Remember when I said that Killing the Children isn't only horror? Reading this second volume, it's kind of hard not to bonk myself on the head, because the horror elements, my friends, are nothing if not manifold. Let's get this out of the way: Should you pick up the second volume of this comic book?... Continue Reading →
The Broken God by Gareth Hanrahan – Book Review
Book 1 review here | Book 2 review here https://youtu.be/18TywmTuv7E Series: The Black Iron Legacy # 3Published by: OrbitGenre: Dark FantasyReview Format: paperbackPurchased Copy. The third novel in the Black Iron Legacy series, The Broken God awakened my slumbering love for dark, heart-wrenching fantasy. Following the Tripartite Armistice that saw Guerdon divided in three influence... Continue Reading →
Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky – Book Review
https://youtu.be/7KUHU75NvP8 Published by: TORGenre: Science fiction, space operaSeries: The Final Architecture (#2 of many, hopefully)Pages: 593 pagesFormat: paperback The sequel to 2021’s Shards of the Earth was among my most-awaited sci-fi titles of this year. When I read Shards I fell in love with its characters, a mishmash of memorable scoundrels who made for one... Continue Reading →
The Girl and the Moon by Mark Lawrence—Book Review
https://youtu.be/mdM4S80F-7c Published by: Ace Genre: FantasyPages: 416 pagesFormat: hardcover Endings are damnably hard to nail—especially when the kind we’re talking about is the culmination not just of a trilogy but of disparate elements woven throughout an entire fifteen-book oeuvre. I cannot judge too well on the latter, having read only half of Mark Lawrence’s novels; but... Continue Reading →
The Hunger of the Gods by John Gwynne (The Bloodsworn Saga #2) – Book Review
Published by: OrbitGenre: Epic FantasyPages: 656Format: ebookReceived free arc copy from NetGalley in return for an honest review https://youtu.be/3-UcuXBPRiI All sequels should accomplish what John Gwynne’s Hunger of the Gods has. That’s to say, Gwynne’s latest expands the world and characters in such a way as to make The Shadow of the Gods appear a... Continue Reading →
Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein – Book Review
https://youtu.be/B7nV20cD6ec This book has got me in a bind. It’s easy to relegate it to one of two neat classifications: either a straight-faced satire that takes the piss out of the military-industrial complex; or else, a fully realised celebration of the serving man’s fraternity, of the sacrifice of the individual for the collective’s greater good,... Continue Reading →
Lucy Snowe’s Dignity as Key to Class and Gender Roles in Victorian England (An Essay on Villette by Charlotte Brontë)
Rather than review a classic that has been spoken about time and again, I thought I'd share with you a response paper I wrote for my class in Victorian Literature a few weeks ago - let me know if you'd like to see more pieces like this on the blog! In Villette (1853), Charlotte Brontë... Continue Reading →
Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree – Book Review
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4FZcNA62LQ Published by: Self-Published, recently acquired by TORGenre: Slice of Life FantasyPages: 318Format: ebookPurchased Copy for my Kindle from Amazon The blogosphere has been abuzz with talk of Travis Baldree’s debut, Legends & Lattes, and for good reason. Slice of life stories are character-driven to their core—no wonder, then, that Baldree’s novel is such a... Continue Reading →
Revival, Vol. 01: You’re Among Friends by Tim Seeley and Mike Norton
Supernatural rural noir has been forever ruined for me by the impossibly high standards of ridiculously fun Stephen King read…but y’know what? Tim Seeley’s Revival promises to scratch that same itch. This first volume, You’re Among Friends, tells the story of twenty-something people coming back to life in a small rural American town. This throws... Continue Reading →
Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah – Book Review
Published by: Bloomsbury Genre: Historical FictionPages: 288 pagesFormat: audiobookPurchased my copy from the Rich Humanoid’s Audio-Book-Store-Place. Author Abdulrazak Gurnah won the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents” - that ability to cut through... Continue Reading →