Travis
Fucking phenomenal. A small-scale story about a time traveling circus that just tries to make the world a little bit better, one person at a time. It explores the difficult and ongoing nature of recovering from trauma, queer found family, and the vital role art plays in making life better.
Both the hype and the hate seems overblown. I have dozens of nitpicks but overall enjoyed reading this and kept wanting to pick it back up.
Octavia Butler doesn't miss, and this was unsurprisingly a great read. But wow was it uncomfortable at times.
The main vampire is actually 53 years old, but looks like a 10-year-old girl. She has amnesia and doesn't remember anything from before, including that she is a vampire. Vampires regularly have sex with humans who are 20+ years old. Taken together, these points lead to some extremely uncomfortable moments early on.
That said, Butler excels at writing “alien” characters. The vampires here are different than any I've read before, and learning about their culture was one of the main draws of the book for me.
Overall, this was a very good book, but I fully understand why this is not what Butler is remembered for.
Loved the heart and emotion. Not so much the sex jokes, though I suspect the excellent audio narration smoothed that over somewhat.
A little weird that robots were given sexual vices identical to humans, but okay. The Pinnochio elements were fun Easter eggs, even for someone like me who's only seen the movie a couple times almost 20 years ago.
Definitely thought this was a comedy... nope. Still a great read, but an exploration of trauma was not what I was expecting.
The main character was insufferable but that was the point. I really enjoyed this take on time travel.
Docking a star because the book unironically praised Replay by Ken Grimwood as a good example of this genre.
Parts of this book were so close to being perfect for me, but it ultimately didn't pack the emotion I was hoping for.
Find this review and more at The Fantasy Inn
It's always a risky move for a reviewer to try their hand at the craft they critique. If their work doesn't live up to their own standards of quality, they may lose some of their audience. Daniel Greene has taken a risk with the publication of Breach of Peace. So the question is... Does it pay off?
The story opens with a macabre crime scene described in bloody, gristly detail. A family has been murdered and it's up to Inspector Khlid to get to the bottom of it. She's helped by her husband and fellow Inspector, Samuel, and the star of the Seventh Precinct, Chapman. The dynamic between these three core characters is one of the highlights of the story.
Sam and Khlid are happily married and seem to do an admirable job trying to keep their professional and domestic lives separate, and Chapman is a gets-shit-done asshole with the emotional intelligence of a brick. Taken together, the clash of colorful personalities accomplishes a lot in the brief number of pages we get to spend with the Inspectors.
If I had to be picky, I wish that we'd either gotten more time inside the heads of Sam and Chapman. We do get a brief, brilliant passage from Chapman's point of view, but it feels out of place in a story almost entirely told from Khlid's eyes.
Breach of Peace will feel like coming home for fans of Brian McClellan, Brandon Sanderson, and Joe Abercrombie. I imagine it's what you'd get if the lovechild of McClellan's Promise of Blood and Sanderson's Elantris had to spend an hour in Glokta's torture chamber.
With that said, there were some aspects of the novella that didn't quite work for me. This is a world where in which the characters are all police working directly for God.
Now, children didn't grow up wishing to be soldiers, but officers... Since their founding, The Capitol Police had been a force for good in the community. Those who had been among the first to join were all heralded as local heroes.
Yes, this is a fantasy world. But most of us reading this novella live in a world where glorifying cops comes with quite a bit of baggage. There's also an uncomfortable attitude of “violence solves problems” in how the book talks about the interactions between police and civilians.
In a pinch, police could usually count on help from armed bystanders...
I've never been a fan of the mentality that the best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Again, this is fantasy—and edging toward the grimdark side of the genre at that. But this line took me out of the story and made me question it's inclusion.
Disobeying an officer of God during a raid was punishable by death. Khlid pulled her trigger.
Putting me into the perspective of a cop who shoots people in a surprise raid is not what I was expecting in this fantasy story. Again, it's hard not to draw real-world parallels here in a genre considered by many to be a temporary escape from reality.
From a craft angle, Greene balances action scenes, quiet character moments, and vivid description with ease. I can typically determine an author's strengths pretty quickly, but I thought all of these aspects were handled well. There's a recurring use of foreshadowing at the end of key scenes to hint at the direction the plot will take that kept me at the edge of my seat while reading. And though this is shorter than a full novel, it captured me attention enough to finish in one sitting, which for various reasons has only happened a handful of times in the last year.
Breach of Peace also takes hold of a few tried and true tropes from heroic fantasy and twists them into something beautifully horrific. I'd say more, but I'd rather you be traumatized like I was.
And finally, the closing chapter leads rather nicely into where I'm assuming the next novella will begin. It's compelling, emotional, and sets the tone for the world and the story to come.
There's a ton of hype surrounding Breach of Peace. Hell, it was an Amazon bestseller hours after the preorder went live. So, does this risky novella pay off?
Let's just say that I think this book only improves Daniel Greene's standing as a critic, and if you discovered his work through a shared love of writers like Brandon Sanderson, I doubt you'll be disappointed.
You can also check out our podcast chat with Daniel Greene here, where we discuss Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames and The Last Sun by K.D. Edwards.
I received an advanced review copy of this novella in exchange for a fair and honest review.
One of my favorite fairy tale type stories! Actual characters and reason to care rather than rich atmosphere.
My thoughts are pretty divided on this one.
Pros: Gods all over the place actively making appearances, totally epic in scope, interesting magic system, some philosophical nuggets of wisdom, and the Bridgeburners
Cons: Some occasional clunky prose, never truly getting inside characters' heads, oddly withholding information for the sake of drama, failing to give a reason to care for several hundred pages
Overall I ended up liking this quite a bit, but I probably would've DNF'd without all the praise the series gets.
This is definitely the novella North wrote for the Black Mirror anthology that never happened, right? Because it out-Black Mirrors the actual show. This is easily the bleakest book I've read by North. You can feel the anger seeping off the page and in your bones (I had to put it down a few times to calm down, and that's as someone who lacks much of the personal experience this book will resonate with).
It's a brutal examination of abusive relationships, society's standards of beauty, the commercialization of medicine, the predatory nature of credit companies, and so much more.
Also there's a haggis orgy.
Read this thinking it might be a good gift to an in-law but it fell flat. I wanted to like it more than I did and on the surface it should've been great - F/F romance between elite soldiers on opposite sides of a war featuring giant mechas? That setup could've been GREAT.
On the one hand, finding out how everything is coming together is so so good.
On the other, the last two episodes fell flat. It's hard to show big climactic action scenes in audio, and this didn't quite pull it off. The follow up dream episode was appropriately surreal but failed to capture my attention at all.
Here's hoping Season 4 can recover the momentum.
You're probably familiar with the McElroys if you are interested in this book. The audiobook edition is unsurprisingly excellent, full of that trademark McElroy brother humor and overflowing with practical, actionable advice for how to start a podcast.
The advice is fairly 101 level, so if you've already been podcasting for a while it likely won't be anything you haven't heard before, but it's a great way to jump start your show if you are new to the game.
Atmospheric writing doesn't really work for me in books, so the first part fell flat. Then it got fucking weird in the best ways. Give this an 8-episode Netflix special.
My first time reading a book by Yoon Ha Lee and it was a lot of fun. I loved the artist main character, the giant pacifist mecha dragon, and the messages about war and colonialism.
If not for the last couple of pages, this would easily have been five stars. But once I'd collected my Kindle from where I'd thrown it across the room–and with some mental gymnastics–I'm willing to concede the thematic appropriateness of the ending.
Endings are the least important part of a book to me, but I expect this one will be divisive.
This was brilliant and it's a shame I didn't get to it sooner. I love the idea of Chosen Ones dealing with PTSD years after defeating the Dark One, and the audio production was excellent. This is how you do a limited full cast production (take note, Dune, you beautiful waste of data storage space).
The upside of having a trilogy where half the drama is characters not communicating is the last book forces everyone to actually talk like emotionally mature adults. Overall I thought this was a fitting end - a bit predictable, but done well. I'm conflicted that a major plot point is an attempted rapist saving the day by forgiving himself, though there are some extenuating circumstances due to the fantasy elements.