Tag: series

Daughter of Smoke and Bone (2011), Days of Blood and Starlight (2012), Dreams of Gods and Monsters (2013), by Laini Taylor

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I loved Laini Taylor's Strange the Dreamer and Muse of Nightmares duology, so this trilogy, her first, has been on my radar for a while. I finally finished listening to it (as audiobook, so names and spellings may not be fully accurate), and I have two primary responses: Wow, that was an astonishingly florid, ooey-gooey-romantic … Continue reading Daughter of Smoke and Bone (2011), Days of Blood and Starlight (2012), Dreams of Gods and Monsters (2013), by Laini Taylor

Binti (2015), Binti Home (2017), Binti The Night Masquerade (2018), by Nnedi Okorafor

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I wanted to like these books. I really, really did: mathematicians, sentient spaceships, alien space jellyfish—what's not to like? Quite a lot, to be honest. But I do want to be fair here: The things I dislike about these books are truly subjective. They didn't work for me not because they were bad, but because … Continue reading Binti (2015), Binti Home (2017), Binti The Night Masquerade (2018), by Nnedi Okorafor

The Worldbreaker saga (Mirror Empire/Empire Ascending/Broken Heavens, 2014/2015/2020), by Kameron Hurley

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I have enormous admiration for Hurley's other work—especially The Stars are Legion and her Nyx novels. They are gooey and imaginative and gross and brutal with a glorious disregard for genre conventions. The Light Brigade, her most recent book before this one, was structurally brilliant, but it was undeniably military SF, which is a genre … Continue reading The Worldbreaker saga (Mirror Empire/Empire Ascending/Broken Heavens, 2014/2015/2020), by Kameron Hurley

Serial Box! The Vela/The Fisher of Bones/Cold Witch/Ninth Step Station

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I was first sucked into the world of Serial Box through their excellent marketing, which offered me the entire first season of Book Burners for free, and which I liked so much that I agreed to shell out real money for some of the other properties. (Now it looks like they're charging for it--and good … Continue reading Serial Box! The Vela/The Fisher of Bones/Cold Witch/Ninth Step Station

Strange the Dreamer (2017); Muse of Nightmares (2018), by Laini Taylor

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My recent spate of reading has been making me eat my words about YA fiction. Strange the Dreamer is an exquisite book, full of magic and yearning and scholarship and history. It starts with a fabulous opening sequence, in which a little orphan boy is brought up in a monastery, constrained by propriety and duty … Continue reading Strange the Dreamer (2017); Muse of Nightmares (2018), by Laini Taylor

The Steerswoman (1989) & The Outskirter’s Secret (1992), by Rosemary Kirstein

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These books seem to be fairly unknown, which is a pity, because they are super. They are the first two books in an (as yet) unfinished four-book series, which follow the travels and discoveries of Rowan, your most bad-ass field scholar in the world. I have not finished the second two books yet, but the … Continue reading The Steerswoman (1989) & The Outskirter’s Secret (1992), by Rosemary Kirstein

Book burners: S1, ep. 2-4: (2015), by Brian Francis Slattery, Margaret Dunlap, & Mur Lafferty (respectively)

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I've been cruising through these episodes as audio books, all narrated by the excellent Xe Sands, and I'm pleased to report that they have improved, fulfilling my expectations and contradicting the fears I had after finishing the first installment. Each episode has a book-demon of the week plot structure, in which our team learns about … Continue reading Book burners: S1, ep. 2-4: (2015), by Brian Francis Slattery, Margaret Dunlap, & Mur Lafferty (respectively)