Swords and Spaceships for March 23

Touraine is a soldier who was conscripted as a child. She’s now been sent back to her homeland with her company to stop a rebellion, where she discovers that some of her blood ties might still bind. There, she also meets Luca, who is looking for a turncoat to help her depose her uncle.

Salo has won permission to pursue his dream of being a mystic despite the taboo concerning the use of magic by men. Disguised by his queen, he attempts the pilgrimage to the Red Temple, only to be stopped by a magical barrier. He cannot return home without completing his pilgrimage, but city politics and the machinations of his own queen stand in his way.

Wendy and her two brothers went missing in the woods five years ago, and that time has mostly been forgotten. But with children newly going missing, her mysterious disappearance (and equally mysterious reappearance) are gaining fresh scrutiny. Then Wendy finds an unconscious boy in the middle of the road, a boy named Peter, and he asks for her help.

For twenty years now, the only way people can have children is via a painful fertility treatment. Children born in this time are monitored strictly, with government controls that allow the removal of children from parents deemed unfit. Kit is a woman who didn’t initially want children, but changed her mind after meeting Thomas. But soon their baby girl, Mimi, is in the government’s sights for removal due to a series of mistakes.

When Lara Barnes’s fiancé disappears on their wedding day, she embarks on a desperate search for answers that leads her to her great-grandmother’s diaries. In those pages, she reads of the dark and magical Secret Circus 80 years ago in Paris, where a daughter of the circus’ owners embarks on a passionate affair and may have set off a curse that will haunt her family for generations.

Amraeya ni Ansarim has lived in a kingdom rife with child disappearances as long as she can remember, but when her friend’s sister is taken, she must seek answers in the royal court. While her rural upbringing and physical disability invite the ridicule of some, she finds an unexpected ally in a foreign princess. With that aid, she turns to the dark streets of the city and uncovers a treachery that endangers the entire kingdom.