Even Though I Knew the End

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I never realized how much I was a body until I didn’t have one, how deeply I was my conscious thought until it disappeared, and I was nothing and nowhere and not. And then I was, and that was when I became afraid.” I lifted the collar of my coat and gathered up my dignity. I was Helen Brandt. He was Initiate Theodore Brandt, and I wouldn’t air out our family business in front of a stranger, even if he knew the rumors anyway.

There is so much I loved about this story. The setting—while necessarily lightly sketched in terms of its magical power players—is delightful: a genuinely seedy and noir-ish city that allows the reader to revel in all the hardboiled tropes (speakeasys, underground clubs, sapphic ladies in sharps suits calling each other ‘doll’) while also not diminishing the reality of living in a world that where who you are is illegal. Plus I am always personally here for angels, demons, war in heaven type stuff. It’s such a wonderful fit for noir.

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Though I Am an Inept Villainess: Tale of the Butterfly-Rat Body Swap in the Maiden Court (Light Novel) Vol. 2 (Though I Am an Inept Villainess: Tale ... Swap in the Maiden Court (Light Novel)) Readers who fell into recent Jazz Age urban fantasies...will love Polk's latest.” — Library Journal, starred review They weren’t Greek to me; I could read that. These marks reminded me of astrological glyphs, of hermetic seals, but I could read those, too. They looked familiar. But I didn’t know them, and I couldn’t put my finger on where I had seen them before. But this is also a book about sacrifice and love and hope and how those three things can take so many different shapes, yet sometimes they look the very same. I highly recommend this one and pray it will be the first book in a series. Damn it. I’d been pinched, and it was my own fault. I had cast no wards at all. I wasn’t great with the invisibility glamour. I hadn’t even set up a trip line. I had been sloppy, and I deserved to get caught.

The flare of pride at my successful spell design dampened as I saw what the enchantment revealed. The crime scene was straight out of a nightmare. Blood painted the walls—not in obscene, frenzied splashes but in the cruel and deliberate lines of magical sigils. They covered the north and south walls, sprawling onto the asphalt to the east and west, and I comprehended some. But the rest? The writing was excellent as was the characterization! I mean, you can pretty much guess in the first minute what it will likely all come down to and yet I was utterly invested and hoped fervently that there was a way out. Whether there was or not, I shall not spoiler.

‘Even Though I Knew the End’ published on November 8, 2022

Rafael Santandreu El método para vivir sin miedo: Cómo miles de personas han superado la ansiedad, el TOC, la hipocondría y cualquier miedo irracional I loved that there was a little bit of everything in here: a noir sort of urban fantasy, a sweet because not overdrawn romance, many magical elements and some nice commentary on what has been done to homosexual people, such as conversion therapy (which, in some places, still is done, unfortunately). I took a bit of my eggs like I was thinking about it. "And all I have to do for my soul and a thousand dollars is find the White City Vampire." This is a must-read for those who like their queer fantasy with a little grit and a lot of soul (pun intended).” — Booklist, starred review But C.L. Polk subverts the typical tropes by writing a main character who’s not only a woman, but a sapphic woman at that. In everything else, Helen stands by the conventions of the genre—she’s a down-and-out detective who doesn’t get along with law enforcement, she’s as brusque as she is charismatic, and while she might have a rough exterior, she also has a heart of gold.