Book Review: FKA USA by Reed King
Marketed as a cross between The Wizard of Oz, A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Road, and Ready Player One, Reed King’s FKA USA chronicles a misfit cast’s perilous and irreverent road-trip across the variegated geopolitical landscape formerly known as the United States of America. Published under the acknowledged “Reed King” pseudonym of a bestselling author and TV writer, the novel presents itself as an unabridged and annotated memoir composed by protagonist Truckee Wallace between 2086 and 2088 about events he experienced a year prior. With an irreverent tone lampooning social and political issues, the novel puts a lot of disparate ingredients into one romp of a tale. Its ultimate success for any given reader will largely depend on the type of humor they appreciate.
Book Review: The Wise and the Wicked by Rebecca Podos
Rebecca Podos’s The Wise and the Wicked is a love letter to the struggles of a young girl as she tries to be herself in the middle of a dysfunctional family. Chock full of magic, sisterhood, and love, The Wise and the Wicked was a fast read that caught me from the very beginning. I found myself really feeling for the main character, Ruby, a 16-year-old who doesn’t expect much out of life. While I finished this book fairly quickly, it’s one that will stick with me because of its well-written, fascinating characters and its open and unpredictable ending. If you like books with strong female characters who take charge of their own destiny while also doing their best to be normal teenagers who fight and fall in love, this is definitely one for you.
Book Review: The Abyss Surrounds Us by Emily Skrutskie
Pride month might be over, but it’s never too late for lesbian pirates and kaiju. However, don’t expect fluffy YA romance from The Abyss Surrounds Us. This is a post-apocalyptic YA sci-fi that follows a tradition of tackling darker topics. Where The Hunger Games looks at living under an oppressive regime and In the Dark Spaces addresses being the sole survivor of a massacre, The Abyss Surrounds Us tells a tale of emotional manipulation and abuse. It begins with climate change. The oceans have risen, the flood walls of New Orleans have fallen, and the governments of the world have split into smaller territories. Ostensibly, these splits were intended to make it easier to protect these smaller population clusters. However, some people always fall through the cracks, leading to a pirate problem in the NeoPacific. Cassandra Leung is a teenager from the Southern Republic of California. Her family is part of the world’s solution to the plague of pirates. They breed and train Reckoners: giant, genetically-engineered sea creatures created to protect their bonded ship. The Reckoners have proved a very useful solution thus far, albeit one that relies on a delicate ecological balance. The creation of Reckoners is carefully monitored so that enough food can be engineered to feed these monsters without disrupting the rest of the ocean’s ecology. In order to preserve both this ecological balance and the political power balance, Reckoner handlers are expected to protect the secrets of their industry with their life, if necessary.
Book Review: VELOCITY WEAPON by Megan E. O’Keefe
Over the last few months, I’ve rediscovered just how spectacularly fun a good space opera can be. Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire had me hooked from its start, and reading Laurence Suhner’s captivating Vestiges has me baffled that no publishers have picked up her Quantika series for translation from the French to English. In addition to those, space opera fans can now add Megan E. O’Keefe’s Velocity Weapon to the to-read list. You may already recognize O’Keefe’s name from her successful steampunk fantasy, the “Scorched Continent” series, or you may have already caught the interview with her by Paul and I for the Skiffy & Fanty podcast. Her first book in The Protectorate series, Velocity Weapon is a well-crafted interplanetary adventure full of twists and turns, compelling characters, and irresistible teases of an expanded terrain for the chapters to come.
COMICS REVIEW: Looking at the 2019 Best Graphic Story Hugo Finalists
Welcome to the latest installment of my comics review column here at Skiffy & Fanty! Every month, I use this space to shine a spotlight on SF&F comics (print comics, graphic novels, and webcomics) that I believe deserve more attention from SF&F readers. This month, I’m going to take a look at the nominees for this year’s Best Graphic Story Hugo Award. Warning: these reviews contains spoilers! As regular readers will know, I’ve been in the habit of using this space to both recommend works that might otherwise be overlooked by Hugo voters during nomination season and taking a look at the short list in advance of the deadline for voting. If you aren’t already familiar with this year’s ballot, you can read the complete list here, but if you don’t want to click away, here are the finalists for this year’s Best Graphic Story Hugo:
Book Review: Do Not Go Quietly: an Anthology of Victory in Defiance edited by Jason Sizemore and Lesley
What are you fighting for? Your space? More space? Your territory? More territory? Your reputation? A better reputation? A better outcome? The best possible outcome? — Bianca Lynn Springgs “Plot Twist” from Do Not Go Quietly: An Anthology of Victory in Defiance Bianca Lynne Spriggs’ volume-closing poem “Plot Twist” challenges the reader with these provocative questions and many more, and had I been doing editors Jason Sizemore’s and Lesley Connor’s job, I would have been sorely tempted to put it first rather than last. However, since this poem’s challenges are as good a return to the real world we’re all stuck in as they are a microcosm of the themes this collection explores, I can absolutely see why they chose otherwise. Which is to say that Sizemore and Connor earned every nickle they could ever conceivably be paid for producing Do Not Go Quietly: An Anthology of Victory in Defiance.
