Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse
Maggie Hoskie, the prickly heroine of Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning (2018), and I took a couple of tries to really hit it off. I read a few chapters of this book several months ago but stalled out and put it aside. But when the announcement of its Nebula award nomination happened to coincide with a cross-country plane flight, I picked up this again and ended up loving it.
Trail of Lightning is a gritty magical fantasy set in Dinétah,
March 22nd, 2019. Tadiana Jones´s rating: 4 | Rebecca Roanhorse | Locus Award | SFF Reviews | 6 comments |
The Fever King by Victoria Lee
It’s the 22nd century, and North America is divided into several different countries in the aftermath of a worldwide disaster. A plague that first hit back in the early part of the 21st century killed ― and continues to kill ― almost every person who get infected with the virus. Those few who survive become “witchings,” developing a variety of magical powers as a result of the virus’s presence in their body.
Noam Álvaro is a bisexual teenage refugee from Atlantia, now living in the West Durham slums of the more well-developed country of Carolinia.
March 20th, 2019. Tadiana Jones´s rating: 2.5 | Victoria Lee | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
Our weekly exploration of free and inexpensive short fiction available on the internet. This week’s column features more of the 2018 Nebula award-nominated novelettes and short stories.
“The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington” by P. Djeli Clark (Feb 2018, free at Fireside magazine). 2018 NEBULA AWARD WINNER, 2019 LOCUS AWARD WINNER (short story)
P. Djeli Clark takes the historical idea of George Washington’s teeth (not wooden, as lore has it) and creates around them a series of vignettes detailing, as the title tells us,
March 18th, 2019. Bill Capossere, Tadiana Jones and Skye Walker | Alix E. Harrow, P. Djèlí Clark | Nebula Award, Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Winter of the Witch by Katherine Arden
Medieval Russia comes to life in Katherine Arden’s WINTERNIGHT TRILOGY, which began in Lesnaya Zemlya, a small village in northern Rus’ in The Bear and the Nightingale and continued in The Girl in the Tower. Vasilisa (Vasya) is a young woman with the rare ability to see and speak with the natural spirits or chyerti of the hearth, stables,
March 14th, 2019. Tadiana Jones, Bill Capossere and Marion Deeds´s rating: 5 | Katherine Arden | SFF Reviews | 15 comments |
Since I fell in love with Sylvain Neuvel’s giant robots and sardonic narrator in Sleeping Giants, I’ve been curious to see what he would write next. The Test (2019) is an excellent novella, quite different from THE THEMIS FILES trilogy, though some similar themes are touched on and there are similarities in the narrative technique.
I went into reading The Test totally cold,
March 11th, 2019. Tadiana Jones and Kat Hooper´s rating: 4.5 | Sylvain Neuvel | Horror, Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
Our weekly exploration of free and inexpensive short fiction available on the internet. Here are a few stories we’ve read that we wanted you to know about, including three 2018 Nebula nominees.
“A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies” by Alix E. Harrow (2018, free at Apex magazine, $2.99 Kindle magazine issue). 2018 Nebula nominee (short story).
Our narrator is both a librarian and a witch (all good librarians are, she claims), and one of her joys is giving library patrons the book they “need most.” So when the black teenager with the red backpack comes into the Maysville Public Library,
March 4th, 2019. Tadiana Jones, Skye Walker and Bill Capossere | Alix E. Harrow, Lawrence M. Schoen | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
The Jane Austen Project by Kathleen A. Flynn
I’m an enthusiastic Jane Austen fan (Pride and Prejudice is my desert island book of choice) but I had never heard of her unfinished novel The Watsons until reading The Jane Austen Project (2017), a compelling time travel novel by Jane Austen devotee Kathleen A. Flynn. In this novel, an old Austen family letter has recently surfaced, indicating that Jane Austen actually did finish The Watsons but then destroyed most of it.
February 26th, 2019. Tadiana Jones´s rating: 4 | Kathleen A. Flynn | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
Brandon Sanderson’s new young adult science fiction novel, Skyward (2018), replaces his intricately detailed fantasy magical systems with equally detailed dogfights between one-person starship fighters of the humans living on the planet Detritus (it’s as bleak as it sounds) and the starships of the alien Krell. The Krell chased a fleet of human spaceships to Detritus decades ago and have pinned them down on the planet since, frequently bombarding the humans with attacks that threaten to wipe out the colony,
February 22nd, 2019. Tadiana Jones and Nathan Okerlund´s rating: 4 | Brandon Sanderson | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
“Do Not Look Back, My Lion” by Alix E. Harrow (2019, free in Beyond Ceaseless Skies, Issue #270, Jan. 31, 2019; 99c Kindle magazine issue)
“Do Not Look Back, My Lion,” begins and ends with Eefa leaving home — she cannot bear to see her daughters and wife march to war any longer, is tired of her wife’s promises that this child (and this child and that child) will be the last marked at birth for service in the Emperor’s endless armies, is tired of being the only worshipper in the lonely Temple of Life while the Temple of Death’s “floor is gummed with the blood of hens and calves and the air is heavy with char.” Eefa,
February 18th, 2019. Jana Nyman, Tadiana Jones and Bill Capossere | Alix E. Harrow, Mary Robinette Kowal | Horror, Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Damsel by Elana K. Arnold
Damsel (2018) has an absolutely gorgeous cover, one of the loveliest I’ve seen, with a glowing title wound about with vines, bleeding hearts and other flowers. But on closer examination there’s something just a little bit off about the cover image. An anatomically correct heart. A golden spur with a myriad of sharp points. A dragon’s pointed tail. It’s a bit disturbing. And it’s an apt metaphor for the contents of Elana K. Arnold’s book, where the fairy-tale details initially mask an allegorical story that is far,
February 13th, 2019. Tadiana Jones´s rating: 2.5 | Elana K. Arnold | Stand-Alone, Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
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