I Can Fix Her by Rae Wilde is a horror novella that I had high hopes for. It about a toxic sapphic relationship that spirals into the surreal. Unfortunately, it didn’t work for me in practice. It felt mostly like nightmare visuals without much else to hold it together.
I know this will be controversial, but another book I was disappointed by this year was A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers. Partly, it was my high expectations. I love cozy sci-fi and fantasy, and I am a big fan of Becky Chambers’s The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, so I thought this would be a new favourite. Instead, I was bit bored. I think this would be a great graphic novel, but the novel fell flat for me.
I picked up Housemates by Emma Copley Eisenberg for book club, and while many of the other book club members loved it, I found it a slog. Like the above two books, it’s very visually descriptive—my “inner eye” has terrible vision, so that’s a common reason I struggle with a book.
Finally, I have the one book I wouldn’t recommend to anyone: The Elegant Courtly Life of the Tea Witch Vol. 1 by Ameko Kaerudo. I was confused while reading it, because I thought it was a sapphic/yuri manga series, but it seemed to be about the friendship between a 12-year-old and adult. Then they went on a date. NOPE. (And yes, they specify on the page that she’s 12!)