Set primarily in an alternative version of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, Kelly Barnhill’s magnificent When Women Were Dragons tells many stories. There is the story of the mass dragoning of April 25, 1955, when over 642,987 mothers and wives stepped out of their human skins to live as dragons, and of […]
And What Can We Offer You Tonight by Premee Mohamed – A Review
Premee Mohamed’s And What Can We Offer You Tonight is a tightly written novella about a story of rebellion from oppression focused on the inner struggle from the invisible chains of psychic servitude. And What Can We Offer You Tonight, narrated by Jewel, a courtesan at the high-end House of Bicchieri, begins with one of […]
9 Unforgettable SFF Standalone Novels I Read in 2020
I was surprised in looking over all the books I’ve read this year that the great majority of them belonged to series, but several were unforgettable SFF standalone novels. These were not all published in 2020 – in fact most are older, some quite a bit older, but they were new to me in this […]
King of the Rising by Kacen Callender: A Review
Freedom from slavery has a cost, not just in human lives but in the internal torture of mind and morality brought on by lifetimes spent in forced repudiation of one’s language, culture, religion and self-esteem. For an ex-slave to have a position of privilege in the midst of this history of oppression is all the […]
Queen of the Conquered: The Inner Violence of Power
Kacen Callender’s Queen of the Conquered, the first book in the Islands of Blood and Storm series, is a searching story of slavery, oppression and the inner violence of power. Set in a Caribbean island chain that had been colonized hundreds of years earlier by a light skinned people known as the Fjern, the novel […]
