Ryan
Music is magic.
On a certain level, I think anyone who's ever played an instrument understands that, as does anyone who's ever poured their heart into a mixtape. Silvia Moreno-Garcia definitely understands it as well; Signal to Noise is a fantastic look at the power of music, and how the right song has the potential to change our lives.
Spanning across decades in Mexico City, Signal to Noise takes that connection between music and magic on a more literal level than that of metaphor - the three teenaged characters at the centre of the drama learn how to use their record collections to exert influence on the world around them, while their adult selves deal with some of the emotional fallout of those exertions. The two halves of the story are balanced well, and Moreno-Garcia creates characters that are easily identifiable without feeling like they're archetypal or cliche. The interesting nature of the characters, mixed with a soundtrack that's both mysterious and familiar, makes this a really engaging read.
The cover boasts that Signal to Noise would be of interest to fans of Stranger Things, and I get why the publisher would say that, but I think a better elevator pitch would be High Fidelity crossed with The Craft. If you were a fan of those films you'd probably dig this.
This marks another enjoyable installment of the Celtic Mythology series from Irish Imbas. The stories cover a fair amount of the same mythological content as the previous entries in the series, but manages to provide interesting and sufficiently unique modern tales about selkie, changelings, and other familiar topics.
Another interesting part of the book was O'Sullivan's opening essay on the differences between Irish Mythology and Celtic Fantasy (with his work being firmly in the former category). As someone who was raised in Canada by Irish immigrants, I've always been a bit aware of the distinction although I never really had a good, succinct way of distinguishing between the two. And I'll admit to liking some of the Celtic Fantasy that he scoffs at, but it was mostly for lack of better options. I'm glad to see that there are collections like this out there that are dedicated to showing more accurate versions of these classic stories.
This was a fantastic, visceral coming of age story. Jared's struggle to deal with his family dysfunction and addiction issues was really heartfelt, and Robinson's witty, quick-paced dialogue keeps the story engaging throughout.
The magical realism parts took a backseat for most of the novel, and that actually suits the story really well. For most of the story it feels like a metaphor for Jared's experience, but by the end it unfolds into a more major theme. Robinson unveils it really well, and the way in which she does it makes the story incredibly enjoyable.
This was everything you loved about the first Murderbot Diary, but moreso. Murderbot explores the meaning of its newfound freedom, while still speaking with the sardonic wit that is quickly becoming its trademark. Along the way it interacts with other AI, which allows Wells to do some interesting worldbuilding, and provides more human fodder for Murderbot to dunk on.
The dark humour of Murderbot is the sort of thing that wouldn't be for everybody, but in a genre that often takes itself Very Seriously, it feels like a breath of fresh air, and the novella length of the story prevents it from becoming overly grim or the humour stale.
This felt so different from Amberlough that it was jarring. The first book was whimsical and breezy, and Armistice is never that, trading the jazz of the first book for angsty punk dirges.
This is, of course, the point: that when facism infests an area, it affects everything around it. People can try to hide from it, or lash out in anger, or react in 100 other different ways, but they're still fundamentally changed by that experience.
On top of the political allegory that Armistice leans into, there's a truly engaging spy tale here, full of double crosses, lost love, and betrayal. That plot, and the characters that live it, help the book avoid ever becoming didactic or patronizing, and helps the story remain truly engaging.
This is the story of Emmaline, a twenty-something woman who's in the process of being discharged from a mental hospital following a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. Em's doing better. She's taking her meds every day, and even gets a job at the local discount big-box retailer. Then Em starts hearing a voice that claims it's a being from another dimension, and it needs Em's help.
What makes Stay Crazy such an interesting read is the ambiguity about the “hallucinations” that Em experiences. As readers, we know that they are real, but only because we know this is a sci-fi story and in sci-fi stories the person's visions or hallucinations are always true. But within the narrative itself, Em doesn't have any proof of that. All she has is her faith in herself and her ability to tell reality from fiction. Seeing Em struggle with that, and watching her trying to determine where exactly the line between sanity and responding to unusual circumstances lies, makes for a really interesting read.
Em is a fun character to follow over the course of the story, as well. She's smart, sardonic, and . All this makes Stay Crazy a dark, fun, thoughtful piece of sci-fi that could form the centre of a Venn diagram that contained Chuck Palahniuk, Phillip K Dick, and Kevin Smith. It deals with harsh issues surrounding mental illness, and does so in a way that's both empathetic and exciting at the same time.
The past, as they say, is a different country. The majority of this book is standard, kind of uninspired standard Canadiana - city person traveling to the backwoods, hoping to find themselves and solve the anomie of modern life.
Then there's parts where the woman's having sex with the bear, and those I just don't know about.
This was a beautiful, heartbreaking story about a residential school survivor as he tries to escape a system and a society that wants nothing more than to strip him of his dignity. Wagamese does a great job of going beyond the intellectual horror that we know those schools inflicted, and presents the emotional scars that stay with someone long after they are removed from an abusive situation.
Overall, this was a pretty entertaining mix of Lovecraftian horror and pulp detective mystery. Rawlik managed to perfectly capture the aesthetics of Lovecraft's style, free of any of the baggage that the original stories contain. The opening was a bit rough - the story meanders a lot and it takes nearly the first third of the book to find its groove - but once it finds the story becomes a lot of fun.
The one real downside I would say the story has is that it's so full of obvious Easter eggs (references to not only all of Lovecraft's work, but other Victorian/gothic horror as well) that they become distractions from the work, rather than bonuses. In that regard it felt at times like a Lovecraftian version of Ready Player One.
This was a really fun idea for a novel - Prohibition-era urban fantasy, full of jazz-era character archetypes and a classic pulpy story about corrupt politicians, land deals, and murder. Once you get beyond that surface level of fun concepts, though, they don't actually meld together very well - they different threads make friction rather than harmony. Not a bad read, but one that feels like it could have been better than was.
Six Wakes is a sci-fi/mystery that takes the familiar idea of the locked-room mystery and moves it to a spaceship. Six clones wake up aboard a ship, their last memory being just before they boarded it twenty-five years earlier. Around them is evidence that all six had recently met with foul play. The novel follows these six characters as they try to unravel the mystery of their missing time, and find out which one of them was the murderer in their previous life.
What makes this story so fresh and dynamic is how Lafferty is able to blend the the two pillars of the story together (the mystery elements and the sci-fi ones), creating a story that felt both familiar and completely unique throughout the entire time I was reading it. She slowly unveils this fascinating, complex world that's been impacted by its technological developments, and provides us just enough clues to keep us engaged in the novel's central mystery while withholding enough that it remains compelling and thrilling. Along with the worldbuilding, the interesting characters, and the engaging mystery, Lafferty weaves themes of rebirth, hopefulness in the face of tragedy, and how technology affects our sense of morality. This was a fascinating book and I loved the experience of reading it.
I want to start off by saying that I get why people would love this book, and there were a bunch of moments in it that were fun. I'm in the demographic that's the prime target for the book (“geeky dude that was alive in the 1980s”) and on a surface level it was a fun trip down memory lane.
Under the surface, though, the story becomes a little disappointing. The main character, Wade, seems really underdeveloped and unremarkable, with little personality beyond “good at videogames”. Despite being such a cypher, though, the other characters in the story idealize him. The villains are similarly shallow. The justification for them being villainous is originally “they're a corporation and try to play the game strategically”, but then they're suddenly murdering dozens of innocent people. The story would have been a lot stronger had its characters been more developed and more fully realized.
This continues with the way that Ready Player One relates to its main theme of nostalgia. Nostalgia – specifically early-to-mid-80s nostalgia for mainstream pop music, video games, and movies – permeates every aspect of the story and the characters' lives. On the surface this might seem fun, especially for the target audience of the book. The problem is, however, that it's a story in which nostalgia and culture have become corrupted. The characters aren't nostalgic for the reasons that people in real life become nostalgic for stuff – because they're wishing for a return to a more carefree time, or because of personal, emotional links to the material. Instead, they're nostalgic for the 80s, a culture that they never experienced or encountered, because Halliday was nostalgic for the 80s. The rich old man has warped society into this cargo cult that worships the trinkets of his youth to the disservice of all else. There's no evidence of any culture existing in the world of Ready Player One beyond 2002 – just slavish observance to the things that Halliday loved. Halliday has an absolutely abusive relationship to the culture of the OASIS, and it's unfortunate that the book doesn't make any attempt to critique or analyze that relationship.
There were some fun moments in Last Shot, and Older has a great grasp of the two protagonists and what makes them tick. Ultimately, though, this suffered from the same problem the Solo movie did, which is that it insists on making Han Solo the protagonist when he's the least interesting part of the story.
Lando's amazing in this. Leia's great, in the small role that she plays. Fyzen Gor is an interesting antagonist. More minor characters, like the Sana Starros, the Gungan security guard, and the Ewok hacker, steal every scene they're in. Han Solo? He mostly shows us why Luke Skywalker was the protagonist of the original Star Wars movies.
I was really of two minds with this. As someone who's a big fan of Rogue One, it was exciting to see more of the characters in the movie, and learning more of their backstory will no doubt make my next viewing of the movie an even more enjoyable experience.
However, as a stand-alone novel this felt unsatisfying. Saw remains a cipher, Jyn's character arc has no real resolution (and the way the plot is developed, it couldn't if it wanted to line up with RO), and the new characters that are introduced seem inconsequential and underdeveloped.
My favourite Star Wars novels are always those that play with the conventions of what the reader expects from a “Star Wars story”, and this one was no exception. It's an employment drama that mostly focuses on interpersonal conflict and workplace politics - it just so happens that those politics and interpersonal relationships are focused around the building of the Death Star. And as a workplace drama it's a pretty entertaining one; the audience of course knows the outcome of Galen Erso's increasing unease over his work for the Empire, and the tension in the story becomes mostly about how much of himself he's going to lose to the manipulations of Orson Krennic and Grand Moff Tarkin. Reading this made me excited to watch Rogue One again, as well, because knowing more about the relationship between those characters will probably deepen my appreciation of their scenes in the film.
This was just a delightful read. Kincaid is a very archetypal urban fantasy protagonist - she's snarky and funny, barely keeping her life together in most areas, but with just enough badassery that she gets through the day. Beyond just being that archetype, though, Charish fills her with enough sass and edge that she's a lot of fun to follow on her adventure.
Beyond that, the world that Charish builds here has a lot of verisimilitude. It's a world filled with zombies and ghosts, but their motivations for being there (and for other people wanting to keep them around) ring very true - dead grunge rockers being summoned to give people guitar lessons, voodoo practitioners being asked to raise zombies to settle contract disputes - it's at the same time both very mundane and fantastical, and the tension between the two really makes the story sing.
This was an absolutely beautifully written examination of heroes and monsters - how they're created, what drives them, and how the realities that surround them help to shape them.
This book is often described as a modernization of the Beowulf myth, and while it very obviously is that, it goes far beyond that as well, subverting a lot of the tropes of the original story. It's not necessary to be familiar with the old English poem to appreciate the story here, but knowing that connection adds an intriguing layer of depth to the overall story.
I've started this tradition of reading Hiaasen novels in the middle of winter. He tends to write so evocatively about Florida that it serves as a nice little mini-break from the weather, and the zany hijinks his criminals engage in can lighten the mood in even the dreariest of seasons.
From that perspective, I was a little disappointed in this one. The narrative's perfectly serviceable, and the satire of celebrity culture works a little too well - Cherry's so vapid and her personality so ephemeral that we never really care what happens to her, and Bang's so well-written as a sleazeball that we never empathize with him. It was a fun enough way to pass the time, but definitely not as entertaining as most of his work that I've read.
For the first 75% or so of this book, I thought it was a fairly standard “first book in a YA trilogy” novel. You have the young heroine who is more powerful than she believes herself to be, the brooding love interest with the mysterious past, the oppressive society that mistreats people similar to the heroine. The supernatural elements, and the society of daevas/djinn, were fairly unique and definitely interesting, but by themselves they didn't feel like enough to carry the story. It felt not bad, just fairly uneventful. Then, at around that 75% mark, the book takes a sharp right turn away from your expectations and it makes it so much stronger. You realize that Chakraborty has done a great job of leading the reader in a certain direction, while also setting up the surprise twist so that it still feels earned. It will be interesting to see where she goes next with this story.
Mata Hari is a fascinating historical figure, and her story is one that is both exciting and a testament to the injustices that women face in patriarchal societies. She deserves books that explain the sensational and extraordinary life that she led.
This, unfortunately, is not that book. Coehlo chooses to frame his story through a series of letters written at the end of Mata Hari's life, and in doing so makes the story more focused on her death than on her life. In doing so, he deflates a lot of the dramatic tension from her life.
The voice in the storytelling is awkward, as well. Mata Hari's letters are written in the first person, but she writes as someone aware of the infamy and iconography she will achieve after her death, which makes the voice sound more like the Coehlo's rather than the character's. This creates an awkward tension in the narration that detracts from the protagonist's telling of her story.