Audely Bensen Writes

I picked up Freya Marske's A Marvelous Light (2021) on a whim. I was browsing the New Book shelves at the library, looking for a brightly-colored contemporary romance to read. Instead, I ended up with a stack full of Julia Quinn and this jewel-toned book. Then, since I was in the mood for romance and the spine was clearly marked as Magic, I didn't read it.  When I finally got around to picking it up, I devoured it. A Marvelous Light is romance and fantasy and mystery all at once, and I cannot for the life of me understand how Marske managed to combine the pacing and the reader expectations of all three commercial genres into a single book.  I guess the only way to find out is to read it again. 

 I picked up Becky Chamber's The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (2014) on a work friend's recommendation. Then, it sat on my TBR shelf for nearly a month, until I couldn't renew it from the library any longer. When I finally began to read, I ripped through this book in about three days, which felt impressive given I've had a hard time focusing when reading lately. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is similar in many ways to my other comfort read, the Vorkosigan series. It features a captain who holds his crew together by focusing on friendships over abstract concepts of loyalty, and a crew whose desires pepper the book and force you to love them.  During the early chapters, I was really nervous about that crew. Since I've been struggling to focus, I thought there was no way I could keep track of more than a single handful of cast members. To my great joy, I was wrong.  Like in the Vorkosigan saga, the space between the various perspectives gives the reader a ...