At the end of last year I finally got around to reading The Thousand Names: Book One of the Shadow Campaigns and thoroughly enjoyed it. The Thousand Names is primarily about a Vordanai military campaign, in the foreign desert land of Khandar, told through a couple of perspectives. The Shadow Throne completely switches gears and setting. It keeps Winter Inhernglass (Lieutenant and female in disguise) and Marcus d’Ivoire’s (Senior Captain) narratives and adds two new ones; Raesinia Orboan (heir to the throne) and Duke Orlanko (Ministry of Information, spy […]
“There are new monsters now”
This novel sneaks up on you. You’re lulled into comfort with descriptions of old video rental places, suburban living rooms, and the polite peace of the Midwest before being startled awake by sudden glances of violence and fear. These shocks originate from movies. Movies within movies. Were they intended for you to see? Why are they here? Who spliced an almost still image of heavy breathing and a woman with a bag over her head into She’s All That? Uncertainty creeps around every corner- breeding fear, […]
“The first rule is don’t fall in love”…. guess what happens??
I picked this up this afternoon as a cozy read during a snow day where work is cancelled and everyone is snowed in. How To Stop Time is about Tom, a man who had a medical condition that causes him to age incredibly slowly. He’s not immortal, this isn’t played off as sci-fi or fantasy. He will eventually age and die, but in the meantime he is 439 years old and appears to be 41. The story takes us back and forth between present […]
I taught you better than to open doors you can’t close
Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts is yet another great example of the kind of book I would have missed had I not started reading more speculative fiction and diversifying the voices in my library. That would have been a pity, because this complex, powerful novel may very well end up at the top of my 2019 favorites list. After Earth suffered an unnamed cataclysm 300 years ago, the remnants of humanity were crowded onto the spaceship Matilda and launched toward some long-forgotten destination. Humanity […]