Austin Grossman’s Crooked is the best book I’ve read this year. I expected good things from Lev Grossman’s twin brother, but not much otherwise as I am not — was not — a big fan of Nixon or, indeed, of American history in general. Let’s be real, I’m an unpatriotic Europhile who prefers reading about the Tudors to the Kennedys, who will always find the Norman Conquest more interesting than the American Civil War.
October 13th, 2015. Kate Lechler´s rating: 5 | Austin Grossman | Audio, Horror, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 14 comments |
Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie
From the moment I started listening to Salman Rushdie’s new book, Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights, I was enchanted. I wasn’t sure what to expect, not ever having read a Rushdie book before, but his leisurely, indirect storytelling style reminded me of a fairy or folk tale, like the 1001 Nights that Rushdie cleverly takes his title from.
Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights tells the story of the jinnia Dunia,
October 12th, 2015. Kate Lechler´s rating: 4 | Salman Rushdie | Audio, Edge, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 6 comments |
The Rim of the Morning: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror by William Sloane
New York Review Books Classics has just packaged two novels by renowned author, editor and teacher William Sloane into a single offering, The Rim of the Morning: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror. Sloane is not an author I’d previously known, probably due to the fact that these stories are two of only three novels that he ever published. Stephen King contributes a short but impeccable introduction,
October 9th, 2015. Jason Golomb and Sandy Ferber´s rating: 4.5 | William Sloane | Horror | SFF Reviews | 5 comments |
Dreams of Shreds and Tatters by Amanda Downum
I’m giving this book a lower rating than I expected to. Usually a 2.5-star rating from me means I found serious structural, character or writing problems with the book, and that’s not the case here. My low rating of Amanda Downum’s Dreams of Shreds and Tatters reflects the gap between my expectations and my experience. The writer did do a few things that jarred me out of the book, though, and I am going to discuss those.
October 8th, 2015. Marion Deeds´s rating: 2.5 | Amanda Downum | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
SuperMutant Magic Academy by Jillian Tamaki
SuperMutant Magic Academy is a difficult book to review, but it is certainly an easy one to recommend. You need to get a copy, and you need to put it next to your HARRY POTTER collection on your bookshelves. It’s funny, shocking, goofy, light, and surprisingly more endearing than a book like this one should be, since at first it seems to be a mere spoof — not always lovingly, thank goodness — of the HARRY POTTER novels.
September 26th, 2015. Brad Hawley´s rating: 4 | Comics | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
Sunset Mantle by Alter S. Reiss
One of the discoveries I made this year about my reading preferences was that I really enjoy shorter reads. It may have been because the behemoth volumes typical of fantasy series made me sceptical that you could, gasp, actually tell a good story that would leave me satisfied in fewer pages, but I am glad now that I am actively looking for stories that I would have otherwise neglected to take into consideration. Alter S. Reiss’ Sunset Mantle is one of those stories which I would have missed were I to only read doorstoppers,
September 24th, 2015. João Eira and Kat Hooper | Alter S. Reiss | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
Resurrection Science: Conservation, De-extinction and the Precarious Future of Wild Things by M.R. O’Connor
We’ve seen a number of books lately dealing with what has been called the “sixth extinction,” referring to the ongoing mass extinction event, and ways in which we might deal with the crisis. Elizabeth Kolbert’s forthrightly named The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History and Beth Shapiro’s How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-extinction are two excellent examples of such titles (I’d also include,
September 23rd, 2015. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4.5 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness
The problem with writing about unremarkable and average people is that they are unremarkable and average. In what is basically one long novel-sized homage to Xander from Buffy, Patrick Ness tackles what it is to be the underdog in his latest novel, The Rest of Us Just Live Here.
Mikey lives in a nondescript American town, trying to navigate the pitfalls of high school. There have been various catastrophes in the town’s history: a vampire invasion,
September 21st, 2015. Ray McKenzie´s rating: 2 | Patrick Ness | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
Ragnarok (Vol. One): Walt Simonson (author), Laura Martin (art), John Workman (letters)
Although Thor was one of my favorite Marvel titles back in the Lee-Kirby era, I never made it to the fabled Walt Simonson run in the 80’s (a problem I intend to rectify eventually). But I have picked up his return to the character via his comic series Ragnarok, which takes place outside the Marvel universe, picking up Thor’s story after the titular great battle, when as foretold in the sagas and myths,
September 19th, 2015. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4 | Comics | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Weight of Feathers by Anna-Marie McLemore
The Romeo and Juliet story is updated with a few twists in Anna-Marie McLemore’s debut young adult fantasy novel, The Weight of Feathers, published September 15, 2015. Two rival families travel between small towns in California in a nostalgic setting that seems to be approximately the 1960s, performing their Cirque du Soleil-type acts for the townspeople. The French Romani Corbeaus (“Ravens”) attach wings made of wire and feathers to their bodies and perform acrobatics in the treetops;
September 14th, 2015. Tadiana Jones´s rating: 4 | Anna-Marie McLemore | Stand-Alone, Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 5 comments |
COMMENT Book #3 of this trilogy is very much a heist story, and I quite enjoyed it!
Pirate stories and heist stories... Do we ever get enough of them?
Very interesting, Ulrich! Thanks for clueing me in!
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