Black Water Sister, Zen Cho. I've been a fan of Zen Cho since I was blown away by the Malaysian vampire story a decade or so ago ("House of Aunts"), so it's not surprising I liked this, but, look, it's so good. Hooked me immediately and never lost me. I really enjoyed her Regency duology but this is a more serious book, with more emotional ( Read more... )

Cut for long and for my opinions. ( Read more... )

Aristotle and Dante Dive Into the Waters of the World, Benjamin Alire Sáenz. Behind cut for major spoilers. ( Read more... )

Machinehood, SB Divya. I liked Divya's novella Runtime (link to what I said about it, since I bothered to find it), so I was excited to see a novel from her. I ended up with mixed feelings! I really liked the beginning - Divya builds a really interesting near-future world (2095) where most work is gig work, everyone has a tip jar, privacy is ( Read more... )

Dune. Sure! That was definitely the first half of a Dune movie! I thought they did some nice stuff with scale, shots of ships and ships or ships and buildings, where you get a real sense of Impressive Space Future Infrastructure, but I honestly found The Big Sandworm Shot kind of underwhelming. It was very dark? Maybe it played better on the big ( Read more... )

Welp, I've had this tab open for three months, which, let's be clear, is not very old at all on the scale of tabs I have open, but is very old for time taken to review something. The particular challenge here was that I loved it and J (big J - very not for little J) wasn't so into it, and so I was going to try to explain why I was so into it, when ( Read more... )

A Master of Djinn, P. Djèlí Clark. Novel in the same world as "Dead Djinn in Cairo" (available online here) and The Haunting of Tram Car 015 (my review here). This was so much fun - detective story meets pulp-action-adventure. Clark has a real talent for writing cinematic action sequences, leading to the Scott-Westerfeld-esque experience of ( Read more... )

In the Watchful City, S. Qiouyi Lu. Novella consisting of a frame story and four short stories in varying genres and styles (five if you count the protagonist in the frame story relating aer own story). I had mixed feelings about it - I thought the frame story was very strong, a lot of vivid imagery and interesting ideas, and two of the four ( Read more... )

She Who Became The Sun, Shelley Parker-Chan. I started this book in a state of almost total cluelessness (a state I find very natural!) - my reading-list note said "alt-hist China fantasy", by which my past self could have meant anything from a second-world fantasy like Empress of Salt and Fortune that's a lot *like* China in some ways, to ultra- ( Read more... )

A Psalm for the Wild-Built, first in Becky Chambers' new novella series. This felt very much like A Pandemic Book, although I seem to have put it on my to-read list in April of 2020, so maybe it was actually A Trump Book or An Election Book or some previous round of trauma, I don't have a good enough understanding of publication timelines to know ( Read more... )