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You are here: Home / Archives for shape-shifting

Monkey Around by Jadie Jang

By John Folk-Williams

Monkey Around by Jadie Jang

Here’s another great novel from 2021 I’m just catching up with. Claire Light, writing as Jadie Jang, has re-envisioned the Monkey King from the Chinese classic, Journey to the West, as Maya MacQueen, a shape-shifter twenty-something woman of the San Francisco Bay Area during the Occupy movement of 2011. Maya, while assuming human form as […]

Filed Under: Fantasy Fiction Tagged With: Asian-American, identity, indigenous culture, Jadie Jang, shape-shifting, urban fantasy

Embertide (Book 3 of The Fallow Sisters) by Liz Williams

By John Folk-Williams

Embertide

Liz Williams’ Embertide is the third outing with the Fallow Sisters (following on from Comet Weather and Blackthorn Winter), and it’s another time-slipping and spirit-battling adventure with Bee, Serena, Stella, Luna, and their reality jumping Mom, Alys. Spirits, both good and evil, frequently interrupt their lives in present-day England. Assisting them are a troupe of […]

Filed Under: Fantasy Fiction, Great Series Read Project Tagged With: England, freedom, gods, Liz Williams, myth, primal Britain, shape-shifting, spirits, star beings, time travel

The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez

By John Folk-Williams

The Spear Cuts Through Water

Impressed as I was by Simon Jimenez‘ beautiful and moving first novel, The Vanished Birds, I have to say I’m just staggered by his second, The Spear Cuts Through Water. Using the second person, the narrator lures “you” with intensely lyrical but dramatically apt prose into a world between worlds. One of several story tellers […]

Filed Under: Fantasy Fiction Tagged With: dreams, epic fantasy, family, gods, magic, myth, shape-shifting, Simon Jimenez

The Outside by Ada Hoffman – A Review

By John Folk-Williams

The Outside by Ada Hoffman

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 […]

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: artificial intelligence, autism, consciousness, obsession, religion, sapphic love, shape-shifting, technology

The Singing Hills Cycle by Nghi Vo #WyrdandWonder

By John Folk-Williams

Singing Hills - Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo

Look, I can’t pretend to keep up with the outpouring of fine SFF writing we are now witnessing, so I’m dipping into the recent past to discuss a pair of stories that are so perfect in their way that it’s hard to write about them. Nghi Vo is a storyteller of dazzling gifts, and her […]

Filed Under: Fantasy Fiction, Wyrd and Wonder Tagged With: Asian fantasy, empire, love, memory, nonbinary, shape-shifting, story-telling

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Something is struggling to be born in this damaged and inspiring world, and I believe science fiction and its speculative cousins are helping us figure out what it is. It’s pushing the imaginations of fiction writers to bend and twist familiar forms to try to capture the forces that are hurling us into a barely conceivable future. This blog is my small way of exploring the half-perceived … Read More about About

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