Graham

In many ways, you would think that the wizard school trope has been done to death, but Naomi Novik proves there is life to this subject still. Her world and school is a much darker affair than the typical Harry Potter-esque wizarding school. Death does stalk the corridors. There is no adult teaching staff, which gives a slight lord of the flies vibe at times. The characters themselves are darker, and greyer in their morals. The imperative to survive outways any heavy moralizing. This is Harry Potter, the Grimdark version.

Our main protagonist is a dark wizard waiting to happen. In this world magicians have affinities. Hers is the magic of death and destruction. The spells she can learn easily are ones that cause carnage. It is an interesting moral quandary. The school itself is also a character in its own right - it provides what it thinks the student needs, but is infested with evil creatures and traps that the students have to learn to survive. And these things are deadly - plenty of people do die from these traps in these pages.

I will acknowledge that there are some issues that have been raised with the writing of ethnic characters in the book - Naomi has acknowledged and apologized for the misuse of the word ‘locs' in an unintendedly insensitive way in a late edit, which will be corrected back in future editions. This was fair criticism and it is good the way that the author has owned up to it. The other criticism has come across as a little bit overblown - this is a magical alternative reality. To me, none of this detracts from what is a supremely dark and intriguing take on a magical school story.

I enjoyed this immensely and can highly recommend it. It was easy to read yet intriguingly dark.

This book essentially follows a single siege battle. An interesting take - fantasy often tries to do more in a single book and I appreciate the intimacy that having a single battle be the entirety of a book creates. Darksoul takes place immediately after the story of Godblind. Rilpor is now under siege and it is this siege that the book follows.

Sieges are bloody, messy affairs, and Anna Stephens does not shy away from the ugliness of such a situation. We have betrayal on both sides, failed relief attempts and bloody fighting in the streets. The mythology continues to infuse the story, with influence of the gods an important factor. A dark and compelling story and the set up for the final book is nicely done

Short story collections are interesting things to read. Often they are difficult to read in one go due to jarring contrasts in style and content. From A Certain Point of View has to be one of the easiest to read short story collections that I have ever encountered as its concept of taking background characters from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope and fleshing out their backstories means if you are familiar with the movies you are already fully ensconced in the world and can recognize and easily imagine the scenes behind the stories being told.

As always with any short story collection there is some unevenness to the quality but overall this is an impressive collection and the gems in it really do shine. My personal favourite was Ken Liu's which puts a desk jockey's perception on how to avoid the blame for not targetting the escape pod that contained C3PO and R2D2 - the bureaucracy behind the empire must have been huge and this is an amusing take on it.

There are some inconsistencies where two different authors have taken different characters from the same scene which are a bit annoying, but honestly that is my main criticism. I look forward to the next collection for the Empire Strikes Back

Gang violence on an isolated space station with echoes of Kurisawa, Tarantino and classic westerns. Our protagonist (only ever referred to as ‘The Miner' in a classic nod to its source material) is a loner and an introvert, but still has to come to port to sell her produce from time to time. She also happens to be ex-military special forces. When the place she lands turns out to be riven by a gangland feud and is constantly trying to cheat her she ends up taking on everyone.

There is nothing especially clever in this story, it is not going for literary prizes or unique plotlines. It is however incredibly fun. If you want to read about a big fight on a space station this is the book for you. Essentially Kill Bill on a space station. Silly fun.

The final book in what is ultimately quite a satisfying quadrilogy. The World Raven picks up immediately where the previous book left off with our various POV characters somewhat scattered to the winds. Most of them stay somewhat scattered, but with three different theatres of conflict that is not such a surprise. In the end, despite some of the epic battles that have come in the series the climax is oddly personal, focusing on Utha and Randall. There are some big set pieces still (Halla Summer Wolf vs Rulag Ursa for example) but it is the smaller conflicts and skirmishes that actually lead to the bigger events.

The end is not so much a total end, but the end in a chapter of a long ongoing saga of which this only a small part, and it works in a strangely satisfying way even if not all the characters get full closure. You definitely feel as this, despite being 4 huge tomey books, is just a part of something larger. Will be interested to see if AJ Smith revisits this world in the future in a different phase of this conflict!

Clive Barker has a truly unique imagination. Abarat can be best summed up as Narnia on acid. It is a hidden world full of the fantastical, but Mr Barker does not rely on standard fantasy tropes with a wild array of fantastical creatures and places. The very idea of Abarat where each island represents a different hour of the day is very different to the standard. This creativeness is almost overflowing - there is so much pouring out of the authors pen that the pace is breathless. The different islands are intriguing and I almost wish that the book would slow down a bit to allow me to enjoy this amazing whimsical world he has created.

The story itself betrays its YA ambition through its black and white characterisations. The villains are a little one dimensional, but the sheer fun and inventiveness of the world more than outweigh this

A reimagination of the Jack the Ripper murders. Jack the Ripper is one of those characters that has been a fertile stream for imagination, and the mystery that surrounds the Whitechapel murders lingers to this day. Clare Whitfield does a good job of conjuring Victorian era London through the eyes of a nurse who becomes fascinated with these murders. The angle taken is intriguing and I will avoid spoilers by not revealing more.

The basic plot follows an amateur sleuthing style angle to a murder mystery and it has some interesting twists and turns on the way. The prose is well written, if a little dry for my tastes. The historical research has been well done. My main issue is with the characters. I found I did not really warm to any of them - the housekeeper and the husband are almost caricatures of unpleasantness.

There were some neat ideas in here, but it wasn't really for me in the end

This was weird. The story is told in a journal style about an expedition to a place called area X - where some ill defined environmental catastrophe happened. As the story continues we learn more and more about previous expeditions to the area, but the overlying alien and strange experience dominates.

This book goes out of its way to feel uncomfortable to the reader. All the characters are referred to by their job description/specialization rather than their name. This impersonal feel gives a cold feeling to almost all the interactions. Then there is the weird otherworldliness of the environment with strange organic tunnels and creatures. There is the overriding mystery of what happened in area X, the untruths about previous expeditions, the jarring description of a bunker as a tower. These all go out of their way to leave the reader uncertain about what rules apply in area X.

I can appreciate the cleverness of these techniques and the craft with which they are applied. However, that coldness, that distance, makes it hard to get truly engaged with the story. This was weird, unsettling and ultimately a bit to cold for me.

I discovered KS Villoso through The Wolf of Oren Yaro, and after reading that I was keen to try some more of her works. Having backed Dyrk Ashton's Paternus KS, this work was included in a bundle of eNovels included.

Blackwood Marauder's is set in the same world as The Wolf of Oren Yaro, but works as a standalone story following Luc ‘Lucky' apn Jak, the adopted son of a farmer. He initially dreams of joining the army to help support his family. However, because he is racially foreign he is rejected. He ends up joining up with a rag tag group of mercenaries.

Luc is an incredibly likeable character, written with just the right amount of naivete to make his luckiness fun rather than irritating or unbelievable. He has his code which he follows. The story is essentially a coming of age tale as we watch Luc evolve from a simple farmboy into a mercenary leader. An enjoyable and well written romp and actually a very good introduction into Villoso's writing as a standalone in the world that she explore more in other works

First things first, this is an impressive debut. Justin Call has created an interesting world, with a well built mythos. Master of Sorrows does an excellent job of setting up this world, even if it focuses on one small village and school. The school setting is a little tropey, but it is interesting enough not to be annoying.

The really interesting aspect of the world really comes in its use of prejudice. In the society set up here, cripples are associated with evil. Anyone with any physical deformity, even received later in life, is considered suspect and in league with evil. The effect of this prejudice is pronounced and almost self-fulfilling in places. The tag line ‘what if you were destined to become the villain' is most likely from this as villainy is not really what I associate with the main protagonist, but he is a cripple from birth.

Ultimately, this story sets up an intriguing future, and I am extremely curious to see where the next book goes.

When asked to describe the Sun Eater series the best description I can come up with is epic Space Opera in the style of Rothfuss. The prose here is gorgeous, in a kind of reflective journal style similar to that used in Rothfuss's Kingkiller Chronicles. At the same time we have the galaxy spanning conflict between the alien Cielcin and humanity, giving the epic space opera elements.

With the Cielcin, Ruocchio has created an enemy that is both relatable and extremely alien at the same time. The central plot in this novel is an attempt by our main protagonist and chronicler, Hadrian Marlowe, to broker a peace between the species. The world that Hadrian lives in has seen a large part of humanity reject technology, especially AI and human enhancement based technologies, but other people exist on the fringe of human society which has openly embraced this. In order to make contact with the Cielcin Harlowe has to find one of these cyber enhanced societies, and that is what the first part of the story deals with. The second half follows the fall out of the negotiations.

There are few space operas that are more epic in scale than this. Ruocchio's world deserves to be known better than it is - this is just such a huge scale. It is beautifully realised and beautifully told. I am looking forward to continuing this story!

I am not the target market for this book. I read it as I received it as part of my Illumicrate subscription, which has introduced me to some books I enjoyed that I might not have read otherwise. This book unfortunately is not one of those.

The key setting of a sorority of witches immediately puts me in a less than thrilled place. Fraternities/Sororities are such an American thing that other than through film I have no real reference for them in my own experience. What I have seen of them from film and TV make them seem uniquely elitist and populated by particularly obnoxious people. This book does nothing to change that opinion. I honestly found myself disliking every character in this book. The teenage angsty love triangle stuff also is a huge turnoff for me.

The prose was passable enough, the plot line derivative but workable, but ultimately the setting just made this a book that I struggled to enjoy.

I have built up a sizeable collection of fancy editions of books so am looking to find ways to protect them. This provides are really nice guide on how to build slip cases and tray cases (along with how to bind your own books, something else I would like to dive into a bit more). Will need to experiment a bit more on this one!

Master of One is advertised along the lines of it being a heist story. I love good fantasy heists, and the start of the book starts very promisingly along these lines, with a thief as our main character being recruited to raid some mysterious ruins. This initial quarter of the book is probably the highlight - our thief has a wonderfully sardonic and snarky sense of humour and the puzzles that he has to solve are fun and intriguing.

However, the book then moves onto a quest to find 6 people and their ‘companions' and unfortunately this section drags somewhat. This is not a short book and this section takes up almost half the book and is just not that interesting. The final section, with the confrontation with the big bad picks the pace up a bit again, but that middle section really drags the story down. The other issue is beyond our main thief character, the rest of the characters are really not that interesting/memorable.

A fun enough YA adventure yarn, this does not offer anything particularly innovative and has some pacing issues, but the good parts are interesting enough to keep me reading.

The Nigerian setting of the Rosewater series instantly gives it a very distinctive vibe. This Africanfuturism series is based around a giant alien being called Wormwood that has settled somewhere in Nigeria, with a city called Rosewater that has grown about it. This alien being has slowly begun to alter many people in the vicinity, giving some superhuman powers, healing people of illness and sometimes even raising them from the grave.

This, the second book in the trilogy sees the mayor of Rosewater rebel against the government of Nigeria. At the same time, something is not well with Wormwood. The protagonists have changed a bit from the first book and we get some new POVs, although some favourites do return. This is an action packed romp with an interesting sci-fi twist and wonderfully Nigerian vibes. Much more political than the first book, it delves into mysterious government controlling cults, and also brings an intriguing look at where the story is going, what Wormwood is doing and its implications for the human race.

Very enjoyable - I have really enjoyed dabbling into africanfuturism as it really does provide a fresh twist on things. Rosewater is a really accessible entry point for this.

Dick's first published work of Sci-Fi, I think this exists mostly as a curiosity. It is an extremely short story and plays on some fairly classic Sci-Fi tropes. The writing is solid and you can see the formation of some of the classic ideas that he later takes up in his major works but it really is very short. It is nice to have a fine published version of it though, as it has not previously been collected. One for hardcore fans mostly

The many worlds hypothesis is an exciting place to start a story concept - that is exactly where Micaiah Johnson begins with The Space Between Worlds. Cara, our protagonist, is a traveler. Someone who is able to travel safely between worlds. The key requirement for a traveler is that they be dead on the world they are travelling to - a nice way of getting around some of the paradoxes that the many worlds theory has. In the world of this book, there are 380 worlds that are similar enough to the datum Earth for people to travel to. Cara is dead on 372 of them. Cara also has a secret. She may not be who everyone thinks she is.

The semi post-apocalyptic setting creates for an interesting world and subset of worlds for things to occur over. The interaction between the various worlds is carefully explored and the main protagonists are developed in interesting ways. The relationships are well developed and add some real color to the story. From the abusive relationship of Cara's former partner (which clouds her view towards him on all other worlds) to the strange and sinister manipulations of the corporation that employs her to travel between worlds, these are all fascinating a at times brutally real. The most heartbreaking is reserved for her relationships with her coworkers, both her mentor and her handler.

This book is the best take on the many worlds idea I have read so far. Thoroughly engrossing and a highly recommended read

Earlier this year I asked my partner to recommend 5 of her favourite books for me to try reading. I am largely a Sci-Fi/Fantasy reader and she is largely a horror reader. The second book of that set of recommendations was Koko.

Koko is an intriguing read, playing heavily on the PTSD and psychological trauma inflicted during the Vietnam war on those who served there. We start with a reunion of 4 members of a platoon who served together there for a memorial to the war in Washington DC. Gradually we learn of some mysterious goings on - a couple of their colleagues who died or went MIA and some not fully referenced atrocity committed by them which led to a court martial. The main association here was the use of the word Koko as a calling card during this atrocity.

Over the years since, the Koko calling card has been left on a series of murders in the far east. The platoon members suspect a former colleague and decide to investigate. It turns out the killer has them in his sights already. This leads to a game of cat and mouse across Asia and the USA as they try to track down the killer before he gets to them.

This is a deeply psychological thriller style story, the horror of war and the atrocities committed providing the background to the creeping dread of being stalked. It walks the boundaries between the thriller and horror genres in an intriguing way. The start was a little difficult, with names, places and important references thrown at you with little reference, but once you work into the story it draws you in effectively. The believability of the scenarios and the stakes give an excellent tension. The twists are interesting and well hidden. Overall I thoroughly enjoyed this!

This was the January 2021 Illumicrate box. I had heard some interesting buzz so I was curious to see what it was like. Unfortunately, it ultimately did not quite work for me. The basic premise has you following the political marriage the son of the emperor of a small planetary conglomerate. This has been done to try and secure the blessing of a larger galactic power, to recognise the Empire as being fully formed and willing, and thus protect it against other more powerful conglomerates in the Galaxy. I can see where the references to A Memory Called Empire come in - there are some similar vibes to the political intrigue, and I did really enjoy this aspect of it. The idea of being a smaller power within a connected galaxy is an intriguing one and the political machinations of the various sects within the power were well realised.

Where this book fell flat to me was on the other central pillar of its story telling, and that is the romance side. Essentially this is a romance story with Sci-Fi politics on the side. I am not a big romance fan, and this book has not changed my mind on this. The idiotic emotional chasing around that the too main leads do is just frustrating and detracts hugely from the interesting political stuff that had been set up. I can see how this might work for people who like romance, but for me it just became annoying.

I am sometimes a bit sniffy about YA, but this one I thoroughly enjoyed. This one uses an Urban Fantasy/Fae setting but the stakes and the fantasy are really well constructed. The title refers to two of the main characters the ‘Dark Star', a fallen immortal who has a tendency to create mischief, and the ‘Hollow Star', a half-fae half-human who has been chosen by Luck as their champion and removed from the whims of Fate. The mythology and world building is one of the strong points of this story. Ashley Shuttleworth has created a very well realised Fae world within the real world. Various Fae courts representing the different seasons have built their secret lives into some of the major cities.

The main plot involves a sinister plot by some disgruntled Alchemist (a forbidden science in this world) that affects both the Fae and the human world. Our protagonists are drawn into this plot as the King of the Fae Courts refuses to get involved. There is a good sense of peril throughout as the various creations of this alchemist are let loose on the world. The interactions and motivations for the main characters are also interestingly portrayed. Even the love interest (which is usually the weakest part of any YA) is done in a way which is sympathetic and not too teenage angsty.

One criticism - this book could easily have mass appeal, but the cover art is not the most enticing to people outside of the usual Fae fantasy market.

The Hunger Games with Greek gods. In this world, every few years an outcast group of Greek gods are hunted. If they are killed, the killer takes the gods powers and potential immortality, but they will be hunted again the next cycle. The hunters are divided into a series of houses, based around the Greek heroes of old. These ‘hunts' occur in modern cities - currently New York. This gives an interesting and deep mythology overlaid on a modern urban fantasy. This gave this a very interesting and unique feel even with it playing with classic YA fantasy tropes.

Overall I was very impressed with this - the characters were well developed, their motivations well realized. Some of the more annoying YA character habits are well avoided. This is definitely one of the better YA books I have read recently in the way it twists the concepts in interesting ways and has a satisfying underlying darkness.

If you like Urban Fantasy and Greek Mythology, I can highly recommend this.

This is a book that had been sitting in my tbr for way to long. My girlfriend ended up getting started on this trilogy before me and was effusive in her praise. I really enjoyed the Bone Ships so was looking forward to reading more of RJ Barker's work and it did not disappoint.

In many ways this a typical coming of age story, where we follow Girton Club-Foot, an apprentice assassin. However, Barker has built a really impressive world around this. Here, magic is looked upon as evil - it damages the land and the only way to heal it is with blood. The ruling classes are dominated by petty dynastic squabbles and it is these that we are drawn into.

Being assassin themed there are lots of secrets in play and these are gradually revealed in a very satisfying way.

This is mightily impressive debut and I am looking forwarded to delving further into the Wounded Kingdom!

City of Lies has an intriguing premise - we are following the story of a poison taster, loyal to the rulers of the city state that the story is set in. Our main character is thrust into his role when his father and mentor is successfully poisoned along with the then ruler. In a somewhat nepotistic way the roles of ruler and food taster both pass on to the respective sons.

In the background of this there is growing unrest in the provinces around the main city - the city's elites are using their position to repress and abuse the population in the areas surrounding the city, largely peopled by a different ethnicity.

The political maneuverings and twists form the backbone of this narrative. They are worked well with interesting twists following right to the end. There are some distinctly dodgy story elements (how a rebel army is maneuvered and armed with no one having any clue about it pushes at the boundary of believability). The lack of thought towards the poorer parts of the society is well done though.

My main gripe really is with the writing style. I found it slightly distant and hard to engage with. For me this is a competent fantasy debut - I am intrigued enough to want to see where this is going. Is it perfect? no. Is it interesting? yes.

The base premise of this police procedural is certainly an intriguing one - a serial killer who has started exhibiting his kills as artworks around London, pickled in formaldehyde tanks. This sets up an intriguing cat and mouse game when the killer decides that the lead police officer on his case is going to be his next target.

This is an impressive crime debut with a well worked hook. whilst there are a few less polished sections (some of the dialogue is very confusing) the overall plot and prose is extremely well done with a satisfying denouement. An enjoyable read.

This was an intriguing hodgepodge of ideas and genres all smashed together. We have some kind of post apocalyptic Edinburgh, people who can commune with ghosts, disappearing kids and magic all colliding together into a fascinating mix.

The main character is a bit of a loveable rascal, who helps pay for her families bills by communing with the dead and providing a messenger service between them and the living. Through one of these ghosts she ends up getting tasked with finding a kid who has gone missing. Researching this leads her to the titular Library.

The story feels very different to typical urban fantasy that I have read - the familiar yet different setting lends both a comforting and discombobulating element. This ends up feeling very fresh! An intriguingly different read.