This novella speaks my language: queer, noir, cyberthriller. This combination of genre keywords is like magic for my mind and soul. I’m always up for This novella speaks my language: queer, noir, cyberthriller. This combination of genre keywords is like magic for my mind and soul. I’m always up for the latter two (see Harkaway’s Titanium Noir!), but add in queer and I’m soaring.
This is an engrossing and intriguing novella about a trans woman who sets out to investigate the murder of her former lover who was still living at the anarchist commune that she herself left in a fit of grief and pique some time ago. It explores themes of identity, memory, grief, belonging, nihilism, control, security, friendship, ethics versus morals, creating and maintaining safe spaces, and self-discovery.
I think reading the afterword for this novella is very important. I don’t always read the afterword in a book, but sometimes it’s nice to read where an author’s head was at when you have questions about why they might have written something a certain way (even if you have your own theories, which is fine). When some authors write, characters take on minds of their own and start to make choices the author didn’t think they’d make when they started writing. Reading the afterword for this book helped me understand where Wasserstein was coming from in her writing, even with my own theories floating inside my head.
This was a great read and I highly recommend it. Since this is a trans sci-fi and does involve trauma and some hate speech I suggest you look up CW/TWs online if you need them.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
I knew within the first few chapters that The Stars Too Fondly was going to be a five star read. By the end of the book I knew it was going to be a boI knew within the first few chapters that The Stars Too Fondly was going to be a five star read. By the end of the book I knew it was going to be a book I needed on my shelf, a book I was going to scream about, and is 100% going to be on my top ten list at the end of the year. It’s one of the best books I’ve read this year, and as of the-book-before-this-one, I’ve read 315 books so far this year.
There’s a line in the blurb: “So, here’s the thing: Cleo and her friends really, truly didn’t mean to steal this spaceship.”
SAY LESS. PLEASE.
Sapphic space adventure rom-com with a strong found family component, a swoony star-crossed love story, and a diverse cast? Are you kidding me right now with some of my all-time favorites vibes all vibing in the same book?
Debut author Emily Hamilton seriously sat down and wrote a book that does what few books do to me more and more: Make me long for extra stars, because if I could rate this book six stars I totally would.
The book pulls you in from the start, with Hamilton’s ragtag group of queer twenty-somethings who just want to peek inside an abandoned spaceship and see what they can glean about the mystery of what happened to the entire crew, who disappeared with a flash of light on launch day. You know what they say: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. They messed around and now they get to find out why it may not be such a good idea to go poking around in strange, abandoned spaceships. Or maybe it’s the stars aligning just right and this was meant to happen.
The story is engaging, propulsive, emotional, romantic, poetic, and so well-crafted I wish I could shake Emily Hamilton’s hand and thank her in person. I cried more than once and I couldn’t tell you how much I love these characters. I just vibed with this book on every level. Can’t recommend it enough.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
Everything about this novella sounded spectacular when I requested it.
The reality of it was much different.
The reason I love novellas is because theEverything about this novella sounded spectacular when I requested it.
The reality of it was much different.
The reason I love novellas is because they manage to pack a wallop of a story in a small packet of pages and still do it with style. Ideally, you should never feel like you’re reading a “short book”. It should feel like the book is the exact length it needs to be to fit the story. This means it should accomplish everything a full book should accomplish in its limited page count.
Navigational Entanglements didn’t feel like that to me. It took too long for the inciting incident to occur. There was too much filler. I didn’t feel like the book was trying to engage me or compel me. Mostly, I was bored.
A novella thrives on economy, and there was just too much waste in the pages. If this book had been more intriguing, faster-paced, or intelligent, then I might’ve been more interested. As it stands, it was hard to finish.
I was provided a copy of this title by Netgalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. A two star or below rating means this review will not be appearing on my social media. Thank you.
File Under: LGBTQ Sci-Fi/LGBTQ Romance/Novella/Sapphic Romance/Sci Fi/Space Opera ...more
Q: What was your favorite television show as a kid?
If you’re one of those people who’s ever been completely incensed when a television show has been wQ: What was your favorite television show as a kid?
If you’re one of those people who’s ever been completely incensed when a television show has been working for seasons towards putting a queer couple together only to have one (or both!) of those characters killed off or suddenly being magically straight as a plank, then you might completely identify with Misha, the protagonist of Chuck Tingle’s speculative fiction novel Bury Your Gays.
Yes, you read that correctly: speculative fiction novel. This novel is marketed as both horror and science fiction, but that’s a spectacular indicator a book is likely to end up in that nebulous category called speculative fiction. When you throw genre fiction into a blender and add a dash of, “What if we add in this variable here?”, then I consider that to be speculative fiction. I hate pigeonholing books like this further because I believe it lessens their appeal and reach. If you like body horror, over-the-top violence, poorly-veiled Hollywood references that were likely written that way on purpose, a protagonist who starts out the book righteously angry and just keeps on getting more justifiably angry, mysterious Hollywood execs who are only worried about money to an inhuman degree, Hollywood caricatures and stereotypes, coming out stories, award show shenanigans, horror villain origin stories, seeing the true damage of AI on the environment and on Hollywood manifested, and love an easter egg, then you’ll dig this.
Did I like it as much as Camp Damascus? No. I find Camp Damascus to be the better of the two novels, but that’s not down to Tingle’s talent as a writer. That’s all about my tastes as a reader. I have a harder time with books that have male protagonists just in general, and I also had expectations this book would lean further into body horror than it did. Combine that with me correctly guessing a good chunk of what happens in the back half early on and it just affected my overall enjoyment. Tingle is a really effective story plotter and has a great sense of energy, imagery, and atmosphere.
It’s a great novel and a lot of fun. You’ll enjoy getting to be as mad at Hollywood as Misha is and cheer him on as he fights to write what he wants.
TWs for: Child abuse/neglect, homophobia, hate speech, gore, very violent deaths, blood
I was provided a copy of this title by Netgalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
File Under: Body Horror/Horror/LGBTQ Horror/LGBTQ Fiction/Science Fiction/Speculative Fiction
So, the thing is: I’m still not sold on alien smut. But I am sold on this alien smut. Because when I was reading this series, but especially this finaSo, the thing is: I’m still not sold on alien smut. But I am sold on this alien smut. Because when I was reading this series, but especially this final book in said series, the fact that the MMCs were aliens didn’t matter in the least. It hasn’t mattered the whole time. When I’m reading the spicy scenes in these books I’m often too caught up in the way C.M. Stunich writes (which is always stunning) to bother worrying about which parts goes where. Who cares how many tentacles are in which orifice? Not me. I care about what Officer Hyt is saying and feeling, and I care about what Eve is saying and feeling. No more. No less. Because what they’re saying and feeling is actually hotter than which part is going where.
To be honest, everyone’s possessiveness, attentiveness, and protective natures is a way bigger turn-on than almost everything else. The way Hyt, Abraxas, and Rurik constantly cover Eve in pheromones and mark spaces is both touching and sexy in a way I’d never condone in real life but find distinctly appealing when a tiny human female is stuck in outer space among environments and alien races who would love to see her dead.
I loved the first half of the book as Eve spends time with Hyt on Yaoh, waiting for Abraxas to arrive and playing “fake-fiancee” with Officer Hyt. She gets to play “possessive girlfriend” and it’s so much fun. I loved the second half of the book more, as she reunites with Abraxas and Rurik and all four of them try to figure out the rest of, well, everything. (Anything more than that would be spoilers).
The playful, sisterly banter Eve has with Jane is hilarious and familiar for anyone who has a bestie who’s as close as a sister. After not seeing much Abraxas since book one I was so happy to have him back. He’s just a dragon-y cinnamon roll who’s incredibly competent.
Watching Eve and the guys come together and pull their stuff together in order to make everything work is everything I could have wished and hoped for out of this series. I loved it so much. I’d love to see what happened to some of the supporting characters in the aftermath of this story. I’ll wait and see what Stunich will do.
All opinions, thoughts, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
Here we go with another book that ensnared me with magic words like “art thief”, “stolen artifacts”, and “anthropology”. What can I say? I’m a sucker Here we go with another book that ensnared me with magic words like “art thief”, “stolen artifacts”, and “anthropology”. What can I say? I’m a sucker for thievery by academics…well, for thievery in general. If you add in outer space, it’s like book catnip! I blame Doctor Who.
Thanks to Bria Strothers at Flatiron Books, I was granted access to the eARC and sent a copy of the physical ARC of this book after my request had sat in NetGalley’s pending request pit forever, and I’m so grateful because I absolutely loved this book!
There’s a line deep into this book that is sticking with me. One could say it’s a throwaway line, but it speaks so much to the themes in this story: “Primitive is more permanent”. That is to say: The longer it took and the harder it was to create something, the more permanent it is. This is also applicable to everything from planets to moons to species: the longer they’ve been around and the more adversity they’ve seen, the more knowledge they’ve gathered and the more permanent their mark on the universe. There is no up and down in space. No time. There is only distance, and some things are too far away to ever be rescued or remembered. Who’s to know if it’s better that way or not?
In many ways, this book feels like a deep space “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”. Maya has been longing to find the Stardust Grail for the sake of her best friend, Auncle, for a long time. Auncle shows up with a scrappy crew and picks up Maya, who has a lead, and they’re off to search for this artifact, which means one thing to Auncle and Maya and something else to the interstellar military officials that are hot on their tails and after the same thing they are. The groups cross paths several times. The book is quite fast-paced, but not to the point of frenetic, which is a good thing, because there are times when emotion and connection need to happen and be absorbed in order for this book to work on all levels.
The climactic scenes in this book are astoundingly well-written and choreographed. It’s a complicated scenario that had to be hard to keep track of and it was executed brilliantly. I was absolutely thrilled with the whole thing.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley, Flatiron Books, and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
I read Pheromone and freaking loved it so much, but I didn’t write a review for it. I don’t remember why. Knowing me, I meant to and forgot. After I fI read Pheromone and freaking loved it so much, but I didn’t write a review for it. I don’t remember why. Knowing me, I meant to and forgot. After I finished Seminal, though, I knew I had to write one because this series is absolutely phenomenal and I need people to get up and not sleep on it.
I don’t usually go for the alien romances where the aliens aren’t humanoid. I know, right? I wasn’t even a fan of Ice Planet Barbarians. There’s something about Stunich, however, that always makes me want to give any genre or trope a try. She’s a terrific writer with fabulous FMCs, an absolutely hilarious sense of humor, and I’ve always enjoyed how sex-positive her writing is. There’s no shame in Stunich’s game, folks.
Stunich has always had such a talent for writing dialogue and creating an amazing amount of sexual tension and chemistry between her love interests that even I, as someone who doesn’t get hot for non-humanoid aliens, was able to feel flushed and squirmy during the spicy stuff because the “alien” aspect of everything was almost the last thing I was thinking about–it was the snap, crackle, and pop of how intense everything felt between Eve and the aliens she’s falling for.
A lot of stuff happened in Seminal, but somehow the book didn’t seem rushed or crammed. That’s proof of good writing, pacing, and editing. Eve has a lot thrown at her, but there are MMCs and supporting characters to help absorb some of the exposition and some of the emotional blows. Poor Avril gets to bear the brunt of Eve’s reckless, stubborn, and sometimes careless behavior, but honestly she’s one of my favorite characters (and the inside jokes between Rurik and Eve about how they should go about killing her made me snicker continuously).
I love that Eve and Rurik both have some internal conflicts regarding the physiological manipulation that their bodies and minds are going through to make them compatible mates, but I love that Eve wants to find a way to free Rurik from the same fate as his father, too. Rurik truly wants to be a good mate and king, but there’s a lot of deprogramming to do there. Officer Hyt? Oh, you poor baby. And steady, protective, fierce, dedicated, loving Abraxas. I love him to the moon and to Saturn.
I can’t wait for Venery, which should be out soon. I never thought that I’d be so happy for a side project that took Stunich away from the F*ckboy Psychos series, but I am.
This review was written without any offer of compensation. All opinions, thoughts, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. ...more
Cascade Failure is just plain fun to read. It’s got that found-family-full-of-misfits feeling from Firefly mixed with a whole lot of adrenaline-spikedCascade Failure is just plain fun to read. It’s got that found-family-full-of-misfits feeling from Firefly mixed with a whole lot of adrenaline-spiked space adventure and a truly great sense of emotion and humor. It was science fiction sunshine in a book…except with way more dead bodies. So maybe a partly-cloudy day in science fiction land?
I’m an atheist, but there’s a saying that goes something along the lines of: You make plans and god laughs. Well, something like that is certainly what happened when a guy named Jal is wandering around the docks on a space station looking to board a ship for his own (very personal) reasons and accidentally lands himself exactly where he doesn’t think he wants to be but maybe exactly where he needs to be. The captain is an AI who is more human than most humans, the engineer is also the doctor and wouldn’t know tact if it smacked her in the face, and the XO and he have…issues. Let’s call them issues. It’s just easier that way.
But then they intercept a distress signal from a planet where everyone’s died all at once from something horrible, and the lone survivor has a story to tell, a theory about it, and a possible solution. They’re all absolutely nuts, but if they survive they might have just saved the universe.
I know Sagas is a debut author, but this really doesn’t feel like a debut effort; and when I say that, I mean that it feels almost effortless. I feel like the crew of The Ambit has been living in Sagas head for a long time, like they’re friends rather than characters. The world building in this book is amazing, like maybe Sagas has been writing backstories for these characters, these planets, these space stations, and everything involved for quite some time now–almost like simulations she would eventually use to finally build the language that would bring this book to life. It’s an amazing story that ends up being a compulsive, page-turning read. I’m dying for book two!
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
File Under: 5 Star Review/Book Series/Found Family/Science Fiction ...more
Often I find I love these punch bowl novels more than most straight-up genre fiction novels. By punch bowl, I rather mean something like what I and myOften I find I love these punch bowl novels more than most straight-up genre fiction novels. By punch bowl, I rather mean something like what I and my friends call “jungle juice”: a bottle of this wine, a bottle of this liquor, a bottle of that liquor, a bottle of champagne, a bottle of some clear soda like 7-Up, a whole lot of frozen, chopped up fruit thrown in to keep it cold and to mask the taste of the alcohol… You know? A little bit of everything thrown into one big bowl until it becomes something dizzying, delightful, and unpredictable.
That’s what The Ministry of Time is: part-spy thriller, part-time travel romance, part-science fiction novel, part-psychological fiction, a whole lot speculative fiction (which is really what this novel should just be classified as, but try telling that to marketers), and it’s all wrapped up in such lovely storytelling prose I can only describe it as literary fiction.
This book led me through hill and dale, up mountains and down into valleys. It was funny, only to take a steep drop into darkness. Romantic one second, only to turn around and be bereft the next. Often I didn’t know if I should be crying or not. Sometimes I’d find myself crying and didn’t know I had started. This story and these characters wound themselves around my heart, latching on with hooks, for good or for ill, and I knew this could only end in heartbreak but it was worth holding on anyway.
Insofar as the dynamic between our two main characters and their sociocultural norms and mores, that’s an intrinsic issue built into the framework of the book and is too much to explore in a review. It’s completely interesting, though. I highly recommend the whole thing.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
This book feels like some of my favorite (and scariest) episodes of Doctor Who got put into a mixing bowl with a psychological thriller and then stirrThis book feels like some of my favorite (and scariest) episodes of Doctor Who got put into a mixing bowl with a psychological thriller and then stirred until all ingredients were well-integrated. This is why I love Barnes’ writing, because as she did with Dead Silence before this, you can’t quite call this book science fiction or space horror or a psychological thriller: It’s pure speculative fiction, a genre mashup of epic proportions that’s like taking whatever she finds in the pantry of her mind and seeing if it makes a tasty treat. And it scores.
This won’t be an in-depth review because going deeper than the surface is just asking for spoilers. I am, however, going to say that if you are the type of person that typically needs TW/CWs regarding body horror/gore/mental games/SI, then you should probably try to find those online before you read this book. Take care of you.
A lot of this book revolves around themes of guilt, responsibility, and memory. How long do you hold onto guilt and trying to make up for something before it’s enough? Who is it who determines that enough has been done to absolve you? Is it even your guilt to carry? Who are you responsible for? Who should you feel responsibility for? In the end, can anyone truly be held accountable for the actions of another adult? When can we consider ourselves or others compromised? Who are we even to judge who is compromised? Who’s to say we’re not the ones compromised? And memory: It’s such a heavy thing, for better or for worse.
As usual, Barnes’ writing is delightfully creepy and evocative, and her world building is absolutely on point. The imagery is vivid and adds so much to the horrific atmosphere of a frozen planet, a (metaphorically) haunted crew, and a ghost station out in space.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
This is the type of book that’s exactly in my niche: a weird book that doesn’t fit into any sort of box that I just couldn’t put down. Imagine you’re This is the type of book that’s exactly in my niche: a weird book that doesn’t fit into any sort of box that I just couldn’t put down. Imagine you’re a mom living in the suburbs and you hate it (I can sympathize. I hate the suburbs). Your husband wants you to go with him to a dinner “soiree” (the amount of time and emphasis the cast of characters put on this word throughout the book is infinitely enjoyable) two of the most influential members of the neighborhood (and the influential is literal, seeing as the wife has an Instagram following of nearly 100K followers) are putting on and you don’t want to go. You have stuff to do and you don’t even like these people! The sitter that was recommended to you turns out to only be 11, but your husband is basically guilting you into going to this dinner party because he’s feeling like you’re not even trying to fit into the life you’ve built together. So you go.
It’s awkward as soon as you get in the door, but as you’re sitting down and contemplating the first course and your cell phone at the same time, the news gets weirder and weirder. No one can get through to the UK. Airports in the northeast are closing. What’s happening?
Imagine if the Glow Cloud from Welcome to Nightvale (all hail the Glow Cloud) became some kind of evil Eldritch horror that somehow targets technology? Or…at least that’s maybe, possibly the working theory? And now you’re trapped at the dinner soiree from hell with people you can’t stand while your kids are at home with only an 11 year old to care for them and you don’t know when or if you’ll get back to them.
This is what I love about writing, creativity, and about innovative writers: the ability to pick up pieces of inspiration from different genres and then throw them together into a plot blender and come out with a book like With Regrets, where technothriller meets domestic thriller meets post-apocalyptic science fiction meets suspense. Heck, you can even chuck in a touch of horror if you want. Just a smidge, though.
This book was engaging from the start and had an interesting plot, but the book as whole is definitely character-driven. For the most part, that’s great. For the majority of the book the characters are intriguing and you want to know more about them. You want to find out what makes them tick and ferret out their secrets. Sadly, somewhere around the beginning of the third act some of the characters start to break down into caricatures or even stereotypes, and the book falls flat for just long enough to lose some of the momentum. It’s not long enough to ruin the book, but it is long enough to affect the overall enjoyment level a little. Otherwise, this is a great read that’s a little out of the box.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
Technothriller marries dark comedy and is seasoned liberally with satire. I’m down. I’m so down.
One moment, Mal is a free AI, just hanging out in infTechnothriller marries dark comedy and is seasoned liberally with satire. I’m down. I’m so down.
One moment, Mal is a free AI, just hanging out in infospace while riding inside a surveillance drone looking for decent pieces of technology to salvage. In the space of minutes, he’s riding inside the brain of an augmented mercenary who’s in charge of caring for a specially-augmented human child while her mother is overseas.
It’s a stupid war just like every stupid war before it and now Mal finds himself not only in the middle of it, but also invested.
This doesn’t meet the criteria for a technothriller for me, but I’m finding that to be okay on a personal level. While I could get along just fine with the computer terminology and vernacular, if it were more of a true technothriller I might have been lost. I suspect some readers might end up being lost as it is if they never had the luxury of knowing someone who worked in IT for years and years.
The dark comedy and satire, though? It hit and it hit hard. I was amused throughout the entire book by the entire cast, but especially Mal. Mal is an AI, so there are limits to his understanding of humans, but he’s definitely his own entity with a vivid imagination, moral compass, and sense of ethics. Watching him grow and learn as this book goes on is infinitely entertaining.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
I love a good space opera. You add on LGBTQ+ to space opera and you can guarantee I’m going to be interested in reading it. But there’s something thatI love a good space opera. You add on LGBTQ+ to space opera and you can guarantee I’m going to be interested in reading it. But there’s something that needs to be said about novels that claim to be space operas: They need to be operatic. Redsight obviously wants to be operatic, but it just isn’t.
Redsight is a good book, but it’s not a space opera. It’s just a really solid sci-fi/fantasy novel about a space war between…well, that’s another thing. It starts out as a war against a pirate in a dangerous and uninhabited part of space. Then the message gets muddied and never quite gets completely back on track.
The thing is: This book is fun. We’ve got three orders of space witches with really cool powers, all following their own cultures and customs. There’s an enemies-to-lovers sapphic romance subplot that’s angsty-cute. There’s a ton of blood, gore, pain, and torture–and some of it is inflicted with consent or self-inflicted for the sake of magic. (Oh, btw, you might want to find a list of CW/TWs for this book).
A chunk of the plot of this book deals with faith and choices you make because of it. What you give up. What you endure. What you bear witness to. What secrets you hold. Who you lose. Who you choose to survive when the time comes to choose. When do you close your eyes and leap?
Had this book followed through on a few of the loose threads left dangling at the end of the book I would’ve liked it a lot more. As it is, it’s a pretty good read and a great standalone.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
File Under: Dark Fantasy/Romantasy/LGBTQ Fantasy/Sapphic Romance/Science Fiction/Standalone ...more
So what’s a trauma-bonded quartet of super soldiers all in love with the female super soldier who could easily take them all out after taking out almoSo what’s a trauma-bonded quartet of super soldiers all in love with the female super soldier who could easily take them all out after taking out almost all of her maniacally evil scientist daddy’s experimental laboratories do?
Well, it turns out they go home, rest up, train, research, and try to find out where that crazy mofo went. He’s squirrely. At first time doesn’t seem to be the largest issue; but after a tragic incident, Nova willingly goes back into her own personal hell, and her men are left to track her down as quickly as possible.
If you look at my rating for Unstoppable, you can see that Unbreakable gained a half-star in rating over Unstopppable. When I read Unstoppable I didn’t feel it was exactly good enough to reach that four star mark, but I am certain Unbreakable is. Read together, the duet is a solid four star read.
What Unbreakable has over Unstoppable, believe it or not, is less spice, which makes way for more plot and character development. We get more of the character’s inner narratives, more of everybody’s feelings and a better look at how they interact, and some of the thought processes behind their decisions, no matter how painful. Like I said in my review for Unstoppable: I do enjoy the way Knight writes spice, but after a while I start to forget who’s even having sex with Nova because it starts to blur.
I enjoyed this duet, and I recommend it highly for the non-squeamish. If you’re squeamish, please check TW/CW before you start.
I was provided a copy of this title by the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
I really wanted to love this book because magical realism and speculative fiction are my favorite genres and because the plot sounded somewhat akin toI really wanted to love this book because magical realism and speculative fiction are my favorite genres and because the plot sounded somewhat akin to one of my favorite reads of 2022, Self-Portrait with Nothing. I was so grateful when Mulholland Books reached out to me and asked if I’d like a copy.
Sadly, there was more of the book I didn’t like than I did. The issue wasn’t with Lauren Beukes’ writing, because I enjoy her writing style–especially her talent for realistic and snarky dialogue. The issue also wasn’t with the plot, because that was why I was so interested in the book in the first place. My problem was with the multiple-POVs, the different storytelling styles (sometimes there are journal entries, sometimes there are letters, sometimes there are medical records, etc), and with the fact that we also have to deal with our characters jumping into different realities and becoming different people. It’s just so…crowded. Add in sections told from Bridge’s mom’s first-person POV in the past, and I just got so tired of all the voices when in truth I was only enjoying the entries from either Bridge or Dom’s (Bridge’s bestie) POV. Everyone else was just noise. I wanted the signal.
It’s a shame. Maybe I’ll come back to it another time when I feel like I have more patience to put up with it, but right now I just felt like this book was too many cooks in the dreamworm kitchen.
I was provided a physical copy of the uncorrected proof of this title by the author and Mulholland Book’s influencer program. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you. ...more
I feel like I was conned by a gorgeous book cover and a really well-written blurb. It’s not the first time, but I’m really bummed about it in this casI feel like I was conned by a gorgeous book cover and a really well-written blurb. It’s not the first time, but I’m really bummed about it in this case, because I was really looking forward to this book and then it took a lot for me to finish it.
Calling this book enemies-to-lovers is generous. It’s more of a socioeconomic difference mixed with distrust for a governing system and then paired with a tenuous employer/employee relationship. They’re not enemies, per se. They just have a lot of trust issues and don’t know anything about one another personally; only rumors.
I just wanted so much more from this book, but pacing issues took up a lot of space and time in this book, which made it longer than it needed to be and really ruined some of the more dramatic, fantastic, and exciting portions of the book. Our FMC, Temperance, needed her hide saved far too much for me to appreciate, and it was usually Arcadio (our MMC) that did the saving. That never sits well with me in romance.
While two out of the other three members of the ship Temperance commands are female (when you exclude Arcadio), this book barely even passes the Bechdel Test because all the other female crew members want to talk to Temperance about 99% of the time is Arcadio (and/or Temperance having intercourse with him). Thanks but no thanks. I’d rather hear about their work aboard the ship, their lives, or anything else.
I just can’t in good conscience say this book truly connected for me. It was an okay read, but not a good one for me.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. No compensation was offered or accepted for this review. Due to the three star or lower rating, this review will not appear anywhere on social media, as personal policy dictates. ...more
I haven’t had this much fun reading a non-smutty book all year. This novel was a hoot-and-a-half that had me in stitches multiple times. I cackled so I haven’t had this much fun reading a non-smutty book all year. This novel was a hoot-and-a-half that had me in stitches multiple times. I cackled so loud at one point my kid came to see what all the fuss was all about. So I read the part I was cackling over to them and they laughed so hard they curled up in a ball.
No, I’m not going to tell you when it is. It’s before 40% into the book, though. That’s a hint.
In a way, this book reminds me a little of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (all pay homage). Poor Charlie doesn’t have any friends, save his cat, Hera. He’s divorced, has less than two-hundred dollars in the bank, and is working as a substitute teacher when he used to be an excellent business reporter for a major newspaper. If that wasn’t enough, his three half-siblings are trying to strong-arm him into agreeing to sell the family house that he’s currently living in so they can split the money they’ll get for it four ways, even though his half-siblings all have plenty of money and he has none. He’s a sad sack, really. I kind of just want to give him a towel and tell him to not panic for what’s coming up next in his life.
Charlie’s Uncle Jake, who was his mother’s brother, dies of pancreatic cancer (screw cancer, especially that one, on a personal note), and asks that Charlie stand witness at his viewing before his cremation. If only he knew what he was getting into. Vulgar funeral bouquets, hired stooges all present to make sure his uncle is actually dead and not just pretending to be…again? And why is everyone suddenly so interested in him?
It’s not long before Charlie is flung into his late uncle’s secret world. To everyone else in the world, his uncle had just been the world’s largest manufacturer of parking garages. To those in the know, however, he was a villain, complete with his own villain lair on a volcanic island. There are hyper-intelligent cats trained as spies, guard dolphins who want collective bargaining rights, a laser array that can blast satellites out of the sky, and the whole island is self-sustainable. The issue is that a lot of other villains hated Uncle Jake, because he didn’t play by their rules. Now that he’s dead, they're gonna come for Charlie, because he’s just a starter villain.
Charlie isn’t without allies, though, and he has a keen mind for business. It’s just…well, the poor dear just needs to not panic, because this is all coming at him so very fast.
I wasn’t kidding when I said this book is funny. It’s hilarious. From the droll sense of humor the cats have to the dirty and Marxist speech of the dolphins I was constantly laughing. The way both Charlie and Til (his uncle’s assistant and now his) feel about rich nepobabies and the Ivy League Brads who come to the table with propositions that will only make more white men like them more rich made me snicker. The ways in which Charlie decides to screw with the other side made me chuckle.
In the end, this story is really just pure escapism: not just for the reader, but for Charlie too. Granted, the stakes are higher for him than us, but he was directionless in life and in a bit of a sticky wicket. His late uncle’s death gave him an opportunity to escape it all and find something new. In the end, he gets exactly what he wanted, and he’s a happy man. Excellent, fantastic read.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, ideas, and views expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
File Under: 5 Star Review/Comedy/Fantasy/Science Fiction/Secret Society/Speculative Fiction ...more
I absolutely adored Samit Basu’s previous novel, The City Inside, and while The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport doesn’t quite meet the bar set by that novel itI absolutely adored Samit Basu’s previous novel, The City Inside, and while The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport doesn’t quite meet the bar set by that novel it’s still a phenomenally clever, enormously creative, and endearing novel.
The story is told from the point of view of Moku, a long-lost piece of alien tech known as a story-bot. His function is to observe, record, and then assemble people’s lives into stories. He was found at the bottom of one of Shantiport’s many polluted rivers, down in the muck inside of a vault by one of the book’s other main characters, Bador. Bador is a bot himself: even though he has the visage of a monkey and has eyemojis instead of eyes, he’s the little brother of a human girl named Lina. Lina, Bador, and their mother have all been under tight surveillance ever since their family patriarch disappeared under the auspices of being a dissenter. In the years since then, Lina’s been working hard to ferret out where their father hid all his hidden tech around the city and Bador has been reluctantly helping her while growing more rebellious and outspoken about bot rights and his dreams of becoming a space hero and getting out of Shantiport.
This is an Aladdin retelling, but it’s not a tightly-woven one. Basu admits in the afterword that the characters kind of went and did their own thing somewhere along the way and I assume he had to keep pulling them back in line with his original ideas. That’s totally okay. Most fairy tale retellings have to have an elasticity to the weave in order to let the author’s interpretation flow through it. I think the problem is that along with the Aladdin retelling, there’s a huge subplot to this book with bot-fighting (in the blurb you can see the nod to Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries, which I’ve never read), and those bot-fights, along with the parts of the plot that come with them, take up huge chunks of page time that felt a lot like filler to me. While the bot-fighting is an important part of Bador’s journey as a character (and Moku’s, too, to an extent), I came away feeling that a lot of it was just empty page time.
The great thing about having a story-bot as a narrator is reliability. Moku is honest, to a fault. Honest and honorable. He’s sweet, caring, anxious, brave, excited, curious, studious, reflective, and capable of great amounts of emotion. At first he’s so limited in what he wants to do, thinks he can do, and thinks he needs to do, but as the books goes on Moku evolves as he begins to care about Bador and Lina as if they’re his family. He’s idealistic, romantic, and a little naive because all he knows are stories…and humans are messy. Moku is honestly my favorite character in the whole book and the only one who made me cry.
There’s a great layering in this book about the differences between generations on how to solve problems: whether to solve it in small, incremental steps and hand off the power to the next generations and trust them to make the best decisions or to make big, sweeping changes and hope the dust settles where it should. It’s about raising your children to think big and to dream big dreams and then telling them, “Hold up! I know we said to dream big, but you can’t just change everything just like that! It’s too much change! You have to think smaller and slower!” is okay or if it’s time for you to stand aside and trust that you raised your kids to do the right thing. The power has to be handed over sometime. Small changes don’t work forever. Some changes just can’t wait for a committee hearing.
Samit Basu is a masterful storyteller and an immaculate worldbuilder. He doesn’t miss anything in his books. Shantiport is a sinking city that was once beautiful. It’s been colonized too many times and has changed ruling clans again and again. It’s besieged by typhoons and pollution and mostly ruled by criminals. Basu gives you all the vibes, helps you paint the pictures in your mind, and lets you feel the humidity, the squelching mud, the glittering holographs, the plasma swords, and more. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable read even though it's a little too long and a little too messy. I still highly recommend it.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
File Under: Dystopian/Fairy Tale Retelling/Science Fiction ...more
Super secret scientific experiments! Psychopathic dad who uses his daughter as his test subject! Like potato chips, the psycReal Rating: 3.5 / 5 Stars
Super secret scientific experiments! Psychopathic dad who uses his daughter as his test subject! Like potato chips, the psychopath couldn’t only stop at torturing his daughter: He tortured numerous children, and all but four of them managed to live. But the genetically engineered birds have come home to roost, and they long to use their enhanced brains and bodies to peck some eyes out. They’re more than up to the challenge. Sayeth the Daft Punk:
“Harder Better Faster Stronger”
Off the cuff, this plot sings to me. A BAMF female who would rather kill a warehouse filled with combatants before a drop of blood touches her men, and a cadre of men who would die for her but will shed more than their fair share of blood before that will ever come close to happening. It’s not “touch her and you die”, it’s “touch any of us and you will die”.
The violence goes hand-in-hand with the kind of bonding that would usually form a tight-knit band of soldiers; but in this case it spins a reverential and uncompromising web of shared trauma, emotional intimacy, and deep love between these five survivors turned rescuers. Their mission is to ostensibly root out the deepest, darkest seeds of our FMC’s father’s research, his labs, and to find any and all other test subjects, if there are even any left. Then they are to help burn it all to the ground.
See all this? This, ALL of this, is my jam. If this were The Voice, I’d be begging this book to pick me as its mentor. I’d smash that red button. The thing is, there’s a lot of issues with this book that interrupt the fun.
I’m not even talking about Nova’s (our FMC) relationship(s) with the fabulous males in this book. Those dynamics and relationships are fine. The men sound hot, have great personalities, and recognize Nova for being far more dangerous than they are. And they’re here for every blood-soaked minute.
No, the main issue I have about this book is predictability and repetitiveness. These characters are supposed to have enhanced intelligence, yet they’re written like they don’t. And the spice scenes? Well, don’t get me wrong–I adore the kind of spice scenes Knight writes in this genre of book, where the characters both crave and can take it hard, fast, and violent, but the spice scenes seemed so much the same with almost every male character and proceeded almost all in the same manner that I stopped trying to keep track of who Nova was engaging with because it all blurred together. In the end, the spicy scenes stopped being hot and started being boring.
In the end, I decided I couldn’t rate it a full four stars because I just didn’t feel like it earned it, but it didn’t warrant a 3 star because the story is too good all on its own. You could’ve removed half the spice and I would’ve still been happy.
I was provided a copy of this book by the author. Any views, thoughts, or opinions expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
If there’s one fusion of genres I’ve come to appreciate a great deal in the last couple of years it’s science fiction and noir. It’s not a new genre, If there’s one fusion of genres I’ve come to appreciate a great deal in the last couple of years it’s science fiction and noir. It’s not a new genre, having roots going back 30+ years, but it’s new to me. The first novel I read with this kind of flavor to it was last year’s The Paradox Hotel, which I absolutely couldn’t put down (just like this book), rated five stars (just like this book), and which occupies a well-deserved spot on my crowded bookshelves (which this book does as well, thanks to Knopf and Penguin Random House). There’s something about the cold, implacable march of science with its empirical laws and rules of evidence and the cool, calm facade of a detective who has their own laws and rules of evidence to follow that simply creates a fascinating, mutually beneficial relationship that can result in some of the most fascinating stories about the human condition. Titanium Noir is a story that has a lot of story to tell and most of it isn’t pretty, but all of it is about some kind of love.
No noir novel is complete without a socioeconomic divide (in this case, a river and lake divide one side from the other–the rich and the not-rich). In the world of Titanium Noir, money doesn’t only mean you live in nicer houses and have better healthcare. It also means you might just make enough money to become a Titan. Not a titan of industry, but one of a select number of people who can afford to be injected with a genetic therapy formula called T7, which will rewind and repair all damage time or injury has inflicted on you. A literal bodily reset. The monetary cost is astronomical. Changes to your body? Yeah, there’s some of those too. You won’t ever be the same again and people will never look at you the same way again. You’re a Titan now, and there’s power in merely being you. The power exchange is too great to overcome now.
Our protagonist, Cal Sounder, is a private detective on paper. In reality, he walks the thin line between the police and the Titans. He looks into things on the Titan’s side of the fence for the police from time to time and he looks into things on the poorer side of town for the Titans from time to time. This time around, he’s been retained by the police as a consultant on a case a little too hot for them to handle: A Titan has been murdered.
The worldbuilding in this book is simply great. Take the gritty, icy streets of Chicago in winter and marry it to the neon city you’d see in an anime like Ghost in the Shell or Akira, and that’s the feel I got from the book. Crazy nightclubs, dirty dive bars, weird socialist social clubs, fusion restaurants, an elite university, a multinational conglomerate, apartment buildings, and a pig farm. This book visits a great many locales, all different from one another and fascinating in their own way given the landscape.
Cal has that same cool, implacable facade of a practiced detective, but with far more leeway than a badge. His morals are a lot more flexible, too. That’s why he’s good at his job. He’s an enigmatic and charismatic character. He’s far more than he seems and capable of far more than you’d be able to discern, but it’s not until the book puts him into a situation that you get to see that Cal Sounder is a man of quick reflexes, wit, resources, and more. He has the trademark cynicism and wariness that comes from being surrounded by criminals and death as a profession, but he has one bright thing in his life and he keeps going, knowing she’s still around and waiting.
The dialogue in this book is amazing. It’s all over the place in tone, just like human conversation should be, but you can read the shifts in tone as if they were being spoken and not written. It has razor-sharp wit, barbed sarcasm, tired musings over cups of bitter coffee, weary late-night conversations, exasperated arguments in hallways and alleyways, demented and dislocated words and phrases uttered under pain and duress, words softly spoken by soft lamplight in the late hours, and pessimistic rants from exhausted cops expressed at all hours of night and day.
The plot is engrossing from the start, leaving the book an absolute page-turner you can’t put down. It absolutely feels like you can’t stop reading, because you never know when something bonkers, bloody, revelatory, or just plain interesting is going to happen. The book just keeps moving because Cal just keeps on moving. Unless he’s hurt. Then he stops for a minute.
The ending might surprise you. It might not. I loved the ending, even though I guessed who the killer was. Keep in mind that the ending and the killer are two separate things. This is a story about love, after all. It’s just about different kinds of love. The killer and the ending are not about the same kinds of love. No matter what, though, this book is absolutely a killer read.
I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. I also received a physical early review copy of this book from Knopf and Penguin Random House as part of their influencer program (thank you). All opinions, thoughts, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
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