Skip to content

Category: 3 Stars

Review: The Power, Naomi Alderman

Since its release in 2016, Naomi Alderman’s The Power has been impossible to miss, receiving accolades from the New York Times and President Barack Obama, among many many others. The premise is that women — through a new organ called a skein, located at their collarbones — suddenly become more physically powerful than men, able to transmit strong jolts of electricity. Things go downhill pretty quickly. I resisted The Power because I am tired of power and the things people do to keep it. 2016 was the year Alton Sterling was killed in my home state. 2016 was the year…

Leave a Comment

My Lady’s Choosing, Kitty Curran and Larissa Zageris

You are the plucky but penniless heroine in the center of eighteenth-century society, courtship season has begun, and your future is at hand. Will you flip forward fetchingly to find love with the bantering baronet Sir Benedict Granville? Or turn the page to true love with the hardworking, horse-loving highlander Captain Angus McTaggart? Or perhaps race through the chapters chasing a good (and arousing) man gone mad, bad, and scandalous to know, Lord Garraway Craven? Or read on recklessly and take to the Continent as the “traveling companion” of the spirited and adventuresome Lady Evangeline? Or yet some other intriguing…

Leave a Comment

Review: This Mortal Coil, Emily Suvada

Welp, this is going to be hard to review without spoilers. But I’ll do my best to segregate the spoilers from the non-spoilers in a secure bunker where contamination won’t be possible. (That’s a humorous This Mortal Coil joke for you.) Catarina Agatta has spent the last two years fending for herself after the dangerous corporation Cartaxus showed up and took away her only companions: Lachlan Agatta the world’s leading gene-coder and may be the planet’s only hope for wiping out the deadly Hydra virus. Then a supersoldier named Cole arrives at Cat’s house with the news that her father…

Leave a Comment

Epidemiology and Elevators: A Romance Novels Round-Up

Among the many things wrong with 2017 as a year is the fact that I hardly read any romance novels during it. What happened? I do not know! Either my brain just forgot romance novels were a thing, or else I was having such an amazing reading year that I didn’t have time to pause and spend some time doing comfort reads. Either way, NO MORE. In 2018 I am going to get back to reading my romance novels, because I love them and they are a blessing in my life. Here is a small round-up of some of the…

Leave a Comment

January YA Round-Up

Here’s what happened in January: I had to wear this neck brace that made it impossible to ever sit comfortably. In part because of this, I was very, very cranky in the month of January.1 Every time I thought about going out and doing something, I’d be like “ugh I’m too cranky for that so instead I will stay home and read and that will cheer me up.” But because it was impossible to sit comfortably, staying home and reading did not cheer me up. But because I am very stupid, I did not figure this out until I had…

5 Comments

Noumenon Is an Ambitious, Frustrating Space Opera

After telling everyone that I was hype as fuck for Marina J. Lostetter’s debut SFF novel Noumenon, I now can’t remember where I heard about it. If you’ve read and loved this novel, drop me a note in the comments and clear up my confusion. I’d probably have given up at the start if I hadn’t heard so much good about it; but then, of course, I wouldn’t be writing hundreds of words about the ways it wasn’t successful. Noumenon is the story of a generation ship (well, a convoy of generation ships) setting out to explore an anomalous star…

6 Comments

Review: The Bloodprint, Ausma Zehanat Khan

Note: I received a review copy of The Bloodprint from the publisher. This has not impacted the content of my review. As Katie always says, it would take more than a single copy of a single book to buy my loyalty. Arian is a warrior, linguist, and Companion of Hira, an order of women who draw their power from the Claim, a type of magic that draws its power from sacred scripture. They are battling against the Talisman, a movement led by the One-Eyed Preacher that seeks to eradicate scholarship and knowledge and the written word and to subjugate all…

3 Comments

Review: The Bedlam Stacks, Natasha Pulley

Note: I received a copy of The Bedlam Stacks from the publisher for review consideration. This has not influenced the content of my review. So a funny thing about Natasha Pulley is that I resisted reading The Watchmaker of Filigree Street for ages, as the cover and premise sounded much more whimsical than I thought I’d be into. But actually, the word I’d use for both that book and her sophomore novel, The Bedlam Stacks, is melancholy. They are really not whimsical at all, so if — like me — you have been avoiding them for that reason, do not…

4 Comments

Review: Jubilee, Margaret Walker

I’d like a show of hands who’s heard of Margaret Walker’s book Jubilee, a 50th-anniversary edition of which was just recently released. Because I hadn’t, and I’m mostly angry with myself about that, but largely angry with America. There’s honestly no reason we should still be talking all the time about Gone with the Wind and I’ve never heard of Margaret Walker’s book Jubilee. Seriously. (A note: You don’t need to defend Gone with the Wind to me in the comments. It has plenty of defenders already and it is doing absolutely fine even now that I have mildly criticized…

9 Comments

Review: Strange the Dreamer, Laini Taylor

My God, Laini Taylor has a lot of ideas. Have we talked about how many ideas Laini Taylor has got? The inside of her brain must be an absolutely wild place to be. Strange the Dreamer is the first in a new series (her earlier one having finished up with Dreams of Gods and Monsters in 2014), and it’s a hell of a ride. Lazlo Strange has always been a dreamer, and what he’s dreamt of is the lost city across the desert. For many centuries, travelers came to Lazlo’s country on camels, bringing stories of a city of domes…

10 Comments