The Fractured Dark by Megan E. O'Keefe

Oooof. I soooo wanted to love this book like the first one. I had never read anything by Megan E. O’Keefe before the Blighted Stars, but I had heard good things about Velocity Weapon (and I found it on my virtual TBR pile, purchased when it was on sale ages ago). 

Everything I enjoyed about the first book seemed to be missing or muted here. No robots, very little spaceship excitement, mostly it was people talking in rooms boringly. The romance, which had a good long slow burn last time, had hit the reset button and slogged for the first half? third? of this volume. 

This book was sooooooo long. I felt like hundreds of pages could’ve been cut and not impacted the overall story, which barely progressed the plot of the semi intelligent fungus taking over everything. Furthermore, the antagonist Fletch was just too creepy and unpleasant that he didn’t really fit in this kind of book. We didn’t need a domestic violence stalker to team up with the fungus. 

Honestly, I’m not sure if I’m going to read the third book when it comes out - I don’t know if I care enough about these characters or this world to slog through another doorstop of a novel. 

Thanks to Orbit and NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for an honest review. 

Saevus Corax Gets Away With Murder by K. J. Parker

 

This final volume of a trilogy felt both incredibly similar and predictable while continuing to surprise me throughout. 

A while back, I became a fan of K. J. Parker. I first heard the name of this author via Jo Walton’s monthly reading lists on Tor dot com. So I requested an eARC of A Practical Guide to Conquering the World by K.J. Parker and loved it! It was grabby (in a “can’t put this book down” kind of way) and it was thoroughly enjoyable. I said I’d be looking out for more books by K. J. Parker and I later really enjoyed an eARC of the Long Game and Pulling the Wings off Angels, which were both delightful books! After that, I went back and read Sixteen Ways to Defend A Walled City and How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It, which were also wonderful. Parker’s books that I have read have been first person tales whose protagonists are usually clever bastards (in a thoroughly enjoyable manner). 

The titular Saevus Corax is no different - a man who is too clever by half that runs a business reclaiming armor and other loot from battlefield corpses. In this presumably final novel, Corax’s world effectively falls apart and the book spins off in some unexpected directions. I wasn’t expecting to learn more about his brother, and there were a number of deaths that really saddened me, as well as some fake outs that surprised me. I guess maybe someone could’ve seen the ending coming but I certainly didn’t. This book had the same feel as all of the other Parker books I have read, but it didn’t feel the same, if that makes any sense. A good end to a good trilogy. 

Thanks to NetGalley and Orbit Books for the eARC in exchange for an honest review. 

Saevus Corax Captures the Castle by K. J. Parker

People keep going back to fast food and fast casual chains because of the predictability - they know they will like what they get. I don’t mean to demean this book by saying that the Saevus Corax books by KJ Parker are like that - you know what you’re going to get and if you like it, you’re really going to like it. 

A while back, I became a fan of K. J. Parker. It started when I read an eARC of A Practical Guide to Conquering the World by K.J. Parker and loved it! It was grabby (in a “can’t put this book down” kind of way) and it was thoroughly enjoyable. I said I’d be looking out for more books by K. J. Parker and I later really enjoyed an eARC of the Long Game and Pulling the Wings off Angels, which were both delightful books! After that, I went back and read Sixteen Ways to Defend A Walled City and How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It, which were also wonderful. Parker’s books that I have read have been first person tales whose protagonists are usually clever bastards (in a thoroughly enjoyable manner). 

The titular Saevus Corax is no different - a man who is too clever by half that runs a business reclaiming armor and other loot from battlefield corpses. In this novel, Corax is blackmailed into capturing the titular castle, but the book spins off in some unexpected directions from there. Like in many of his books, Parker’s treatment of women seems odd and stilted, and I didn’t buy the romantic angles of this book, but I kept being surprised by the surprises and the betrayals. 

With Parker’s books, you know exactly what you were going to get. This book feels very similar to every other Parker book that I’ve already read, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Anyone that has ever enjoyed any of his books before should enjoy this one. 

Thanks to NetGalley and Orbit Books for the eARC in exchange for an honest review. 

Through Clouds of Smoke: Freud's Final Days by Suzanne Leclair

On a lark, I requested an eARC of this graphic novel from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. The description sounded interesting; I thought that this would be a comic exploring the final years of Sigmund Freud, who was a fascinating historical person. I was looking forward to getting some insights into the man, but I was disappointed. The dialogue was stilted at best. None of the characters talked like real people, and I’ve gained no insights into who Freud was as a person. The art was interesting, but I found the lettering to be frustrating to read. I would suggest that you skip this one.

A Few Rules for Predicting the Future by Octavia E. Butler

I first read Octavia Butler when my science fiction book club read Kindred a few years ago (we loved it but felt it was fantasy and not science fiction). I read her collection Bloodchild and Other Stories when I got it in a nebula award winning humble numbed and really enjoyed it. After that I would buy kindle editions of all of her series when the collected editions went on sale and I read and loved the Xenogenesis trilogy. But her other books stayed on my TBR shelf, getting passed over for newer things, until I recently read Octavia E. Butler: The Last Interview and Other Conversations which reminded me how much I loved her.  I’ve recently read Wild Seed and Parable of the Sower.  So I was excited when I saw this book on NetGalley and I got a copy from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.  

I was hoping for an essay collection.  Instead this book is one essay.  It is a reprint of a magazine article with some disappointing and distracting illustrations.  It’s a good essay! I enjoyed it! But I wouldn’t pay what the publisher is charging to own this.  

Saevus Corax Deals With the Dead by K. J. Parker

 

A while back, I became a fan of K. J. Parker. It started when I read an eARC of A Practical Guide to Conquering the World by K.J. Parker and loved it! It was grabby (in a “can’t put this book down” kind of way) and it was thoroughly enjoyable. I said I’d be looking out for more books by K. J. Parker and I later really enjoyed an eARC of the Long Game and Pulling the Wings off Angels, which were both delightful books! After that, I went back and read Sixteen Ways to Defend A Walled City and How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It, which were also wonderful. Parker’s books that I have read have been first person tales whose protagonists are usually clever bastards (in a thoroughly enjoyable manner). 

The titular Saevus Corax is no different - a man who is too clever by half that runs a business reclaiming armor and other loot from battlefield corpses. I don’t want to spoil the plot, which was full of delightful surprises, but suffice it to say that Corax is more than he originally appears, and he cleverly gets into and out of various and sundry scrapes. 

When I tried to start reading this book the first time, I wasn’t quite in the mood for it, and couldn’t get more than a few pages in, but when I went back to it, I could not put it down. It has that same grabbiness as the other Parker books that I have read. 

With Parker’s books, you know exactly what you were going to get. This book feels very similar to every other Parker book that I’ve already read, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Anyone that has ever enjoyed any of his books before should enjoy this one. 

Thanks to NetGalley and Orbit Books for the eARC in exchange for an honest review. 

Ravensong by TJ Klune

Ok, that’s it, I’m giving up on this series.

I was curious about this series before I started it. I really enjoyed the Extraordinaries trilogy by TJ Klune (although his strong pro- and anti- police stands in different volumes gave me whiplash), but I didn’t really vibe with Under the Whispering Door. I enjoyed the sentiments of House on a Cerulean Sea but felt the world building was weak in a way that took me out of the book.  But I still liked the author enough that I was full of anticipation when NetGalley and Tor gave me an eARC of Wolfsong and Ravensong, reprints of the first and second books of Klune’s Green Creek series in exchange for honest reviews.

Going in to that first book, I thought it was going to be more urban fantasy than paranormal romance. I was wrong. It was totally a paranormal romance, which was interesting because I don’t usually read in that subgenre. The first book was enjoyable but a slog - as I said I’m my review of that volume, there was like a novella’s worth of story here and the book was like 500+ pages.  I also didn’t like the age gap between the romantic leads.  

Sadly, this sequel was more of the same in the worst ways.  There felt like there was barely a short story’s worth of plot in Ravensong and it was so long and boring to get to it.  The characters are not interesting enough to spend time with and, once again, the main romantic relationship of this book also starts with an age gap with one of the parties below the age of consent.  It’s icky. I was bored and even the cliffhanger epilogue wasn’t enough to get me to pick up volume 3.

I’m not curious enough to try the next one - I’m tapping out here.