I’ve never read anything quite like Ken Liu’s debut novel The Grace of Kings.I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain it for a week now and the closest I can come to is this: Chinese history meets The Iliad meets Game of Thrones. Sometimes it reads like a history book…and then our heroes wage their wars on the backs of whales or from steampunk-inspired hot air balloons. Sprawling and ambitious, I couldn’t help but cheer for this book, even when I didn’t love […]
Asteroids! Aliens! Apocalypse! Atari! (OK, no Atari, that’s just me)
The best thing I can tell you about Fear the Sky is that I plan to read (or listen to, as I listened to the audiobook version) the sequels. Really, if you have any interest in this book, that’s the best starting place. It made me interested in learning more of the story. When I downloaded this audiobook, I didn’t know much about it. I think it was just recommended by Audible. I hadn’t read hard science fiction in a long time; it’s one of those genres I read in phases. […]
Dear Marissa Meyer, THIS is how you end a dystopian sci-fi series
Spoiler warning! This is the THIRD and final book of the trilogy and it’s going to be impossible for me to review this without referring at least a little to stuff that happened in the previous two books. Hence, this is not a review you want to check out until you are well and truly caught up. Interested in the series? Go forth and start at the beginning, with Red Rising. So readers will remember that when we last left Darrow at the end of […]
Dystopia turned up to eleven
4.5 stars Just up front, there will be some minor plot spoilers in this review, but most of it is also revealed in the official synopsis of the book from the publisher. Any details of the plot I give, only cover the first third or so of the book. Still, if you prefer to go in completely cold, and have managed to stay ignorant of the premise of a book published several years ago, you may want to skip this review and just take my […]
I can’t wait to see what Bryan Fuller does with this source material
Shadow is serving time in prison, patiently keeping his head down and counting the days until his release. He longs to get home to Laura, his travel agent wife and passes the time learning coin tricks and dreaming of what they will do together once he’s out of jail. Only a few days before he’s due to be released, Shadow is told that Laura was killed in a car accident, along with Shadow’s best friend Robbie, whom Laura was apparently having an affair with. As […]
Oh Thank God, An Honest Narrator
The beauty in this book was breathtaking. Rothfuss’s structure, world building, and character development are so rich and colorful it almost feels like the world is jumping off the page at you in bright, vivid, reality. It may be sacrilegious to say, but I feel that Rothfuss could become this century’s Tolkien. His love for music, lyrical poetry and folklore bleed through every page of this novel in the best way possible. As much as I was gushing about this series after finishing “A Wise […]