I’m way ahead of the publication date for this one, but I couldn’t resist jumping right into The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles by the remarkable Malka Older. This is Book 2 of the Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti, my favorite detective couple since Holmes and Watson, and it’s another beautiful and charming story. As in […]
The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older
The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older, author of the remarkable The Centenal Cycle, is a many-layered book that becomes more and more interesting upon closer examination. On the surface, it is a very good mystery about the search for a missing man. It is also a fine relationship story about the investigator, Mossa, […]
When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill
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 […]
The Oleander Sword by Tasha Suri
In The Oleander Sword, the second novel of The Burning Kingdoms trilogy, Tasha Suri has produced an even more intensely involving and brilliant book than she did in The Jasmine Throne. That first novel richly explored the many selves and identities its characters had to adopt to survive as they strove to increase their power, […]
Spear by Nicola Griffith – A Review
Nicola Griffith’s short novel Spear takes us on a luminous journey deep in Welsh roots of Arthurian legend to record the exploits of Peretur as she seeks to understand her nature and the fate that awaits her at Caer Leon, the stronghold of Arturus and his Companions. As Griffith explains in her afterward, she has […]
The Outside by Ada Hoffman – A Review
There is so much to love, so much to be challenged by in Ada Hoffman’s The Outside. It’s one of those books I immediately set about re-reading because the characters and what happens to them are so compelling. One of those characters, as I think about it, is the Outside itself, that mysterious level of […]
