Books shelved under “Ebook”

This book is a hot mess. I don’t even really know where to start with it.

The Dark Net is a horror novel with the basic premise what if demons took over our computers? It’s a mediocre take on the idea that our dependence on networked devices, our proclivity for screen-time, leaves us vulnerable—in this case, to possession, psychic hacking I guess. They do say that the eyes are the windows into the soul, right?

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Sometimes novels are really philosophy tracts in disguise. If you’re Neal Stephenson, this usually turns into an unwieldy doorstopper that uses its tremendous bullk to beat the reader into submission. If you’re Herman Hesse, you write a kind of novella that is also pretty dense yet somehow manages to be simple and light at the same time. Siddhartha is one of those delightful early twentieth-century novels that by modern standards do not work at all…

As much as I think the finale of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine might be one of the best TV finales ever, I do wish we had seen (canonically, on screen) what the aftermath of the Dominion War brought. It’s one thing to tell a war story—and DS9 told it well—and another to talk about after the war. About picking up the pieces, rebuilding, and healing wounds of all varieties. Aftershocks is exactly that kind…

Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the eARC!

Maren is seventeen years old and ready to strike out on her own. Well, not exactly on her own. She has a girlfriend, aka a heartmate, Kaia, who is the more adventurous of the pair. They are head-over-heels in love for one another—but when an elite group of Aurati, women who do dirty work for the repressive Emperor, show up and abduct Kaia for purposes…

This review will be shorter than usual because I broke my elbow and have one hand in a cast.

I read this because I remember reading a later book in the series, The Warrior Returns, featuring Amalric's sister, Rali, as the narrator. I don't think I ever read The Far Kingdoms itself, so I decided to go back and give it a try. I don't regret this, but it didn't do much for me…

(A much shorter review than usual, since I have broken my left elbow and am typing with one hand in a cast.)

Not a particularly original story or even mash-up of tropes. Walking to Aldebaran piggy-backs on that time-honoured sub-genre of Big Dumb Object stories. Lots of cool ideas and set pieces from Adrian Tchaikovsky, but very little that is surprising or truly interesting above and beyond the skill of the writing style itself. Thanks…

So you want to stage a soft-coup and manipulate the succession, but you have one problem: you need some kind of plausible heir. Fortunately for you, about 17 years ago you encountered a baby at the same time there was a royal massacre, and well, you know, one thing led to another, and you ended up stashing her with some super skilled warrior so she would grow up all big and strong. Also, you read…

I grew up in the ’90s, and I vaguely remember on TV when I was a kid some kind of scandal involving this guy named Bill Clinton, whom I knew as the President of the United States. The word impeachment kept getting thrown around, but of course I didn’t really know what that meant. Fast-forward 20 years, and the word has resurfaced as a possible fate for the current President, Donald Trump—and this time, I…

This may not be the best book I read all year, but it is the best non-fiction book I’ve read so far in 2019, and any future non-fiction book this year is going to have to work hard to unseat this one. Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World snuck up on me. When I received my eARC from NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press, I was anticipating a mildly interesting book…

As with the first book, Smoke & Summons, I received a free eARC from NetGalley and publisher 47North. Like the first book, Myths & Mortals feels like original and competent urban fantasy. Charlie N. Holmberg adds more layers to the saga of Sandis Gwenwig, such as it is. However, this book does little to assuage my grumping from the first book. Another cliffhanger ending, and not all that much development of Sandis’ character either.

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Reader, I finished the first chapter but could not go any further. The writing (or maybe copyediting) of this book is atrocious.

I know that in this day and age commas are misunderstood beasts of punctuation. As someone very invested in eradicating comma splices from my students’ writing, I tend to lean on the side of using fewer commas when in doubt. Yet this book takes that position to the extreme. The result are torturous…

The light versus the darkness. Heaven versus Hell. Good vs evil. It’s a timeless story, yet one with so many variations. Cracked is yet another take on this idea. Eliza Crewe tells an intense and urgent story of a hybrid caught between two worlds. Perhaps the most intriguing idea that Crewe brings to the table is the way the main character has to consume souls. Beyond that, there isn’t much here that I haven’t really…

Kind of space-opera, kind of not? Off Planet intrigues me because it’s kind of about interstellar war, or at least the tricksy politics that can lead to an interstellar war, yet its main characters aren’t (with a few exceptions) soldiers or politicians. The protagonist is literally just trying to live her life, mind her own business, but others can’t have that. Aileen Erin crafts some fairly interesting and intense situations and brings a fair amount…

I enjoy reading stories about demonic possession—particularly stuff that departs from the more conventional ones set in our world—and Smoke & Summons approaches possession from a different angle indeed. Charlie Holmberg’s story is about someone who has been victimized and enslaved trying to escape her captor even as she discovers she might be part of a much bigger plot. Set against the backdrop of a somewhat authoritarian and isolationist state, there’s more going on in…

People love to joke about being addicted to their devices. Yet addiction and dependency, as serious medical issues, have specific definitions. There’s a lot of debate right now about whether one actually develops addictions to the Internet, or to the use of one’s phone—and if so, what do we do about it in a society that not only rewards but often requires the use of these tools? Wired establishes an addiction to such communications and…

Last year, Sara Barnard dazzled me with Beautiful Broken Things. Now, thanks to NetGalley and Pan MacMillan, I got my digital hands on an eARC for the sequel: Fierce Fragile Hearts is narrated by Suzanne and tells the story of what happens to her months after the conclusion of Beautiful Broken Things. This book is just as good, if not better than, the first one. Every time I didn’t think it could get…

It has been almost exactly two years since I gave Zenn Scarlett a rather mediocre review. In fact, I almost didn’t bother reading Under Nameless Stars. I’m glad I gave it a chance though! Although I don’t remember much about the first book, this sequel feels punchier, faster-paced, and more interesting than that one.

This book picks up where the first left off, so spoilers for the first book but no spoilers for Under…

Well, here we are. Almost four years ago I started re-reading Animorphs. I had been wanting to do this for a while, and then my Goodreads friend and occasional Twitter DM enthusiast Julie started her own, finally galvanizing me to just do it, as Shia Le Nike says. (You should also read Julie’s review of #54: The Beginning as well!) It has taken me considerably longer than Julie to finish re-reading this series, but…

I read #53: The Answer and #54: The Beginning back-to-back because this book ends on a cliffhanger. Like the rest of my reviews of Animorphs, I’m not really flagging this as having spoilers despite discussing the plot, because I figure that if you’re reading this review of the end of a 50-book series 20 years later, then you probably don’t care that much about spoilers.

ALSO, weirdly enough, very specific spoiler for Buffy season…

Because there’s nothing like reading some Animorphs books out of order …

#51: The Absolute is where the proverbial manure hits the air redistribution machine. I mean, I haven’t generally been marking these reviews with spoiler alerts, because I feel like if you’re reading a review for book 51, you’re either in way too deep or you don’t care about being spoiled. But I had to flag this review, because this …

… this…