Wednesday, April 26, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Harvest House by Cynthia Leitich Smith

 


Harvest House is the latest YA novel by acclaimed Muscogee Nation author Cynthia Leitich Smith. The novel is actually a stand-alone follow up to an earlier apparently acclaimed YA novel, Hearts Unbroken, but this novel is entirely stand-alone (I haven't read that earlier novel and didn't even known of its existence prior to reading this book and was totally fine reading this book). Also, unlike that book, this book is a genre book, with it featuring a ghost story at its core, as our protagonists deal with not just a made-up haunted house, but also a potential real haunting at a cross-roads of an Indigenous girl who supposedly died at the scene years ago.

The result is a really effective and strong short novel, which features a teen indigenous protagonist Hughie Wolfe as he tries to deal with a number of issues faced by indigenous teens these days: such as a white woman who doesn't understand and refuses to listen when she's dealing with harmful tropes (an Indian Burial Ground), showing solidarity and helping fellow indigneous youth and others dealing with prejudice, and (to a much lesser extent in this book) straight up racist conservative people. Hughie also has to deal with typical teen issues, like trying to get into and have a relationship with a girl he likes, dealing with friends, not selling out on who he is, and the loss of his beloved fall school play. Then of course there's the fantasy horror elements: a supposed ghost story - promoted with some harmful anti-indigneous tropes - that might contain a grain of truth, stemming from the disappearance of a native girl years in the past. Smith weaves this all together really well into a novel with an enjoyable story, characters, and message that's well worth reading for YA and even perhaps some non YA audiences.

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Monday, April 24, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

 


Legends and Lattes is a debut fantasy novel by author Travis Baldree. The novel is now a Nebula Award Nominee and had an odd route to get there: it was first self-published, but got attention and went viral due to its pretty remarkably fun cover. Then popular author Seanan McGuire gave it a glowing review and it wound up picked up by Tor Books for a traditional republished edition (complete with a bonus extra story). And well, here we are, with it seemingly a pretty big success, at least in terms of popular acclaim.

The story is a spin on a couple of SF/F archetypes I've enjoyed in the past: first, it's kind of an "after the adventure ends" story, as it follows Orc Barbarian Viv as she quits adventuring after one last quest to try and fulfill her dream: to open up a successful coffee shop and bring the glories of coffee to towns who've never heard of it. Secondly, it's the type of low key SF/F story which doesn't have a big bad or a big world ending or even small scale conflict to fight - this is a low key cozy novel showing a group of people, most notably Viv, just trying to succeed at the happy life of their dreams. So while the novel clearly takes the tropes and trappings of dungeons & dragons for its setting, it's going in a very different direction.

And as I'll explain below in further depth, it's a very good direction: Legends and Lattes is excellent cozy fun, with a wonderful lead protagonist, solid enjoyable side protagonists who you really want to root for, a slow but very well done F-F romance, and more. The novel is short, but is an absolute delight and really drew me in such that I couldn't stop reading Viv's story as she tried to establish a new life for herself, one in which she wasn't still the brutish Orc Barbarian people assumed she must be, but was instead the coffee shop owner of her dreams. Great characters, great sweet fun, and some solid themes? Yeah, Legends and Lattes is a winner.

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Thursday, April 20, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy Mini Review: No Windmills in Basra by Diaa Jubaili (Translated by Chip Rossetti)

 


No Windmills in Basra isn't a book I feel particularly qualified to review - the book is an anthology of mostly flash fiction (fiction ranging from less than a page to just a few pages) as well as perhaps a few stories that might qualify as full short stories, all written by Iraqi author Diaa Jubaili.  The stories all take place in Iraq and calling some of the stories "fantasy" may be a bit of a misnomer, they're more about surrealistic and imaginative (almost like magical realism, although obviously from a different culture) takes on the state of life in southern Iraq.  So perhaps someone with a more literary bent is a better person to review this, I don't know, but I did want to leave at least a mini review on this book that I did complete this year after a borrow from the library.  

Because No Windmills in Basra is a fascinating read and well worth your time, which at a very short length, it won't take up too much of, even as it hits at times significantly hard. 

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Tuesday, April 18, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: A Song of Salvation by Alechia Dow

 


Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on July 11, 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.

A Song of Salvation is a young adult space opera novel by author Alechia Dow. The novel is technically the third in a series, after The Sound of Stars (which I read and reviewed HERE) and The Kindred (which I have not read), although it is entirely stand-alone, and does not require reading those books to be enjoyed. It was a novel that I probably wouldn't have taken too much interest in based upon the prior novel I'd read (which I'd liked but not loved), except one of my favorite reviewers (Alex Brown) highlighted it as a rare kind of YA novel - a YA space opera written by a Black author. So I was interested enough to request it and give it a try.

To be honest, my feelings on A Song of Salvation remain kind of mixed, just like its predecessor novel. On one hand, this is an enjoyable YA Space Opera novel, featuring a solid duo of main point of view characters (plus a really enjoyable third main character who doesn't get POV chapters) - Zaira, a girl from a race on the verge of genocide who possesses the lost power and soul of a goddess inside her, and Wesley, a boy who ran from the godlike beings who could tell him his destiny and has instead found a cynical life as a pilot/smuggler. Together they get involved in a conflict between gods and races for the sake of saving the Universe and the way they interact, learn to love, hope, and find something despite difficult lives and destinies that wait them, works pretty well. On the other hand, the book throws in a bit too any things, like a last act destined love interest (a minor character from a prior book) who just felt out of place and utterly unnecessary, and too much of things seem to be resolved by last second deus ex machinas, as if the author couldn't bear to let any characters' plots and relationships go unsettled. The result is an enjoyable read, but not one that'll make one of my highlights of the year.

NOTE: As I mentioned above, this book is stand-alone, but is also the third and final book in a sequence of other books that began with The Sound of Stars. Characters from both prior books do recur in this novel, with the protagonists of The Sound of Stars playing a peripheral but important role in the book's conclusion. So if you have any interest in reading those books, I recommend doing so first. If you aren't sure, you can start here instead, it's not like there are any spoilers here for those books that will affect your enjoyment of those, and you won't really be lost at all when the prior books' characters show up.

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Wednesday, April 12, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Furious Heaven by Kate Elliott

 


Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on April 18, 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.

Furious Heaven is the sequel to Kate Elliott's Unconquerable Sun, her genderflipped queer space opera retelling of the story of Alexander the Great, and is the second book in the trilogy. The novel is LONG, even for Kate Elliott (who is known for chunkers): Amazon lists it at 728 pages as compared to the first book's 522 pages. Still, I love Elliott in general (she's one of my favorite authors) and I really enjoyed Unconquerable Sun, for its fun space opera, its tremendous secondarary major characters, and some solid themes, so I was excited to bite into this, even if it would take up much of my reading time for an entire week (as opposed to my 1-2 day reading time of most books). This is especially the case because in my experience, Elliott works tend to really hit their stride in book 2s of her trilogies.

And well, Furious Heaven is pretty great at times, as it follows the second phase in the careeer of Elliott's version of Alexander (Princess Sun) - her campaign/invasion against the Phene (her version of Persia). The book features a bunch of new but still strong characters, develops further our existing characters, and features a breathtaking pace as Sun rarely allows herself (of is afforded) time to relax before moving on. At the same time, the book's breakneck pace is, strong interlude chapters aside, perhaps also a bit of a weakness, as we rarely get too much time to see how things play out as the status quo rapidly changes, and Elliott's Sun - ostensibly our most important character - remains by far the least interesting. So for once I think this is a slight step back from the series opener....but it's still very good.

Disclaimer: Elliott asked her followers on twitter two years back for suggested fake book titles to be included in this book and picked one I suggested in response and added me to the Acknowledgements of this book by name. I promise this credit did not affect my review.
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Monday, April 10, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Debunked by Dito Abbott

 




Debunked is a self-published Young Adult Adventure Fantasy novel written by author Dito Abbott.  The novel is one of this year's semifinalists in the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC2 - my reviews of these books can be found here) and is one of six books my team and I have been assigned to read and Judge to see if they will make the finals.  You'll note I refer to the book as fantasy above as despite it somehow qualifying as a semifinalist in the SPSFC2, it really isn't science fiction as I usually think of it and even the Amazon categories for the book list it as "Action & Adventure", "Sword & Sorcery," and "Young Adult Fantasy".  That said the novel does feature a steampunk esque portal fantasy world and mad scientists galore, so I guess I can see how it was considered qualified for this competition (and really the SciFi/Fantasy distinction is kind baloney).  

Unfortunately, even if I do consider Debunked SciFi for the purposes of the competition, I didn't find it very good at all.  The story tries to do two things mainly: first, be very humorous through a ridiculous setting, complete with footnotes as the story goes on that reveal more ridiculous parts of the setting, and second, to put our heroes - teen siblings Ozzy and Alex - into constant exciting danger as they find themselves on the run in a fantasy world that barely makes any sense and is constantly trying to kill them.  The problem is that the humor did not work for me - the setting is ridiculous but ridiculousness on its own isn't funny to me anymore, it needs to be actually absurd in a way that's amusing or funny, - and the constant danger just felt exhausting, as Debunked is not a short novel and our characters are a new dangerous situation basically every few pages, which makes each moment of danger have very little impact and just feel like more of the same.  There's some character development here, so it's not all bad, but there's just not enough or any space for the characters to breathe, and it felt so exhausting to read that I just didn't care in the end.  

Some more details after the jump:

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Tuesday, April 4, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Wicked Bargain by Gabe Cole Novoa

 


The Wicked Bargain is a YA Historical Fantasy novel by author Gabe Cole Novoa, a Latinx transmasc author who had previously written a trilogy under a pen name "Ava Jae". I'd never heard of him or this novel, until my favorite reviewer - Alex Brown from Tor.com, Locus and their own blog - put in an absolute glowing review of this book. The novel takes place around 1820 in the Caribbean, as countries in Latin American began to assert their indepedence from Spanish rule via violent revolution and Latin non-white pirates sailed around and seized Spanish vessels - pirates generally ignored and forgotten in White western stories in favor of White Western pirates. And so Novoa tells a story of fictional pirates, featuring a transmasc non-binary teen named Mar as they deal with not just the historical background, but their own dangerous magical powers, as well as Demons (Demonios) and Devils (Diablos) who have their own sinister agendas.

It's a queer young adult fantasy tale that works really really well and is absolutely deserving of acclaim. The Wicked Bargain doesn't do anything super unique in its tale - the ideas of a teen dealing with dangerous uncontrollable magic inside them, with a possible romance with a boy they're forced to be around that's inconvenient in its timing, and dealing with both historical oppressors and/or deals with the devil are all ideas that I've seen (and many readers will have seen) before. However, the Wicked Bargain combines all of these ideas and executes them beautifully, and puts them all into a story featuring characters from backgrounds that are often ignored in these tales - queer and trans characters, characters who are Latinx and non-White, and who are from backgrounds forced to deal with colonial imperial oppressors...in this case the people of 1800s Latin America. Its characters are really well done, its themes are excellent, and its just a really well told story, which makes it extremely easy to recommend to readers looking for YA and even just general good historical fantasy and adventure fiction.

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Monday, April 3, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Those Left Behind by N.C. Scrimgeour

 


Those Left Behind is a self-published space opera novel by author N.C. Scrimgeour, and it's also the first in a now fully published trilogy. The novel is one of the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition 2 (#SPSFC2 - See my earlier SPSFC2 reviews here) semifinalists and is part of the group my group was assigned to judge. For what it's worth, I didn't go into this book fully blind - I was the third of my team's four reviewers to give this a try and I had a vague impression of what the other two readers thought about it - that they liked it but felt it didn't quite satisfy all the ideas the novel brought up. But I've not always agreed with my teammates on certain books, so I was interested to see if I agreed with their perceptions

Alas, I pretty much had the same impression: Those Left Behind takes a seemingly VERY Mass Effect inspired premise and setting and features a plot that follows five point of view characters who are generally all pretty interesting and excellent....but doesn't have enough page length to really commit to any of those characters, leaving me feeling unsatisfied with the book as a whole. The writing and prose will draw you in fairly well, but there's just too much here for the author to handle, and even understanding that it's the first in a trilogy isn't enough to make the book fully satisfying (the similarities of the book to Mass Effect's plot does not help in this regards). I can see how this earned a place in the semifinals, but it isn't one I think should go much farther, even if I didn't dislike it.

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