Saturday, September 28, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Novella Review: The Lost Child of Lychford by Paul Cornell




The Lost Child of Lychford by Paul Cornell (Witches of Lychford book #2)

The Lost Child of Lychford is the sequel to Paul Cornell's "Witches of Lychford" (reviewed on this blog here), and the second in what will soon be a four novella series.  The series features three women - a young vicar, a young skeptic once touched by magic, and an old woman experienceed in the craft - who have to come together to stop invasions of the supernatural in a quaint English town.

I enjoyed the first of these novellas quite a bit - it was short and not mind-blowing in any way, but its main characters were strong and had depth and the story, while somewhat predictable, was executed really well.  And The Lost Child of Lychford is similar, if a little stronger I think, in the way its plot continues the story of these three excellent women facing the supernatural in an incredibly creepy way, as this invasion features the mysterious enemy targeting the three of them deliberately and meticulously, which Cornell writes in fantastic fashion.

Again, I read this novella as an audiobook - and while the reader is good, for some reason the reader is not the same one as the reader from the first audiobook, which is a bit distracting.


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Thursday, September 26, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Isle of Blood and Stone by Makiia Lucier




Isle of Blood and Stone is a YA fantasy by author Makiia Lucier, and the first of a duology of books - the second of which just came out in August.  It's a stand-alone novel mind you, featuring a solid interesting fantasy world, with a pair of excellent main characters, who struggle to discover a truth long hidden, whose revelation they know will almost certainly only bring pain.  It's a pretty solid setup, and I'm certainly interested in reading the second half of this duology later this year.

Unfortunately, the execution falters a bit along the way, especially by the book's end, where the book wraps things up insanely quickly in a way that is hardly very satisfying.  The book includes some fantastical elements that generally go nowhere and its romantic subplot isn't particularly enthralling, even if it's fine.  Essentially what we have here is the skeleton of a perfectly good young adult fantasy, but not the execution needed to take this beyond fine.

More specifics after the jump:

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Wednesday, September 25, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Forbidden Stars by Tim Pratt



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 October 8 2019 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.

 Tim Pratt's "The Axiom" trilogy made a pretty damn strong first impression with "The Wrong Stars" (Review Here), featuring an excellent mix of humor and space opera (with a little romance along the way).  The story featured a misfit cast of characters as the crew of a ship discovering a looming Universal Threat from a highly advanced but dormant species of aliens, and the resulting work was a pretty close to perfect lighthearted story that made me crack up and smile while still posing serious consequences for our heroes.  I didn't quite love as much the second book, The Dreaming Stars (Review Here), quite as much, as I felt the book lost a bit of the oddball humor and charm that I loved about the first - it was still pretty good mind you, just not as good.

The Forbidden Stars continues this downward trend and accelerates it, to my disappointment.  The book focuses far more than its predecessors in a single character's perspective and features a far less interesting conflict for most of its duration.  Moreover, not only does the book lose much of its humor, but it feels for much of it like a completely different type of book altogether: one following a hyper competent military-esque agent waging a one woman war on an oppressive underestimating enemy.  There's nothing wrong with that type of plot and its competently executed, but it's not what I've come to expect from the first two books in the series, and even executed nicely it feels kind of generic as a result.


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Monday, September 23, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Whispers of Shadow & Flame by L Penelope




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 October 1 2019 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.

Whispers of Shadow & Flame is the second book in author L Penelope's "Earthsinger Chronicles" series, after her first book, Song of Blood & Stone (Reviewed Here).  Both Song and this book were originally self-published, but are now being rereleased by a traditional publisher, with this second book coming out this coming month.  I liked Song a little - it was a solid fantasy romance story, featuring strong themes of racial prejudice and the issue of refugee camps in a country bordering a totalitarian government that seem a little more relevant now than even just a year ago.  Still, I felt Song felt utterly barebones at times, with very little depth to the setting outside of its themes, and a personal conflict that felt rather weak and predictable overall.  I may have skipped this second novel, had I not see it come up on NetGalley for a potential review.

And Whispers of Shadow & Flame definitely course corrects on the issues of its predecessor - the setting this time around is far deeper, with the story featuring far more characters of importance and really exploring the world over the course of its plot.  It's actually not a sequel per se - the book takes place during the same time period as Song, but in the neighboring totalitarian nation instead, dealing with characters dealt with but not really seen in that first book. And I really enjoyed these characters for the most part, as well as the romance that develops, but the book has two issues: a bifurcated plot where one plotline is much stronger than the others, and an ending that well....isn't an ending, but instead a cliffhanger for a third novel.

Note: You can start the series with this book and you'll probably be okay doing so.  The book references characters from the prior book on occasion, but they never really actually show up on screen, outside two greater powers who lurk on the periphery.  That said, some of the concepts of this world were explained in greater detail in the first book, so you might be a little lost at first if you try it.  

More after the Jump:

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Thursday, September 19, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Suicide Club: A Novel About Living by Rachel Heng




Dystopian fiction is a classic extension of the SciFi/Fantasy Genres - for example, a quick search of my own book reviews just this year reveals 8 works with dystopian settings that I've read and reviewed this year, and I'm not exactly searching them out.  Obviously these settings allow for writers to explore futures that seem both horrifying and possible for us in our own lifetimes, and the stories within these settings, while sometimes still being fun to read, naturally can be read as messages to the reader - even more than how basically any fiction serves as a message to the reader.  If you're one of those people (sigh) who for some reason thinks "message fiction" is evil and is a problem, Dystopian SciFi is almost certainly not for you.

Suicide Club is dystopian Science Fiction of a most classic sort, leaning heavily into the horrors and hypocrisy's of its dystopia, with the main characters' struggles being against the bounds of this dark future rather than merely being set amongst it - a 1984 comparison here is not inapt, honestly, if you want a classic example of this type of book.  It has two strong lead characters, a plot that works rather well and will keep readers on their toes, and an interesting dystopian setting that will raise questions for any reader.  And yet....Suicide Club has so much in it, that its messages become kind of muddled, to the point where I'm not quite sure what the author was trying to say, and I suspect that readers of different political persuasions might have some very different takeaways from it, which isn't ideal.

I'll try to go more in depth on this after the jump.  Note that I read this as an audiobook, so if I get any spellings of characters/places/ideas wrong, that's why, but the reader was very good and is recommended. 

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Wednesday, September 18, 2019

Spoilery Discussion: The Unkindest Tide and Seanan Mcguire's October Daye Series


If you couldn't tell from the name of this post, this is a post where I'm going to vent my thoughts about the October Daye series as a whole, and my speculations as to where things are going.  I'll also be talking about spoilers in The Unkindest Tide that I tiptoed around in my review post.  So if you're interested in the series, and haven't read all 13 books, don't read any further.

For my non-spoiler review of The Unkindest Tide, see THIS post.

You have been warned.


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SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Unkindest Tide by Seanan McGuire




I've said this quite a few times, but Seanan Mcguire's October Daye series is one of my favorite ongoing series out there.  I first got interested in the urban fantasy series when the first ten books were in the Hugo Packet 3 years ago and I intended to read only a few of them for voting purposes....only to binge read them all within a week.  I've read each of the next two books on the day they were released, so uhhhh yeah, I love this series, although I did think the most recent book - Night and Silence - was a bit of a lowpoint of the series for being really repetitive of past adventures.

The Unkindest Tide is however a terrific return to form, with the book paying off on plot threads that have been dangling since Book 5 in a creative and interesting way and moving our characters and world in some really interesting directions.  As usual, I would not suggest this book as a starting point for the series - despite the first chapter being nearly entirely devoted to recap, the book relies heavily on past story developments to work.  But this book is yet another good reason for newcomers to try and get into the series, as it's producing works that range from solid to great nearly every year.

Note: This book also contains a short novella "Hope is Swift", which I will quickly review below as well.

Note2: This will be as spoiler-free a review as possible.  I will post a spoilery thoughts post for this book as well, so if you're interested in my spoiler-filled thoughts, wait for that, and if you want to post in comments, do so there


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