Tuesday, January 31, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Heart of the Sun Warrior by Sue Lynn Tan

 
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/heart-of-the-sun-warrior-sue-lynn-tan/1141000039




Heart of the Sun Warrior is the follow up to January's young adult fantasy novel, Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan.  That first novel featured a world inspired by Chinese mythology, with its protagonist being Xingyin, the daughter of Chang'e the Moon Goddess and Hou Yi the Archer.  I loved that novel, as Xingyin's coming of age-sorta journey to find a way to free her mother from a decree by the Celestial Emperor results in her discovering the rest of the Celestial Kingdom and its neighbors, becoming a fierce warrior, finding the interest in a Crown Prince, and being the only one between the Immortal World and dangerous foes and the greed of the Celestial Emperor himself.  The world and setting was terrific, the main character was tremendous, and the story worked really well.  So I was really excited to get a chance to read the sequel.  

Heart of the Sun Warrior is a mixed bag of a follow-up, not quite working as well as its predecessor at times...and yet its highs are REALLY high, especially its final few chapters, which work tremendously well and tugged incredibly hard on my heartstrings.  The story's revisiting of old parts of the setting doesn't quite work as well the second time around, and the major conflict between Xingyin and the new antagonist is kind of rote, even with the theme of the importance of love working well with everything else.  But the new parts of the setting we see work really well and Xingyin remains an excellent heroine through it all.  And while I largely don't love love triangles like this...the way this novel concludes it is excellently done.  The result is a novel that I wound up really liking even if it's a bit uneven, and I would definitely recommend both it and its predecessor to readers looking for good new YA.  

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Wednesday, January 25, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: White Horse by Erika T Wurth

 


White Horse is a horror novel by author Erika T. Wurth, an author of Apache, Chickasaw, and Cherokee descent. The story features a protagonist in Kari, an Urban Native* of similar descent as she begins to have visions of a monster the moment she touches a bracelet with Indigneous* symbols that belonged to her long disappeared mom and follows her as she finds herself forced to investigate (and have visions of) what happened to her mom and what happened in Kari's own tragic past. It's also a story dealing with how the men in Kari's life and the lives of Kari's friends refuse to let women like Kari and her family/friends have their own autonomy and Kari's struggle against that. It's a novel that wasn't on my radar until it was reviewed on the Tor.com blog (horror is something I dabble in but don't love), but intrigued me enough to give it a shot.

*The story uses the word "Indian" in the narrative, which I usually don't use in these reviews (as a White reviewer, unlike the author).*

And White Horse is very very good, even as it gets very dark due to its strong protagonist in Kari, a woman with a ton of baggage who is forced to deal with it all by the visions brought on by a bracelet she didn't even want. Its a story that blends supernatural with real life horrors of abuse, drug, and trauma passed on by it all from generation to generation and it works really well due to how strong the narrative is from the perspective of Kari: a woman whose mother disappeared and whose father is basically comatose and whose best friend overdosed and her next best friend and relative deals with a controlling/emotionally abusive husband who doesn't like Kari. I don't think that the story ever gets kind of scary so if you're looking to be terrified you're not quite in the right place, and it kind of resolves itself a bit too easily in the end, but this is a really well done tale that should very much interest other fantasy/horror fans, especially those looking for ones from a non-white male perspective.

TRIGGER WARNING: Drug Use/Overdosing, Suicidal Ideation/Suicide Attempts, Spousal Abuse/Child Abuse. Nothing gratuitous and well done as part of the narrative, but this book is dealing with serious stuff and it may be very difficult for some readers to read.  

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Tuesday, January 24, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Strike the Zither by Joan He

 



Strike the Zither is the third novel by Joan He, a writer of largely young adult novels who has really impressed me with her two prior Young Adult works, Descendant of the Crane and The Ones We're Meant to Find. This book is the first half of a young adult fantasy duology* which adapts the Chinese classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms (ROTTK). I have only passing familiarity with ROTTK, mainly from other adaptations, but I really loved He's other YA works because He managed to fill those works with really interesting deep characters, especially in her protagonists, and in how she subverts your expectations a great deal in the process and rarely takes the obvious route with the plot. So I was very excited for this book.

*He's first YA novel Descendant of the Crane might've also been meant as the first book in a series, but that was abandoned seemingly for financial reasons as best as I can tell. That said, this novel does appear to have a follow up scheduled for next year, so it's not in danger of suffering a similar fate.*

And Strike the Zither isn't quite as interesting as the other two prior He works, due perhaps to how the story is bootstrapped to the setup of the original work, but it's still a very solid first half of a duology that makes me want to read the conclusion. The story begins as a genderflipped version of ROTTK, but as you should expect from this review and from He's other works, takes a turn after the first act to branch off from the original and to subvert expectations. Its main protagonist, a strategist teenage girl named Zephyr, is really well done as she tries to support her chosen righteous leader with strategies that isolate her and suggest she's changed sides...or worse, and struggles with her allegiances (and other things) in the process. And the story deals well with questions of fate and destiny that come up along the way, as the characters struggle with prophecies and declarations in the process. It isn't quite as unique or special as He's other works just yet, but there's still time in the second half for this story to hit that mark....

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Monday, January 23, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Things They Buried by Amanda K. King and Michael R. Swanson

 


Things They Buried is a 2019 self-published "science fantasy"* novel written by dual authors Amanda K. King and Michael R. Swanson.  Though self-published and part of the Self Published Science Fiction Competition ((SPSFC2 - my reviews of these books can be found here)) novel seems online to have garnered some reviews from reputed sources like Kirkus and has far more copies in libraries I access - including an audiobook - than many of the other books I've read in this competition.  As such, one might suspect this is a bit of a ringer, and that it might have a higher quality than some of the other works I've judged - a feeling that was intensified when it made the quarterfinals off the recommendations of one of my colleagues.  

*The Novel is described as "Science Fantasy" on its publishing pages and is entered in the SPSFC, yet there is some dispute among my team whether this really fits the Science Fiction part of "Science Fantasy" or whether this is just better defined as Dark Fantasy or Horror Fantasy.  If you're looking for strictly SciFi, this novel probably isn't going to do it for you.*

Unfortunately, despite this pedigree, Things They Buried really didn't work for me, to the point where I very much disliked the book.  The book has elements of dark fantasy and horror, with a bunch of jump scares in the second act, and follows two major protagonists and two side protagonists...except I really didn't like the two major protagonists thanks to them acting like assholes for large segments of the book (they do get a little better near the end).  Things aren't helped by the story's attempt at dealing with protagonists struggling with trauma and abuse feeling more like trauma porn than an actual attempt at showing the struggles of trauma and recovery therefrom, or by a lot of really minor elements that bugged me, chief of which was a fantasy world obsessed with various species having specific mental traits with little flexibility - a rather bad trope.  All in all, this one is not one I can recommend to others.  

TRIGGER WARNING:  Rape as backstory, Physical Abuse of children, sometimes shown on page in flashbacks, Child Slavery, Severe Post Trauma struggles.  As you might extrapolate from the above, I did not think this book handled these issues well.  

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Thursday, January 19, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Genesis of Misery by Neon Yang

 



Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC Audiobook (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on September 27, 2022 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

The Genesis of Misery is the first full length novel from author Neon Yang, who previously wrote the Tensorate Novellas - which began with the acclaimed The Black Tides of Heaven. Those novellas were fantastic stories dealing with queer East-Asian (silkpunk) inspired settings and fascinating and often morally questionable characters and I was really excited to get an early copy of The Genesis of Misery to read as a result.

And The Genesis of Misery is a fascinating science fantasy space opera-y novel, although it kind of feels a little incomplete as the first novel in a trilogy. The story follows the origins of Misery Nomaki (She/They), who believes herself to be infected with a deadly void disease causing delusions but has made others believe they are a prophecized messiah, one who will break the stalemate in a fight betweeen faithful believers and heretics. Along the way we have love, sex, mecha fights, magic-like use of "holy" materials, giant space battles and more as Misery begins to believe in her own divinity...before things obviously go very wrong. The story works thanks to how entertaining its main character is, the irreverent, cynical, and fly-by-the-seat-of-their pants character of Misery. It's also really interesting as it deals with ideas about truths, beliefs, and faith, and how even one who doesn't believe can blind themselves by tricking themselves into it. However, the book ends its run just as revelations were finally being made about what was really happening, which left me not quite fully satisfied, although I desperately want for more.

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Tuesday, January 17, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Sphere: A Journey in Time by Michelle McBeth

 

The Sphere is a self-published time travel based science fiction novel written by Michelle McBeth. The novel is a short novel and was part of my group of judges for this year's Self Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC2 - my reviews of these books can be found here) - and in fact made our list of quarterfinalists. As such I was intrigued by this novel, especially as the two other judges who had read it previously both found its setup intriguing although they disagreed as to whether the book's ending and payoff managed to satisfy.


I find my own verdict on the Sphere to be similarly mixed. The book's time travel setup does work well and its prose and lead character Addy - a woman who works for a mysterious organization that sends people back in time to discover lost historical truths like who was the inspiration for one of Shakespeare's sonnets - really carries the book well and makes this short book go by quite quickly. And the book's plot does work somewhat from that character's perspective, as she tries to figure out how to act and what to do when things go wrong with a fellow time traveler's mission and things begin to be revealed about the organization for whom she works. At the same time, the book tries to throw in teases to other mysteries which are not paid off here (and which are then setup for a sequel) which prevents this from being fully satisfying and there isn't quite enough meat on the bone of this story to really impress or make this book stand out too much.

Some more specifics after the jump:

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Monday, January 16, 2023

SciFi Mini Book Review: The View from Infinity Beach by R.P.L. Johnson

 



The View from Infinity Beach is a SciFi Young Adult novel that was self-published by author R.P.L. Johnson in 2021.  It was also a part of my group of books for the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC2 - my reviews of these books can be found here) and was a favorite of one of my co-Judges.  So after it made the Quarterfinals, I was excited to give it a try.  

Unfortunately, The View from Infinity Beach didn't quite live up to my expectations.  It's a fine science fiction YA novel of the kind that I think was pretty common back in the 90s - featuring a bunch of teens on a space station find themselves leading a rebellion against an occupying military greedy force from Earth.  However, while the physics of the setting (a space station rotating to create gravity) are used pretty well, the characters other than the lead character are paper thin, and there just isn't anything special here....it's just very much a generic YA SciFi book full of teens leading a fight against adults in space, and there's a lot better out there.  


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Wednesday, January 11, 2023

SciFi Mini-Book Review: Fear by James McLellan

 


Fear was a book that made the quarterfinals of my group of the Self Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC). This was however, not a slam dunk Quarterfinalist - one of our reviewers on our team of four enjoyed this quite a bit and the other one felt utterly perplexed and that he was missing something, so it didn't seem to work at all. So I went into the reading of Fear knowing this might be a polarizing, if short, work and wondered on what side I would fall.

Unfortunately, the answer is that I fell on the side of Fear not working - Fear is ostensibly the story of an independent film director in the future who has had some success but is not a household name, with the story following him as he tries to get made his passion project movie Phobos (aka Fear), a remake of an adapation of a famous horror novel on Mars. I believe this story is an attempt at absurd satire, as the filming goes completely awry due to editors, nutjob actors, and more....but the writing of this short novel never really hits home on that note - it's never a particularly humorous story, the plot beats don't seem to flow consistently, and there really aren't any characters of any depth. The result is a story that I can't recommend and one that will not be high on my rankings for the competition.

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Tuesday, January 10, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Illuminations by T Kingfisher

 



Illuminations is the latest book by author T Kingfisher, the pen name for children's author Ursula Vernon, who usually uses that pen name for adult work (like her romances or horror novels) or for middle-grade/YA works that her editors insist is too scary/strange/horrifying for kids to read (see Minor Mage or A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking). This is one of that second kind of novels - a novel that will probably be listed as middle-grade but really could be read by kids younger than that, with little in here particularly scary or difficult even for readers younger than its main protagonist Rosa, who is ten years old. If you've read Vernon/Kingfisher before, you should know that her books are filled with enjoyable and adorable characters, often present and caring families, hilarious offbeat dialogue, and even some moral lessons appropriate for both kids and adults. She's one of my favorite authors and I was excited to bite into this new self-published work.

And well Illumniations has all of the above hallmarks of Vernon/Kingfisher's work, and probably works even better for the young crowd than her more recent middle-grade/YA works, but at the same time didn't really have the same spark for me as an adult reader as some of those other works. This time around we're following a girl Rosa from a family of artists who sell their magical art to people who want to use such art for its magical effects - like keeping away rats or cleaning drinking water. Naturally Rosa gets into trouble when she unleashes an old evil from a box who wants to destroy this art, and she finds herself running around trying to make up for that mistake with the help of a talking crow. It's an enjoyable setup, with enjoyable characters who don't always follow the usual script - Rosa's family is made up of artists who are oddballs who don't work together and whose rivals DO work together for instance, the opposite of how you'd normaly see this setup (and such rivalry is not actually tense or hateful, but friendly). At the same time, it really does feel far more like a children's book, so for older readers like myself it isn't going to stand out as much as those other middle-grade/YA works that really hit for all ages.

More after the jump:

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Monday, January 9, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Left Hand of Dog by SI Clarke

 


The Left Hand of Dog is another novel that I read as part of the Self Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC), of which I am part of one of the Judging Groups. In this case, it's a book that actually got enough love from my co-judges that it made my group's quarterfinals, so this was a book I had some reason to look forward to - and one which I'd likely have never heard of if not for the SPSFC. It's a self-acknowledged Geeky Book, which bears the subtitle "An Extremely Silly Tale of Alien Abduction", so you can guess pretty well that this book is aiming for a light and somewhat humorous tone right from the start.

What you might not guess is that this is also a found family type novel, featuring one human (and her dog) and a bunch of different types of aliens (and a robot), dealing heavily with accepting who you and others around you are in the end. And while the book takes a bit to really develop its characters to really hit those themes and character moments, particularly with regards to its non-binary ace heroine and the other aliens she encounters, it really works to become a satisfying, cozy and enjoyable found family story in the end, silly or no (think a sillier Becky Chambers novel). I honestly didn't find the humor here to be that funny, or laugh that much, but the novel still really worked for me despite that, so I can see why other reviewers liked this enough to push this forwards.

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Thursday, January 5, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Ten Percent Thief by Lavanya Lakshminarayan

 



Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC Audiobook (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on March 28, 2023 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.


The Ten Percent Thief is a novel that was originally published in India as Analog/Virtual in 2020 and which is now being published in the West by Solaris/Rebellion in March 2023. The novel was hyped up by a few authors I like, and carries a dystopian science fiction premise: what if, in the future, a society/city is organized as per a bell curve, with privileges and technology - particularly technology based upon internet and virtual tech - offered foremost to those higher on the curve - your top 20%ers (or higher) - and almost everything denied to the bottom ten percent. So of course society is organized as per "merit"....but who decides what is meritorious and how is it all enforced is of course the devil in the details.

It's a fascinating book, told in chapters that are each their own vignettes, such that the book tells a number of stories even as it moves overall general story of the city, Apex City, forward from one story to another. And this works tremendously well as it shows the dystopian ways Apex City keeps and tries to keep its citizens both "productive" and socially desirable according to its preconcieved notions and shows how the people cast out of it, the Analogs, struggle to survive, build their own society under its noses, and to resist. Not any part of this story is subtle, but the book's stories cover an incredibly wide scope as it examines society, satirizes attributes of our own society in hilarious but dark ways. The result is really really good, and I highly recommend this.

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Wednesday, January 4, 2023

SciFi Mini Book Review: The Aspirant by Nick Adams

 



The Aspirant was another book in my pool for the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC2), in which I am a Judge looking for the best in a group of self-published SF novels.  It's one of a few novels that I wound up finishing from my initial pool, which says something for how readable it is in its tale of a young 17 year old boy prodigy who gets caught up in a Young Adult space opera thriller/conspiracy.  Unfortunately, it wasn't one that I loved in the end, both for reasons of me not loving the genre and for some major flaws with how the story unfolded.  

This will thus be another mini-review, due to my lack of really having too much to say on this one, so I'll quickly explain after the jump:

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Tuesday, January 3, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy/Horror Book Review: The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas

 




The Hacienda is a gothic horror novel written by debut author Isabel Cañas, with the novel taking place in the aftermath of the Mexican War of Independence.  The novel's marketing carries comparisons to Mexican Gothic (by Silvia Moreno-Garcia), last year's highly successful Mexican Gothic Horror novel, and one I liked quite a bit, just like most of Moreno-Garcia's works.  And there's something here to that - like Moreno-Garcia's work, this is a novel inspired by and based in the history and cultures of Mexico, in this case the time after it achieved independence, where the Country that colonized Mexico may be gone, but the impacts of colonization are not.  Add in Class-Conflict (again, influenced by colonialism), religious conflict, gender struggles, and well horror, and you have this novel.  

And it works generally pretty well, even if horror is not usually my main genre, and the book does the the thing where the protagonists ignore obvious clues for way way too long.  But the atmosphere is conveyed really excellently as the novel deals with two protagonists - a woman Beatriz who leaps into marriage to try to make her own way in a world where her family was ostracized for choosing the wrong side of the conflict and a priest Andrés who secretly comes from a family of native magic practitioners (a witch) who tries to help her cleanse the hacienda (estate) of a malevolent spirit that is threatening Beatriz and all the hacienda's inhabitants.  And the themes work pretty well too, so overall this is a recommend for someone looking for gothic horror with serious themes dealing with a culture that isn't for once American or European.  


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Monday, January 2, 2023

2022 Book Reading and Reviews in Review: The Highs, the Lows, and my General Thoughts

 



2022 was a very different year for me.  In prior years, reading was something I did on my commute, in Court, and often at home for fun, given that I had a lot of free time.  For really good reasons this year however (I found my soulmate and got engaged), my reading at home was largely curtailed this year, resulting in me finishing "only 145 novels and 18 novellas", down from around 220 books and like 30 novellas each of the past two years.  I still read a lot of great stuff this past year, so in this post (and only this post, as I don't have time for three separate posts this year), I'll go over how my reading went overall, my goals and misses, and the best stuff that I can really recommend.  

As in prior years, my reading met a few of my goals pretty damn well.  Of my 145 novels, 82 (56.55%) were by authors of color (as far as I can tell) and just over 3/4 (108 or 75.86%) were by Women (96) or Non-Binary authors (12).  I've tried to read books by authors who aren't just the classical white male authors every year, and I think I generally succeed at this point.  

One area I'm not sure I succeeded in is reading new authors with only 56 (38.62%) of my 145 novels coming from authors I hadn't read before.  I think I'd like to get that closer to half if at al possible but that's hard given how many authors I read who I like and have more stuff coming out.  

More on my favorite novels after the jump.


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