All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders is a perfectly cromulent novel. But there’s nothing about it that set my soul on fire. To be perfectly honest, I’m not really sure why it won the Emperor Norton award. It’s a fine novel, but I didn’t see anything that would be “extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason.” in the novel. The plot follows Patricia and Lawrence from childhood through adulthood. Lawrence is a science geek and an inventor. […]
Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket
Every good fairy tale starts with a wish. The little mermaid wishes to walk on land. Cinderella wishes to go to the ball. Maleficent wishes someone would just throw her a fucking bone and invite her to a baby shower. And in Neil Gaiman’s Stardust, all our hero wants is to get the girl. The other thing every good fairy tale needs is a quest. In this case, the quest is for the heart of Victoria Foster, the most beautiful girl in the village. Or […]
World Building for Dummies
This is not meant to be a criticism of this book, which I enjoyed, but to say that world building, especially for dystopian future worlds, is very challenging. Red Queen won the 2015 Goodreads Choice Award for Debut Goodreads Author. I read the book description and although I am leery of YA dystopian series, I decided to give it a shot. I’ve read a few of these book series post Hunger Games, and this one I’ve found is the best at fleshing out both the […]
The Rainbow Man’s kind of a dick
I picked the Kindle version of this book for free as part of my Amazon Prime membership. The once monthly offer of a free book is nice in one respect because it gets me to read things that are out of my comfort zone. It’s not so nice when you’re a confirmed non-believer and you realize about halfway through the book that you’re reading a Christian novel. I’m sure I selected it because of comparisons to Flannery O’Conner in the reviews but other than […]
Didn’t like it then, now I do. It’s magic!
If you read my reviews regularly, you’ll probably know how much I love The Dresden Files, but that I initially didn’t like it very much, to the point where I gave up after reading book three way back in 2009. I just didn’t think the series was for me. That I thought that at the time is alternately hilarious and horrifying. I almost didn’t pick this series back up, and so I almost missed out on what has turned out to be more and more […]
‘Pride and Prejudice’ meets ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ is actually a pretty apt comparison.
Pretty dang soon after I finished up reading Eon and Eona late last year, I learned that Alison Goodman had a new YA fantasy series about to start up. Since her first series was complicated and interesting and took lots of risks (even if they didn’t always work), I was already intrigued by the promise of a new series from her, but when I saw her refer to it as “Pride and Prejudice meets Buffy in English high society”, I pretty much needed to read […]