Review: The Kingdom

The Kingdom by Jess Rothenberg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Blurbed as it was by Dhonielle Clayton, I'm a little surprised that this new piece of YA sci-fi has slipped under the radar as well as it has. And a little disappointed in the community for not hyping this one up a little more like it deserves. Set around the end of the 21st century, it's kind of a YA Disneyland meets Jurassic Park meets Westworld, a magic-kingdom-type theme park story where there are so many cloned animals (because by this time too many have become extinct in the real world) and all the princesses are eerily lifelike robots...which begs the question, are they human enough to stand trial when one is accused of a crime? And as this book unfolds, are we sure that Ana's really the one who ought to be on trial? Because let's face it, the trial scenes we do see, they're a freaking kangaroo court - because even a hundred years or so from now, there's really no way for humanity to stop sucking when it comes to treating anyone even remotely other. Though mercifully there's no cliffhanger on this one, I'd still love to see more stories from Jess Rothenberg set in this universe, whether they be prequels or sequels or even side stories parallel to this one.

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Review: Finale

Finale by Stephanie Garber
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I honestly think that Caraval would have actually been better off as a single book. Don't get me wrong, there's enough to keep me entertained in both Legendary and Finale, but there's also enough to make me feel increasingly that this series has had nothing but diminishing returns. The ridiculously overpowered nature of Legend himself does not help, though at least it's clear that as awful as he is, there's far worse in the other Fates. And since this book is split between the POVs of both Scarlett and Tella, with a lot of short chapters and switches between them, it's a breezier read than its nearly 500 pages would suggest. To this series, I now bid anoshe, and hope that Garber improves her craft even more on her next book - gotta support local Bay Area authors, right?

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Review: Birthday

Birthday by Meredith Russo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Trigger warnings for this book: homophobia (including repeated use of slurs), transphobia (including internalized transphobia and - often unintentional on the characters' parts - misgendering), gender dysphoria, alcohol abuse, parental death, attempted suicide by overdose.

Meredith Russo debuted strongly with If I Was Your Girl a couple of years ago, and with her new novel Birthday, she blows it out of the water. Once again a relatively short piece of YA contemporary, #ownvoices with a trans girl protagonist - though in this case, she shares the protagonist and narrator positions with her best friend, a cis boy...and over the six years this story takes place, the evolution of their dynamic in all sorts of unexpected and life-affirming ways.

Review: The Philosopher's War

The Philosopher's War by Tom Miller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A year and a half after Tom Miller debuted with The Philosopher's Flight, here he gives us a look at the Great War as fought by empirical philosophers abroad. The result is a little like the 2017 Wonder Woman film, a post-steampunk war movie with villains trying to take the chemical weapons we know were used in our real history and make them even worse - a scarily easy proposition given how, in this universe, the earliest smokecarvers made some pretty decisive and poisonous moves to end the Civil War. Not to mention the Franco-Prussian War, which is discussed here as a distant prelude to World War I.

Review: Dark Age

Dark Age by Pierce Brown
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Bloodydamn goryhell, Pierce Brown, you really are an Apex Asshole.

Perhaps one of the longest-awaited books of the year - any year, really, especially considering that it's been delayed at least an entire one before it eventually came out - Pierce Brown's fifth novel is one he rightly describes as a "mental twister" and a "Frankenstein." Over 750 pages long, loaded with some of the most intense action in sci-fi history (the prologue owes soooooooo much to the opening of The Last Jedi) and continuing Brown's trend of ever-expanding his world-building skills with a new primary setting on Mercury (think of it like Australia, a huge continent with most of the population on the coast and lashed by heavy storms, while the interior is a huge desert waste) and no less than five POV characters: the previous book's Darrow, Lysander, Lyria, and Ephraim, plus our favorite lady badass, Virginia.

Review: Fire Boy

Fire Boy by Sami Shah
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

After years of me not reading this book despite Aimal Farooq's ravings about how awesome it was, I've finally gotten around to it. Well, I think part of the problem might have owed to the fact that, since this book was published in Australia, most libraries in the Bay Area didn't carry it - nor did any of the other California libraries I can potentially special-order from. But at some point recently, I think Aimal brought the book up again, or maybe she told another of her famous djinn stories. Something along those lines? Maybe, in this or some other universe. The point being, I finally looked again, found that the Palo Alto library had Fire Boy and gave it a long-awaited order. And though this book be relatively short, it's a punchy little piece of Pakistani urban fantasy, living at the intersection of Neil Gaiman and Mohsin Hamid with a touch of Brenna Yovanoff's The Replacements thrown in for good measure. All I'll say is this: the local libraries better have the second half of this duology. One of them. Somewhere in California.

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Review: The Chosen

The Chosen by Taran Matharu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Taran Matharu's told a pretty great story in his Summoner series, and now, he returns with a whole new kind of fantasy, one that, in my head, harks back to a lot of British YA novels from around ten years ago or so. Like, for instance, the TimeRiders or Escape from Furnace series. And also some of the most iconic YA stories like The Maze Runner or The Hunger Games. Or some truly otherworldly adventures like Predators or Land of the Lost or Codex Alera.

Review: Eliza and Her Monsters

Eliza and Her Monsters by Francesca Zappia
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Trigger warnings for this book: depression, social anxiety and isolation, suicide.

I picked up this book on the kinda sorta recommendation of Lisa Moore Ramée, because she told me that there's a manuscript she's working on that someone compared to this book. Other than that, I have no idea what Ramée's got in mind for her story, but if Eliza and Her Monsters is comparable to that one, I'd say it's in good company. Eliza herself is a terrifically gifted webcomic creator, but anxiety severely limits her ability to interact with others around her - except via the internet, and behind a certain wall of anonymity. I can relate - hell, I do the same with my own Wattpad profile. And I'll keep on doing the same even when I get published, I'm sure. But for this book, I'm happy to say it's a great first taste of Francesca Zappia's talent, and I'll for sure be reading more of her books soon enough!

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