Book #136 of 2023: Defiant by Brandon Sanderson (Skyward #4) [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.] A generally satisfying finale to author Brandon Sanderson’s YA space opera Skyward, following three previous novels and a sequence of tie-in novellas cowritten with Janci Patterson. The wider ‘Cytoverse‘ that began with the 2008 story Defending Elysium …
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Book #135 of 2023: A Power Unbound by Freya Marske (The Last Binding #3) Romantasy is the buzzy new publishing genre these days, but for me personally, the fantasy elements always take priority over the romance ones in such a blended work. For that reason, I’ve grown less enamored of this particular trilogy as it’s …
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Book #134 of 2023: Two Truths and a Lie: A Murder, a Private Investigator, and Her Search for Justice by Ellen McGarrahan In 1990, reporter Ellen McGarrahan witnessed the state of Florida’s botched execution of death-row inmate Jesse Tafero. (The electric chair sparked and caught fire, ultimately taking seven minutes and three separate jolts to …
Book #133 of 2023: Third Girl by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #40) A fine mid-1960s title from author Agatha Christie, although at this point she’s clearly struggling to understand the contemporary counterculture youth movement. So there’s some silly depictions of nihilistic young people and their supposed drug habits throughout, and the mystery itself hinges on …
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Book #132 of 2023: 100 Places to See After You Die: A Travel Guide to the Afterlife by Ken Jennings A breezy survey of different ideas about the hereafter: both those of various world religions and the ones dreamed up for particular works of fiction, from Riverworld to Dead Like Me to San Junipero to …
Book #131 of 2023: Horses of Fire by A. D. Rhine I’ve generally been enjoying the recent cottage industry kicked off by the popularity of Madeline Miller’s Circe in 2018, wherein ancient Greek myths are given novel-length treatment and in the process often reapproached with a feminist lens. On the surface, this title is just …
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Book #130 of 2023: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh This sci-fi novel starts and ends pretty well, but it loses its way rather dramatically for a large section in-between. The early worldbuilding presents us with something like Ender’s Game (or perhaps Brandon Sanderson’s Cytoverse) by way of The Giver — a dystopian militarized society …
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Book #129 of 2023: I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me by Jamison Shea This debut novel and its heroine should have been right up my alley: an #ownvoices queer Black teen, striving to prove herself in the cutthroat and frequently racist world of French ballet, who makes a pact with …
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Book #128 of 2023: Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer This 2023 title is an expansion of author Claire Dederer’s viral 2017 article, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” She’s no closer to coming up with a definitive prescriptive answer to that question of how one should treat Woody Allen …
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Book #127 of 2023: System Collapse by Martha Wells (The Murderbot Diaries #7) The second half of this latest Murderbot adventure lives up to my high expectations for the series, but the first part is an experimental departure that doesn’t really work for me. We start in media res, with the neurodivergent cyborg showing unusual …
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