Dia Reeves: Bleeding Violet
I read Bleeding Violet on Justine Larbalestier’s recommendation, and it strikes me that it has some common elements with Larbalestier’s (très nifty) “Magic” series: both feature estranged families...
View ArticleBeard, Donihe, Duza, et al: The Bizarro Starter Kit (Orange)
I hoped The Bizarro Starter Kit would help me figure out if I’d like bizarro fiction, a genre self-defined by a loose collective of writers with a shared love of cult/trash cinema. It didn’t. The...
View ArticleMichael Reaves and Steve Perry : Death Star
The first part of Reaves and Perry’s novel is set immediately before the original 1977 Star Wars movie; the second section is set during the time frame of the film, and interleaves most of the scenes...
View ArticlePhilip Reeve : Mortal Engines
Reeve’s young adult steampunk novel is set in a dystopian future where steam-powered cities literally roam the blasted earth on enormous tractor treads, devouring each other in the practice of...
View ArticlePhilip Reeve : Predator’s Gold
Mortal Engines left me so eager for more that I scoured all three bookshops in the town we were staying in for a copy of the sequel, Predator’s Gold, even though I suspected I was setting myself up for...
View ArticleRick Riordan: The Lightning Thief
It took a while for The Lightning Thief to win me over. For much of its length, it felt too nakedly calculated to appeal to Harry Potter fans (with the interesting, but hardly unique, added dimension...
View ArticleDaniel Radosh: Rapture Ready!
Rapture Ready!, an outsider’s tour of many facets of evangelical Christian culture was entertaining and informative, lucidly and sometimes even beautifully written. I already knew about the existence...
View ArticleDia Reeves: Slice of Cherry
I liked Reeves’ first novel Bleeding Violet so much that I ordered her second in advance of its publication date. And then I didn’t read it until now thanks to a quandary familiar to me: I didn’t want...
View ArticleAdam Roberts: Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer
There was a lot I appreciated about Robert’s elegantly crafted Jack Glass, but I definitely didn’t think it succeeded at everything it set out to do. The middle section of the novel, for instance,...
View ArticleWillo Davis Roberts : The View from the Cherry Tree
For better or worse, I found myself thinking of The View from the Cherry Tree as sort of what-if-Ralphie-of-A-Christmas-Story-witnessed-a-murder? story. (The novel substantially predates the film, of...
View ArticleLaura Resnick: Disappearing Nightly
I liked Disappearing Nightly, but I have a bit of trouble explaining why. It’s a light contemporary fantasy with a whodunnit flavor and a dash of romance. It partakes of several genres, and I didn’t...
View ArticleRainbow Rowell: Fangirl
Fangirl has a soundbite to make it easy to describe: it’s the YA novel about the girl who writes fanfic. Like most soundbites this is terribly and unfairly reductive; it’s about a whole lot of other...
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