Reading Reality, LLC

10/11/2025

Stacking the Shelves for October 11, 2025

Stacking The Shelves is all about sharing the books you are adding to your shelves, may it be physical or virtual.



This meme is hosted every Saturday by yours truly, - The covers shown here are merely a TEASER! Link to full post in bio to see the pretty covers of ALL the books in this week's stack!

10/11/2025

Stacking the Shelves (674)

This time around, let's start with something other than pretty. Because this stack has not one but THREE books I picked up for the title. Specifically, How to Defeat a Demon King in Ten Easy Steps, How to Talk to Your Dog About Murder AND Slayers of Old. I mean, really, I'm not sure which [...]

10/10/2025

Daedalus is Dead by Seamus Sullivan

This is a story we think we know. Sorta/kinda but not exactly. Because the story, at least as it's presented in the books of Greek myths that I remember, puts Icarus at the center. Again, sorta/kinda, casting King Minos - he of the labyrinth and the minotaur - in the role of villain, while Daedalus is the desperate grieving father of the naive young man who flew closer to the sun than wings made of wax could support.

Icarus has become a byword for hubris. Or perhaps leaping before one looks. A bit of both.

But the original story ends with Icarus' fall. In this retelling, Icarus fall is the beginning. The beginning of daddy Daedalus placing himself at the center of the story and being an extremely unreliable narrator of this tale of self-justification and yes, indeed, hubris. Because if Icarus did fall out of hubris, that apple didn't fall far out of the tree at all. But the metaphor doesn't actually mix quite that way - at least not as this reader read it.

This retelling was more interesting than revelatory. Because this isn't so much a different take on the story - the way so many recent retellings like 's or 's are - as it is the sound of one man clapping pretty much entirely for himself. It does do a terrific job of making these figures out of Greek mythology seem a lot less like plaster casts and a whole lot more human, but the book it reminded me of the most - because of the ways it played with myths and archetypes and defied easy explanation or summation - was by

10/10/2025

: Daedalus is Dead by Seamus Sullivan

My Review: Something about that title probably rings a bell. In some form or another, the Greek myth about Icarus is well known and subject to oodles of interpretation - all of which somehow come back to overwhelming ambition and pride going very much before a really HUGE fall. This is, actually, so...

10/09/2025

The Witching Moon Manor by Stacy Sivinski

The Quigley Sisters are back in this delightful followup to last year's and the magic is even more delicious this time around!

They thought they were each headed for their own HEAs, but they've returned to turn-of-the-last-century Chicago because their dreams seem to be inexorably turning toward nightmares - and it's all their own fault. Both literally AND figuratively.

On the personal side, there are clouds on the horizons of the futures they set out for with such high hopes. Best-selling author Beatrix has writer's block, Violet has lost her confidence in her acrobatic talents and Anne has come to realize that all is not well in magical Chicago. All because they turned aside from the duty as witches to give a dying friend his own ghostly HEA when they really, REALLY shouldn't have.

You know things are bad when Chicago's winter gets so cold that even the mundanes think something is wrong - only because it is.

To put right what's wrong, the Quigley Sisters have a whole bunch of mysteries to solve. They have to figure out why dear old Mr. Crowley's lover wasn't able to go into the light when he died, and rearrange things so they can be together in the afterlife even if no one knows what went wrong in the first place.

In the second, third, and fourth places, each of the Quigley Sisters just plain needs to open up to her sisters, so they can do what they've always done - help each other with whatever has gone wrong. But just as Crowley wasn't willing to admit to his truths, the sisters are having an equally hard time owning up to theirs.

Even while Chicago's winter isn't just coming - it's coming for them all.

Anyone who loved the first book, or who is looking for a new cozy fantasy or honestly who just loves a good, magical Chicago story is going to fall in love with the Quigley Sisters - if they haven't already!

10/09/2025

A+ : The Witching Moon Manor by Stacy Sivinski

My Review: When last we met our heroines, at the end of the author’s positively delightful and utterly charming debut novel, The Crescent Moon Tearoom, the Quigley sisters were saying goodbye to each other at the door of their tearoom, each on the way to their very own fates and happy ever afters....

10/08/2025

Legalist by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.

This series - in fact, both this series and the author's previous epic fantasy political thriller series, the , are pretty much for me. There's just something about watching really competent people do their jobs really well who still get into terrible trouble and make world-ending mistakes that just works for me. As long as those people are trying their best while they are facing those impossible odds.

That this series also invokes a vast sweep of history - even if it isn't our own history - and makes it feel relevant anyway just makes it that much better.

All of which means that this reader had an absolutely grand time with this fourth entry in series, and that I'm already on pins and needles waiting for the next and final volume - which has already been turned in so at least I know I'm not waiting in vain.

But if you enjoy big, sprawling SF/fantasy political epics, if you like watching good people fight the good fight against seemingly impossible odds - but on a chessboard instead of an actual bloody battlefield - this series, might be your jam as much as it is mine.

Start with and be prepared to isolate yourself to fully experience a complex world and an excellent read!

10/08/2025

A+ : Legalist by L.E. Modesitt Jr.

My Review: Looking back at the Grand Illusion series, the very first book in the series, Isolate, was, among its many other marvelous themes and threads, a story about staging a mostly non-violent political coup from the inside. Following with Councilor and Contrarian, the series continues to explor...

10/07/2025

Mirage City by Lev AC Rosen

Los Angeles, 1953, one year after the events of , just in time for Andy Mills' birthday celebration back in San Francisco, while he's stuck in LA on a case, tracking down three missing people and avoiding his mother. He only manages half of that potentially explosive combination.

Because his mom is part of the whole thing, while figuring out what that terrible thing is looks likely to break what's left of their relationship and both of their hearts. He's never told his mom that he's gay - and she's never asked. Maybe she should have. Whether she's suspected, Andy doesn't know.

Just like Andy's never asked exactly what kind of fancy clinic his mom is working at as a nurse. And maybe he should have. Because his missing persons case and her fancy clinic are on a collision course that's ready to explode - in more ways than one.

Andy is a fascinating character because he's such a mixture of regret, remorse and guilt, while at the same time trying to do the right thing AND feeling guilty about the times he didn't. He doesn't feel worthy of respect, but can't stop trying to redeem himself. He's happy and he's scared of it. And we're inside his head and he's pretty honest about his messed up emotions, even when they hurt.

The case is a mess, his client is keeping secrets, and who and what he's after isn't at all what he's going to find. The story is read in the absolutely spot on voice of and it's confusing and convoluted and sometimes even terrifying in all the best/worst ways because it's exactly the kind of thing that really happened.

I was caught up in it completely, and only switched to text because I couldn't find out what happened fast enough. But I was all in, and that's been true of the entire series. Start with and take a trip back in time to noir California. Be prepared for a dark,dangerous and compelling ride.

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10/07/2025

A- : Mirage City by Lev AC Rosen .bsky.social

My Review: Los Angeles is possibly the ultimate ‘mirage city’. Not only does it appear in the heat haze of the California desert as a mirage, but what we think we see and know about it is a mirage created by the Hollywood star-making machinery that has painted the city as the place where there.....

10/06/2025

The First Thousand Trees by Premee Mohamed

The entire series reads as three views of the world after a climate change apocalypse. It's about different ways that humanity survives - at least so far - after the end of the world as they know it. Because they do NOT feel fine, although some of the scenarios feel finer than others.

Which is very much the point that is brought home in this third in the series. Reid and Henryk's world did not come to an end in any kind of bang. There was no big event or explosion. Instead, it's been a long slow slide from the high-tech, interconnected world WE know to the barely hanging on, low-tech, high-catastrophe world THEY are in the middle of.

The three books in the series have shown us three different possibilities, because the health and safety and opportunities for survival have gone down different roads because the first thing that went is the ability to (relatively) easily change one's circumstances by moving to another place. Which has been Reid's point all along, that apocalypse doesn't happen the same everywhere or all at once.

Henryk, not surprisingly considering his entire history so far, has sloped off to the kind of terrible, tyrannical human-made-worse disaster that we expect to see in post-apocalyptic settings. He's a character who seems to always make the worst possible choice for himself, and it results in him drifting into the worst possible place, at the bottom of the ladder. It's not surprising that Henryk got sucked into this mess. The surprise is that he learned enough from his bestie Reid that when he inevitably hits bottom, he's able to dig himself a tunnel and get out.

The series is heartbreaking gem of a journey. A journey that one needs to start at the beginning in to get the full effect of the ultimately catastrophic but still surprisingly hopeful whole.

10/06/2025

: The First Thousand Trees by Premee Mohamed .com .bsky.social

https://www.readingreality.net/2025/10/bookreview-the-first-thousand-trees-by-premee-mohamed/

My Review: The Annual Migration of Clouds series has been an exploration of what happens after “the end of the world as they know it”, which is a very different thing from the actual end of the world. The world is ticking along just fine in this post-climate-apocalypse dystopia, but the humans w...