Book Review: The Tiger’s Daughter by K Arsenault Rivera
The relationship, told in letters and looking backward from the present, of two extraordinary women and their evolving relationship is the heart of The Tiger’s Daughter, the debut novel by K Arsenault Rivera. Far from the Great Wall of Europe, The Tiger’s Daughter uses models of medieval China and the steppe cultures beyond it as its social model, political models, and its fantastic and mythological elements as well. Shefali is a member of the Qorin, a warrior people of the steppe who have been powerful enough at times to severely threaten the more settled Hokkarans and their Empire. Inside that Empire, Shizuka is the niece of the Emperor, and so the putative Heir to that Empire. Brought together at a young age, their fateful meeting sets them both on courses that will part, intersect, and ultimately change both the steppe and the Empire in ways neither of them can predict, or even intend.
Book Review: Horizon by Fran Wilde
The Compton Crook award-winning, Nebula-nominated Updraft by Fran Wilde landed her acclaim, accolades and a very fine YA novel to start the novel portion of her writing career. Focusing on a New Weird world above the cloud of flyers, skymouths and towers of bone, Updraft was one of the most memorable books I read in 2015. Cloudbound, which came out in 2016, took the world of the Bone Towers and its characters in new and intriguing directions. Somewhere in there, the series got a reboot of covers, too. Now, with Horizon, Fran Wilde completes the trilogy. After the revelations of Cloudbound, and the instability that the Bone Tower society has undergone after the events of Updraft, Horizon brings us to the ground, literally and figuratively, in this concluding volume. The three novels of the Bone Towers Trilogy have all done different things, and done them well. Updraft is a classic YA coming of age story with a strong central protagonist, unfolding and unfurling the wings of the author’s worldbuilding even as we have a deep dive into the personality, hopes, fears, dreams and struggles of Kirit. It would have been the easier, safer and perhaps more expected path for the author to continue the trilogy from Kirit’s point of view and go for a grand arc of Kirit’s story at the time of great change for her community. Surely, I think, the author must have considered and contemplated that sort of path for her subsequent novels.
Book Review: All Good Things by Emma Newman
I was introduced to the writing and the work of Emma Newman by means of Between Two Thorns, an urban fantasy novel. I don’t normally read much urban fantasy as a general rule, but I was taken by the small stories Newman wrote in support of the novel and that world, and by the writer herself when she came all the way from the U.K. to attend a local convention here in Minneapolis. I was enchanted by her writing and her personality, and resolved to read all of her work henceforth. That decision led me to read more of the Split Worlds, as the series has come to be called, so I read Any Other Name and All is Fair, the second and third books in the series. When Newman, in conjunction with her husband, started Tea and Jeopardy, what is now a Hugo award-winning podcast, I started consuming that as well. Other writing efforts took the author’s time, and I started to read those wonderful SF efforts as well.
Guest Post by Stephanie Burgis: Alternate History: Taking a New Path
I love historical fantasy, both as a reader and a writer – which won’t surprise anyone who’s read any of my first five novels. Three of them (forming the Kat, Incorrigible trilogy) were frothy, fun MG adventures set in Regency England; two of them (Masks and Shadows and Congress of Secrets) were dark, romantic adult fantasies set at different historical points in the Habsburgs’ Austro-Hungarian empire. My first three MG novels and my first two adult novels have been very different in tone from each other, but there was one thing all five of those novels had in common: They all approached historical fantasy as a secret history, in which magic worked discreetly behind the scenes of our real history books. (For instance, the opera house at Eszterháza Palace really did burn down in the historical year I wrote about in Masks and Shadows – but in reality, I very much doubt it was burned down by an act of dark alchemy! Or at least…that certainly wasn’t the official explanation that landed in any of the history books I read. 😉 )
Book Review: Skyfarer by Joseph Brassey
You’ve kind of heard this story before, or elements of it. Young trainee in a new power, from a sheltered backwater land, gets caught up in a struggle against an implacable tyrannical foe sweeping all comers against it. Young trainee is talented, perhaps more than they know, but the opposition is led by a charismatic and implacably evil head who would stop at nothing to get what they want, including using a doomsday weapon to get the Macguffin first. Magic, battles, intrigue, adventure and full-color glorious epic as forces collide and the fate of a world hangs in the balance. Off the shelf components in some cases, maybe, but infused with a mixture of fun and adventure, such a combination can be darned entertaining. Skyfarer is the debut novel by Joseph Brassey. The worldbuilding drew me in hard and early in the novel. We need a word for this kind of setting, since here at Skiffy and Fanty one of my fellow bloggers, Kate Sherrod, recently reviewed An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors. That novel’s universe features a set of floating continents in a Jovian planet’s atmosphere. Airships fly from continent to continent, with different cultures and polities on them. The roleplaying game Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies had a world like this, with a variety of layers of skies that islands from the small to continent sized drift in, and can be reached with ships made of a wood that defies gravity. And then there is the Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game where one of the Elemental Planes, the Elemental Plane of Air, is mostly an empty sky dotted with floating islands of various sizes. The Larry Niven novels The Integral Trees and The Smoke Ring, set in a giant oxygen bearing atmosphere in free fall, is an early example of this.
Book Review: MJ-12 Shadows by Michael Martinez
Syria, in the Middle East, is full of turmoil. Violence, political chaos, powers outside the region meddling and backing various factions and individuals, only enflaming and extending the conflict. The government there is on the edge of collapse, as outside agencies and internal struggles threaten to destroy Syria entirely. Good people trapped in a horrible situation that there seems no way out of, and everything even the United States tries to do just makes it all worse. A novel detailing the modern-day tragedy there? Sadly, no. The year is 1949, and we are in the midst of an alternate history, a history where the end of the Second World War and the start of the Cold War was marked by the emergence of paranormally gifted individuals, individuals who are scooped up by the espionage apparatuses of the United States and the Soviet Union, as the game of espionage takes a fantastic turn.
