Review: BOOK BOYFRIEND by Emily Wibberley & Austin Siegemund-Broka

Nov 112024
 

Library Journal: Jennifer Worth is a devoted fan of the “Elytheum Courts” series of romantasy novels, so she eagerly seizes the chance to attend a special immersion event for super fans like her. To her utter surprise, her work rival, Scott Daniels—who’s never shown interest in the series—is also there. Their strained professional relationship has always been strictly business, but when they both join a high-stakes scavenger hunt, Jennifer begins to see a different side of Scott. He is no longer the rude coworker who only wants to engage in professional topics; now he seems to be flirting with her. As the competition intensifies, so does the chemistry between Jennifer and Scott, and they both realize that competing against each other has always been fun. Jennifer is left questioning whether their blossoming romance is as magical as the fantasy worlds she adores or if she’s just tricking herself into believing things between them can last in the real world.

VERDICT Readers who enjoyed Sally Thorne’s The Hating Game will love this charming enemies-to-lovers story, and it will be adored by anyone who’s passionate about their favorite book fandoms.

Review: THE VALKYRIE by Kate Heartfield

Nov 042024
 

Publishers Weekly: Brave women warriors and diplomats shine in their roles as leaders in this alluring reimagining of Norse mythology from Heartfield (The Embroidered Book). Valkyrie Brynhild has just been exiled from Valhalla by Odin for contradicting his orders. Resigned to the life of a mortal in Midgard, she declares that she will use her wisdom, strength, and rune magic to help those who need protection. Meanwhile, Christian Burgundian princess Gudrun agrees to marry Hun prince Bleda to secure a peaceful alliance—but then Bleda’s brother, Attila, slays him and declares the truce void. In the aftermath, the serpent dragon Fafnir attacks with its poison breath, and Gudrun’s brother, King Gunnar, runs away. With him missing, Gudrun becomes queen and uses her diplomacy skills and knowledge of herbal magic to protect her people. Fortunately, Brynhild and her new friend, Sigurd, the owner of a powerful dragon-killing sword, arrive to help. The complex romances, alliances, and betrayals between Gudrun, Sigurd, Brynhild, and Gunnar intertwine with heartbreaking and tragic results. With a brilliant heroine at the helm, this richly detailed, character-driven story renders epic mythological battles on a human scale. (Oct.)

Review: REMEMBER YOU WILL DIE by Eden Robins

Oct 302024
 

Wall Street Journal: A peculiarity of American fiction is that it is filled with visions of the apocalypse yet lacking in explorations into the experience of death. Writers can imagine the end as a collective catastrophe but rarely as something intimate and individual. A clever, genre-blending book by Eden Robins, “Remember You Will Die” illustrates the paradox. The novel is written as a collection of obituaries of deceased characters from the distant past to the speculative future. Its title derives from the ancient Roman custom of employing slaves to remind triumphant generals of their mortality. Yet the ultimate impression is one of continuity and perpetuation. It’s real interest is in the ingenious ways that humans try to erase death. The novel’s many obituaries—some written in the standard newspaper template, some more informally—hopscotch across time periods, projecting as far ahead as the 22nd century. Gradually the passages create a mosaic of future pandemics and climate crises, as well as of controversial new developments in artificial life and interplanetary colonization. One story outlines the adventures of an outlaw artificial intelligence called Peregrine who, through a process of “in-vitro gametogenesis,” bears a human child. The obituaries dwell on the innovators of these death-defying advances or on avant-garde artists—or both at once, such as Aristotle Williams, a sculptor who invented Peregrine’s “neo-skin.” “Art is emergent, art is a living thing,” declares the maker of huge art installations involving nature. The persistent idea in this book is that life and art are conjoined creative ventures driven by an opposition to death—and often, as in the case of the poppy flower, which flourished on World War I battlefields, growing out of death’s physical residue.  Poppies are one of many recurring motifs in this wild, exfoliating book, which jumps around so frantically and contains so many intertextual references that readers will need to take notes to have any chance of keeping up. Ms. Robins has clearly enjoyed herself designing this vast network of connections, which often resembles the art installations it commemorates, full of patterns and puzzles and messages. Its excess and energy make it less a memento mori than a reminder, spelled out in boldface, of the remarkable tenacity of life.

Review: ASUNDER by Kerstin Hall

Oct 182024
 

Reactor: As with her debut novel, the immersive and compelling Star Eater, Kerstin Hall chucks you straight into Asunder and asks you to keep up. She is a master of consistent, sometimes subtle worldbuilding; anything she needs you to understand, Karys sees, or interacts with, or has cause to explain or have explained to her, succinctly and elegantly.

This story sits just under the skin, a tangle of questions about faith and shame and what a person does with the power they have—or that is given to them. It is, immersively and emotionally, about survival: how a person survives, what they do to survive, what they endure while surviving, and where the choices they make in order to survive wind up taking them. I can’t shake Karys and her choices out of my head, and frankly, I don’t want to.

This world deserves more story, and more time, and more readers, and I hope it gets all three.

THE TAPESTRY OF TIME by Kate Heartfield in The Guardian!

Oct 172024
 

Congratulations to Kate Heartfield and her book, THE TAPESTRY OF TIME, for being part of The Guardian‘s round-up for best recent science fiction, horror, and fantasy!

Set in England and France during the second world war, this novel centres on a family with the gift of second sight. As rational young women, the Sharp sisters dismiss their experiences as coincidence (Kit), imagination (Ivy) or a talent for pattern recognition (Rose), until they realise they may be able to aid the war effort. Their father has a theory that the Bayeux Tapestry was begun before 1066, to be used as a predictive tool in warfare. In the summer of 1944, Ivy is an undercover agent in France, and art historian Kit has stayed on in Paris, when they learn of a Nazi plan to take the tapestry, leaving Paris to burn. The sisters are the only ones who can stop them – if they survive long enough. Paranormal elements are expertly woven with real history to create a convincing and exciting tale.

Review: REMEMBER YOU WILL DIE by Eden Robins

Oct 112024
 

Locus: Told almost entirely through obituaries, it’s a frequently funny, frequently poignant book that uses its unusual form to explore connection and character…. Original and thoughtful, refreshing despite the constant centrality of death, this is highly recommended.

Starred Review: THE INTERSTELLAR MEGACHEF by Lavanya Lakshminarayan

Oct 092024
 

Library Journal: Saraswati Kaveri has left her life on Earth behind. Arriving on Primus with a bag of clothes and her little robot Kili, she is determined to take her chance on Interstellar MegaChef, the most watched cooking show of the galaxy. Primus cuisine is exacting and amalgamated, and never has an Earthen chef, with their primitive, messy techniques, participated. Serenity Ko has created the wildly popular sim SoundSpace, but a drunken celebration–turned–angry mob chase has forced the young prodigy to take a mandatory leave to rest. Serenity, of course, instead decides she needs to create the next hit sim, this time one for food. If only she knew how to cook. A chance encounter between her and Saraswati launches a partnership to change the future of food, if their own individual goals don’t destroy their chances first. While the food descriptions themselves are few, the emotional impacts of food on the various characters still center culinary pursuits in the novel.

VERDICT Lakshminarayan (The Ten Percent Thief) offers an engaging story that dives into themes about the appreciation of food, colonization, and xenophobia and features two morally gray queer women attempting to find their footing with each other.

Starred Review: THE IMPROVISERS by Nicole Glover

Oct 032024
 

Booklist: Glover’s latest is a standalone set in the world of her Murder and Magic series (starting with The Conductors, 2021), this time set in the 1930s. Velma Frye is an African American aviator in the early days of flight. She’s also a magical investigator, and when a fight breaks out at one of her air shows, Velma leaps into action. Mysterious items seem to be provoking discord all over America. Luckily Velma’s got an airplane, a family that includes the protagonists of Glover’s previous novels, and a nosy reporter who is more helpful than he appears. The Improvisers is packed with action, family drama, and even some romance. The plot is fast-paced and varied and Velma is a protagonist who feels realistic and accessible. There are lots of great characters, including a librarian named Lois, but Dillon Harris, Velma’s rival and companion, stands out as a foil to the famed aviator, often saving and annoying her in the same paragraph. Velma and Dillon’s back-and-forth banter is reminiscent of classic screwball comedies and contrasts delightfully with the complex mystery at the center of the story. Recommended for fans of books that mix magic and historical fiction, like Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation (2018) or Freya Marske’s A Marvellous Light (2021).”

Review: INTERSTELLAR MEGACHEF by Lavanya Lakshminarayan

Oct 022024
 

Publishers Weekly: Lakshminarayan (The Ten Percent Thief) sets this delicious, futuristic flight of fancy nearly 2,000 years after humans first settled on the planet Primus, which has since far outstripped Earth in cultural and technological development. Earthling Saraswati “Saras” Kaveri knows that auditioning for Primus’s hit cooking competition show, Interstellar MegaChef, is a long shot, so when she gets accepted, she jumps at the chance to leave Earth and her manipulative family in search of fame and fortune. Saras is not prepared for the xenophobia and prejudice she encounters upon her arrival and during her first—and last—day of competition. Meanwhile, Primian tech developer Serenity Ko has released her most successful simulation yet, but instead of the promotion she’s expecting, she’s sent on a mandatory vacation to force her into a better work/life balance. Ko seizes the time off to begin working on an ambitious new project: adding food into virtual reality. The project brings her into Saras’s orbit as the women work together to explore the ways food, experience, memory, and history intertwine. Lakshminarayan’s vision of the future feels fresh, the descriptions of food are mouthwatering, and the thematic exploration of culinary culture is rich and nuanced. Readers will be delighted. Agent: Cameron McClure, Donald Maass Literary. (Nov)

Review: ASUNDER by Kerstin Hall

Sep 272024
 

Locus: Kerstin Hall writes sharp, fierce stories with precise and visceral prose, and with worldbuilding that possesses a keen sense for the weird, the haunting, the marvellous, and the twistedly strange. Asunder is only her fourth long-form work, her second novel (after 2021’s Star Eater and the novella duo The Border Keeper and Second Spear) and it is every bit as vividly compelling as I’ve come to expect from Hall – indeed, even more so.

Karys Eska is an independent deathspeaker, locked into an irrevocable compact with Sabaster, a terrifying and unforgiving otherworldly being. She won’t survive her compact being called in – not, at least, in any form recognisable as Karys Eska – and while she doesn’t know exactly when that will be, her time is running short.

Karys makes her money, though not very much of it, by using her abilities to answer questions about the dead in the city she calls home. When a job finding out what happened to some smugglers goes suddenly, terribly, dangerously wrong, she stumbles over a dying stranger. Ferain Taliade is the last survivor of a slaughtered embassy, and he’s willing to pay what to Karys is a practically unimaginable amount of money for her help. In trying to preserve his life, she accidentally binds him in a way that she has no idea how to undo. This binding may be the death of them both, rather than Ferain’s salvation: He now exists in the material world only as Karys’s shadow, and as a voice in her head, and every bit of received wisdom suggests that this binding will eventually destabilise in a fatal fashion.

Asunder strikes me as a novel interested in the consequences of desperate choices. All of the major characters have made choices that they were driven to by their circumstances: All of them have been, or are, trapped in some way by the consequences (foreseen or otherwise) of those choices. Many of those choices had no real good outcome. Karys – prickly, foul-mouthed, fighting with her last breath to be a survivor, determined to find some way around the compact with Sabaster that, she’s just learned, will lead to personal consequences even more horrifying than she’d previously imagined – is a deeply compelling protagonist. Her relationships with Ferain, with Winola, and with figures from her past – and the relationships of the other characters in the novel with each other – are all fraught and complicated things, filled with the silences, the secrets, and the partial understandings that undergird real relationships between real, complicated people.

Asunder is a thoughtful novel, complex and deep. It’s also a fast-paced, tense ride through a world that doesn’t hold back from glittering weirdness. Luxury travel in the bellies of dimension-hopping spiders, weapons that turn a person inside out, trains that run on rails made of light, drugs made from the corpses of dead gods, godlike beings with hundreds of wings and faces in their groins: Hall holds back neither wonder nor horror. But throughout, Hall’s skill and control of the narrative never falters. All the moving pieces slot into place, building into a nail-biting climax.

The ending leaves open as many questions as it answers, but although I would desperately love to see a sequel, Asunder is a complete narrative just as it is. A phenomenal one: I can’t recommend it highly enough

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