrior. The book doesn’t treat the missing limb as a tragedy. It treats it as a mythic cost, which is a very different framing than superhero stories usually take.
Prometheus even shows up, which is when I finally gave up pretending this was a Wonder Woman story at all. He gives Diana some of his blood to forge the Nemesis lasso, and he also creates a zombie Pegasus. Yes, really. It still has feathery wings, but the body is a black skeletal shape, and Diana “feeds” it with magic like it’s some kind of Underworld rescue horse. At that point the book wasn’t even pretending to be DC canon. It was just doing its own mythic thing and letting Diana tag along.
Steve, the love interest barely registers as a character. He’s rescued (alive) in the Underworld for reasons that never quite gel. After defeating the enemy to live on Earth as we know it as an incarnation of Medusa - she appears "stuck" and Steve, the Wonder Woman Whisperer, steps up to remind her she’s actually Diana and she transforms back. They otherwise have zero chemistry.
The part that actually worked for me was the relationship between Diana and Circe. In this version Circe is her adoptive mother, not a villain, and the story keeps circling back to that bond. There’s a line about how you learn to love a child by raising it, and that feels like the real heart of the book. Everything else — the battles, the romance, the transformations — is secondary to that relationship.
I kept waiting for Athena to show up, since she’s the one who sprang from Zeus’s head, not Artemis or Diana. But the book isn’t interested in Athena at all. It’s interested in Circe, in chosen family, in the idea that Diana is who she is because someone loved her into being.
The ending is pure Greek myth. Diana shows mercy, tries to avoid killing, does what she has to do, rescues her mother, and leaves the Underworld. Then the story just stops. No epilogue, no wrap-up, no superhero-style resolution. The quest is over, so the tale ends.
I liked parts of it. The art is stunning and they have alternate covers sprinkled throughout that are stylistically different portraits of Wonder Woman. The adoptive-mother theme is lovely. The disability reveal is handled with more grace than I expected. But the whole thing is a bit of a mishmash. Some readers will love this version of Diana as a mythic heroine. Others will miss the clarity and grounding of a more traditional Wonder Woman story. It’s ambitious, uneven, and definitely memorable.
REVIEW: Absolute Wonder Woman, Vol. 1: The Last Amazon by Kelly Thompson
RATING: 3 stars
I watched both Mickey‑17 and Superman (2025) because they’re Hugo nominees. I never would have watched Superman otherwise, and after this I’ll probably keep avoiding the franchise. Mickey‑17 at least felt like it had something interesting going on.
One of the things I appreciated about Mickey‑17 is how it handles identity in a way that lines up with what I’ve been thinking about since reading Old Man’s War and writing that earlier post about cyborgs and memory uploads. Old Man’s War raises the question of whether someone is still the same person after their body dies and their memories get transferred into a new one. The characters themselves start to wonder about it — and the story never really resolves it. Their world treats memory like a file you can copy into a new body and call it continuity, even though the cracks are obvious.
Mickey‑17 doesn’t gloss over those cracks. It leans into them. Mickey‑18 isn’t Mickey‑17. He’s similar, but he’s also more aggressive, more cynical, more fed up with the colony. He reacts differently because he is different. That’s the whole point: copying memories and experiences doesn’t preserve the person. It just preserves the data. The continuity of consciousness is gone.
What makes this even sharper is how the colony treats the Expendables. They’re commodities. They’re infrastructure. They’re bodies the system can use up because it has decided those bodies don’t count the same way other bodies do. It’s the same pattern I’ve noticed in other stories — Murderbot, Old Man’s War, The Handmaid’s Tale — where some people are treated as infinitely renewable resources and others are treated as irreplaceable. In Mickey‑17, the colony needs the fiction that each new Mickey is “the same person” to justify killing him over and over. But the moment Mickey‑17 and Mickey‑18 exist at the same time, the whole system collapses. You can’t pretend they’re interchangeable when they’re standing next to each other arguing.
Nasha is the only one who seems to understand that. She treats Mickey like a person, not a curiosity. Everyone else just wants to ask him what it feels like to die, as if his subjective experience is some kind of novelty item they get to poke at. Nasha is the one who recognizes his personhood, and that’s why she defends him the way she does. She sees the human being the colony refuses to acknowledge.
Even Mickey‑18, with all his sharper edges, still has a moral code. He’s not just “the angry version.” He’s a person with his own perspective, shaped by the gaps in his memories and the circumstances of his awakening. And he makes a choice that protects Mickey‑17 and Nasha, not because he’s programmed to do so, not because he’s a copy acting out a script, but because he recognizes their humanity. He’s not a defective version. He’s not a spare part. He’s a person making a decision.
That’s what made Mickey‑17 work for me. It actually takes its own premise seriously. It doesn’t pretend that memory equals identity. It doesn’t pretend that you can kill someone and reboot them and call it the same life. It doesn’t treat the philosophical questions like window dressing. It builds the story around them.
Then there’s Superman (2025), which I had to force myself to finish. I paused it, went to bed, and came back the next day because I felt obligated to get through it for the Hugos. I spent half the movie wondering how Lex Luthor convinced so many people to go along with his ridiculous plans — pocket universes, portals, “cities I care about,” whatever that was supposed to mean. And then I saw the endless credits list and thought: all these people worked on this, and this is the result.
There was one moment in Superman (2025) that actually worked for me, and it was Lois interviewing Clark as Superman. She’s the only person in the entire film who seems to understand that “I prevented a war” is not automatically a heroic statement. Her immediate pushback — basically, “Did you? Or did you just decide your assessment was the only one that mattered?” — was the only time the movie acknowledged that Superman acting unilaterally is not automatically noble.
It’s not like he was stopping a giant meteor from taking a chunk out of the Earth and throwing it off orbit. He was intervening in a geopolitical situation with actual governments, actual people, and actual consequences. Lois is the only one who raises the obvious question: who gave him the authority to decide what counts as “preventing” something? That scene had more moral clarity in thirty seconds than the rest of the movie had in two hours.
And honestly, that one exchange just made the rest of the film’s worldbuilding problems stand out even more. If the movie had followed that thread — the one where Superman’s unilateral actions have political, ethical, and human consequences — it might have had something to say. Instead, it went right back to portals, pocket universes, collapsing skyscrapers, and people cheering while their city falls apart.
The worldbuilding is a mess. If you’re going to make up fake countries and fake cities, why keep “United States” at all? And obviously Mexico exists because someone mentions a burrito. It’s inconsistent in a way that makes the whole setting feel flimsy. Metropolis is supposed to be a major American city, but Mr. Terrific and the newspaper editor are basically the only Black characters. It just adds to the sense that the world is a cardboard backdrop.
The destruction scenes are even worse. Entire skyscrapers collapse and people are somehow cheerful. A building ripped in half is a demolition site, not something you push back together like a broken toy. Mr. Terrific “closing the rift imperfectly” and Superman staring at mismatched cracks like it’s a minor cosmetic issue is absurd. That building is condemned. The whole city should be traumatized. Instead, the movie treats it like a quirky workplace disagreement.
The xenophobia subplot, trying to make Superman look bad for being an "alien," has no emotional weight. The movie doesn’t build a world where that fear makes sense. It doesn’t build a world at all. It just gestures at themes without doing any of the work.
By the end, Superman is apologizing to Mr. Terrific for pointing out that a cracked building isn't lined up, and I’m sitting there thinking: you should all be apologizing for the entire movie.
Mickey‑17 gave me characters who felt like people, not props. It took its own ideas seriously. It understood the same thing Old Man’s War hints at but never commits to: that identity isn’t something you can copy‑paste. Superman (2025) couldn’t even keep its own world consistent. One respected my time. The other made me hit pause and go to bed.
I finished An Invisible Parade as part of my Hugo reading, and it’s one of the most striking books in the packet this year. The writing is incredibly strong, and the emotional clarity of the story is what carries it. It treats death, hunger, anger, and fear with a kind of honesty that respects a child’s interior life instead of simplifying it. Nothing is softened or turned into a lesson. These emotions are presented as companions a child learns to walk alongside, not problems to be solved.
The artwork is even more impressive. Every page is dense with sensory detail. You can hear the sounds of the people in the street, smell the food, feel the excitement and tension in the air. The world feels lived‑in and immediate, and the emotional atmosphere is almost tactile. The small touches matter, right down to the cat tucked into one tableau. It’s the kind of book that invites you to slow down and take in each page.
There is one moment that didn’t work for me. The embodiment of “hunger” is shown as a homeless person holding a sign, framed as a reminder to be grateful. That choice felt off‑putting and the wrong kind of message. It reduces a real person’s suffering to a symbolic prompt for someone else’s emotional growth. In a book that is otherwise so careful in how it personifies difficult emotions, this stood out as a misstep.
I also noticed the phrasing in the author’s note: “Día de Muertos is part of my culture.” I rarely see that form; in my experience it’s almost always “Día de los Muertos.” But “Día de Muertos” is a legitimate variant used in Mexico, especially in cultural and institutional contexts. It isn’t a mistake or a dropped article. It’s simply not the form I’m used to seeing, and it caught my attention because the rest of the book is so precise about cultural grounding.
As a piece of illustrated storytelling, this book is exceptional. As a Hugo nominee, it sits in an odd place. It isn’t science fiction, and it’s only lightly fantastical. The figures that appear aren’t speculative beings in the genre sense; they’re allegorical presences meant to make internal experiences visible. That’s powerful, but it doesn’t make the book a genre work. Its strengths come from emotional truth and artistic craft, not from speculative worldbuilding.
It’s a beautiful and moving book, and I’m glad it’s in the packet. But it doesn’t feel like science fiction or fantasy, and that makes its placement on the ballot feel slightly out of alignment with the award’s usual scope.
As part of my Hugo reading this year, I read the 2025 graphic novel adaptation of A Wizard of Earthsea. It’s a beautiful book. The landscapes, the magic, and the sense of scale are all handled with care, and the art invites you to slow down and take in each page.
The storytelling doesn’t land with the same force as the novel or the audiobook. The adaptation compresses the narrative in ways that flatten the emotional arc and weaken the transitions. Some scenes feel abrupt, and the internal stakes that drive Ged’s growth don’t come through as clearly.
A few artistic choices also introduce new confusion. The dragon sequence is the most notable. The panels make it appear as though Ged is becoming a dragon, rather than asserting control through the dragon’s true name. In Le Guin’s world, that distinction matters. Transformation magic has strict limits, and dragons are not beings a wizard can imitate. The visual metaphor muddies that boundary.
There’s also a noticeable inconsistency in Ged’s skin tone. He is described in the text as having dark brown skin, and the graphic novel reflects this, but not consistently. He appears darker as a child than as a young man. Given how intentional Le Guin was about the racial makeup of Earthsea, this stands out.
Overall, it’s a visually rich adaptation and a welcome inclusion in the Hugo packet, but it doesn’t match the clarity or emotional depth of the original story.
REVIEW: A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel by Fred Fordham
RATING: 3.5 stars
This is my first year as a Hugo voter and my first time attending Worldcon. I genuinely had no idea I was even eligible to vote until this year, so diving into the voter packet has been a mix of surprise, delight, and a little bit of “why didn’t I do this sooner.” One of the best parts of the whole experience has been discovering works I might never have picked up on my own, and The Space Cat is exactly that kind of discovery. I’m so grateful the creators made it available in the packet.
The book is a fantastic set of stories about a wild lynx‑point Siamese who travels with his family to Nigeria for the year and ends up saving the world from alien invaders. He’s also secretly an alien himself, and his orange space‑cat friend—who he adores—turns out to be his sister. It’s whimsical, heartfelt, and visually rich in a way that a lot of reviewers seem to have missed. People who complained that the story “wasn’t complex enough” were clearly reading only the text and not the art, because the art is doing so much of the emotional and narrative work.
The depiction of kitten zoomies alone deserves an award. Periwinkle’s first day in the house, running nonstop in frantic loops, mapping every corner and surface, is exactly what my mom’s cat Paddy did when we brought him home. It’s so accurate it’s almost documentary. And the hot sauce incident is hilarious in the most cat‑true way possible: the bold investigation, the instant regret, and then the offended look that somehow blames the universe for allowing hot sauce to exist.
The alien plot is playful and unsettling at the same time. The glowing blue plant‑creatures that mimic plants during the day and take over human minds is a clear nod to "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." The final battle where geckos, dogs, owls, and cats all band together is chaotic and charming. It’s a story about cooperation, identity, and belonging, told through expressive art and tight, efficient writing.
For me, this is easily a four‑ or five‑star work. It succeeds on its own terms: visually sophisticated, emotionally resonant, culturally grounded, and genuinely funny. As a first‑time Hugo voter, finding something this joyful and well‑crafted in the packet feels like exactly what the Hugo process is meant to do—surface stories that deserve more attention than they get.
Gamestorming 2.0 is actually a facilitation toolkit that doesn’t need the “game” label: the book is excellent, but not because the authors call everything a “game.” The “game” framing is actually the weakest part. The competency‑based facilitation is the strongest.
The book is full of practical ways to structure conversations, elicit input, break patterns, and help people think differently. It treats collaboration as a learnable skill, not a personality trait. They even include a section on how to draw, which was surprisingly effective even in audiobook form. That part is fantastic.
But calling these activities “games” feels… off.
And, sitting in a windowless, over‑air‑conditioned basement room with stale snacks, bottled water, and a cafeteria voucher (for a cafeteria with long lines and few vegan options) is definitely not play. You can have better conversations in a nightclub.
When we label these activities as “games,” it creates a subtle performance expectation. You’re supposed to act enthusiastic. You’re supposed to suspend disbelief. You’re supposed to “play along.” And if you don’t, you risk being seen as resistant or not a good corporate citizen. The framing becomes a compliance test.
The irony is that the book doesn’t need the game metaphor at all. The actual value is in the frameworks themselves — the structured ways to think, draw, map, question, and collaborate. Adults don’t need their work disguised as fun. They need clarity, structure, psychological safety, and honest language.
What I appreciate most is that the book respects human capability. It assumes you can learn to draw. You can learn to facilitate. You can learn to visualize ideas. You can learn to collaborate. None of this is innate. It’s all learnable.
If you want to go deeper into the part that actually makes collaboration work — the human part — I’d pair this book with Nonviolent Communication. Gamestorming gives you the structures. NVC gives you the interpersonal skills. Together, they cover both the mechanics and the humanity of working with other people.
Gamestorming 2.0 is worth reading — just ignore the “game” branding and treat it as what it really is: a practical facilitation toolkit for people who want to help groups think better.
REVIEW: Gamestorming 2.0 by Dave Gray & Sunni Brown
RATING: 4.5 stars
All That We Burn — A (Sapphic) Thriller for Readers Who Don’t Usually Read Thrillers
I don’t usually read thrillers. My default genre is science fiction, where suspension of disbelief comes easily because the world isn’t meant to resemble my own. When a story takes place on another planet, in a future society, or in a reality with different rules, I don’t expect the worldbuilding to match my lived experience. I’m willing to accept the unfamiliar as long as the internal logic holds. Contemporary thrillers, on the other hand, often ask me to believe that ordinary people behave in extraordinary ways without giving me the psychological scaffolding to buy into it. That’s usually where the genre loses me.
But Marisa Billions keeps pulling me in anyway. All That We Burn is the clearest example of why her work is growing on me. It’s marketed as a thriller, but what makes it compelling isn’t the danger or the twists. It’s the way she writes about people who are desperate to be seen and equally desperate to hide the parts of themselves they fear will be rejected. That emotional architecture is what makes the story believable, even when the plot takes sharp turns. She builds her world from the inside out, through psychology rather than geography, and that’s a kind of worldbuilding I can trust.
The three central women in this story are all performing versions of themselves. Parker, the hyper‑competent lawyer with the trademark pompadour and bespoke suits, projects absolute control. She wins every case, commands every room, and maintains a polished exterior that leaves no room for doubt. Underneath, though, she’s terrified of vulnerability. Her competence is a shield, and the moment someone threatens her emotional equilibrium, she collapses in ways she never would professionally.
Calypso, with her dark hair and distinct golden eyes, is a Katrina refugee who rebuilt her life into something curated and artistic. She owns a tattoo shop, lives in a loft that feels like an artist's sanctuary, and has created a world where she can finally breathe. But her stability is built on escape. She’s reinvented herself so thoroughly that the past feels like a ghost she can outrun, until it catches up with her in the form of Macy.
Macy is the redheaded cop who is always fumbling, always dropping the ball, always trying to be someone she isn’t. Off duty, she dresses in boho and hippie clothing, projecting a softness and free‑spirited ease that she can’t sustain. She’s petite, fiery, and emotionally volatile, and she’s been carrying a torch for Parker for years. That unrequited longing becomes the fuse that ignites the entire story. Macy’s jealousy, insecurity, and desperation drive her to fabricate a New Orleans case file accusing Calypso of crimes she never committed. It’s a lie built on Parker’s deepest fears, and Parker falls for it instantly. The woman who never loses a case doesn’t even fact‑check the file. Her emotional blind spots undo her in a way no opposing counsel ever could.
The unraveling that follows is messy and human. Calypso flees. Macy attacks her in a remote Washington cabin. No body is found. Parker spirals between guilt and denial. Javier, one of Calypso’s clients, steps in with a kind of ambiguous menace that Billions handles beautifully. Javier is always performing a version of himself too. Maybe he’s involved in sex trafficking. Maybe he’s killed someone. Maybe he hasn’t. The point is that he plays the role of the dangerous man so convincingly that when the moment comes, he delivers exactly the version of himself he’s been selling all along.
Around these three women orbit characters who add texture and grounding. Xander and Xochitl are the stable straight couple, the emotionally functional pair who quietly support Calypso without needing to perform anything. They’re the ballast in a story full of people who are constantly shape‑shifting to survive. Parker’s assistants, too, become crucial; they’re the ones who finally uncover Macy’s lies and force Parker to confront the truth she was too afraid to see.
What makes the book work isn’t just the plot, though the twists are well‑timed and satisfying. It’s the worldbuilding—not in the sci‑fi sense of constructing a new reality, but in the psychological sense of making the characters’ choices feel inevitable. Calypso’s tattoo shop feels lived‑in. Parker’s legal world is crisp and sterile, mirroring her emotional defenses. Macy’s police work is chaotic and full of self‑inflicted wounds. Even the intimacy scenes are handled with restraint and emotional intelligence. They’re sensual without being anatomical, grounded in tension and proximity rather than explicit detail. It’s adult without being clinical, which is rare in queer thrillers.
By the time I finished the book, I found myself wanting to Google “Calypso Boudreaux” to see if she had a backstory website. That’s how vivid she is. And that’s ultimately why Marisa Billions’ work is growing on me. She writes thrillers that feel like character studies with a pulse. Her stories are about the cost of vulnerability, the masks we wear, and the danger of being truly known. Even if thrillers aren’t your usual genre, All That We Burn has the depth, tension, and psychological nuance to pull you in.
REVIEW: All That We Burn by Marisa Billions
RATING: 4.5-stars
I didn’t expect This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me to be a book about identity reconstruction, but that’s exactly what it is. Maggie isn’t a chosen one; she’s a woman whose life stalled at sixteen after a catastrophic breakup, who spent the next nine years drifting through the gig economy, undervaluing herself, and quietly shrinking from her own potential. When she’s dropped into Rellas, she doesn’t suddenly become magical — she becomes competent, and the world responds to that competence like it’s a superpower.
That’s the real magic of Book 1.
Maggie negotiates with mercenaries, frees enslaved children, recruits one of the deadliest knights in the kingdom, and disposes of bodies in what might be a river monster or might be a piece of ancient biological waste‑processing tech. She thwarts a serial killer. She dies — repeatedly — and is resurrected by whatever ancient system is still running under the skin of this world, a “magic” that feels more like automated repair protocols than divine intervention. She builds a household from nothing. She makes allies. She makes enemies. She survives. And she does all of this while still thinking of herself as “average,” “plain,” “middling.” She hasn’t caught up to the fact that she’s the protagonist of her own life.
And in the middle of all this, the book keeps dropping in these fabulous square pastries — flaky, sweet, portable — and Maggie, being from Austin, immediately recognizes the vibe. They’re kolaches by another name. It’s a tiny detail, but it’s doing real work: it grounds her, reminds her (and us) that she had a life before Rellas, and that she’s carrying pieces of that life with her even as she’s forced to reinvent herself. It’s one of the few sensory bridges between the world she left and the world she’s trying to survive.
The book knows this. The world knows this. Maggie doesn’t — not yet.
And that’s where the men come in.
Because yes, the men are absurdly good‑looking. Comically good‑looking. Ramond, Reynald, Solentine, Severin — every one of them is described with the kind of detail usually reserved for the cover model of a romantasy paperback. Meanwhile, the women are framed entirely differently — not as objects of desire, but as fully realized adults with mastery. Clover is tall and “average,” sure, but she’s also an elite lady’s maid, costurier, hair and makeup artist, etiquette encyclopedia, and household COO rolled into one. Shana is a former knight who can swing a mace, command a kitchen, and produce pastries that could probably start a small religion. These women aren’t decorative; they’re the backbone of the world. They’re what competence looks like when it’s lived, not fantasized.
This isn’t male gaze. It’s a narrative trick.
The men aren’t romantic prizes. They’re archetypes — masks, roles, life paths. They’re the versions of adulthood Maggie never chose for herself. Each one represents a different future she could have had if she’d ever believed she deserved one. The fact that they’re beautiful is almost beside the point; it’s shorthand for “this is a fantasy of possibility,” not “this is a fantasy of romance.”
And the masks matter. Book 1 ends with a cascade of unmaskings: Ramond revealing his intentions, Reynald revealing his emotional investment, Solentine revealing his lineage and long game, Severin revealing his leverage and ruthlessness. Everyone has been pretending to be someone else. Everyone except Maggie, who still hasn’t learned how to pretend — or how to choose.
Her kidnapping at the end isn’t a romantic twist; it’s the culmination of her reactive nature. She still sacrifices herself for others. She still doesn’t see her own value. She still hasn’t claimed her agency. Book 2 is going to force that reckoning.
And then there’s the magic — or rather, the “magic.”
Rellas is a four‑millennia‑old society sitting on top of ancient systems it no longer understands. The Eight Families’ powers behave like genetic access keys. The Strelka behaves like a biotech guardian. The river creature that eats bodies behaves like a maintenance system. The mage blasting a meteorite with a laser is not fantasy; it’s physics. The world is running on decayed infrastructure, and the people inside it have mythologized the user interface.
Book 1 only shows us six of the Eight Great Families. We get the warrior families — Arvel’s Enduring Flame, Everard’s Fatefire, Bors’ Rageglow, Savaric’s Exultant Call — and two non‑warrior families, Hreban’s Mirror Heart and Yolenta’s Gold Glean. The other two Great Families are conspicuously absent, and that absence is not an oversight. It’s a promise. Their magic is either subtle, dangerous, or plot‑critical, and the authors are saving them for when Maggie is ready to understand them.
Which brings me back to Maggie.
Book 1 isn’t about romance, or magic, or even politics. It’s about a woman who has been emotionally frozen for nearly a decade suddenly being forced into motion. It’s about competence rediscovered. It’s about the world responding to her as if she matters long before she believes she does. It’s about the slow, painful, necessary process of reimagining a self you abandoned years ago.
The men are beautiful. The magic is ancient tech. The pastries taste like home. The women are competence incarnate. The society is old and brittle. But the heart of the book is Maggie learning, step by step, that she is allowed to choose her own life.
Book 1 is survival. Book 2 will be agency.
And I’m here for that journey. REVIEW: This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews
RATING: 4-Stars
