Book Reviews by Eitan

I received an ARC of this book from Tordotcom in exchange for an honest review. This review will not contain any spoilers. This book was not what I expected, mostly for good. The first chapter sets up a classic, if conflicted, Chosen One--so far, so normal. The second chapter is a beautiful single-paragraph time skip--a little more unusual, but still one of my favorite devices (see: The Traitor Baru Cormorant , among others). By the third chapter we have left the mythic tone behind and moved into what feels like a Soviet-era bureaucratic dystopia. Even having been told that this novel was about former Chosen Ones growing up, the tonal shift was striking given that I expected something more in the style of American Gods --myths infusing the modern world with their own styles and sensibilities. Instead, despite names like Fetter and The Perfect and Kind, the rhythms of the story feel closer to the modern world (with subplots about pandemics, refugees, government changes) than to an imag...

I received an ARC of this book from Grove Atlantic in exchange for an honest review. This review will not contain any spoilers.  My prior experience with Helen Macdonald was limited to her nature writing (I loved Vesper Flights ) but when I saw she was co-writing a thriller with science-fiction elements, I thought it would be worth a look. Especially in its opening section, Prophet delivers several moments that recall Macdonald's careful attention to the natural world and gift for writing characters who are, via observation, trying to piece together a framework through which to understand it. Towards the end, several moments of near-horror recall her story "Deer in the Headlights," which uses that same precise prose to great effect in showing us a world that is subtly wrong in unsettling ways. At various points in the book, characters are able to spontaneously generate objects and scenes with nostalgic value--from teddy bears to 1950s diners to arcade games--and these...

I received an ARC of this book from Subterranean Press in exchange for an honest review. This review will not contain any spoilers for Jade Shards but will discuss characters and events from the Green Bone Saga. After her previous follow-up novella, The Jade Setter of Janloon , Fonda Lee returns to the setting of her Green Bone Saga with four short stories about the pro- and an-tagonists: Ayt Mada, Kaul Lan, Kaul Hilo/Maik Wen, and Kaul Shae. Each adds some backstory to characters that we see grow and change through the main novels and largely succeeds at delivering the kind of intimate character moments I appreciated from Lee's writing.  In "The Witch and Her Friend," we get to see Ayt Mada's rise through the eyes of Anden's mother Aun Ure. The story does an excellent job of showing how the two girls' friendship, which began in school, gradually fades as they choose different paths in adulthood. Aun Ure's decision to step back from life as a Green Bone ...

I received an ARC of this book from Tordotcom in exchange for an honest review. The Archive Undying reminds me of Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit . Both are novels in which the protagonist is haunted by a voice in their head, a voice which is both character and plot device, a voice whose mysterious intentions are key to the story but unspool slowly over time. Both use detailed, often visceral descriptions of physical acts to ground a world full of complex terminology that is rarely explained to the reader. And both are concerned with hard, world-remaking decisions that force their protagonists to question the principles that have become as ingrained in them as the other mind that's grafted to them. For the most part, this parallel is high praise-- Ninefox Gambit remains one of my favorite books of the last decade, and I enjoy being dropped into a world that I have to figure out mostly through the characters' eyes rather than through infodumps. However, The Archive Undying ...

I received an ARC of this book from Tor in exchange for an honest review. This review will not contain any spoilers for Furious Heaven , but will contain spoilers for the previous book in the series, Unconquerable Sun .  The three main points of view--Persephone, Apama, and Sun--all carried their weight, though I tended to find Persephone the least exciting (especially in the first half of the book). Apama's increasingly complicated, but still loyal, relationship to the Phene Empire was a highlight of the book for me. She served as an excellent window into Rider politics and showed the range of Rider personalities in a way that wouldn't have made sense for the Chaonian characters. Without spoiling who exactly Apama meets, it suffices to say that she encounters Riders of all ages and temperaments, each of whom has a crucial role to play both in the plot and in her character development. If anything, I felt shortchanged by the cuts back to the Chaonian perspective, since some ev...

I received an ARC of this book from Saga Press in exchange for an honest review. This review will not contain any spoilers.  While I am a big fan of Westerns on the screen, I've never felt any particular interest in seeking them out on the page. Still, when I read an excerpt of The Strange on Tor.com, I was immediately reminded of the Coen brothers' classic film True Grit (2010). When the blurb for the book mentioned it as well, I decided to get a jump-start on the release date next week and went looking for this advance copy. What I found was a compelling story that ended up drifting a little too far from its initial promise for my taste, but still kept me engaged for a weekend and brought some of the classic Western elements to a new setting. Annabelle Crisp is not quite a ringer for True Grit's Mattie Ross (if you haven't seen True Grit , stop reading this review and go watch it! Nobody does dialogue better than the Coen brothers, and Hailee Steinfeld knocks it ou...

I received an ARC of this book from Subterranean Press in exchange for an honest review. This review will not contain any spoilers.  Experienced readers of this blog (are there any of them out there, besides...me?) will notice that Rose/House has already appeared on my "best of 2022" list, so it should be little surprise that I found this novella to be an incredible step up from an author I already held in high regard. Pivoting from the space opera of the Teixcalaan duology to a near-future horror-tinged haunted house story infused with a practitioner's knowledge of architecture and urban planning, Arkady Martine takes a huge left turn without ever leaving her wheelhouse. Despite the radically different setting, Rose/House continues Martine's exploration of many of the same themes from those novels--personhood and exclusion, constructed spaces and their influence, mysterious alien entities with terrifying goals. After being somewhat too genre-savvy to truly appreciat...