I am not a Hemmingway fan but I have to appreciate his comment on sleep: “I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?” This feels extremely true sometimes, but in fiction, sleep isn’t always safe from disaster either. Here are 15 stories that feature strange relationships with …
How Kinch, our narrator, tells the story makes this novel so exceptional. It’s as if you’ve run into the thief at a tavern in this world, after the events of a series, and become drinking buddies with Kinch. Now, he’s telling you the whole story of how he ended up here in the first place as you pick up the next rounds of ale.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built, the new novella from Becky Chambers, though obviously brief, is a complete meal: it has the rich depth of philosophical reflection, the acid brightness of humor, and the unfamiliar spices of a whole new planet. (Well, moon.) Most of all it is satisfying. This is the kind of book that …
I was on page 27 when I realized I didn’t want this book to end. That’s early even for a particularly great book, and this is truly a particularly great book. From the very first pages to its last, its greatness shines. Elfreda is a low-ranking sister in the ruling theocracy of Aytrium, a small …
Parenting is tough even in the best of times. When the cyberpunk distopia you’ve been escaping for the last thirteen years suddenly shows up on your door, you might start to wonder how far you’ll go to protect your kids. It’s a tale as old as time as we review Dryad on this episode of …
Is it weird to call a horror novel charming? Because Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke is definitely charming. Disturbing, upsetting, and frightening yes, but it just starts out so endearingly, with a quirky little exchange about an antique apple peeler via emails. Agnes, a young woman trying to sell her family’s kitchen …
How important is a story to you? Important enough to hear? What about important enough to learn, so that you can tell it again? Is it important enough to preserve—important enough to write down, if you know how to write, important enough to recite if you can’t? Important enough to die for, to kill for? …
When gods go to war, it is no small thing. The Shadows of Gods by John Gwynne is a Scandanavian-inspired grim and dark book that nevertheless avoids the common pitfalls that come with the label of grimdark fantasy. It is not grim for grim’s sake, as in, it is not without hope and light moments. …
Zychtykas Three—Kas—is a broke mecha scholar from offworld. Zhi is a broke mecha fighter and also a broken mech fighter, using whatever she can scrape together to enhance an antique model for modern pit fights. When their lives collide, all manner of sparks start flying, although they have to risk everything to keep those sparks …
The series, A Chorus of Dragons by Jenn Lyons, since its first book The Ruin of Kings, released in 2019, has quickly become the series I look forward to the most. The fourth book, The House of Always, is no exception. It continues to balance the world-building, plot, and character development of the characters and …