Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee
Untethered Sky is a mostly enjoyable fantasy novella by Fonda Lee, but one whose brevity I felt prevented it from reaching its full emotive potential. This is, however, something I often feel upon reading novellas (though not always as per my 5-star review of The Lies of the Ajungo), so readers of this review should keep that in mind. Some of us, it appears, are just generally not built for the form, though exceptions can always break through.
April 11th, 2023. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3.5 | Fonda Lee | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
Dead Country by Max Gladstone
Dead Country (2023) is Max Gladstone’s seventh title in his highly recommended CRAFT series (OK, technically, it’s the start of a new trilogy entitled CRAFT WARS), which might make some readers who sadly have yet to wade into the series hesitant to pick it up. But in some ways, Dead Country is oddly a perfect place to enter this universe. Let me explain.
No, there is too much.
April 5th, 2023. Bill Capossere and Marion Deeds´s rating: 4 | Max Gladstone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link
The vast majority of story collections by their nature vary in relative strength from piece to piece. I’m always happy when I fully enjoy more than half of the stories and thrilled if that hits three-quarters. Well, there are seven stories total in White Cat, Black Dog (2023), Kelly Link’s newest collection in which she brings her trademark style to a series of retold fairy tales, and of the seven I only disliked one, while the others ranged from really good to great.
March 28th, 2023. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4.5 | Kelly Link | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
The Lies of the Ajungo by Moses Ose Utomi
The Lies of the Ajungo (2023), by Moses Ose Utomi, is as close to perfect a modern parable as I’ve read in some time, with prose as sparse as its desert setting and lessons just as unforgiving. I loved pretty much everything about it from its opening line — “There is no water in the City of Lies” — onward.
The novella opens with a brief bit of worldbuilding history: Long ago when the City of Lies suffered greatly from its lack of water,
March 17th, 2023. Bill Capossere´s rating: 5 | Moses Ose Utomi | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
Tenacious Beasts by Christopher J. Preston
Tenacious Beasts (2023) by Christopher J. Preston, is a rarity among environmental/ecological books nowadays — an uplifting work that highlights positivity, resilience, and hope for the future. As such, it’s a highly rewarding book and a breath of fresh air amongst all the depressing numbers out there having to do with our world and the creatures we share it with.
That isn’t to say Preston turns a blind eye to those depressing numbers. Far from it. In fact, he begins by listing some of those very numbers:
Wildlife populations have declined 20 percent over the last century.
March 16th, 2023. Bill Capossere´s rating: 5 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Clytemnestra by Costanza Casati
Clytemnestra (2023), as the style makes clear, is another entry in the ever-growing genre of Greek myth retellings. Casati does a nice job here of creating tension even within a well-known tale, and has several quite moving scenes, though the book’s somewhat flat style and — for me at least — odd choice of where to end, places it more in the middle tier of similar works.
After some a welcome family tree and large cast of characters that also serves to refresh a few details (who raped whom,
March 7th, 2023. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4 | Costanza Casati | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty
Shannon Chakraborty, author of the recommended THE DAEVAVAD TRILOGY, is back with the start of a new series, and if the first book, The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi, is any measure, it’s sure to be as fun and magic filled as the first (sharp-eyed readers will at one point note it’s actually set in the same universe as the first as well, albeit much earlier).
Some years ago Amina Al-Sirafi was a famed smuggler and pirate before going into retirement to care for her daughter,
March 3rd, 2023. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4.5 | S.A. Chakraborty | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
The Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhill
Kelly Barnhill’s novella The Crane Husband is a darkly grim reimagining of and response to the Crane Wife folktale. A tough read thanks to its bleak near-future setting and dark focus on abuse and family dysfunction, and at times quite blunt in fable fashion, it’s also a rewarding read thanks to its lovely sparse language and strongly voiced narrator.
The story is set in the run-down and nearly abandoned rural Midwest, a few steps into the future where farmland is owned by a single far-away large conglomerate that raises monocultured,
March 1st, 2023. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4 | Kelly Barnhill | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Arch-Conspirator by Veronica Roth
Arch-Conspirator (2023), by Veronica Roth, is a tautly written reimagining of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone. While some will probably wish for a bit more world-building detail and deeper development of some themes, fans of the novella form will find a lot to like here.
Set in a post-apocalyptic, far-future refuge where the land outside the story’s locale is uninhabitable, it’s a world whose population rests on a knife’s edge of survival and so has chosen to lessen the chance of extinction by mandating births (“It didn’t matter if a person wanted a child or not … If they were viable … they were required to carry a child,
February 21st, 2023. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4.5 | Veronica Roth | Short Fiction, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
The Darkness Manifesto: On Light Pollution, Night Ecology, and the Ancient Rhythms that Sustain Life by Johan Eklöf (translated by Elizabeth DeNoma)
The Darkness Manifesto: On Light Pollution, Night Ecology, and the Ancient Rhythms that Sustain Life by Johan Eklöf (translated by Elizabeth DeNoma) is a solidly informative book that raises some serious questions and challenges us to think differently about how we might live our lives, though it suffers somewhat from its structure.
Eklöf is an ecologist who specializes in bats, so one can see where he might get his fondness for the darkness of night.
February 17th, 2023. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Right!! Lindelof and Cuse clearly had parent issues!
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Andi, don't forget Shannon's cold and greedy stepmom: "Oh, I kept the money, sweetie. You're on your own!"
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