This review is based on an eARC (Advance Reading Copy) provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Sky Full of Elephants will be released on September 10, 2024. Sky Full of Elephants, Cebo Campbell’s debut novel, has been marketed almost entirely outside of genre spaces, but an audacious speculative premise and… Continue reading Fantasy Novel Review: Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell
In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan is not a story that would’ve caught my attention based on the blurb, but I have so many bookish friends who adore it that it’s been on my TBR for years at this point. It also fit at least two tricky squares for my themed Bingo card this… Continue reading Fantasy Novel Review: In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan
I read plenty of C.S. Lewis as a kid, but the reputation of Till We Have Faces for philosophical density scared me off. Then, as an adult, my lukewarm feelings toward Greek myths and desire to diversify my reading kept me from picking it off the stack. But an offline book club picked it for… Continue reading Fantasy Novel Review: Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
I go back and forth about whether to review readaloud children’s literature as part of my regular blogging, but I was using Wise Child by Monica Furlong toward my 2023 Bingo challenge for the elusive Druid square, and honestly, I thought it was good enough to deserve a standalone review. Wise Child is a short… Continue reading Fantasy Novel Review: Wise Child by Monica Furlong
This review is based on an eARC (Advance Reading Copy) provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Service Model was released on June 4, 2024. I’ve been a fan of Adrian Tchaikovsky for a few years now, though his tendency to release books faster than I can read them has kept… Continue reading Sci-fi Novel Review: Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky
I’d been hearing a lot about the work of John Scalzi for a long time, but I hadn’t actually read any until his pandemic novel, The Kaiju Preservation Society, made the 2023 Hugo shortlist. And with the appearance of Starter Villain on the 2024 Hugo shortlist for the Best Novel category, this is the second… Continue reading Sci-fi Novel Review: Starter Villain by John Scalzi
I’ve read a little bit of Vajra Chandrasekera’s short fiction, and I’ve been consistently impressed with his prose and creativity, but just as consistently finding myself at the end wanting a little bit more. So I decided to skip his debut novel, The Saint of Bright Doors, only circling back around when it surprised me… Continue reading Fantasy Novel Review: The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera
There were a pair of novels in 2023 with eerily similar—and discouraging—hype cycles. Both Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh and Witch King by Martha Wells were hailed as the next big thing, with as much pre-release buzz as anything I saw last year, and then completely fell off a cliff post-release, with a few… Continue reading Sci-fi Novel Review: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
We’ve made it to the finals of the third annual Self-Published Science Fiction Competition. My team has whittled down a slush pile to two semifinalists, and then joined up with two more teams to cut our combined six semifinalists to just two finalists. Now everybody is reading the same books, as only six remain. And… Continue reading Sci-fi Novel Review: Memoirs of a Synth–Gold Record by Leigh Saunders
Usually I manage to finish a pair of Bingo cards with a bit of time to spare, but this year, March saw me still hunting for a couple more books to fill some tricky squares. One of those tricky squares was Set in the Middle East, and I decided to circle back to an acclaimed… Continue reading Fantasy Novel Review: Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson
