Kirkus: Annalise Williams, 24, is obsessed with an unsolved crime: the disappearance and presumed murder years earlier of a 16-year-old girl with the same first name: Annalise Wood—”the kind of girl you look at and think, of course someone would want to take her.”
An intriguing, suspenseful, and briskly paced story with complex characters, evocative descriptions of England’s Cambridgeshire, plenty of clever misdirection, and a satisfying ending.
Locus Magazine: With Elizabeth Bear’s previous novels in the same world: the Eternal Sky trilogy of Range of Ghosts, Shattered Pillars, and Steles of the Sky. That trilogy is one of the best – most deeply thought, carefully structured, and elegantly finished – epic fantasies of the last decades.
Bear’s worldbuilding is, as ever, a richly detailed delight, rendered tangible in cut-glass prose. The precision and care with which she employs language make the landscapes through which her characters move come powerfully to life – and gives those characters, too, powerful presence and compelling life.
It’s an enormously rich and textured novel, magnificently compelling – and really easy to read. Despite its sprawling, epic canvas, its pace is tight, and Bear cuts between plotlines with an adroit eye for tension. The Stone in the Skull is an astonishing delight of a book.
Washington Post: With over 200 color and black-and-white illustrations, six appendixes and nearly 1,000 annotations, this edition of “Frankenstein” is a cornucopia of background information … Klinger’s edition allows readers to understand the complexities of the novel as well as the difficulties endured by its author. Only then can one be truly inspired by Mary Shelley’s genius and her bravery.
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.