The Red Scholar's Wake by Aliette de Bodard
This wasn’t bad, but it could have been so much better. I think I just really don’t gel with this author. I read a short story from her that one year I voted for the Hugos and it turned me off so hard from her stuff. She seemed like the kind of author who was more interested in being artsy and impressive than in telling a good story. Those kinds of authors and I usually butt heads. So when this book was chosen for December’s […]
The Christie Affair by Nina De Gramont
This is much more like what I wanted from 2021’s The Mystery of Mrs. Christie, a book which also speculates on what happened to Agatha Christie when she went missing for eleven days in 1926. At the same time, I could not have predicted what avenues this story would take. So really, it’s more like this gave me the feelings I was looking for, even if not in the way I expected. The other book gave me a plot more like I expected but was lacking […]
The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett
What it comes down to with this book is that I just had a great time while reading it. I really feel like Janice Hallett is getting better with every book. She had the puzzle element down in the first book but I didn’t care about the characters or connect emotionally with the story. In her second book, The Twyford Code, I connected hard with the characters thanks to some clever twistiness and she still had the nice puzzle element, even leveled up a little. With […]
The Curator by Owen King
This book has one of the lowest average ratings on Goodreads I’ve ever seen*; it’s currently sitting at a 3.01, where anything under 3.5 is considered low, and anything under 3.25 is pretty dire. You see a rating like that and your first instinct is, “Whoa, what’s going on here??” And honestly, I understand it. I read this book back in March (it is now late June) and I’m still not sure if I even liked it. It is an extremely weird reading experience with […]
A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians (The Shadow Histories, #1) by H.G. Parry
Okay, I always understood the French Revolution, meaning I understood why there was one, and that it got out of control because hUmAnS, but I have never before been able to hold the chronology of it in my head, or remember the various stages, or the political parties or players. And it never descended to the human level for me before, never really reached my emotions because of the ways it’s been funneled at me before. It feels sort of perverse to say that a […]
The Escape Room by Megan Goldin
This little book does exactly what thrillers are supposed to do. It kept me frantically turning pages wanting to know what would happen next, it was a fast read, and it has an extremely interesting premise: Four co-workers who don’t really like each other are stuck in an “escape room” elevator that isn’t what it seems, and there were well-paced reveals of dark secrets lurking around the corners of the story. If I hadn’t disliked the four characters in the elevator so much, I might […]
