2025/002: The Bride of the Blue Wind — Victoria Goddard

"Never once," said Sardeet, "did he ask me my name." [chapter 5]

I started reading this expecting a novel: it's a novella, the first in Goddard's 'Sisters Avramapul trilogy', featuring the three daughters (Sardeet, Pali and Arzu) of the Bandit Queen of the Oclaresh. This is the story of how Sardeet became the bride of a powerful spirit, the Blue Wind, and how Pali and Arzu rescued her. It's a version of the Bluebeard story with an Arabian Nights flavour, intense and poetic. 

I think I would have liked it better if Sardeet (later to be known as the most beautiful woman in the Nine Worlds) had been older, but she's fourteen when the Blue Wind makes her his bride -- and yes, she's consenting and happy (or thinks she is), but I couldn't help thinking of her as a child.

I'm looking forward to the other two novellas in the trilogy, though. Possibly I will like Pali more if I read about her youth: and I know so little about Arzu, the Weaver...

For the 'A book with an adjective in the title' prompt of the 52 in 52 (2025) challenge. Blue!

2025/001: The Masquerades of Spring — Ben Aaronovitch

Later, when I told Lucy about the love that dare not speak its name, he held me close and said that it may not speak its name, ‘But it sure as shit sings the blues.’ [loc. 263]

New York in the Roaring Twenties, the height of the Jazz Age: a city where an expat English magician can listen to the best jazz in the world, seek out the company of like-minded (i.e. queer) men, and avoid the attentions of the Folly, who took a dim view of his youthful japes. Augustus Berrycloth-Young, man about town, has a Black lover (Lucien, or Lucy), a Black valet (Beauregard, who arrives under mysterious circumstances), and a taste for the finer things in life. But he's loyal to his country. When the Folly's chief fixer, one Thomas Nightingale, arrives from London on the trail of an enchanted saxophone, Gussie rises to the occasion and assists, financially and esoterically, with Nightingale's investigations.

This was immense fun, a great start to 2025, and features a drag ball, the Harlem Renaissance and a tantalising catalogue of (sadly fictional) volumes in 'The Further Adventures of the Remarkable Beauregard', which seem to have a Jeeves and Wooster vibe, and make me suspect that there's much more to Gussie's valet than meets the eye. I'd love to read them...

For the 'Set in Spring' prompt of the 52 in 52 (2025) challenge.

For the 'Seriously Long Series' prompt of the 2025 Speculative Fiction challenge. This is part of the 'Rivers of London' series, though it's a side-story rather than the main arc.