After the self-assigned inundation of reading to vote in the Hugo Awards this summer, I took a break and read A House Between Sea and Sky, by Beth Cato. This semi-urban fantasy turned out to be a perfect recovery book for me, a little bit mysterious, creepy, and suspenseful, but ultimately quite cozy and comforting.
The last book I read by Premee Mohamed was The Butcher of the Forest, a dark fantasy that read very much like a fairy tale, in an extremely good way. But Mohamed has a huge range, so it’s not surprising that the next work of hers that I’ve read (I’ve missed several in the meantime, but I’ve been very busy), is something completely different, a spy novel. Yes, Wickhills also uses a dark fantasy setting, which is very important to the plot, but most of the book is about trying to outmaneuver other factions within a city-state, and figuring out whom to trust, so the main flavor here is espionage. It’s a complicated novel with complicated characters that grabbed my attention from the start and held it all the way through. From the publisher’s description on NetGalley:Looking after a defecting scientist should have been Vycol Ferec’s easiest mission. But now he’s on the run from the intelligence agency he works for, dodging a handler who might have gone rogue and relying on a secret patchwork of illicit resources and dodgy contacts. Turns out his defector might be carrying an apocalypse-level magical weapon — and protecting it requires Ferec and his team to go underground, literally. Down here, the rules are very different… and the tense peace between every city in the world will shatter unless Ferec can drag their darkest secrets into the light.
I was really impressed by Mary G. Thompson’s dystopic science fiction novel last year, One Level Down. Her new SF novel, Precious Children, shows that she is full of interesting ideas and can explore and execute them really well. I look forward to seeing more from her in the future! From the publisher’s description: A wealthy family trying to cheat death is overmatched—by a stubborn teenager hiding in a body that looks like their son. In this taut tale of genetics and entitlement, nature vs. nurture goes horrifyingly wrong.
My favorite stories from June and July involve cultural heritage, family, friendship, and political change.
The Night Pool is a book that’s full of brutality and horror, with the supernatural elements basically secondary to the tragedies and traumas mostly inflicted by white men during the Gold Rush in Conoma, California. Bringing light through this darkness are the female characters who reach out across ethno-cultural divides to support each other in sisterhood. In the end, there is comfort and strength to be found in this novel, despite the sad and terrible things that happen and that are done.
So yes, my expectations were thrown by the book seeming to be a Buddy Comedy. […] It took me time to realize that Cope was aiming for something else. Something more like if Leiber wrote the Gray Mouser as a vicious little girl and Fafhrd as an uptight and possibly racist wizard, and they really, really didn’t like each other.
