Posts from 2016 :: Page 5

Ben Gold is in serious trouble. After the events in FALLING SKY, he now finds himself imprisoned on a ship captained by a man named Malik who would like to see Ben dead. Fortunately, Ben has the brilliant Miranda, who negotiates for Ben’s life by offering her medical skills in a post-apocalyptic world where such a resource is in short supply. The question is: standoffs don’t last forever, so how will they escape?

Ben has spent his life as a scavenger in a world where only the clever and strong survive, which means Ben has talents of his own. So he negotiates for his life in exchange for scrounging up ship parts Malik needs to keep his boat afloat. But Malik has Miranda, which doesn’t give Ben much leverage.
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I think I’ve mentioned before just how utterly cool it is to have this job as a reviewer. The other week I was having this conversation with a couple guys from work that went something like this:

Guy1 to Guy2: You like reading fantasy, Guy2. You should read Dan’s review blog.
Guy2 to Me: You have a blog? Which one?
Me to Guy2: Elitist Book Reviews. It’s a website now, but yeah I write for them.
Guy2 to Me: Wait. You write for Elitist Book Reviews?

Turns out he’d been following our site for quite some time and we were only then figuring it out. Way cool stuff. Love it when that happens. Of course, there are down-sides to the job too. The one that probably irks me the most is that there are times when I just don’t feel like I have the free time to read a book off-the-schedule that I’d like to because I really need to read from my ever-growing review pile in order to keep up with what I’ve committed to writing. Occasionally though, I do get to go off track for a bit, and thus it was, with a good degree of tardiness, that I finally got around to read Red Rising (EBR Review) recently. Immediately after finishing, I ran out and got Golden Son, because RED was seriously amazing. And now I’m here writing this, and I’m able to tell you that the next book in the series is just as amazing, if not completely more so.
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Continuing my Horus Heresy binge I have another review for you! This time we have PHAROS by Guy Haley (Amazon), Book 34 in Black Library’s massively successful tie-in series. It’s a bit of a leap from my last review given that ANGEL EXTERMINATUS (EBR Review) is Book 23, is set in an entirely different theatre of the galaxy spanning civil war, features a completely different cast of characters, and even delves into different themes. There exists some Horus Heresy novels that can be read out of their numerical publishing order but if you haven’t been following along with the series I would not recommend starting with PHAROS. It’s essentially a sequel within a sequel within a series. It’s sequel-ception! That said, I’ll try not to reveal too much about the book in case you’re intrigued by the Horus Heresy but uncertain about jumping into a series that is currently 38 books long.
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Have you ever read a book that is just magical? I don’t mean a book with magic in it. There’s a million of those out there (and I like quite a few of them), but a book that is magical. There’s a difference to it, isn’t there? Books that are magical have a different feel to them. It’s beyond a compelling story (although again, I love that).  It’s just a feeling you get when you read it. I think it’s kind of like wrapping up in a warm blanket, or sitting by a fire and letting the warmth diffuse through you. That is what UPROOTED by Naomi Novik was like for me. I would sit and read and a warmth would just spread through me. This book is magical.

I’ve read some of Naomi Novik’s work before and I’ve enjoyed her Temaraire books. I saw UPROOTED when it came out and it looked kind of fun, but I had a lot on my plate and I never got around to it. Then it was nominated for a Hugo award. Then it won the Nebula award.  By this point I’m thinking, “Ok, let’s give it a shot.” I’m so glad I did.
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HOLLOW CITY starts right where MISS PEREGRINE’S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN leaves off, our hero children on the run from the horrible hollowgasts and wights. Their main concern is for Miss Peregrine, herself, who needs help returning to her human form, but they need to find another of her kind to perform the magic. So off they travel in search of help, all the while being pursued. The exciting beginning events teach us the reality of their situation and what they must do to find help, and…

…yawn.
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So, I totally picked this audiobook off the shelf because the cover totally caught my eye and the title latched me solid before I could move my eyes away. Absolutely couldn’t pass it up once I’d seen it, and I’m so glad that I read this one. Lots of potential in a title like that, don’t you think? Well, if you’re in for a little horror that is, and we’re usually game for that around here at EBR. And even though all of the stories weren’t exclusively about slasher girls and monster boys — there were, for instance, some slasher boys and some monster girls, heh heh — nearly all of the stories did a great job of staying true to the theme of the anthology.
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I’ve been on somewhat of a Warhammer 40,000 reading binge of late. Or, more accurately, a Warhammer 30,000 reading binge as each of the five titles I’ve devoured in the past month has been set in the Horus Heresy event series. I’m a Warhammer 40k fanboy (I have the Imperial Aquila tattooed on my chest), but I’d taken a few year hiatus from the universe. Now I’m back with a vengeance and there is a surplus of new material to gorge on. The most recent Horus Heresy novel I’ve read, ANGEL EXTERMINATUS by Graham McNeill (Amazon), is the 23rd book in a series that is currently on its 37th installment. The books are penned by multiple authors, and all of the books are connected by larger events and characters but not all are necessarily sequential. It’s a truly impressive collaboration. It’s been ten years since Black Library began publishing the Horus Heresy and a lot has happened since the opening trilogy. ANGEL EXTERMINATUS is perhaps most closely tied to the fifth book in the series, FULGRIM (Amazon), also written by Graham McNeill. ANGEL EXTERMINATUS is also a prequel of sorts to several of Graham McNeill’s books set 10,000 years after the Horus Heresy two of my favorite 40k books: STORM OF IRON (Amazon), DEAD SKY BLACK SUN (Amazon); one of my least favorite: CHAPTER’S DUE (Amazon). In any case, ANGEL EXTERMINATUS is not the place for newbies to start.
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Patricia A. McKillip’s writing is often described as ‘ethereal.’ If you’ve read really anything by her you would be nodding your head. In her most recent anthology, DREAMS OF DISTANT SHORES, we are treated to her lovely prose, with a collection of stories that are surprisingly different. They are alternately strange and silly, but all are thought-provoking.
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I don’t review enough of the books I read, and I don’t read enough books in certain genres or categories to really review them. On the Best of 2015 EBR list, I marked BLUESCREEN by Dan Wells as one I was looking forward to. I don’t really read YA as a category (I am neither young, nor an adult, so my wife says), and so I admit some bias, but I like cyberpunk and dystopia, and here we are.
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Isaac Vainio, once-librarian and now major player on the world stage, helped reveal magic to the world along with certain Porters and allies. The Porters are an organization of magic-users founded by none other than Johannes Gutenburg himself. Libriomancy, discovered by Gutenburg, is magic using books and “libriomancers” are able to pull things out of books, things that real authors have imagined and in which a certain amount of belief exists from readers, which fuels the magic. These items–weapons and magic cloaks and healing elixirs–and even characters, have a profound effect on the real world, with mixed results and sometimes dire consequences. Jim C. Hines has taken this idea and developed it in a most satisfying way. He often references favorite sci-fi and fantasy classics, even some obscure geek favorites, and also simply makes books up when he needs them. These are some of the best, especially when they parody bad speculative fiction.
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