Brightfall by Jaime Lee Moyer
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
DISCLAIMER: I was provided with an advanced reading copy of this book by the publisher (via Amazon Vine) in return for an honest review.
I’m not going to lie, I really wasn’t impressed with this book. It’s got so many faults and flaws that the few shining moments it does have don’t really raise it above a two-star rating, in my opinion. And honestly, this is a hell of a shame, because the basic premise has so much promise and so much to offer.
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Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars
DISCLAIMER: I was provided with an advanced copy of this book by the publisher in return for an honest review.
I have to admit that I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect when I started this book. I’d seen some of the reviews already doing the rounds, and followed a few conversations about it on social media, and while they were enough to intrigue me, they didn’t really give a clear indication of just where this book would take me.
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Dread Nation by Justina Ireland
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
When the dead start to rise at the battle of Gettysburg, the American Civil War comes to a sudden end with both sides agreeing to join forces against this new shambling threat. Some years later, Jane McKeene is a student at Miss Preston’s School of Combat, a place where young women of colour are trained to fight the dead and protect the white folks from being turned into zombies. As you can probably imagine from that very brief introduction, this book really doesn’t hold back on showing the true face of racial inequality in the not-so United States of the nineteenth century.
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Stone Mad by Elizabeth Bear
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Okay, first things first. If you haven’t already met Karen Memery and read about her first adventure in the (almost) eponymously titled Karen Memory then I heartily recommend you go grab that book now. It isn’t absolutely necessary to do so in order to enjoy this second adventure, but it does help, and it’s a cracking good read. Also, there may be some spoilers to book one in this review.
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Child of an Ancient City by Tad Williams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a remarkably good little book. It tells the tale of an ill-fated caravan journey between Baghdad and Armenia, and how the book’s protagonist and narrator, Masrur al-Adan, manages to survive bandit raids and the attentions of the vampyr stalking them.
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Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Kindred is a dark and deeply disturbing novel that predominantly explores the lives of slaves in the antebellum South through the eyes of a time-travelling protagonist. The fact that this protagonist, Dana, is a woman of colour from the 1970s allows Butler to show a strong juxtaposition between the world that Dana knows and the world she finds herself unwittingly thrust into.
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Unfiltered ramblings on a number of topics including books, writing, role-playing, wargaming and life. You have been warned.
