Treacle Walker (2022), by Alan Garner, is a little book, a strange book, a layered book, a mystifying book, a linguistic romp of a book, a stimulating book, a delightful book. It may also be, to employ two of the many Google-necessitating words from its pages, a hurlothrumbo or lomperhomack, a macaroni or taradiddle of a book, though I’ll leave it to your own investigations as to whether any of those fit (if those few examples of Garner’s dialect didn’t scare you off,
January 15th, 2024. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4.5 | Alan Garner | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
The Reinvented Detective edited by Cat Rambo & Jennifer Brozek
As is typically the case for story anthologies in my experience, The Reinvented Detective, part of an anthology series edited by Cat Rambo and Jennifer Brozek, was a mixed bag, with stories ranging from excellent to good to flat at best.
All of the stories are set in the future, though the time spectrum runs from the relatively near-future to a few decades to a far-flung future of interstellar travel. Settings move from the “real world” to the virtual one (sometimes within the same story),
January 9th, 2024. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3 | Cat Rambo, Charles Coleman (C.C.) Finlay, Harry Turtledove, Peter Clines | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
The Dragons of Deepwood Fen by Bradley P. Beaulieu
The Dragons of Deepwood Fen is an enjoyable start to a new fantasy trilogy by Bradley P. Beaulieu. Though the novel has a few issues, Beaulieu offers up an interesting world, a complex political set-up, and a nicely original use of that old fantasy standby, the dragon.
Ancris is the chief city of a long-standing, aggressively imperialistic empire, with the “vassal state” of the Holt having held them off enough to carve out a small amount of self-rule (within the empire) under their political leader known as the Imperator.
January 3rd, 2024. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3.5 | Bradley P. Beaulieu | SFF Reviews | no comments |
2023’s Memory Reborn is the third book in David Walton’s LIVING MEMORY series, which started with Living Memory and introduced us to individuals from an advanced society living during the Cretaceous Period, and who happened to be dinosaurs (maniraptors to be precise). Reading Memory Reborn, we were both eager to see how Walton resolved the many, increasingly complex problems the modern-day characters, both human and dinosaur, faced. Neither of us expected the love story to be the plot line that grabbed us the hardest.
December 22nd, 2023. Marion Deeds and Bill Capossere´s rating: 3.5 | David Walton | SFF Reviews | no comments |
We Are the Crisis by Cadwell Turnbull
As I was thinking how to start this review of Cadwell Turnbull’s We Are the Crisis, planning on noting how it slots into the category of “one of those books I admired but didn’t fully fall into,” I thought I’d refresh my memory of my thoughts on its predecessor, No Gods, No Monsters. And darn if I didn’t open that review with “the book had me admiring it more than enjoying it.” So I guess we’re both pretty consistent,
December 19th, 2023. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4 | Cadwell Turnbull | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Reposting to include Marion’s new review.
Daniel Mason’s North Woods (2023) is a wonderfully and precisely crafted collection of related short stories that greatly impresses with its varied styles, vividly detailed descriptions, sharp sentence constructions, connecting echoes, and a few unexpected twists and turns. I would have preferred a bit more emotional depth at times, though several of the stories, particularly toward the end, offer up some more than a few moving scenes. Between those moments and Mason’s consummate craftsmanship,
December 7th, 2023. Bill Capossere and Marion Deeds´s rating: 4.5 | Daniel Mason | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
The pleasure for me in reading E. Lily Yu’s collection of short stories, Jewel Box, was sourced in two of the book’s elements: its what-if premises and its, well, jewel-like language, which glittered precise and edged as any gemstone in a Tiffany’s case. The plots and characters, meanwhile, were more hit and miss for me, which is why I’m not giving it a five.
As is typical for collections, the individual stories varied in their impact,
November 6th, 2023. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4 | E. Lily Yu | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon
In Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, Cat Bohannon sets herself an ambitious task as evidenced by the sub-title — How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution — and I’m happy to report she’s more than up to the job, turning out out a work that impresses across the board: in information and organization, in scholarship and research, in voice and wit,
October 20th, 2023. Bill Capossere´s rating: 5 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, Gavin Edwards
MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, Gavin Edwards is an even-handed, highly readable, always interesting, sometimes fascinating history of Marvel movie-making, starting from their early days of licensing characters to formation of their own studio, to reclaiming some of their most popular characters, to merging their TV and films under one roof to their purchase by Disney up to their most recently released films and TV shows in 2022.
September 29th, 2023. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4.5 | Comics, Film / TV, Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Normal Rules Don’t Apply by Kate Atkinson
In a number of her novels, Kate Atkinson explores the idea of alternate possibilities, playing with “what if” scenarios for various characters. Showing she doesn’t need a full novel to explore the heady concept, Atkinson returns to that theme in Normal Rules Don’t Apply, a collection of eleven loosely linked short stories.
The first, “The Void”, is a masterclass in chilling mundanity as out in the countryside an old man and his equally old dog find their daily walk shockingly interrupted by a horrific sight.
September 25th, 2023. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3.5 | Kate Atkinson | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
It would give me very great pleasure to personally destroy every single copy of those first two J. J. Abrams…
Agree! And a perfect ending, too.
I may be embarrassing myself by repeating something I already posted here, but Thomas Pynchon has a new novel scheduled…
[…] Tales (Fantasy Literature): John Martin Leahy was born in Washington State in 1886 and, during his five-year career as…
so you're saying I should read it? :)