Month: September 2021

You Brought Me the Ocean: A sweet romance with beautiful artwork

You Brought Me the Ocean by Alex Sanchez, drawn by Julie Maroh

Jake Hyde dreams of the ocean and has secretly applied to the marine biology program at the University of Miami, but in waking life, the ocean is limited to the aquarium in his room. His father drowned, and since then his mother has resolutely kept him away from water (hence the secrecy about University of Miami). She even moved them to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, to keep her son away from water.

A yearning for the ocean’s not the only secret Jake is keeping.

September 7th, 2021. Marion Deeds´s rating: 5 | Comics, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |

The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring: Rose Rita in the spotlight

The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring by John Bellairs

The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring (1976) is the third novel in John Bellairs’ LEWIS BARNAVELT series for kids. Each is a stand-alone horror mystery. It’s not necessary to read them in order but it’d be ideal, if you can, to start with the first book, The House with a Clock in Its Walls, because that’s the one in which we watch Lewis,

Sunday Status Update: September 5, 2021

Brad: I just read Dead Day by Ryan Parrott, a great comic that transcends the zombie genre. And I read Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, a fantastic novel. I’ve also recently read a bunch of old pulp fiction crime novels, of which my favorite was Dead End by Ed Lacy. I’ve also been reading poetry, and over the past few days I finished reading Selected Poems by Langston Hughes, The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni,

September 5th, 2021. Tim Scheidler | Status Update | 1 comment |

Dead Day: Transcends the Zombie Genre

Dead Day by Ryan Parrott (writer) and Evgeniy Bornyakov (artist)

“What would you do if the dead could come back for one day?” asks writer Ryan Parrott in describing in the introduction his motivations for writing Dead Day. Indeed, Parrott imagines a world in which the dead do, in fact, come back for one day, and we see that they all have different desires, ranging wildly from the mundane to the violent, as might be expected from a horror comic, but what really makes this story work is the way the living talk about their expectations from the dead when dead day rolls around,

September 4th, 2021. Brad Hawley´s rating: 5 | Comics | SFF Reviews | no comments |

The Desert Prince: The next generation of THE DEMON CYCLE

The Desert Prince by Peter V. Brett

The Desert Prince is the newest installment in Peter V. Brett’s fantasy universe where humans have been battling demons for ages. The prior series (THE DEMON CYCLE) ended mostly in seeming victory for the good guys (the humans), but as is often the case in these sorts of stories, victory only lasts until the next trilogy. This new series picks up about fifteen years later, and while some characters return from the prior series,

September 3rd, 2021. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3.5 | Peter V. Brett | SFF Reviews | no comments |

The Witness for the Dead: Chockablock with intrigue

Reposting to include new reviews by Jana and Bill.

The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison

The Witness for the Dead is the long-hoped-for sequel to Katherine Addison’s marvelous and unusual 2014 fantasy, The Goblin Emperor, in which we met Maia, a half-goblin, half-elf young man who unexpectedly inherited the throne of the elf kingdom when his father, the emperor, was killed along with his brothers in an airship explosion. Thara Celehar,

September 3rd, 2021. Tadiana Jones, Jana Nyman and Bill Capossere´s rating: 4 | Katherine Addison | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Thoughtful Thursday: What’s the best book you read last month?

It’s the first Thursday of the month. Time to report!

What is the best book you read in August 2021 and why did you love it? It doesn’t have to be a newly published book, or even SFF, or even fiction. We just want to share some great reading material.

Feel free to post a full review of the book here, or a link to the review on your blog, or just write a few sentences about why you thought it was awesome.

And don’t forget that we always have plenty more reading recommendations on our Fanlit Faves page and our 5-Star SFF page.

September 2nd, 2021. FanLit | Giveaway!, Thoughtful Thursday | 22 comments |

The Figure In The Shadows: Exciting, scary, and sweet

The Figure In The Shadows by John Bellairs

Lewis Barnavelt, 11 years old and recently orphaned, has been settling in at his uncle’s house. It’s 1949, about a year since we saw him last (in The House With a Clock in Its Walls) and he has made a new friend – a tomboy named Rose Rita.

When Uncle Jonathan opens a trunk owned by his father (Lewis’s grandfather), Lewis, a lover of history, is bequeathed with his grandfather’s lucky coin. When he begins wearing the coin around his neck,

WWWednesday: September 1, 2021

Clarion West offers online classes. (Thanks to File 770.)

On Mary Robinette Kowal’s blog, R.W.W. Greene talks about celebrity names and other things from her new dystopian novel Twenty Five to Life.

On his blog, John Scalzi notes that adaptations from his work Love, Death and Robots won juried Emmys.

This is not really an article, it’s more of a text trailer, but Eli Lee’s new speculative fiction novel uses food as a way to cement a sense of a different world.

September 1st, 2021. Marion Deeds | World Wide Wednesday | no comments |

Fury of a Demon: Enjoyable, engaging, and entertaining (but…)

Fury of a Demon by Brian Naslund

I admitted back when I reviewed Brian Naslund’s Blood of an Exile that I had resisted the book sitting on my shelf and picked it up somewhat grudgingly, expecting yet “another fantasy about a roguish-yet-likable gritty swordsman and his band of gritty companions battling the odds to save their gritty world.” Which, as I noted then, wasn’t so far off in terms of plot, but which in more important ways didn’t come near being accurate,

September 1st, 2021. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3.5 | Brian Naslund | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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