Barnes & Noble: “As action-filled and nail-biting as it can be, Bishop makes the powerful choice to confine the most important battles to play out in her characters’ psyches and emotional landscapes. Instead of making them victims for some hero to save, Bishop makes these damaged characters into champions, leading to the trilogy’s most heartbreaking, memorable sequences, as driving most of the major climaxes.
Read the full review of the The Black Jewels Trilogy at B&N’s Sci-fi/Fantasy blog.
Kirkus: A young woman cursed with a powerful paranormal ability takes drastic action to escape her fate. The prolific and often profane Wendig (Zeroes, 2015, etc.) originally published this novel in the U.K. in 2012, and he seemed to catch readers by surprise with the foulmouthed, punk-rock girl at its heart. The first in a series, this delightfully vicious and bloody urban horror novel provides a perversely entertaining introduction to a dangerous fugitive with a little something special up her sleeves. …This won’t be everyone’s cup of tea—Wendig spins his story with Tarantino-esque multiplicity, and the book’s pyrotechnic profanity, bloody ultraviolence, and lack of romance are unlikely to appeal to fans of Laurell K. Hamilton or Patricia Briggs. But for those who like their noir with a twist of horror, this novel provides an engaging blend of occult surrealism, nihilism, and startling violence. A lean, mean fantasy novel that’s likely to leave readers dented and bruised.
Library Journal: Five hackers are picked up separately by government agent Hollis Copper and offered a one-time-only deal: work for the National Security Agency (NSA) or go to jail. The five have little in common—Aleena is an Arab Spring activist, DeAndre a clever thief, Chance a poser hacker, Wade an old-school conspiracy nut, and Reagan an online troll—but they are forced to work together when they are dropped at a secret location called the Lodge. Their individual missions to hack various companies seem connected, and they start putting together evidence that the government is using them to test a new computer called Typhon. As they near the truth, the hackers become a threat to the people who are trying to manipulate them. This new novel from Wendig, whose Miriam Black books (Blackbird; Mockingbird) are coming to TV soon, is highly cinematic and should appeal to fans of technothrillers.
Publishers Weekly: Clarke (the Assassin’s Curse series) brings novelty and delight to steampunk Antarctica in this complex and lovely mystery. Eliana Gomez is the first female PI in Hope City, a domed city originally built to support an amusement park full of steam-powered automatons, and she wants nothing more than to emigrate to warmer climes. When recently widowed Lady Luna, an heiress with a secret, asks Eliana to recover some stolen documents, the fee is too good to turn down, even though it puts Eliana in the path of Hope City’s biggest crime boss and at odds with her boyfriend. With robots from the amusement park evolving their own intelligence and agendas, freedom fighters agitating more openly for Antarctic independence, and the increasing unreliability of the power supplying heat and light to the city’s main dome, Eliana’s need for a hasty departure quickly becomes urgent, even as the tasks required become riskier. The worldbuilding will sweep readers away, and the entertaining and compelling cast of characters will make excellent company on the journey.
Kirkus: This collection of stories provocatively and effectively illustrates the multidimensionality of someone considered to be a monster, and readers will find much of it fascinating and moving. A variety of characters affected by a school shooting offer their perspectives in this work of realistic fiction penned by 17 different authors and coordinated by Hutchinson. When Kirby Matheson, a high school student with a history both of being bullied and of coming to the aid of others being maltreated, kills six of his fellow students and then himself, everyone searches for answers. A vignette from the point of view of his childhood tormentor is deeply troubling. The most experimental section is narrated by the gun Kirby used to commit the murders. However, the sheer number of perspectives feels unwieldy at times. Engaging and heart-wrenching but spread a bit too thin.
Stranger Horizons: Vermilion: The Adventures of Lou Merriwether, Psychopomp by Molly Tanzer is a fun adventure novel that is as intersectional in genre as it is in character. … a madcap comedy of errors that resolves in a moustache-twirling over-the-top climax—and which leaves plenty of room open for sequels, in the best pulp tradition.
RT Book Reviews: With an engaging, diverse cast of characters, a pace that almost never lets up and more than a little of Wendig’s signature humor, Zer0es contains absolutely no dull moments. While Chance Dalton occasionally ventures into “Gary Stu” territory, these hacker heroes have layers, filling those few quieter scenes with a rewarding emotional complexity. And don’t worry, Luddites, even if you don’t know a thing about technology, you’ll still find this book to be an unbelievably thrilling ride.
The Guild of Saint Cooper is a wistful, elegiac and far-reaching cosmic dystopian novel set in Seattle and its suburbs.
Shya Scanlon is a major talent, rightfully compared to other reality-bending masters like Philip K. Dick and Haruki Murakami. His narrative moves toward an ending that is either apocalyptic or some grand and alien resurrection, leading readers on a wild ride as gorgeous and layered as Russian nesting boxes, provoking as many questions as answers in the end. “A road like a Möbius strip that led to the underside of itself, until you traveled it again to arrive where you’d begun.”
A group of co-opted hackers discovers a secret government experiment gone terribly wrong.
Prolific sci-fi novelist and games enthusiast Wendig (Under the Empyrean Sky, 2013, etc.) whips up a Matrix-y bit of old-school cyberpunk updated to meet the frightening technology of the modern age. This is an ambitious, bleeding-edge piece of speculative fiction that combines hacker lore, wet-wired horror, and contemporary paranoia in a propulsive adventure that’s bound to keep readers on their toes.
An action-packed yet cerebral thriller that lives in that murky nexus between today and the future.
Locus: It’s surprising that Cherie Priest hasn’t made the jump into full-on young-adult fiction before. Many of her previous books, like Boneshaker, Dreadnought and the rest of the Clockwork Century, could easily be marketed to a younger audience. I Am Princess X, however, is the first one that is explicitly aimed at the 12 and over set.
The story itself is fairly straightforward. Libby and May meet in elementary school and become BFF. The friendship ends, however, because Libby is killed in a car accident as a young teen and May moves away from their shared pocket of Seattle. May comes back to visit her old stomping grounds and starts spotting Princess X stickers everywhere, which wouldn’t be a big deal except Princess X is a character she and Libby created as kids. Libby, it turns out, might not be as dead as May has been led to believe.
May’s hunt for her lost friend isn’t told simply with words. Interspersed with a straightforward narrative are comics-style pages that fill in the gaps in the Princess X story; we learn about how this mysterious, katana-wielding, webcomic-starring princess found herself on the search for four keys and how May realizes that the keys are actually aimed at her. It’s a refreshing take on a standard “magic ticket” story.
What’s also refreshing is the lack of a romantic subplot. Priest’s Princess is about the lasting power of friendship, rather than about finding a boyfriend. It’s a fun, oddly cheerful murder mystery that pushes against some of the restrictions of straight-up words on a page.