Vogue: Mean Girls meets The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which is basically a long-winded way of calling it perfection in book form. It’s from the POV of the “third most popular girl in school” who’s a self-described freak at heart, and it takes a funny, relatable look into the intricacies of high school social hierarchy.
Romantic Times: Priest takes the epistolary format H.P. Lovecraft was fond of and uses it to far better effect, both in terms of characterization and horror. Her protagonists (Lizzie, her sister, her lover Nance O’Neil and the friendly Dr. Seabury) are extremely well drawn even as the nerve and mind-shredding events of 1895 drive them apart. Priest skillfully makes the menace around them specific and concrete while also remaining shadowy and unknowable, achieving maximum impact. Putting real historical characters in genre settings is an idea that’s seemed tired for a while, but this novel shows how compelling it can still be in the right hands. Continue reading »
Kirkus: Smart and sardonic, with wry echoes from classic tales (a little “Telltale Heart,” anyone?) mixed up in an inventive, winning narrative. Another dark fantasy by master of the genre Bennett (American Elsewhere, 2013, etc.), a literate swirl of religion, politics, finance and other sources of misery. “You know you are my foremost Continental operative.” Thus a suit to our protagonist, a divinologist who just happens to know her way around a conspiracy theory. Continue reading »
New York Times Book Review: It’s the classic teenage movie “Heathers,” with a love triangle and Anika as Veronica Sawyer, the darkly comic insider with an outsider’s perspective and a tortured outcast love interest who raises questions of social hierarchy.
SFX Magazine: Tonally The Incorruptibles delivers a hearty scoop of Abercrombie-style grimdarkness, although layered with more magic and religion. The prose is extraordinary rich. But that never detracts from what is, ultimately, a ripping yarn. Whether you file it under Western or fantasy, The Incorruptibles is a rare thing: a clever story and an action-packed one.
Philadelphia Inquirer: McGoran’s style is at once hard-boiled and enjoyably breezy. His character descriptions tend to the generic (“The door to one of the cabins opened and two women in their early twenties came out, one large and solid, the other small and wiry with a long braid”). But he keeps the plot and the action humming along in a way that makes Deadout an excellent beach book.
Romantic Times: Harrison is back and ready to rumble with this next exhilarating book in her Elder Races series. This time the story revolves around Xavier del Torro, right-hand vampyre to the powerful Nightkind King and Tess Graham, a human, whose past is coming back to haunt her in a big way. When you crack open a Harrison tale, you know you are in for an amazing ride filled with rich characterization, clever world-building, and exciting adventure!
Library Journal: The personalities of Shara and her hulking assistant Sigurd leap off the page, as do supporting characters such as Shara’s former lover Vohannes Votrov and the gruff local Saypuri governor Mulaghesh. The world Bennett (The Troupe; American Elsewhere) has constructed is a complex political landscape of a subjugated people holding onto the memories of their glory days and protective gods and the conquerors reaping revenge for their own previous subjugation. An excellent spy story wrapped in a vivid imaginary world.
Literary Review: “Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon …disrupts the standard alien arrival cliches in numerous ways. …Okorafor brings science fiction back to its Utopian ideals. …Writing a novel in which optimism is not naivety is a challenge, and it is accomplished here with panache. …Patriotic and ambiguous, all-embracing and proudly independent, with a sense that any single viewpoint might be as fictional as aliens turning up: Lagoon offers a clever swerve from science fiction’s usual tracks.”
Tor.com: Be prepared to bid a bittersweet goodbye to Beth and her best friend, then… but not before they’ve had one last adventure together. An adventure as incredible as it is desperate; as tragical as it is magical. … The City’s Son, for its part, marked a strong start, and the emergence of an improbably promising new voice in the genre. The Glass Republic—an ingenious inversion of the expectations set by said—proved Tom Pollock was no one-hit wonder. With Our Lady of the Streets, he goes three for three. I couldn’t have asked for a more satisfying finale. And sorry as I am to say farewell to Beth and Pen, I’m even more excited to see what this awesome author sets his sights on next.