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Liz Bourke

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A Shaky Resolution: Luna: Moon Rising by Ian McDonald

Thu Mar 21, 2019 3:00pm 3 comments 4 Favorites [+]

Award-winning author Ian McDonald began his Luna trilogy in Luna: New Moon, and continued it in Luna: Wolf Moon. Now, in Luna: Moon Rising, the trilogy reaches its conclusion as the war that has raged between the Five Dragons of the Moon (and now has drawn representatives of Earth into the fray) enters its newest stage.

There’s just one major problem with Luna: Moon Rising: it doesn’t feel like a conclusion. It feels, in fact, a lot more like a prologue, like the end of an opening act of some much larger arc. For every thread that’s brought to some kind of conclusion, another one spreads its wings.

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An Explosive Debut: The Perfect Assassin by K.A. Doore

Wed Mar 20, 2019 1:00pm 2 comments 3 Favorites [+]

K.A. Doore’s The Perfect Assassin is a priceless gift of a book.

Or so it felt to me, anyway. I’ve been finding it difficult to enjoy reading lately, to concentrate on how the words fit together into the pattern of a narrative, to see what works and what doesn’t and find pleasure in it. The Perfect Assassin is easy to enjoy, sharp and clean without being straightforward, a debut novel invested in being both good and fun.

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Sleeps With Monsters: Intimate Space Operas

Tue Mar 19, 2019 3:00pm 5 comments 2 Favorites [+]

Ever since I read E. K. Johnston’s Exit, Pursued By A Bear, I’ve been a fan of her quiet, understated approach to narrative. The work of her books is, as far as I can tell, closely circling thematic resonances, interpersonal tension, and character development, rather than the splashier and more obvious tensions and drives of action-led novels: thrillers, adventures, capers and heists. Even when her novels include such action, it’s always in service to the development of the character arc. The stakes are always intensely personal.

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Series: Sleeps With Monsters

A Sharp Noir-ish Thriller: The Rosewater Insurrection by Tade Thompson

Wed Mar 13, 2019 2:30pm 1 comment 1 Favorite [+]

Award-winning author Tade Thompson’s Rosewater was first published in the US by small press outfit Apex in 2016. I reviewed it here last year, when it was republished by Orbit as the first novel in a trilogy. The Rosewater Insurrection is the second novel in that trilogy, and although it’s as interesting and hard-edged as the first volume, it’s a very different book to its predecessor.

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Space Battles, Secrets, Refugees, and Dying Suns: The Vela

Fri Mar 8, 2019 1:30pm 1 comment 1 Favorite [+]

The Vela is the latest in Serial Box’s slate of speculative fiction offerings. This one’s space opera, with an approach to politics ever so slightly reminiscent of James S.A. Corey’s Expanse. Its concept is credited to Lydia Shamah, Serial Box’s director of original content, but its execution is down to an award-class writing team: Becky Chambers, Yoon Ha Lee, Rivers Solomon, and S.L. Huang. All of their individual talents combine to make The Vela a potent brew.

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Sleeps With Monsters: Intrigue, Espionage, and Capers

Tue Mar 5, 2019 4:00pm Post a comment 2 Favorites [+]

I’ve been waiting for a follow-up to Amanda Downum’s Kingdom of Dust for years. Downum’s first three novels, The Drowning City, The Bone Palace, and Kingdom of Dust were rich, detailed works involving plenty of magic and even more intrigue. Now she’s published The Poison Court, an excellent novel of murder and palace intrigue, and it’s every bit as good as I’d been hoping for.

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Series: Sleeps With Monsters

Fun, Messy Time Travel: Alice Payne Rides by Kate Heartfield

Tue Mar 5, 2019 3:00pm Post a comment Favorite This

I’m coming to the conclusion that Kate Heartfield may be the author whose work proves the exception to my “time travel stories never satisfy me” rule. Time travel is messy, and in a story where time travel is the focus, a classic linear narrative never quite works out. But in Heartfield’s Alice Payne novellas—first in last year’s Alice Payne Arrives, and now in its sequel, Alice Payne Rides—the mess is part of the point. The false starts, the paradoxes, the putative dead ends: these are part of the time war that the characters are either fighting or have got themselves caught up in.

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Standalone Fantasy Short on Complexity: The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

Thu Feb 28, 2019 2:30pm 5 comments 1 Favorite [+]

The last standalone epic fantasy of significant length I read was Jacqueline Carey’s magisterial Starless (2018), a novel told from the perspective of its sole narrator, and one so deftly paced that it seems precisely as long as it needs to be, and no longer. Samantha Shannon is a younger and less experienced writer than Carey, and The Priory of the Orange Tree is her first published epic fantasy and her first published standalone novel. It may be unfair of me to judge them by the same standards, but while The Priory of the Orange Tree does eventually get its legs underneath it for a satisfying endgame, it remains something of an unbalanced, unwieldy beast.

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Sleeps With Monsters: Engaging Fantasy Thrillers

Tue Feb 26, 2019 3:00pm 3 comments 4 Favorites [+]

How’s 2019 treating you so far, friends? I’m personally finding the onslaught of new and excellent books a little overwhelming.

Into that overwhelming (but excellent) category fall the two novels I want to talk about this week, Michelle Sagara’s Cast in Oblivion and Claire O’Dell’s The Hound of Justice (forthcoming in July from Harper Voyager).

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Series: Sleeps With Monsters

Striking and Ambitious Fantasy: The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie

Tue Feb 26, 2019 1:00pm 9 comments 2 Favorites [+]

If there’s one thing one can say for sure about Ann Leckie, it’s that so far in her career she shows no signs of settling into a rut. All her novels have been ambitious in their own separate ways, and they’ve played with gender, language and identity to fruitful, thought-provoking ends. (Let’s be honest, I’m a fan.) That ambition continues to show in The Raven Tower, her first novel-length published fantasy—and shows itself in some interesting, unconventional narrative choices.

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Complex Sword-and-Sorcery: The Afterward by E.K. Johnston

Thu Feb 21, 2019 3:00pm 2 comments 2 Favorites [+]

Every so often, a book comes along that I fall in love with entirely. A book that hooks its fingers into my heart and soul and nests there. Last year the novel that did that to the most precise, complete point was Aliette de Bodard’s In the Vanishers’ Palace. Although they’re very different books, this year it looks like E.K. Johnston’s The Afterward is a strong contender.

Johnston is perhaps best known at this point in her career for her Star Wars work (Star Wars: Ahsoka, with Star Wars: Queen’s Shadow forthcoming), but her original fiction has included both the critically-acclaimed contemporary novel Exit, Pursued by a Bear, and the striking science fictional That Inevitable Victorian Thing (which, certain elements of its worldbuilding aside, presents a deeply compelling story of self-discovery and the intersection of romance with responsibility). With The Afterward, she ventures into the territory of sword-and-sorcery, and casts a nod towards the epic fantasy of the late 1980s. The Afterward is set in the aftermath of a successful quest to vanquish an ancient evil, when the fellowship has disbanded and returned to the lives that the quest interrupted, and the responsibilities that come with those lives.

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Sleeps With Monsters: A Coincidence of Prisoners

Tue Feb 19, 2019 1:00pm 6 comments 2 Favorites [+]

An odd coincidence saw me read two books back-to-back—both with the word “prisoner” in the title—by authors who began their novel-publishing career in the 1980s. Both Barbara Hambly and Lois McMaster Bujold have definitely grown as writers in the last four decades, and their recent works can be relied on to provide deep, thought-provoking reads—and deeply entertaining ones, too.

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Series: Sleeps With Monsters

Sleeps With Monsters: Quiet Novels About Changing The World

Tue Feb 12, 2019 3:00pm 3 comments 1 Favorite [+]

This week I want to talk about a pair of short, independently published novels that deal with marriage, communities, and the process of change in conservative societies. It takes hard work and hope to begin to change the world, but the work is worth doing.

Those novels are M.C.A. Hogarth’s Healer’s Wedding, set in the “Pelted” space opera universe, the first book in a new duology; and Stephanie Burgis’s Thornbound, the second full novel in her “Harwood Spellbook” series, set in a country that resembles 19th-century England—but a 19th-century England ruled by a council of women where it is only socially acceptable for men, women’s helpmeets, to learn magic.

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Series: Sleeps With Monsters

A Simple, Measured Fantasy: Dark of the West by Joanna Hathaway

Thu Feb 7, 2019 2:00pm Post a comment 2 Favorites [+]

Joanna Hathaway’s debut novel, Dark of the West, can classify itself as fantasy by virtue of its setting: a secondary world whose technology seems to fit an equivalent of our 1930s. With its radios and tanks and machine guns, it perhaps bears comparison with Lara Elena Donnelly’s Amberlough, another magicless fantasy novel with a 1920s/1930s feel. But Amberlough and its sequels foreground the complexities of politics, understanding that while the personal is political, social movements can be bigger (more complicated, more long-lasting) than any single person. For Dark of the West, there appears to be no such thing as competing political interests. Everything, it seems, comes down to personal animus or personal loyalty.

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