2018 book 26

Tamora Pierce's Tempests and Slaughter
I feel like I usually like Pierce's books, though I perhaps have found some of the more recent ones overly simplistic. She's going in the other direction here, though--there's a young boy with powerful magic (and a powerful case of puberty, geez louise) and his two friends, one of whom is one of the heirs to the throne, the other of whom is The Girl (who the protagonist has a crush on, of course), and there are lots of politics and magical school things and interfering god and societal issues (it's a brutal society) going on. This did not feel like a Tamora Pierce book to me, in some ways, and I can't pinpoint why--she's had boy protagonists before, so that's not it, though I guess there is usually not as much focus on said boy's penis. The narration also feels really choppy. On the other hand, there is a pretty awesome magical bird as well as a crocodile god, and I liked both of them a lot. I just thought this would be a fun read, but it’s actually a huge bummer. B.