Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Rating: 4.5

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Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales: Emily and Wendell fight to save a faerie kingdom

Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett

When the third book in Heather Fawcett’s EMILY WILDE series opens, the irascible scholar Emily and her lover, the faerie prince and erstwhile scholar Wendell Bambleby have entered his realm and intend to reclaim the throne, after Emily deposed his usurper stepmother in the second book. Emily is far from optimistic about this plan, since the court is filled with traitors and those still loyal to the usurper queen. When Wendell bests his uncle Taran in a contest,

February 18th, 2025. Marion Deeds´s rating: 4.5 | Heather Fawcett | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Orbital: A moving elegy to our environment and planet

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital (2023) will, for some people, barely qualify (if that) as a novel, leaving them crying “Where’s the plot? Nothing happens!” And you know, I can’t argue with them. If you define a novel as a series of plot steps from a to b to c such that change occurs, then yes, Orbital probably won’t squeeze in under that definition. Its focus is less on “what is happening” and more on “what am I feeling about what is happening?” or “What am I thinking about while things are happening?” And if you’re looking for conflict or fleshed out and distinctive characters who are different at the end than when we first meet them,

Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories: The eerie, the surreal and the beautiful

Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories by GennaRose Nethercott

I loved GennaRose Nethercott’s novel Thistlefoot, one of the best books I’d read in a long time, so I followed it up with 2024’s story collection, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories. This collection displays the beautiful, the eerie, the surreal, and the terrible, written in Nethercott’s precise, poetic prose that reminds me of the writing of Kelly Link.

The books contains fourteen stories.

Bringer of Dust: The worlds of the Talents collide

Bringer of Dust by J.M. Miro

2024’s Bringer of Dust, J.M. Miro’s second book in the trilogy of THE TALENTS, finds our survivors from Book One, Ordinary Monsters, scattered across Europe. Maybe “scattered” isn’t the right word, because their locations are purposeful, as they seek to find an orsine they can open, to return to the world of the dead and rescue Marlowe, the Shining Boy.

A quick review of the magic: Clanks can manipulate their own flesh,

January 28th, 2025. Marion Deeds´s rating: 4.5 | J.M. Miro | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Tegan and Sara: Junior High by Tegan Quin and Sara Quin (An Oxford College Student Review!)

Tegan and Sara: Junior High by Tegan Quin and Sara Quin (writers) and Tillie Walden (artist)

In this column, I feature comic book reviews written by my students at Oxford College of Emory University. Oxford College is a small liberal arts school just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. I challenge students to read and interpret comics because I believe sequential art and visual literacy are essential parts of education at any level (see my Manifesto!). I post the best of my students’ reviews in this column.

January 25th, 2025. Brad Hawley´s rating: 4.5 | Comics, Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |

The Voyage Home: Powerful, in a quieter fashion

The Voyage Home by Pat Barker

Amongst the flood of Greek myth retellings over the past number few years, three authors have stood out to me. Two are Madeline Miller and Claire North, the first for her fantastic Circe (not to mention the brilliant The Song of Achilles from a decade earlier) and the second for her excellent and just-concluded SONGS OF PENELOPE trilogy. The third is Pat Barker and her WOMEN OF TROY series,

The Spite House: First class cursed-house horror

The Spite House by Johnny Compton

Spite houses are real and I went down a shallow rabbit hole preparing for this review. With his 2023 novel, The Spite House, Johnny Compton takes on the concept of a house built solely to irritate and harass nearby landowners, and morphs it into something original and scary.

Eric Ross and his two daughters, Dessa and Stacy, are making their way through Texas, trying to keep under the radar. They have the normal concerns a black family in Texas would have,

Dorohedoro (Volume 1) by Q Hayashida (An Oxford College Student Review!)

Mandy Sun is a second-year student at Oxford College and is majoring in Computer Science.

December 28th, 2024. Brad Hawley´s rating: 4.5 | Comics | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |

The Great White Space: Black mountain side

The Great White Space by Basil Copper

For those of you who have read everything written by the great H. P. Lovecraft but are still hankering for another solid dose of cosmic horror and tentacled monstrosities, hoo boy, have I got a doozy for you! Although written four decades after the so-called “Sage of Providence” dominated the field of weird fiction in the 1930s, this book – Basil Copper’s The Great White Space – is such a convincing pastiche that all fans of the genre should be left happily grinning nevertheless.

Bury Him Darkly: Malice from the chalice

Bury Him Darkly by John Blackburn

Although it’s been almost 18 years since I last read English author John Blackburn’s first novel, A Scent of New-Mown Hay (1958), I still vividly recall several segments of the book, mainly due to the forcefulness of the writing therein. And really, with its plot conflating a female ex-Nazi scientist, deserted Russian villages, and a fungoid mutation that is slowly spreading across Europe, the book is inherently hard to forget.

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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