It’s been thirty years since the television show Mister Magic left the air under tragic circumstances. There are no recordings of the show and no record of any production company, directors, or actors, yet people remember watching the show avidly as children.
Val has spent thirty years in hiding with her dad. She didn’t attend school and barely left the farm where she and her dad lived. Instead, she worked with the farm’s owner, Gloria, and kept her life small.
When her dad dies, Gloria posts a message on social media about his passing. Old friends from Val’s childhood show up to the funeral and suddenly, Val has the opportunity to learn about a past she’s kept locked away from herself. Namely, that she and her friends were the last set of children on the show before it went off the air.
I was engrossed in this novel right away. The author writes horror well enough that I found myself glued to the pages to find out what was going on. I was strongly invested in Val learning about her past and what happened on the television show. However, at about the midpoint, I wasn’t as eager to pick the book up after putting it down. This was mostly because I was getting tired of Val not remembering things and her friends not answering her questions. I wanted to yell at Val to ask better questions and/or not let her friends change the subject.
The last fifth or so of the novel explains everything, but feels rushed. With the middle dragging out the question of what’s going on and the end supplying an answer that I couldn’t have guessed at, I felt a bit frustrated.
Overall though, the narrative voice was consistent and engaging enough for me to consider reading something else by this author.
Anisa is a translator and works at adding subtitles to movies. She feels her work is insignificant as she’s not translating great works of literature. Adam, her new boyfriend, tells her about the Centre, where one can go and absorb language in two weeks for a hefty sum of money. Only allowed to refer one person in your lifetime, he refers Anisa.
At first, Anisa thinks it’s impossible to absorb language in such a short time. She attends anyway, choosing German, where she has a strict schedule of meditation, meal times, and listening to a Storyteller speak in German. She’s astounded that the process works and opts to choose Russian next.
While at the Centre, she becomes attached to her supervisor Shiba. They form a bond that lasts outside the Centre and Anisa learns that Shiba’s dad is one of the inventors of the process. While staying at Shiba’s family’s place, Anisa learns some truly disturbing things about the Centre.
Written in a stream of consciousness style, the novel has a conversational tone that’s fairly easy to follow. The author includes a lot of non-English words, more than a simple peppering, which was a bit distracting. Authentic, though, as the character talking is from Pakistan and moved to Britain while in college.
I was disappointed with the ending. I’m not sure how I might have liked it to end, but felt like the story was a bit unfinished. All the loose ends are tied up nicely, but I was left thinking that the impact of the story was lost because of the ending.
This author is really good at writing exhausted characters, this novel is no different.
Jack is a pen tester – penetration tester; someone who breaks into a facility at the request of the owner/CEO – and is caught just as she’s leaving her latest job. After explaining everything to the police, going back to retrieve her car, then driving home, she arrives to find her husband has been murdered at his desk. At first she’s questioned as a grieving spouse, but much too quickly, the evidence points to Jack ordering a hit on him.
The moment she realizes she’s a suspect she leaves the police station to try to find evidence of who actually killed her husband. In the process, she injures herself badly enough to cause an infection. Now she has to race against time to find the evidence before the infection takes over, all while dodging CCTV cameras and not using anything to digitally ping her location.
The novel is paced exceptionally well. As a reader I felt Jack’s exhaustion and desperation to find the killer. All the crumbs are in place for the reader to follow and figure out who was responsible for the death, and Jack not figuring it out quickly enough is believable because of the high-stress situation, lack of food, and growing infection.
My only nitpick is that a fair bit of information is repeated unnecessarily in the last quarter of the book. By the fourth mention of not having any bandages left, I was frustrated and wanted to tell the author to trust the reader to remember. That and other repetitive bits made the last few chapters a bit tedious. Otherwise, this novel is just as engrossing as the author’s previous work.
Asuka barely made the cut to be one of the 80 people sent to Planet X; humanity’s last hope before collapse. As an Alternate, she has no specialty training and instead fills whatever role is needed. That role turns out to be solving the mystery of who built and set off a bomb on the outside of the ship.
While all 80 people were trained in a rigorous, elite training facility before launch, they are still by and large young adults. Having slept through the first decade of travel, they were awoken to become pregnant before arriving at their destination, a full decade ahead of them. These young adults have only their DAR (Digitally Augmented Reality) to help communicate with the ship’s AI and a quantum communicator to communicate with Earth.
A war breaks out on Earth, which muddies the hierarchy of who is in charge back home while Asuka investigates her shipmates – her friends – as best she can.
This novel is wonderfully constructed. It’s basically a Locked Room Mystery set in space, so the list of suspects really isn’t that long. But these 80 people are trained to rely on one another, so who would build a bomb, and why? The answer surprised me, but in a good way. Once I reached the end, I understood why bird species were mentioned often. Not only because Asuka is a lover of birds but because the ship’s AI tried to work around protocols by presenting birds in Asuka’s DAR. The author wove this information into the narrative in a way that felt so natural that I was unaware that I was receiving clues.
The author also presented the dangers of DAR in a manner I hadn’t considered: what if that DAR was corrupted? Could you believe what you saw? Could you believe what the ship’s AI was telling you? Also, by each person having a customized DAR, each person was basically working alone. Sure, other people could be invited to view someone’s DAR surroundings, but if not invited, each person lived in a different world and saw the ship differently. At first I thought this DAR would help stave off madness because it would give the illusion of space and scenery that the person found soothing. As I read on, the horror of not being able to trust your senses became evident.
I enjoyed this novel from start to finish and look forward to the author writing another novel.
This novel was one of the rare cases where I remembered why I’d put it on hold at the library. Usually I just open the book and start reading to see how fast I can pick up on the plot. For this one, I knew it was because the protagonist lived in a retirement village. I don’t run into many books where the main characters are older, perhaps my own fault for not seeking them out.
In this novel, Joyce gets invited to attend the Thursday Murder Club, where three other people discuss old, unsolved cases. Just as Joyce joins, a man is murdered. Now they have a fresh case to examine.
The storytelling was delightfully light. The author uses several characters’ points of view, including two detectives, each a different chapter. Joyce’s diary entries are sprinkled in between these short chapters, which is an interesting way of getting her point of view.
As the novel progresses, another man is murdered and an extra body is found in a grave. I thought things would get confusing but the author did a wonderful job in keeping everything tidy.
My only complaint was that for a mystery to be successful, the reader must have all the clues at hand and be able to come to the same conclusion as the characters. In this novel, the ending chapters revealed everything and tied up all the loose ends, but I doubt I’d have been able to know who the killers were based on the information given.
Still, this is a light read with quirky characters. I’ve already put the sequel on hold but there’s a lineup of people ahead of me.
Imagine if technology could inform billionaires about an impending apocalypse. Imagine if that technology could give those billionaires advanced notice so they may flee to luxurious bunkers to wait out the apocalypse.
In this novel, Lai Zhen is given access to this technology as a gift from her lover Martha Einkorn. Zhen, a coding genius, wants to know how this program works, so she takes it to a good friend where the two of them take their time untangling the code. When Zhen discovers the program has been shut off remotely, she goes to one of the billionaire’s bunkers to reactivate it.
The program informs her of an impending apocalypse and helps her flee to a lush island stocked with every supply imaginable. Three billionaires also occupy the island; their plane went down on its way to a luxury bunker.
Without the billionaires in charge of their companies, Martha and her three compatriots move to change the world.
This novel was a bit of a slog. There are excerpts from a fictional chatroom/message board for survivalists. The posts in the novel relate back to the Bible and what, exactly, ownership means. I felt, fully and truly, that these message boards could have been cut from the novel without losing anything of value. By the end of the novel, I felt like the author was a bit heavy-handed in the constant rabbit/fox stories presented.
The narrative style flowed well enough and the characters were wonderfully distinct throughout. The novel begins with the program pinging a billionaire, then dives into the life of another billionaire. They have their orders: to flee quickly and quietly. Then the novel falls into backstory. Sometimes backstory within backstory.
The information was good and relevant, but I was wondering when we were going to get back to the billionaires getting the message to leave. What prompted the message? Why are they leaving? What apocalypse has befallen the Earth? These questions are answered, but I got impatient waiting for it.
I was tempted to stop reading partway through because of this impatience, but the characters were well enough written that I kept on reading. The payoff was absolutely worth it. There isn’t a twist, not exactly, but there’s a double reveal that made the slog worth it.
The cover is particularly well done. It represents the message of the book beautifully. The image of the fox being prominent over the rabbit is apt, as is the use of gold, silver, and cream.
As a side note, I’m pretty sure we could take Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos and insert them into the three billionaires featured in the novel. The biggest question is; would things work out the same if we removed these three from their companies? I doubt we’ll ever know for sure.
Colony ship Voyager has been travelling for 250 years to get to the planet Promissa, where they plan to land and colonize. Except every probe that reaches the surface goes dead before it can transmit information. With roughly four and a half months until their journey is complete, scientists must work out the problem while being hindered by the Governor’s political desires and a growing faction of people that believe colonization is wrong.
The novel counts down to arrival date, detailling how the Governor skews information and manipulates media so the residents of the ship see only what he wants them to see. Pushing against him are the scientists who want more information from the surface of the planet before committing to sending large groups down. In addition, the ship’s Charter has a mandate of a death date: the person’s 75th birthday, which helps preserve resources. A small group begins to protest this mandate, since they’ll be colonizing soon anyway and so there shouldn’t be much strain on the resources. This protest evolves into not colonizing as it’s unethical.
Which presents a problem. As a reader, I understand that the ship has very limited resources, so people can’t live out their natural lives. New generations need to be born and with each birth there must be a death. Also, if the people decide not to colonize, how do they expect to be able to support a growing population if they get rid of the death mandate? This wasn’t answered in the novel, or if it was, I missed the explanation.
Other minor problems nagged at me as well. Landing was dangerous because they couldn’t get the probes to send information about microbes and whatnot. Political forces demanded landing parties go anyway and people were selected on the whims of the Governor. They were all tested for agoraphobia because they’d lived on a ship for something like five generations, therefore, people weren’t accustomed to open spaces. Some of the people who tested poorly were still sent down. That makes no sense. In addition, if the elders are slated to die anyway, why not send them down to the planet? They’d worked up until their 70th birthday, so work was a huge part of their lives anyway, and they could be useful in testing the atmospheric conditions and survivability of the planet.
Another minor issue that nagged at me was the media. The ship had televised news and entertainment. Why didn’t they have a science channel as well? As a reader, I’d expect that in the later generations, a timeslot would be allocated for information about the planet.
While the bulk of the novel takes place before arrival, there is just enough information at the end to explain why the probes weren’t sending information. But I felt like the author had a really good concept that was only explored at the tail end of the book. Yes, this novel is more about the struggle as they reach the planet, but in the end, the reader discovers that both the planet and the ship have gained a kind of cognizance. Now THAT would be an interesting book: how the ship behaves to protect the crew, how the planet behaves to protect itself, and how humans bung all that up. But I suppose that could all be written in a sequel.
Overall, the novel was all right. Good enough for me to finish it, but frustrating that (what I felt was) the best part was at the end and not really explored.
I kept stumbling across rave reviews of this novel so I thought I’d give it a read. I haven’t read anything else by the author but am familiar with titles that include the phrase, “Got Pounded in the Butt” or somesuch thing. Based on the reviews, I figured this book would be a serious horror.
It was not.
I’ve read a lot of horror in my day. Many dark evenings were spent deep in the trenches of gore, psychological horror, thriller, and graphic murder mysteries. While it’s not my thing right now, I’m familiar with spine-tingling creepiness nestled between the words of horror novels.
This novel made me tip my head in amusement, not horror. I mean, a girl coughing up a bunch of bugs? Sorta gross, sure, but more amusing than anything else. Before I get too much farther, here’s the basic plot:
Rose is twenty and on the cusp of graduating high school. Her uber-religious upbringing entailed taking two years off school to study the tenets of the Kingdom of the Pine, so she’s a bit behind her peers. KotP also runs the most effective gay conversion camp, Camp Damascus. Rose, while enjoying a late summer day with friends, notices how she really wants to impress another girl, not the boy she arrived with.
But her thoughts of this girl are interrupted by the visage of a strange looking woman with stringy hair, long fingers, and white eyes hiding in the trees nearby. Whenever Rose thinks of her attraction to other girls, this creepy woman shows up. At one point, the creepy woman actually breaks one of Rose’s fingers, so she’s not a mirage.
Now, I can get behind this plot. LGBTQ+ people are tormented by their demons. Okay. Those demons are tethered to the person at the gay conversion camp. Sure. Rose doesn’t remember attending the camp and is shocked that her parents don’t seem fazed by her coughing up a billowing cloud of bugs or when she tries to tell them about the creepy woman. Great.
These elements could contribute to a gut-wrenching creepfest but instead I felt little more than amusement. I finished the book only to see how things would be resolved; would Rose vanquish her demon? What of the demons of the others affected?
After finishing the novel I sat and thought about why this didn’t tug at my heartstrings or ice my belly. I suspect it’s because the author keeps the reader at a distance. Variations of the phrase, “I found myself…” in the narrative put a wall between the reader and the character’s experiences, as did the use of “suddenly” and “seemed to”. Bottom line: it was all telly and not showy.
Not every scene needs to be shown. Many scenes can be (and should be) told to keep the narrative flow running. But a novel that’s all telling makes for an emotionless read.
Along the same lines, I believe an editor should have caught the overuse of “I blurt” and “…is all I can think to say”. Those phrases appeared so often that I wanted to highlight them and send the manuscript back to an editor.
The overall message, however, is good. Vanquish your demons and find comfort and support in your found family instead of your blood relations, especially if the person you are goes against the person your relatives expect you to be. People deserve to have the room to learn who they are without punishment or shame. If that means someone has to leave a room and find a new one with more supportive people, so be it.
From what I know, this author is popular online and writes inclusive stories featuring LGBTQ+ characters. This novel had the potential to be great, but turned out feeling rushed and emotionless.
Lydia is a translator for a Logi, an alien species that has an embassy on Earth. The Logi communicate telepathically and only a small selection of humans can understand them. Lydia enjoys her job and has a good rapport with Fitz, her Logi employer, although translating for too long will give the effect of drunkenness in her. One night, after overdoing it with translating, Fitz is found dead in his study. Lydia lives in his residence and was the only one home. Too bad she can’t remember what happened, or even if she was the one who killed him.
The author does an excellent job of keeping the reader firmly implanted in the world. These Logi aliens are commonplace and accepted by most humans, which is reflected well in how Lydia interacts with Fitz and her social media. The world doesn’t feel too far into our future, which is a feat in and of itself. Glasses supply a constant feed of social media and recording the world around the wearer and scrolls offer another kind of access to the internet, social media, and recording yourself. Everyone is constantly being watched and potentially recorded and Lydia dealt with this in a way that felt believable.
The author also uses language to keep the reader firmly entrenched in the narrative. Words like ‘idee’, ‘veearr’, ‘ayaie’, and ‘enpeecees’ are used just like the acronyms are now and it makes sense that these acronyms would become words in the future.
The novel was engaging enough, but it’s a mystery that I doubt can be solved by the reader until the last bit of the book. The clue of how Lydia knows who the killer is doesn’t make sense to the reader until Lydia explains it at the end. Other than that, the book takes some odd twists and turns, which I found entertaining enough to consider seeking out the author’s other novels.
I don’t normally read a lot of fantasy, but the “high fantasy and low stakes” remark on the back cover caught my attention. I ended up loving this book so much that I wanted to crawl in between the pages and live there. The author’s narrative style was engaging and made for an easy read. My single and only complaint is that some scenes could use a little fleshing out. They felt a bit bare-boned in places and I craved just a tiny bit more padding between bits of action and dialogue.
The author did well in describing the different characters so I had an idea of what a hob or rattkin was despite my lack of fantasy background. I particularly enjoyed how the author presented each species as more than the expected criteria. Like the main character, Viv, is an orc but isn’t bloodthirsty and violent. Although she can and will wield a sword when needed. This was wonderfully refreshing.
There’s the teensiest bit of romance as well. Once Viv settles into running the shop she realizes she has warm feelings for Tandri, a succubus who has been helping with advertising and general management of the shop. These feelings don’t come to light until near the end and the author did a wonderful job in building their relationship so the warmth felt natural.
The stakes are, indeed, low. Viv opens a coffee shop in Thune after living a life slaying beasts and receiving bounty. She gets a hold of a Scalvert’s Stone, which the superstitious believe to have the ability to bring fortune and success. She buries the stone in her new shop and marvels at the wonderful people that come into her life. Cal the hob helps her renovate an old livery, Tandri the succubus helps her with advertising and running the shop, Thimble the rattkin becomes her baker, and a dire-cat comes and goes as she pleases.
Viv worries about the stone often enough that it never leaves the reader’s mind. An old party mate, Fennus, comes around to sniff it out, and the Madrigal’s group of thugs warn of payments needed to keep the peace.
These threats are present, but not the focus. The gentle pace of the novel created a soft world, one of delight and joy, with only enough stress to make the joy seem balanced.
The novel also featured a short story in the back, “Pages to Fill”, which gave some insight into the turning point for Viv. She’s in the midst of a quest when she decides she wants something more from life. More than beating people up, more than hunting down bounties, more than bloodshed. For me, it was like a last sip of the world before I had to let it go.
I recommend this novel to anyone who plays D&D, or perhaps would like a softer tone on monsters and mayhem.
Should Be Writing 