Category Archives: Reviews

A Taint in the Blood by S.M. Stirling

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I quit. I can’t read this. The second time a rape is sketchily described and not treated as something horrible has been too much. Plus all the telepathy scenes are impossible to figure out–it just needs a clearer layout!–because telepathy is shown the same way as stream-of-consciousness thought. It’s endlessly confusing. Add distasteful on top of it and I just can’t force myself to continue. There are some interesting ideas about vampires but nope, I can’t ride it out.

View all my reviews

Medicine for the Dead by Arianne “Tex” Thompson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I hesitated to pick this book up because I struggled so much with the cultural and language references in the first. That was a huge mistake–I enjoyed Medicine For The Dead much much more.

For one thing, all the characters have been introduced, but now there are fewer people so there is plenty more time to settle in and really get to know folks, and this is where Tex shines. Through moments and peeks and confusion, she highlights the differences between cultures, people, and expectations, the narrative only clear to the reader but hopelessly tangled for the characters themselves.

It’s a traveling book, but it is also a book where we finally get the magical payoffs that were only hinted at in book 1. Here is a melange of powers, and each incites a different reaction.

More than anything, though, I was struck by the way things just. kept. getting. worse. Just as I found myself feeling like ok, they’re going to make it, Thompson would come out with another shocker. You certainly can’t get too at ease in this tale.

View all my reviews

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow. Such incredible prose. I had no idea what I was getting into. I understood this was a war book, and about Vietnam, but I had no idea it was less of a book about war than a book about how war affects people, about the spaces between fighting, about slowly losing yourself in the darkness and the fear.
I had been afraid this was a glorification of war, but it is anything but. It is hard truth wrapped in incredible writing, and I am sorry I waited this long to discover it.

View all my reviews

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One of the amazing things about reading is it allows us to communicate, mind to mind, regardless of time or proximity. That was how it felt to read The Sparrow—diving in and having a heartfelt conversation with the author about the future, about philosophy, about God.
I’m upset I didn’t discover this book sooner. It was a powerful and engrossing read, the kind of book that you tell everyone about even before you’re done with it.
On the face of it, it’s almost silly: a group of Jesuits are the first people to discover—and then go out to meet—a new alien sentient species. They want to “meet God’s other children.” But it’s sincere rather than farcical. The main character, Emilio Sandoz, feels called by God. And you wonder, throughout, if he is right.
The mission goes horribly wrong, and the communications sent back to Earth tell a twist on the facts that lead everyone back on Earth to revile Emilio, the only survivor. Emilio is a broken man when he returns, and it takes months to get him physically and emotionally healed enough to tell his story, for the truth in the misunderstandings to be revealed.
I won’t get into it, other than to say it is powerful.

My only complaint about the story is that it pulls back a little on the narrative just at the climactic reveal. Just when the horrible truths are being told, the narration shifts exclusively to a distant third-person telling, as Emilio dispassionately explains what happened. But the rest of the story had let it flit from character to character. It felt a little like a cheat, like even the author had trouble imagining the horrors she had dreamed up and only wanted to examine them academically. But I would have liked to have heard it from closer-up, from one of the other characters as it happened, to feel the full terror rather than an academic one.

Still, the book is brave in so many ways. I only hope we haven’t disappointed our past selves too much by being so far behind the sci-do curve.

View all my reviews

Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Lost Adventures by Bryan Konietzko

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Such a fun addition to the Avatar universe! I wish I’d had this when I was still watching the show so I could put the stories in the right chronology, but it was still fun to look back and piece it together. The comics range from quick sketchy one-pagers to full stories, and it is easy to see how this led to the creation of the full comics later released. I wish some of these stories had made it as episodes but it’s great to see them regardless!

View all my reviews

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I can’t say with certainty I liked this book, but I can tell it will be one that sneaks up on me when I’m not expecting it.
The Forever War describes an intergalactic war where leaps across wormholes and general space travel causes relativistic jumps in time—the war is “forever” because a one-year mission may be 760 years back home. Things get wonky very fast with relativity, but the book is grounded in the single-soldier story of William Mandella, who was among the first drafted in and frankly doesn’t want to be there at all, and yet he keeps getting dragged back in.
I think it’s a disservice, though, to call it a war book, which is how it was described to me, even though it is definitively marked by the author’s experiences in Vietnam. Aside from brief action sequences, the book is overall a hard sci-fi novel. That is both the strength and it’s weaknesses. It presents an alternate reality with lots of hard science as an underbelly, if you’re into that. But it also is so busy setting up alternative futures as we flick forward in time that things get sketchy.

The middle portion, which covers a jaunt back on Earth, suffers the most from this. This future is pretty crappy all around, and yet I have trouble accepting that both Mandella’s parents and those of another character managed to survive fine until the two weeks they’re there. It serves to force characters back into space but seems harder to believe than the psychic space-critters had been.

Somehow, despite being very much about war, The Forever War seems like less of a war book than The Things They Carried, and yet also not quite sci-fi enough. It is a blend of things and yet poses very good questions about the future, the nature of war, and what we collectively are willing to put up with.

View all my reviews

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I gave this a solid attempt, but it didn’t grab me by the end of Part 1 so I am dropping it. The synopsis sounded so promising: Victorians, arts, demons, sisters divided…
But the story really doesn’t deliver. For some reason, the author not only thought The Portrait Of Dorian Gray needed a modern update, she 1) boldly declared as much in a prologue and 2) outright named one of the characters “Dorina Gray.”
Gag me. Derivative much?
But I was still enticed by the promised demons and sisterly rivalry, so I pressed on. We have two sisters, the somber elder who loves fencing to the detriment of all other things, and the younger, Dorina, who is vapid and “bravely” gay and into art even though she has never seen it in person. But the elder sister has almost no personality. She has literally no interests or conversation aside from fencing. And, of course, she is charmingly self-taught. (Eyeroll)
It makes her boring. She has no interest in anything else at all? None?
The other major character is Lady Henrietta/Henry, who has a demon that makes her love art but she wears pants and is also gay and blah blah blah. She’s a lot of stereotypes of the woman who doesn’t give a damn, and is so obviously the author’s cat’s-paw that you may as well have called her Deus Ex Machina.

I gave up. Sorry, readers.

View all my reviews

The Churn by James S.A. Corey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’ve read all of The Expanse series, so I didn’t even read a synopsis before I checked this one out of the library—it was a given that I needed to read it. I knew it was very early in the series so I figured I would be able to follow regardless.
So when I say I was caught off-guard by the story, you understand how amazing that is. I’ve read thousands of pages in this universe and yet was still wonderfully, pleasantly surprised by this story!
Absolutely delicious writing and some of the backstory I had been craving. Just don’t pick it up when you have something else to do; you will neglect your work, your sleep, your spouse to keep reading.

View all my reviews

Gods of Risk by James S.A. Corey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When you think to yourself, “Self, I need more Bobbie Draper in my life,” and of course you will because you are breathing air and are sensible as fuck, go crack open this stellar little side-read.
Gods of Risk is a jaunt around Mars as hosted by Bobbie’s nephew, David, a brilliant teenager on track to a solid position in Mars’ elite university if he doesn’t ruin things with his side venture cooking drugs. Ah teenage impotence. Bobbie is living with them because she’s between gigs, as it were, and it’s a lucky thing for David as his side venture goes sideways against the backdrop of increasing tensions between Earth and Mars.
Yes, you need more Gunny Draper in your life, no question.

View all my reviews

Q is for Quarry by Sue Grafton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An utterly charming mystery! I had not read any of Sue Grafton’s books, but when I heard she had died and so many fans were so bereft, I looked her up. Of all the alphabet, Q was the first available. Luckily for me, each book can be read entirely as a stand-alone.
The book is set in the 1980s, and it made it feel like a throwback. Oh, Kinsey, just wait a few years! Cell phones will make your life so much easier. Of course, the slow uncurling is part of what makes it pleasurable.
The interesting thing about this book is the PI is not hard boiled, and it has none of the threats to the main character I had come to expect after years of Law & Order episodes. It’s just a cold case, and PI Kinsey trying to tease together long-cold clues. I very much liked the two retired cops, each cranky and lonely, who become grumpy sidekicks. They seem like uncles you like to drop in on but don’t talk to much.
I think I’ll be reading more of the series. Despite centering on a murder, it is cozy and lovely.

View all my reviews