Author name: trishmatson

Educated as a physicist yet living as a journalist, Trish Matson is an award-winning writer and editor whose ever-expanding list of interests includes a lifelong love of SF/F, plus wordplay, libraries, games, music, dancing, audio drama, and podcasting. She’s listed as TrishEM on various fora, but you can find her most easily on Twitter.

Cover of Ruiner, by Lara Messersmith-Glavin, featuring a bounding hare with wings, and hooved rear legs, above a murky area.
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Book Review: Ruiner, by Lara Messersmith-Glavin

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Ruiner is a novel about a world where old ways and new are clashing, with a city that extracts resources from outer territories to benefit some of its citizens, and where disputes are settled via combat storytelling. The two protagonists start far apart, as one is a desert-dweller and another is a street rat, but events and elements in their lives draw them into each other’s arcs. Author Lara Messersmith-Glavin does a great job of drawing characters with rich backgrounds and inner lives. I really enjoyed diving into this world and learning about its people, and the ending definitely left me wanting more.

Cover of The Geomagician, by Jennifer Mandula, featuring trilobites, ammonites, a pterodactyl, a skeleton of an ichthyosaur, and various plants, with a cameo brooch of a woman.
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Book Review: The Geomagician, by Jennifer Mandula

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Mary Anning was a real-life professional fossil collector and dealer in the first half of the 19th century; given the breadth and depth of her knowledge, she was also a paleontologist, but that wasn’t officially acknowledged until after her death, since she was a woman and therefore ineligible to join the Geological Society of London. In her excellent debut novel The Geomagician (coming March 31), Jennifer Mandula reimagines Mary as a woman living in a world with magic, in which fossils are the best medium for storing magical power. Hunting for freshly exposed fossils after a landslide, she is thrilled to discover a pterodactyl skeleton — and then one of the fossilized eggs comes to life and hatches in her hands! Mary is suddenly faced with new opportunities in her life, and new challenges.

Cover of It Came from the Floodwaters by Seann Barbour, featuring a blue skull against a black background, with red lettering.
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Book Review: It Came from the Floodwaters, by Seann Barbour

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If you’re looking for an entertaining, tightly focused horror tale with interesting, diverse characters and a strong arc for the protagonist, you should consider Seann Barbour’s new novella, It Came from the Floodwaters, coming March 13. It starts out with people trapped in their Savannah apartment building by rising floodwaters, throws in some spooky notes, and then quickly escalates to pulse-pounding action with a high body count. But because the Big Bad is particularly interested in one special person, there’s also lot of creepiness woven throughout the story, along with the adrenaline rushes.

Cover of Hell's Heart, by Alexis Hall, featuring a great eye surrounding by squirming pink tentacles, against a black background.
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Book Review: Hell’s Heart, by Alexis Hall

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It did take me just a little work at the beginning of the book to get into it. If you hated Moby-Dick for its pacing, or lack thereof, and for all its digressions, you’ll almost certainly hate Hell’s Heart too. If you hate disaster characters, you’ll cringe at many decisions made by “I.” But there’s much more than enough in here to keep an attentive reader thoroughly engaged and entertained. I thought it was great!

Cover of Nobody's Baby, by Olivia Waite, featuring two men and a woman dressed in Edwardian(?)-style clothing, leaning over a big white crib with a baby in it; the room has plants, but behind them are windows revealing a starfield.
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Book Review: Nobody’s Baby, by Olivia Waite

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Using medical logs and other ship records, Dorothy quickly finds out the baby’s genetic heritage, but its origins are still swaddled in mystery. There’s a highly suspicious gap in the memory of someone who really ought to know what happened, so Dorothy has to do a bit of digging to find out the motives of several people involved (or not) with this little bundle of joy.

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