Reading: Unreal Alchemy

Tansy Rayner Roberts' Unreal Alchemy collects together the first four of her Belladonna U stories, following the lives of the members of student indie band Fake Geek Girl and their friends, flatmates and significant others in a magical alternative Australia.

Like everything I've read by Roberts, this is utterly delightful and just plain fun; funny and geeky and perfect comfort reading, with interesting characters (the point of view shifts between the characters, and their voices are so clearly differentiated that I stopped needing the chapter headings to tell me who was speaking after a while), plots that never get beyond "mild peril" and a queernormative setting. I ended up reading it in two days, because I couldn't resist the urge to read "just one more chapter", and then another, and another...