Phil in SF started reading A Shadow in Summer by Daniel Abraham (Long Price Quartet)
From debut author Daniel Abraham comes A Shadow in Summer, the first book in the …
Starting another book from the large backlog of stuff in my ebook library.
Reviews and Comments
aka @kingrat@sfba.social. I'm following a lot of bookwyrm accounts, since that seems to be the only way to get reviews from larger servers to this small server. Also, I will like & boost a lot of reviews that come across my feed. I will follow most bookwyrm accounts back if they review & comment. Social reading should be social.
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Phil in SF reviewed His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik (Temeraire, #1)
Aerial combat brings a thrilling new dimension to the Napoleonic Wars as valiant warriors rise …
Not my thing after all
4 stars
The origin story of the dragon Temeraire, captured from the French by the captain of an English ship, William Laurence. The person who drew the short straw is rejected as a rider by Temeraire, and Laurence becomes the rider in his place, but must give up his career in the navy. Training and battles in the dragon air service follow.
It is well-written, but the extended treatment of the proper relationship between riders and dragons was not interesting enough for me to want to seek out the sequels. People who like tales of manners will find this more enjoyable.
Phil in SF reviewed The Girl Who Sang Rose Madder by Elizabeth Bear
aging former rock star contemplates how long one can make art
4 stars
Content warning reveals the science fictional element
Quite enjoyed this tale of an aging rock star who learns her sister's band's guitarist is undead.
Phil in SF commented on Promises Stronger Than Darkness by Charlie Jane Anders (Unstoppable, #3)
They're the galaxy's most wanted—and our only hope.
When Elza became a space princess, she …
I've now completed a Bookwyrm list for the Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book, with Promises Stronger Than Darkness being the final book on it (for now).
List can be found at sfba.club/list/79/s/locus-award-for-best-young-adult-book for those on SFBA.club.
Phil in SF wants to read The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro
A modern American classic, this huge and galvanizing biography of Robert Moses reveals not only …
Just acquired in ebook. Will start when I finish my current read.
Phil in SF started reading His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik (Temeraire, #1)
Aerial combat brings a thrilling new dimension to the Napoleonic Wars as valiant warriors rise …
This has been on my TBR for 15 years. I originally got the ebook as a freebie from suvudu.com, a long defunct site run by Penguin or Random House (I forget which company owned the Del Rey imprint before the merger). Let's finally take a crack at it.
Phil in SF stopped reading Arguing with Zombies by Paul Krugman
An accessible, compelling introduction to today’s major policy issues from the New York Times columnist, …
when i picked this up i thought it was new writing. it's actually old columns of his. they were great when i read them the first time. not really interested in re-reading them, particularly the ones from the Bush era.
Phil in SF reviewed Never Go Back by Lee Child (Jack Reacher, #18)
Former military cop Jack Reacher makes it all the way from snowbound South Dakota to …
Serviceable Reacher again
3 stars
Never Go Back has a simpler conspiracy than the previous book, A Wanted Man, and it meant I could actually enjoy this one. The bad guys mess with Reacher, setting him up to take a fall for a murder he did not commit. This sets up a cat-and-mouse between Reacher and the baddies, as he escapes, dodges the fuzz & the henchmen, tries to rescue the girl, and gets down & dirty with the woman he decided he wanted to meet something like 4 books ago.
Phil in SF commented on White Sky, Black Ice by Stan Jones (Nathan Active, #1)
In the small Alaskan village of Chukchi, what are the odds of two suicides occurring …
The woman sitting at the counter next to me at The Pork Store this morning was reading White Sky, Black Ice. I mentioned reading and liking it. Because it's not a well known book, it sparked a long discussion of our favorite authors.
Phil in SF reviewed High Heat by Lee Child (Jack Reacher, #17.5)
July 1977. Jack Reacher is almost seventeen, and he stops in New York City on …
Young Jack Racher goes from Korea to NYC and takes down the mob
2 stars
Also, he's in high school but so cool he picks up college girls.
As before, young Reacher is even less believable than adult Reacher. Very meh on this story.
Phil in SF commented on The Chicago Manual of Style by University of Chicago Press
Much has happened in the years since the publication of the seventeenth edition of The …
I bought the latest edition of the CMOS and put it on a newly created "Reference" shelf here.
Phil in SF reviewed New Under the Sun by Nancy Kress
Set in the near future, Nancy Kress’ story gives us a world increasingly hostile to …
Standard Kress fare
3 stars
Kress likes to do "what if human bodies were changed..." stories. This one is: what if a symbiotic species inhabited a human such that it could make changes to the host but the person and symbiote could only communicate in a general sense. So the symbiote can make its host able to spit toxic saliva when threatened, or change the host's pigment and apparent age, etc. Set in an era where there's a breakdown in civil society because large numbers of US residents believe in witches (and want to burn them at the stake).
The Pieczynski piece features a woman in 1980s Sandinista Nicaragua who focuses the energy of the fighting between Contras and Sandinistas and turns it into sentient whirlwinds and golems.
Phil in SF reviewed The Murders in Great Diddling by Katarina Bivald (Berit Gardner, #1)
The best stories are the ones we didn’t know needed to be told.
The small, …
Cozy mystery with a bit of police procedural
5 stars
While attending a tea party in Great Diddling, author Berit Gardner witnesses the murder of Reginald Trent in the manor of his aunt, Daphne Trent. Reginald Trent is pretty universally disliked in the village of Great Diddling. Everyone there dislikes him. Berit Gardner, wanting to avoid writing her next book, investigates instead. Meanwhile the townsfolk, lead by tourist board chair, decide to take advantage of their sudden notoriety by holding a books & murders literary festival on short notice. At the center of the crime is who controls the books of Tawny Hall, Daphne Trent's massive collection.
It's a cozy mystery. It's a bit of a police procedural. It's an homage to readers, though there precious little of the point of view of readers. All the town's characters have backstories. My main nitpick is the ultimate solution to the mystery of the murder follows a pretty standard pattern, so whodunnit …
While attending a tea party in Great Diddling, author Berit Gardner witnesses the murder of Reginald Trent in the manor of his aunt, Daphne Trent. Reginald Trent is pretty universally disliked in the village of Great Diddling. Everyone there dislikes him. Berit Gardner, wanting to avoid writing her next book, investigates instead. Meanwhile the townsfolk, lead by tourist board chair, decide to take advantage of their sudden notoriety by holding a books & murders literary festival on short notice. At the center of the crime is who controls the books of Tawny Hall, Daphne Trent's massive collection.
It's a cozy mystery. It's a bit of a police procedural. It's an homage to readers, though there precious little of the point of view of readers. All the town's characters have backstories. My main nitpick is the ultimate solution to the mystery of the murder follows a pretty standard pattern, so whodunnit won't be a surprise after a while. But the journey there is pretty entertaining.
The audiobook narrator, Helen Lloyd, does a great job in the audio version.
Phil in SF reviewed Citadel by C. M. Alongi
In this luminous sci-fi debut, a nonverbal autistic woman refuses to crumble as she stands …
clumsy, without any subtlety
2 stars
Content warning spoiler review
Citadel is set up as an over the top patriarchy. The enemy are native "demons" who our MC figures out are probably sentient. At 40% on, she has set out to make contact and finds out the demons are telepathic. after all the clumsy world-building at that point, the final straw was our MC insisting that the demons who tell her that humans started the killing are wrong, rather than ask them what they know. you're doing first contact, and your character is suddenly a bull in a china shop, despite being much smarter than that before then. final straw for me.
Phil in SF reviewed Relentless Melt by Jeremy P. Bushnell
Stranger Things meets the Golden Age of Detective fiction in a rollicking supernatural detective thriller …
Fun coming of age story
4 stars
Relentless Melt starts off with young Artie Quick attending their first investigation class at a night school for young men run by the Y.M.C.A. The teacher, an older policeman, observes that Artie appears to be a young woman wearing a young man's suit, making them ineligible for the class. Nevertheless, he seems inclined to keep Artie's secret.
Artie is taking the class to, as they later figure out, make sense of why their brother Zeb has abandoned the family for a life of crime. But at the outset Artie thinks they're intrigued by solving crimes. And so Artie and their best friend Theodore, a young adult with family money but living on his own, decide to practice solving crimes by investigating a scream heard in a local park late at night.
The book is a little bit coming of age, a little bit amateur sleuths solving a mystery, and a …
Relentless Melt starts off with young Artie Quick attending their first investigation class at a night school for young men run by the Y.M.C.A. The teacher, an older policeman, observes that Artie appears to be a young woman wearing a young man's suit, making them ineligible for the class. Nevertheless, he seems inclined to keep Artie's secret.
Artie is taking the class to, as they later figure out, make sense of why their brother Zeb has abandoned the family for a life of crime. But at the outset Artie thinks they're intrigued by solving crimes. And so Artie and their best friend Theodore, a young adult with family money but living on his own, decide to practice solving crimes by investigating a scream heard in a local park late at night.
The book is a little bit coming of age, a little bit amateur sleuths solving a mystery, and a little bit of magical fantasy. When Artie's investigations instructor suddenly cancels class, Theodore convinces Artie to join him at his school where he's learning a bit of being a magician. Theodore's one spell he's working on allows him to quietly sneak quietly by casting a sphere spell around his feet.
You'll notice I use the they pronoun here. A lot of what makes this good is Artie feeling how their sense of self changes when they're wearing a men's suit. Neither Artie nor Theodore quite knows what to do with themselves, Theodore's attraction to Artie, and Artie's feelings of ambiguity to Theodore.
The character study is intertwined with a lovely mystery. The scream they heard leads them to a criminal enterprise that is abducting young women, including the daughter of Artie's teacher. The sleuthing led to something I was not expecting in the least, and yet it made for a great story.