Books shelved under “Ebook”

Alternative title: Tobias is Not OK. Another extremely well-written, gut-punching character story with an otherwise uninteresting plot to keep it chugging along.

The Test reveals that Tobias is still basically shattered from his torture at the hands of the sadistic, and possibly mad, Yeerk Taylor. While the rest of the Animorphs have been dealing with their own shit, apparently, for the last ten books, Tobias has been keeping it together around them…

As Canada celebrated its 150th birthday this year, reconciliation was increasingly a buzzword on the lips of politicians, journalists, and celebrities. Most people seemed to recognize that we have a ways to go in our relationship with Indigenous peoples—but most people also seem unwilling to put that recognition into action. As my recent review of Seven Fallen Feathers shows, our country is still a hostile place when it comes to Indigenous lives. And the present…

One of the hallmark tropes of the Golden Age of Science Fiction is colonies on the moon. You couldn’t swing a cat in a lunar lander without hitting a 1950s moon colony. Artemis reminds me a lot in vibe and atmosphere of these books, like what Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress could have been if we had more accurate knowledge of lunar and astro chemistry and physics in the 1950s. That’s not to…

First of all, can we agree that it should be “95” or “ninety-five” but never “ninetyfive”, like WTF.

Distinctly weird hyphenation aside, 1517: Martin Luther and the Invention of the Reformation, is a thoughtful examination of one of those well-celebrated yet mythologized moments in history. Peter Marshall uses the stories surrounding Luther’s apocryphal posting of the 95 theses to examine the character of the Reformation in Luther’s time, his legacy and effects on the…

The Helmacrons, first seen in #24: The Suspicion make their second appearance in Animorphs. This time, the Animorphs voluntarily shrink themselves to extract the Helmacrons from Marco. Hilarity(?) ensues.

My feelings for this book are similar to my feelings for The Suspicion. If I were to make a list of the “essential” Animorphs novels to read, The Journey wouldn’t be on it. The B-story, in which Marco must retrieve a camera that…

Not actually my cup of tea, The Future of War: A History is a massive data dump and analysis of what we used to think about the future of warfare. Lawrence Freedman has clearly Done the Research, and I have to hand it to him: there’s compelling stuff here. Thanks to NetGalley and Public Affairs for the eARC.

I love the premise of this book. It kind of merges my passion for literature and my…

Yes, hello, hi, someone asked nicely on Twitter and got an eARC of City of Betrayal and that someone was me, but then I went and didn’t read it until near the publication date anyway because … busy … and not wanting to sit on my review, but also wanting to hype it up closer to publication. So, although this is an honest review, it most certainly is biased, because I liked City of…

So … this is a proof copy from the publisher via NetGalley (tanks), and I have to just put it out there that I didn’t actually see any maps in this version. I don’t know if that’s by design or simply that they hadn’t been set into the book at the type this version was exported. It seems a little silly to me that a book called A History of Canada in Ten Maps does…

This is one of those tough books to rate and review, because anything I say is going to feel too harsh. Bad Girls from History is not a bad book by any means; I think there is a sizable audience out there for whom this could be an interesting and informative read. I’m just not a member of that audience. Dee Gordon’s dive into presenting 100 women who misbehaved is a little too encylopaedic, a…

One of the benefits of deciding to request books from NetGalley is that it exposes me to more academic science writing than I might otherwise find. Thanks to Columbia University Press for letting me read this. I’m really fascinated by the study of religion, from a sociological and anthropological perspective. I love to learn about the history of religions, and also about how we know what we know. Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods looks at the…

Animorphs has become so dark! I feel like a broken record, like I say this every review, but wow. The Familiar opens up, as several other recent books have done, in the middle of a big, chaotic battle. The Animorphs have inflicted damage on the Yeerk troops, but the latter are practically inexhaustible, while the former are six adrenaline-fuelled-but-scared kids. And as the tide of the battle turns against them, they start losing…

I didn’t really know what to expect from this; I just requested it from NetGalley and Curiosity Quills Press on a whim from its description.

Brooklyn, our first-person protagonist, is cool under fire—literally, for she is a firefighter. She discovers that, courtesy of her estranged father, she isn’t fully human. She’s half-human, half … something else. Something that the uninformed would term “demonic”. It explains a lot about Brooklyn, about her past and her present…

I’m not all that comfortable with our tendency these days to label or ask if a piece of media is “feminist”. I don’t think that’s the right way to be looking at or critiquing media. All media are ultimately creations of our society and therefore contain threads of the implicit biases within our society. Rather than trying to decide if something is or is not feminist, as a whole work, we should be critiquing it…

Mask of Shadows was just some random fantasy novel I requested on NetGalley in exchange for a review, and then I started hearing all about it elsewhere. Linsey Miller’s debut novel features a genderfluid protagonist trying to become the next assassin to the queen. Sal is a thief and one of the few survivors of a massacre that wiped out almost all of their countrypeople. They view the assassin position as a chance to align…

Sometimes I come across stories that are so well-written but also so safe and undemanding in their tropes and structures that I'm simultaneously enchanted and bored. Three is one such story. Immediately recognizable to anyone with even a passing knowledge of post-apocalyptic stories, it nonetheless has all the hallmarks of an exciting, well-paced, thoroughly plotted novel. Jay Posey has a talent for narrative, both in the sense of the twists and turns that keep you…

Infernal Devices is the story of George, an unremarkable man with no major talents who has inherited his father’s watchmaker shop. Various zany characters show up and drag him into an intricate conspiracy reminiscent of H.G. Wells, H.P. Lovecraft, and mostly, in my mind, Jules Verne. K.W. Jeter propels George through increasingly dangerous, nonsensical, over-the-top adventures powered by steampunk, bravado, and sheer imagination. This is an adventure in the classical sense, and as a work…

Welcome back to the alternative Scranton, where the supernatural is out in the open, and Stan Markowski and his partner, the undead Karl Renfer, have to investigate supernatural crimes. Evil Dark is the second entry in Justin Gustainis’ Occult Investigations series. Stan, Karl, Christine, et al continue to process the aftermath of the first book. Then two FBI agents rock up to town, looking for some help tracking down the creators of supernatural snuff films.…

It’s the last Megamorphs entry, and Back to Before closes this series-within-a-series with a bang. Pushed to the breaking point by yet another horrifically gruesome battle, Jake succumbs to the temptation presented by Crayak’s minion, the Drode. He agrees to let the Drode rewrite time so that Jake, Cassie, Marco, Rachel, and Tobias never walk through that construction site, never acquire morphing abilities, never meet Elfangor or Ax or learn about Yeerks. Yep, this is…

The Other reminds us how far the Animorphs have come from being the naive kids they were at the start of the book. Gone are the days of insufficient plans. Enter the world of automatic suspicions, backups, dissembling and disguise. The Animorphs are tried-and-true insurgents now. And Marco, joker that he is, might be the most strategically-minded of them all.

There are other Andalites on Earth. (Again.)

They don’t want to fight the Yeerks. Mertil…

This is the book on transgender rights, gender identity and expression, and policy that you never knew you wanted.

Welcome to the latest instalment of “$#A$^% am I ever behind at reviewing my NetGalley books”. Today I review Beyond Trans: Does Gender Matter?, out at the beginning of June from New York University Press. To summarize Heath Fogg Davis’ thesis in one sentence in his own words: “I show why it is in the…