Dawn is the first book in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy, and like much of Butler’s work I’m going to go through them very slowly, both to savor them and let them filter through my head. Butler does not write easy science fiction, the contents of her novels challenge the reader and the ideas in them linger long after the last page is turned. Dawn starts with the awakening of Lilith Iyapo. Earth has just gone through a nuclear war and Lilith remembers the small, pitiful struggles […]
Napoleonic France with MAGIC
The Guns of Empire is the fourth book in a series, which I read before I started participating in the Cannonball Reads and so there are no previous reviews. I’m going to try and summarize both this book and the previous books without spoiling anything, but my short recommendation is this; READ THIS SERIES. It’s fabulous. It’s an alt-world Napoleonic France with magic and cross-dressing lesbians in the French Foreign legion. This series is a magical-alt-world mashup of the Frech Revolution, the French Foreign Legion, and […]
Modern Arthurian Knights
I am embarrassed to admit that I was halfway through the book before I recognized that this was a King Arthur retelling, on the other hand that could speak to McKillip’s ability to weave story threads around so that only the bare bones of the legend remains. On the other hand, once I recognized the bones as being King Arthur and his knights, the bones became extremely obvious. Patricia McKillip has long been one of my favorite authors, I absolutely adore her writing and she hasn’t […]
A Final Trip to Green Gables
I wanted to like this book more then I did. Of all the Anne books, this is the one most distant from Anne herself, which is saying something considering she practically disappeared in the last couple of books bearing her name. This is a collection of short stories, most of which had been published previously, which Montgomery slightly altered to fit the Blythes in somehow (it’s more obvious in some stories then others) and then connected with a few poems and smaller pieces of Anne reading […]