Month: November 2018

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CITY OF BROKEN MAGIC by Mirah Bolender

A new review – from Tuesday! – over at Tor.com:

City of Broken Magic is Mirah Bolender’s debut novel. I’ve read a lot of debut novels in my time (and will undoubtedly read many more), so I feel confident in my conclusion that City of Broken Magic is the kind of debut one calls promising.

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Sleeps With Monsters: Angels and Demons

A new post over at Tor.com:

f I were a cleverer sort of person, I’d find a nice thematic commonality that links Molly Tanzer’s Creatures of Want and Ruin and Juliet Kemp’s The Deep and Shining Dark, two books that I want to tell you about this month, and spin a persuasive line on why they’re connected (when really, I’m talking about them together because I read them back-to-back). But while they share a concern with community (communities) and with the bargains one might make with intangible powers, they approach these concerns in ways that are sufficiently different that I’m hard-pressed to find any other points of commonality.

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LIES SLEEPING by Ben Aaronovitch

A new review over at Tor.com:

Lies Sleeping is the latest instalment in Ben Aaronovitch’s Peter Grant series of magical murder mysteries, set in London and featuring a London Metropolitan police force that really doesn’t want to have to admit that magic exists. Lies Sleeping is the seventh full-length novel in a series that also encompasses several graphic novels and at least one novella. Peter Grant’s London has depth, breadth, and a complex array of recurring characters, and every one of the novels can be relied on to start with a bang.

 

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EMPIRE OF SAND by Tasha Suri

A new review over at Tor.com:

Empire of Sand is an astonishingly accomplished debut, set in a richly realised world. It’s a novel about power and about colonialism. It’s a novel about unequal power relationships, and about the abuse of power. It’s a novel about trust and its lack, about choices and compromises. And at its heart, it’s a novel about compassion: about the risks, and the rewards, of choosing to be kind.

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CITY OF ASH AND RED by Hye-Young Pyun

A new review over at Tor.com:

Though the author previously won the Shirley Jackson Award for her The Hole, City of Ash and Red belongs in the literature genre, I feel, rather than in the SFF one. It’s involved in an entirely different project than the usual run of speculative fiction novels: its concerns and its tools are literary ones. It’s a well-constructed, elegant novel whose translator has done an excellent job: the prose is deft and eloquent, the sentences compelling, the voice distinctive.

I disliked it intensely

 

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Sleeps With Monsters: Science Fiction Romance from Ada Harper

A new post over at Tor.com:

I came across A Conspiracy of Whispers and A Treason of Truths by Ada Harper (also known as A.J. Hackwith) quite by accident. A friend retweeted the publication announcement for A Treason of Truths into my timeline, with commentary along the lines of “empress/spymistress science fiction romance.” As you might imagine, it rather piqued my interest.

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ALICE PAYNE ARRIVES by Kate Heartfield

A new review over at Tor.com:

Alice Payne Arrives is an elegantly-written novella, precise and deft in its effects. Heartfield writes a fast and gripping story, mounting to a tense cliffhanger. But Heartfield also writes a story that’s tremendously fun, filled with humane, believable characters. I enjoyed it a hell of a lot, and I’m really, really looking forward to where Heartfield goes from here.