Library Journal: Lex has been traveling the world since graduating college. She’ll go anywhere but home: Memphis, TN. Rather than facing her mother’s unsettling death, she immerses herself in words, creating a lexicon of her own lived experience. Yet after a heartbreak and with help from her godmother Cami, Lex returns to Memphis for what she assumes will be a short visit. Instead, Cami gives Lex the opportunity to learn her mother’s life story. Through her mother’s own words in diary entries from before Lex was born, this daughter begins to question who she is and how many ways there are to define family. A quick and intimate read, Cook’s second novel (after How To Bury Your Brother) embraces the classic story of a daughter realizing that within her mother was a woman she never knew, who was as spirited and strong-willed as Lex herself. Though the plot is predictable, this isn’t frustrating. The familiarity and assurance that you know what’s coming is rewarding and endears the characters to the reader. VERDICT Readers of Southern and women’s fiction will become deeply immersed in this mother-daughter narrative.
Jun 102021
Booklist: Sharpson’s debut novel takes place in the 2200s in the Caspian Republic, a totalitarian state that is in theory a safe haven from “the Machine,” inhabitants’ term for the rest of the world and its utopian society administered by and populated with sentient AI. The narrative follows Nikolai South, an operative for StaSec, one of the two security forces in charge of maintaining the status quo in the Republic. When a prominent, rabidly anti-Machine journalist dies and is revealed to have been an AI living in a clone body, South is assigned to look after the AI widow of the deceased as she comes to view her husband’s remains. He is thrown into a whirlpool of intrigue as various factions conspire to use the widow’s visit for their own ends, and is simultaneously dragged back into his own muddled past by the widow’s resemblance to his own dead wife. Well-written and suitably grim, this picture of one dystopian holdout in a utopian world should please many sf readers interested in visions of a post-AI future.
Booklist: El works as part of the Order, a sisterhood and core central body that rules Aytrium and keeps it running. Her magic, or “lace,” is powered by consuming the flesh of her ancestors. This power comes at a harsh price, and it’s one that El is willing to escape at any cost, which is why she agrees when a resistance group asks her to spy on the sisterhood’s top officials. Hall’s world is intricately woven, with a complex web of side characters, suspenseful pacing, and slowly unraveling revelations. The Order and the world of Aytrium is exceedingly dark, and sexual assault and body horror are major parts of the plot. El’s inner motivations are sometimes revealed very late despite the first-person narration, and the plot’s revelations rush toward an abrupt end that doesn’t quite fit the intricate work of its beginning. All of that said, Star Eater is an exciting horror-fantasy about power, violence, and control, and El’s complicated quest to be free of the violent magic system at the sisterhood’s core will keep readers compelled from the first page.