Tor.com content by

Vanessa Armstrong

Tue May 25, 2021 2:30pm Post a comment 2 Favorites [+]

Any high-level categorization of a book inevitably fails to fully capture the complete essence of a story. And then there are books like The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley, where even assigning several labels to the tale still doesn’t do the story justice.

The Kingdoms contains multitudes: it is a love story, a seafaring war novel, a time-travel mystery, an alternative history tale, and more. And while each description in the previous sentence is accurate, each description fails to capture all that the book encompasses.

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book reviews

Grimdark Fantasy With Heart: The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman

Vanessa Armstrong

Tue May 25, 2021 11:30am 1 comment 3 Favorites [+]

There are books that have voice and then there is Kinch Na Shannack, the narrator in Christopher Buehlman’s The Blacktongue Thief. Kinch has a lot of voice—you can easily picture him in a tavern somewhere relaying his tale to a group of pleasantly soused patrons.

What does his tale entail? Kinch, a blacktongued thief indebted to the Taker’s Guild, starts his story when he and a group of fellow thieves try to rob the wrong Ispanthian warrior. The story moves on from there, with the Guild strongly encouraging Kinch to travel with the same warrior as she goes off to Oustrim, a good eight-week journey away by land.

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book reviews

Changing While Standing Still: The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers

Vanessa Armstrong

Tue Apr 20, 2021 1:00pm 4 comments 4 Favorites [+]

Contemporary life is a busy thing, full of demands and schedules and deadlines and destinations. The same holds true in Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer universe, where a cadre of sapient species are part of an intergalactic civilization called the Galactic Commons (GC, for short) with its own rules, expectations, and inequities.

It’s natural for those in the GC—just like it’s natural for us humans on Earth—to get lost in the day-to-day of one’s own life and the immediate stressors and concerns that go with it. And it’s equally jarring—as the year that was 2020 has shown all of us—when the routine and freedoms we took for granted get upended.

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book reviews

The Shape of War in R.F. Kuang’s The Burning God

Vanessa Armstrong

Tue Nov 17, 2020 2:00pm 1 comment 1 Favorite [+]

We start The Burning God, the last book in R. F. Kuang’s Poppy War trilogy, at the beginning of a battle. It’s an appropriate start for a trilogy rife with war. And though the sides have changed—Rin is now the head of the Southern Coalition after she was imprisoned by the Republic she once fought for—the brutal nature of warfare remains the same.

This unrelenting toll of battle, like in the two books before it, remains an overarching theme in The Burning God. In war, those with power commit horrific acts, justifying it as a necessary evil to achieve their ultimate aims. Both sides are often corrupted in this way, and Kuang makes sure to remind us that our protagonist, Rin, is no exception.

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book reviews

Stories Within Stories: Exploring The Lives of Saints by Leigh Bardugo

Vanessa Armstrong

Wed Oct 7, 2020 1:00pm 1 Favorite [+]

Sometimes there are books within books. I don’t mean this in a metaphorical sense—the worldbuilding in some novels includes the creation of a physical tome that plays a part in the overall story. This Russian doll of the publishing world usually remains only on the page of the original book. Sometimes, however, the book within a book gets its own real-life publication.

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book reviews

Superheroes and Spreadsheets in Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots

Vanessa Armstrong

Tue Sep 22, 2020 3:00pm 5 comments 2 Favorites [+]

Pop culture and superheroes go hand-in-hand. There’s the Marvel Cinematic Universe, of course, and so many reboots and reincarnations of Batman over the years that I’m daunted by the task of counting them all. Hench’s main character, Anna, however, would likely know the number–she’s a spreadsheet aficionado who lives in a world much like ours except that superheroes and supervillains are real, an almost mundane addition to everyday life.

Superheroes and supervillains, however, aren’t all they’re cracked up to be in Anna’s world. And in this vein, Natalie Zina Walschots’ Hench is similar to the comic book series and recent television adaptation of The Boys, where a corporate conglomeration uses superpowered people as (among other things) a product to sell to the masses.

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book recommendations

Five SFF Books With Dogs (and Dog-Adjacent Beings) as Key Characters

Vanessa Armstrong

Wed Aug 26, 2020 1:00pm 52 comments 5 Favorites [+]

"Collie takes on a Frog" by Hermine Biedermann-Arendts (c.1870-1916)

People love pups, so it’s not surprising when humankind’s best friend shows up in the stories we write, even if those stories take place in some fantastical realm or on an alien planet thousands of years in the future.

Oftentimes these dogs (or wolves, or other dog-adjacent species) play the sidekick or the supportive friend to a human character, such as the direwolves in The Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin. Other times, however, a canine character can be the antagonist of the story, such as in Stephen King’s Cujo. And still other times, most often in middle grade books but not always, there’s a dog who speaks like a human and has adventures of their own.

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book reviews

A Post-Apocalyptic Story With Thrills of All Kinds: Kit Rocha’s Deal With the Devil

Vanessa Armstrong

Wed Jul 29, 2020 2:00pm 1 comment 1 Favorite [+]

Like some hot n’ sexy times thrown into your fast-paced sci-fi dystopian thriller? If so, Deal With the Devil was made just for you. The book—the first in a series by Kit Rocha, the pseudonym for the New York Times best-selling erotic romance writing duo Donna Herren and Bree Bridges—not only paints a dark, corporate-controlled future, but also gives you hot, smoking characters that you come to care about.

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Hugo Spotlight

Hugo Spotlight: The Brutal Beauty of Seanan McGuire’s In an Absent Dream

Vanessa Armstrong

Wed Jul 29, 2020 12:00pm 1 comment 3 Favorites [+]

In the lead-up to the 2020 Hugo Awards, we’re taking time to appreciate this year’s best novella Finalists, and what makes each of them great.

Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series is no stranger to the Hugos—the first three novellas have all been finalists in previous years, with the first book, Every Heart a Doorway, winning the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Novella.

The books are Hugo finalists for a simple reason—they’re very, very good. And the fourth installment, In an Absent Dream, is no exception. The series, which focuses on kids who have found magical doors to their perfect, fantastical worlds but then find themselves thrust back into our mundane reality, has rightfully captured the hearts of many an SFF reader.

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book reviews

History and Magic Combine in A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians by H.G. Parry

Vanessa Armstrong

Thu Jun 25, 2020 3:00pm 4 Favorites [+]

H.G. Parry’s A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians is an epic historical fantasy, a magic-imbued retelling of the political and social turmoil that took place in late 18th-century Europe as well as the French colony Saint Domingue (currently the sovereign state of Haiti). Those who know their history will recognize that this is the time of the French Revolution (AKA the Reign of Terror) as well as the Haitian Revolution, a slave uprising that created an independent Haiti, a state free of slavery and led by the land’s former captives.

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Brandon Sanderson

What Kind of Knights Radiant Would You Be? A Guide to Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere

Vanessa Armstrong

Mon May 11, 2020 10:00am 31 comments 9 Favorites [+]

Words of Radiance cover art by Michael Whelan

In times such as these, it can be helpful to look forward to things, such as the November release of Rhythm of War, the fourth book in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series. November is still many months away, however, and many of us need a distraction NOW.

But just because we can’t read Rhythm of War yet, that doesn’t mean we can’t revisit the world of Roshar in other ways. For starters, you can reread the previous books. That’s probably the best thing to do, if I’m being honest. But if you’re looking for something a bit shorter and sillier to do, read on to figure out what Order of Knights Radiant you’d be if you found yourself making a spren friend on Roshar.

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book reviews

The End of Everything Brings New Beginnings in John Scalzi’s The Last Emperox

Vanessa Armstrong

Tue Apr 14, 2020 11:30am 7 comments 2 Favorites [+]

Things are stressful right now! Very uncertain and stressful! One thing that’s neither uncertain nor stressful, however, (or at least not in a bad way) is John Scalzi’s Interdependency series. The first two books—The Collapsing Empire and The Consuming Fire—have been out for awhile, and one thing to look forward to during this global pandemic is the release of the third and final book of the series, The Last Emperox.

Before we get into the review of The Last Emperox, however, let’s have a quick refresher on where we left things in The Consuming Fire (you can also read a more detailed, spoiler-full review of that book here).

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John Scalzi

Getting Ready for John Scalzi’s The Last Emperox: A Refresher on the Mercantile Houses of the Interdependency

Vanessa Armstrong

Tue Apr 7, 2020 12:00pm 1 comment 4 Favorites [+]

With The Last Emperox arriving next week, it’s time to jump back into the universe of the Interdependency. John Scalzi’s space opera is a series where an ancient, little-understood space-time highway called the Flow has begun to deteriorate, leaving the different settlements of the Interdependency cut off from one another and, for the most part, unable to survive on their own.

Scalzi has created a rich cast of characters for us to follow during this tumultuous time. Most of them are part of the 1%—rich and powerful members of the mercantile families who oversee all trade and commerce in the system. As we gear up for The Last Emerpox release, let’s revisit those Houses and the characters who are members of them.

[Warning! Spoilers galore for the series so far.]

book reviews

Stage Magic and Shapeshifting in the Gilded Age: The Glass Magician by Caroline Stevermer

Vanessa Armstrong

Tue Apr 7, 2020 11:30am 2 comments Favorite This

Muggle magic is a big part of my life—my husband is a professional magician, after all. So whenever I see a book out there that has a character skilled in sleight-of-hand, my eyebrows perk up. And when I come across a book that combines the wonders of prestidigitation with historical fantasy, my eyebrows just about fly off my face. Caroline Stevermer’s The Glass Magician is just such a book; in it, we follow Thalia Cutler, a stage magician (based on the real-life stage performer Dell O’Dell) who performs across the United States during the turn of the 19th century.

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