Book Review: Don’t Sleep with the Dead, by Nghi Vo (and The Chosen and the Beautiful, and more)
Don’t Sleep with the Dead … delivers some prose that make me sigh with delight and envy, as well as some passages that are harrowing with their intensity and dread.
Poetry Book Review: The Thorn Key, by Jeana Jorgensen
It’s not a long collection, containing about 40 poems (some just a few lines, many several e-pages long), a foreword, a list of content warnings/triggers, a fascinating multi-page afterword, and an appendix that lists which fairy tales inspired which poems. I don’t necessarily recommend trying to read all the poems in one go, since that may blunt their edges and impacts, but rather reading a few per day, taking time to savor them.
Book review: Soulstar, by C.L. Polk
Even though I have a heavy reading schedule of new books for Skiffy and Fanty, it was absolutely worth the time to go back and read Soulstar.
Review: Necrobane by Daniel M Ford
Some of the less than smart choices Aelis made in the first book, and in this book, really do come back on her. This is a book that is all about the consequences of personal actions, on scales ranging from Aelis’ health, to the fate of a friend, to the main plot, the wave of undead threatening the borderlands that she set in motion.
Book review: Motheater, by Linda H. Codega
This book did not go where I was expecting with the main plot, but I loved the twists and turns that it took. People with the best of intentions can be blind to the harm they’re storing up for the future, and anyone can make promises that end up being derailed by events beyond their control…
Book Review: Ida by Alison Evans
Next weekend I’ll be attending Continuum, a speculative fiction convention held in Melbourne. Whenever I’m attending a convention, I always like to try to review something by one of the Guests of Honour. This year, Continuum is playing host to Alison Evans, one of Australia’s up-and-coming talents in YA SFF. Their debut novel Ida won the Victorian Premier’s People’s Choice Award and was shortlisted for this year’s Aurealis Awards. The story is about Ida, a young woman with the ability to go back in time and revisit any decision she’s ever made. The decision can be as trivial as which type of shampoo she buys to something as important as choosing to drive another route in order to avoid a fatal car crash. However, one day Ida finds herself saddled with the consequences of a decision she’d previously tried to avoid. Then she starts traveling back in time against her will.
