It's finally happening - Cyrus and Sarah have finally read The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson! Turns out they loved it, but isn't that always the way with books you've been putting off? Baru Cormorant is a twisty turny hard fantasy novel about the devastation of empire, with fabulous worldbuilding, fantastic characters, and also it's kinda gay. We love to see it. Topics of discussion include the belief structures behind imperialism, the joy of an unreliable narrator, and what the fuck a 'murre' is.

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Did you know it's really hard to write jokes about books with central themes of racism? Cyrus and Sarah find this out while covering Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, an epic historical fiction novel about the the 20th century Korean experience of Japan. Our intrepid readers, who were sooo sleepy this week, cover personal experiences with identity, the Korean horror movie Exhuma (which totally whips), dead relatives, and the mythologizing of the family narrative. Did I mention they're sooo sleepy?

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Are we in the cultural zeitgeist yet? This week, Cyrus and Sarah cover Sunrise on the Reaping AND The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins, the two latest Hunger Games novels, both of which are prequels to the original trilogy. Did our intrepid readers kind of forget how brutal these books can get? Yeah a little bit. But if we've learned anything from the Animorphs episodes, Cyrus and Sarah love it when teenagers experience inconceivable horrors. Also discussed are the comings and goings of tiny animals in our house, the fallout of the book-reading challenge thunderdome, and Cyrus forgetting that marsupials are, in fact, mammals. May the odds be ever in your favor! Is this anything?

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