Book Review: Cuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge
It is England during the reign of King George V. The Machine Age is at its peak, and human society is in flux, becoming increasingly urbanized, secular. The Great War has come to a close, but the traumatic devastation it has wrought echoes on in family’s lives. Nations struggle to recover and political/economic turmoil presages greater conflicts and changes to come. What the future holds is not only a concern for humanity, but also for The Besiders, a race that has lived alongside us in the margins, driven further into the isolated shadows as human civilization spreads. Eleven-year-old Triss Crescent awakens in a bed surrounded by her parents and a doctor, her memory fragmented and incomplete. She gradually recalls that the family is together on vacation, and that she has had an accident, coming close to drowning in the Grimmer, a local millpond. But she has difficulty remembering the details of how she fell in, or how she managed to get out. Triss’ younger sister Pen was there to witness the accident, but Pen sulks in the corner of the room, far from Triss, and won’t say more than angrily proclaim that Triss is lying, pretending; that Triss is not who she claims to be.
Book Review: The End of the Sentence by Maria Dahvana Headley and Kat Howard
Malcolm Mays has been running from a tragic event in his past. His flight has taken him to the tiny community of Ione, Oregon. There, he has bought an old, abandoned house to make his own, sight unseen. Much to his surprise, the town knows all about the House, and its reputation casts a long shadow indeed. Worse, Malcolm is getting impossible letters from a prisoner, Dusha, in the Oregon state prison who should be long dead. A prisoner that tells Malcolm that the house will “welcome him” but that Malcolm must prepare for Dusha’s release from the prison at the end of the sentence. Impossible letters, a haunted house, dark secrets, the dread coming of Dusha, and Malcolm’s own tragic past come together in The End of the Sentence, a Subterranean Press novella, a collaboration between Maria Dahvana Headley and Kat Howard.
Book Review: The Copper Promise by Jen Williams
Sebastian and Wydrin are mercenaries and adventurers, longtime friends and partners, doing jobs for coin in a way and manner familiar to a lot of sword and sorcery fiction. Sebastian is the big guy, a defrocked paladin of a mountain god. Wydrin is an infamous rogue of the port city of Crosshaven known as the Copper Cat, deadly with two blades. The opening of the book starts off straightforwardly enough, with the pair hired by a deposed noble to break into a magical vault. A magical vault that contains a long imprisoned scaly God and followers that the pair inadvertently free. Oops.
Book Review: Aurora: Darwin by Amanda Bridgeman
In the Solar system of 2075, the UNF, an extra-national and international force deriving from all of the nations of Earth, handles much of the policing and issues among the variety of space stations and habitats. The UNF handles international disputes on Earth as well, and many who have Earth Duty in the UNF dream of Space Duty. Corporal Carrie Welles is the daughter of one of the first UNF soldiers to ever get Space Duty, an Original. Living up to her father and her family’s name is important to her. Thus, when Captain Harris of the Aurora is assigned Corporal Welles, and two other female recruits in the bargain to a formerly male-only ship, and given mysterious orders to visit a silent space station on the edge of inhabited space, Mars orbit, this is Welles’ big chance. She’s already made a name for herself as a sharpshooter on Earth, but those skills are going to be far more useful than she expects when the mystery of the Darwin is uncovered.
Book Review: The Clockwork Dagger by Beth Cato
Octavia Leander is a healer, and a talented and blessed one at that. A graduate of Miss Percival’s school for the training of Medicians, those who can not only use herbs and other remedies to heal the sick, but draw upon the power of the Lady to do wondrous feats of healing, even wounds and conditions that threaten the victim with death. Octavia’s desire to use her talents, and an offer to help a village on the far end of the nation of Caskentia from her, leads her to board an airship for the long journey. On that ship, Leander faces intrigue, adventure, romance and danger, the latter especially in the person of the eponymous agent of the Queen, The Clockwork Dagger. The Clockwork Dagger is the debut novel from Beth Cato.
Book Review: Genevieve Cogman’s The Invisible Library
A seemingly endless Library, with books from across multiple worlds. A library with connections and portals to endless worlds. It can take hours, even days, to get to locations within the library. It is a Library of the first order, in the same tradition as Pratchett’s multidimensional and universe-spanning idea of L-Space in his Discworld novels. The Librarians are devoted to the love of books, their acquisition and preservation. They travel to alternate worlds in search of rare books, of key books, of special books to add to their collection. This process does not always go well, especially with the rarer finds. Irene is a junior librarian of the Library. When she is assigned a new assistant (who is clearly more than he appears) and a seemingly simple task to find a book in an alternate London, things start going wrong immediately.
