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. […]
I knew better, I really did. This is absolutely a typical Anne Bishop book.
There is no doubt that Anne Bishop can write a compelling and entertaining story. The problem is that lurking under that very compelling and entertaining story is an ugly miasma of misogyny and -in this book’s case- racism. While not overtly rapey as The Black Jewels trilogy was, this book is still very much within Anne Bishop’s oeuvre, and that oeuvre means it’s sexist as hell and contains some really disturbing relationships. The plot is simple enough. A girl, Meg, on the run from people who think they own […]
I pity books that follow amazing reads, it’s very hard to be fair to them
Wolf Justice by Doranna Durgin is a completely mediocre book, there’s nothing particularly bad but neither is there anything spectacularly good. And reading it right after The Night Circus means that it suffers a bit by comparison. It’s a very quick, light read but it just doesn’t do much to distinguish itself from the bulk of generic fantasy. This is the sequel to Touched by Magic, but only in the sense that it has the same characters and not in the sense that it continues the […]
The Circus is a Dream and I am a Dreamer
Lucky number thirteen, and what a thirteen. I’m going to have a hard time being articulate about this book because all I want to do is cry I loved it so much. After I had finished I closed my kindle and held it close to my heart to revel in the world of the book just a tiny bit longer. It’s hard to describe the plot without giving too much away. And this is a book that unfolds like a flower, each unfolding giving you […]
Unicorns and magic and tragedy oh my
This is a pretty typical mid-90s fantasy. It’s decent, but nothing particularly amazing. Still, there are worse books to spend a few hours with. And the thing that interests me most about the novel is not the actual book, but the publishing history. Reandn is a Wolf in the Kings Keep. As near as I can tell this means he’s a palace guard but more responsible for patrolling the outside of the keep as opposed to the inside (The Hounds) but not too far, because […]
The B plot is much stronger then the A plot, and that’s ok
Book two of this series picks up an hour or two after book one ends. I dove in head first and emerged a few hours later at the end of the book. While I liked Omens, I found Visions to be a lot more enjoyable. This may be because the set up was done and things were all in place so now we could really explore the world that Armstrong is building here. The A plot is a murder mystery. Someone leaves the body of a […]