Thursday, December 31, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Thorn by Intisar Khanani

 



Thorn was an originally self published YA Fantasy novel by Intisar Khanani, which was picked up by a major publisher and rereleased this year.  I've actually read one of Khanani's earlier fantasy self-published series (Sunbolt/Memories of Ash), which were both very enjoyable if highly and sometimes distractingly derivative of other works (My review of both stories are here and here).  So it's no surprise that Thorn is openly derivative - the story is in large part an adaptation of The Brothers Grimm's fairy tale "The Goose Girl" into a more fantasy-esque world, to go along with other additions to make this a full novel.  

And well, Thorn manages to portray a strong voiced main character and deals with some strong themes about class and justice in a monarchal fantasy world, which made often made it compelling and hard to put down.  These themes are grafted on as additions to the fantasy version of The Goose Girl story (featuring vengeful Sorceress) and the additions work incredibly well.  At the same time however, the book tries to stick to the story of The Goose Girl as its skeleton, and always comes back to that story even when it's significantly less interesting than the additions.  The result works overall as a novel, but couldn't help make me long for a version of this book less tied to the original Brothers Grimm story.  

TRIGGER WARNING:  Rape (never on page, but the after effects are seen) and Physical Abuse, rarely on page, form major parts of the plot.  They're handled well and are never superfluous, but be forewarned.  

Note:  I read this in audiobook form, and as such if I misspell any names or concepts, that's the reason why.  

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Wednesday, December 30, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Hollow Empire by Sam Hawke:

 



Hollow Empire is the sequel to last year's "City of Lies," a both fascinating and frustrating fantasy novel from Astonishing Award nominee Sam Hawke.  The book featured a brother and sister - Jovan and Kalina - in the intriguing the State of Sjona and its capital city of Silasta, a city of ideals, where people can seemingly do what they want and love who they want...but secretly was built on a system of oppression.  Jovan and Kalina were both heavily privileged - their family is both publicly high in status and secretly in charge with proofing the Chancellor of Sjona's food for poison - and as such a large portion of the book was them figuring out how much they really didn't know about the lives of many who lived in their City-State, and how to deal with the rebellion of those oppressed peoples who...may have actually been in the right.  Add in Court Intrigue, a Mystery Traitor or Two, and the hinting of real dangerous magic in this low fantasy setting, and you had a very well done and enjoyable first book, even if it did have a few problems that prevented it from being one of my favorites from last year.

Hollow Empire follows up on the story two years later, once again with the story split between Jovan and Kalina's points of view, and dealing now with the cleanup from the class conflict and rebellion from the first book, while the city's unknown enemy remains out there.  This poses some interesting thematic questions about handling the aftermath and repairing the damage of oppression, but overall the result is a book that is a bit less interesting in themes than its predecessor.  On the other hand, our two main characters have grown tremendously since the first book for the most part, and that's such a really enjoyable thing to see.  Add in some more court/political intrigue, magic, foreign powers, and potential romance, and Hollow Empire may not live up to its predecessor, but it's still a very solid book.  

More after the jump, but warning: Spoilers for City of Lies are inevitable.

Note: I read this mostly as an audiobook, and the two readers are again excellent...but they are NOT the same readers as the ones for City of Lies, which is a bit disorienting.  

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Tuesday, December 29, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Doors of Sleep 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 January 12, 2021 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. 


Doors of Sleep is the latest book by author Tim Pratt, whose work I've previously enjoyed quite a bit (see his "The Axiom" trilogy or his most recent tie-in The Fractured Void).  Those novels were all fun space operas featuring fun casts of misfit characters having enjoyable relationships, quirks and smart interactions with dangerous enemies, and for the most part I really liked the results, even if none of the books were truly tremendous enough to fall into my "must read" category.  Doors of Sleep is the start of a new series which isn't quite space opera, so I was curious to see how it would read compared to those others.

And Doors of Sleep is very fun and entertaining, which reminds me of a number of other stories, from Marie Brennan's Memoirs of Lady Trent in writing style to well, Doctor Who, in that it features a man traveling through different worlds accompanied by occasionally changing companions and trying to do good on as many of those worlds as he can.  And yet it's not Doctor Who, in that our protagonist is not some mad genius but just a well meaning accidental traveler, who is far more human and thus breakable than that show's classic hero.  The result, aided by Pratt's solid entertaining writing, is a rather fun (although not comedic unlike his other works) and well done novel that ends on a satisfying point while promising more to come.  

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Monday, December 28, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Blazewrath Games by Amparo Ortiz

 




Blazewrath Games is a YA Fantasy novel that is also the debut of author Amparo Ortiz.  The novel features a plot that will feel very reminiscent of other novels in its alternate history fantasy setup:  take our world, add a second world of magicians that becomes known to the "regular" public years in the past, add in dragons who often bond with other humans with various magical abilities and physical forms, and finally have all these things come together with a World Cup of a sport involving all of it.  So yes, this one certainly will remind readers of some major elements from Harry Potter, because it certainly seems like the author set out at one point to do her own spin on that, except centered on a Puerto Rican girl (and featuring many other people of color) in a world filled with publicly-out LGTBQ people, and a fantasy sport that makes slightly more sense than Quidditch.

Which could be a pretty good starting point for a novel, but Blazewrath Games - though fun - has a lot of problems.  The book is clearly trying very hard to do a better job with its world in all the areas Harry Potter failed, and to deal with strong themes such as what it means to be Puerto Rican in the diaspora vs from the island itself, about self-confidence in the face of despair, and about the power in just being yourself....but it stumbles repeatedly, never quite fully exploring any of these themes in depth.  Add in a plot that suggests some interesting twists and turns and basically has none, a problematic sportswashing element that misleads the reader about the state of our own world, and well....I just wish this had faced another serious edit, as its fun core gets swamped by the other problems.  

Note: I read this half as an audiobook, and the audiobook reader is excellent.  So if you do want to read it, that format is worth your time.  

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Friday, December 25, 2020

Fantasy Novella Review: Over the Woodward Wall by A Deborah Baker

 


Over the Woodward Wall by A. Deborah Baker

Over the Woodward Wall is a middle-grade novella with an odd backstory.  The story first featured as an in-universe book in Seanan McGuire's stand alone adult novel "Middlegame," as a Wizard of Oz-like story written as a coded guide to teach the fictional author Baker's disciples alchemy.  McGuire wrote snippets of the story for Middlegame and decided (with the Publisher) to eventually actually write the full story as its own stand alone middle-grade novel (Baker is of course, another of McGuire's pseudonyms here). 

So it's not surprising that the story is a fun middle grade tale of two different children going on an adventure trying to get home from a strange fantasy world, one which really will remind readers of both The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland quite a bit.  What is surprising is how incomplete the story is, with it just....ending and it begging for a sequel.  I can't imagine children reading this being satisfied as a result and can imagine them frustrated which just makes it weird, and while this is fun for adults, it won't be more than an interesting curiosity. 

More specifics after the jump.

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Thursday, December 24, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Flytrap by Stephanie Ahn

 



Flytrap is the third book in Stephanie Ahn's "Harrietta Lee" urban fantasy series, which began with Deadline (Review Here) a few years ago and continued with last year's "Bloodbath" (Review Here).  This series is one of the rare self-published series that I've actually both tried and am now trying to keep up with, so I was excited when I realized this third book had been published during quarantine and that I'd missed it.  For those who haven't heard of the series, it features Harry Lee, masochistic (in the sexual sense, explicitly) lesbian and disgraced blood witch, as she navigates New York trying to deal with the mess of her life and the magical world.  It's a fairly explicit series - the first book features full BDSM play, the second pretty explicit (lesbian obv) sex with a demon - so it won't be for everyone, and it has some narrative issues that you might expect from self published work from a relatively new writer, but it's a lot of fun to read.  

Flytrap is more of the same, for better or worse.  It's still a very enjoyable and fun narrative with its masochistic lesbian blood witch heroine, and if you enjoyed the sex scenes in the last one, they are taken up a notch this time around.  The plot is actually tighter than book 2 as well, which helps things move a lot more smoothly, and the prose is really well done.  On the other hand, as the third installment in a series, the book feels weird, with old characters never showing up and new characters and traumas popping up that you'd think would've been mentioned before.  Hopefully the next book in the series feels more like part of a series than this one, but on its own, this is still very fun.

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Wednesday, December 23, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Rebel Sisters by Tochi Onyebuchi

 



Rebel Sisters is Tochi Onyebuchi's follow up to his YA novel "War Girls" (see my review here) one of my favorite - and easily one of the most devastating - novels of last year.  War Girls was a novel essentially in the vein of RF Kuang's The Poppy War - in that it took a real world conflict, filled with horrible atrocities, and shifted it into a genre setting.  And well, moving the horrors of the Nigerian-Biafran Civil War into the future and adding giant mechas didn't make the story any less devastating, especially as it followed two sisters on opposite sides of the conflict.  And the story concluded in a satisfying if heartbreaking fashion, all the while making serious points using its historical background, that it never really made me think it needed a sequel, so when I found out it was getting one I was both frightened and excited.

And Rebel Sisters is....a hell of a sequel, although a much harder book to pin down than its predecessor.  It once again features past and present atrocities shifted into the future or at least referred to, although those atrocities are more from all over the world rather than specifically from its mainly Nigerian setting (the exiling of refugees and their physiological reaction to the threat of deportations, the adopting of such refugees by privileged white folk, and the genocide and erasure of the Uyghur people by China, etc.).  It combines these historical and present day horrors into a plot featuring characters who are forced to react to it all and try to find answers....but it stops well short of trying to suggest there are answers at all.  Indeed, one of the book's central arguments is left with an "answer" that is so ambiguous as to leave many readers thinking about it for days afterwards...and I'm not quite sure it how to feel about it.  

More specifics after the jump (Spoilers for War Girls are unmarked below, although I don't think they matter too much to your enjoyment of that book):

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