I am embarrassed to admit that I started reading Clelia Farris’s brilliant story collection Creative Surgery thinking I was in the middle of a different book. That can happen with Kindle. Everything looks the same. There are no beautiful covers, unique typefaces, pages to turn down. You just open and there is the text. I […]
Son of the Storm by Suyi Davies Okungbowa
I like writers who take risks in introducing their heroes. Son of the Storm by Suyi Davies Okungbowa sets this first book of The Nameless Republic series on the continent of Oon and its dominant country called Bassa. But unlike the image of the sleek figure on the cover art, the protagonist appears before us […]
A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine
With a cascade of luminous and psychologically intricate prose, Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace picks up shortly after the conclusion of A Memory Called Empire. It’s another brilliant book that I find even richer than the first volume of this series on the Teixcalaan Empire and its remote satellite, Lsel Station. The two novels […]
Lagoonfire and The Inconvenient God by Francesca Forrest
Here are the first two completely captivating Tales of the Polity: the novelette The Inconvenient God and the short novel Lagoonfire. Their author, Francesca Forrest, suggests there will be more stories in her interview with the Little Red Reviewer. And I hope to see them soon. Forrest has a uniquely fascinating imagination that blends charming […]
Linda Nagata’s Pacific Storm: A Review
I put off reading Linda Nagata’s Pacific Storm for a while because I was so enamored of her far future epics that I wondered about a nearish-future thriller set in Hawai’i awaiting the arrival of a powerful hurricane. Well, once I got into the story, I couldn’t let go. Pacific Storm has that feel-it-in-yours-bones tension […]
A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark
P. Djèlí Clark’s A Master of Djinn returns to the alternate Cairo of 1912 featured in A Dead Djinn in Cairo and The Haunting of Tram Car 015. This time Clark has given us a full-length novel that offers much deeper insight into the richness of this remarkable world. Special Investigator Fatma el-Sha’arawi of the […]
