Book Reviews by Eitan

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 ...