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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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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