Once common in LA’s Eisenhower years, just a few of these giant donuts remained in greater Los Angeles.

This is very helpful to me, a non-musician, and it made me want to ask Aoki a ton of questions about her own musical background. Tremon’s main assignment at the moment is ensuring that hell gets its promised seventh soul from Shizuka; his methods become increasingly devilish and his check-ins more frequent as his doubt in Shizuka grows.The shadow of Godolia’s tyrannical rule is spreading, aided by their giant mechanized weapons known as Windups. When she hears teenager Katrina Nguyen playing in the park, she recognizes something in the girl’s playing: she’s far from being a virtuoso right now, but she has an instinct that can’t be taught.

Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Aoki draws from her own experiences as a queer Japanese American woman to craft a dark but ultimately hopeful sci-fi exploration of the threats faced by queer people of color. If you are an inveterate reader, the odds are good, better than good actually, that fellow readers or close friends (sometimes, happily, they are both) that at some point they will recommend a book to you.So for much of the story, we exist in a calculated limbo of Aoki’s design, wondering how Shizuka might possibly cheat her way out of her deal, thus redeeming and saving herself at the same time. A queer love affair sparks between an older tech entrepreneur trying to launch a “safe space” app and a disillusioned young teacher obsessed with Moby-Dick. We then switch perspectives to Shizuka Satomi, a legendary violin teacher nicknamed the Queen of Hell looking for her 7th and final student.