This series is so highly rated, and I am five books in wondering what I just don’t understand. It’s not terrible, but from my view it’s a very middling, derivative fantasy series. I guess every series just has its fans who do connect with it, and I’m certainly guilty of fanning all over series whose appeal leaves other people stumped. I should have reviewed this sooner. It’s been nearly a month and I don’t remember anything that really happened in Baptism of Fire, and it’s […]
William Gibson, poet of cacaphony
I admit that I find Gibson to be rather oblique reading. I first read Neuromancer for CBR IV, and I wasn’t really motivated to read the rest of the Sprawl books for a number of reasons. But I really like the *idea* of cyberpunk, and after watching Netflix’s Altered Carbon I thought I might give some abandoned cyberpunk series another chance, including this one and, yeah, the Takeshi Kovacs books. I don’t remember Neuromancer all too well, but from what I do remember, some of […]
“For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it. ”
Alias Grace is Margaret Atwood’s imagining of the true story of Grace Marks, a convicted (and later pardoned) murderess… “Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word—musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.” … in 19th century Canada whose sensationalistic trial left doubt as to the nature of her involvement in the double […]
A righteous defense of a difficult book
When an author of Courtney Milan’s caliber takes as much time as she (admittedly) does between books in her series, you often cope — as I did — by re-reading a bunch of her back catalog in between. Every re-read reminds you how she is working on another level from most other romance authors right now, between the articulation of the themes she explores and the maturity of the relationships she crafts. When her new book finally drops two years later, you hope, and expect, […]