The Ashfire King by Chelsea Abdullah
The Ashfire King is Chelsea Abdullah’s follow-up to the highly enjoyable The Stardust Thief, picking up pretty immediately after the events of that book, which ended on a pretty sizable cliffhanger. While the new novel doesn’t attain the heights of its predecessor, which I called “one of the most enjoyable and captivating books” I’d read that year, despite some issues it moves the story along, deepens several of the characters,
May 23rd, 2025. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3.5 | Chelsea Abdullah | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Written on the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay
In Written on the Dark (2025), Guy Gavriel Kay returns to his “quarter-turn from our own” world, here shifting time and place to a late-medieval “France” (Ferrieres in Kay’s universe) ruled by a “mad king.” When the king’s brother is killed by the powerful Duke of Barratin and left on the streets of Orane (think Paris), tavern poet Thierry Villar finds himself embroiled in the politics and intrigue of a world he’d never imagined himself part of, as Ferrieres tries to avoid civil war while also attempting to fend off an exterior invasion by the king of the island nation across the channel [some spoilers to follow in this review;
May 20th, 2025. Bill Capossere and Rob Rhodes´s rating: 5 | Guy Gavriel Kay | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 6 comments |
Karen Russell’s newest, The Antidote (2025), is at times a great book, is at times a befuddling book, and is, in a few instances, a flawed book. The strengths of the book are many: wonderful character creation; the exploration of gravely important themes such as historical erasure, the treatment of Indigenous people, the shaming of women; a healthy dose of magical realism via a magical camera, a sentient scarecrow, and memory-vault “witches”; and wonderfully rich, vivid description. The issues crop up with regard to character presentation,
April 25th, 2025. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4 | Karen Russell | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
The Book That Held Her Heart by Mark Lawrence
Mark Lawrence’s first title in his LIBRARY TRILOGY, The Book That Wouldn’t Burn, made my Top Ten Books list the year it came out (2023), and while its sequel, The Book That Broke the World, wasn’t as strong, I still quite enjoyed it. Now Lawrence is out with The Book That Held Her Heart,
April 22nd, 2025. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4 | Mark Lawrence | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite
Murder by Memory is a cozy mystery novella by Oliva Waite set on a generation spaceship. Unfortunately, despite the intriguing setting, this didn’t connect with me for a number of reasons: the brevity of the novella form seemed to work against the story, neither the mystery nor the solving of it was particularly compelling, and the novel was both a bit overly expository and too twee for me.
The HMS Fairweather has been journey through space for 300 years, carrying thousands of passengers whose minds are stored in the ship’s Library so when their bodies wear out or are damaged,
March 18th, 2025. Bill Capossere´s rating: 2 | Olivia Waite | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 6 comments |
Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe by Carl Zimmer
Carl Zimmer’s book Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe is an always informative, often fascinating, and at times worrying look at humanity’s long speculation and exploration of what is in the air around us and what we breathe besides the life-giving oxygen we need.
Zimmer covers a lot of ground here, going back to ancient civilizations and the idea of “miasma” or “bad air,” an explanation of sickness that held sway for centuries until being rivaled in the 14th century by the opposing idea that “diseases such as plague were caused by contagion — a poison that grew inside the sick and then spread to the healthy.” A speculative theory strengthened by the invention of the microscope in the 17th century,
March 14th, 2025. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Tomb of Dragons by Katherine Addison
2025’s The Tomb of Dragons is the fourth book in Kate Addison’s CHRONICLES OF OSRETH. The Goblin Emperor has retroactively been designated Book One. The Tomb of Dragons, like the two books before it, features Thera Celehar, a Witness for the Dead, as he tries to bring justice to his world in large and small ways.
In The Goblin Emperor,
March 10th, 2025. Marion Deeds and Bill Capossere´s rating: 4, 5 | Katherine Addison | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Days of Shattered Faith by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Days of Shattered Faith is the third book in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s TYRANT PHILOSOPHERS series, continuing that series’ strong run of quality. While each book is meant to stand alone, and this one certainly can, reading the others will allow for a richer experience given the reappearance of multiple characters.
As with the other two books, Tchaikovsky shifts to a new setting in this universe and introduces a new group of characters (with some old ones as noted),
February 27th, 2025. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4.5 | Adrian Tchaikovsky | SFF Reviews | no comments |
When the Earth Was Green: Plants, Animals, and Evolution’s Greatest Romance by Riley Black
Riley Black’s The Last Days of the Dinosaurs made my top ten books of the years when it came out (if you haven’t read it, you absolutely should), so I was excited to read her follow-up When the Earth Was Green: Plants, Animals, and Evolution’s Greatest Romance. I’m happy to report that like its predecessor, it’s an impressive work of popular science marked by wonderful prose and an engaging voice.
February 25th, 2025. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4.5 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Gorge directed by Scott Derrickson
The good news about Apple’s new movie The Gorge is that it’s a perfectly serviceable streaming movie, the actors do an excellent job, the visuals are fantastic, and you also are basically getting two movies for the price of one. The bad news is one of those movies is vastly more original and engaging than the other, the plot of that second film is overly familiar and predictable, and while the visuals are stunning, they’re also something we’ve seen before.
The premise of the film is that post-WWII,
February 17th, 2025. Bill Capossere | Film / TV | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Yup, Marion, your memory serves you well! Oh...as regards these three recent Bond reviews of mine, as the old saying…
I remember this book for introducing me to poison gardens... and Kobe beef.
Ana and Din are such marvelous characters. Beyond all the other strengths of the novels, it is their relationship that…
Well, now I want to read The Stardust Thief and then this one! Two more on the TBR Tower---*thanks*, Bill!
I think it comes from reading a lot of mysteries and heist novels! It didn't detract from my reading pleasure…