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Gabriella Buba: Saints of Storm and Sorrow (Paperback, 2024, Titan Books)

María Lunurin has been living a double life for as long as she can remember. …

Saints of Storm and Sorrow

I don’t hate you. I hate that I don’t have better answers to all that’s wrong in my city. The only choices shouldn’t be bloody vengeance or doing nothing. I hate that the Codicíans’ ‘gift’ of empire is generations of trauma.

Overall, I think I'm a bit mixed on this book. I was most intrigued in the messy middle, where all of the characters are caught between competing and interesting tensions. It felt impossible for any character to do right by another while being caught in such structural traps. The focus of the book also (surprisingly?) felt firmly on these relationships between people who care about each other, and the messed up ways that colonialism warps their love.

I also quite enjoyed a character whose magic is tied to her emotions, and so she quite literally has to repress her anger and sadness in order to survive and hide.

It's …

commented on Saints of Storm and Sorrow by Gabriella Buba (Stormbringer Saga, #1)

Gabriella Buba: Saints of Storm and Sorrow (Paperback, 2024, Titan Books)

María Lunurin has been living a double life for as long as she can remember. …

Kaliane Bradley: The Ministry of Time (Hardcover, 2024, Simon & Schuster)

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and …

The Ministry of Time

Overall, I love this novel's ideas but the genres it mixes together work against each other rather than being stronger for the combination.

(also please name your protagonist, it's so awkward, thank you)

I found the writing here to be surprisingly funny and engaging. The dialogue between the protagonist and Graham continually made me laugh, and the book is peppered with delightful drive-by analogies like "he looked oddly formal, as if he was the sole person in serif font" or "I lay in my own body like a wretched sandbank".

The strongest part of the book to me (and the part that I found the most engaging) was the relationship and dialogue between the protagonist and Graham. A 19th century sailor is a great foil for modern London life; however, it also does a good job of making both the protagonist and Graham real, fallible characters who each make incorrect …

Brenda Peynado: Time's Agent (2024, Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom)

Pocket World–a geographically small, hidden offshoot of our own reality, sped up or slowed down …

Time's Agent

This book was a potential book for the #SFFBookClub poll for a while, but I ended up reading anyway because it looked intriguing.

As a reader, it seems like a novella is a hard length to hit; it's hard to have the space for both pacing and sufficient worldbuilding, and it's also hard to have enough runway for the resolution to resonate and feel satisfying. The short of it is that I feel like this novella nailed it for me.

The worldbuilding here is brutal. The book kicks off with idyllic introduction of Raquel working for the Global Institute for the Scientific and Humanistic Study of Pocket Worlds. Pocket worlds are small offshoots of reality, much smaller than our own universe--maybe the size of a meadow or a room or a bag even--and they can run at different time rates to our own universe.

After the protagonist Raquel falls into …

Cherie Dimaline: The Marrow Thieves (2017, Dancing Cat Books, an imprint of Cormorant Books Inc.)

In a futuristic world ravaged by global warming, people have lost the ability to dream, …

The Marrow Thieves

This book is off the #SFFBookClub backlog, and I saw it mentioned on Imperfect Speculation (a blog about disability in speculative fiction).

The novel is set in a post-apocalyptic near future world where most people have lost the ability to dream, and the only "cure" is through the exploitation of bone marrow from indigenous people who still can. The book follows Frenchie, a Métis boy who has lost everybody he cares about and travels with a found family trying to find safety and community. The metaphor here resonates directly with the horrors of Canada past, as armed "recruiters" capture anybody who looks indigenous to send them off to "schools" to extract their bone marrow.

I know this is a YA novel, but I wish some of the characters and the protagonist Frenchie had more depth. Maybe this would land better for somebody else, but I also don't have any room …

Suzan Palumbo: Countess

A queer, Caribbean, anti-colonial sci-fi novella, inspired by the Count of Monte Cristo, in which …

Countess

I enjoyed this recontextualization of the Count of Monte Cristo into a science fiction story of revenge against empire and colonialism. It riffs on many elements from the original, but ultimately takes them in a different direction. Here, Virika is still framed by one of her peers due to his career jealousy, but it's also because of rebuffed sexual advances. Instead of "wait and hope" from the original, this book has the much more modern "success or perish" mantra.

As both a personal and thematic moment, the final scenes of negotiation come satisfyingly full circle, but sadly there's not that much room for worldbuilding in this short novella. It makes the larger diplomatic picture feel shallow, and the end of the book feel abrupt.

#SFFBookClub

Izzy Wasserstein: These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart (EBook, 2024, Tachyon Publications)

Security expert Dora left her anarchist commune over safety concerns. But when her ex-girlfriend Kay …

Short and bitter

These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart is a vignette about working through guilt and self-loathing toward self-forgiveness.

There's a lot going on in terms of themes: gender, transhumanism, anarchy and fascism, cloning, all mixed into a more standard crime plot.

Although the main thread is satisfactorily wrapped up, there's definitely room to explore the world further - I want more Dora!

#SFFBookClub

Izzy Wasserstein: These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart (EBook, 2024, Tachyon Publications)

Security expert Dora left her anarchist commune over safety concerns. But when her ex-girlfriend Kay …

These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart

These Fragile Graces is a fun trans noir murder mystery novella. It's a story that focuses much more on interpersonal and community relations than it does on a well-plotted mystery or detailed worldbuilding. That focus also sums up my feelings about what I felt worked and didn't in the story.

Mostly, I wish the mystery plot was a little bit more cohesive, and that there was more detail about the state of the world itself rather than being in a vague near-future urban decay. I loved the small detail of having memory implants to deal with trauma-based dissociation from childhood, but I wish the ideas around implants/augments and a rejection syndrome connected more to the plot.

It is nice to see an anarchist commune in fiction (I feel like maybe I've only read this in Margaret Killjoy's work previously) and how the protagonist Dora wrestles with her relationship with the …

reviewed Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #2)

Micaiah Johnson: Those Beyond the Wall

Faced with a coming apocalypse, a woman must reckon with her past to solve a …

Those Beyond the Wall

This was the #SFFBookClub book for February 2025. I am honestly a little surprised that it got a sequel. While I enjoyed it, I think this book suffers a little from being in the shadow of such a strong first book. It brings back nearly every character, although rooted in one world rather than worldhopping, and as such you really need to have read the first book to enjoy this one. The pitch for this book read almost as a murder investigation, but with foreknowledge from book one, it seemed incredibly obvious what the cause could be. This could just be a case of incorrect expectations on my part that the book would have more of a mystery element.

Thematically, I'm here for this story about justice and tearing down borders that separate the hoarding and exploitative rich from the poor. Here for the anger about how these rich people …