My appetite for Nisi Shawl’s Everfair has gone up and down since I first heard of it. It came highly recommended by multiple sources and ticked off so many intriguing boxes: a speculative, steampunk alternative history of an African nation by a woman of color. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. After I bought it earlier this spring, I noticed the Goodreads collective rating was on the low-ish side, and I’m not always as immune to popular opinion as I like to think I am. It […]
Don’t Expect Logical Actions from Racists
Thank you so much to caitycat! I doubt I would have stumbled across this novel without her review, and I thoroughly enjoyed it despite some minor complaints about potential red herrings or loose threads. The novel is set near Baltimore in 1880. The North never won the Civil War because of the zombie outbreak that followed the Battle of Gettysburg, leading to a quick reconciliation between the two sides to face the common threat to the survival of humanity. Slaves were declared free, but, for […]
Napoleon’s Last Gambit
The concluding volume of the Temeraire series starts where the previous novel ended, with the Russians and their allies in pursuit of Napoleon as he and his armies withdraw back to the safety of France. While certainly weakened, Napoleon is not done, and still has the ability to wreak havoc, especially by using dragons and politics against his enemies. The whole series has demonstrated the vast differences in the status of dragons in countries, and focused on the inequality of their status in Europe compared […]
From the East to the West
While the novels are all divided into three parts, in some the breaking points between the parts are much more obvious than others – for example, His Majesty’s Dragon basically divided as the initial time between Laurence and Temeraire, their military training, and their time on active combat duty. For others, it was less clear and the stories bled over between parts a lot. This novel almost feels like three novellas united in one book, but in a good way. After the mostly successful mission […]