Some spoilers ahead:

How do I begin to describe the things this book made me feel? 

I have been a long time fan of Benjanun's work. Her Machine Mandate series and especially Machine's Last Testament inspire everything I write. Her nuanced lexicon draws on terms I've never once heard and always ring true in the moment they are written.

In my personal Discord, I have a channel called #delicious-words. 

Many of the entries are drawn from her works. 

I had not the pleasure of reading Devi's prose before this book (a small fib: I did read Hades Calculus, but I started it after this book. I think. Unimportant), but I can see her influence shaping the familiar wit that Bee brings to everything she writes in a way that is both elegant and scandalous.

It took me a long time to read this book—both to start and to finish. I consider this to be a point of praise. In the wake of my experiences with the Human Domestication Guide community that I will refrain from detailing, much of my capacity to consume written word was consumed with a sour taste. Nevertheless, I picked it up.

I read it in the dentist's office, live-posting my adoration for Dallas and Yves and Olesya and Viveca because I know first-hand how much it means to stumble across such love like a forgotten chocolate bar still-fresh and sealed at the bottom of a bag.

I read it in the courtroom, waiting for a Jury Duty that would not come but took two days of my life entirely. By day two, I was excited to go back to the courthouse; it meant I'd have several hours dedicated to just Maria Ying's delightful storytelling.

I finished it on a plane on my way home, bicep braced to my wife as he sleeps off a trip to visit his family and friends in the Midwest and heart set on seeing my lover who waits for me alongside our miserable little cat who would not hesitate to raise her offensive little claws toward even Dallas as she has no regard for her own safety. We will eat French Dip and I will cry and I will likely tell þem of how much I loved this book and how much I missed þem.

I am lost in my own rambling to make a point: Every time I picked back up The Grace of Sorcerers—whether it had been weeks or months since I'd last touched it—I knew where I was immediately. I knew what was happening. I felt Yves' passion and Olesya's pain without hesitation. It is a rare thing for written word to stick over such time passing, but I never once felt lost.

The last twenty percent of the book vanished in less than an hour on the plane where I write this review. The horror and gut-punch of Yves' loss and the utter delight at her reunion clawed its place into my chest as surely as she found her place within her lover's warmth.

Bee, Devi, and now the other authors that make up the real-life Maria Ying: Thank you. For inspiring, for haunting, for hurting, and for writing such scalding erotica that continues to give me a goalpost to strive toward for my own work and the most perverse little twists of excitement in the pit of my stomach over the marriage of disgust and passion.

As an additional piece of gratitude; thank you for including my work in one of your Itch.io bundles earlier this year. I rarely have the money leftover after bills and groceries and everything else for my household of artists that I am grateful to patron to purchase treats for myself, and I promptly used the proceeds to take my lover out to a fancy steak dinner and got þem drunk as a skunk.

I will look forward to picking up the next book after I keep my promises to the lovely C. S. Cary to read some of her works. And Persephone Effect. And Callisto Khan's The Zeus Constant. And—well, you get the gist.

Until next time, all my love to the cast of Those Who Break Chains; all my respect to the Maria Ying collective; and all my loathing to the repulsive and vile Cecilie Kristiansen, who makes a better bug than a person