I had absolutely zero interest in The Kaiju Preservation Society when it came out. I’d heard good things about John Scalzi, but the Pacific Rim comparisons weren’t a selling point, nor was the description as a popcorn novel that required little of the reader. I figured I’d skip it and maybe try another of his… Continue reading Sci-fi Novel Review: The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi
The month before the Hugo Award nomination deadline always involves a mad scramble to read as much off the award-eligible section of my TBR as I can. This year, I was able to squeeze in three 2022 novels before the end of April, and my first priority was a first contact novel that seemed exactly… Continue reading Sci-fi Novel Review: A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys
The marketing of C.S.E. Cooney’s Saint Death’s Daughter did absolutely nothing to appeal to me. Queer coming-of-age? Could be good, but not a selling point in itself. Features necromancers? That’s probably a negative, to be honest. Comparisons to Gideon the Ninth? Absolutely a negative. But enough bookish friends liked it that I decided to give… Continue reading Fantasy Novel Review: Saint Death’s Daughter by C.S.E. Cooney
As a long-time lover of portals and multiverses, the description of Aimee Pokwatka’s debut novel Self-Portrait With Nothing immediately caught my eye. And when it was singled out for praise in Amal El-Mohtar’s Best of 2022 list, I determined to seek it out as soon as I could. Self-Portrait with Nothing follows Pepper, a forensic… Continue reading Fantasy Novel Review: Self-Portrait with Nothing by Aimee Pokwatka
I don’t usually branch out into horror, but Alien has proved that I can enjoy a good haunted house in space, and when Dead Silence by S.A. Barnes got picked up as part of r/Fantasy’s New Voices Book Club, the description sounded interesting enough to make it worth a try. Dead Silence opens with the… Continue reading Sci-fi/Horror Novel Review: Dead Silence by S.A. Barnes
The first round of the second annual Self-Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC2) has ended, and my team has hand-picked three semifinalists to send to two other teams of fellow judges. In return, we have received six semifinalists from two other judging teams, which we will read before the end of April. One that I was… Continue reading Sci-fi Novel Review: The Last Gifts of the Universe by Rory August
I’m not usually much of a horror fan, but M. Shaw caught my attention with their unsettling short story “Man vs Bomb”—one of the best I read in 2021—and the premise of their weird horror novella One Hand to Hold, One Hand to Carve was intriguing enough for me to close 2022 by taking a… Continue reading Horror Novella Review: One Hand to Hold, One Hand to Carve by M. Shaw
I posted the first edition of my 2022 Recommended Reading List back in early December. But then everyone else posted their own lists, and there’s no better way to blow up a favorites list than spending a couple months reading everyone else’s favorites. There was a lot of amazing sci-fi and fantasy published in 2022,… Continue reading Tarvolon’s 2022 Recommended Reading List: Award Season Edition
Tracy Deonn’s Legendborn was one of my biggest positive surprises of 2021. It was my vote for the Lodestar that year (though it’s hard to complain too much about a loss to the also-excellent A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking), and it saw Deonn in my top two for the 2022 Astounding Award. Point is,… Continue reading Fantasy Novel Review: Bloodmarked by Tracy Deonn
I may not have been quite as wowed as the general public by the first two books of Naomi Novik’s award-winning Scholomance series, but I had a whole lot of fun with both A Deadly Education and The Last Graduate and was excited to return to the world for the trilogy closer, The Golden Enclaves. … Continue reading Fantasy Novel Review: The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik
