Click on stars to FIND REVIEWS BY RATING:
Recommended: 
Not Recommended: 
Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers
Having recently seen Saving Mr. Banks, a film that purports to examine the strained relationship between author P.L. Travers and film-maker Walt Disney when it came to adapting Mary Poppins for the big screen, it was only natural that I finally got around to my long overdue reading of the classic children’s story Mary Poppins (1934).
Having grown up with the Disney film, it’s quite shocking to realize how little one resembles the other.
July 29th, 2019. Rebecca Fisher and Tadiana Jones´s rating: 3.5 | P.L. Travers | Children | SFF Reviews | 5 comments |
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H.P. Lovecraft
Randolph Carter keeps dreaming of a beautiful unknown city which he is aching to visit. After begging the gods to show him the way and receiving no answer, he sets out on a dream-quest to find it. The priests tell him that nobody knows where the city is and that the journey will kill him, but Randolph Carter is not deterred. His quest takes him through fantastic and mostly dangerous places where he meets strange friends and enemies. All the while he can tell that the gods who don’t belong to Earth are trying to stop him from discovering Unknown Kadath.
July 26th, 2019. Kat Hooper´s rating: 3.5 | H.P. Lovecraft | Audio, Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 5 comments |
The Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley
Dr. Lilo Alexandr-Calypso, a brilliant geneticist who lives on the moon, has broken the law by fiddling with the human genome. Just as she’s about to be executed, she is saved by a group of vigilantes who want to use her skills to help them free the Earth from the alien invaders who’ve taken over and kicked the humans off.
Lilo doesn’t want to serve anyone, but their leader, a former president of Earth, has captured a clone of her and says that either she or the clone will be executed for Lilo’s crime.
July 18th, 2019. Kat Hooper´s rating: 3.5 | John Varley | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Bonfires and Broomsticks by Mary Norton
In Bonfires and Broomsticks (1947), part two of Mary Norton’s BEDKNOBS AND BROOMSTICKS duology, it’s two years after events of the first book, The Magic Bed-Knob. The three young siblings, Carey, Charles and Paul, get the chance to leave London and spend the summer in Bedfordshire with their spinster friend, Miss Price, who was a witch in training. And they still have the magic bed-knob that enables them to fly through time and space on Paul’s old bed,
July 15th, 2019. Tadiana Jones´s rating: 3.5 | Mary Norton | Children | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Purple Sapphire by John Taine
In the Rare Book Room in NYC bookstore extraordinaire The Strand there has resided, for quite some time now, a volume that I have greatly wanted to acquire. The book in question is Scottish author John Taine’s very first novel, The Purple Sapphire, which was first released by E. P. Dutton & Co. as a hardcover in 1924 … the same year that Dutton released Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin’s now-classic dystopian book We.
July 12th, 2019. Sandy Ferber´s rating: 3.5 | John Taine | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
A Red-Rose Chain by Seanan McGuire
This is one of my favorite of Chris McGrath’s covers for the OCTOBER DAYE series, and it’s one of my favorite titles too, so it pains me to say that this isn’t one of my favorite books in the series. A Red-Rose Chain (2015) suffers from some pacing issues and didn’t quite knock my socks off like The Winter Long did.
The kingdom of Silences, analogous to mortal Portland, declares war on the Mists.
July 10th, 2019. Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 3.5 | Seanan McGuire | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son. Everyone on the same page? Okay… Hill has delivered a deeply satisfying and literate novel in NOS4A2. He is absolutely his own man, and he’s very good. But he’s also picked up some tricks from his father. He writes children well, especially those that have some unique ability. In this case, Victoria McQueen has a special gift: she can find lost things. And this skill tends to transport her to wherever those lost things happen to be.
July 1st, 2019. Jason Golomb and Marion Deeds´s rating: 3.5 | Joe Hill | Horror, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 13 comments |
Take a Thief by Mercedes Lackey
One of Mercedes Lackey’s most popular characters is Herald Skif, the young former thief who we met in the first two VALDEMAR trilogies (HERALDS OF VALDEMAR and MAGE WINDS). In Take a Thief (2001), a stand-alone prequel novel, Lackey gives us his backstory.
It starts as so many of her stories do. Skif is a young orphaned boy who is basically a slave to his cruel uncle.
June 27th, 2019. Kat Hooper´s rating: 3.5 | Mercedes Lackey | Audio | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Clash by Night by C.L. Moore & Henry Kuttner
Clash by Night (1943) , by the wife-husband team of C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, is an odd bit of a bird, feeling less like a smoothie that blends together different story types and writerly styles and more like a salad where you can easily spot the tomatoes, greens, peppers, etc. Uneven overall, but it does have its good points.
The opening gives us the setting quite directly, with an unknown narrator of the future telling us,
June 25th, 2019. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3.5 | C.L. Moore, Henry Kuttner | Short Fiction, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
The Silver God of the Orang Hutan by David Douglas
As many of you here at FanLit may have already discerned, this reader is a huge fan of English author H. Rider Haggard, and at this point I have read 45 of the man’s 58 novels. Haggard, for good reason, has been called “The Father of the Lost Race Novel,” and his influence on that genre has been enormous, casting a very long shadow across the decades since he came out with the triple whammy of King Solomon’s Mines,
June 20th, 2019. Sandy Ferber´s rating: 3.5 | David Douglas | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
It's a tightrope act for sure.
[…] Stuart (2 December 2015). “Roadside Picnic: Russian SF classic with parallels to Vandermeer’s Area X | Fantasy Lit…. fantasyliterature.com. Retrieved 8 […]
yes, I mean, there are certainly lots of good sci-fi/fantasy novellas out there, so they aren't impossible to do, but…
Well, your review is a perfect match for what they marketed it as, so... that's good. I'm having the same…
Rumor has it he is actively writing the final novel, Master Alvin, publishing chapters through his subscription only service, but…