Author: Annie
City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Ilmar is a conquered city. Only a few years before Adrian Tchaikovsky’s imaginative novel, City of Lost Chances, opens, it was taken by the Palleseens as part of their quest to “perfect” the world. Tchaikovsky’s cast of characters provide a wonderful selection of vantage points to watch as the city begins to spin out of […]
Clark and Division, by Naomi Hirahara
Aki Ito has always looked up to her older sister, Rose. Rose was beautiful. She was popular. She was fearless. She was the one to strike out to Chicago to make a new life after the Ito family was incarcerated in Manzanar along with thousands of Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor. So […]
Case Study, by Graeme Macrae Burnet
Trigger warning for suicide. Graeme Macrae Burnet works his metafictional magic again in Case Study, a tale of unreliable narrators and unstable identities. The narrator of this book—also named Graeme Macrae Burnet—has been working on a biography of a controversial psychologist when he receives a set of five notebooks from a woman who believed that […]
Witch King, by Martha Wells
It’s definitely a sign that you’re going to have a bad day when you wake up dead. One would think that Kai, the protagonist of Martha Wells’s electrifying novel Witch King, would be used to it. This isn’t the first time he’s woken up dead. He is a demon, after all. But waking up dead […]
Reading at sea
I arrived back home on Monday after just over a week on my very first cruise. My sister and I took a cruise from Seattle up the Canadian and Alaskan coasts and, after all of the running around and time zone changes, I needed some time to get settled back into my routines. Posting has […]
The Heart in Winter, by Kevin Barry
Late in Kevin Barry’s amazing novel, The Heart in Winter, rumors start to race around Montana and Idaho as people recount what they heard about Tom Rourke and Polly Gillespie’s doomed love. It sounds like a tall tale or sordid scandal or a blues song the way folks tell it. They’re not far wrong. There […]
House of Shades, by Lianne Dillsworth
Beggars can’t be choosers. Neither can women doctors in 1833, apparently. Protagonist Hester Reeves agrees to treat and care for a dying old man so that she can make enough money for her small family to resettle in a nicer part of London. At least, Hester thinks that’s the only task she’s expected to take […]