Welcome to Elitist Book Reviews!
We're a small group of people that just happen to have better taste in books than you. :) Aside from being completely awesome, we also read lots of books and love to give out our opinions like candy. What's your favorite flavor? Science fiction? Check. Fantasy? Double-check. Horror? Can't do without a little of that. So find yourself an awesome chair or comfy nook quick, because you're about to find a whole lot of recs for a whole lotta great books.
Recent PostsA Sea of Storms
It seems to me that nautical tales don’t get near enough attention. At least within the fantasy genre, that is. There aren’t many that I can pull to mind. Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch, Robin Hobbs’ Liveship Traders books, Tide Child books by RJ Barker. There are some really cool steampunk airship books around too — Chris Wooding’s Ketty Jay books, Butcher’s Cinder Spires — but they only kind of count. I did come across another one from Tor a while ago: The Sin in the Steel by Rayn Van Loan, that was pretty decent (review to come).
There are obviously more out there that I’m not listing here, tons of little stories from authors that relatively few have heard of and some that are just escaping my normal bear-trap of a mind, but still it seems like it takes more effort than it should to come up with any kind of significant list. Now, I’m not one that necessarily goes out looking for specific things in my fiction. The semi-recent rash of marketing efforts that I’ve seen in this vein are more than a little ridiculous. But, if you happen to have noticed the same dearth of ocean-faring fantastical tales and find yourself in the mood for something out of the ordinary, this book might be just the one for you.
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Back from the dead
Well, yeah, I know it been about forever since we’ve posted anything here. No excuses. Life just got the better of us, and we didn’t make the effort to pick ourselves back up off the floor… until now.
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Residue by Steve Diamond updated and re-released
Hey there, all! Thought there’d be lots of readers out there that would want to know our illustrious founder, Steve Diamond, has updated and re-released his debut novel after some not inconsiderable publication difficulties, and we’d be remiss if we didn’t make at least some little bit of noise about it.
Residue has been given a hefty uplift and re-published with Primordial Press. Additionally, Parasite, the sequel to Residue, has been released in quick succession. Watch for a review of that one soon. If you’re up for a quick read about a psychically altered college-age student trying to fight back against wicked corporations, vicious monsters, and a history he’s just learning about, this book is for you. If you read the first incarnation of the book, this round has shifted the MCs to be a little older, and brought in a bit more of the horrific that Mr. Diamond is so well-known for.
Congrats to Steve! Here’s to hoping for many more […]Read the rest of this post »
Warriorborn
There are relatively few authors for whom I’ll buy physical copies of novellas. By and large, they end up being too short for the money they cost. Falls into the same category as Audible books that are only 3 or 4 hours long but still cost me a full credit. Not that length, necessarily, lines up with goodness, but it absolutely lines up with potential *amount* of goodness, yeah? When it came to this one, I found myself smack dab on the top of fence. After all, it was being released at essentially the same time as the next novel in the main series, and it had been forever since the last (first) book in the main series came out. What if the novella ended up being super important to the story? What if it was a connector? Gah! I just couldn’t do it. So, I bought the thing, and here we are.
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Yumi and the Nightmare Painter
Yumi and the nightmare painter is book 3 in Brandon Sanderson’s “Year of Sanderson” and like TRESS OF THE EMERALD SEA (EBR Review) it sometimes has a fairytale quality to it, with a mind-bending setting, magic that helps the people survive a harsh world, and characters you can’t help but love despite their flaws.
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The Dragon’s Promise
Shiori’s continuing story from SIX CRIMSON CRANES, begins in book 2, THE DRAGON’S PROMISE, as she travels with Seryu, her dragon friend, to the bottom of the sea, to meet the king of the dragons.
If you haven’t read SIX CRIMSON CRANES, then this book will not make much sense to you; it doesn’t make very a good standalone because you get a lot of important backstory, setting explanation, and magic development that will only make sense if you’ve read book 1. Otherwise what follows will be horrible spoilers. (You’ve been warned.)
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Six Crimson Cranes
A friend recommended SIX CRIMSON CRANES, explaining that it’s a sweet story for young adults with romance and a creative re-telling of the traditional six swans fairytale.
And fortunately, that’s what it turned out to be.
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Witch King
The great thing about Martha Wells is that even if you don’t read anything about the book beforehand, you can be guaranteed it is something different and unusual. And in a good way. WITCH KING is one such book.
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The Far Reaches
It seems like my social media feeds have been getting slammed lately by ads for this new anthology of science fiction stories put together by Amazon. Almost seemed to double in frequency after I got them, oddly enough. Sometimes it just boggles my mind how much money must flow through the coffers of social media ads, and I can’t help but wonder how much of it goes to absolute waste. In this case, it got me to pick them up, but everything since then? Yeah.
You’ll notice that our image doesn’t match the name of the collection. Yup. Thank you e-book collections. So, instead I just included the cover for the best story in the group. Hint hint. Wink wink. Nudge nudge.
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Eversion
If there are any core concepts more central to the genre of science fiction than mind-bending ideas, awe-inspiring vistas, and grand adventure, I don’t know what they are. In the relatively short time period since the fantasy genre has split from it, and stories written under its guise have taken us up and out into the cosmos, many authors have endeavored to fill the space with their version of the best kind of fiction. I may be biased, but in my view there is no better fiction than great science fiction. And Alastair Reynolds is writing some of the best science fiction there is.
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