Where the Axe Is Buried by Ray Nayler

 

I read this book at the wrong time.

I had never heard of Ray Nayler until I saw his book The Mountain and the Sea on the nebula nomination list. (It’s still on my TBR pile!) 

When I saw a new book by him on NetGalley, I decided to give it a go. This book was hard. It’s set in a world with an incredibly brutal fascist regime where the leader’s mind keeps getting transferred into new clones bodies when the body degrades. Some of the imagery was evocative and some of the language was beautiful, but reading about this brutal government as my own country descends further into fascism was not the diverting SF novel I was looking for. I also felt like many of the characters were ciphers with no interiority. 

An interesting book, but not for me at this point in in time. 

Splinter Effect by Andrew Ludington

 This was a very promising debut! 

I have been trying to read outside my comfort zone - I try to make sure I don’t get into a rut where I only read the same authors all the time. Also, I’ve been reading a lot of fantasy lately and I decided to more actively seek out more science fiction books. 

So a few months back, when I got an email from NetGalley telling me I was auto-approved for a bunch of books by authors I had never heard of, I decided to say “what the heck!” And I downloaded all of them, thinking maybe I’d find something good, maybe I wouldn’t. So I was very pleased when I started reading and realized/remembered that this was a time traveling archeologist book!

In premise, this book felt like it was trying to be Connie Willis mixed with Indiana Jones. 

Now, I absolutely adore Connie Willis and her Oxford time traveling historians, and the premise revealed in To Say Nothing Of The Dog that items about to be destroyed in history can be removed from their original time and brought back to the present/future. At first I thought this book might be in conversation with that book, but I don’t think so. I don’t think this author is that familiar with a lot of other SF books, because this book often felt like a trope-fest crossed with a Byzantine history course - But fun! I’m not adequately conveying how much fun this book was or how much of a page turner it was. Even though the main character was too morose and too good at everything, and the twist was able to be seen a mile away, and the science of the time travel did not seem well thought out, I didn’t want to put this down! I really enjoyed it, flaws and all, and look forward to the next book in the series. 

The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses Malka Older

I am really enjoying this series! I first started reading this series of novellas when the first one was nominated for a Hugo Award. I really enjoyed it and checked the second one out of the library shortly after I finished it and liked that a lot too! I’m all for a Holmes/Watson framework for a mystery, and I have loved SF mysteries since I discovered the Caves of Steel in junior high. I was excited when I got an eARC of this third volume from Tor and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. 

The mystery in this book is not quite as fun as in the first two - frankly, by the time of the solution I had forgotten who several of the suspects were. I love the world building and the setting of these books, and the characters are the reason I keep coming back. I understand why the narrator is infatuated with Mossa- I love Mossa as a character- but Mossa is a terrible person to be in a relationship with and it shows (as, presumably, Sherlock Holmes would be a dreadful boyfriend).  I enjoyed how academic research was key to solving the mystery. And I enjoyed just how terrible an investigator/interviewer the narrator was (I was also taking a science-based interviewing course for law enforcement while reading this book).  

Bottom line - I will happily keep reading these as long as the author keeps writing them. 

The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

This was an excellent book but possibly the worst audiobook I have ever encountered. 

I really enjoyed This is How You Lose the Time War (I read it when it came out, years before Bigolas Dickolas) so I was excited when I heard that Amal El-Mohtar had her first solo book coming out. I didn’t get an eARC from the publisher but I did get an audio ARC. I love audiobooks - I’ve had an audible membership since before Amazon bought them - and I listen to audiobooks all the time. I almost never listen to music. I want to listen to a book. What I don’t want is to listen to music when I’m trying to focus on a story. What I want even less is to listen to running water when I’m listening to an audiobook. Do you get where I’m going here?

This is a delightful, if slight, story. (The hardcover is less than 150 pages - I’m read longer novellas so I don’t know why it’s being advertised as a novel). It’s a tale of 2 sisters in a fantasy realm where people can cross over to sort of a fae realm but the villian ( a needy incel) is sadly much more based in reality. 

I enjoyed the sisters and their story. But the audiobook production was atrocious! You could barely hear the narrator some times due to the music or the running water sounds. They were just dreadful. And the producers obviously didn’t think about what listening at higher speeds would do to their sound effects. Like many people, I listen to audiobooks at around 2X speed. I find many narrators are too slow and this way I can enjoy more books. But at an increased speed, the sound effects and the singing, and the music were just intolerable.

Do yourself a favor, get this book in hardcover or e-book formats. It was an excellent story and I will happily read anything else this author writes. Don’t get the audiobook. 

When The Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi

Finally! A return to form by one of my favorite authors. I’m a big fan of Mr. Scalzi’s work since I found Redshirts on the new books shelf at my local library years ago, and Ive been reading his website regularly for a long time. But his last few novels have been weaker than some of his earlier work, and I think it was due to his habit of rushing through writing them to make his deadlines (as he has eloquently described on his blog). 

But I knew when I got the new John Scalzi book from NetGalley and Tor in exchange for an honest review that I would enjoy it - because I already read it!! I was at NYCC in October and got an ARC from the Tor booth and I got it signed by John Scalzi there. He was surprised because he hadn’t realized they would have hard copies available, and he said that my copy was the very first he had signed for this book!

The premise for this book is fun - suddenly without warning the entire moon - and all of the moon rocks on earth - turn to cheese. The book then has some vignettes and snapshots of how different people around the country are dealing with this. 

In some of Scalzi’s more recent books, the protagonists have been glib and unpleasant ciphers, but not in this book. The characters feel like real people! 

The format of the book is both a strength and a weakness. You don’t get to spend a lot of time with interesting characters before a new chapter starts and we leave them behind (often forever, though some recur in later segments). But a bigger flaw is the ending.  With a high concept SF book like this, a lot of the value comes from the ultimate answers to the question of how did the big weird thing happen. Remember Stephen King’s Under the Dome? Remember how the ending cheapened the whole book and undercut everything? SPOILER ALERT: this isn’t as bad as in Under the Dome, but it’s close. There is no answer. The moon cheese just reverts back to moon rock. Nothing is ever explained. It’s left as a big mystery. This makes the book feel much more fantastical than science fictional, if that makes sense. 

But, problems with the structure and ending aside, I really enjoyed this book. It was a total page turner and very readable. Best Scalzi book I’ve read in years. 

Demon Daughter by Lois McMaster Bujold

As I have mentioned before on the blog, I was late to the Lois McMaster Bujold party and only discovered her when she was nominated for Best Series for the Vorkosigan saga. I think it was the Baen book covers that turned me off. But I’m on board now! 

She definitely deserved the best series Hugo award for the Vorkosigan Books, and also deserved it equally for the World of the Five Gods series. I have still not read any of the novels in that series yet, but once I started reading the Penric and Desdemona novellas, I couldn’t stop. I was hooked instantly and binged my way through the series. Thankfully, Ms. Bujold is still writing more Penric stories. 

I was thrilled to get a copy of this new Penric novella - Thank you, Subterranean Press, for the eARC in exchange for an honest review. As usual for a subterranean press edition, there is a new cover with gorgeous cover art. 

This book was a joy, like all the Penric stories are, although it wasn’t an altogether fun romp. Penric and his wife are hurting after some miscarriages when they encounter a young girl who gets a demon and thinks that she has killed get father and all of her shipmates. A little heavier stuff than some other Penric tales.  But it is all handled with skill and grace. 

It would not be the best place to start with the series, but if you’ve read any of the others before, you will really enjoy this one. Can’t wait for the next one!

The Fourth Consort by Edward Ashton

I’m so glad I took a chance on this book! Ever since I joined NetGalley, I dreamed of the day when I would just be auto-approved for all of my favorite authors.  So a few months back, when I got an email from NetGalley telling me I was auto-approved for a bunch of books by authors I had never heard of, I decided to say “what the heck!” And I downloaded all of them, thinking maybe I’d find something good, maybe I wouldn’t. So I was very pleased to be sucked right into The Fourth Consort by Edward Ashton. I didn’t know anything about this book going in,  it I quickly learned that it was a first contact style book.  Humanity is linked up with a conglomeration of other species (although they are way down in the pecking order) and the protagonist is part of a first contact team for a low tech species of alien bug type people (I kept picturing them as mantis-like).  There is a rival alliance of aliens who get into a shooting match in orbit with this conglomeration resulting in our protagonist stranded on this planet with one other human and a rival alien from a stronger, more violent and honor based culture.  The book was a really fun page turner, hampered just a bit by the protagonist being a great guy who was pretty great at everything he tried. He read like a super-competent cis white guy Andy Weir- style main character and was the least interesting person in the story.  But other than his bland super-competence, the book was a lot of fun! I would totally read something else by this author and I hope he continues these characters’ stories.