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When Mira is nine, her eccentric mother disappears. No one knows who Mira’s father is, but luckily, mysterious trustees ensure that Mira is placed with loving foster parents in Ohio. Mira’s upbringing becomes more conventional, but her foster parents die when she’s in her early fifties. That’s when she learns she still owns her childhood […]
Category Archives: SF/F Books
Just my two cents on science fiction (SF) and fantasy novels/anthologies I’ve read. Sometimes I comment on the state of publishing SF and fantasy.
I don’t always appreciate Young Adult (YA) SF/F. The world might not be complex enough for my taste and sometimes I don’t relate to the protagonists (perhaps I’ve crossed into crotchety-old-fart-land — more on that “place” later), but this wasn’t the case with Westerfeld’s Leviathon. I cared about the characters, particularly Alek. The girl Deryn […]
For the first week after surgery, I couldn’t get to sleep easily. The pain was disturbing if I lay on my side. My back felt least strained when I lay flat upon it, but I had to endure the screaming-sharp pain of initially putting pressure on my incision. The pain would eventually calm down, but […]
I just finished Retribution (#5) and Chosen (#6) in the Anna Strong Vampire Novels by Jeanne Stein. I admit I haven’t had time to read The Watcher (#3) and Legacy (#4), but one of my hobbies is to skip parts of series anyway. This helps me see whether a writer provides enough backstory and drops […]
SpellCrash, by Kelly McCullough, could be called cyber-fantasy. There’s magic, dimension-hopping, and spells merged with computer hardware/software operations. There’s a large cast of characters, with backstories, but the characters also fill roles in Greek mythology, which helps the neophyte hang on. Surprisingly, I felt cast adrift by the lack of real locations (that sounds ironic […]
My favorite in this reading pile was Carol Berg’s Song of the Beast, closely followed by Brandon Sanderson’s debut novel, Elantris. They’re both standalone traditional fantasies, with rich detailed worlds, complex characters, twisted plots, action, and politics. I chose both because they were traditional fantasy, but unashamedly standalone. Perhaps because these books didn’t attempt to […]