Book reviews of new and old, local, national and international books. Anything goes.
Ancillary Sword is the second book in the Imperial Radch series, an intergalactic saga featuring an imperialist, AI-controlled empire and a genderless society by way of words. The human and ancillary citizens aren’t biologically genderless, but do not use male identifiers. Everyone is “she”, “her”, “sister”, and “mother” as customary in the controlling Radch empire….
Bonnie Milani is one of my favorite indie authors. She is the author of Home World, a science fiction novel that absolutely blew me away and solidified Milani as one of my favorite authors to watch. Cherry Pickers & Liquid Gambit are two short stories, one rising from the species who inhabited the universe in…
Crooked Kingdom is the second book in Leigh Bardugo’s popular Six of Crows duology, another story line in her world of Grisha which began with the The Grisha Trilogy. In this YA political and paranormal high fantasy, our six crows had just completed an impossible heist only to find betrayal as a reward and one…
Six of Crows is the first book in Leigh Bardugo’s new duology set in her high fantasy world of Grisha magic. Her first series, Shadow and Bone, takes place in the same world. Although this trilogy was released first, it doesn’t need to be read prior to delving into Six of Crows. The stories are…
Swedish sensation Fredrik Backman has been providing the world with hearty laughs and tender smiles through his runaway international success in A Man Called Ove. It’s a favorite among book clubs and perfect for beach reads. And it helped get me out of a reading slump. Washington Square Press | May, 2015 | Paperback |…
I tore through Aveyard’s third (but not final) book in the Red Queen series. These books have some addictive qualities: they’re easy to read, and they’re really, really hard to put down. Just one more chapter and I swear I’ll call it a night – two hours later at 3 am, you say the same thing….
Glass Sword is the second book in Victoria Aveyard’s wildly popular Red Queen series. In this young adult high fantasy, the world is divided by blood type: red versus silver. The Silvers maintain control with their varying paranormal abilities while the Reds, normal humans, serve and die underneath them. But a rebellion is growing with…
Haruki Murakami is an international bestselling author from Japan with a number of massively popular books to his name. A few years back, I read his 1Q84 omnibus and became an instant fan. It was a slipstream mix of literary and surreal fantasy that captivated my imagination. Kafka on the Shore dwells in the same vein of literary…
Another hyped-up series! How can I resist? I’ve been looking to get to this series for a while and now that the third book is out, I went ahead and got all three for a back-to-back reading. Red Queen has been blowing up GoodReads since its release in 2015 and judging from the sheer volume…
When this book was picked for book club, I was skeptical. It just isn’t something I would pick up on my own. Judging from the description, I assumed this book would be filled with extreme right-wing political rhetoric. I’m more of a middle-of-the-road person, with the exception of my feminist leanings, and extreme point of…