The Sun and Star by Rick Riordan and Mark Oshiro

Fun fact about me, I was super into the Percy Jackson series growing up! Read all the books, read the roman and egyptian spin offs, and I felt my heart flourish when I found out Nico, an actually important character, was gay!! For real, that was a pretty important moment for me as it was around the time I was still figuring myself out.
Fast forward around 10 years and it's come to my attention that Nico now has his own book, how exciting!! And right when I'm on my "quest" to read gay fantasy, it's a fun coincidence!
.......sadly though it's a funner coincidence than book. This... is fine. It's serviceable. But man is it dull. Part of it might be that I'm not up to date with the whole of the Percy Jackson universe, the book mentioned a good couple events that I'd never read, but it was easy enough to figure out the state of things, especially since this book is mostly standalone.
What really let me down though was Nico himself, and most of the characters really. It may be that I'm older but there wasn't really any genuine charm to them? Or there was but... it felt adolescent. And not really in an interesting way, which made it odder when the book tried so hard to grapple with things like Nico's trauma. It felt more that corporate decided "Oh lets have a book where Nico faces his traumas and has an adventure with his boyfriend the Gays(tm) will love that." and I don't know if I can give a more harsh critiscisim than that. It also made me feel odd that I'd been away from this series for so long but all the events and characters seemed to be just the same from a decate ago?! Somehow?? Bleh.
Is it competently written? Sure. Is it a slog to get through? Not really! But it doesn't feel interesting or really all that fun.

Teacher of the Year by M.A. Wardell

A perfectly lovely little story about a teacher ending up with the handsome divorced father of one of his new students.
Not really much to say here, it's cute, the characters are fun and entertaining, and even if where it ended up was predictable, it was a nice ride. I will say though that happy as I was to see that there wasnt an old "oh miscommunication..." moment in the book it did have something pretty close to it, which was a touch of a hassle to power through.