– goodreads –
This was, I confess, a complete impulse read. I was idly browsing cheap ebooks and – hey, I’ve heard of this before. And it looks to be barely longer than a novella, too! Checking the preview, the strangeness of it all was incredibly compelling. I had to go back to it at the earliest possible opportunity.
– goodreads –
This was pretty much an impulse read. I saw a lot of talk about it in the last couple weeks, I was curious but not enough to disrupt my already messy TBR, then the magical words “it’s short” got mentioned. And sure enough, at only a little over novella length, it’s an astonishingly quick read, but that doesn’t mean it packs any less of a punch.
Time for another novella round-up post! Lately, thanks to all the slumps, I’ve been going more and more for shorter books. This time around, all three novellas reviewed are SFF and all are books I’d highly recommend.
Time for another mini review post to clear out my backlog a bit!
While it’s true that in the past few months the most I managed to finish was the occasional novella or romance book, I found some really, really good ones. If anyone else is looking for shorter (all except Slippery Creatures are novellas) or lighter reads, here are some I’d suggest.
Sometimes, it’s just not to be. Sometimes, no matter how much I want to love a book, there comes a point where I can’t force myself to read another page. Not necessarily because it’s a bad book – in this batch, there’s even two I’d give 4/5 for execution – but it happens. I often write shorter reviews of books I DNF’d just so that there’s some note on them on goodreads, but they are too short to be a blogpost on their own, and I haven’t had enough to group them together until now.
Besides, backlog cleaning is never a bad thing.
– goodreads –
ARC received from the publisher (Serial Box) in exchange for an honest review.
I accepted this review request for several different reasons. First, the line-up sounded fantastic. Second, the setting – 1930s Manhattan. Awesome. Third, while I have read a few Lovecraft-inspired books, I have never read a noir before and I wanted to see if I can like one. I knew there was a high likelihood that it would be free of unexamined racism and sexism, which seems to be the issue with most noirs I heard of, and I was absolutely correct. It was great – a little too horror for my taste (which is more me being a wimp than any fault of the writing, really), but great.
(I should probably mention I went for the text version, not audio, so I can’t say anything about the narration.)
– goodreads –
ARC received from the published (Tachyon) in exchange for an honest review.
They were birds of bright fire that fell from the sky and cocooned me, until I could see and hear nothing except the warmth and the feathers enveloping me and the threads of the wind singing each to each until my whole skin was ignited by the sun, my body changing and changed by the malleable flame.
I have been familiar with R.B. Lemberg’s works for a while – Geometries of Belonging and Grandmother-nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds (which should preferably be read before reading this book) are two of those short stories that stuck with me long after I read them. So when Erio brought The Four Profound Weaves to my attention, highly recommending it, I knew that sooner or later, I will end up reading it. Queer books with lovely prose are precisely my kind of thing.
As suspected, I adored it.
Continue reading “Review: The Four Profound Weaves by R.B. Lemberg (Birdverse)”
– goodreads –
ARC received from the publisher (Saga Press) on Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
I have first heard of the book on twitter and got curious when I learned it was inspired by a song. At the time, I haven’t read any of Solomon’s books (though my friends have recommended me An Unkindness of Ghosts plenty) nor have I heard of Clipping. But I went and listened to The Deep – it was not my usual type and yet I liked it. I liked it a whole lot.
And the ever-important question: Was the book any good? Hell yes. Though I was a bit unsure at the start, it did pretty much exactly what I expected from the song, and more.
Through August and September, I plowed through so many books I accumulated a bit of a review debt. Not reviewing them would, of course, not do, so this is my attempt to catch up and clean out the drafts.
– goodreads –
ARC received from the publisher (Serial Box) in exchange for an honest review.
I pounced at the opportunity to read this barely holding back the squeeing. You mean a story written by Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, S.L. Huang, and Rivers Solomon? YES PLEASE 
I haven’t read any serials before (I have been planning to poke into Tremontaine, but, well, Mt. TBR), but just from the line-up, this was bound to be good. And it was! As I hoped, this turned out to be exactly the sort of sci-fi I love the most – character-focused, with a side of social commentary. Honestly, I can’t wait for the sequel.
To Other Worlds 