What I Read in April 2026

[tabacoychanel]

 

Shen Tao, The Poet Empress (2025) This debut is not fucking around. You’re either going to cry ugly tears or peace out from boredom (I did both; I have a trick where if a book isn’t grabbing me I read the end first). Let’s start with the stellar cover design which blares: NOT ROMANTASY. It’s “village girl implausibly rises to the rank of empress” but it’s the very furthest thing from a romance. It’s a remorseless road paved with cruelty and torture, but the kind of bleak where you can see the flowers growing in the cracks of the cement iykwim? The most similar thing I’ve read is Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Avatar, which is much more wide-ranging in its concerns, but the core question is still “how to get close to an IRREDEEMABLE MONSTER in order to learn & exploit his greatest weakness?” I enjoyed The Poet Empress well enough but what made it stand out for me was it’ssteeped in Chineseness. By the time I closed the covers I could smell the plum wine and the sandalwood.

Ilona Andrews, This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me (2026)(Maggie the Undying #1) How in the blue blazes is Ilona Andrews so insanely good at fight scenes?? I’m thinking specifically about the red-hot haze of berserker rage, which we see in the Kate Daniels series and we see it again here, and there is not an extraneous comma. Ordinary girl gets reincarnated into her favorite epic fantasy series?! Sign me the fuck up. Soooo I wanted this book to have me a in a chokehold, and it only did that in a few places. Bc it’s Ilona Andrews the worldbuilding is ofc super involved, but in a way that detracted from the immersive experience of reading it. My brain was overheating from unraveling the (overly intricate) plot. I was hooked from the moment I met the invincible swordsman, and then I kept running into roadblocks that sapped my interest. Betimes all the descriptions of minor characters’ eye colors made me feel like I was wandering through a video game.

It was an enormously pleasurable romp. No complaints about the central romance—I found it more compelling than the Kate Daniels romance—and I was charmed to revisit Andrews’ favorite hobbyhorses: Our heroine inhabits a highly inhospitable world? Check. Our heroine’s internal conflict is between independence and genuine romantic connection? Check. Our entrepreneurial heroine starts a small business (she sells scented soap) in a fantasy setting? Check. Our heroine, via her leadership qualities, accrues a retinue of dependents and/or children? Check. The found family/crew of misfits aspect was stronger here than in Sarah Rees Brennan’s “Time of Iron” series, which is the other recent isekai portal fantasy that it’s been garnering comps to.

Sarah Rees Brennan, All Hail Chaos (2026)(Time of Iron #2) Nobody does Attack Dog Boyfriend like Sarah Rees Brennan does Attack Dog Boyfriend. The two iterations in this book, Chaotic Evil (Key) and Lawful Good (Marius), both had me frothing at the mouth. The idea of abdicating your own judgment in favor of your beloved’s and declaring “I don’t have a moral compass, I just do what they tell me” is inordinately hot and also deranged. 10/10 I had a blast.

Brennan is as usual both heartfelt and gleefully silly. Rae’s POV was admittedly tiresome—just because you act like a Rich Bitch for isekai reasons does not make your behavior less reprehensible. I wanted to reach through the page and shake some sense into her. Rae continues to double down on her strategy of “fixing” everyone’s lives instead of, idk, showing some real vulnerability to the man she loves. Rae and Key have this in common, they think of themselves as disposable as far as the world is concerned. That cliffhanger! I’m on tenterhooks for Book 3.

Rachel Gillig, The Knight and the Moth (Stonewater Kingdom #1)(2025) Like going to a RenFaire stoned out of your mind. There’s a lot of romantasy being published these days and most of it is utter tripe, but this one is actually doing something. Unfortunately the thing it is doing outwore its welcome with me about halfway. I don’t regret reading it but had to stop and ask: Am I reading this in good faith? Or am I stockpiling ammunition against my sister?

My sister once attempted to summarize for me the plot of Rachel Gillig’s wildly successful One Dark Window. I wound up more confused than I was going in. My sister tends to have that effect. She counts Gillig among her faves so I felt a professional obligation to finish it so I could have a holistic impression of her taste and give her better book recs, but this book was slow to hook me. She meets the love interest—hates the insufferable git on sight, naturally. Antagonism ripens into attraction as he goes about defending her honor all unasked, yawnnn. My brain kept asking questions like “why is there no stigma against extramarital sex in a medieval setting?” which is a sure sign that I was not invested in what was happening. I will not be reading the sequel. Instead I will continue to publicly roast my sister.