Publishers Weekly: This solid mystery from Slaughter (While I Danced) opens with the murder of Clara Seibert’s twin sister, Moura, a piano prodigy. Clara’s voice and internal conflict feel authentic, and the contentious relationship between the sisters is equally believable.
Publishers Weekly: After an eight-year hiatus, Landon (The Dark Reaches) returns with a complex fourth novel that combines dystopian and first-contact themes. Vika Jai, a young female xenobiologist, wakes from 40 years of cryogenic sleep to a ravaged ship and crew. Only three humans survive to make landfall on Shothef Erau, an inhabited planet known to have been bombed by an alien force.
This is a quiet, tense book, saturated with dread. Vika, barely out of adolescence, is convincingly depicted as maturing just a hair too slowly in an environment with little room for error.
Tor.com: I want to rave about Elizabeth Bear’s The Stone in the Skull. Actually, it feels like I need to rave about it: a glorious, dramatic, lush and striking fantasy set in the same continuity as the Eternal Sky trilogy (Range of Ghosts, Shattered Pillars, and The Steles of the Sky), with a brilliant cast of characters and an opening that involves an ice wyrm attacking a caravan on its way up a frozen river. It’s no exaggeration to say I was hooked from the first page.
Add that to Bear’s amazing worldbuilding, gloriously precise prose, and excellent pacing. And a wonderfully human, humane approach to relationships. The Stone in the Skull is not exactly warm and fuzzy fantasy, but it rejects grimness and spits in the eye of pragmatism as the major criterion of human relationships. It may not take place in a kind world, but its characters move through their world with compassion. It’s hopeful without being naive. And I really love it.
Library Journal: The Victorian era setting of Tanzer’s latest (after the marvelous Weird Western Vermillion) adds a formality that contrasts nicely with the dueling and demonic communion. At its center is a difficult sibling relationship and the Gray sisters’ parallel efforts to find somewhere to belong.
Tor.com: The same sustenance that I garnered from the prior trilogy in this world is on offer, here: a nuanced exploration of culture, sexuality, gender, and politics that never loses sight of the singular individual human in all that grandeur. Moments of humor and hubris are sprinkled throughout. The physical and emotional experiences of these people as people form the backbone of the novel as it spreads across its fantastical and massive scope.
Booklist: Clara Seibert’s identical twin sister, Moura, was murdered five months ago, and Clara is still a suspect in the unsolved crime. While the twins were not close (Moura was a piano prodigy about to leave for Juilliard, while Clara has no musical aptitude but a considerable talent for journalism), Clara and her family are still reeling. Then Clara, who runs the school newspaper’s advice column, starts getting threatening e-mails (such as the book’s title) and finds herself needing to take an active role in the murder investigation.
A tidily constructed murder mystery.
New York Times: Okorafor invents wild, fantastical creatures and world, but she’s got an even rarer gift, too: She can describe the effect of using magic—the emotional and physiological repercussions of it—so viscerally, it’s as if it were a fever we’d contracted ourselves.
Okorafor describes Sunny’s moments of anguish beautifully, as well as her feelings of kinship and wonder. This is a novel about a girl who’s just trying to find her place in the world, even when she’s called upon to save it.
B&N SFF Blog: From its opening pages, Elizabeth Bear’s The Stone in the Skull wears its virtues on its sleeve, introducing us to two characters, Dead Man and the Gage, who are immediately enigmatic, yet also compelling and achingly human (doubly impressive for the Gage, a towering automaton powered by a human soul).
And this is where the book truly excels, beyond the magic-laced action scenes and top-tier worldbuildingin the way Bear loads layered relationships between a whole host of characters into a relatively slim page count.
With every new story, Bear leaves her mark on the world. There is a weight to her worldbuilding, to the subtlety of her characterizations. Hers is a mark that identifies the boundlessness of epic fantasy, of worlds created by a singular mind, but shared and enjoyed by many.
The Stone in the Skull begins a fantastic new saga, reminding us that Elizabeth Bear is truly one of the premier fantasists of her generation. If you’ve yet to discover her work, there’s no better time.
RT Reviews: Tanzer crafts a dark, heady tale of sensuality and the supernatural, full of deceptively complex characters and plenty of dangerous surprises. Tanzer deserves credit for creating a complex and insightful relationship between her two sisters, and providing them such a gripping adventure in which to grow.Locus: Full disclaimer: I haven’t read Elizabeth Bear’s first trilogy set in the Eternal Sky world (Range of Ghosts, etc.) but am also not sure it matters. While I’m sure a reading of The Stone in the Skull would be enhanced by knowing about this world before dropping into it, that knowledge is not required to enjoy the visit there. And it is enjoyable.
The story opens with the Gage, a brass automaton, and the Dead Man, a drifter, of sorts, trudging over ice-choked mountains to deliver a message to a queen in the damp land of Sarathai-tia. Mrithuri, said queen, is undertaking a public ritual involving lotus flowers – and the results of said ritual indicate that changes are about to come. Thus, the plot is launched.
What works so well in just about every Bear book are her characters, which always feel finely drawn and solidly connected to the story they are in. The plot hews closely to the whole band-of-rogues-assemble-to-
It’s hard to talk about the first book in a trilogy, if only because it isn’t intended to feel like it comes to a complete closure. This book ends by setting the next part of the story up well and making this reader wish she had the next book within arm’s reach so that she can find out what happens next.