Review: Old Bones

Old Bones by Douglas Preston
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Spinning off from Preston and Child's famous Agent Pendergast series is this, the first novel in twenty years or so to feature Nora Kelly - and also, as a major character, newly minted FBI Agent Corrie Swanson of the Albuquerque Field Office. Remember when she was Lisbeth Salander before Lisbeth Salander was Lisbeth Salander? A punk hacker type living in the cornfields of Kansas as far back as Still Life with Crows? Now she's official, thanks in no small part to Pendergast's mentorship. It's too bad that Corrie wasn't the main character of this book, because I feel like were she the primary instead of the secondary to Nora - and were she connected to Nora geographically a lot sooner - this book would be significantly improved for it. That said, though, its connection to the historical tragedy of the Donner Party is of great interest to this Californian, and while the Big Bads' plot is pretty easy to predict early on, what you don't expect is who one of the Big Bads really is. No spoilers though, but hopefully there'll be other, and better, Nora Kelly and Corrie Swanson stories in the future.

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Review: There's Something About Sweetie

There's Something About Sweetie by Sandhya Menon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sandhya Menon is one of those YA rom-com writers who never fails to get all the laughs out of me, and There's Something About Sweetie, her long-awaited follow-up to her debut novel, is no exception. In many ways opposite to When Dimple Met Rishi, here we get a hotheaded guy and gentle girl instead of Dimple and Rishi's deliberate inversion of gender stereotypes. But oh, how they both get some character dynamism over the course of the book. Especially Ashish, who proves himself so much more mature than his rebellious player self from Book 1 - even if he still scoffs at a lot of his parents' expectations, namely, his insistence on eating bacon behind their backs. And as for Sweetie, totally living up to her name, she may have a lot of internalized shame about being fat because of how hypercritical her family is about it, but she's already got such a strong core of confidence - helped in no small part by her own athletic prowess - that it really makes the difference in how she ultimately gains the courage to stand up for herself against certain nasty relatives. And, just like When Dimple Met Rishi, this book is a pretty spot-on cross-section of certain sections of Silicon Valley society: it's very diverse in all the ways, with numerous races and sexual identities repped on the side, but also highlights a bit of class divide, with Sweetie being nowhere near as rich as Ashish's family (though at least she doesn't think a gallon of milk costs twelve bucks a pop! Well, maybe at Whole Foods it does.) About the only quibble I could give geographically is how many lakes this book suggests the Silicon Valley has - trust me, if they do, they're tiny. But while I'm not sure if Menon is going to write any more books in this universe, if not, at least she ends Dimple, Rishi, Ashish, and Sweetie's universe on a high, sweet, humorous note.

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Review: The Dragon Republic

The Dragon Republic by R.F. Kuang
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

R.F. Kuang debuted last year with a historically-inspired piece of dark, violent, terrifying fantasy in The Poppy War, and now that we've moved past this timeline's analogue to World War II, the analogue to Mao's Revolution takes center stage. With Rin knowing that Nikara's present leadership can't be trusted, of course she aligns with a charismatic new force in the Dragon Warlord, who promises to overthrow the corrupt empire in favor of a western-style democracy. It's just too bad Hesperia, the western superpower of this universe, isn't as good as they want you to believe they are based on their press. Hesperia, after all, was the original colonizers of Nikara, even before the Mugen Federation tried to do the same. And as they return to Nikara in this book, they bring all the usual tricks and tools you can expect from a Western imperalist toy bag: physical size advantages, men with no qualms about rape, powerful weaponry, an incomprehensible and inelegant language, and disgusting racism and self-superiority (hell, there's a point where a Hesperian scientist and sister outright calls her people the "white race," ironic since Rin's third-person narrative describes them as having the color of a "freshly gutted fish..." but I digress.) Middle book syndrome? What's that? Kuang doesn't know, and nor do I know where she's going to go with the third and final book of the trilogy. Logic says that China's rapid industrialization will come into play, but given how creatively Kuang has played with historical influences already, there's really no way to predict where she'll take us.

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Review: A Crash of Fate

A Crash of Fate by Zoraida Córdova
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not the first piece of EU fiction that Zoraida Córdova has blessed us with, but this first tie-in to Galaxy's Edge (am I the only Star Wars fan who hasn't been there at Disneyland yet, though?) is a pretty sweet first official Star Wars novel of hers. Reminding me a lot of Claudia Gray's Lost Stars, A Crash of Fate takes us to Batuu in what I can only presume to be the gap between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, in which we get to see some classically Star Wars story elements - cocky adolescents of little means but lots of heroism, a love story for the ages, and a sense of sheer wonder at what may lay beyond your little backwater home. But being a work of the Disney era, it also manages to reflect 2019 values pretty well too, and Córdova writes in a hell of a lot of casual diversity - people of all races, aliens of all stripes, even the occasional bit of LGBTQ+ rep on the side. Though Batuu may be an isolated world in the middle of scenic nowhere, that doesn't stop it from hustling and bustling on the level of New York in truly cosmopolitan style. Now, hopefully it won't be long until I get ahold of Delilah S. Dawson's Black Spire to well and truly continue my exploration of Batuu.

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Review: The Calculating Stars

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This year's Hugo winner for Best Novel, and oh so very well-deserved it was - and oh, how I'm going to start reading every Mary Robinette Kowal book I can get my hands on now! A brilliant piece of alternate history that reads like the love child of Deep Impact and Hidden Figures, Kowal's novel takes us to a 1952 where a meteorite impact off Chesapeake Bay wipes out the East Coast, plunges the world into a nuclear winter, and then, by 1956, promises a huge spike in global warming due to the greenhouse effect caused by all the steam and ejecta from the impact. So the world's fledgling space agencies are now determined to start some emergency interstellar colonization...but because it's the 1950s, there's a lot of less-than-stellar gender and racial politics involved, which our heroine Elma York, as a gifted engineer and as part of a diverse team of gifted engineers from around the world, ends up having to challenge head-on. No wonder she's prone to anxiety attacks - wouldn't you in her shoes? But this is - excuse me - a damn fine novel, and I'm very glad that not only is there a sequel already available (I hope it wins next year's Hugo already!), but Kowal has promised at least two more stories to follow. Given that this is all meant as a prequel to Kowal's Hugo-winning short story "The Lady Astronaut of Mars," I can only imagine just how increasingly expansive in scope her work will get!

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Review: Soul of the Sword

Soul of the Sword by Julie Kagawa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The ARC I got of the first book lists the title as Demon of the Blade, but GR has something different...either way, I'm just super psyched this book is coming!



And super mad that I have to wait after that bloodydamn cliffhanger from Book 1!



(Edit: No, I didn't get an ARC of the second book, that was a silly slip of the type on my part!)

But after reading this second book, I'm very glad it came out less than a year after Shadow of the Fox, the way some of Kagawa's earlier books have done - because now that that cliffhanger has come and gone, the stakes are higher than ever, and there's some really nasty magic that needs to be undone if peace is ever to be had in this kingdom.

Of course, there's still one more book to go, so the wait continues. But only till next year or so. And at least Night of the Dragon has a less-than-a-year gap too, thank all the gods!

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Review: The Rise of Kyoshi

The Rise of Kyoshi by F.C. Yee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While we're waiting another calendar year for F.C. Yee to give us the long-awaited sequel to The Epic Crush of Genie Lo, now Yee has started up another epic crush of a series centered on a kickass girl who needs to work a little extra-hard to realize her destiny is approaching faster than she expects. Only this time, Yee is building the origin story for a character we know pretty well, except perhaps less so than we thought until now: Avatar Kyoshi. She may have lived over 200 years in canon, but way back in her teens, she still had to come into her own as the Avatar just like Aang and Korra will eventually do later on. But Yee throws in a most unexpected twist: having those searching for the Avatar find someone else who may be the one, and completely overlooking Kyoshi even as she makes it clear that she's the true bridge to the Spirit World. Meanwhile there's a whole lot of conflict between various factions in the Earth Kingdom (its sheer size really makes it ungovernable in practice, doesn't it?) as well as a team of pirates trying to bring down the four nations, but because of the fact that they're, uh, pirates, they're primarily Water Tribe anyway (something of a call forward to Amon and the Equalists?) Yee devotes over 400 pages to all these in-universe issues, and there will be at least one more book - because while it's taken quite a while for him to really take off in the publishing world, he's finally getting the recognition he deserves from this book and from Genie Lo.

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Review: Return to Zero

Return to Zero by Pittacus Lore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The final book in the series?

Of this entire story universe?

I'm sad about that. Truly, I am. But after an entire decade, it's only fitting that this tenth book of the franchise is the last one, and they go out on some pretty high notes for sure. To be fair, this book is a little bit on the long side, maybe more than it needs to be. But it finally brings a lot of story threads full circle, and brings back a few of my old faves - nice to see John and Marina and Ella again! - and perhaps the most insidious threat since the original Mog invasion, one that gets pretty personal in terms of how much it scares the hell out of me.

Again. I'm sad that this will be the end of this franchise. But hey, at least it ends with a bang.

To the world of The Lorien Legacies and Lorien Legacies Reborn, I now bid ave atque vale, for the second and likely final time.

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