Tag: historical fiction

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Review

“The Witch’s Lens”

Luanne G. Smith

This held up reasonably well as a story, and had some fun little twists to it. The hidden backstory got revealed at just the right pace, and really changed the tone of the latter half of the book, which I quite enjoyed. There was a bit more ‘monster movie’ to it prior to that, which doesn’t tend to be my favorite, but the action-adventure of it outweighed that long enough to carry me to the end.

The magic system was interesting; there were places where it felt like a hard magic system, but overall, I think it’s really a soft magic system, which contains the occasional regional hard magic system. The presence of a djinn with a wildly different set of powers, including “oh, I actually don’t care about the macguffin, that’s just, like, a normal thing for my people” felt a bit hilarious, honestly. The whole dramatic fight, a large part of World War I coming down to the negotiation about this rarity… and the representative from the middle east is like “oh, I thought you had something interesting to discuss after all this. Peace.” and just up and leaves. Excellent.

The only issue I had with the book was that it was trying to do the “normal people don’t know about magic” thing, but couldn’t actually decide on what level that was a thing. Like, everyone acknowledges superstition and the existence of hedgewitches… but the fact that the government is employing magic users for purposes of war is a deep secret that must be kept from the normals? It’s inconsistent with itself.

That said, since the book is almost entirely the magic users amongst other magic users, it’s not too much in your face, so it’s okay to read past it. Overall, a fun 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

“Through the Doors of Oblivion”

Michael G. Williams

This was a fun little novella. Emperor Norton is such a character that he feels like he should be completely fictional, but is, in fact, an actual historical figure. And Williams did a good job of working around my issue with historical fiction—the rule to time travel appears to be “you can’t change what’s in the historical record,” but thanks to, y’know, there not being cameras around all the time in 1910, it’s easy to fudge things. Steal an artifact from the past? No worries, the building burned down shortly afterwards, destroying all the evidence.

It’s a fun and hopeful little story, I quite liked it. 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 Naturalist Society”

Carrie Vaughn

This was one of the free books that Amazon hands out every month as part of Prime, which meant my expectations were low—there’s the occasional gem in there, but on average, those books tend to feel rather bland. They’re aimed at the widest possible audience, so of course they’re generic.

This, though? This was a delight. The fact that two of the three protagonists were a gay couple was already putting it in the top 10% of Free Prime Books for me. That trio felt something like a Venn diagram to me—these two are queer, these two come across as being autistic, these two are part of the upper class but looked down upon for not being old white guys. It feels all the more progressive for being set in the late 1800s; everyone is so concerned with scandal, and for the majority of the book the scandal is simply that gasp, a woman is interested in science? Doesn’t show know that’s not a feminine interest? The shame!

I almost bounced off this book, at the beginning. It’s a rough time for me to be reading a book that has a scene of someone listening to a loved one breathe their last. I’m glad I kept with it, though—not just because of the aforementioned delightful setting and characters, but because so much of the book was about Beth fighting for her right to grieve, and doing so in the way that was right for her.

So, for that, and all the other things, I absolutely loved this book. It’s so rare that my “why don’t you just-“ mutterings at the book actually turn out to be what they do, and work great for everyone. If I’ve got my scheduling right, it’s only available for pre-order at the moment, but I think it’s well worth it; 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

“Under a Gilded Moon”

Joy Jordan-Lake

Downton Abbey, but make it Appalachia.1

I’m of mixed opinions about this book. It was very well-written; the prose was a delight to read through. But it has that ‘literary’ feel to it; there’s no real closure at the end, a token bit here or there but not nearly enough to leave me feeling like the story has actually been wrapped up. I suppose that’s what I get for reading historical fiction; when the person you want to get their comeuppance is an actual historical figure, you can’t deliver on that desire without breaking the timeline. Alas.

As I said, it’s a pretty book to read; I don’t regret the time I spent with it. I just wish it was a more just world; back to my other genres I go.

  1. I haven’t actually watched any Downton Abbey; I just know that it’s got that above stairs/below stairs split going on. ↩
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Review

“Atomic Robo”

Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener, Lee Black, Ronda Pattison, Nick Filardi, Anthony Clark, Jeff Powell

Atomic Robo is one of my favorite comics, one I’ve been reading long enough that I wish I had some way of figuring out exactly how long I have been reading it. It’s getting a review now, however, as I recently did an all-the-way-through reread.1

Here’s the concept of the comic: Nikolai Tesla built a nuclear-powered, fully sentient robot. He’s creatively named Atomic Robo Tesla, and generally goes by Atomic Robo, or just Robo to his friends. Being a bulletproof, super-strong robot, he gets into some adventures! Being an ageless machine, those adventures occur across a wide range of time. Being a world where it’s possible for Nikolai Tesla to build a nuclear-powered, fully sentient robot, those adventures involve a whole lot of pulp science fiction—there’s an entire comic early on where Robo spends a few hours fighting giant insects while having a discussion via radio about why giant insects are impossible.

Basically, it’s some of the most fun science fiction I read, and I absolutely love it. There’s some really interesting storylines, and there’s also some really funny storylines. Just about everything that Dr. Dinosaur shows up in absolutely hilarious—everything else in this world feels like it’s following some rules, though different ones than our world, but Dr. Dinosaur is just running around inside his own personal reality distortion field. And he shows up precisely often enough to maintain the hilarity of how well he plays off of Robo.

So, hey, if you’re at all interested in any of this, go read the comic. The nice thing about webcomics is that it’s all free online! And, honestly, I really recommend starting from the beginning—it makes the most sense that way, and while there’s some early references to stuff that shows up again later, it’s more little hints that make it better on reread.2

  1. Well, in April; these reviews aren’t exactly timely. (Which I usually avoid admitting to, but in this case, the specific things going on in the comic at the time were what set me off rereading from the beginning, I wanted to remember what was being called back to. ↩
  2. Seriously, I had a moment on this most recent reread where I realized that something really early on had been foreshadowing of a storyline that happened, in publishing time of the comic, something like a decade later. Their ‘about’ page says “Everything that happens will fit into the larger setting; everything that happens will happen for a reason” and they mean it. ↩
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Review

“Signal Moon”

Kate Quinn

This is one of those stories that, going in, you know is going to hurt. Voice-only time travel does not a happy ending make, especially across 80 years. But it’s still worth reading—it’s quite short and to the point, and very effectively told. Spend an hour being sad.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 King’s Man”

Evidently, I do movie reviews now? I suppose it’s somewhat in keeping with all the book reviews I’ve been doing, but as it’s a new thing I still feel the need to point out: I am not a professional reviewer, I just don’t want to make an account on… whatever website it is that people use to do movie reviews.

After having it in my queue for a while, I finally got around to watching The King’s Man. I absolutely love Kingsman, and while there’s still a good deal to enjoy in the sequel, it was nowhere near as good as the original. I was hoping the prequel, then, would be as good as the original. Sadly, it wasn’t.

Quite frankly, The King’s Man is bad. Not terrible, but absolutely not good. It’s campy, but I can’t tell if it’s campy in the “this will be a cult classic in a decade” way or just campy in the “we’re all going to forget about this” sense. Too early to tell on that regard.

The plot makes absolutely no sense. And, yes, I realize that I’m saying this about a prequel to a film that had “a SIM card makes you murder people” as the core of the plot, but at least that just required some hand-wavey science fiction. That’s the problem with trying to do a prequel—we know how history went. If you haven’t sat down and called it Alternate History as a genre, then when you start breaking the timeline, it gets really hard to suspend that disbelief.

Like Deadpool 2, it feels like they came up with a couple key scenes they wanted to have in the movie, and then had to figure out a way to string them together with some semblance of a plot. As a result, though, here I am, a day later, still trying to come up with a sensible explanation for why any of the Bad Guys were listening to the Big Bad. He’s just… some guy? Like, sure, I can believe some guy with a hatch to grind could pull together a few well-connected people with grievances to start this evil plot, but Rasputin just doesn’t fit. What’s Rasputin’s motivation for listening to you, dude? He’s the de-facto ruler of Russia, he’s got all the food, drink, drugs, sex, and power a man could want; why would he show up to your drafty Evil Meeting Place in the middle of nowhere together threatened by you into messing with his good thing he’s got going?1

That said, I still enjoyed watching it. I’m glad I missed it in the theater because the best way to watch this is somewhere that you can pause it to laugh in disbelief with your friends. It’s got some solid action scenes, and the cast is fun and does a good job of it all. The pacing is all over the place, the plot makes no sense, and there’s a serious change of tone for a bit in the middle, but so long as you don’t go in expecting something that’s gonna win awards, you’ll have a good time.2

  1. And, speaking of that drafty Evil Meeting Place: this movie is set prior to the invention of the jet plane. How, exactly, is Rasputin making it from Moscow to your undisclosed location on the other side of Europe for these meetings without it being commented on? ↩
  2. The bit in the middle is probably even more effective if you haven’t seen Kingsman, or you have the kind of brain that doesn’t latch on to world building details like mine does. For me, it was predictable, and the tension was in wondering when that Canonical Event was going to happen; I suspect that scene feels very different if you go in without that foreknowledge. ↩