Do you love the giddy ridiculousness of a good heist story or a long con that finally comes to fruition and leaves the sneering, callous rich bewildered, humbled, and a little poorer? The “Gentleman Bastard sequence,” as author Scott Lynch has called it, has….some of that. If you dig through a whole bunch of other stuff. Currently three books long with more allegedly to come, the series centers around Locke Lamora, a street orphan who ended up as an apprentice of sorts in a secret […]
I’ll be on my way
Many years ago, starting out a new job in a new city, a good friend and I moved into an apartment together to save on rent. On moving day, we got all the boxes indoors, dug out the necessities for the night, ate carry-out on the bare floor, and passed out for the night. Neither of us so much as got up to go to the bathroom until morning. And yet when we blearily emerged and went into the living room, we found all the […]
Young blood
For a book that features deep space travel and multiple distinct alien races, Ann Leckie’s Provenance is a surprisingly human and even cozy story. A companion work to her stunning Imperial Radch trilogy (more informally referred to as the Ancillary trilogy sometimes), Provenance focuses on smaller stakes — though of course there are intergalactic ramifications. It follows Ingray Aughskold, the adopted daughter of a planetary noble, as she takes a risk to impress her mother and stumbles into a tangle of converging political plots and […]
Happiness is a warm gun
The last time I reviewed a Brandon Sanderson book, I complained of Sanderson fatigue, the review got featured, and several more people complained about it with me. So it is a bit sheepishly that I confess I not only went back to him but that I read the entire second Mistborn series minus the one book that hasn’t been published yet. And I enjoyed them immensely. In fact, for someone like me who still had fond memories of earlier Cosmere experiences, The Alloy of Law, […]