CBR10Bingo: Listicles When I had my embarrassing epiphany this spring that my CBR reading list and library were unacceptably skewed toward male authors, I spent a number of hours googling female authors, particularly those in genres with which I’m less familiar. One of the best sources I found was a list called “27 Female Authors Who Rule Sci-Fi and Fantasy Right Now”, several of which I’ve purchased already and even more that are high on my wishlist. My most recent read from those recommendations was […]
Don’t do me like that
CBR10BINGO: And So It Begins My favorite book series is Iain M. Banks’s Culture. Each book offers a self-contained story of its own time and place within the vast universe of the Culture. Sure, it’s helpful to have the incremental, accumulated knowledge of the Culture that comes from reading multiple books, but you don’t have to keep track of characters and timelines. I also appreciate series like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Vandermeer’s Southern Reach that are really just one long book broken into […]
Utopian ideas in a dystopian space
On its face, The Queen of the Tearling is your standard young adult fare – a young queen, a handsome and mysterious love interest, emerging magic, a kingdom that must be saved. I’m not dismissing YA novels when I say this, but the Tearling series is so much more. These books are suitable for high schoolers, but also eminently rereadable and enjoyable for those of us celebrating our ten+ year reunions. Think late Harry Potter range. But the good ones. Kelsea Raleigh has known her whole life […]
If you read the first book, don’t read this book. Imagine your own ending. #CBRBingo
No question, this is the weakest book in this series by quite a large margin. Before I read it, I saw the sharp drop in the ratings for it, and I almost couldn’t believe it. The first two books were solid, what could possibly be so bad about this one? Well. Those ratings make sense now, because this book was aggressively incompetent. What were cute and comforting levels of predictability in the first two books became clichéd and eyeroll-worthy in this one. The problem, I […]