Genre: Adventure

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries is a curious case of a lot of great ideas implemented in a slow and laborious manner. Incorporating aspects of historical fiction, fantasy, light romance and folklore, the elements were there for what many positive reviewers have describe as a cozy and enchanting read. Unfortunately the narrative and tone was not for me and I alternated between struggling to stay interested in the story and being baffled at seemingly random lurches in unexpected directions. The main highlight for me and the area Heather Fawcett was consistently strong in was the folklore aspect layered into the story. Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries is full of lengthy and detailed stories told by the villagers of Hrafnsvik, encounters with the Fair folk, and even recapped from Emily’s own research. These stories placed in self-contained chapters are often longer than non-folklore chapters given that the story is presented via Emily’s written journal, some entries being extremely short and uneventful. These stories all have some sort of theme that connects to whatever Emily is experiencing at the time, and the imaginative quality of these tales often surpasses the novel’s actual story itself (like modern Grimm fairy tales). The interest within…

There’s honestly a lot of great ideas going on in Peng Shepherd’s All This & More including science fiction time and reality bending, second chance life choices and romance, an underlying mystery revolving around the unreleased tv show season, and the unsettling appearance of Chrysalis. This is all done on top of a “Choose your own adventure” branching storyline book setup. Yet despite how ambitious and creative Peng’s concepts are on paper, it was amazing how uninteresting and tedious this was for me to read. I don’t know what it was exactly, but this book felt heavily catered towards suburban mother book club members in their late 30’s to 40’s based on Marsh’s characterization and the tone. I thought the Choose your own adventure concept and branching choices were decently executed but the pacing, unusual choices in focal points, and Marsh’s character were all not to my taste and squandered the excellent premise. Also to properly review and critique the book in its full entirety, I went back and read through every potential choice including any parallel sections and each short ending. An unrelated nice touch though was the “System Error, you shouldn’t be here” due to cheating and not…

Don’t let the page count and novella length fool you, Martha Wells is a literary wizard for packing so much action and content into All Systems Red’s 150 pages. I kept seeing The Murderbot Diaries popping up in book lists and booktuber recommendations, and winning a Hugo Award certainly helps give it some critical street cred. Despite its short length, I thoroughly enjoyed this and breezed right through in one day. This is a pretty short read so I’ll try and keep this review appropriate short. While many sci-fi works get bogged down with heavy exposition and detailed world-building, All Systems Red doesn’t have the luxury of length and immediately takes off running from the get-go. This novella is pure plot, though surprisingly a bit light in terms of fighting/gunfire action. Despite being called Murderbot, Murderbot isn’t a killing machine (at least on paper) and acts as a defensive security unit for hire. And they’re a weaponized tool that could care less about what happens to their human clients, at least initially. The premise of an indifferent narrator is clever in concept, allowing the book to get away with skirting heavy world-building with an effective mechanism of “I never bothered…

I wrote in my review of Morning Star that Pierce Brown had a monumental task then to conclude the staggering uprising premise introduced in his original trilogy in a decisive and satisfying manner. Perhaps an even bigger challenge is to build on the original trilogy’s work and segue the series into its next arc; rebuilding and running a society after it was torn down. As such, Iron Gold had dual purposes to transition the series to a new direction as well as recapture the page-turning intensity that made the first three novels impossible to put down. I consider Iron Gold a resounding success at the former by somehow expanding the solar system society further and using many clever strategies to jumpstart new plot threads. When it comes to the latter however, I found Iron Gold to be competently solid but a bit touch and go with its pacing and reader interest. I was initially hesitant when I started reading Iron Gold, expecting an extended lull and flood of information dumping to bridge the ten years that pass between Morning Star and Iron Gold. I also expected Darrow to experience a shift in priorities or mindset, similar to the beginning of…

Reading and now reviewing Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir felt like one of the greatest tests of my patience as a reader and my ability to separate the book’s objective and subjective strengths/weaknesses. The writing style and presentation resulted in one of my least favorite reading experiences of the last year and would rightfully deserve a 1-star rating if not for the book’s concept and attention to probable scientific theories. I’ve since learned a lot of my distaste for Project Hail Mary is mostly due to Andy Weir’s signature (or potentially infamous) writing style, with only the following character-related items being Project Hail Mary-specific points. However, after taking some time to review the material after finishing the book, I can appreciate some of its strong technical qualities that no doubt contributed to its popularity and nomination for a 2022 Hugo Award. I was not previously familiar with Andy Weir’s past novels and had only seen short clips of the theatrical adaptation of The Martian, however what was immediately obvious is Weir’s strength for writing geeky science reactions and creative sci-fi concepts. The premise’s catastrophic phenomenon and its implications for life on Earth is not only creative, but also fascinating…