Started: 9/15/18
Gave up: 9/15/18
Started and gave up on the same day. I just wasn’t interested. The characters didn’t feel real, their actions didn’t make sense (for real people), and the plot didn’t get going before I quit. I’ve heard really good things about a different book by this author. Maybe I can get it from the library. It would be interesting to know if her style changed (improved) or if she’s just not for me.
Started: 9/5/18
Finished: 9/7/18
A well-off Victorian teenager with a bad attitude goes on an adventure with his best friend (who he’s secretly in love with) and his sister (who is awesome and gets her own sequel).
Started: 8/7/18
Finished: 8/11/18
LOVED this. The Civil War got interrupted by the zombie apocalypse, and while slavery technically ended (because everyone is needed to fight zombies), really all the former slaves got drafted to be the front line in the fight against the zombies. Young adult, really strong voice, great main character. I think (I hope) there will be a sequel.
Started: 7/29/18
Finished: 8/7/18
Really good, really interesting, but a little tough to start. Once I was in, though, I was all the way in. The magic is super weird but in a good way, and at the same time, this is set in our future.
Started: 7/21/18
Finished: 7/29/18
Interesting way to look at reincarnation (kind of reincarnation, kind of immortality), but I feel like the story went off the rails towards the end. Pretty good, didn’t love it.
Started: 7/1/18
Finished: 7/3/18
I loved this book. It’s fantasy – boy finds himself in a land with elves and mermaids and so on, which is always good for me – but the characters (all teenagers, followed from age 13 to 18) are written so realistically it’s easy to forget this is fantasy. (Fantasy novels don’t always do characters justice.)
Started: 6/27/18
Finished: 7/1/18
Slavery in space. Set on a generation ship so far from its beginnings that no one questions the structure, our main character is probably meant to be on the spectrum and has enough medical skill to have some freedom while still working within the system. It’s good, with a mystery at its center, and some interestingly misunderstood characters, but a pretty serious read.
Started: 6/15/18
Finished: 6/16/18
Young adult novella, set in a future with tech that looks like magic. A young woman belongs to an insular African village and leaves it (runs away?) to go to an interstellar university. The first in a trilogy. SO GOOD.
Started: 6/13/18
Finished: 6/15/18
This is silkpunk, which I believe is Asian steampunk, with some tech, some magic, a twin fated to die with the other determined to save them both. It’s an intro to the author’s novel-length series, but I’m not in a hurry to read those. Good, but not for me.
Started: 6/4/18
Finished: 6/7/18
This starts out kind of like a Beauty and the Beast story, but it gets weirder fast and in a very good way.
Started: 5/29/18
Finished: 6/2/18
Thieves and heists and magic and adventure. What’s not to like? I mean, when the writing is good. As it is here.
Started: 5/23/18
Finished: 5/26/18
There’s a secret society whose members steal rare books from all the universes to store in the invisible library between the universes. Sounds awesome. The execution was not awesome. It was okay and sometimes interesting, but I felt let down.
Started: 4/20/18
Gave up: 4/20/18
It’s urban fantasy, or maybe paranormal romance, or maybe both. I like that genre (duh), but I just didn’t care about this one. Couldn’t get into it. There’s one series like this that I heard was really good starting with the second book, but I can’t remember if it was this one, and Twitter wasn’t able to help me when I asked. So I gave it up. There are lots of other books in the sea.
Started: 4/15/18
Finished: 4/20/18
This one was odd. I liked it, but the technology in this universe is, I think, deliberately inscrutable. It could be really interesting – it relies on calendars, dates, and the population’s belief in those calendars – but the way it’s described is not clear at all. The characters are interesting, and the plot is interesting, but there’s a space battle and how it’s being waged might as well be in Greek.
I was really looking forward to this one, too.
Started: 4/13/18
Finished: 4/15/18
Another Holmes and Watson take, but this time the Holmes character is an unstable Vietnamese woman and Watson is a sentient spaceship. It’s a novella, just long enough to solve one mystery, but while I liked the characters, I found the mystery (so basically, the story) a little…not hard to understand exactly, because I followed the plot, but hard to explain, maybe? Like, I read it, but I don’t think I could describe what happened.
Started: 3/26/18
Gave up: 3/28/18
Gave up on this. No character development, and there’s a taken-for-granted-women-are-objects-for-sex assumption that I just can’t handle.
Started: 2/17/18
Finished: 2/18/18
Lovely novella about lesbians in 1940s San Francisco with a little bit of magic.
Started: 2/6/18
Finished: 2/10/18
A generation ship story with clones, told over a LONG period of time in a series of vignettes. Pretty good – we spent just enough time with the characters in each story to like or understand them. There was one episode that seemed a bit extreme, but it was good storytelling, so I’m okay with it.
Started: 1/28/18
Finished: 2/3/18
Speculative fiction, second American civil war begins 60 years from now, the south refuses to give up oil. Told entirely from the point of view of a young southern woman fighting, not for the cause (she doesn’t care about oil), but because the war (and the north) destroyed everything she knew and loved. It felt real and dirty and uncomfortable, and I’m not sure I liked it, but it was good.
Started: 1/28/18
Finished: 1/28/18
Another novella, also good, but not as gripping as the previous two. Felt more psychological thriller than science fiction.