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18 Mar 2024
Themes surrounding the binary view identities are exhibited by all of Twice Lived’s characters.
13 Mar 2024
Wesley Chu’s newest fantasy series specifically examines the impact of legend and military tradition on the lives of the protagonist, a prophesied hero, and the mentors he encounters along the way. The initial book in the series, The Art of Prophecy (2022), introduced Jian, literally designated Hero of the Tiandi, as well as his master Taishi, and shared their quest to fulfill Jian’s destiny: to defeat the Immortal Khan. In this sequel, Jian’s further training, and the ramifications of his actions, ripple and change the world’s social landscape: a widespread knowledge of the prophecy involving Jian drives the actions of whole communities.
11 Mar 2024
This collection is at its strongest when engaging with the mundane and the personal, bringing to life its queer fantasy through humorous and incisive portrayals of the speculative worlds in which the stories take place.
6 Mar 2024
While it’s inspiring to see characters overcome external obstacles, it would have been nice to see them working through things internally.
4 Mar 2024
It was fascinating for me to explore this aspect of Blackgoose’s worldbuilding, to slowly tease out its meanings and parallels to our own world, and to see how this system of government and history and technology shaped the story. I am also partial to stories with dragons.
28 Feb 2024
I read The Body Problem by Margaret Wack when I was going through my own body problem. Or, rather, I was going through an unfortunate period in my family life when my apartment—shared with my two kids under two and my husband—was infested by bedbugs. Lots and lots of bedbugs. I read this stunning poetry collection with reverence and awe the day before these bugs were truly discovered, and I’d read it in my bed—completely unaware that, in a handful of days, I would never see that apartment or bed ever again. (And with good riddance, too.) It would only be after surviving this ordeal, and opening this collection in my new home a month later, that I would understand its true beauty and power.
26 Feb 2024
Lord’s latest addition to her Cygnus Beta universe follows a familiar trajectory to those earlier novels, although it doesn’t feel like this so much in the initial chapters.
21 Feb 2024
How to Navigate Our Universe is a collection of speculative poetry by Mary Soon Lee which plays with the notion that planets might have personalities, moons might have jealousies, and the universe itself might be understood by examining its neighborhoods. All of its poems seek to bring the vast unknowability of the universe down to size by anthropomorphizing, describing, and categorizing it in ways that humans might be able to comprehend. The collection is divided into five sections that gradually work their way outwards from the home of earth, then the solar system, and moving toward the outer reaches of the universe.
19 Feb 2024
This novella is an intriguing proposition.
14 Feb 2024
“Ish” is chimeric. The suffix belongs to verisimilitude (as in “almost”) and the uncanny (also as in “almost”).
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