The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Girlfriends Mal and Lee are cryptid hunters. They don’t believe in any of the monsters they hunt, of course, but it’s fun to follow the clues and debunk the myths for their blog. But on their last adventure, they saw some weird stuff and Mal disappeared.
That was four years ago. Now, suddenly, Lee runs into Mal on the street in London and she’s with a man who looks like a Neanderthal. Where has she been and why is she with that guy?
January 14th, 2021. Kat Hooper´s rating: 3.5 | Adrian Tchaikovsky | Audio | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Ministry for The Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel, The Ministry for The Future (2020), feels like a blueprint. Set in our near future, it follows a set of diverse characters living all over the world who are trying to solve the climate crisis, repair our world and, essentially, save the human race.
The novel begins in India where Frank May is working at a charity organization’s neighborhood clinic. Heatwaves have become a regular occurrence there. When the worst one yet arrives and power is shut off,
December 29th, 2020. Kat Hooper´s rating: 4 | Kim Stanley Robinson | Audio, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
Wonder Women and Bad Girls: Superheroine and Supervillainess Archetypes in Popular Media by Valerie Estelle Frankel
Wonder Women and Bad Girls: Superheroine and Supervillainess Archetypes in Popular Media (2020), by Valerie Estelle Frankel, pretty much lays it all out in the title. Starting in the earliest days of comic books and progressing through the decades to the present, Frankel explores a boatload of characters, the famous and expected (Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Black Widow, Storm, Catwoman) and the lesser known and unexpected (Rulah Jungle Goddess, Pow-Girl, Veda the Cobra Woman). The breadth is a definite strength of the book,
December 11th, 2020. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3.5 | Comics, Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton
Stuart Turton’s debut novel, The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, was one of my favorite reads of 2018, a compulsively readable and wildly original murder mystery, an homage to Agatha Christie, with a science fictional wrapper. Turton’s second novel, The Devil and the Dark Water (2020), is a highly twisty and eerie Sherlockian mystery, set in the seventeenth century on a large ship traveling from Batavia (now Jakarta,
December 11th, 2020. Tadiana Jones´s rating: 4.5 | Stuart Turton | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger
Elatsoe (2020), a YA debut by Darcie Little Badger, creates a richly woven world of folklore, myth, story, friendship, and family, all set in “a slightly stranger America,” one “very similar to our own … [but] shaped dramatically by the magic, monsters, knowledge, and legends of its peoples, those Indigenous and not.” As a debut, it shows some of the typical first-book characteristics (issues with pacing, transitions, etc.), but it’s overall a warmly rewarding and enjoyable read.
Elatsoe — “Ellie” for nearly all the book — is a 17-year-old Lipan Apache girl with the ability to raise ghosts,
December 10th, 2020. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3.5 | Darcie Little Badger | Stand-Alone, Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
I was going to start this review of Piranesi (2020) by Susanna Clarke by stating that I was of two minds on the novel and then noting that this was both appropriate and also strong praise. Appropriate because the book is in many ways of the mind, and is as well of two worlds. Strong praise because my two minds were “I loved it” followed by “I liked it.” But then I thought more about it, and I decided my minds were really “I loved it,” “I liked it,” then “I loved it” again.
December 10th, 2020. Bill Capossere, Tadiana Jones and Marion Deeds´s rating: 5 | Susanna Clarke | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 10 comments |
Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present by Chris Gosden
Chris Gosden takes on a lot in Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present (2020) — a history of magic through time and space, skipping across millennia and the continents. Though “history” might be a tad misleading, in that Gosden includes our current age in his survey and then makes a call for magic to, if not “return” (he would argue it never left),
December 8th, 2020. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4.5 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | 6 comments |
Flash: 100 Greatest Moments by Robert Greenberger
Flash: 100 Greatest Moments (2020), by Robert Greenberger, is a browser’s reference book that doesn’t stint on illustrations, always a plus for this sort of subject.
As the title says, it’s a look at a (obviously subjective) list of highlights from the eight or so decades the character has been around.
While some fans might quibble here and there, the list as a whole is most likely going to find general consensus.
As noted, while one can read it cover to cover,
December 1st, 2020. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4 | Comics, Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes
If your view of a Neanderthal is a sloped-head, grunting, not-so-bright guy hunched against blowing snow while he tracks a mammoth, unaware of his impending extinction and eventual supplantation by his far-smarter and much smugger cousins (that would be us), it’s time to update that image. And archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes has just the method of doing so: her fascinating, detailed, and vivid recreation of our ancestor: Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art (2020).
For the longest time Neanderthals were seen as a failed species: brutish,
November 20th, 2020. Bill Capossere´s rating: 5 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher
… and we watched the willow branches bow outward from the passing, and it was invisible except that invisible was not the right word, because its not-there-ness hung in the air like an afterimage.
The Hollow Places (2020), by T. Kingfisher, reminded me a lot of the other folk-horror novel of hers I read recently, The Twisted Ones. Both take place in or close to small southern towns,
November 10th, 2020. Marion Deeds´s rating: 5 | T. Kingfisher | Horror, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Thanks for the reviews you two. I put the book on my TBR as soon as I saw ads for…
We seem to be on the same page. Yeah, the depiction of some (at least two) of the women characters…
The correct and more accurate term for the book thing is "challenged," I think. Frankly, the intentional removal of books…
Not sure I can be persuaded on two of these articles. When I was young book-banning meant you couldn't sell…
I haven't either, and probably won't, the general plot seemed similar, though.