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Book Review: Of Sand and Malice Made by Bradley Beaulieu

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Before she started her quest for vengeance against the Twelve Kings of Sharakhai, Ceda had a different encounter with the supernatural otherness that infuses the world of the Shattered Sands. Early in her career as a pit fighter, her exploits, and a chance encounter, brought her to the attention of Rümayesh. Rümayesh is an ehrekh, a creature of fire and chaos living in Sharakhai under the guise of humanity. Her interest and fascination with Ceda, however, as with all who attracted her attention, is a corrosive, sadistic and destructive one, as befits her nature. Ceda found herself having to protect much more than just herself in order to ward against the creature’s manipulations. This is the story told in Of Sand and Malice Made, by Bradley Beaulieu. Of Sand and Malice Made isn’t really a prequel as I expected at the outset, but rather a side story to Ceda’s main tale. While Twelve Kings of Sharakhai has a number of threads in different time periods, Of Sand and Malice made is a much more straightforward narrative, set in a single time frame in between a couple of the time frames in Twelve Kings. Ceda is already the White Wolf, but relatively young and new to the arena, her youth being much more noteworthy than her skill. Ceda is still fighting for a place there, fighting to make her name. The novel does well in showing that she’s not the force of nature that she is in the “present” portions of Twelve Kings in Sharakhai.

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Book review: Firebrand, by A.J. Hartley

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I hate, hate, hate coming into a series in the middle (which means no, I haven’t read the first novel in this series, Steeplejack, but I sure plan to soon!), but I have a good personal track record with author A.J. Hartley, so I knew that if anyone could write a good middle book that still stands on its own it would be he. My assumption, in this case, proved absolutely correct, in case you’re wondering. Firebrand is the second volume in Hartley’s steampunk-flavored, young adult series “Alternative Detective”, and takes place a few months after the events in the first novel, which took a young woman from “steeplejack” (a person who works up high on the roofs and sides of very tall buildings, mostly cleaning chimneys but also doing repairs and maintenance and other sundry jobs) to amateur detective, and landed her in the very informal employ of a member of her city-state’s Parliament. As this novel opens, Anglet Sutonga is now enjoying an unaccustomed level of financial security and autonomy, but her sense of duty and survival instincts don’t let her get too comfortable, so as the novel opens, she is chasing an infamous cat burglar over the rooftops of Bar-Selehm, which leads her into a whole new mystery of linked and nested conspiracies, exploitation, human trafficking, treason and, of course, murder.

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Book Review: All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells

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A SecUnit assigned to the exploratory group PreservationAux has a problem. Two in fact. As an android, it’s supposed to serve the small exploratory mission to which it has been assigned. The SecUnit’s entire function is to support the exploratory mission’s investigation of a local planetary environment that it has placed a bid on to look at. Androids like SecUnit are a safety precaution from the Company because, well, alien planets can be rather hostile. And of course, they are handy recording devices, too, for the Company that is. A mandatory helper and a spy for anyone looking to explore the wild frontier in space. Given that planets are not monolithic single-biome worlds, having multiple teams from competing groups spread out across a newly found world is a pretty regular thing. Who knows what you will find over in the next valley, down the river a bit, from another team. One team can’t find everything on a planet.  So when a neighboring team to SecUnit’s goes dark, that’s a bad sign for its team, a major concern.  What disaster befell them? Environmental? Natural? Something else? Given the proximity, is it a threat to PreservationAux, and to SecUnit itself?

Torture Cinema Polls

Torture Cinema Poll: Mayday!

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Well, everyone, Babylon AD was pretty awful. More awful than some of us remembered. So good job on your April pick! This time around, there are no redeeming features to any of these movies. We swear. None. So pick away and be confident that whatever you do choose, it will be torturous for our participants!!

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Retro Childhood Review: Fog Magic

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“It’s the things you were born to that give you satisfaction in this world, Greta. Leastwise, that’s what I think. And maybe the fog’s one of them. Not happiness, mind! Satisfaction isn’t always happiness by a long sight; then again, it isn’t sorrow either. But the rocks and the spruces and the fogs or your own land are things that nourish you. You can always have them, no matter what else you find or what else you lose.” Portal fantasy is a popular genre for middle children’s fiction, as evidenced by the fact that 3 out of my 4 Retro Childhood Reviews are about children finding their way to new worlds. In The Neverending Story, Bastian is escaping a grief-filled reality; in Firebrat, Molly is learning to appreciate her Grandmother; the reasons for traveling through portals are as varied as the stories themselves. But portal fantasy, at its core, allows a child reader to travel to new worlds along with the protagonists. Fog Magic, by Julia L. Sauer, a Newberry Honor Book, is an absolutely charming addition to the genre. Though this is not a book that captures my heart to the level of some of the others on my shelves, it is nonetheless one that I turn to from time to time, to escape to the simplicity of an earlier age.

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