Posted May 27, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
The Lies of the Ajungo, Moses Ose Utomi
Received to review via Netgalley
The Lies of the Ajungo is very short, shorter than I’d expected, and follows the journey of one boy from the City of Lies. Slowly, he begins to meet people from other cities, begins to learn their stories, and perhaps to have the tools to unravel the problems they all turn out to share. I didn’t find the eventual secret too surprising, but I did enjoy the journey, the accumulation of evidence that finally made the whys and wherefores clear.
I’m surprised to read that this is actually going to have a sequel/companion, because it felt very self-contained. I can see where you could fill in the gaps in the world, but at the same time, I’m not sure why you’d want to. It feels like a fully-formed thing of its own, and almost with a moral to it, like a story plucked from the middle of a set of stories from One Thousand and One Nights (or The Decameron, or the Canterbury Tales, if they hadn’t been such very white European stories).
I enjoyed the reading experience well enough without getting deeply absorbed or very involved with it. I’d be curious to read more, but I’m not in a hurry for it and if I don’t read more, I’ll be alright with that.
Rating: 3/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Moses Ose Utomi, SF/F
Posted May 23, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment
The Salt Grows Heavy, Cassandra Khaw
Received to review via Netgalley
I didn’t expect to come away from this book thinking about how oddly tender and romantic it was! Which is not to say it would appeal to someone who is looking for those things, because there’s a lot of gore and darkness as well, and this is definitely more dark fantasy/horror than romance. It’s just that out of that dark story, the friendship that grows up between the narrator and the plague doctor really shines.
I think the juxtaposition of that against the gore and darkness actually makes it feel a lot stronger, where it otherwise might feel unsatisfactory for want of detail.
Khaw doesn’t give you a lot to work with here in terms of setup or worldbuilding: each piece of information you get is fed to you a sliver at a time, with many unanswered questions left over at the end. You don’t know every step that brought the characters to where they are, nor exactly where they will go from the end — these things are just sketched in, leaving the horror and the relationship between the two main characters in strong relief.
It would not, on the surface, be my kind of book, but the plague doctor won me over.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Cassandra Khaw, horror
Posted May 20, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Cibola Burn, James S.A. Corey
[This review never got posted back when I read the book, and has been waiting in buffer since then! Don’t worry, I didn’t read the later books before this one…]
This one’s complicated. I read this enormously fast, and only once bogged down and got stuck on not quite wanting to pick it up again. Getting bogged down and getting stuck might sound bad, but it mostly happens when I get anxious for the characters, which was happening in spades, and getting unstuck depends on the pace — if it lingers too long, I might never get through it.
But… I found aspects of the ending very similar to the first book (with elements of the third), and it felt like for all the high drama and death and flashing lights, it didn’t get us anywhere. Other people have mentioned that it is important later, but it doesn’t feel like it at the end of the book: it feels like we get right back to the status quo in many ways, especially for the crew of the Rocinante.
A lot of the characters are sucky people, as well. Murtry, for instance, just doesn’t feel real because he is a complete cartoon corporate villain, and I wouldn’t have been terribly surprised for him to do some insane maniacal laughter. It makes no sense that nobody seemed to see him for what he was before Ilus.
Also, not enough of Naomi doing stuff. And Amos didn’t get to shoot enough people.
So yeah, a bit frustrating and not my favourite, despite being a very grippy read.
Rating: 3/5
Tags: book reviews, books, James S.A. Corey, SF/F
Posted May 18, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Tommy Cabot Was Here, Cat Sebastian
Tommy Cabot Was Here is a second-chance romance where you can feel the yearning between the two main characters early on. Everett’s memories of his closeness with Tommy, of the schoolboy infatuation between them and the horrible uncertainty about how they felt and what exactly they were doing, all ring quite true even now — and make a lot of sense with the decade it’s set in as well, where it would’ve been all that with bells on.
It’s quite a slim book, but that vividly evoked teenage passion works wonders to stir the pot and make their gravitation toward each other feel natural.
Plus, Tommy’s ex-wife Pat is pretty awesome, and I love that she’s portrayed as understanding both of them, and understanding the link between them, and that the divorce is completely amicable.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Cat Sebastian, romance
Posted May 15, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
The Keeper’s Six, Kate Elliott
Received to review via Netgalley
On the surface, this sounded fascinating, and the snippets of detail we get about the world in the opening were intriguing, but somehow it took me so long to get into it: it took me weeks to plod through the first half, which is fatal in such a short book. After that, I sped through it, and found the payoff quite satisfying — which makes the setup even more frustrating, honestly.
Assessing it from this vantage point, what did I think? Well, Esther is the most clearly drawn character — Esther, and Marianne, who is antagonistic toward her and whose motives we never fully understand. The world is fascinating, the way the Hex is formed and the roles they play, the dangers of the between-worlds that they need to traverse to reach other worlds. The worldbuilding felt like setup for a novel, but the characters didn’t: I mostly remember the names of the characters, since I finished it yesterday, but I don’t have real opinions on any of them except Esther and Marianne.
It feels like there was a lot of potential that just didn’t work out for me. I’m curious to read Elliott’s longer-form work to see if that gives the right payoff for that kind of detail: sometimes people just aren’t good at working in miniature, and there was a lot here that did interest me.
Rating: 2/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Kate Elliott, SF/F
Posted May 14, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments
Untethered Sky, Fonda Lee
Received to review via Netgalley
Untethered Sky ends up feeling like quite an intense story, a story of obsession and single-minded dedication to something that doesn’t love you back. Ester is a ruhker, trained to hunt with and manage a roc in order to hunt monsters, obsessed with her bird and everything about her. Her only friends are ruhkers as well, and she’s barely in contact with her family — everything is about the rocs, and especially her own bird.
I really enjoyed it, because it felt like Fonda Lee really sank into the character and how she’d view the world. There’s a lot we don’t know about it, because Ester only cares about rocs and the monsters they hunt, and that makes complete sense for the character. Her love for her bird, her feelings about her friends, it’s all perfectly thought out, and Lee does beautifully with making it feel real.
I love as well that it doesn’t take the easy way out: the ending is more than a little heart-wrenching.
Rating: 5/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Fonda Lee, SF/F
Posted May 13, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Knight’s Wyrd, James D. Macdonald, Debra Doyle
Received to review via Netgalley
My ears pricked up as soon as Sherwood Smith’s introduction mentioned Rosemary Sutcliff. I loved Sutcliff’s books as a kid, and anything that had the same flavour sounded great to me — and the good news is that there was some of that realism, some of that taste and smell of another era (even though this is also fantasy).
I hadn’t heard of it before, so it was all new to me… sort of. It feels familiar and mythic in its structure, in the way that Will’s destiny plays out, but with a touch of that earthiness that I associate with Sutcliff, grounded in small details of everyday life. Will’s a likable protagonist, someone who generally wants to do the right thing even though he is not, in himself, particularly heroic. He sees something he can do, should do, and he does it — but not without thinking about the inconvenience of whatever it is.
It’s not a super-complex story, but there’s a virtue in the simplicity of it and the straight-forwardness of its protagonist. I enjoyed it very much.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Debra Doyle, James D. Macdonald, SF/F
Posted May 12, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment
The Last Heir to Blackwood Library, Hester Fox
A book about a mysterious library — it might as well come stamped with “Nicky, buy me!”.
The book starts when Ivy inherits Blackwood Abbey, a mysterious and isolated stately home that she had no idea she was the heir to. Without knowing much about the area, or what her new role might be, she travels with hope to take up her position as the new Lady Hayworth. Mysterious things begin to happen as soon as she arrives in the place, but she’s reassured when she finds the library, hoping to find her solace and excitement there.
I’ll try not to say too much, for fear of spoiling the surprise. Suffice it to say: the library isn’t a particularly ordinary library, and Ivy’s role as Lady Hayworth is nothing like she imagined.
For the most part, I enjoyed reading this, but it had a few weaknesses. The main one is difficult to get to grips with, given the plot: a particular character has to both experience things and then totally forget about them, and the book deals unevenly with showing that to the reader. Certain events are never described, and yet the relationship/character-building within those scenes would be essential to really feel satisfied by the ending, to my mind — while it would give the game away too soon to include them. It made certain things feel a bit rushed.
Still, I did enjoy this, and the “click” as certain things came together.
Rating: 3/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Hester Fox, romance, SF/F
Posted May 11, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments
Babylon’s Ashes, James S.A. Corey
I don’t know if it’s in part the way I read it (quite spread out, not all at once), or just the sprawling nature of the series by this point, but this one did not come together well for me. It feels dark and uncompromising: people are awful to each other, and I have to be in the head of characters who do and think violent, dreadful things. Everything is bad, and there’s not much hope. That made this a very difficult read for me.
Part of the problem is the sprawling cast. There are ways it could be made tighter and still have the scope, like dropping some of the more-or-less unnecessary POV characters (whose names I barely remembered between appearances). On the one hand, putting Holden in the centre gives him too much credit and the book pushes against making him the Main Character for all of humanity… but this is a book, and sometimes that kind of thing can tighten things up and make it feel easier to get into.
I also have a question about something weird where I’m not sure if I missed something, or whether something actually weird happened, that I should really look back and find out…
The book brings us to an interesting place, it’s just also a pretty wretched place. Everyone is suffering, and even the Rocinante isn’t a safe home to return to where no harm will touch. And that makes sense, it’s realistic, but for me it was all maybe a little too grim.
Rating: 3/5
Tags: book reviews, books, James S.A. Corey, SF/F
Posted May 10, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments
The Navigating Fox, Christopher Rowe
Received to review via Netgalley
I really enjoyed The Navigating Fox, but I find myself not sure what to write about it. Let’s try to start at the beginning: this is a world where “voiceless” animals like the ones we know can be given human-like intelligence and voices. Quintus Shu’al is a navigating fox, the only one of his kind (at least, as far as we know or he knows). As the book opens, he’s being investigated for his part in the loss of a whole expedition he promised to guide to find a remedy for the Empress’ sickness.
It quickly becomes apparent that things aren’t what they seem, and that there’s a lot of scheming going on by various different parties, leading to Quintus guiding a whole cavalcade to the end of the world to close the gates of Hell (apparently).
The story runs two threads in parallel: the earlier journey, with the lost expedition, and the later journey to the gates of Hell. As those threads converge, we get to see more of the world — though there’d still be plenty more to learn if there were to be a follow-up, because it’s a pretty fascinating setting.
Despite the quirkiness of the idea of a book with talking animals, it’s not quirky in execution (for the most part, at least). It’s treated seriously, without taking itself too seriously, if you see what I mean.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Christopher Rowe, SF/F
