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Category: review

Boy’s Life — Robert McCammon

A lot can happen in a year. This is a magical book. It says so right at the beginning, where the now-adult author and narrator of the book talks about the magic of childhood, and how important it is to hang on to that magic–not to let it go.  The book chronicles a year in the life of Corey, a 12-year-old boy growing up in a small town in rural Alabama in 1964. The first…

Ancestral Night — Elizabeth Bear

I have been very busy for the last 10 days and haven’t had a chance to blog this book that I finished about a week ago. This was an interesting read. I didn’t know the gender of the main POV character until about half-way through the book. It didn’t matter, and I think that was a choice by the author. I also liked how the tech is described in just enough detail that you know…

Replay — Ken Grimwood

I wanted to read outside my normal genre and this is one of my wife’s favorite books. She found her old copy and I brought it on a flight. It has been a LONG time since I read a book in one siting, but I read the book from start to finish between Phoenix and Boston. Even if I hadn’t been trapped on a plane, I would have had a hard time putting this one…

Ancillary Justice–Ann Leckie

After struggling so much with my last read, I rewarded myself with a book that I knew I was going to like, and wow, did this one deliver for me. Interestingly, one of my complaints about The Two Body Problem was the diverse cast of characters and the complex plot structure. Yet, in Ancillary Justice, there is a sentient starship who divides herself into multiple “ancillaries” to run the ship, a complex plot involving a…

The Three-Body Problem — Cixin Liu

I really struggled reading this book. It was extremely slow paced for the first 60-70% and I had a difficult time differentiating the characters from each other. Unlike other reviewers I read about online, I didn’t have a hard time with the fact that the book jumped around in time. But I wanted to expose myself to something outside my comfort zone. I am a little bit familiar with the big picture of “Eastern Literary…

The Recollection–Gareth Powell

This book has been on my TBR pile for a long time and I finally picked it up for my birthday (which I share, one year different, with GLP!) this year. This story begins with two brothers arguing because both are in love with the same woman, and she had feelings for both as well. Before they can reconcile, the older brother gets transported through a mysterious arch that appears randomly in the tube station…

This is how You Lose the Time War–El-Mohtar and Gladstone

I don’t remember when I first heard about this book but I remember hearing very good things about it and I was not disappointed. Two time agents are at war. Red and Blue, a technical future and a natural future, incomparable with each other. They are the best at what they do, but when Red finds a letter on a bloody battlefield that read “Burn before reading,” we learn that there is more going on…

Lords of Uncreation–Adrian Tchaikovsky

I have struggled to find time to read with my busy real life but I made time over the last few days to finish the last half of this book and it is a fantastic end to this large galaxy spanning (literally) space opera. Tchaikovsky has created a world and universe that is so real and so complete and so fantastic that even though I knew I was getting to the climax, and I was…

Crooked Kingdom — Leigh Bardugo

This 2nd book completes the “Six of Crows” series where we follow the adventures of Kaz, Inej, Nina, Matthais, Jesper and Wylan as they attempt to undo the wrong they received at the hands of a crooked “merch” at the end of the last book. I’ve been struggling to find time to read, but I finally had some time and read the last quarter of it last night. It got to the point I love…

Six of Crows — Leigh Bardugo

My novel has multiple POV characters. More than a year ago, one of the people in my writing group suggested I read this book because it tells its story through multiple POV characters as well, and she thought it would be good for me to see an example. Now, most of the SF I have read recently is also told through multiple POV characters, so this isn’t new for me, but I figured I would…