I got started with Hugo voting a couple years after perennial nominee Seanan McGuire broke through with a Best Novella win for Every Heart a Doorway, so I haven’t read the entire Wayward Children series of portal fantasy novellas, but last year’s nomination of Come Tumbling Down and its associated backstory for me two-thirds of… Continue reading Fantasy Novella Review: Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire
In about a month, I’ve gone from never having read anything by Becky Chambers to having read two novels and a novella. While neither of the other two hit the five-star threshold, I could see clear progression as a writer from her debut to her Best Novella finalist. And so I was looking forward to… Continue reading Sci-fi Novel Review: The Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers
Not being especially enamored with either steampunk or fantasy detectives, A Master of Djinn is a book that I wouldn’t have cracked without a pretty significant push. But enough people were excited about P. Djèlí Clark’s debut novel in his existing steampunk Cairo setting that it made the short list for the Hugo Award for… Continue reading Fantasy Novel Review: A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark
After whittling our initial 30-book allotment down to three, my SPSFC team has received six more semifinalists from other judging teams. Our scores of these six new books, along with our original three semifinalists, will combine with with 81 other scores (nine each from nine teams) to determine the SPSFC finalists. Each of the six… Continue reading SPSFC Semifinalist Review: Dog Country by Malcolm F. Cross
The beginning of the year is always a scramble to reshuffle the TBR after seeing a cavalcade of “Best of the Year” lists. And one of those books that showed up quite a few times was Jennifer Marie Brissett’s Destroyer of Light. Brissett is an author that’s been on my radar for a while, so… Continue reading Sci-fi Novel Review: Destroyer of Light by Jennifer Marie Brissett
After my first year of participating in the Fantasy Bingo challenge left me starting a bunch of new series and leaving myself on cliffhangers, I decided that this year, I’d get extra ambitious and do a themed card with all sequels. This was before the card was actually released, and one of the squares was… Continue reading Fantasy Novella Review: The Four Profound Weaves by R.B. Lemberg
Max Gladstone is an author that I’ve had on my list for quite some time. His books are almost universally liked in my circles, he’s won awards, and his Craft Sequence neither has a high barrier of entry nor the required commitment for an extended series. And yet, as reading challenges and shiny new objects… Continue reading Fantasy Novel Review: Full Fathom Five by Max Gladstone
I really loved Benedict Patrick’s Yarnsworld novelette “And They Were Never Heard from Again,” but I found the series’ first novel They Mostly Come Out at Night to be a disappointment. So I returned to the creepy forest of the Magpie King for a third Yarnsworld story with some trepidation, and again came out with… Continue reading Fantasy Novel Review: From the Shadows of the Owl Queen’s Court by Benedict Patrick
Nominations for both Hugo and Nebula Awards certainly put Finna on my radar, but I knew next-to nothing about Nino Cipri’s debut novella before reading it—in fact, I mistakenly thought that the title was a reference to the African American slang for “going to” (by way of the Southern US idiom “fixing to”) rather than… Continue reading Sci-fi/Fantasy Novella Review: Finna by Nino Cipri
The title is great, the cover is gorgeous, and Benedict Patrick’s novelette “And They Were Never Heard From Again” was one of the best stories I read all of last year. So dipping back into Yarnsworld for the first full-length novel was a no-brainer. They Mostly Come Out at Night is a dark fairy tale, with… Continue reading Fantasy Novel Review: They Mostly Come Out at Night by Benedict Patrick
