Travis
This was such an excellent book. It has a lot in common with The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August and The Sudden Appearance of Hope by Claire North. It even takes the same central conceit as The Sudden Appearance of Hope: a woman who is immediately forgotten by everyone who meets her.
Addie LaRue is a far more personal and emotional book, though. The deal with the devil aspect felt both refreshingly original and like a classic example of the Faustian bargain I was hoping for. Around 20% in the story took an unexpected turn that made me fall in love.
I had two cheesy lines prepared for this review before I even read it, and I'm thrilled to say I get to use the positive one. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue left a mark on me that won't soon be forgotten.
So, this was a fascinating look into the life of Wonder Woman's creator and how the character came to be. The guy was a polyamorous “feminist” with a thing for bondage and loved nothing more than telling people he invented the lie detector test (the precursor to the polygraph, which was even less accurate).
It's a little mind blowing how much Wonder Woman ended up being a feminist icon, despite the creator attempting to fetishize feminism to his own ends.
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.
I obviously need to reevaluate some of my impressions of what “young adult” means. This book pulls no punches, both in how it ruthlessly critiques pretty much everything wrong with America (in the 1920s and now) and grinds your heart to bloody pulp beneath its heel.
The sheer wholesomeness of the found family that is the Diviners crew is such a stark contrast to the horrors they face. Prepare for an emotional roller coaster of dazzling heights and stomach-dropping lows.
Wow, what a book. This comes the closest to filling the void in my heart after finishing Maggie Stiefvater's Raven Cycle series, but it's not really all that similar?
There's a supernatural serial killer trying to bring on the apocalypse, the slow assembly of a magical scooby gang, and some poor decision making with a ouja board. There's also some excellent commentary on bigotry, police corruption, and religious cults. It's always chilling to get to the end of a book and read an author's note explaining that yes, most of the darker content of the story is taken straight from history.
All in all this was an incredible read, and I'll be looking up as much of Libba Bray's work as I can. It also confirms that January LaVoy is one of my all time favorite audio narrators.
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.
The City of Brass sparked my interest, unveiling a rich and vibrant world with complex characters. The Kingdom of Copper launched the series to new heights, playing with my emotions in ways few other series have. Together, the first two books of the Daevabad Trilogy had set my expectations unrealistically high for the final book. So how did it measure up?
S.A. Chakraborty stuck the landing. The Empire of Gold is her most impressive work yet.
After the second book trampled my heart to pieces, this one slowly began stitching it back together. It can be excruciating to watch characters I love act horrendously to each other, and I was worried that would dominate Empire of Gold. There's very little I love more in a book than being pleasantly surprised by how wholesome and supportive characters can be to each other. Without giving too much away, let's just say I was happily surprised on more than one occasion.
The story starts out a little slow, allowing the characters to recover from and process the traumatic events of Kingdom of Copper and put the final pieces in place for concluding each major character arc. For a book that's nearly 800 pages long, it was a refreshing change of pace before the epic conclusion.
Like most of my favorite books, the ending the Daevabad trilogy delivers is bittersweet. Granted, it leans more toward sweet than the bitterness I expected. This is not a book that shies away from death, but Chakraborty proves time and again that death is not the only way to torment a beloved character or pull on readers' heartstrings.
This is a book about family: the ones we're born with and the duty owed them, as well as the ones we choose and how far we'll go to help them. It's also a book about sacrifice. One of the main distinctions between the protagonists and antagonists of the series is whether they're willing to sacrifice themselves for others or vice versa. And—perhaps ironically in a story so strife with violent conflict—it's a book about peace.
Endings are a tricky thing. They have to feel final, but the lives of the surviving characters don't simply end with the turning of the last page. Chakraborty strikes a delicate balance between the two, closing the story with what could almost be a new beginning.
If The Empire of Gold is a bit of an emotional roller coaster, I have to say that it was an intensely enjoyable ride. Remember what I said about my heart being stitched back together? That can be every bit as painful as it sounds, but the end result makes it all worth it.
Listen to my podcast interview with S.A. Chakraborty talking about The Empire of Gold here.
Congratulations, Audible. Your marketing worked. You figured out I'm hot trash for any story involving time loops, and you found a book to put in front of me for $3. Well played.
Replay by Ken Grimwood follows a man who dies of a heart attack in 1988. He was only 43 years old. Luckily for him, he wakes back up in his college dorm as an 18-year-old boy in 1963. All of his memories are intact, and he has his entire life ahead of him... again.
Sound intriguing? I thought so too. If you'd like to dive into this book spoiler-free, stop reading here. Major spoilers to come.
There's so much to explore with this concept, from the protagonist having fun exploiting future knowledge to the philosophical implications of this endless cycle of time. Jeff Winston, our plucky time looping hero, decides to make the most of his lives by exploring an ageless, time-honored tradition espoused by philosophers throughout history: fuck bitches, get money.
Jeff quickly breaks up with his college sweetheart when she fails to understand the sexual prowess he's gained from his past life. He then exploits every friend and family member he has to borrow money to bet on the Kentucky Derby. You know, because he happened to remember the winning horse from 25 years ago off the top of his head. As one does.
Once Jeff has secured his fortune and started his own highly successful company (creatively named Future, Inc.), he dedicates his numerous lives toward pursuing sexual pleasure. In one cycle, he tries out the Party Girl experience. When that fails to satisfy him because the party girl checks notes likes to party, he attempts to woo his former wife as a young woman. But alas, his would-be lover fails to succumb to his constant bragging about how rich he is. Light stalking follows.
From there, Jeff cycles through a handful of women throughout his lives. Sometimes he cheats on one love interest with another from a previous life. Most memorably, perhaps, is his decision to buy original Party Girl a plane ticket to Paris to join him in a year or so of wild sex parties. After two of his partners finish competing to see who could sleep with twenty men in the same orgy, Jeff has a moment of profound vulnerability. He opens up to one of the women and admits he knows the future.
His swinging buddies have the gall, the pluck, the sheer audacity to make fun of him for this unasked for round of sharing. So, like any rational man, Jeff angrily returns to the U.S. with Party Girl in tow. They nearly die in a plane crash on the way—after all, Jeff's remarkable memory only extends to horse races and investment opportunities, not things that could kill him. Jeff comforts Party Girl by abandoning her on the runway after a rough crash landing. Before you judge Jeff too harshly, remember that Party Girl had this coming. She made fun of Jeff.
There is eventually a semblance of plot. Other than the awkward moments where Jeff fondly remembers destroying a bridge as a 12-year-old because his hot teacher loved her husband more than him, the time he had sex while tripping on acid and imagined he was sleeping with his daughter, and coming onto his former lover when she's only 14 years old, the book does improve in the second half. Things get interesting when Jeff meets a woman who is also replaying her lives. The two of them contemplate the nature of the time loops, impacting the future, and finding other replayers like themselves. Oh, and they fuck. A lot.
Meeting this fellow time looper has a profound effect on Jeff. To take a direct quote from the book:
Her wet inner flesh was like something ancient, something proto human.
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.
For a variety of reasons, I've been finding it difficult to get through the books I pick up recently. That's not to say the books I've been picking up are bad. Far from it. But my attention span just... hasn't quite been there.
Enter Black Stone Heart by Michael R. Fletcher.
This book gripped me from the start, and I finished it in a couple of frantic sittings. That's the first time a print book has done that for me in years. The story is intensely readable and nearly impossible to put down.
We open with Khraen crawling his way out of the earth, with no memories of his past life. He's little more than a feral animal, and only slowly comes to his senses as he recovers the shattered pieces of his obsidian heart. With each new fragment, he comes closer to regaining his former power.
But his power comes at a steep cost. Can he become the man he once was? And more importantly... should he?
There are some fantasy tropes I will always love, especially when done well. Villains vs villains, progression fantasy, and amnesia where the current personality fears becoming their old self are among those, and Fletcher delivers on these in spades.
That said, I think this will be a book where your enjoyment hinges on how much you like grimdark. This book is grim. It's dark. And it's really fucking grimdark.
I loved some of the driving themes in this book. What does it mean to be evil? Can we trust history when it's written by the victors? And are we permanently defined by our past?
However, the grimdark nature of the story overpowered the themes.
There's a significant amount of tension centering around whether Khraen will give in to the monster he once was or become his own person. In this reader's humble opinion, Khraen is already far beyond redemption. He's leapt over the line between morally grey and unforgivable so many times, he might as well be playing hopscotch on his descent through the circles of hell. Even Sauron wasn't encouraging the brutal flaying of innocent people just because he was horny. (I've only read the main four Lord of the Rings books, so if this occurs in the Silmarillion... sorry?)
This made Khraen an unforgivable villain and completely unlikable for me. And yet, I still couldn't put the book down.
Overall, Black Stone Heart was incredibly fun yet relentlessly dark. There's a lot to love for hardcore fans of the grimdark genre, but many readers will understandably want to steer clear of this series.
Every so often you read a book that boggles your mind so thoroughly that you feel completely and wholly inadequate trying to express your thoughts as a reviewer. Harrow the Ninth is such a book.
I loved Gideon the Ninth when I read it last year, and it's killer ending left me anxious to read Harrow (for reasons that I suspect are obvious if you've read Gideon, and if you haven't... read on at your own risk). But part of me was worried the sequel would live up to my inflated expectations.
It did. It really really really did.
If it wasn't clear from Gideon, Harrow confirms that Tamsyn Muir is a writer who excels at experimenting with structure. The story follows a nonlinear timeline; the one fixed point is a countdown to the Emperor's murder, which we're informed of in the very first line of the prologue. We also experience Harrow's story in second-person narration, which Muir pulls off to spectacular effect in a way that rivals N.K. Jemisin's use of the second-person in her Broken Earth series.
Then you went under to make war on Hell.Hell spat you back out. Fair enough.
Gideon
You were only half a Lyctor, and half a Lyctor was worse than not a Lyctor at all.
Harrow the Ninth
Alecto the Ninth
I received an ARC of this book from Tor.com Publishing in exchange for a fair and honest review. This review originally appeared on The Fantasy Inn blog.
Any time I see Sanderson's name on something, I pretty much know that I'm in for a good time. Snapshot was no exception.
Snapshot is a science fiction detective mystery following two detectives as they investigate a “snapshot” of reality. A mysterious entity is able to perfectly recreate a single day in the past, and humanity has taken advantage of that to solve crimes that would otherwise be unsolvable. It felt a bit like Brandon Sanderson writes Minority Report, and this was every bit as fun as that comparison suggests.
As always, the story came with a compelling set of rules within the universe. Snapshots can only exist for a limited amount of time, and only days in the last couple weeks can be replicated. Detective are expected to complete their investigations with a low percentage of deviations. Just like the Butterfly Effect concept, introducing snapshot detectives into a replication of the past is bound to change that past.
Out of all of Sanderson's work, I think this is the most perfectly suited to a movie adaptation. The speculative elements are awesome and don't require an enormous CGI budget, the scope is limited, and the action never lets up. Sometimes Sanderson's writing starts slow as he sets the foundation for his trademark Sanderson Avalanche at the end. Snapshot was too short to allow this build up.
I did have one issue with the story. Without giving too much away, there was an element of sexual assault present that I didn't think needed to be there. It was completely unexpected and while it served to clarify some character motivation, something else could have done the same. It wasn't that the issue was handled poorly so much as it didn't need to be an issue in the first place.
That said, this was a whole lot of fun. It was my first experience with one of Sanderson's science fiction works—though I'll happily argue this is technically science fantasy—and it only increased my respect for his skill as a writer. I listened to the audio version of the novella, and William DeMeritt did a great job capturing that gritty detective feel. If there's ever a sequel to Snapshot, I'd happily pick it up as soon as it releases, though I think it works perfectly as a standalone story.
Find this review and more at The Fantasy Inn
I have a confession.
I'd been putting off reading Saga for a long time. It's one of the first titles that come up in nearly every conversation about graphic novels. It's recommended almost every time I see someone ask which graphic novel they should read next. The hype was so great that I figured the actual story couldn't live up to my expectations.
Holy shit was I wrong.
Saga begins with the birth of a baby. It's not the picture perfect birth you might expect from a children's fairy tale—at least, no fairy tale I've ever read depicts the bloody, sweaty, profanity-laced side of birth—and it marks the beginning of the story, not the end. And while the rest of this first book follows the adventures of that baby's parents, Alana and Marko, the overarching story revolves around the life of Hazel as she slowly grows into an adult.
The universe of Saga is consumed by war. Landfall is the largest planet in the galaxy, home to a winged species of humanoids like Alana. Wreath is Landfall's tiny moon, home to a horned species of humanoids like Marko. Planet and moon have never been on good terms, but now their war has expanded and outsourced into the entire galaxy.
Marko and Alana fought on opposite sides of this war, until they met each other and fell in love. Hazel represents the potential for peace between the warring wings and horns, and she blurs the black and white lines of the conflict for both sides.
Naturally, neither Landfall or Wreath can permit this. Landfall sends a royal robot (yes, you read that correctly) to hunt down the family, and Wreath contracts the most deadly mercenaries in the galaxy.
For a story with a scope as epic as Saga, the heart is always the characters. The ruthless mercenary will stop at nothing to save a child from a life of slavery. The lethal warrior will do anything to end the cycle of violence. And the quick-tempered soldier is a loving mother with a passion for romance novels. The cast of characters is large and varied and full of the beautiful contradictions that make up humanity. Or, you know, a winged and horned variation thereof.
Vaughan juggles a dazzling collection of moving parts with precision and skill. Minor details in the plot that seem like throwaway worldbuilding elements come back to play a critical role multiple volumes later. An internally consistent magic system exists right beside futuristic technology. Various storylines weave in and around each other, creating a story that's a masterful work of art.
And, of course, there's the art.
Fiona Staples' distinctive style breathes life into Saga. Some drawings are intentionally simple and to the point, while others are intricately detailed. Each and every panel is beautiful, with colors that pop from the page.
Staples also play a significant role in developing the story. The flashbacks that help build a rich sense of character and the visual worldbuilding details are her ideas, and they add so, so much to the story.
As awful and violent as much of the Saga universe is, there is always light. This is no grimdark tale of hopelessness and misery. Villains show compassion, the heroes sometimes come out on top, and the humor will have you laughing aloud on several occasions. And perhaps best of all, the characters never fail to help each other out when they need it most.
There's an element of almost-but-not-quite fourth wall breaking throughout the story. A future version of Hazel chimes in every so often to address the reader and offer commentary on her parents' actions. The first instance of this (which happens to be the first line of the book) can also be taken as Vaughan speaking to readers about the beginning of Saga:
This is how an idea becomes real.
Sometimes Vaughan uses Hazel's voice to comment on the nuts and bolts of writing, such as explaining what it means to Kill Your Darlings, right before killing one of his. It's a highly effective technique and only served to draw me further into the world of Saga.
If you can't tell by now, I loved everything about this first book of Saga. I nearly read the whole thing in one sitting, which is practically unheard of for me. I laughed, I cried, and I spent way too much time admiring the gorgeous art.
If anything I've said sounds intriguing, I highly encourage you to give Saga a try.
You won't regret it.
Find this review and more at The Fantasy Inn
Geek Wisdom: The Sacred Teachings of Nerd Culture is a collection of mini-essays written by N. K. Jemisin, Genevieve Valentine, Eric San Juan, and Zaki Hasan. It was edited by Stephen H. Segal.
With such a diverse team of writers, I was happy to see the emphasis on positivity and inclusion present in Geek Wisdom. It highlighted the positive elements of geek culture that we can all learn from, while gently reminding us that we still have a ways to go. Each of the 200 or so mini-essays takes a popular movie, game, book, or TV show and examines what made them so impactful and enduring in our collective conscious, as well as what nuggets of wisdom can be gleaned from them.
For a book that's less than 250 pages, 200 mini-essays was a lot. No idea is discussed for more than a couple pages, which was something of a double-edged sword: It was easy to pick up the book and start reading without commitment, but it was just as easy to set it down.
I did appreciate the extensive footnotes on geek history, though. For instance, did you know that Superman: The Motion Picture (1978) was the first time Lex Luthor was portrayed as a businessman? Or that Mario was originally called “Jumpman” and was actually once portrayed as the villain? These little fun facts were sprinkled throughout the text and my inner trivia nerd loved them.
One unfortunate aspect of geek culture is that it tends to be considered, to put it bluntly, white and male. I don't believe that's actually true, but there is unfortunately still a very real problem with sexism, racism, and an “us vs. them” mentality present today. Geek Wisdom felt like it was primarily written to nudge a few of the less open-minded geeks towards wisdom through the lens of their favorite franchises. So you could say this is a highly political book. Rather than trying to make their arguments themselves, the authors are simply pointing out the wisdom to be found in geek classics all along.
There's a central dilemma they deal with: Because most geeks have, historically speaking, generally identified as outcasts on the margins of society, they often have trouble understanding that it's possible for some geeks to be marginalized even within geekdom due to other qualities of identity, such as gender, race, and class.
Of all the points that stood out to me in Geek Wisdom, one of the most memorable was how we interpret strength. There's a trend in geek culture to look down upon physical strength, prioritizing wits and intelligence. And that's a perfectly valid set of priorities, but not the only one.
We all tend to believe that our own best characteristic represents “true strength,” just as we're all instinctively inclined to believe that a person who agrees with us a lot must be a very smart person indeed. Therefore, as intellectuals, we find physical force abhorrent in the extreme, in part because it just plain is, but also in part because our self-esteem depends on believing that mental power is more important.
I could go on and on with relevant quotes from the book. It's one of the most quotable books I've ever read. Instead, I'll close with one last quote that I feel best encompasses the message of Geek Wisdom:
We geeks all share an important trait. It's not just that we can imagine—everyone can—it's that we're not afraid to.
We geeks are not afraid to imagine new worlds, from the far past to the distant future, full of magic and impossible technology and societies entirely unlike our own. So why not imagine a better version of our own world?
Find this review and more at The Fantasy Inn
I received an ARC of this book from Orbit in exchange for a fair and honest review.
This was not an easy book to read.
DiLouie pulls no punches and his books force us to take a long hard look in the mirror to examine uncomfortable truths. Where One of Us dealt with the horrors of extreme prejudice, Our War tackles tribalism and political radicalization.
In the near future, the president of the United States refuses to step down after being impeached. The country erupts into civil war, with liberals supporting Congress and conservatives standing behind the president. 10-year-old Hannah Miller and her brother Alex find themselves on opposite sides of the war. Though the nation's political divide is sharper than ever, the siblings are just fighting to survive. Meanwhile, a UNICEF worker and reporter discover America is using child soldiers and set out to expose the truth to the world.
For many, America stopped delivering on its ideals. Instead of solving these problems, we retreated into tribalism. Fed by alternate news sources, we ended up living in divergent realities...Competing ideas of what America is about. Marsh's election was a symptom, not the disease...The war awakened something primal in us. The war may end, but we may never come together again unless we rediscover that unifying idea of what America is.
DiLouie shows an uncanny knack for capturing what it means to be human. I came into this book expecting a particular political point of view to be favored. Instead, vastly different beliefs were portrayed with compassion and understanding. I fell in love with characters on all sides of the war, complex humans capable of both good and evil.
The horrors of war don't end with violence. Families are splintered along political lines, those in power turn a blind eye to the use of child soldiers, and Americans can no longer pretend to have the moral high ground compared to more “barbaric” nations. Worst of all, the general public quickly learns to accept their terrifying new reality as normal.
She wondered how future historians would describe what happened to America. Most likely, they'd...call it a period of temporary derangement...but the country had been slowly losing its mind as long as she could remember.
Our War is not an easy read, but it's an important one. Once again, DiLouie has managed to distill one of humanity's greatest conflicts into a masterpiece of literature.
Where classics like 1984 or Brave New World warned of dystopias set years in the future, it's only too easy to envision a world like the one presented in Our War becoming reality in mere months. America may have been losing it's mind for a while, but the storm that follows the calm could be just around the corner.
More reviews at The Fantasy Inn.
I received an ARC of this book from Tor.com Publishing in exchange for a fair and honest review.
Names are powerful things. For a long time, Johann of Elendhaven was a thing without a name. After a drunken sailor named Johann in a fit of violence, Johann's dark and twisted nature took root as he learned survival on the streets.
Monster was the best, his favourite word. The first syllable formed a kiss, the second was a hiss.
Florian Leickenbloom is the last surviving member of the family that built Elendhaven from the ground up. He's a frail magician with a passion for revenge and a talent for twisting the minds of others.
Together, Johann and Florian make for a dark and twisted pair. Even though I found myself rooting for them to triumph over the innocent town of Elendhaven, I was never truly invested in their fate. Both are unrepentantly despicable and equally deserving of the title Monster of Elendhaven.
The Monster of Elendhaven is not an easy story to describe. It's a bit like a gay Frankenstein meets a post-apocalyptic Count of Monte Cristo... only darker. Johann and Florian are nearly as terrible to each other as they are to Elendhaven, and despite the sexual tension between them do not expect this story to be a romance. While this novella is a brilliant and gripping horror, it would make for an absolutely horrendous love story.
Death is kind. It's only life that holds suffering.
The broader world in which this story takes place is fascinating, even if mostly confined to the background. A magical disaster akin to a nuclear Armageddon took place hundreds of years ago, and the city of Elendhaven is built in one of the craters that were left behind. Parts of the world were corrupted beyond repair, and the occasional deformed creature still appears from time to time.
There's also a secret organization of deadly Mage Hunters who don't take too kindly to magicians abusing their powers.
The Monster of Elendhaven is not fun. It's not happy. And by all that's dark and unholy, it is not a romance.
It is, however, a compelling and disturbing dark fantasy that's lingered in my imagination for weeks.
More reviews at The Fantasy Inn.