Tag: SF/F

Review – Half-Resurrection Blues

Posted January 20, 2015 by in Reviews / 8 Comments

Half-Resurrection Blues, Daniel José Older

This book is made awesome by the setting and cast — it’s full of detail that places it exactly in time and space, in Brooklyn and in the ghost/s of Brooklyn; it’s full of characters with all kinds of origins and all kinds of stories, all of which is supplemented by the kind of details that make them feel real. Mannerisms, foibles, culture-specific ways of speaking or thinking… and it’s never some kind of monolithic culture, but all sorts of cultures in a melting pot, a dialogue. The background of the story was interesting, too: the halfies, the Council of the Dead, the ngks, house spirits… it comes together into a pretty interesting mythology in general.

In terms of the plot, I was less enthused, though it’s certainly not a chore to read. It’s just a little bit predictable; I was constantly reminded of other books while I was reading it, constantly a couple of steps ahead of the plot. Like, come on, who wouldn’t guess that with the ability to kind of read thoughts, a woman would figure out you killed her brother? And that wouldn’t go down well with her? I’m hesitant to even call that a spoiler, that’s just human.

I’m planning to read Salsa Nocturna anyway, and to read more of Daniel José Older’s work, but I wasn’t blown away. It’s more solid fun than something that swept me off my feet.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, SF/F

Review – The Awakened Kingdom

Posted January 17, 2015 by in Reviews / 4 Comments

The Awakened Kingdom, N.K. Jemisin

This novella has been released both separately as an ebook, and bundled in with the omnibus of the trilogy. I don’t know quite how I managed to miss that it existed, but I did. I quickly rectified my ignorance by grabbing a copy, and couldn’t resist getting stuck in right away. It helps that the narrator’s voice is infectiously fun; the godling who narrates is a child, full of enthusiasm to live and do and learn and grow. And she does all of this, of course, giving us glimpses in the meanwhile into the world without Sieh, a world where Itempas is learning to change and there is a fragile agreement between mortals and godlings that allows them to live in the same plane of existence. It shows us the world changing in other ways, too — the society in Darre, the actual physical conditions of the world changing and forcing society to change…

And there’s glimpses, just at the end, into the world that comes after that.

Mostly just glimpses, though; this is a novella. I would love to have more of it, although Shill’s voice might get a bit more annoying at length (though I think Jemisin is, as usual, a genius with her narrators). It could sort of stand alone from the three novels, too, but to really understand what’s going on, I wouldn’t recommend it. At this length, it feels that little bit unsatisfying because I think there’s always more I’d want to know about the world, but on the other hand, it ends just where it needs to end to leave you space to imagine.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, N.K. Jemisin, SF/F

Review – Days of Blood and Starlight

Posted January 16, 2015 by in Reviews / 2 Comments

Days of Blood and Starlight, Laini Taylor
Reviewed on 16th June, 2013

Mmmm. I don’t know why it took me so long to get round to finishing this. There’s something very compelling about Laini Taylor’s writing, prompting me to read it in great big gulps. This was a harder read than the first book, emotionally, because here are all these characters you care for and they’re split up, dead, misled, in over their heads… There’s lots of pain and betrayal and more pain. There is still some hope left, at the end of the story, but it’s a battered hope. And when I started out writing that sentence, I wasn’t thinking about the double meaning there, given the meaning of Karou’s name. But that works, too.

I wasn’t expecting the ending — not the key event, anyway, the thing that allows some room for hope. I wasn’t thinking along the right lines when a certain character got involved and spilt all they knew to another certain character. I did guess some of the other stuff, but there was enough going on to keep me intrigued and on the edge of my seat.

I didn’t love this as much as I remember loving the first book, but I did like it a lot and I cannot wait for the third book.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Flashback Friday, Laini Taylor, SF/F

Waiting on Wednesday: A Darker Shade of Magic

Posted January 14, 2015 by in General / 10 Comments

Waiting on Wednesday is a feature normally hosted at Breaking the Spine, though it hasn’t been updated during January. Regardless, I felt the need to share this one.

A Darker Shade of Magic, V.E. Schwab

Kell is one of the last Travelers—magicians with a rare, coveted ability to travel between parallel universes—as such, he can choose where he lands. There’s Grey London, dirty and boring, without any magic, ruled by a mad King George. Then there’s Red London, where life and magic are revered, and the Maresh Dynasty presides over a flourishing empire. White London, ruled by whoever has murdered their way to the throne—a place where people fight to control magic, and the magic fights back, draining the city to its very bones. And once upon a time, there was Black London…but no one speaks of that now.Officially, Kell is the Red Traveler, personal ambassador and adopted Prince of Red London, carrying the monthly correspondences between the royals of each London. Unofficially, Kell is a smuggler, servicing people willing to pay for even the smallest glimpses of a world they’ll never see—a dangerous hobby, and one that has set him up for accidental treason. Fleeing into Grey London, Kell runs afoul of Delilah Bard, a cut-purse with lofty aspirations, first robs him, then saves him from a dangerous enemy, and then forces him to spirit her to another world for a proper adventure.

But perilous magic is afoot, and treachery lurks at every turn. To save all of the worlds, Kell and Lila will first need to stay alive—and that is proving trickier than they hoped.

Since I received access to the preview excerpt on Netgalley, my first Waiting on Wednesday post for a while is an obvious choice… V.E. Schwab’s A Darker Shade of Magic. I have various of Schwab’s books somewhere on Mount TBR, some lurking in the foothills even, but I haven’t got round to them. Based on the small part of the excerpt I read, I think A Darker Shade of Magic will probably be the first book I read by this author. I didn’t stop reading because I didn’t like it: quite the opposite. I usually hate teasers when I can’t get hold of the full book, and that’s exactly what happened in this case. I really, really want the book already, and I only read a few pages, skimmed a bit more, and generally skidded over the surface of the book.

I mean, when you open with this, what do you expect?

Kell wore a very peculiar coat.

It had neither one side, which would be conventional, nor two, which would be unexpected, but several, which was, of course, impossible.

The first thing he did whenever he stepped out of one London and into another was take off the coat and turn it inside out once or twice (or even three times) until he found the side he needed. Not all of them were fashionable, but they each served a purpose. There were ones that blended in and ones that stood out, and one that served no purpose but of which he was just particularly fond.

I don’t know if anyone needs to read further, but I sure don’t. I’m hooked, if just to hear more about that impossible coat.

A Darker Shade of Magic is out February 24th 2015!

Tags: books, SF/F, Waiting on Wednesday

Review – Poison Study

Posted January 12, 2015 by in Reviews / 4 Comments

Poison Study, Maria V. Snyder

It’s been a while since I first read these books — longer than I’d thought, even! I’m not entirely sure what tempted me to revisit, since I generally think of Snyder’s work as light entertainment. I’m not so keen on the romance elements, especially where they come across as kind of creepy (there’s an age and power dynamic between Valek and Yelena which is completely weighted toward Valek the entire time), and I didn’t think that much of the fantasy setting. But… I think I’ve actually changed my mind. The relationship is signalled better than I remembered, even though on Yelena’s side I’m still a little concerned about Stockholm Syndrome, and Valek’s not off the hook for being an assassin and playing mind games.

And the world is more interesting than I remembered, too: what I remembered as a fairly run of the mill dystopian post-revolution world was not so simple. Commander Ambrose has done horrifying things, particularly in the cause of getting into power, but there’s a flexibility there — for example, when a teacher brings a girl to him wanting her to be punished because she’s found a different (actually better) way of doing things than he’s taught her, and the Commander sends him away and gives the girl a job doing something she wants to do. The characters are better drawn than I remembered, with a lot of shades of grey.

The Commander is particularly interesting because he’s a transgendered character, and that’s dealt with pretty well: the character and narrator believe that he’s male, full stop. There are a couple of slip-ups where he treats his ‘female self’ as contemptible or is controlled because he sees that self as weak, but otherwise neither the characters nor the plot lean on gender stereotypes. He’s not male because he can do male-coded activities; he’s male because he just is, and he doesn’t see women as any less capable. Women can be soldiers as easily as men, in his world; it’s not about gender, but ability.

There were a lot of difficult topics explored here other than that, too — rape, coercion, conflicts between liking someone and betraying them, good people doing bad things, or people doing bad things to achieve a good result… Most of it is handled pretty well, without prurient detail. My main issue is the whole shortcut evil=rape=evil thing. It happens with a couple of different characters and it’s lazy, lazy stuff.

This really wasn’t quite the bubblegum I remembered; I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the trilogy attentively too.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Maria V. Snyder, SF/F

Review – Winter Rose

Posted January 11, 2015 by in Reviews / 4 Comments

Winter Rose, Patricia A. McKillip

When I first read this, it was the first book I’d read by McKillip and I really didn’t appreciate it. I thought the words were lovely, but the substance was all over the place; everything had dream logic, and sometimes I couldn’t hold onto that logic and follow it through — or I’d come to totally wrong conclusions that I don’t think McKillip intended at all. But I expected this time to be different: I’ve come to really love McKillip’s work, in general, and to enjoy and follow the lyricism, the imagery, the logic of it that’s more to do with magic than orderly lines of reasoning. The quality that makes me feel like this is real magic, more so than anything Gandalf could ever do.

And yet. Nope. This book still makes very little sense to me. It’s ‘The Snow Queen’ and ‘Goblin Market’ and Tam Lin, and I don’t know if it intends to be all three or if I’m just grasping at straws. It’s got the magic and mystery of McKillip’s other work and yet it never quite comes together for me in the same way. It’s beautifully written, and yet it never coalesces quite into sense for me.

I think I understood it better than I did the first time, and at least I went into it prepared to take my enjoyment from the beautiful words and the feeling of magic, but I find myself blinking when reading reviews where people think this is the most warm and human of McKillip’s novels, the least mythical and distanced. There are parts of it like that — Perrin’s love for Laurel, through everything; Rois and Laurel’s father’s uncomprehending love for his daughters… But mostly it was so lyrical that I couldn’t touch it.

I make it sound like I really disliked it, I think, but it’s more that I’m just not on the right wavelength. Clearly some people are, and I’m close enough that I can appreciate some of the beauty. I think there’s a really emotionally absorbing, satisfying story in there for some people, judging from reviews. Just… not for me! I was really disappointed that I still don’t ‘get’ it, despite my new appreciation of McKillip’s other work.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Patricia A. McKillip, SF/F

Review – Daughter of Smoke and Bone

Posted January 9, 2015 by in Reviews / 2 Comments

Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Laini Taylor
Reviewed 5th June, 2012

I’m not entirely sure what hooked me about this book. I just know that I picked it up intending to read a couple of pages, and put it down a hundred pages later feeling dazed — and had that same experience every time I picked it up to read it. Laini Taylor’s writing is good, with only a few points that struck me as missteps — the reveal of a certain character’s history being one of them; it felt wrongly placed in the narrative somehow — and a sense of humour, a good eye for the right details to include, and with an excellent pace.

It’s technically part of the whole trend of paranormal romances, with ‘angels’ and ‘demons’, but Laini Taylor doesn’t take the existing mythology and stick to it. Her worldbuilding is quite inventive. I loved the characters, too, particularly Brimstone: unsettling, fascinating, and comforting, all in one.

One of the plot-twists was obvious to me, but the reveal at the end took me a little bit by surprise. I’m looking forward to the next book, to see how everything is going to be resolved. And fingers crossed for more about the chimaera we come to know and love…

Rating: 5/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Flashback Friday, Laini Taylor, SF/F

Top Ten Tuesday

Posted January 6, 2015 by in General / 14 Comments

This week’s theme from The Broke and the Bookish is “top ten debuts you’re looking forward to in 2015”. I didn’t actually know much about who had a debut coming out, so I ended up turning to Goodreads lists. These are mostly YA books, since I couldn’t find convenient lists of upcoming fantasy. Clearly I am not very plugged in to what’s coming out soon!

Since these are upcoming books, I’m gonna link the titles to the Goodreads page so other people can check them out in more detail.

Red Queen, Victoria Aveyard. I’ve been looking at this one for a while, at least — I kept seeing it in other people’s StS posts and such. It sounds interesting, though I can’t say I really know much about it beyond the basic summary.
The Girl at Midnight, Melissa Grey. I hadn’t heard of this one till I started making this list, actually; I’m intrigued by the idea, and I do always love the ‘there’s-a-city-below-the-city’ trope (Neverwhere, Un Lun Dun, King Rat, etc).
Shutter, Courtney Almada. The cover looks really freaky, and it sounds fun. I’ve seen a couple of advance reviews already and my interest is definitely piqued.
A Wicked Thing, Rhiannon Thomas. It’s a Sleeping Beauty rewrite, shut up and take my money.
The Storyspinner, Becky Wallace. There’s a touch of the troubadour tradition about the idea of the Performers, so yeah, I’m in on this one.
The Wrath and the Dawn, Renee Ahdieh. Definitely want this one — it’s a reworking of Scheherazade’s story, and it sounds like it has an interesting take on it.
The Invisible Library, Genevieve Cogman. You had me at ‘library’. (Have bought it since I made the list!)
An Ember in the Ashes, Sabaa Tahir. Set in a Rome-like world, you say? Rebel Scholars, you say? Gimme!
The Witch Hunter, Virginia Boecker. Seems like my kind of book, especially with the comparison to Graceling.
The Unhappening of Genesis Lee, Shallee McArthur. I read a review of this and it intrigues me, though I’m sort of side-eyeing that new title trend of ‘the [x]ing of [name]’ (e.g. The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer).

I’m obviously in need of more titles, so I’m definitely going to be paying attention to TTTs this week…

Tags: books, SF/F, Top Ten Tuesday

Review – The Wolf Hunt

Posted January 2, 2015 by in Reviews / 5 Comments

The Wolf Hunt, Gillian Bradshaw
Review from 1st February, 2013

I was initially excited when I saw that this was based on the Breton lai ‘Bisclaveret’. I studied that lai in my first year of university, and I’ve had cause to go back to it fairly often since, and I rather like it. Perhaps especially because of the inevitable LGBT reading of it: it’s homosocial at the least, and then the other details make it very easy to read it as a homosexual love story. Bisclaveret is betrayed by his wife, and ultimately everything is set to rights by the king, who loves him very much — and the story includes a scene where Bisclaveret sleeps in the king’s bed… If you want to read more about that analysis, I suggest William Burgwinkle’s Sodomy, Masculinity and Law in Medieval Literature.

Anyway, so I was very disappointed when I looked closer and found that this story de-queers the original lai. It invents a whole new character, Marie, to be Bisclaveret’s ‘real’ love interest. I was much less inclined to let myself enjoy this, at that point.

But Gillian Bradshaw has a way of coaxing me along anyway, and I found myself reading big chunks at once. She really is a good writer, and ultimately I found it just as compelling as the other books I’ve read by her, despite my initial resistance. The lai still limits her, in some ways — Marie Penthièvre would be a wonderful heroine, but often we’re limited to Eline and her paramour Alain, neither of whom exactly fill me with warmth. I felt like there was an attempt to understand Eline, at times, but what she did just made it impossible to like her — and Marie’s understanding of her made Marie seem ridiculously saintly.

But for the most part I loved the characters: Marie, the duke, the duchess, Tiher… Even minor characters. Tiarnán, less so, because he makes a silly mistake of judgement when it comes to women. But he does learn from what happens to him, it seems.

Looking forward to the other Gillian Bradshaw books I’ve got on my to read pile.

Rating: 5/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Flashback Friday, Gillian Bradshaw, SF/F

Review – The Forgotten Beasts of Eld

Posted December 31, 2014 by in Reviews / 6 Comments

The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, Patricia A. McKillip

Somehow, from the midst of feeling dreadful because of this cold, I realised that what I really wanted to read was something by Patricia McKillip. It’s so strange how I disliked the first book of hers I read; I feel like I appreciate her work more with each book I do read. And this one… it’s fairytale-like, mythic — a review on GR said ‘parable like’, and yes: that too. It’s full of epic fantasy elements but the real struggle is between taking revenge and being true to who you really are and those you love. (The phrase “being true to yourself” sounds annoyingly cliché, but I can’t think of another way to put that without quoting the whole book.)

McKillip’s writing is gorgeous, and works well with the character she’s chosen — a girl who has not been loved, does not know how to love; who hasn’t been among people to be drawn into loves and hatreds. And in the course of the book she does learn, and she struggles with it… There’s a coolness to the book, like a mountain stream; an aloofness that you can get with distance from something, but toward everything. I can understand why some people disliked it for that very thing, but for me it perfectly matched the subject.

I like high fantasy, but since so much of it draws from the same well as Tolkien, there’s something all too real about it sometimes. This book, the character of Sybel, are closer to real magic for me, in the same way that the contemplative parts of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea books (the sleeping man with the thistle growing by his hand…) come closer to real magic for me than all the magic rings and restless shades in the world.

And one last thing to love: I adore the way that the relationship between Coren and Sybel works out. That it has to be worked on, from both sides, that it’s not always matched.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Patricia A. McKillip, SF/F