Night of Cake & Puppets by Laini Taylor
For years Laini Taylor’s been a favorite here at FanLit, and now I know why. I picked up Night of Cake & Puppets, a stand-alone novella set in Taylor’s DAUGHTER OF SMOKE & BONE world, because it was short and available on audio at exactly the length I needed for a recent car trip: two hours and forty-five minutes. Perfect. That’s not all that was perfect about Night of Cake & Puppets.
March 16th, 2020. Kat Hooper and Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 4.5 | Laini Taylor | Audio, Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
With Station Zero (2019), Philip Reeve brings to an end the RAILHEAD trilogy begun with Railhead and Black Light Express, and if it’s not a perfect conclusion, it’s pretty darn close, leaving you at the end with a sense of satisfying, even gratifying, resolution tinged with a lingering bittersweetness that makes the final result all the more richly rewarding. With this Cosmic Railroad trilogy (not an official title) and his earlier PREDATOR CITIES/MORTAL ENGINES work,
March 13th, 2020. Bill Capossere and Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 4.5 | Philip Reeve | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente
CLASSIFICATION: Weaving together fairy tales and history, Deathless is kind of like Pan’s Labyrinth, if it was told by Hayao Miyazaki and Neil Gaiman. Highly recommended for fans of adult fairy tales, Russian folklore, and Catherynne M. Valente.
FORMAT/INFO: Deathless is 352 pages long divided over a Prologue, 6 Parts, and 30 numbered/titled chapters. Narration is in the third-person, mostly via the protagonist, Marya Morevna.
March 10th, 2020. Robert Thompson and Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 4, 5 | Catherynne M. Valente | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Black Light Express by Philip Reeve
Black Light Express (2017) is Philip Reeve’s just-as-good-as-the-first-book follow up to Railhead, continuing the exhilarating romp while expanding the universe and its inhabitants, as well as digging a bit more deeply into the hidden history of the created world and offering up some more page time to some of the first book’s secondary characters. Warning: there will be some inevitable spoilers for book one (you can just stop here with the take-away that I recommend the duology).
March 9th, 2020. Bill Capossere, Jana Nyman and Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 4.5 | Philip Reeve | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Restless Girls by Jessie Burton & Angela Barrett (illustrator)
I loved the story of The Twelve Dancing Princesses when I was a little girl, but was also terribly disappointed with it. Twelve sisters sneak out of a secret door in their bedroom every evening to dance the night away in a magical fairyland, with only their worn-out shoes left as evidence of their rule-breaking.
And then their father comes along to spoil all the fun, setting potential suitors outside their door in order to find out what’s going on,
March 6th, 2020. Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 3.5 | Jessie Burton | Children | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany
After reading about Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter I went in search of it and found it at my university library. Reading it was quite a different experience for me, but people who aren’t prepared for the style of writing like I was might be disappointed, confused or scorning of the slow, dream-like pace, archetype characters and poetical language. This might be especially true of fans of typical fantasy genre books (authors such as David Eddings or Terry Brooks) where a fantasy universe is deemed to be good only if it has a solid backing and an exhaustive array of facts and figures to add realism to the stories.
January 23rd, 2020. Rebecca Fisher and Sandy Ferber´s rating: 5 | Lord Dunsany | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
MONSTRESS 3: Haven by Marjorie Liu & Sana Takeda
It’s always an event when the next collection of Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s MONSTRESS is released — I take a copy home, make sure I won’t get interrupted, and just sink down into the complex storytelling and truly gorgeous illustrations. Every year this ongoing graphic novel cleans up at the Eisner and Hugo Awards, and for good reason.
Maika Halfwolf is a young woman with a terrible secret: an ancient monster resides within her body,
December 11th, 2019. Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 5 | Marjorie M. Liu | Comics | SFF Reviews | no comments |
It struck me on reading this YA novel that there’s a definite hierarchy to the stories that are told within the STAR WARS universe. Obviously the movies are the most important: they are seen by the most people, and encompass the most important events in the overarching space epic. They’re “tent-poles” so to speak.
In second place are the animated television shows such as The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels which build on the canon that’s laid out in the movies,
December 9th, 2019. Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 3 | E.K. Johnston | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Moonlight and Ashes by Sophie Masson
This is one of three fairy tale retellings by Sophie Masson that are only tangentially based on a traditional tale, the others being The Crystal Heart (Rapunzel) and Scarlet in the Snow (Beauty and the Beast). Moonlight and Ashes (2012) tackles Cinderella, and is quite possibly the best of the three. Incorporating elements of the story that are usually forgotten in retellings (such as the magical hazel tree) and Masson’s own imagination,
November 29th, 2019. Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 4 | Sophie Masson | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Remember Me by Christopher Pike
The idea of a ghost who has to solve their own murder from beyond the grave is a slam-dunk. I’ll read or watch any variation of this story, from Patrick Swayze in Ghost to all those early X-Files episodes. So having been a fan of Christopher Pike in my teen years, I’m not sure how Remember Me (1989) managed to slip my notice. But hey, better late than never!
Shari Cooper is dead, thrown from a balcony at a friend’s party.
November 28th, 2019. Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 3 | Christopher Pike | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no comments |
COMMENT Was I hinting that? I wasn't aware of it. But now that you mention it.... 🤔
So it sounds like you're hinting Fox may have had three or so different incomplete stories that he stitched together,…
It's hardly a private conversation, Becky. You're welcome to add your 2 cents anytime!
If the state of the arts puzzles you, and you wonder why so many novels are "retellings" and formulaic rework,…
I picked my copy up last week and I can't wait to finish my current book and get started! I…