Genre: Dystopian

Part urban paranormal fantasy, part futuristic dystopia, Samantha Shannon’s The Bone Season is a wildly ambitious novel and a unique series starter that’s full of conflicting elements that on paper should not work. Additionally, it throws the reader into the thick of it with a list of undefined terminology, chaotic world-building, and a whiplash shift in setting three chapters in. Yet despite a rough beginning, those that give the novel a chance will be rewarded with a thrilling and complex dark fantasy story that gets progressively better and better over the course of its nearly 500-page run. Despite being over a decade late to The Bone Season hype train, I was fully invested in its wild ride through Shannon’s futuristically bleak version of London and Oxford. Note, an important disclaimer is that this review is based on a first edition copy of The Bone Season as originally written and published in 2013. Fully aware of the novel’s rougher patches, Samantha Shannon and Bloomsbury released revised editions of the first four books in the series in 2023 for The Bone Season’s 10yr anniversary which bring them more in line with her current matured and more lyrical writing style and refining the…

The following review is based on a complimentary Advanced Reader Copy provided by the author in exchange for an honest review. In the year 2263, Jason’s world and home under New Toronto is a world unlike any other. Under a dome protecting the city from raging toxic storms, New Toronto and its inhabitants are at war against an Imperial Invasion from across the Solar System while simultaneously fighting a separate battle within against a nanophage epidemic infecting humans, robots, and cyborgs alike. Haunted by strange visions and a voice in his head, Jason’s life in a hidden underground enclave is thrown into chaos when latent psychic abilities start to threaten both himself and everyone else around him. As the United Federation of Earth combats the Imperial forces in space, with the help of his brother David and friend Sam, Jason hears the calls of the mythical and extraterrestrial obelisk Abaddon that promises salvation from his uncontrollable powers, as well as information about his mysterious past. Serving as the first entry in the Abaddon Cycle series and Colin Searle’s debut novel, The Call of Abaddon is an ambitious sci-fi epic that mixes cyberpunk elements (bio and nanopunk flavors specifically) with the…

“If the world was ending you’d come over, right? You’d come over and you’d stay the night…” because you broke your leg in a bear trap- Never has my heart felt so warmed by a post-apocalyptic survival road trip adventure, but Erik J. Brown’s debut novel All That’s Left In the World did that and so much more. A YA survival story of two lonely teenage boys finding a home in each other after most of the world died all around them, the book’s characters, tone, pacing and plotting feels pitch-perfect and is an incredibly well-crafted novel. A lot of other reviewers had previously mentioned how wholesome and cute it is, which had me raising an eyebrow given the genre and premise (I sometimes find post-apocalyptic stories slow and repetitive), but it really is such a hopeful and heartfelt book that far surpassed all of my expectations. Providing much needed queer representation is a sub-genre of science fiction that lacked clear standouts while avoiding being too graphic, harsh or scary, All That’s Left In the World is an outstanding and well-rounded book that’s sure to satisfy a wide variety of readers, even adults as well despite its YA classification and…

Desert dystopia, war-waging fae courts, hordes of the undead, metal-crafting and a dark, snippy otherworldly savior, Callie Hart incorporates a lot of appealing elements from all-across the fantasy genre and melts them together into the romantasy epic Quicksilver. Featuring a strong-willed and resourceful FMC cast into a magical multi-dimensional and vast world, there’s a lot to like in Quicksilver and the intertwined fates of its main characters paired with steamy scenes feel directly catered to what most romantasy readers are looking for. Unfortunately despite being full of ambition, demonstrated through its overarching plot, the actual execution of its various fantasy elements doesn’t feel connected and at times, the rules of magic and world-building to be quite wild and unhinged. With less than graceful transitions between its fantasy and romance scenes and near incoherent magic rules towards the end of the story, Quicksilver was unfortunately a miss and an overhyped booktok influencer pick for me. Depending on how you look at it, Quicksilver can either feel like a nod to many popular fantasy books that came before it, or a manic combination of everything trendy thrown together haphazardly. Taking the romance element out of the equation temporarily, the fantasy-filled story of…

Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police is a poignant and thought-provoking exploration of loss masquerading under a dystopian premise. With the concept of an unexplained totalitarian regime and the premise of police taking objects and people at random intervals, many would expect this novel to be a psychological thriller or mystery. That is not the case at all as Ogawa merely uses the plot elements as framework to discuss and reflect on how people process loss and memories over time in an abstract manner. While subjectively The Memory Police wasn’t quite for me, I still appreciated the beautiful prose and can easily see why this book is critically well respected and worthy of literary analysis. Despite having some similarities initially to other established dystopian works (a lot of people compare it to 1984), at its core I would not consider The Memory Police to technically be a dystopian novel. While there is a plot to the book, it’s quite abstract and not the focus. The female narrator is a writer who enlists the help of an elderly unnamed old man to hide away her editor referred to as “R” from the Memory Police who mandate things and memories associated with them…