When I saw earlier this year that Kristin Cashore had a new novel, I was hesitantly excited. I loved Graceling, liked Fire, and thought Bitterblue was fine. Still, it’s never guaranteed that an author can come up with a new idea and world, and create another property as beloved as Graceling. I started writing the review shortly after finishing this book in February, and struggled were to go with it. I noticed many other reviewers were deliberately vague, and couldn’t figure out how much I […]
“The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you.”
I’m a sucker for a book that promises to be a mind-bender and has a bunch of people talking about how weird it is. Enter Annihilation, the first book of the Southern Reach trilogy. The series is about Area X, a strip of coastline that’s been reclaimed by nature and is being shielded from the general public as a military-protected “ecological disaster site.” In the decades since Area X was formed, various expedition teams have gone through the border with the mission of documenting just […]
The DODO Doorstopper
‘My name is Melisande Stokes and this is my story. I am writing in July 1851 (Common Era, or – let’s face it – Anno Domini) in the guest chamber of a middle-class home in Kensington, London, England. But I am not a native of this place or time. In fact, I am quite fucking desperate to get out of here.’ Having never read anything by Nicole Galland before, I may be speculating, but her influence on Neal Stephenson’s infodump tendencies seems to be a positive […]