Tag: fiction

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Review

“The Unbalancing”

R. B. Lemberger

I’m not quite sure how I feel about this one. It’s definitely an interesting world—I’m particularly a fan of anything where the Ancient Magic/Technology gets explained in terms of the current stuff. And the setting is remarkably idyllic… at first.

That’s where my uncertainty comes in; Lemberger created a really beautiful world, one that’s, whilst not perfectly utopian, a heck of a lot closer than ours is. And this story is, fundamentally, about the end of that civilization. Entropy comes for us all, I suppose.

That said, for the setting and magic system alone, I’d recommend reading this one. It’s fairly short, and approachable in that; the names threw me a bit at the beginning, but the naming as a whole makes more sense as the story goes on. Give it a read.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“This Way Out”

Tufayel Ahmed

This is a contender for “most stressful book I’ve ever read.” Science fiction and fantasy are easier; when the stakes are ‘the fate of the entire world,’ it’s easy to remember that these aren’t my problems they’re dealing with. This, though, is much more approachable in scale… which means it feels like the sort of thing I’d actually have to figure out.

Boy, am I glad that I’m already on the “going to therapy” train, reading through someone else’s breaking point that gets them to start was rough. Don’t want to be back there, thanks very much.

All that said, I did really enjoy the book. It’s not quite the Hero’s Journey, more of an immediate plummet and then a slow climb back up, but there’s a palpable sense of progress throughout. You can feel the protagonist’s work they’re putting in, and seeing it actually pay off feels very rewarding. Stick with it through the painful beginning, and I hope you’ll enjoy it too.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Through a Darkening Glass”

R.S. Maxwell

I enjoyed this book a lot more than I expected to. Honestly, most of the way through I was looking at the protagonist like “you’re kinda the worst.” She is, though — bursts into this town and starts nosing around in everyone’s business, digging up the past, and it’s not even a “let’s help people figure this out!” kind of thing, she’s just over here like “I’m an English major and I’m gonna write a book about this!” That said, by the end of the book I was just accepting that that’s what she was like, and she learned some discretion at least, and meanwhile I was having so much fun with everything else going on that I didn’t much mind it anymore.

The overall feeling of this book is… a Gordian knot. It actually did a great job of tripping me up; I thought I’d figured out how everything was going to be tied together into one big bow at the end, and I was hilariously wrong. I think that’s about all I can say without it being too much of a spoiler.

Suffice it to say, I enjoyed the heck out of this book. It struck a truly wonderful balance between some Gothic spookiness, a romance arc, some mystery, a surprising amount of comedy, and a reasonably-accurate historical feel. Absolutely worth a read; check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Cosmic Cats and Fantastic Furballs”

Mary A. Turzillo

In general, I enjoy anthologies; it’s a whole bunch of little things, so generally, even if one of them is bad, the next one won’t be. That said, on the occasions where I consistently don’t like them, they’re an edge case in the way I think about books. In general, my rule is that I have to get something like 10-20% of the way through a book before I can determine that I just don’t like it and won’t be finishing it. With an anthology, I instead feel like I have to give each story a shot… and then the stories themselves are, almost always, too short to be worth skipping once I’m partially through.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that I didn’t really enjoy this one. There’s just something about the way that Turzillo thinks, or writes, that didn’t click with me. Oh well, it wasn’t terribly long; on to the next book.

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Review

“Shards of Honor”

Lois McMaster Bujold

Somehow I had mixed this up in my head with the Honor Harrington books. Which isn’t much of a mystery; it’s space combat sci-fi, it’s got “Honor” in the name, easy enough to conflate.

That said, “Shards of Honor” was a good read; it’s got some Star Trek vibes in the beginning, but getting into the actual Space Combat Sci-Fi parts, it has a whole bunch of different vibes to it. The latter story arc got surprisingly comedic; I think it’s just the protagonist having a solid sense of humor as she faces adversity.

All in all, I enjoyed the read! Give it a go.1

  1. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
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Review

“The Silences of Ararat”

L. Timmel Duchamp

This was an interesting little story; I see now why the collection it’s part of is titled “conversation pieces.” I quite enjoyed the process of piecing together the setting; vaguely in the future, definitely post-United States, with just a touch of magic. It reminds me of a book I didn’t finish, actually – The Fever King had a similar “the USA collapsed, here’s what it is now” kind of vibe going on, although that one was a lot more fantasy-forward.

An interesting read; I’d say it’s worth checking out.1

  1. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
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Review

“Queer Weird West Tales”

ed. Julie Bozza

“Queer science fiction anthology” might be my favorite genre, at this point. Save a couple creepy ones, the stories are almost all hopeful, and the last one in the collection was an excellent anchor to end on, a nice little redemption story. Definitely a bit predictable in what the twist was going to be, but it’s a 40-page short story, there isn’t that much room for surprise.

The ‘wild west’ framing is also a fun one, particularly in the handful of cases where the authors decided to twist what that actually meant. Really it’s more of a “frontier” collection than anything else, it’s just that “western” is the genre we think of for that concept.

Overall, quite enjoyable; give it a read.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Debunked”

Dito Abbott

Something like 100 pages in to this book I looked over at my sister and said “I can’t tell if I like this book or not, but hopefully I’ll figure it out by the end.” Here I am at the end of the book, and I’ve concluded that I did like it, although I don’t know if I liked it enough to go looking for the sequel.1

There’s parts of the writing that remind me of Terry Pratchett’s works for younger readers; the footnoting style is very reminiscent of that, really, but you can feel the different age group as the target demographic. I think the part I struggled with the most was the plot; the book feels less like A Story and more like a collection of setpieces strung together. A ramshackle lighthouse under siege during a storm! An airship full of strange creatures! A flying city next to a desert hurricane! A fortress library, suspended above the caldera of an active volcano! And, honestly, any one of these makes for a fun setting for some scenes, and a good little vignette, but piecing them all together into a coherent whole is… challenging.

That said, if you just want to settle in for a quick read with some solid comedy, this was a pretty good book. Go in with the right expectations, and have fun!2

  1. The book is very clear throughout that it is Book One of the series, it really wants you to know that it’s part of a series and there’s more books to read. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“A Thousand Recipes for Revenge”

Beth Cato

Once again, a really interesting magic system—this time, focused entirely on food, although with a fun theological twist to how it works. In short, anyone can be a cook, but to make truly good food, you have to be a Chef: someone in possession of a tongue blessed by the five gods. Add to that the existence of magical ingredients, and the requirement that they only work when used by a Chef and blessed by the gods, and you’ve got a recipe for a very different course of history than we had.

And, wonder of wonder, this is an author that actually followed that. Some of the different cultures of continental Europe are vaguely recognizable, but which countries actually exist and what they’re called, entirely different. Which is very fitting, honestly; given how much of our history has been driven by arguing about capital-g God, if we had very clear miracles happening all the time, a whole lot of things would’ve gone very differently. There’s no need for converting people when the extremely-active deities are out there doing it themselves.

Wrapped up in that setting, there’s a very interesting story: a former military Chef, now in hiding for leaving military service.1 And, separately, a foreign princess, freshly arrived in this vaguely-France-inspired country to be married to their crown prince, sealing an alliance of their kingdoms. Where it gets fun is finding all the places their stories intersect; early on, it’s just a brief flash of “based on timing, I think that coach the Chef saw go by was taking the princess to the ball!” But as the story goes, you can find more and more moments like that.

Towards the end, the plot gets absolutely wild. Somewhere between an M. Night Shyamalan twist and a well-done Marvel story, in how it feels, but that’s all the spoilers you’ll get from me. Go read the book!2

  1. And, for reference on what time period we’re vaguely in, several of the chapter-start quotes pull from regulations and other materials that very clearly state that a Chef is the property of the Crown. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“The Alchemist”

Paolo Bacigalupi

A sequel to The Executioness, and one that answered some of the questions I wondered about in that one! (If it seems convenient that I read them in this order, it’s because I read the jacket and decided to start with The Executioness so that I could end on the, presumably, happier note of someone figuring this out.)

Because of course bramble, even magical bramble, can’t be the end state. It’s too complex; entropy always wins in the end. And here, someone figured out the proper way to burn it so that it truly dies.

Unfortunately for me, that happened far too early in the story for it to be a happy ending just like that. Looking at how many pages you have left is a great way to stress yourself out about a book.1 Still, figuring out just what would go wrong, and how the protagonist would get out of it, made this one more of a fun read than the first. Check it out.2

As a fun follow-on, after I went to post this review: I have, in fact, read this before, and even posted a review here! It’s been long enough that I had no memory of that, so I’m posting a new one as well. I suppose you can compare Past Grey’s thoughts, if you’d like.

  1. I’ve got another one I’m working on that I’ve had to take a break from for a month or so, because everything is going great for the protagonist… and I’m just barely halfway through. Something is about to go horribly wrong. ↩
  2. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
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Review

“The Executioness”

Tobias S. Buckell

This is one of those stories where the worldbuilding is executed incredibly well, and it leaves me with so many interesting questions. The short version: magic exists! But using it generates bramble—a plant that you apparently can’t kill, and whose thorns, in a very fairy tale fashion, make you fall asleep. I, of course, immediately start wondering about the sort of ecosystem this implies—because, given something like that, surely something has evolved a way to eat it, right?1

The story itself is… not fun, really, but an interesting read, at least. Worth giving it a go, as it was a pretty quick one.2

  1. Or, also a fun concept, maybe not yet! Which does imply that the combination of magic and bramble is, on an evolutionary timescale, pretty recent. And that puts me back into my common thought “how can I explain this magic system as actually being some kind of advanced technology from right before the sci-fi civilization collapsed back to these dark ages?” ↩
  2. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
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Review

“First Test”

Tamora Pierce; graphic novel adaptation by Devin Grayson and Becca Farrow

I somehow missed that this was going to be a thing until the day before it was released. It took me something like ten seconds between finding out it was up for preorder and actually putting in the preorder; I consider it a testament to my willpower that I made it days after it was delivered before I finally let it jump the queue and be my next thing to read.

Keladry of Mindelan is my comfort reading. The visual treatment here brought me so much joy; it’s quicker to read than the original novel is, and I suspect I’m going to wind up rereading it quite often as a result. Sitting down to reread the Protector of the Small quartet is an investment, it’s what I’m doing with my reading time for a while. This, I can get through in something like an hour.

There’s a couple places where I could feel the edits, but for the most part, everything felt natural; sure, the story was abridged some, but all of it made sense.1

Two thoughts on this visual treatment, specific to that: my immediate thought upon seeing Neal was “he looks like Sokka!” and I sorta held on to that feeling throughout.2

And, even more so in this visual treatment where the words stand alone more, one of my favorite quotes jumped out at me. I was glad it made it in:

The short sword is the sword of law. Without it, we are only animals. The long sword is the sword of duty. It is the terrible sword, the killing sword.

It should surprise precisely nobody that I’m going to recommend this book. I grabbed the paperback—I think I already knew that this was going to be an oft-reread comfort book for me, and wanted the comfortable feel of a paperback to match that. Please, vote with your wallet; get them to do the rest of the series, too.3 I really want to see a baby griffin. And, weirdly, one of the killing machines.

  1. Well, okay, the fact that the Gift was shown (only twice) and was the same vague sparkles each time instead of being the color of each person’s magic, that bugged me a bit. ↩
  2. Hakuin Seastone also sorta reminded me of Zuko, although I think he’s a bit more Live Action TV Series Zuko than Animated Series Zuko. ↩
  3. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Prodigals”

Alan Dean Foster

This was a fun little romp of a book. It starts as a first contact scenario, a nice hectic experience for everyone involved as the various contacted governments scramble to pull together contact teams. And then it promptly goes off the rails for them, as nobody’s expectations about what First Contact will actually look like have anything to do with what happens.1

There’s some fun twists and turns in the book, and I quite enjoyed it. Towards the end it went a little funny, but I think… reasonably stuck the landing. Check it out.2

  1. And I am, frankly, delighted that the book managed to come up with a coherent reason for why this first contact was completely nonsensical in a way that most First Contact stories completely fail at. They’re from space. Do you know how much stuff there is out there? Why would an advanced race bother landing on a planet to mine for resources? ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Embers”

Vathara

I really enjoy the genre of “alternate history” — the idea of taking one moment in time and twisting it so that something went differently, and then rolling everything forward to see how much variation we’d get, it’s just so very fun. It’s the concept of the Butterfly Effect, applied.

Embers feels like… not the opposite, but the inverse of that, somehow. It’s taking the way things are and attempting to roll history back to see what some of the big moments were that created this state of affairs. And it gets to ask some really interesting questions as it does so.

Take as a given that, 100 years before Avatar: the Last Airbender really kicks into action, the Fire Nation committed genocide. They killed every last air nomad save, importantly, one. The show tends to paint this as a single event, a single day in which all four air temples were targeted in a coordinated attack, Sozin’s comet making an overwhelming strike possible, but do pay attention to the fact that they aren’t the “air nation”, they are the air nomads. They wouldn’t all have been in the temples; there would’ve been many nomads out being nomadic, and the Fire Nation had to hunt them down too.

This is, obviously, horrible. Genocide is one of the definitive evils, and the Fire Nation did it more effectively than any historical genocide has managed.1 But remember one part of those historical genocides: they weren’t immediate. Hitler didn’t wake up one morning and declare by executive fiat that it was time to kill every Jewish person on the planet… he, and others, spent years building up hatred against them.2 Painting them as the villains, as sub-human, as an insidious evil that was out to destroy the world. One evil dictator does not a genocide make. Humans are, at their base level, not that easily controlled. World War II was full of tales of people who did their little bit to help, who saved one or two people.

And now, ask yourself: how, exactly, did the Fire Lord convince his people that the Air Nomads had to die? How did he make them hate the Air Nomads, so much that every soldier sent into an air temple was willing to fight and die to eradicate an entire people?

Embers is a fascinating read, that goes deep into these sorts of questions. What are the cultural differences between the nations? How was one Avatar expected to solve all the problems of the world, given how dang big a place the world is? How can you put the world back in order after a century of oppressive genocide… without letting the vengeful Earth Kingdom and Water Tribes turn around and start slaughtering their way through the Fire Nation? All sorts of fun questions. With fun bonuses in the form of the end-of-chapter notes, where Vathara goes through and explains some of their thinking in what’s going on, the historical concepts driving it, all that sort of stuff.3 I highly recommend it, and it is, delightfully, free to read.

  1. Although, that concept is something that Vathara argues against, as well, over the course of the story. ↩
  2. Frankly, “years” is an understatement; antisemitism has centuries, millenia at this point, of history. Look up the history of pogroms. ↩
  3. The use of the chapter-end-notes in transformative works is such an interesting piece of meta-material in this form of writing. It’s almost like the footnotes of David Foster Wallace or Terry Pratchett, but can set aside the fourth wall entirely and speak directly to individual readers, if they were there and commenting as the piece was being written. Someone get a sociologist over here to look into this. ↩
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Review

“Year of the Griffin”

Diana Wynne Jones

This is one of those books that I’ve read over and over, and picking it up again feels like coming home. It may well be the first of Jones’ works I read; I know that I read it before I did Dark Lord of Derkholm, despite it being the sequel.1 I think this may even predate Terry Pratchett in my reading history. Which is to say, I’ve been reading this book since well before I was in college myself. This was, I think, the first time I’ve read it since college, though, and it sure felt strange to be reading it from the other side of that divide. Two different kinds of nostalgia, all at once.

That’s really what the book is: freshman year at Wizard College. The overall setting is precisely as much a hodgepodge of Vague Fantasy Novel Setting as it was in Dark Lord, and the focus on this one little part of it does nothing to change that. It does make a delightful expansion of the concept, though, as well as that very British lampooning of higher education.

This has that categorical Jones book thing where at the beginning I don’t feel particularly invested, and there’s no individual moment where it really latches on… but suddenly I look up, and I’m 2/3 of the way through the entire thing, and desperately want to finish it at the cost of whatever other obligations I may have had for the day. She was really a master of that sort of slow build.

I think that’s particularly effective in this book, as it has a whole lot of different threads going on. It’s an ensemble piece; there isn’t one protagonist, there’s the whole handful of theme, and each of them has a full-fledged story of their own. You could draw out a Hero’s Journey chart or something for each individual character, and it’d work just as well—but the way they all interleave together, and support one another, is really what makes it. It’s a book about friendship, and growing up. Hell, it is a key plot point that they have a group therapy session at one point; that is, quite possibly, the high point of the conflict in the book. It’s not an action-adventure, it’s not particularly a romance, it’s… college.

I adore this book. You might want to start with Dark Lord of Derkholm, as it provides more context, but I can confidently state that you can do just as well the other way around. Give it a go.2

  1. And oh, would you look at that, I also haven’t done a review here of Dark Lord of Derkholm, so that’s something I may have to do sometime, as it’s also a wonderful read. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩