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.
Shelf Awareness: In her first novel for young adults, Cherie Priest (Boneshaker) introduces Libby Deaton and May Harper, who unite to create the comics character Princess X. The story quickly becomes a gripping mystery after Libby mysteriously disappears and May becomes obsessed with finding her.
In a clever innovation, Priest seamlessly integrates Kali Ciesemier’s comics within the prose narrative. Each new episode of Princess X reveals further clues and a terrifying reality for their creator. Ciesemier’s portrait of Princess X achieves a sense of both anxiety and bravery. Priest demonstrates that creative teamwork of the kind shared by Libby and May leads to an intimate knowledge of one’s collaborator.
Locus: Of Noble Family, book five of Mary Robinette Kowal’s “The Glamourist Histories”, concludes the sequence with emphatic proof that her world-building and her characters can’t be constrained by the standard tropes of alternate-historic magical fantasies or variations on Regency Romance. There’s a sharp irony in the epigraph, from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park: “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody not greatly in fault themselves to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.”
Questions of identity drive these books, centered around the husband in a married pair of glamourists. David Vincent couldn’t come into his own until he cast off his former self: the Honourable Vincent Hamilton, third son of Lord Verbury (an earl). Of Noble Family forces David to confront that self and its heritage, when he gets word of his father’s death: not in England, but on the Hamiltons’ sugar cane estate on the Caribbean island of Antigua (British West Indies), where the tyrant long held sway. Continue reading »
io9: At the end of the day, Vermilion is a roller-coaster of a ride: it’s exciting, suspenseful and a downright blast to read, but it maintains a serious side that underscores the complicated history of the American West.
To read the full review of Vermilion, click here to go to io9.
Tor.com: Dreams of Shreds and Tatters is a baroque, creepy, gorgeous, atmospheric book. I keep wanting to find more adjectives, for there’s a layered, textured depth to the prose here, rich and velvety and dark. … I loved Downum’s other work, but I didn’t expect to enjoy Dreams of Shreds and Tatters half as much as I did. Unexpectedly, I adored it. It’s darkly gorgeous, tense, and gripping, with compelling characters and a subtle, unnervingly psychological element to its fantasy-horror turn. And, delightfully, not without a sense of humour. I recommend it highly. Please tell me there’ll be another novel like this.
To read the full review of Dreams of Shreds and Tatters, visit Tor.com here.
Publishers Weekly: Wendig (Blackbirds) piles on the thrills and chills in this fast-paced near-future novel about human frailty and inhuman ambition. Five American hackers grabbed by the Feds are given a choice: a jail sentence, or a job working on a secret NSA program run by the mysterious Typhon. Now the hackers need to figure out Typhon’s true identity and motivation, preferably before Typhon is done using them. Wendig wields the tools of suspense and tension with skill. His large cast of characters is entertaining, the moments of horror are sharp and chilling, and the story races to a breathless conclusion. This is a promising opening to a new series for SF thriller fans.