Dave

Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy.

Roanhorse is a strong writer and is perhaps better suited for longer works. There was a lot of focus on the very interesting setting here, so much so that the plot and characters took a backseat to it. This was an enjoyable and smooth read, but felt like it was missing something.

When everything was resolved it sure felt like the last twenty or so pages were doing a lot of the plot's legwork for it.

GRRM knows how to do a few things well; build characters that you care about, kill those characters and to drag unrelated characters into the mix to break up the tension. It creates a kind of jerky narrative at times that really feels like it was made for TV.

TYRION IS IN TROUBLE, HOW WILL HE EVER COPE?

Cut to commercial.

Jon Snow takes his glove off and clenches his sword hand.

It keeps you reading, at least.

So, I have not read the previous book still, but the author made it clear this could be read independently. This was one of those ebooks Tor sends out to subscribers for free that goes on a folder somewhere and gets lost that I didn't actually lose and I'm glad I didn't.

Truthfully, I had no idea what to expect. Readers are trained to look for tropes, so everything I was reading about this hit those pretty hard, which are not really indicative of what the book was actually about. Sapphic romance? Cool. Historical fantasy? Sure! Nonbinary representation? Alright, cool.

I still had no idea what to expect.

One thing I noticed right away is that I've yet to really read a modern novel that tackled nonbinary representation well, as in using they/them pronouns. Most I've read have been SF and have defaulted to a specific gendered pronoun to deal with some sort of alien society, etc. There's a couple of things I noticed here. The first is that I sorta found myself getting lost at first, having to stop and realize the “they” wasn't being used for the group, but the individual. It's silly, I obviously know this and use it normally, but I haven't read a novel that does that well yet, so there you go. The second is holy shit, I read a broad range of books that err progressive, how haven't I read something that does this already? Publishing has a lot of issues, but representation needs to be more than just ornamental for brownie points. Do better. Like this book.

Alas.

What struck me about this book was how this worked on an allegorical level. Written by an Asian American during, well... I don't even know how to explain these last few years, right? People are awful and the treatment of nonwhite cultures in the west/global north errs on the side of awful, if not criminal.

So, this book asks a simple question: Who controls the narrative and how does it impact “othered” people?

Tigers are “othered” here. Feared for being vicious, blood-thirsty villains who attack at random without regards for life. They're shapeshifting, of course, which means they're actually tigers who can take the form of people to appear “normal” and, look... if you understand how a lot of nonwhite cultures exist within a fairly homogenous monoculture, you've heard about this and probably know people who have to do this to get by.

Think ‘Sorry to Bother You' and the “white voice” black folks would use at the call center to get a better reaction on the phone.

The central focus is a group cornered by three tiger sisters and the resident storyteller/cleric of the group finds a way to bargain for their lives by telling them a story. It's a well known folktale about a relationship between a tiger and a cleric.

The cleric tells the sanitized, “cultured” version of the tale, which paints the tiger as a dangerous beast to fear, dehumanizing the character for being different and misunderstood. It also shows the cleric, who within the framing of this sanitized version of the story, openly mistreats the tiger, as a civilized savior (a “white savior,” if you will).

Throughout the telling of the story, the tigers respond to each passage with frustration and anger, making the cleric write down the story as they remember it, which contains an almost identical plot, but with wildly different details.

You see, the tigers remember the tiger character with pride, label the treachery of the cleric for what it is, and don't celebrate the bare minimum the cleric does to make good without putting in any work. The tiger saves the cleric numerous times and yes, there are bargains that come with it, and some of what happens are due to cultural misunderstandings, but the tiger loves the cleric and is willing to look past most of this.

Ultimately, Chih remains afraid regardless of this heightened understanding and happily takes the assistance of other hunters swooping in to the rescue to scare off the tigers, although they do imply that the tigers should be left alone. There's a sense of yearning and perhaps this was a mistake to break a pact with the tigers like in the story and that they would spread the written story.

This proved to be a really well done case of showing how outside cultures are powerless in the face of their oppressors to control their own history or be seen as literal humans. Just fantastic stuff. I'll definitely read more from this author.

So many people told me how incredible this was supposed to be, so I went in with high expectations. I don't really read comics, but at least expected a decent story. the story was just so sparse and predictable. I guess people dig the art in this? I don't know.

This book was a slow, contemplative one with that Murakami sparkled added in.

Since it's, you know, three books, it's longer and the plot can feel like it's ebbing and flowing in odd ways because of that.

There are a lot of elements of this book that dip into what we already know. Hey, look, it's star-crossed lovers with the outside world preventing them from seeing each other. It's a book about a novelist! Very original! Ah yes, mentions of 1984 and a Communist cult, subtle!

This is very much a book about writing, if that makes sense. Tengo is a sad, lonely guy and writing fiction is his escape from reality. Much of what happens in the book is on a surrealist plane, inside of a world with two moons, little people with ominous, ill-explained powers, cocoons to grow ideas and people, and the idea of one's mind and essence split into two parts. There are perceivers and receivers.

Aomame is searching for Tengo, which means entering the world of his fiction, both of them lost inside of this surrealist world, although not everyone they speak with or encounter is seemingly aware of or inhabiting this parallel world as well. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't, it's sort of immaterial unless you yourself want to get lost in Cat Town.

The best of this series yet. The Nux/Immortan comic was just a bit brief, each guy probably deserved their own comic. The Furiosa one was just, well, disappointing. Any good will that the movie had for empowering the female characters dissipated with a comic pretty much entirely about the wives being raped while Furiosa sat back and watched.

This one, though? It answered a LOT of the questions that everyone had about the timeline. Was Hardy's Max the original Max? Did the first three movies matter? The answer is “yes,” which is tremendous. Looking forward to the second installment.

Not really sure what to think about this. Amazon gave me this along with a few others for purchasing TFA. I'm not really into comics but checked this out and.... Yeah, nothing much here.

If you are super passionate about Deus Ex and want a little extra back story for the latest game this might be okay. Just not particularly interesting.

The best of the series yet. Always poignant.

It's a new book! It's free at dvewlsh.com!

I'm not usually into non-fic, but Heather's tale of being stuck in Thailand during the COVID-19 pandemic while a burgeoning pro-democratic movement blossomed there weaves a great tale from Heather's experiences all framed around the failures of modern capitalism.

There's not many books, never mind non-fiction, that I pick up and read almost straight through, then feel immediately compelled to help the author however I can, but right here, that's one of those books.

SI's writing style continues to evolve with each work and I'm looking forward to the series attached to this story.

I feel like this story relies pretty heavily on knowing Devon already, which will make this good for newer readers and perhaps harder to penetrate for newer ones. It serves as a good glimpse into Devon's personal life and stuff before her adventures to Mars, while introducing readers to Lem.

Nerys was clearly the antagonist here and while there are definitely people in real life that suck like Nerys, the character still feels like a composite of the “well-intentioned liberal” that considers “wokeness” to be a passing trend and will follow along with a wink and a nudge and can't see people for who they really are.

Hey, this is my book. It's a backstory for the Andlios world focusing heavily on the Krigans and Cydonians. Sign up for my newsletter to get a free copy!

May 2021 Update: Gave this a fresh once-over just because.

A book with strong themes, is well-written and is the kind of book that I'd wish more publishers were putting out.

There's no hand-waving away racism, or “solving” it. The book bounces between two POVs; Ella, an unwanted black girl, and Ms. St. James, a well-off white woman doing research on civil rights. An enjoyable read.

Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy.

Enjoyable, easy to breeze through and inoffensive when it comes to the genre.

I picked this up specifically because of the scattered bad reviews based upon sexual content and Americans complaining that they somehow couldn't understand it.

It's worth a read and those people are hilarious.

Nothing better than a buncha scuzzbags doing scuzzbag stuff, right?

Comics are what they are. Short snippets of a story that go by in a flash. What impressed me with this was the worldbuilding. Things were familiar enough to where I'm immediately filling in blanks about this universe and unique enough to exist on their own.

Looking forward to the rest.

There was something almost hypnotic about the early parts of the book and the themes present that kept pushing me forward, but as it moved along, the focus shifted enough to where the narrative felt more like a device to drive home the themes than tell a compelling story.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but when we get to the mother in the middle, then the friend in the last third, it's a lot less engaging of a read.

I think the thematic content present here is super interesting and worth exploring. A woman reclaims herself from a world that wants her to be a number of things and treated, well, like a moldable object. Only her path towards this self-realization intersects with several people along the way, and helps to drag them down, hurt them, and somehow, her path of self-actualization becomes one of destruction for others. It's sorta bleak.

Still worth a read. Thanks to Random House and Netgalley for the review copy.

There’s something about the way this book opens that punches you in the gut right away. The care and attention given to each scene in visceral detail reaches out and refuses to let you go, which isn’t something most books can accomplish.

If this book is anything, it’s dripping with intent. Don’t be afraid of the heady messages and themes that are buried in here about trauma, love, self-worth and how people who are different are forced to navigate a world that often makes no sense to them.

If you know Alex from the Constellis Voss books, it helps, but you don’t need to have read the previous books to be immersed. Alex is a complicated character who just wants the surrounding people to be happy after growing up a subject of abuse, neglect and forced into a life of sex trafficking and crime. Alex’s struggle with identity is never internal, it’s almost always external. While Alex understands he’s a boy, it’s everyone else insisting on treating him differently, be it like a girl or placating him by calling him a boy, but treating him differently.

When Alex can finally make friends is when things get complicated. At that point, Alex has already morphed into an assassin, hell bent on destroying his captor and boss, Boris, and is convinced not just that he’s a bad person, but an irredeemable villain that doesn’t deserve love and affection. While love is a central theme, don’t confuse it with romance. There is some romantic love at parts of Alex’s life, but it all gets jumbled up in his head while he’s fighting his fracture psyche and trying to literally push Boris’s deadly bullet leveled at him out of his head and prevent his own death.

Most of the book is Alex experiencing and fighting for these memories. The ones he doesn’t want seem to be the strongest, while the ones he wants to hold on to and cherish are the ones being wiped out by the bullet that’s coursing through his mind. Because there are always those people in life that want to control, to take all the accumulated good and block it out to maintain that control. Whether Alex realizes it or not, Alex isn’t the villain, nor is he only the summation of the things he was forced to do (mainly fuck and kill), but is a person with a lot to give and built up a community of people initially to help reach his end goal of destroying Boris, only for that to become something much more.

The book’s climax was masterfully built to, and not at all expected. Because this isn’t a story about revenge, fucking and killing. It’s a book about finding the people who love you, accept you for who you are and will accept all the messy bits that come with these relationships.

Getting to know, and I mean really know, some of these characters is also a treat, and helps add more context to the other books. Getting to see prime Alex interacting with all of them and forging these bonds that will carry forth into the future is really something.

Man.

I grew up as the occasional anime viewer. I was a dork, but not a superdork, basically. About two years ago now a friend of mine recommended this series to me. Not only did he recommend it, but he insisted on me watching it. So I did. I'm not sure that even he knew the profound impact that it would have on me.

Fast forward to now and the novels that the series was based off of are finally being translated into English and released to the public. When I found that out I purchased this and devoured it as quickly as I could. I've been immersed in contemporary science fiction for the past two years now and I've mostly found myself in the land of malaise more than being excited about what's out there. Reading this was just a reminder of what great science fiction can really do to a reader.

While I'm already intimately aware of the story, characters and lore of LoGH, reading the novel was a treat. The narrative style and point of views featured throughout the novel added depth and interest to one of the deepest, most interesting series that I can think of. Since this was a translation it's difficult to really hyper-analyze the prose itself, although it was punchy and kept the tone that fans will recognize from the show. That means that the narrator keeps a rather dry, historical perspective on events, but when it shifts to the point of view of the characters everything felt weighty and substantive.

The way that this series handles a rather objective view or humanity, society, governmental systems and the whole concept of “good” or “bad” is really without peer. Yes, it's a series about war, but it shows both sides and endears the reader/viewer to characters on both sides of the story, instead of looking to say who is bad and good. The whole thing works because of just how strong these characters are, too.

This isn't an overly-complicated piece of literature when it comes to language or science, which tends to be what trends heavily for science fiction these days, but the story and the characters are just so marvelously done that it's impossible not to recommend this book. If somehow you haven't seen the series (which doesn't seem like a stretch), I implore you to check out this book.

This is a good book, but not spectacular.

I read this after reading Mexican Gothic. I'm not really a person who sticks to a genre, so any genre differences aren't gonna bother me. This book, on it's own, is good. What shines through the most is the rich world crafted here, in fact, it felt like a lot of worldbuilding went into this book for just one novel.

A look at modern day Mexico, but with vampires as a real thing, and different kinds from different parts of the world was fascinating. While the characters are good, there are quite a few POV characters and some are stronger than others. Domingo and Atl passages prove to be useful while Rodrigo, Nick and Ana parts feel like they're there for plot motion alone.

None of those characters get enough life breathed into them beyond perhaps Nick to make them matter. There's a character death near the end that is supposed to have some impact that instead got me to verbalize a “What? Why?” You can at least track Moreno-Garcia's growth as a storyteller pretty well and see there's a ton of promise here that she builds off of in her later work.

Very rarely do I find a writer and want to devour their entire catalogue, yet that's exactly what happened when I read Mexican Gothic.

Now, here we are, with Moreno-Garcia releasing a different kind of book into the wild.

There's this idea that once an artist establishes themselves, they need to strictly adhere to what the public knows of them or worry about upsetting or losing them. So when an author like Moreno-Garcia releases a very different book, it's a risk.

I'm glad she took this risk.

Velvet Was the Night is a neo-noir set in Mexico during the Mexican Dirty War. What was this, exactly? It was Mexico's branch of the Cold War, where the US backed the Mexican government's efforts to purge “radical” beliefs through your bog standard repression, violence and silencing. Leftist student and guerilla groups rose during these times and there were eruptions of violence stemming from subversive, government-funded groups trying to ensure leftist ideologies didn't take over their country.

If you saw the very good ‘Roma' you've seen what those looked like, but Velvet Was the Night comes from a much different perspective. Where Roma came from the view of a wealthy family and their maid during that time, this book plants the reader right in the middle of the conflict. We see two alternating POVs through the book: Elvis, a member of the government-funded group of young thugs, the Hawks, and Maite, a 30-year-old secretary who obsessively read romance comics and didn't really follow the news.

The contrasts couldn't be more stark if they tried. Maite was ignorant of what was happening, while Elvis was creating the news. Both were living as they were because of circumstance, not from conviction or belief. Yet, both end up in a tangled web surrounded by people full of conviction, and are forced to take sides.

Elvis doesn't seem to have a grasp on what these lefty students care about, just that ‘commies' are bad, and his job is to bust ‘em up, intimidate journalists and make sure nothing positive was written about the student protests, nor were there photos or any proof whatsoever. Because, look, that's how this goes, right? Remember back to Minneapolis in the summer of 2020 during the George Floyd protests? Where there was a mysterious umbrella-holding man in police tactical gear who smashed up an AutoZone attempting to start a riot, while onlookers filmed him and chased him away (into an actual precinct building)?

This is real stuff that happens. The Hawks were a real group that existed and this is what they did. Moreno-Garcia mentions in the afterward about her research, including declassified documents about the actions of the Hawks, their intent and the US govt propping them up with money, training and support.

Maite, on the other hand, waits for her romance comics to be released every week and to her, these things happening were just minor annoyances. They were the things she'd read about in the paper and think “how awful” without taking a side. Multiple times throughout the book she presents the safe narrative of events presented by their government. Guerilla fighters? No, they're terrorists. Peaceful protests from students? They were violent riots and the police and military were there just to keep them in line. What's relatable about Maite is we all know a Maite or two in our lives. Perhaps you, my dear reader, are a Maite. Life is hard enough, right? So you get lost in the minutiae of your own life, in your books or shows or movies, and the things happening around you are distant and strange.

When Maite's neighbor, Lenora, introduces herself and sets the stage for Maite's adventure, it's innocent enough. She's gotta get out of town and needs someone to check in on her cat. She'll be back on Sunday, Monday at the latest. Of course it's not that simple. Lenora is a photographer and has photographic proof of the Hawks not only existing, but causing a recent riot. It's a direct contrast with what the government and president have stated, the kind of stuff that could blow everything wide open.

Maite doesn't know this, though. She just knows there's a cat she has to feed and Lenora never came back. This leads Maite down the rabbit hole, so-to-speak, of checking in with Lenora's comrades, a smarmy and handsome photographer pal, journalists and even a fling with a wanna-be freedom fighter. All of a sudden, these distant events were her life and Maite has some serious questions.

Elvis is on a different path, but is heading toward a similar destination. Their group lives in relative secrecy, everyone working under a code name and a pal who got shot at the riot in question, never comes back. The leader of the Hawks, El Mago, is the kind of guy Elvis aspires to be, although there's friction there. He loves his rock music, books and having fun, it's just that life has taught him he needs to be hard and violent to get anything he deserves.

While Maite is undergoing her personal radicalization, Elvis is following her and finding himself drawn to her. There's nothing inherently special about her, in fact, she's dreadfully normal, but her taste in music, books and the way she carries herself is magnetic to him. Watching while she cavorts around with his enemies and entangles herself further into this web, question arise the more Elvis digs. El Mago is out for himself, he's told, and the Hawks were expendable to him as long as he can get ahead. Everything they're doing is built on a bed of lies. El Mago is a true believer in their cause, or is he? Is he just a violent sadist who wants power?

Both Maite and Elvis are forced to make difficult, life-altering choices based on their moral compasses, and it's not on the side of their government.

The plotting in this novel is tight, allowing some breathing room early on before the story unravels and the world shrinks in on itself. There are inevitabilities about Maite and Elvis and their shared fate, but each have very natural awakenings and problems they deal with. What we see is that people, even the blissfully ignorant or those led down the wrong path, when faced with moral, life-or-death decisions, are going to gravitate towards what may feel alien, but feels right to them.

I can't commend Moreno-Garcia enough for taking a risk like this and I very much look forward to her next one.

The four stars is rounded up.

As much as I enjoyed this book, I found the last act to be sorta weak in comparison to the rest. There were a lot of ideas and themes focused on throughout the book, only when they all came together it really wasn't clicking, or felt lacking in finesse. For example, the attempt to flesh out the antagonist in the final act felt too little, too late. He was already a caricature, and perhaps if left like that, things would've been more impactful?

I'm not really sure. There's an argument to be made for the characters on the island feeling flat to serve the broader narrative, but I'm not sure I'm of that mind.

Still enjoyable and well worth the read.

Good, not great. Went a bit long and I'm not sure why it had to. Was obnoxious in places but well-written and a fun concept.

Like the rest of the Murderbot stories, this was a nice, fun and short read. There wasn't a ton of narrative heavy lifting going on here, as in this was a mostly isolated story.

If you were expecting the story of Murderbot to progress this wasn't the book to do that. Murderbot gets swept up into a mysterious death on the station and helps solve the case.

There were times when the plot felt thin and a bit too breezy. While the villainous GrayCis was mentioned numerous times, their looming threat felt very distant.

A worthwhile read if you're invested in the series, but nothing new.

Jemisin is one of the best voices in SFF today and this short story is just further proof of that.

You'll read reviews about it being “heavy-handed” only to see it's only heavy-handed to those who disagree with the story's theme.

The story takes on another layer when you consider who the story's publisher is and how this was all a direct criticism of late stage capitalism, greed, toxic masculinity and the inherent racism that comes with these things.

Bold. It's especially bold knowing how many people this story would upset.