Category :: Review
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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Legionnaire
I’m always on the lookout for a great, quick read, and when I came across this one, I decided pretty quickly that it fit the bill.
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The Heirs of Babylon
I haven’t read near enough Glen Cook.
I keep telling myself this, and yet my penchant for continuing to push his books down my TBR pile is, quite frankly, fairly embarrassing. I actually received this book quite some time ago, and only recently took the chance to read it. Mainly because it was short and I needed to get to something short. One of these days I’m going to figure out how to get ahead of the review game again, and have these things scheduled out. Until then, one foot in front of the other.
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The Wolf
It’s not often I come across a modern book that’s been written from the 3rd-person omniscient viewpoint. Especially recently. For those of you not in the know, this means the story is told from an external perspective (like a god) that knows the thoughts and feelings of all characters, knows information that a given character doesn’t know but that you the reader should, and almost always employs the use of “head-jumping”.
There are very few instances where a book written in such a way will not turn me off very quickly. For me, an experiential reader, consuming a story from the viewpoint of one character, and then suddenly finding myself experiencing the story from the viewpoint of a different character, without some kind of obvious change in the narrative (a chapter end; a break in the text to denote a change of scene) is very disorienting and immediately off-putting.
Every once in a while though, a book written in this way will come along that doesn’t completely ruin the experience of the story for me. Almost invariably, this is because the story “sticks” to a single POV for the large majority of the time. I.e., minimal head-jumping. DUNE is one that immediately comes to mind, but that was written in another era completely.
I can’t think of any others. Though, I might be guilty of having some selective cognition here.
The point is that this book is a second that succeeded for me where others have failed.
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