Book #321 of 2021: The Magic Labyrinth by Philip José Farmer (Riverworld #4) This 1980 sci-fi finale is honestly worse than the miserable third volume, although it picks up slightly for its closing stretch, in which the tower at the headwaters of the river is finally reached and breached. Not that that goal has ever …
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Book #243 of 2021: Zero K by Don DeLillo Theoretically, this is the story of a man saying goodbye to his ailing stepmother before she undergoes assisted suicide and cryogenic freezing (in the hope of being reawakened and cured at some unknown future date), and then later to his father when he follows in her …
Book #96 of 2021: The Liar’s Dictionary by Eley Williams This story starts off on the wrong foot — taking the first 4% to wax rhapsodic about the soul of dictionaries before we even meet a single character — and somehow grows worse from there. It’s a split timeline, with one lexicographer protagonist in Victorian …
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Book #61 of 2021: Among the Beasts & Briars by Ashley Poston This story has it all: a generic fantasy setting, under-explained and inconsistent magic, a random and meandering plot, weirdly colloquial dialogue, and juvenile characters — both protagonists and antagonists alike — with no credible motivation driving their actions. Also quasi-bestiality, after the heroine’s …
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Book #39 of 2021: The Effort by Claire Holroyde There are occasional glimmers of potential to this new sci-fi release that tempt me to award a 2-star rating — ‘it was ok,’ on the Goodreads scale — but the bad parts are honestly pretty bad and even the best sections aren’t great. The sex writing …
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Book #268 of 2020: Don’t Call the Wolf by Aleksandra Ross The main problem with this standalone fantasy novel is that none of its characters seems to have a clear motivation driving their actions, resulting in a narrative with the shape of a quest but less weight than a typical tabletop roleplaying campaign. They’re just …
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Book #213 of 2020: Kind of a Big Deal by Shannon Hale A one-star rating feels perhaps too harsh for this title, which I didn’t exactly hate reading. But structurally it’s a mess that inelegantly transitions from one lackluster concept into another near the end, lowering my appreciation after I’d already spent most of the …
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Book #129 of 2020: The Winner’s Curse by Marie Rutkoski (The Winner’s Trilogy #1) I picked up this book on the strength of author Marie Rutkoski’s later novel The Midnight Lie, which features a different cast in a different area of the same fantasy setting (sort of like the relationship between the Grisha trilogy and …
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Book #116 of 2020: The Sound of Stars by Alechia Dow An incredibly frustrating read. From the coercive romance between an alien conqueror and the human prisoner he’s blackmailing, to their instant feelings for one another, to the pointless miscommunication drama that a simple conversation could have avoided, to the meandering plot, random unearned ending, …
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Book #31 of 2020: The Straight Razor Cure by Daniel Polansky (Low Town #1) The misogyny in this urban fantasy debut is so pervasive that it sometimes occludes the racism, ableism, and homophobia that also populate the work. (I lost track of how many times someone’s purported gayness is used as an insult — including …
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