Reviews :: Book Genre :: Fantasy :: Page 45

I read about this book awhile ago. It was a story about a time machine repairman, who owns a non-existent dog. It also happens that his mom is stuck in a one-hour time loop, living the same Sunday dinner over and over and over. Also the protagonist’s (who just happens to be named Charles Yu just like the author) dad may have invented time travel. Oh, and Charles also killed his future self, so he’s wondering when his present will catch up to the past, where he gets shot. I read that premise and thought, wow, that sounds like a book full of great fun ideas. It looked like a fun book. I need to read that.
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I, like any decent purveyor of story critiques, am an author-hopeful. Once, about ten years ago and near the beginning of my writing “career”, I came up with the idea of evil monsters that could travel through shadows to get where they wanted. I thought at the time how creepy and cool something like that could be, and that I might actually use these shadow beasts in a story someday. That is, until a good friend of mine suggested that doing so might not be such a great idea because the bad guys could just wait until night time (or ANY time/place that it got dark) pop in on our heroes, slaughter the lot of them, and then take over the world. End of story. I’ve moved on since then. This novel felt like it hadn’t.
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Many people have strong feelings about Lev Grossman’s 2009 book THE MAGICIANS (Amazon). It’s inspired no small amount of passion—both for and against. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the book, it tells the tale of Quentin Coldwater, a young man who’s about as diehard of a Narnia fan as you can get. (Except of course Narnia isn’t actually Narnia. It’s called Fillory—but the parallels are too strong for there to be any doubt in the reader’s mind.) He’s a genius, extremely gifted, and kind of a major self-obsessed jerk. You know—like a lot of teenagers you know, except Quentin really is a genius. But he hates his life, and he wishes more than anything that Fillory were real, and that he lived there, instead.Read the rest of this review »

Gill, former Olympic track hopeful, ends her running career after a life-changing car accident as well as a relationship with her trainer-boyfriend. Julianna, world-famous sculptor, is on the verge of bankruptcy as the result of not having sold a single work for the last fifteen years. It’s at Julianna’s remote British estate where their stories merge. Gill rents the little cottage on the grounds with the intent to recover in some peace and quiet. At the same time Julianna is hosting a summer art school, and plans to muddle through somehow and keep the creditors at bay.

It’s during a stroll through Cairndonan Estate’s extensive grounds that Gill inadvertently walks into the Otherworld—and a man follows her out.
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Brent Weeks‘ immensely popular Night Angel Trilogy (Amazon) was published in quick succession. Readers had all three of his debut books on hand, devoured them, and then had to wait for his next novel. While imperfect, it was easy to see Weeks’ potential for spinning a good yarn. THE BLACK PRISM (EBR Review) has been released since then, but Weeks did take a little time to go back to the world he started out with, and gives us a novella about the assassin Durzo Blint.
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When you read a lot of novels, there comes a time when you need something… different. No farmboys who are destined to become the savior of the land. No elves or dwarves. No schools of wizards. No epic stories that plod along for 82 bajillion pages. Typically when the menu calls for something like this, Subterranean Press is the best place to go. But lately, it seems like Night Shade Books has the kind of story that is needed.
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Here we are with the Hugo novellas. In case you are wondering, a novella ranges from around 17,500 words and measures up to 40,000 words in length. There’s some beautiful stuff in this set of nominated works—in fact, it was a little hard to choose which was the best. In the end, this category will vary a lot from reader to reader. Anyway, let’s jump in.
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It’s been a while since I read these novelettes, but I wanted to sit on them for a bit to see which ones stuck with me, which ones disappeared from memory and just see when I came back to it, which ones were the best compared to the others. The question I hear a lot is, “What the heck is a novelette?” Simply put, it’s a work of fiction ranging from 7500 words to around 18,000 words in length. It is that piece of fiction that takes up the space between the short story and the novella.

There were some pretty good pieces of of fiction in this year’s Hugo nominated batch of novelettes. So here we go:
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There comes a time in nearly every series where the side characters of the first two or three novels become so interesting that they take on a life of their own. The readers beg, plead and offer bribes to the author for more information or more “screen time” for their beloved side-character. A lot of times we see this in the form of some short stories or novellas. But if we are lucky (sometimes), we get a full novel with that chosen side character as the main focus.

This was the case with Larry Correia‘s Monster Hunter series. From the moment the character Earl Harbinger was introduced in MONSTER HUNTER INTERNATIONAL, fans pleaded for Larry to write more about the werewolf. Larry relented, and we have MONSTER HUNTER ALPHA (Amazon) to show for it.
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This was my first foray into the works of Cathrynne M. Valente. It seems like whenever I would turn around someone (usually our resident reviewer, Shawn) would be saying how incredible a storyteller and writer Valente is. A guy like me can only take so much of that kind of hype before he gives in. Unfortunately reading an author’s work based off that kind hype can also lead to letdowns–it has happened to me more times than I can count. I was worried. Luckily for me (and for all you discerning readers out there), it seems that everything people are saying about Valente is true. She is amazing.
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