Reviews and Comments

Flippin' 'Eck, Reader

losttourist@ramblingreaders.org

Joined 1 year, 6 months ago

I live in north west England and particularly enjoy speculative fiction, although am happy to try most well-written books.

You can also find me elsewhere on the Fediverse using the profile @losttourist@social.chatty.monster

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reviewed The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang (The Poppy War, #1)

R. F. Kuang: The Poppy War (Hardcover, 2018, Harper Voyager) 4 stars

A brilliantly imaginative talent makes her exciting debut with this epic historical military fantasy, inspired …

Darker than I expected

4 stars

An orphaned child on the cusp of their teenage years escapes their abusive adoptive parents by gaining admission to an elite school where they learn to channel all sorts of amazing abilities and powers.

So far, so Harry Potter. But this is no derivative work. Firstly, the setting is a fantasy world version of China, with a plethora of cultures and expectations vastly different from many more traditional fantasies.

And although it starts out reading almost like a Young Adult book, as you progress towards the final third of the novel things change. They change a lot, becoming downright brutal in places, and by the time you get to the final pages you realise that this is most definitely a quality addition to the grimdark subgenre of fantasy.

An enjoyable tale for fans of Hitchhikers.

4 stars

Upon finishing this book and reading the author's list of people he'd like to thank, I was slightly disappointed not to see the late Douglas Adams there. Because there is no doubt that the writing style was strongly influenced by HHGTTG and other works in that series.

This isn't sci-fi, at least not in the traditional sense, but neither is it fantasy in the traditional sense. It's in some ways akin to the worlds built by Neil Gaiman, where a normal existence is suddenly overlaid by elements of the fantastic. And if you like Gaiman, and Pratchett, and Adams and so on, you'll probably enjoy this.

The downsides: this was the author's first novel, and it shows. There are some over-complicated plots, and the cast of characters is perhaps a little too large to fully get to grips with, and as every one of them has more than one unpleasant …

Emily Tesh: Some Desperate Glory (2023, Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom) 5 stars

All her life Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of …

A gripping modern space opera

5 stars

What happens if you take the classic space opera format -- soldiers! weapons! aliens! humanity fighting for its very survival! -- and give it a queer, feminist, 21st century twist? You get Some Desperate Glory, that's what.

The book manages to walk the tightrope of combining hard sci-fi themes with social science fiction, and manages to pull it off in style.

(Minor spoilers ahead)

The primary character, Kyr, is a teenage soldier in the vein of Starship Troopers or Ender's Game, brought up from birth to be one of humanity's last living soldiers on a secret base where the few remaining humans have their resistance movement. So far, so expected.

But as the book progresses we see Kyr's black-and-white view of the world gradually peeled back and altered as she gains access to other, hidden and banned points of view.

Without going into too much spoilery detail, over the course …

Peter Ross: Steeple Chasing (2023, Headline Publishing Group) 4 stars

[publisher's copy from the back of the book]

Churches are all around us. They contain …

An interesting and eclectic journey through the UK's places of worship

4 stars

From parish churches to cathedrals, from Saxon times through to the Victorians and today, Christian places of worship have been a key part of the physical and spiritual landscape of Great Britain.

In this book the author visits a small selection of those churches and cathedrals, giving us a glimpse of his feelings and the impressions they left on him. The book is grouped into themed chapters and the writing style is light and easy to follow.

You don't need to be a Christian or even a believer in any kind of religion - the author himself is not - to enjoy this book. Anyone who has wandered into a small parish church while hiking around the countryside, or visited one of the impressive cathedrals in UK cities, will probably find something of interest here.

John Scalzi: Starter Villain (2023, Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom) 4 stars

Inheriting your mysterious uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might imagine.

Sure, there …

A fun, fast-paced modern satire

5 stars

This was a quick and easy read, with the plot zipping along at a rapid pace and not too many characters or complicated ideas to get straight in your head.

It's a fun parody of James Bond style villains but also quite a good satire of California techbros, VC funding, and mega-billionaires. If any of that group are on your "I don't like these people" list, you'll probably enjoy this book!

Shannon Chakraborty: The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi (2023, HarperCollins Publishers) 5 stars

Amina al-Sirafi should be content. After a storied and scandalous career as one of the …

This should be on every fantasy lovers book list

5 stars

I thoroughly enjoyed this book! What's not to love: it has pirates, monsters, the supernatural, sword fights, magic fights, and adventures galore.

I don't want to include any spoilers, but the plot revolves around Amina al-Sirafi, a retired female pirate captain living in 12th/13th Century Arabia. Due to ... events ... she is lured back onto the ocean for one last irresistable treasure hunt. Although, just like Jake & Elwood, first she has to get the band, or rather her crew, back together.

This book is filled with well-rounded and unforgettable characters, and takes the reader on a fantastic journey around the lands and peoples bordering the Indian Ocean of 800 years ago. With, as previously stated, a very hefty dose of magic and fantasy thrown in as well. Definitely worth a read.

reviewed The Inverted World by Christopher Priest (New York Review Books classics)

Christopher Priest: The Inverted World (Paperback, 2008, NYRB Classics) 3 stars

Inverted World (The Inverted World in some editions) is a 1974 science fiction novel by …

Rightfully a classic, but left me feeling unfulfilled

No rating

I've only read one book by Christopher Priest before, A Dream of Wessex.

This one, Inverted World, is not in any way related to that but has a similar quality in that you gradually learn about the strange world in which the narrator lives by following their own disoveries about that world.

By around two-thirds of the way through the nature of the world starts to become not just apparent but largely explained, although the reason for its existence don't get touched upon until the very final few pages of the story.

And the story felt ... truncated. I wasn't clear to me what the final resolution was or what Helward (the main character) was going to do, or indeed what any of the characters were going to do next. I honestly feel like it could have done with another 50 pages or so to tie everything up.

Still, it's …

Justin Lee Anderson: Lost War (2023, Orbit) 5 stars

A terrific modern classic fantasy story

5 stars

This starts out very much like a classic fantasy story: a disparate group of adventurers are thrown together on a swords-and-sorcery epic quest to save the world from an unspeakable evil.

But quite quickly you start to realise it's something more than that. The author is a huge AD&D fan and lots of the concepts from that start to appear in the book. After all, every decent D&D campaign also features a fighter, a magic user, a cleric, and an archer.

The world seems loosely based on Celtic Scotland, and the story has the right combination of set battle pieces and world/character building to keep everything moving along nicely. The characters are varied and all have just enough human flaws and failings to be believable.

(Very very mild spoiler warning): There is a plot twist at the end of the story that I'm pretty sure you won't see coming until …

Annalee Newitz: The Terraformers (Hardcover, 2023, Tor Books) 4 stars

From science fiction visionary Annalee Newitz comes The Terraformers, a sweeping, uplifting, and illuminating exploration …

Engaging, but could have been better

3 stars

I didn't enjoy this as much as I'd hoped to.

The plot is broad in scope and sweeps across a period of a couple of millennia. Although set almost 60,000 years in the future it touches upon (and in some cases dives deeply into) themes that are very relevant in the 21st century, and the writing is generally engaging.

So why didn't I really like it? A couple of things: the structure of the book (three sections each set approx. 1,000 years apart) meant that just as you were starting to really understand some of the characters they were left by the wayside and a whole new set of individuals got introduced. At the end of each section it felt to me that there was still a lot of potential development of both plot and characters, and maybe this book could have worked better if each section was significantly expanded …

Adrian Tchaikovsky: Children of Memory (2022, Pan Macmillan) 4 stars

Earth is failing. In a desperate bid to escape, the spaceship Enkidu and its captain, …

Worth persevering

4 stars

This is the third -- and I believe final -- installment in Adrian Tchaikovsky's acclaimed Children of Time series.

The action once again moves on to another alien world but with many of the same characters and species from the earlier two books. And of course we are introduced to additional new intelligences, as you'd expect from the earlier stories' trajectories.

However it took me well over half the book to really get into it. The multiple plots seemed not only hard to keep track of, but self-contradictory at times as well. Eventually everything does fall into place and there are enough plot twists to keep you intrigued right to the end, but there were definitely times when I had to force myself to keep reading as the frustration was starting to get too much.

I'm glad I kept going, though. In the last third of the book many of …