Book Review: Creatures of Light by Emily B. Martin
Emily B. Martin’s trilogy of queens comes to an end with Creatures of Light, a breathtaking finale that ties up loose ends and left me aching for more even as I celebrated such a glorious end. I call this series a trilogy of queens because each book is written from the perspective of a different, strong woman. In Woodwalker, we followed ranger Mae on her journey to reclaim her place in her home country. In Ashes to Fire, we watched Mona fight to keep her country free from their former conquerors. And in Creatures of Light, Gemma risks everything to preserve her dreams for her own country even as her country condemns her actions.
Horror review: Penny Reeve on A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge
Although she’s been a name within the young adult horror/fantasy scene for a while now, Frances Hardinge was recently projected into the mainstream public gaze when her novel The Lie Tree won the 2016 Costa Book of the Year Prize. After such a bar was set with her last novel, Hardinge’s fans waited with bated breath for her newest, A Skinful of Shadows. Luckily it is an intricate and masterfully told coming-of-age tale, full of intrigue and more than a little creepy, which lives up to expectations. Plus, it was nominated for the Waterstones Book of the Year Award 2017. Take that, Costa. A Skinful of Shadows is a dark fantasy novel, set during the English Civil War. We meet our protagonist, Makepeace, as a young girl who lives in the attic of her Puritan uncle’s house, along with her mother. She is haunted by very realistic dreams of ghosts and other terrifying things, and to help her deal with her strange affliction, her mother often forces her to stay in a church overnight to deal with the demons in her head.
Book Review: Windhome by Kristin Landon
An expedition to an alien planet goes horribly wrong, and the survivors try and find their way amongst a most alien culture in Windhome, by Kristin Landon. Forced quickly to survive with reduced numbers and a fear of what has occurred, the expedition’s goal to make contact with the locals and find evidence of aliens who have ravaged worlds, including the very world they have landed on, is the core of the plot. The heart of the book, though, is the social and sociological relations the three human survivors have with the tall furred aliens who live on the cold and heavily glaciated planet. Windhome is very much in the grips of an ice age, with continental glaciers having marched as far as they have in our own world’s most recent glacial maximum. The author does an excellent job with designing an alien species, the Anokothu, living on such a world, especially one that has recently suffered devastation and loss that has only narrowed the margins of safety and surpluses needed for life. The author provides some twists to their biology that inform and help drive the narrative. This is an alien society that is more egalitarian in some ways, but in other ways the values of the aliens are orthogonal to those of human and human society. They may be humanoid and look in the vaguest sense like humans, but the author makes it clear that they are simply not humans with funny rubber masks. This is also true of other species on the world, which have analogues to Earth animals, but definitely are not. Their riding animals, for example, may be used in the way of horses, but they are dangerous carnivores, and have to be handled carefully.
Book Review: The Dark Days Club by Alison Goodman
If you ever thought Jane Austen needed more demon hunting, The Dark Days Club by Alison Goodman is the book for you. In Regency London, Lady Helen Wrexhall is preparing for her presentation to the queen. Her parents died under mysterious circumstances no one talks about except to mention the shame Lady Helen’s mother brought to the family. This means that Lady Helen must be a paragon in order to avoid the stain of such an association and marry well. Which makes it very inconvenient when she starts to manifest unusual abilities. Having grown up being able to read the tiniest signs of emotion in people’s faces, she starts to find herself filled with a restless energy. When one of her family’s housemaids goes missing, Lady Helen sets out to investigate. She finds herself drawn into a shadowy side of the world she never knew existed and to the Earl of Carleston. Through him she learns the truth of her abilities and must choose between her duty to her country and her desire to lead a normal life.
Book Review: Prey of Gods by Nicky Drayden
Artificial Intelligences, Gods and Goddesses, tailored viruses gone wrong, mind-expanding drugs, political and social turmoil and more, all in a near-future South Africa, is the matrix where Nicky Drayden embeds an assortment of disparate and diverse characters in her debut novel Prey of Gods. The author’s penchant for mixing a variety of characters and a variety of genre elements that do not seem to match together or work together at first makes the novel one of the most intriguing and unpredictably diverse novels I have read in 2017. There are a number of threads and plots and stories going on through the novel in what at first appears to be a discordant tangle, but in truth is a layered and complex story that eventually comes together. The author slowly allows the silos of stories and characters and their individual genre elements to come together and mix, and recombine in the latter portions of the novel. It’s probably easiest to describe the individual silos and what’s going on, one by one, as a sense of what Drayden is trying to do in the novel.
Book Review: Behind the Throne by K.B. Wagers
Behind the Throne by K.B. Wagers takes a familiar idea, the fish out of water, from a distant part of a galactic empire, and updates it for a 21st century mentality and enlightened point of view. In not all, but many works past, the protagonist would be male, it’d be a patriarchal empire ruled by a King, Emperor, what have you. Women would have at best secondary roles, with even the occasional strong female character having a relatively unexplored interior life, and certainly not a full-on point of view that gives us her real story (I’m looking at you, Princess Leia). A man’s world, where men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. Some novels and novelists have tried to buck this sausage fest of space opera in the past. Elizabeth Moon’s Vatta series, for example. Some of Debra Doyle’s and James D. MacDonald’s Mageworld novels feature a strong female protagonist front and center. Even with these exceptions, Space Opera and space adventure have for decades been overwhelmingly a male-dominated and male-catered affair. Luke Skywalker and Han Solo cast long shadows indeed.
