Book #16 of 2025: The Last Song of Penelope by Claire North (The Songs of Penelope #3) Easily the best installment of its trilogy, and not only for finally dealing with the most exciting sequence of the plot, when the wayward king Odysseus returns home to Ithaca and defeats the perfidious rivals for his wife’s …
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Book #3 of 2025: House of Odysseus by Claire North (The Songs of Penelope #2) Unfortunately not as gripping as the first book in the series, though just as committed to its feminist reclamation of Penelope’s traditional narrative. The problem here is that the previous volume already established her basic status quo keeping the suitors …
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Book #180 of 2024: Ithaca by Claire North (The Songs of Penelope #1) An extraordinarily effective Greek mythology retelling, centering on the character Penelope and the wider kingdom around her while her husband Odysseus is still lost at sea following the victory at Troy. (He’s been gone for 17 years, placing this novel roughly three …
Book #55 of 2022: Notes from the Burning Age by Claire North Author Claire North has written some of my very favorite novels, but this is one of her efforts that doesn’t quite hit the mark for me. The premise of the setting is sound: a post-apocalyptic future where holy priests try to recover digital …
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Book #245 of 2019: The Pursuit of William Abbey by Claire North Claire North’s latest supernatural thriller imagines a late-Victorian protagonist doomed to speak the truth in people’s hearts while the ghost of a boy he saw killed moves inexorably towards him. The closer the spirit gets, the less William Abbey can resist his compulsion, …
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Book #105 of 2019: The Gameshouse by Claire North This book collects three novellas from author Claire North, previously published independently in 2015. Together they tell of a secret society who play wide-ranging games of skill and chance for fantastical stakes of extended life, memory theft, and more. North utilizes an omniscient first-person plural perspective …
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Book #159 of 2017: The End of the Day by Claire North This novel was a bit of a departure for author Claire North, and I have to admit that I didn’t care for it as much as her earlier books. There’s definitely stuff to enjoy here as North sends the Harbinger of Death out …
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Book #80 of 2017: The Sudden Appearance of Hope by Claire North Another wildly inventive thriller from author Claire North, this one about a woman who fades from people’s memory as soon as she’s out of their sight. That concept leans a bit close to North’s earlier novel Touch, since the characters who forget their …
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Book #61 of 2017: Touch by Claire North A neat spy thriller about a character who can flit from body to body through skin contact, temporarily taking over other people’s lives while they black out. The entity known as Kepler has lived for hundreds of years that way, ever since discovering the power when facing …
Book #21 of 2017: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North I’m a big fan of time loop stories, but even in the context of that particular genre, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is remarkable. (I’d personally put it second only to Ken Grimwood’s novel Replay, which is one of …
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