fantasy

Dark Light by Jodi Taylor

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Started: 7/26/20
Finished: 7/29/20

SO DISAPPOINTING.  I mean, it was enjoyable enough, but I was expecting a completely different story since this is supposed to be a sequel to the White Silence AND it picks up right after the other ended.  It went in completely different directions (more than once!) and seemed to have nothing to do with the plot of the first book (which had not been resolved), and when it did pick up the plot of the first book (sort of), it resolved unsatisfactorily.  Meh.  Also, the writing felt more amateurish than the first book and both books felt like that compared to her other books.  I don’t understand how that could be, but there it is.

White Silence by Jodi Taylor

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Started: 7/23/20
Finished: 7/26/20

This book, or at least parts of it, scared both Corey and Mel, so I went into it gingerly.  If it was dark outside and I thought it was going in a scary direction, I put it down until the next day.  Maybe that’s why the parts that scared them didn’t scare me.  Regardless, I liked it.  Weird sinister things kept happening to the character, and I REALLY wanted to know what was going on.  Super glad there was a second book.

And Now His Lordship Is Laughing by Shiv Ramdas

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Started: 7/22/20
Finished: 7/22/20

SO GOOD.  It’s fantasy, it’s horror (even though I heard on a horror panel that the author doesn’t think of it as horror, so maybe I should just say it has an element that depending on what you’re afraid of, you could absoLUTEly think it’s scary), it’s historical fiction, and it’s emotional (I cried).  SO.  GOOD.

The Deep by Rivers Solomon, Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes

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Started: 7/18/20
Finished: 7/19/20

This novella was inspired by the song The Deep (by clipping.), which I haven’t listened to yet.  The premise is that the pregnant and going-into-labor slaves who were thrown overboard midocean (true) gave birth to mer-people (probably not true) who built a whole civilization and society around a historian who remembers everything so that the rest of them don’t have to.  The story is mostly about the current historian who is having difficulties with this burden, but it also goes back into the memories.  It’s very good.

In An Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire

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Started: 7/5/20
Finished: 7/8/20

Fourth in the Wayward Children series, this one takes one of our characters back in time to when she found her door.  It’s so good, and the ending is so sad.  It felt sadder than the others, but I’m not sure why – they’re all sad stories because they can’t find their way back to where they feel they belong.  I should re-read the first one, at least.

City of Lies by Sam Hawke

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Started: 7/5/20
Gave up: 7/5/20

First in a new series that could be really good, but again, I had formatting issues I can’t get past.  It’s a PDF with a watermark across every page that says something like “DO NOT REPRODUCE OR WE WILL COME AFTER YOU”.  The watermark is okay, but a PDF on a Kindle is annoying because I have to keep resizing the pages.  I tried to convert it to a readable Kindle format (Amazon tells you how), and that process put the words from the watermark into the text of the book.  But not in one sentence on each page, no.  No, it broke up the watermark sentence and inserted the individual words into the text, making the actual book unreadable because it made no sense.  I would like to read this book, but I’ll get it from the library or something.  I’m not going to get it done in time for Hugo voting.

Dragon Pearl by Yoon Ha Lee

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Started: 7/5/20
Gave up: 7/5/20

13-year-old goes to space to rescue her older brother, and I am not in the mood.  The writing is good, the premise is good, but the formatting on my Kindle is atrocious (it’s a converted PDF), and the mind of this 13-year-old is not as comfortable to live in as the mind of the 12-year-old wizard was (from my last book).  I’d like to come back to this later, but I’m not going to finish it in time for Hugo voting.

Deeplight by Frances Hardinge

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Started: 6/23/20
Gave up: 6/25/20

YA, possibly Lovecraftian (at least insofar as it includes monsters in the ocean deeps), with an Artful Dodger-like main character, but it didn’t grab me.  It seems perfectly readable, and maybe I’ll go back to it, but I have a limited amount of time to read Hugo-nominated books, and I don’t want to spend time on this one.