If people liked Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein, this is a heads-up that she has a new novel out, The Enigma Game, in which one of the characters appears to be Julia's brother Jamie. It's a bunch of people (including a mixed-race Jamaican-British girl) who are in and around an airfield in Scotland during WWII. And ... stuff.

I have no idea if the ending is as traumatic as CNV, though. Hopefully it will be less distressing than the book about the concentration camp.

Yeah she’s a good writer but I don’t need so much trauma right now! It sounds interesting though

My friend Helen can never see the shelf where my favorite popcorn Celtic fantasy series lives, because she would lovingly mock me until we're both dead. She grew up in an Irish-speaking part of the island and one of her siblings is a historian; she could point out aaaaaaaall the ways in which it's trash. I know it's trash. I don't care: women have swordfights and fly spaceships and no one is sexually assaulted, and that's a horribly low bar but I will take it.

Beverly in the series I'm reading there is one nobleman character who starts talking about his wife and how she seems in his POv chapters makes it seem like she is sweet but not a woman who understands or wants to understand about the current events/politics. Once it's her POV chapter it unfolds that this is not the case.

women have swordfights and fly spaceships and no one is sexually assaulted, and that's a horribly low bar but I will take it

Honestly, it's distressing how high a bar "no one is sexually assaulted" can be. It's an *important* bar.

I don't necessarily set that standard for what I read. I do find that I am reluctant to read something by an unknown-to-me male sounding author just in general.

I don't necessarily set that standard for what I read. I do find that I am reluctant to read something by an unknown-to-me male sounding author just in general.

-t is me.

A couple of years ago I set myself a challenge of not reading anything by white men for a year, and while it's no longer something I'm doing as a rule, I just ... don't, 90% of the time. And when I do, it's someone who I know to be not like the crappy-my-wife-writing run-of-the-mill dudes, and even then it's an imperfect filter.

I think I followed your lead on that, amych, although I don't know that I did it for a year but I did consciously have that criteria for some period of time and then just having it in the back of my mind for a while broke the habit, I guess.

Clearly my decision to write under a gender neutral pseudonym going forth is the right plan.