Lately, I’ve been escaping into sci-fi, fantasy, and romance novels so often that I felt I needed a dose of reality. Vox might have been too much reality. Parts of it infuriated me so much that I had to put the book in the freezer down to allow my blood pressure to drop. So, not super relaxing, but it was good. Vox is told in the same vein as The Handmaid’s Tale, wherein our heroine is suffering through a grim dystopian future. Though there are […]
50: Revisiting a haunting and beautiful dystopian novel
The Chancellor has June’s book club pick for our friend group, and he chose Future Home of the Living God, much to my enormous delight. I read and reviewed this about seven months ago for CBR 9, so I am going to plunk that link right here and just talk about my response for this re-read. Because I loved it even more than the first time I read it. I think we’re going to have a rollicking discussion this month, because a few of us […]
I’m here for the sloth sidekick
It wasn’t until after I had finished Zoo City that I realized the author is the same Lauren Beukes who wrote The Shining Girls which is a book I really enjoyed last year. The tonal range between these two novels is huge, so I’m really excited to read more of Beukes’ work. Technically they’re both fantasy, but The Shining Girls is horror mostly rooted in reality except for one piece of magic anchoring the entire tale, whereas Zoo City is infused with magic and a […]
One step sideways from reality
How do you describe this book? Prescient? A foretelling? Crystal ball gazing? Or simply something that was written by a talented author that from a particular perspective now might be close to a possible future? I finished reading The Handmaid’s Tale for the first time a couple of weeks ago. I’ve deliberately read it slowly to take it all in. I’ve also taken a couple of weeks to absorb it before I wrote this review. 30 years ago, it was certainly dystopian fiction several steps […]