Review: Dragonfall

Dragonfall by L.R. Lam
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

L.R. Lam's long awaited return to the fantasy genre gives a lot of similar vibes to their debut trilogy with Micah Grey, but also a lot more of the epic fantasy influence of one of their favorite authors, Robin Hobb, to whom this book is dedicated. There's also a fair amount of N.K. Jemisin influence with the wide variety of POV styles: Arcady gets a first person POV, Everen gets second person (with "you" in this instance being addressed to Arcady), and several other characters with maybe one or two POV chapters each, all in third person. Some of these characters - namely Sorin, as well as Arcady themself - also give lots of V.E. Schwab vibes, being quite reminiscent in various ways of Schwab's genderfluid thief fan fave Lila Bard. Fittingly for a book from Lam, this one also boasts as gender diverse a cast as they've ever written, with sign language indicators of pronouns which characters give after introducing their names. Not unlike the real world, though, it's not as widely accepted elsewhere in universe - at least one other nation in this book is spoken of quite negatively because of its extremely conservative and unaccepting attitude towards LGBTQ+ people. For me, though, this book's main selling points were how it took a couple of stylistic devices of which I'm not particularly fond - second person POV from Everen, and the enemies to lovers dynamic of Everen and Arcady - and made me appreciate them. Everen, in particular, is one of my favorite characters Lam has ever created (perhaps second only to Micah Grey, with Dax a close third and Taema fourth). And as for that ship, well, it works extremely well as a slow burn. Hopefully it's not too long a wait until Lam gets the second book published, because that burn needs to pick up the pace on its fuse, if you know what I mean...

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Review: My Heart Is a Chainsaw

My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I hadn't read any Stephen Graham Jones books before, but this one had a mildly longer wait time at the library than I expected, and I still have The Only Good Indians waiting a little further down my to-read pile from the library. But for this one, I'm afraid I'm definitely not continuing the trilogy.

I guess I'm a sucker for foresty mountain settings - it's part of the reason I moved up to the Pacific Northwest, after all. And this setting, a small town in Idaho maybe 8000 feet in elevation, feels like it could be a thing of beauty to portray on screen, even if the rich peeps in their fancy cars (which they park across the lake from their homes since their homes are inaccessible except by boat) are bespoiling the beauty with their very presence and making you want them all to get got by some slasher villain.

That, for me, though...it's the problem.

I don't like slashers.

Review: Silver in the Bone

Silver in the Bone by Alexandra Bracken
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I was honestly ready to give up as an Alexandra Bracken reader entirely after Lore - for me, that book was such a misfire, a coalescence of all of Bracken's biggest faults (stories bloated with dead air, characters with shockingly little appeal) - that I gave it a rare one star that wasn't a DNF. For this book, the first in a planned trilogy rooted in Arthurian legend, I'm going to be generous with an extra star because it was a more interesting story than Lore, and slightly less burdened with Bracken's usual overlong dead air. But it's seriously just damning this book with faint praise - the story is still quite muddled and slow, and at times it's hard to tell that this isn't supposed to be a historical fantasy until a cell phone suddenly crops up, and then it feels like a huge anachronism that never gets addressed. At this point, I'm just giving up on Bracken as a reader, but at least I'm giving up on a higher note than Lore - that would just have been too much disappointment.

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Review: The Spare Man

The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I found this book at the library and picked it up on the basis of A) that it was by the author of one of the best Hugo winners in recent memory, and B) that it had a pretty striking Art Deco cover, and the little dog too! That, plus Andy Weir's blurb hinted that, like Kowal's signature Lady Astronaut series (for which I've been waiting since 2020 for the next book!), it was an alternate history kind of sci-fi. That turned out to be wrong, as the book was ultimately revealed to have a near future setting, late 21st century, albeit with that Art Deco aesthetic. But that dissonance of expectations vs. reality, for me, was only the tip of the disappointment iceberg.

Review: Damsel

Damsel by Evelyn Skye
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Though the cover art comes with a Netflix sticker claiming that this book was adapted by Evelyn Skye from Dan Mazeau’s screenplay for the upcoming film, I do have to wonder how much of that is true. Certainly Skye claims to have had her kid help her devise the language of the dragon, known in universe as Khaevis Ventvis. Basically, it’s a sort of dragon Esperanto, combining Slavic and Germanic harsh sounds (and the former’s lack of articles), Esperanto’s agglutinative structures, and the pronoun droppable verb conjugations of Romance languages like Spanish or Italian. (And this in a world where the humans speak a sort of pseudo French or Italian language of their own…) For me, it’s the linguistics and the unique twist in the premise (a princess overcoming a terrible fairytale fate when she’s chosen as a sacrifice by the family she’s meant to marry into) that allow me to be a bit more generous with an otherwise pretty mid and surprisingly overlong story. Well, maybe that, and the fact that I’m still for sure going to see the movie on Netflix, and it’ll be almost entirely because the always awesome Millie Bobby Brown is starring in it.

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Review: Antimatter Blues

Antimatter Blues by Edward Ashton
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

At this point, I'm convinced that this series is just one that publishing decided, arbitrarily (as it's wont to do, as insinuated in R.F. Kuang's Yellowface), to hype up with a film deal ready to go before the first book was even published. And what a way to hook all the cinephiles with the promise of a film adaptation (retitled Mickey 17) written and directed by Bong Joon-Ho as his follow up to one of the best movies of the century, Parasite.

Review: Yellowface

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

R.F. Kuang has established herself these last several years as a new genre titan in fantasy, but now she takes a sharp left turn into contemporary metafictional satire with her fifth novel, one which managed to go viral in a lot of literary circles - including, of course, Book Twitter - months in advance of its publication. And it's easy to see why. Yellowface is, yes, a searing satire of the publishing industry and its tendency to talk out of both sides of its mouth when it comes to diversity and equality, but it's also one of the most absolutely, eminently, despisable books I've ever read, and that owes almost entirely to its cast of characters, each one more disgusting and punchable than the last. The only reason this one doesn't get a one or two star rating from me is because the unlikability is precisely Kuang's point.