Ricky Pine's Blog, page 51
October 23, 2019
Review: Amnesty
Amnesty by Lara Elena DonnellyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
The funny thing about this series is that even though it takes place during times of great sociopolitical upheaval in its alternate world, Lara Elena Donnelly makes heavy use of time skips between the books so that all the stories emphasized in her writing are not those of war. Perhaps it's because there are simply so many World War II stories that even making a counterpart story would feel troped to death, somehow? Well, if there's one thing that Donnelly is...
October 21, 2019
Review: Armistice
Armistice by Lara Elena DonnellyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Picking up three years after the events of Amberlough, the middle entry of the Dossier could fool you into believing that Gedda is still the center of this universe, the only place where any action happens. Well, nope. Not when this book largely takes place in Porachis, a distant land heavily inspired by India. Tropical locale, sticky history with Geddan colonization attempts (though not nearly as much as Liso, Porachis's allies), a unique writing system that Geddans have t...
October 20, 2019
Review: Amberlough
Amberlough by Lara Elena DonnellyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This trilogy, I've seen it often enough on the shelves at work that those pretty as hell covers made me really want to get into it. And so I've started my journey through a second-world fantasy built on the level of Leigh Bardugo's Grishaverse, Fonda Lee's Green Bone Saga, R.F. Kuang's The Poppy War, or Avatar: The Last Airbender - paralleling the real world, historically and politically, but for sure not our world. The only difference between this and all the others I've mentioned be...
October 17, 2019
Review: Shatter City
Shatter City by Scott WesterfeldMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
The sequel to Impostors brings us to the midpoint of Westerfeld's latest series in finer form than its predecessor in all the ways, and not just the fact that Shatter City is a significantly cooler title. There's also the ways in which this book finally starts growing into its own thing, distinct from all the other books in the Uglies-verse that came before it - and as on point as the social commentary of the original series is, Shatter City raises the stakes by introducing us to P...
October 14, 2019
Review: The Fire Keeper
The Fire Keeper by J.C. CervantesMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
The middle entry of J.C. Cervantes' planned Storm Runner trilogy sees Zane Obispo having to deal with a lot of unexpected ramifications from his first adventure. Not only having to live in isolation on a faraway island where shadow magic mucks with the WiFi, but the fact that by publishing his adventure in the world, even in a form where only the godborn (that is, we in the real world) can read the most salient details, has earned hi...
October 12, 2019
Review: The Girl Who Lived Twice
The Girl Who Lived Twice by David LagercrantzMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
The Millennium series is now officially doubled in length vs. how Stieg Larsson left it, and just like The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, David Lagercrantz gives us his third Lisbeth Salander story as a sort of soft ending - really, this could work just as well as Hornet's Nest as the series finale. Lagercrantz has said that this will be his last Lisbeth Salander novel, but if it's not, that'd be nice too, given the u...
October 7, 2019
Review: These Divided Shores
These Divided Shores by Sara RaaschMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
How long was it gonna be until someone told me there was a title and cover for this sequel to These Rebel Waves?
And after that massive cliffhanger on the first book too!
I wanna see some major-league ass-kicking in this book, too. Reylo-grade ass-kicking. We all know Raasch can make it happen!
And guess what? Being Raasch, she delivers pretty well on this, the second half of her second series, and a pretty perfect piece of duology co...
October 3, 2019
Review: The Fated Sky
The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette KowalMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
The sequel to this year's Hugo winner for Best Novel, The Fated Sky is, according to Mary Robinette Kowal, the second half of a duology - but it's not the end of the Lady Astronaut series, because Kowal has at least two more companion novels planned, at least one of which is meant to be roughly concurrent with this book in the timeline. The alternate timeline, now moved up to 1961 and beyond. Nearly a decade after the meteorite i...
October 1, 2019
Review: The Merciful Crow
The Merciful Crow by Margaret OwenMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I first heard about Margaret Owen as an artist - more specifically, for her creations of the first official art of L.L. McKinney's Alice, and also one "whoops my hand slipped - A WHOLE BUNCH" sketch of Leia strangling Jabba the Hutt. Now, of course, she's got a book that's pretty well a work of art in and of itself, purely on the strength of its fantasy world-building. Comparable to Leigh Bardugo in its Russian-esque second-world st...
September 23, 2019
Review: Old Bones
Old Bones by Douglas PrestonMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Spinning off from Preston and Child's famous Agent Pendergast series is this, the first novel in twenty years or so to feature Nora Kelly - and also, as a major character, newly minted FBI Agent Corrie Swanson of the Albuquerque Field Office. Remember when she was Lisbeth Salander before Lisbeth Salander was Lisbeth Salander? A punk hacker type living in the cornfields of Kansas as far back as Still Life with Crows? Now she's official, th...
