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Liz Bourke

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book reviews

Energetically Youthful Epic Fantasy: City of Dusk by Tara Sim

Thu Mar 31, 2022 2:00pm 1 Favorite [+]

Tara Sim is a well-respected writer of YA SFF. (I have her Scavenge the Stars, of which I’ve heard nothing but good things, on my shelf for when I can steal time to read it). City of Dusk, the opening volume in a projected trilogy, is her first novel aimed at a primarily adult audience. You cannot imagine how much I wanted to love it, but alas! Not all books are for all readers, and while City of Dusk is a perfectly acceptable sort of epic fantasy, I’m too old and jaded to be charmed by its youthful cast of aristocratic protagonists, their divinely-sourced magic, and the threat of their world’s slow decay.

book reviews

An Explosive Space Opera: Seven Mercies by Laura Lam and Elizabeth May

Tue Jan 25, 2022 3:00pm 1 Favorite [+]

Seven Mercies, the second novel-length collaboration between Elizabeth May and Laura Lam, is the conclusion to the space opera duology that began with 2020’s Seven Devils. A small and ragged band of rebels stand against the might of a murderous empire and the AI that’s capable of controlling the minds of its citizens. The results are explosive.

Sleeps With Monsters

Sleeps With Monsters: Two Books About Family Situations

Tue Jul 27, 2021 3:00pm 7 comments 2 Favorites [+]

I don’t think Zen Cho is capable of writing a book that isn’t a fascinating and stylish delight. Black Water Sister is her latest, and it’s a striking, appealing narrative of family, displacement, “home”-coming, coming-of-age… and ghosts.

Jess has grown up in the USA, the only daughter of Malaysian Chinese immigrants. Her memories of Malaysia are holiday snapshots. She’s just finished college, and her girlfriend has moved to Singapore. And now Jess is moving back to Malaysia with her parents in the wake of her father’s brush with cancer, to live with her father’s younger sister’s family in George Town. Jess is not out to her parents, or to any of her family, and she’s feeling dislocated enough with the move to Malaysia before she starts hearing voices.

Series: Sleeps With Monsters

Sleeps With Monsters

Sleeps With Monsters: Making Good Choices

Tue Jul 13, 2021 3:00pm 2 comments 3 Favorites [+]

Last time out, I believe I mentioned Jo Spurrier’s Winter Be My Shield, and mentioned that I’d be reading the next two books in the “Children of the Black Sun” trilogy as soon as I could get my hands on them. Those books are Black Sun Light My Way and North Star Guide Me Home, and they are just as good, if not better, than their predecessor.

Series: Sleeps With Monsters

book reviews

The Hidden Palace by Helene Wecker Is a Measured, Gorgeous, Character-Driven Fantasy

Fri Jul 9, 2021 10:30am 2 comments 1 Favorite [+]

The Hidden Palace is Helene Wecker’s long-awaited second novel. Wecker’s debut, The Golem and the Jinni, was published to no small acclaim in 2013. Those of us who remember that novel and its fantastic blending of myths from different traditions in the grounded setting of immigrant communities in late 19^th-century New York have been anticipating The Hidden Palace for quite some time.

It lives up to its predecessor.

Sleeps With Monsters

Sleeps With Monsters: Books Visceral and Gripping

Tue Jun 29, 2021 3:00pm 2 comments 2 Favorites [+]

What’s the weather like where you are? It’s high summer for me, with temperatures reaching a blistering 18C and sea-swimming looking good in waters with a surface temperature of 12C… which probably explains why I enjoyed reading a book set in the freezing heart of winter: reminded me a lot of cold water shock.

Series: Sleeps With Monsters

book reviews

A Striking Debut: The Wolf and the Woodsman by Ava Reid

Wed Jun 16, 2021 2:00pm 1 comment 3 Favorites [+]

The Wolf and the Woodsman is Ava Reid’s debut novel. This fantasy draws its inspiration from the early medieval history of Hungary: the name of the land where the story is set, Régország, is a pair of Hungarian words that could be translated as “long-ago country.” It draws, too, from the history of Jewish people in Hungary. It would seem to fit comfortably into the recent tradition of Eastern European fantasy, a tradition that has its most popular and most iconic examples to date in Naomi Novik’s Uprooted and Spinning Silver, though other examples range from Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale to Rena Rossner’s Sisters of the Winter Wood and Ursula Vernon’s (writing as T. Kingfisher) The Raven and the Reindeer. The Wolf and the Woodsman is fiercer and more viscerally bloody than Novik’s work: an impressive debut.

Even if its climactic battle seems to arrive practically out of nowhere.

Sleeps With Monsters

Sleeps With Monsters: The Difference Between Survival and Cruelty

Tue Jun 15, 2021 3:00pm 4 comments 3 Favorites [+]

Two of the books I want to talk about this time have already been ably discussed on Tor.com by Molly Templeton, whose review of Nicole Kornher-Stace’s Firebreak prompted me to get off my arse and order my copy, and of whose review of E.K. Johnston’s Aetherbound I’d be very jealous, if I were the jealous sort. But I think I can add just a little additional enthusiastic discussion…

Series: Sleeps With Monsters

book reviews

The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri Is Complicated, Unapologetic, Powerful, Glorious

Tue Jun 8, 2021 3:30pm 3 comments 6 Favorites [+]

The Jasmine Throne is the opening volume of a new epic fantasy trilogy by Tasha Suri. I’m not sure I know how to express my feelings about it. I enjoyed Suri’s “Books of Ambha” duology, Empire of Sand and Realm of Ash, and admired them as well-constructed epic fantasy with a strong romantic component, but they never made me feel like this—gobsmacked, a little awestruck, violently satisfied, painfully engaged.

Perhaps I do know how to express my feelings after all.

book reviews

Lamplighters Vs. Vampires: The Lights of Prague by Nicole Jarvis

Wed May 26, 2021 2:00pm 2 comments Favorite This

Reviewing a disappointing novel is, at times, an exercise in careful precision. Is it disappointing because of what it is, or because of what I wanted from it? Is it disappointing because I read it back-to-back with a novel that dealt with many of the same themes in a more complex, more assured fashion? Is it disappointing because it’s now fourteen months into a global pandemic and I’m a gnarled, crabby knuckle of a human being joylessly waiting to punch everything in the face? You must decide for yourself, though I often fear it’s the latter.

This preamble may perhaps indicate to you that I found The Lights of Prague, Nicole Jarvis’s debut novel, rather disappointing.

Sleeps With Monsters

Sleeps With Monsters: Saffron, Robots, and Space Assassins

Tue May 25, 2021 3:00pm 4 comments 1 Favorite [+]

A few days ago, I looked at the calendar and said, “But what do you mean, it’s more than halfway through May?” My sense of time passing remains disconnected from reality, in a faintly comedic way that makes the day of the week a constant startlement.

Series: Sleeps With Monsters

Sleeps With Monsters

Sleeps With Monsters: Procedural Fantasy and Queering Historical Epic

Tue May 4, 2021 3:00pm 2 comments 3 Favorites [+]

I’m finding reading difficult lately, but I’d like to talk about two books that I particularly enjoyed.

Series: Sleeps With Monsters

author interviews

Sleeps With Monsters: In Conversation With Tasha Suri

Tue Apr 27, 2021 3:00pm 1 comment 4 Favorites [+]

Photo © Shekhar Bhatia.

Recently, I caught up with Tasha Suri over Zoom to discuss her life, career, and writing during a global pandemic, in advance of her forthcoming and highly anticipated The Jasmine Throne, a queer epic fantasy whose worldbuilding has strong influences from the Indian subcontinent. Her household had recently been vaccinated—a great relief in these days—and we condoled each other on how time has gone strange and how the activities of daily life have been so restricted, especially when you live with vulnerable people. “You don’t live in London,” she says, “because you don’t like to go out!”

I joked that I’d try not to be a terrifically boring interviewer and ask Where do you get your ideas? But the question’s already out in the open. “I still don’t know,” Suri says. “People do keep asking, and I still can’t answer that question.”

Series: Sleeps With Monsters

Sleeps With Monsters

Sleeps With Monsters: Water Horse by Melissa Scott

Tue Apr 20, 2021 3:00pm 4 comments 2 Favorites [+]

Melissa Scott’s career spans, at this point, four decades. Perhaps best known for her Astreiant fantasy novels (initially written with her late partner Lisa A. Barnett, and later alone), she’s also written innovative science fiction, space opera, and tie-in novels for Stargate and gen:Lock. Her most recent original novel, the space opera Finders, came out from small press Candlemark and Gleam: a vivid and lively novel full of character and intrigue.

Now with Water Horse (Candlemark and Gleam, June 2021) Scott returns to fantasy with a self-contained volume of war, weirdness, and people strained to their breaking point by a generations-long war.

Series: Sleeps With Monsters

Interviews

Sleeps With Monsters: C.L. Polk Answers Seven Questions

Tue Mar 23, 2021 3:00pm 9 Favorites [+]

Photo: Mike Tan

Canadian C.L. Polk is a writer and gentlebeing of tact and good taste. The concluding volume of their award-winning Kingston trilogy, Soulstar, has just recently come out, and their The Midnight Bargain was a finalist for the “Canada Reads” television competition. They’ve agreed to answer a few questions today. And I’ve agreed to try not to ask boring ones.

Series: Sleeps With Monsters