Review: Imagine Me

Imagine Me by Tahereh Mafi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So this is supposed to be the final Shatter Me novel, and...I'm not gonna lie, this is the first in the series that wasn't a five star for me, or even a 4.5 rounded up to 5. More like 3.5 rounded up to a 4. I hate to say it, but now I see why this book has a surprisingly low GR average - for being the ending to a big series, one of the most imaginative in all of YA, it does feel like Mafi kinda put a rush job on it to meet the "once a year" pattern of the rest of this trilogy. The story just kinda drags for a while, feeling oddly turgid even with Mafi's usual gift of atmospheric and creepy and experimental prose. But the second half, full of horrifying twists and turns, helps make this some of Mafi's most daring work yet, finally bringing us stakes so high as to be unbeatable in any future installments. Though I do wish there would be more just so it didn't have to end on such a state of mild disappointment, at least it ends, and with surprising sweetness too. And dear God, I found Kenji so goddamn relatable in this one, more than ever. Especially with his admitting his tendency to wall off and refuse to trust anyone. I'm glad that Mafi gave us his POV instead of Warner's for the vast majority of the book, because I just love Kenji too much. To the Shatter Me series, I once again bid ave atque vale...and also, one last thing. The tagline on the cover? Eerie foreshadowing there now that I've actually read the book.

View all my reviews

Review: The City We Became

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

N.K. Jemisin's first full-length novel since The Stone Sky is pretty well-primed to win her some more Hugo Awards - maybe in 2021? Hopefully there'll be an in-person ceremony again by then. Until then, we can savor the fine flavor of this book, grown very organically from her story "The City Born Great," as featured in How Long 'Til Black Future Month? Here we get not only that story replicated in the prologue - at least, until a gnarly little twist comes along - but then five different avatars for each of New York's boroughs, each as diverse as the city itself, spanning all the spectra of race, gender, and sexuality, come up and learn of their mission to continue the birth of their city. Even if a literal H.P. Lovecraft villain (naturally, Jemisin specifically invokes this particular mythos as a supernatural driving force behind systemic racism and eco-fascism, a direct rebuke of Lovecraft's own bigotry) wants to bring that growth coming to a crashing halt. Though the world-building is a bit dense, relying on a heavy stream of hard sci-fi vocabulary at times, it's always refreshing to see Jemisin's signature snarky, world-weary narrative style back on our bookshelves again for a new trilogy.

View all my reviews

Review: Shadowshaper Legacy

Shadowshaper Legacy by Daniel José Older
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It took quite a while - about two years, in fact, but that's no surprise given how many projects Older has on his plate - but Shadowhouse Fall now has its follow-up, the third and final novel of the Cypher. Sierra and all the other 'shapers have their most important missions yet - first, get several of their friends out of jail after the events of the previous book; then take on the white supremacist Bloodhaüs (whose ill-placed umlaut, I think, is Older's cheeky way of poking fun at authors who do poor research of foreign languages, especially, say, languages from various PoC cultures - look at how many people are digging holes in the linguistic basis of J.K. Rowling's chosen names for boarding schools in Africa and Asia) for control of the Deck of Worlds and all of magic. Luckily, this time, Sierra finally has some of her best ancestral help yet - for while her family used to try to keep 'shaping a strictly male skill, there are some women practitioners too powerful to ignore, especially when they're the voices in Sierra's head insulting everyone and everything in witty island Spanish. After days reading Older's latest lovely piece of work, I can now bid this series ave atque vale and hope he's got more good YA stuff in the pipeline. But I'm sure there'll first be another Dactyl Hill Squad book too...

View all my reviews

Review: The Warsaw Protocol

The Warsaw Protocol by Steve Berry
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Berry's latest Cotton Malone novel doesn't quite stick with me as much as his previous two have - focusing as they did on Martin Luther King, Jr. on the fiftieth anniversary of his assassination, and then on my ancestral homeland of Malta - but for the fifteenth Cotton Malone adventure, it's for sure a pretty serviceable one. Though I still find myself scratching my head a lot about what even the Warsaw Protocol actually was, the endless machinations between current heads of state trying to stop an illicit auction of Christian relics, as well as the US trying to forcibly install missiles in Europe, make for pretty fascinating reading. Though the stakes feel just a little not high enough, they're also very topical, particularly when the aptly named US President Fox (a conservative asshat clearly inspired by Der Orangefuehrer himself) tries to muscle his way into everything, and the complicated personal life of the Polish president, Janusz Czajkowski (yeah, I see what Berry did there, naming him after James Rollins), gets too close for comfort to ending his career. I'm sure Berry will be giving us another great Malone book next year, especially on that tantalizing little ending...

View all my reviews

Review: Deathless Divide

Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's been nearly two years since Justina Ireland came out with her highly successful alternate history horror story, Dread Nation. Now, at long last, here's the sequel, delivering on the promise of that ending with a letter about a rumored safe haven - appropriately called Haven - in California. But for 500 pages, Ireland takes a long damn journey to get there, dialing up the criticism of America's racist past - and present, especially given how appropriate this book's themes of spreading contagion and rampant inequality are in the time of the coronavirus.