I’ll admit it — I’m pretty scared of Mount Everest before you populate it with ghosts. Ever since I read Jon Krakauer’s riveting nonfiction book Into Thin Air, I’ve felt a little shudder at the very thought of climbing it. So when I heard about The White Road (2017), a horror novel set on Everest, I figured it was guaranteed to freak me out in epic fashion.
Simon and his friend Thierry run a website dedicated to creepy things.
August 22nd, 2019. Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 2 | Sarah Lotz | Horror, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater
Blue is the only non-psychic in a large extended family of psychics in Henrietta, Virginia. Her only unusual ability is that her presence amplifies the psychic powers of others around her, but she herself cannot use these abilities. So it’s a shock when, while sitting vigil in a graveyard with her aunt Neeve, Blue sees the spirit of a boy about her age who is destined to die in the next year. She learns that there are only two possible reasons she was able to see him: either he’s her true love,
August 21st, 2019. Kelly Lasiter and Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 4 | Maggie Stiefvater | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
Ink (2018), by Alice Broadway, is the first book in a YA dystopian trilogy with a unique, if gruesome, premise. Everyone in the city of Saintstone has the events of their lives tattooed on their bodies. When a person dies, their skin is removed and made into a book, which is then judged at a ceremony that recalls the Weighing of the Heart in Egyptian mythology. If the person is determined to have lived a good life, the book (and by implication, the person’s soul) is returned to their family to be remembered forever among the ancestors.
August 19th, 2019. Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 2 | Alice Broadway | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Song of Rhiannon by Evangeline Walton
The Song of Rhiannon (1972), the third volume in Evangeline Walton’s MABINOGION TETRALOGY, begins with Manawyddan, son of the sea god, haunted by grief and feeling directionless after the events of The Children of Llyr. (I haven’t read The Children of Llyr, but I have read “Branwen Daughter of Llyr,” the medieval Welsh tale on which it is based. It features a Red Wedding’s worth of deaths.) His friend Pryderi,
August 16th, 2019. Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 3.5 | Evangeline Walton | Mythopoeic Award | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
Strange Toys by Patricia Geary
Strange Toys is an odd, creepy novel. It won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1987, though apparently Patricia Geary hadn’t actually intended it as science fiction at all. I found it while exploring the labyrinthine basement of a local used bookstore, but it was reprinted in electronic form in 2018.
The heroine, nicknamed Pet, is the baby of her family. (We never learn her real name.) She is nine years old as the book begins,
August 15th, 2019. Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 3 | Patricia Geary | Horror, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
A Green and Ancient Light by Frederic S. Durbin
A war is raging, and a young boy is sent to spend the summer with his grandmother in her small country village. His life changes forever when she decides to rescue a downed enemy pilot and nurse him back to health. While helping her tend to the injured man, the boy also meets Mr. Girandole, a faun, who was once his grandmother’s love and is still her dear friend.
She knows just the place to conceal the pilot while he convalesces: a crooked little tower in an overgrown sculpture garden in the woods.
August 14th, 2019. Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 3.5 | Frederic S. Durbin | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Shadowhouse Fall by Daniel José Older
Daniel José Older’s Shadowshaper was one of the best books of 2015 — not “best YA books” but best books of all categories. It featured an engaging, authentic female hero, an original magical system, mundane issues as well as magical ones, and a distinctive voice and sensibility. 2017’s sequel, Shadowhouse Fall, shows no second-book slump in this series.
Sierra Santiago is mastering her skill as a shadowshaper, an ability that melds spirit contact with art,
August 13th, 2019. Marion Deeds and Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 5 | Daniel José Older | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
SHORTS: In this week’s column we review several short fiction works that we’ve read recently, including three more of the current Retro Hugo nominees from 1943.
“Galatea” by Madeline Miller (2013, $3.99 on Kindle; anthologized in xo Orpheus, edited by Kate Bernheimer)
In the Roman myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, a sculptor creates a statue so beautiful that he falls in love with it. Aphrodite has mercy on him and turns the statue into a real woman,
August 7th, 2019. Kelly Lasiter, Kat Hooper and Tadiana Jones | Fritz Leiber, Leigh Brackett, Madeline Miller | Audio, Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
I’d been meaning to read Yarrow (1986) for years. I loved Charles de Lint’s Memory and Dream, in which he tells the story of a painter touched by the Otherworld. And I’m a writer (or at least a wannabe one), not a visual artist, so I figured, “if I liked his artist book so much, how much more am I going to love his writer book?” Unfortunately, the answer is “not as much.” Yarrow is very early de Lint,
August 5th, 2019. Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 3 | Charles De_Lint | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 5 comments |
Sunny Nwazue, an albino who needs to stay out of the sun, has always been different from the other kids in her school. When her family returned to Nigeria after living in the United States for most of Sunny’s childhood, she never quite found her place. Her strangeness becomes even more obvious when she sees a vision showing what appears to be scenes from the end of the world.
When Sunny finally makes a few friends, she begins to realize there’s a reason for her strangeness,
August 2nd, 2019. Kat Hooper and Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 4 | Nnedi Okorafor | Children | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
I would love to completely leave the psychopathic edgelord's hellsite, but bsky appears to exist only as an app, and…
I had it on my list to reread (which means I looked over at the bookcase one night, saw it…
Marion, I'm saving James (and Orbital) for after my semester ends so I can devote my undivided attention to them.…
Susan, glad you enjoyed. Samuel Jackson should absolutely play him in the movie!
Troy, 100% agreed. Sadly the BBC adaptation is also confused about this. They seem to think Orciny is some kind…