185 reviews found
Showing 41 to 60 of 185 results
Lauren Beukes writes haunting pieces of speculative fiction, and The Shining Girls is no exception. If you like serial killers, time travel, or investigative journalism, then this book is for you. I don’t normally read thrillers, serial killer stories, etc. That just isn’t my cup of tea. But I like Beukes; Broken Monsters is a fantastic work, and I was hoping for more of the same here. By and large I was satisfied, although certain…
The Woken Gods has a wicked premise: what if the deities of various ancient mythologies were real entities, but at some point in time, for reasons lost to us, they were put asleep or fell asleep? What happens, then, if they wake up and return with a vengeance, and the only people who can stand against them are a shadowy secret society called the Society of the Sun that just happens to have made it…
Mike Heath is back at it again with that great cover art. Ugh. That angled title. Yes.
Yes yes yes yes yes.
Oh, and A.J. Hartley wrote a book that goes between these covers. It’s pretty good too.
What, you want more? OK, fine.
Firebrand is one of those sequels that comes out swinging, delivering more of what you loved about the first book without any of that messy “middle book” syndrome that so often…
A pleasure, as always, to revisit The SPI Files. Lisa Shearin always brings it—and by it I mean that combination of humour and serious situations in need of ass-kicking that results in delightful urban fantasy stories. The tone might be light, but the stakes are often high. This the kind of series you can easily devour over a week or two yet keep coming back to time and again.
Mac and Ian are back…
Urban tales of grimdark faeries really appeal to me for whatever reason. I think it has something to do with the juxtaposition of modern sensibilities and skepticism with the sheer brutality of fae logic and deal-making. The Uncertain Places certainly creates the right atmosphere. Lisa Goldstein’s storytelling reminds me, in ways of Charles de Lint’s approach to mixing our world with the fantastic. However, I found the plot a little convoluted and the main characters…
So here I am, working my way through my honestly impressive backlog of ebooks from Angry Robot and Strange Chemistry. I have zero memory of Poltergeeks, the first book in this series from Sean Cummings, except maybe a vague impression that I liked it. Fortunately, Student Bodies makes it easy enough to dive into Julie Richardson’s life as a Shadowcull that I didn’t feel lost at all. Also, disclaimer: I read the first third…
Sisters Red is the best kind of fairytale retelling, in that Jackson Pearce takes the kernel of a fairytale (“Little Red Riding Hood” here, obvs) and then … just runs with it. There’s no need to hew too closely to the “original” story—because what is the original story, anyway? Instead we get this cool, thrilling urban fantasy adventure about sisters who slay werewolves … like, yeah. I’m down with that.
Scarlett and Rosie March are…
To whoever finds this,
I say unto you now thrice, look, this isn’t really a novel.
Reader, I write this with the hope that, one day, we might be successful in undoing (redoing? doing? DOing?) what has already been undone. But if you are reading this and scratching your head, then perhaps all our efforts have come to naught.
I believe that a concerted time-travel project (or “diachronic operation”) has been carried out, in…
I don’t remember how The Devil You Know ended up on my to-read list, except maybe that a lot of people compare it to The Dresden Files, one of my favourite fantasy series of all time. Yet it’s worth noting that I like The Dresden Files in spite of its noir elements, and I like Harry Dresden in spite of the streak of casual chauvinism that runs through him. The Devil You Know is…
The difficult relationship between power, responsibility, and humility is on full display in The Mistress of Spices, where Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s empathetic and passionate writing merges with magical realism. I loved a lot of the ideas in this book, and the meditative way in which CBD punctuates the narrative with beats on each spice. Yet the execution of the story itself, and the characters, left much to be desired.
Tilo is a young woman…
Would watch the movie, like, yesterday. You get on that, movie-producing people.
Shadowshaper is one of those books I loved from page one, and it only got better. Daniel José Older’s command of character, culture, and language results in a breathtaking contemporary urban fantasy. This book reminds me a lot of Charles de Lint’s work. The protagonist is thrust into a world she doesn’t quite understand, one built on myths and legends only half-shared or…
I am always on the lookout for new and interesting takes on urban fantasy. I enjoy urban fantasy set in our world, where the supernatural are either covert or living openly, but there is something so good about made-up cities and their cultures. Radiant, Karina Sumner-Smith’s first book in a trilogy about the Towers, is a prime example of this. She creates a world where magic is as commonplace as technology is for us—but…
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…
A Criminal Magic hooked me from the start. A friend gave this to me for my birthday (apparently it was on my to-read list, not that I’d remember). I started it on Saturday, and 25 pages in I texted her to let her know she had picked well. Lee Kelly’s story of sorcerers labouring under a magic Prohibition in an alternative 1926 is just captivating. From parallel plot-lines to a careful, judicious use of magic,…
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…
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.…
My library did not have a copy of this, because it has been independently published, so I had to go and buy it like the fan I am. The Ghost Rebellion picks up shortly after The Diamond Conspiracy. Books and Braun are back, along with longtime supporting characters like Bruce Campbell, and some new faces in the principal setting of India. The Ministry managed to foil a plot against the British Empire while technically…
It has been over a year since I last reviewed a volume of Supernormal Step, the fantastic webcomic by Michael Lee Lunsford about Fiona, a girl with blue hair who has been sucked into a strange, parallel universe where magic is real and that’s really freaky. Fiona has long been on a search for a way home, and while she doesn’t get much closer in this one, she does learn more about the mysterious…
Magical cities are one of my favourite tropes in fantasy novels. I think I could read nothing but magical city fiction for a while and take a long time to feel sated or bored; there is so much room for variation. Camorr from The Lies of Locke Lamora is an example that readily springs to mind, but this is a very old trope. As its title implies, City of Strife is very much a story…
I picked up Trickster Drift when it came out, but I knew I wanted to re-read Son of a Trickster to refresh my memory before I started the sequel. I’m really glad I did. It has given more an extended visit to Jared’s world, and what an interesting world this is.
I really love this book, and re-reading it has only increased my appreciation for its depth and the skill…
Showing 41 to 60 of 185 results