What’s happening to me, personally, doesn’t matter. If it’s not the ideal time, well, it’s the only time we’ve got.” As I was listening to a section about a third of the way into Bloodline I was struck by the deeply screwed up dynamic of the Skywalker family. Some friends and I joke that Anakin and Luke Skywalker are the biggest drama queens in the galaxy. Listening to Leia recount being tortured for hours by the man she now knows was her father, it doesn’t feel like […]
“If you had the time to lose, an open mind and time to choose.”
I avoided this book for years because I was told it was a romance novel and I have a prejudice against romance novels. Perhaps it was the seemingly endless supply of Harlequin books my mother seemed to devour. The closest I ever got was a minor obsession with V.C. Andrews which take a decidedly darker turn than the average “bodice ripper.” While I’m still not a fan of a straightforward romance novel, I have included books that fall under the “romance” umbrella into my […]
Quests for chivalry and loyalty in Westeros
This is a review for the audiobook version of the first three ‘Dunk and Egg’ novellas by George R R Martin, set about a hundred years before Game of Thrones. They come together in one file on Audible, which is quite nice and easy. Each novella is about 3-4 hours long (much easier to digest than the 33+ hours of A Game of Thrones, for example). The novellas are difficult to find on their own, coming in edited volumes from a variety of sci-fi/fantasy authors (at […]
“Why is some accident of uncontrolled neurochemistry the ‘real me,’ and a carefully reasoned system of priorities somehow false?”
Borderline is a sharp urban fantasy book with a new take on the “fairies walk among us” trope. It stands out, in part, for its unusual protagonist (more on that later) but also achieves above-average marks for its balance of fresh world-building with a well-paced plot. Leaning too hard on one or the other can result either in a story that drags under the weight of excessive detail, or an ill-defined, unprincipled universe where anything goes with the plot because anything can be magicked to […]