Here is a book I purchased for my mother’s birthday although I had not read it and I had read very few if any reviews of it at the time of purchase and I didn’t read it first. I got it for her only on the basis of the short excerpt NetGalley provided in their “Buzz Books” sampler. That is how much I love the narrative voice of Nao Yasutani. A very very lot. I’m leading with that because the synopsis of this book would not have induced me to read it. One of the two lead characters is —…
22 CommentsReading the End Posts
The Mapmaker’s War is hokey but not in the way I expected it to be. And it is a lot like Ronlyn Domingue’s first book, The Mercy of Thin Air, except with that book’s good qualities deployed in a much less awesome way. All in all I’m glad I didn’t get it for Mumsy for her birthday, because I think she will like A Tale for the Time Being much better. The Mapmaker’s War‘s “magic bean” — a term I’ve stolen from Clare! — is that it’s written in the second person. An older version of the protagonist, Aoife, is…
16 CommentsI have been wanting to read this book foooooooreeeeeeeveeeeer. I mean, ever since I heard of it. The plot is that this carer, Oscar Lowe, is walking through Cambridge one day and is lured into a church by the sounds of heavenly organ music. In short order he falls in love with the organist’s sister Iris, from whom he eventually learns that the organist himself, Eden, believes that he has the power to heal people with music, maybe even to bring them back from the dead. Or, in the short version of this synopsis, everyone’s in Cambridge doing creepy experiments.…
17 CommentsThings I do not like in books include: Dudes wandering around trying to get laid Jokey nods to historical situational irony Unrepentant asshole protagonists And yet here is the first paragraph of The Teleportation Accident. When you knock a bowl of sugar on to your host’s carpet, it is a parody of the avalanche that killed his mother and father, just as the duck’s beak that your new girlfriend’s lips form when she attempts a seductive pout is a quotation of the quacking noise your last girlfriend made during sex. When the telephone rings in the night because a stranger…
15 CommentsThe original subtitle of this post was “Laini Taylor should build all the worlds,” but I reconsidered. I guess I don’t want Laini Taylor to build all the worlds, but she should at least be on the official worldbuilding committee. It would be her, JRR Tolkien, JK Rowling, Susanna Clarke, and NK Jemisin. And some other people. TBD. You’ll notice I left George R.R. Martin off this list. I did that on purpose. My official worldbuilding committee will consist of authors whose worlds ARE NOT SUPER RAPEY SO THERE. (On that subject see also this and this.) What I thought…
35 Comments