Valerie

This book hurts.

At first, I was disappointed that the main character shifts from Shara (whom I adored) to Turyin Mulaghesh (who was fine but not Shara). Then I realized exactly how few books are written from the perspective of an over fifty, black, female, one-armed war general, and I got over it. Mulaghesh's perspective is not like anything I've ever read before, and that alone makes this book a great one.

City of Stairs was a book about Diplomacy, about secret wars and manipulation and cultural absorption. It was about how conquerors and conquered moved on after the wars had been one. City of Blades is about war in a much more raw and primal sense. It does not sugar-coat, it does not pull punches, and it does not hide the horrific acts humans commit under the conditions of war. It's about soldiers as human beings instead of pawns. It's about living with yourself after doing wrong things for what seemed like right reasons at the time but who can be sure. It's about how society treats its veterans when they are of no more use to us. In short, it's an extremely timely book that a lot of people would benefit to read before they cast more stones.

At times, it actually gets too bloody for me, which is unusual because generally I can self-censor the gore down to an acceptable level for my stomach. Maybe I've just been watching too much Game of Thrones, but I had difficulty not imagining a lot of the more vivid descriptions in here. Bennett has a visceral tone in this book that I don't remember from Stairs. Maybe it has to do with Mulaghesh being so much more raw a character than Shara.

I read an article the other day about non-gender roled societies in fantasy and how few of them there actually are. The cultures in this series all value people on their merits rather than their gender. There are major female characters and throwaway female characters, female guards and soldiers, and a female engineering head (who happens to be Sigrud's daughter and amazing). A lot of bit parts that would normally be painted as stereotypically male are given to women which adds a normalcy to the idea that so much fantasy literature lacks. There are also at least three distinct races in the books and numerous nationalities. Culture clash was a theme in Stairs and it is continued here through the violent, death-obsessed culture of Voortyashtan.

The themes are not as much about religion in this book (though Voortya and her followers provide an epic backdrop to the events) but more about the humans and the reasons and ways we wage war. It's a remarkable book, and it hurt me page after page in a way few books do. That's a good thing, I think.

When I was in high school, I had a big Stephen King phase (like had my sweet sixteen party at the hotel that inspired the Shining big). I read a huge portion of his catalog and really loved the suspense and scare factor. Sometime in my twenties, I stopped liking that feeling, and mostly cut horror out of my media diet. So when my book club picked this one, I was apprehensive. My only experience with Joe Hill was a short story collection I found when I lived abroad and read because English books were so hard to come by, and that collection was SCARY.

I'm not sure if this book was not that scary or if I'm just no longer as easy to scare as a I once was. Hill refers to it as his senior thesis on horror fiction, and the nods to his father's work are everywhere. It's at many points clever, and the heroes are unconventional and interesting. It also has an extremely well written child protagonist which is a rarity. The pacing and suspense are right up there with King's work too (I do feel bad to keep comparing the two as I'm sure Hill is sick of it, but this book is so clearly a love letter to his father's work).

That said, did I enjoy it? Not really. As a new mom, I'm really not into child endangerment stories, and a lot of the trauma and scary parts were less suspenseful and more uncomfortable for me. Mild bad things happen to kids and dogs in this book, and I am just not here for that I pretty much knew who would live and die because of the tried and true King formulas, and the horrific Christmas imagery was just not something I enjoyed at all. Is it a bad book? Not at all. If you enjoy horror, especially works like IT, I think this is a great piece in that genre, but the time when I could really enjoy it is long past.

Reading this book did nothing to dissuade my conviction that Felicia Day and I should really be best friends. We could eat snacks and talk about Prodigy and introduce ourselves by GPA to people! It'd be magical!

I fell in love with Felicia Day sometime during the course of The Guild largely because I identified so strongly with Codex who Felicia admits is more than a little autobiographical. Since then her career as an actress, writer, producer, and all around stuff-tryer has been something of an inspiration in my life. I tried to tell her that at a convention once and we ended up apologizing to each other about fourteen times. It was magical, but not as magical as if I'd known to bring up childhood obsessions with Prodigy at the time.

This book is an extremely honest and open portrait of an oddball. It has light-hearted chapters about silly and serious things in her early life parts of which did literally make me laugh out loud, no internet acronym overuse intended. It also has starkly emotional accounts of her battles with anxiety, depression, and harassment which, again literally, made me tear up. It's pretty rare that books do either of those things to me, let alone what I at first assumed would most likely be a collection of her funniest tweets (I would have bought that too, mind you). In any medium Felicia has presented herself, I get the impression of a nervous but extremely genuine woman, and this book highlights that genuineness beautifully in both her strengths and weaknesses.

I don't read celebrity biographies terribly often, but the ones that I do seem to feature anxiety, depression, and the the feeling of being a fraud very prominently in their themes. They are always sad themes, but I find them extremely reassuring. I think a lot of people, myself included, cope with success by going “Oh God! I tricked everyone into thinking I'm good at this! One day they'll figure out their wrong and I will be crushed under the weight of my lies!!!” However, I think we all think we are the only ones who feel that, and all the supportive friends in the world can't truly crush that thought. Felicia's book reminded me that even my heroes feel that way, that it's okay to feel that way, and also that you can feel that way and still make good art.

On the off chance that Felicia is scrolling through Goodreads comments and finds this review (which from the content of the book is maybe not such an offchance but I would be doing the same thing), thank you for being brave enough to put this out in the world, Felicia.

What a beautiful novella. Vo creates an entire world in just 87 pages. Elegant, quiet, and yet ringing with stories as yet untold in this universe and with these characters. For a story told primarily in flashbacks with the endings of most of the characters known in the first few pages, it's also surprisingly suspenseful. Thanks for my book club for introducing me to this author.

I think I was a bit disappointed in this one because I wanted something on the level of the Green Bones Saga, and this is definitely not that. I also don't love the humans vs. giant predator that doesn't follow basic evolutionary predator behavior trope. The rocs in this book are awesome, but I don't love the manticore conception at all.

That said, once I managed to stop thinking about how the manticore makes no sense in the ecosystem of this world, I did enjoy the quiet, human drama that Fonda Lee really excels at, and the ending was perfectly melancholy and well done. So mixed feelings, but I still think Lee is one of the best of this generation of fantasy writers.

I love Lindsay Ellis' videos, so I was excited to get this through first reads. I honestly didn't have super high expectations, and I was pleasantly surprised. Cora is maybe not my favorite character ever, but I enjoyed the aliens a lot and the “girl and her alien” storyline was a lot of fun. I think the stuff with the CIA/government officials was a little hand wavey and puts a lot more faith in our military forces than I for one am willing to give credit for, but I didn't mind so much. Nice to live in a fantasy world where the US doesn't immediately blow up something they don't understand.

This book is extremely hard to categorize. I was surprised to learn it won the Locus for best horror, but the more I read, the more that made sense. It's horror in the Heart of Darkness sense much more than the Stephen King sense. This is about the horror of people as much as any of the monsters.

That said, it's incredibly complex, beautifully layered, and an exploration of ancient Africa that I've never seen the likes of. My book club host compared it to Ulysses, and I think that's fair. I wished often that I had a reader's guide because my white suburban self certainly didn't recognize anything though it has the feel of being impeccably researched. It expresses a diversity of ancient African societies, many more technologically complex than medieval Europe, and that alone is worth the price of the book. It's got an extremely Freudian sensibility to it that at first was off-putting (mommy issues, anyone?), but gradually I came to see the narrative (especially Mossi) calling out Tracker for his attitudes towards women and children. He is rarely a likable character, but his journey, growths, and falls are all fascinating.

That said, little about this book is “fun” (with the exception of some of the lover's quarrel dialogues between Tracker, Leopard, and Mossi). This is a book about pain and trauma and it never shies away from it. Rarely is a book too graphic for me, but this one came close. I'd say, if you make it through the eyeball scene, you're fine after that. Even James notes in the acknowledgments that his mother is allowed to read all but 2 pages of this book (and I'm assuming it's those too. Nothing ever gets better for long, and just keep expecting tragedy. If you are in the mood for a cheerful fun read or if you have any triggers around violence or sexual abuse, do not touch this one. However, if you want a literary dark fantasy that explores a culture mainstream SFF has ignored for decades, this is worthy of the praise it got. I'm pregnant right now and not able to drink while reading it, but if you can read this with some strong alcohol, that might help.

I love Naomi Novik a lot, and her writing style is great, but premise-wise this book just wasn't for me. It's sort of a fun twist on the magical school genre, but it's still at its heart a magical school book with teen drama and regular monster attacks, something I might enjoy as a tv show, but that just doesn't work for me in a book. If you're into magical school drama, this is probably a great choice for you, but I'm hoping she returns to her eastern European historical fantasies soon.

After a lot of thought, I think I figured out why I had trouble connecting with this book and with a lot of the epic fantasy I've tried recently, and I think the answer is HBO. I feel like every time I read a newer fantasy, it's structured exactly like a multi-series HBO epic drama, and while that can be fun, and there's certainly a place for it, the story doesn't seem to need the novel. It doesn't want to be a novel at all, and so the actual writing just doesn't quite step up as high as I would like.

It has a lot of great elements: Southeast Asian setting, complicated characters, well-crafted political intrigue. But I kept seeing how I was being set up for the next volume/season two, how the visuals of the rot or the Hirana would work on a screen where the words don't really bring them to life. I don't know. Maybe I'm just a big jaded. I'm still giving it 4 stars as I don't think it's a bad book by any stretch of the imagination, and if you want to read big budget HBO fantasy, this is a perfect fit, but for me, I just never felt super connected to anything and probably won't continue on in the series.

Also, I know every pregnancy and birth experience is different... but like, no. None of that plotline worked for me at all.

I definitely wouldn't have picked this book up on my own, but I'm glad my book club chose it. It starts out as a hacker thriller novel, but halfway through morphs into some really crazy sci-fi on themes of artificial intelligence and exactly how much of our lives is offloaded to the internet. The characters are often reprehensible but interesting and mostly realistic. I think more could have been done with DeAndre and Aleena, but overall I enjoyed watching these characters. I'm not sure if Wendig is a genius or just a walking dad joke with his spot on naming (Copper? Chance? Really?). The science starts strong, but things do get wonky at the halfway point so don't count on it for hard sci-fi. If that doesn't bother you, it's a great thrill ride.

Whoever said economic theory wasn't sexy?

TBC merges the colonialism of dozens of different societies with Nazi-esque eugenics over a vast and diverse empire. The title character, and island girl from a society where two men and one woman is a standard marriage, watches her home be overridden by the Masquerade and decides the only way she can save it is by working within the system. She puts on her own masks, and convinces herself she can commit any atrocities for the greater good. You never realize the amount of atrocities a good accountant can commit.

Dickenson pulls no punches. Do not read this story if you are after a happy ending. Or beginning. Or middle, really. No one gets to be happy long in this novel. But if you're looking for a story about perspective, where love and loathing, help and harm, home and exile, are all just a minute perspective shift apart, try it. You may be depressed, but you won't be disappointed.

So, I definitely went into this with a lot of bias. Everyone had already told me this was a blatant Tolkein rip-off and Terry Brooks is a cheap hack. I can see where everyone is coming from, but I'm going to try to make a review of my own opinions.

The first half of the book, it was hard to avoid the LOTR comparisons. Brooks has openly confirmed his inspiration and his desire to write an LOTR that was a little less academic, a little more action based. That's fair. Did he succeed? I don't really think so. There were a lot of first novel issues. The third person omniscient narrator was a little too blatant in its perceptions. The characters were pretty bland and one-sided. You could say some of this for Rings too, but Tolkein has a prose that is a joy to read, where Brooks is (at this point at least), pretty dull.

The second half was a lot better. The distinct parallels are much fewer, and the new characters like Panamon Creel and Keltset made the action/adventure side come to the fore. One of the strongest criticisms of Rings is that pretty people are good and ugly monsters are bad, and Shannara avoids this with characters like Keltset and the healer gnomes. He at least recognizes his villainous races as complex enough to have good people among them.

The biggest issue I had was it kind of felt like Brooks read LOTR and said, “You know what this needs? Less chicks.” It took 342 pages to get a female character onstage, and her role is limited to being obsessed over and kidnapped by male characters and doing absolutely nothing herself. But no, let's add more blonde, white dudes and get rid of all those pesky womenfolk.

Parts of the book were enjoyable, but I think overall its going to be pretty easy to forget. Still, it's another classic of the genre I can cross off my list.

I was honestly surprised at how much I enjoyed this book. It's been on that shelf of classics that I knew I should have read by now but feared it would be too dry (you bet your stillsuit pun intended). Also I was once scarred by the image of Sting in a metal bikini. Reading it, however, I was surprised at how quickly I became invested in the characters. I could see how other sci-fi/fantasy authors had been inspired by this series and the way it merges politics and adventure.

Obviously, the setting is the most impressive part of the piece. I must have gone through a couple gallons of water reading the book. They attention paid to every detail of desert life is a credit to Herbert and he's on par with Simmons as far as making me feel the world he has created.

My only real struggle is the treatment of women on Dune. We get this all powerful force of female mysticism in the Bene Gesserit, but their entire goal is to create a single man whom they can control. Jessica is a well-rounded, intriguing character but the other women all fall into typical SF tropes. I may continue the series just to learn a bit more about the Bene Gesserit and how the world moves on now that Paul has assumed control.

While I didn't love this as much as I loved the first one, I still had a great time reading it, especially as the action builds towards the end. In this volume, Sigurd becomes the primary POV character, and the journey he has taken, the planning that Bennett must have been putting into this character from the very beginning, transform Sigurd from one-dimensional overpowered bruiser to a multi-farted plot point and perhaps our only hope in the face of this new threat.

Shara, too, while less present in this book, is a shadow whose influence stretches wide over the story as we see the impact her life had on her country, her friends, and the family she chose for herself. if nothing else, this series is one of the few books written by men that I know of which include incredibly complicated and unique female characters.

More so than City of Swords, the Divine elements of this book are back in focus. This is the aspect that most sucked me into this series, and Bennett's creativity and exploration of this world where hey, miracles happen, make it well worth any mythology nerd's time. If you enjoyed the other two books, you will be right at those here.

I'm really confused how this book was never on my radar. A multi-level sci-fi adventure love story through time inspired by the stories of Hadiran and Antinous? With aliens? I guess, judging a book from its cover, this small press story didn't look like much, and I probably would never have noticed it had my book club not chosen it. This is why I stay in book clubs folks.

The learning curve to getting into this story is steep, though. It's very hard to blurb, and any summary I found was vague and unsatisfying. Eventually, I just got into the rhythm of the structure of a series of vignettes, accepting that our main characters would change gender, age, orientation, and relationship every few vignettes or so. It's an ambitious, experiment of a novel, and I think the ending is a solid pay-off. If you are looking for some weird sci-fi and not intimidated by stories that don't even start letting you in on the secret until three quarters of the way through the book, give this one a try. If you are also a computer science geek or coder, I think this was written especially for you. I bet there are a lot of references in the code portions that I have no way of understanding.

I always love reading the print versions of this series. The art is so beautiful that the webcomic just never does it justice. Also so much has happened since these comics first ran, I need the refresher. The Oz parts are the strongest in this story, and it is always a treat to return there.

I love when Gaiman does Fairy Tales. He takes what we know, studies it, and builds something new and beautiful. It's never ham-fisted like say making Cinderella into a girl power tale about the French revolution while (stupid revivals) or overdone (look... another Alice and Wonderland epic battle scene), and it's never exactly what you'd expect. One of my favorite short stories of his is “Snow, Glass, Apples,” a vision of a very differen Snow White through the eyes of the queen.

This is (luckily) not the Snow White of that story, but a new creation who then steps out of her epilogue and into Sleeping Beauty's. She is referred to only as “The Queen” and is a strong, stalwart queen without slipping into character. Essentially, the book follows her choices which mirror the big choice of returning to her castle and sleepwalking the rest of her life or fighting off a land of eternal sleep. It's all the stuff of dreams, and that is Gaiman's wheelhouse.

I read the story before when it was collected in “Trigger Warning,” but I highly recommend the Chris Riddell illustrated version. The pictures add a depth and elegance to the story, and I found myself staring at even the tiniest illustrations noticing all the little details snuck into each panel. Riddell is a master illustrator and his collaborations with Gaiman are becoming some of my favorite.

If you like new twists on old stories and are tired of the same twists over and over again, you can't go wrong with this one. Even if you have “Trigger Warning,” you'll probably at least want to keep this version on your shelf. It's just too pretty to not appreciate.

This book is the reason I joined Sword and Laser. My copy is a dingy paperback that I'd never heard of before and probably have walked past a million times in used book shops without a thought. Inside, it's almost exactly the type of fairy tale I thrive on.

I was nervous at first because a guy named “Barry Hughart” was writing an homage to Chinese mythology, and I'm still curious as to what someone with the cultural background would think of it. My own knowledge of Chinese myths is limited to a few Journey to the West adaptations and some questionable Taiwanese dramas. Still, I think Hughart really captured the storytelling flavor of an ancient myth, from any culture. It's witty and clever at some points, then bawdy and gratuitous the next. The balance kept me engaged without the book itself becoming pretentious in any way.

I felt a lot of the style was also very reminiscent of a reversed Don Quixote, with a clueless Sancho Panza and a clever knight. Li Kao's slightly flawed character is a little bit wise sage and a lot of folk trickster. The dialogue had me laughing out loud regularly, particularly anything involving Ma Grub and Pawnbroker Fang. Number 10 Ox is a little harder to grasp, but then again he's the readers avatar into the world and just as confused as we're supposed to be at times.

I loved the twists and turns that slowly wrap the main characters into a larger, more epic tale, and the way that plot turns in on itself time and again. Miser Shen is probably my favorite character, and also the only one responsible for me getting weepy eyed.

The only problem I have with the book is one I have consistently with fantasy fiction, and since this book was written in the eighties and set in “A China that Never Was,” it can't really lean on the “period piece” crutch I give to a lot of authors. The book represents women pretty awfully. Every female character in the story is either an awful, greedy succubus or a sexy bimbo. I might give Bright Star the exception here, but being half-naked most of her time on stage and valued only as a concubine, I really can't. I did enjoy Lotus Cloud and the way men reacted to her. I felt her role in the story was appropriate to her character, but still I don't think it would be too hard to portray a single woman as an intelligent being.

I think it only grated on me because the horrible women are so horrible and there is no redemption for any of them the way there is for most of the horrible men. Murdering them is seen as the appropriate solution. I don't mind the ridiculously gory violence, which is par for the course in the little Chinese mythology I know, but there is just no balance in the story on gender lines. I feel like I bring this up in every review I make and I'm sounding like a pretentious women's studies major, but I just feel the criticism is valid here.

It's a shame that it puts such a damper on what would otherwise be a five-star book for me. The pacing, the humor, the depth of emotions explored all make it a wonderful read, and I will certainly continue on in the series once I can find the other two books. I would certainly recommend it to anyone with a love of mythology and a good sense of humor.

This is a pretty nerdy book. I could have gotten any number of free Project Gutenberg editions of Frankenstein, but I had a dilemma over whether to read the 1818 or the 1831 edition. Annotated versions solve the problem! Included with the 1818 text are several articles on cultural impact, annotations that help you experience both the texts and the changes Shelley made in between, as well as tons of notes fearlessly attempting to explain away plot holes.

I'd never actually read Frankenstein before this, and this might not be the best way to experience it as a first read, but I still enjoyed the process. It seems silly to review the actual story because what could I add to the other two centuries of criticism? That said, one of the forewards writes of Frankenstein as a modern myth in line with Dracula and Sherlock Holmes. When you say “Frankenstein,” people know what you mean even if you've never touched the book. So it's surprising how different the story is from the myth that has been passed down the last few centuries. It's a story I'm glad I finally read, and an edition that does justice to author and the story.

Bonus: Klinger is clearly a big fan of Young Frankenstein and one of the appendices is an interview with Mel Brooks.

I think this would have been an awesome short story, but as a novel, I got a little overwhelmed by the protagonist's situation. I'm also pretty sure that a lot of the Wonderland madness going on in the Building as a clear parallel for the author's time and place that does not immediately translate to mine. I felt as frustrated as the protagonist trying to make sense of senseless bureaucracy, and I think it was an amazing concept. I just don't generally like to read to feel that frustrated. I felt like I was stuck in a Kubrick/Lynch crossover film with no end in sight.

I'm also not sure why the author bothered with the introduction. The introduction about the post-paperpocalypse world really grabbed me, and I was disappointed to not see it picked up at the end.

This is a book that it feels weird I never read before. My husband bought it for me as part of our holiday used book stocking stuffer tradition, and it is exactly the sort of collection I would have been really into during my modernized fairy tale period. I'm less into that sort of thing these days, but the stories hear clearly built the foundation for so many of the works I loved. The depth of Carter's language, the pacing of each story, the visceral punch of the descriptions all make this an incredible collection, highly recommended to anyone who enjoys a good feminist retelling or who used to and somehow missed this one.

Reading McSweeney's makes me a better reader and a better writer. I always feel like a few themes jump out at me in each issue, and for this one, it's the idea of grief. So many of the stories here explore that open wound, and I found myself tearing up on more than one occasion. Not a beach read issue, perhaps, but worth your time if you're feeling emotionally resilient.

A phenomenal read. I'm a big fan of stories within stories, and this book's interwoven narrative is great fun to puzzle out. My favorite was certainly an Orison of Sonmi-451. I admit I had trouble at the beginning, and it took my a while to get the feel of what Mitchell was going for, but once I was a couple stories deep, I couldn't put the book down. My only criticism is that the warnings for modern society (especially in the Sonmi chapters which I forgive if only because I love a good robot rebellion), can feel a bit heavy-handed. The wealth of story more than makes up for the occasionally preachy tone.

I'm at a loss to put this in a genre. The Sonmi and Zachary chapters are science fiction, Ewing and Frobisher are historical fiction, the Luisa Rey and Timothy Cavendish are just straight up modern fiction. Something for everyone and I hope the upcoming movie does it justice. Tom Hanks is way too old to play Zachary though meaning they've rewritten that whole storyline. Doesn't fill me with faith.

Jason Brubaker is a phenomenal artist and Sithrah lives up to his previous work. This first volume is mainly exposition, but it appears to be setting up an epic story. The art is gorgeous, the story is intriguing, and it's much better reading it in print than update by slow update on the web.

I think this book holds the record for longest time between kickstarter and project in hand of any I have ever backed. Still, it made good on its promise and is a great all ages piece.

Molly Danger starts out as a kid superhero homage, but it quickly develops into something more. Molly's backstory and the realities of the setting are revealed slowly, and it quickly becomes obvious that there is more to the tale than Powerpuff Girls. The language is challenging for kids, but in a way that hopefully will give them exposure to large words without them losing out on any of the content. Jamal Igle's illustration are classic and his sense of humor will read equally well to kids and adults.

I plan on putting this one in my classroom, and I'm glad I'll be able to do so. Not only do we have a female superhero but also an unconventional family to which I think my students can easily relate. It's a perfect option for people who love superheroes but are done with gritty reboots.