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Review: And What Can We Offer You Tonight by Premee Mohamed

Aug 112021
 

Booklist: Mohamed (Beneath the Rising, 2020) offers a new novella with stunning artwork by illustrator Carly A-F. The story starts with a group of courtesans, led by the protagonist, Jewel, who work in a luxurious, high-end brothel. Mix in murder, a lust for revenge, living dead girls, and rituals in an abandoned church to create a unique, lyrical story: Mohamed is skilled at combining just the right ingredients in a recipe that makes for a gothic delight. The main characters exist in a futuristic dystopia where they oversee funerary processions and funerals that mostly happen at sunrise. As it turns out, our motley band of characters has some enemies and face danger from them, but will they be able to survive? While the novella is steeped in a Victorian, Picture-of-Dorian-Gray style, it reads smoothly and has a cinematic quality. It is a fast-paced tale that fans of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman graphic novels will enjoy. The lustrous prose and lush settings will also tantalize fans of Anne Rice.

 August 11, 2021  Tagged with: ,

Review: Paper Doll Lina by Robyn Lucas

Aug 102021
 

Booklist: Lucas paints an alarmingly accurate picture of a family held hostage. While at times difficult to read, Lina’s journey is ultimately one of hope. Readers will be charmed by Lina and Noah, particularly fans of Olivia Dade’s Spoiler Alert (2020), which has a similarly complex love story.

 August 10, 2021  Tagged with: ,

Review: When the Sparrow Falls by Neil Sharpson

Aug 052021
 

The Times: Nikolai South is a policeman working for StaSec, the state security organ of the Caspian Republic. Covering roughly the territory of present-day Azerbaijan, the republic is a last, lonely redoubt of undigitised humanity, but it’s hardly the beacon of freedom its founders intended. The novel opens with South’s inspection of two suicides. The young, especially, are killing themselves in an effort to transfer their consciousnesses out of the half-starved, authoritarian republic and into the digital Ah! Sea (a too-good-to-be-true emerald cyber-ocean dotted with floating castles).

South is tasked with minding a visitor from beyond the republic’s borders — a world transformed by artificial intelligence, where more than half of humanity lives in cyberspace. His visitor, an AI in a cloned body, is not even strictly human. And, as if South’s chalice were not poisoned enough already, the visitor is the spitting image of his wife, dead these 20 years.

One misstep will kill him, as South tries to protect and understand his charge, ducking and diving all the while through internal struggles within StaSec and its longstanding rivalry with ParSec, the security organ of the totalitarian New Humanist Party.

Neil Sharpson’s debut is adapted from his stage play, The Caspian Sea. It mixes Cold War nostalgia with smart thinking about artificial intelligence and spiritual identity. There’s many a wry nod to the writings of Christian anarchist Jacques Ellul, but while the homework’s impressive, what really matters is South’s lugubrious, Smileyesque odyssey through present bread queues and past disappointments.

 August 5, 2021  Tagged with: ,

Review: Come with Me by Ronald Malfi

Aug 032021
 

Bookpage: A stunning and heart-clenching novel that represents the best of what both the horror and thriller genres have to offer…. A perfect fit for fans of Stephen King and modern true crime classics like Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, Come With Me both awes and terrifies from beginning to end.

 August 3, 2021  Tagged with: ,

Starred Review: A Snake Falls to Earth by Darcie Little Badger

Jul 192021
 

Kirkus: A 16-year-old Lipan Apache girl from Texas and a cottonmouth person from the spirit world connect when both need help.

When Nina was 9, her Great-Great-Grandmother Rosita told her a story in Spanish and Lipan Apache. Using dictionaries to painstakingly make sense of the garbled transcription app results, Nina uncovers a mysterious story about Rosita’s sighting of a fish girl in her well, long after the joined era when animal people still lived on Earth. Nina uploads her musings about her family’s stories to the St0ryte11er video platform. In the Reflecting World, innocent Oli, a cottonmouth snake person, reluctantly leaves home, settling down and befriending ancient toad Ami, two coyote sisters, and a hawk. Animal people can shift between their true and false (humanoid) forms and are able to visit Earth; Nina’s and Oli’s lives intertwine when he and his friends travel to Texas seeking help after learning that Ami is dying because the earthly population of his toad species faces extinction due to human environmental destruction. They in turn help Nina with the suspicious man lurking near her Grandma’s home, an impending tornado, and her Grandma’s unexplained illness whenever she leaves her land. Little Badger (Lipan Apache) alternates between two distinct, well-realized voices—Nina’s third-person and Oli’s first-person perspectives—highlighting critical issues of language revitalization and climate change. The story leads readers through two richly constructed worlds using a style that evokes the timeless feeling of listening to traditional oral storytelling. A coming-of-age story that beautifully combines tradition and technology for modern audiences

 July 19, 2021  Tagged with: ,

Review: Star Eater by Kerstin Hall

Jul 162021
 
Tor.com: Kerstin Hall’s Star Eater is a stunner of a novel. As debuts go, it’s up there with Max Gladstone’s Three Parts Dead, A.K. Larkwood’s The Unspoken Name, and Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, and—to me, at least—a little reminiscent of all three. Hall’s prose is precise and striking, her characters compelling, and her narrative—well, damn. Damn. To say nothing of the worldbuilding: the bloody, visceral, deeply embodied queerness of its reified metaphors, the personal and political freight borne by the control and regimentation of the female body and its reproductive and generative potential, flesh consumed to fuel a society built on a fundamental act of theft… there are layers here. This novel has teeth and claws and it’s not afraid to use them—but it’s also a lot of fun, and undergirt with a generous helping of kindness. It’s absolutely fantastic. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
 July 16, 2021  Tagged with: ,

Review: Soulstar by C.L. Polk

Jul 152021
 

Locus: Polk draws political developments as deftly as they do personal ones…. Soulstar is a fast, gripping, engaging, and thoughtful read. It’s a worthy and satisfying con­clusion to the Kingston story.

 July 15, 2021  Tagged with: ,

Starred Review: The Free Bastards by Jonathan French

Jul 142021
 

Kirkus: It’s nothing short of an adventure fantasy masterwork…. One of the most original fantasy sagas to come along in years; like Tolkien on a bender.

 July 14, 2021  Tagged with: ,

Review: Star Eater by Kerstin Hall

Jul 092021
 

Tor: Engrossing, horrifying, and vivid, Kerstin Hall’s debut novel Star Eater is a hard one to talk about. This is in part simply because there’s so much there there—so much inventive worldbuilding, so much carefully structured power, so many things I want to exclaim over.

Star Eater is a magical consideration of what it means to destroy a power structure. It’s an intimate, gripping exploration of what people are willing to do to maintain the systems that they believe maintain the world; it’s also a story that asks what doors might be opened if we could truly envision a world unlike the one we live in now.. Hall mixes her unique worldbuilding with familiar tropes—the chosen one, the love triangle(ish), the conspiracy, the mentor figures, the loss of a mother—and the combination creates a book that feels both familiar and unnervingly strange.

 July 9, 2021  Tagged with: ,

Starred Review: The All-Consuming World by Cassandra Khaw

Jul 082021
 

Library Journal: The universe is controlled by the Conversation, a hive of AI minds who refuse to let what’s left of humanity take it back. The planet of Dimmuborgir is mostly legend, hiding a secret superweapon that will make whoever controls it supremely powerful. The Dirty Dozen, a diverse mercenary group, was once feared throughout the universe, but 40 years ago their last mission ended in a tragedy that still binds them together, yet apart. Now Rita and Maya are bringing the Dozen back together—kicking, screaming, dying, reviving—for one last mission: to find the secret of Dimmuborgir before the sentient spaceships do. They also need to recover one of their own who’d been thought dead. But when you’re made of clone tissue, uploaded sequences, and modified tech, can you ever die? Filled with emotional trauma, some body horror, and abusive relationships, this can be a difficult read. Yet it’s enthralling too, as it mashes and blurs the lines separating human from machine; the commanding prose brings to mind Tamsyn Muir’s “Locked Tomb” trilogy. VERDICT Khaw’s (Hammers on Bone) first full-length novel is a sensory deluge of language and action that will sweep readers away in a flood of joyful, violent abandon.

 July 8, 2021  Tagged with: ,
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