Posted June 2, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Crimes of Cymru, ed. Martin Edwards
These aren’t strictly all one thing: some are stories written by Welsh writers (and not necessarily set in Wales), while others are by non-Welsh writers (but set in Wales). As a result, it’s a fairly mixed bag, but still a fun collection.
I was pleased by the inclusion of a story by Rhys Davies, whose work I enjoyed when I was doing a Welsh fiction in English course — I do wonder if it might’ve been possible to find more works by Welsh authors, but on the other hand, it did seem that some of those included were already pretty obscure.
As always, I enjoyed this more than I expected to: somewhere in my head I have the idea that I’m not that into short story collections, at least not themed ones that can contain works of varying quality… but the British Library Crime Classic ones have been pretty universally entertaining.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, British Library Crime Classics, crime, mystery
Posted May 29, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment
Pathogenesis, Jonathan Kennedy
Pathogenesis was less absorbing for me than I’d hoped; I love non-fiction about diseases, even though I’m already studying for my MSc in the subject and thus most of it is not new to me. Still, often there are titbits I didn’t know, and that seemed like it was going to prove true here too when I read the introduction: did you know that viral genes are involved in the formation of the mammalian placenta?
But overall, the rest of it was much less scientific, less based on… well… pathogenesis, and much more about history. How diseases affected armies and governments, and how changes like capitalism (of which the author seems to be a huge fan) changed the approach to public health. Which is to say, created a demand for it, since there was no such thing under feudalism.
For someone who is interested in the history of infectious diseases in relation to humanity, this is probably still fascinating. For me, it was just a bit to starboard of my real interests, and I found it far too simplistic in discussing how diseases work. (Plus, there was definitely a lot more room to consider the impacts of the current pandemic and what it means for the future. Consider the impact on the treatment of tuberculosis, for example — deeply negative.)
It was alright, but not what I wanted, ultimately.
Rating: 3/5
Tags: book reviews, books, history, Jonathan Kennedy, non-fiction, science
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
