Not of Woman Born, Edited by Constance Ash (1999, 272 pages) – A themed anthology of unusual births and even more unusual birthrights. A nice mix of some intriguing short stories, most of which I really liked. Hunting Mother by Sage Walker – I’m always intrigued by what order an anthologist puts the stories in and how they decide. I would not have picked this as my “grabber” story simply because it doesn’t have a lot of story to it. It’s got enough atmosphere for […]
Proof There’s No Life After Death
The Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov (1994, 435 pages) – How do I know there’s no life after death? Because Isaac Asimov would claw his way out of the ground and strangle me if he knew about this negative review. I’m usually a big fan, and I’ve never understood people who consider Asimov to be dry and pedantic. I love and reread the original Foundation Trilogy every couple of years, and his short stories are always clever and wicked funny on occasion. However, having struggled […]
Freaks & Geeks
As I was reading this book, I kept thrusting it into people’s hands demanding that they read the back cover. This book swings for the fences and I knew that no matter what my ultimate opinion of the experience, it wouldn’t be for lack of ambition on Julia Elliott’s part. Read the rest at Pop Culture Penalty Box.
A Refreshing New Take on an Old Classic
I don’t know why I put off reading this series for so long. It’s GOOD. Meyer is an excellent story-teller and like alwaysanswerb says, Meyer uses the Cinderella fairy tale as her basis, but the story is 100% her own. I think the thing that makes this absolutely brilliant is moving the plot into a super-advanced technological future where we can’t make any real ties to the bucolic setting of the original fairy tale. Cinder (Cinderella) is a cyborg living in “new” Beijing (the old […]
We took you out from your mother’s womb; Our temple, your tomb
This book is a sequel, and this review may contain spoilers for the first book in the series, Cinder. I was initially surprised to see the direction Meyer chose to go when continuing her series, The Lunar Chronicles, in that she introduced a new protagonist and switched between character POVs, rather than just sticking with Cinder’s. A lot of time, this is a YA contrivance that bothers me somewhat, because it’s frequently a shortcut into another character’s emotions without having to write them descriptively (e.g. […]
Once you gone tech you ain’t never going back
Reading Cinder was a great way to get back on the YA train after my last misadventure. It’s actually well-written in addition to being well paced and having a heroine who doesn’t completely suck (the opposite, in fact — Cinder is a total badass.) The long and short of it is this: set in the future in “New Beijing”, the story is a retelling of Cinderella, except our title character is a cyborg. If that sounds awesome, it’s because it is, but the citizens of […]
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