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Sarah Rees Brennan, Long Live Evil: Portal fantasy in which a young woman about to die after suffering for several years gets a chance to live in her sister’s favorite fantasy world. Turns out she’s in the body of one of the villains. If only she’d been able to pay a little more attention when they were reading the early books (brain fog was an issue). If she embraces evil, successfully handles the Emperor-to-Be, and outmaneuvers her beautiful, pure stepsister, maybe she will be ok. There were definite echoes of Brennan’s other works (genre savviness, banter), and though I preferred In Other Lands I will read the next one—which there should be, since it ends on a serious cliffhanger.
Keanu Reeves & China Miéville, The Book of Elsewhere: Based on a comic book universe created by Reeves, I’m told in the description. Maybe reading the comic book would have helped me, but ultimately this is a story of an immortal—hard to kill, resurrects every time he does—who periodically goes into rages in which he kills everyone/thing around, and he’s been doing that for over 80,000 years. There’s an immortal deer-pig, a babirusa, following him around and trying to kill him, as well as other potential children of the lightning. Through much of the book, he’s working with the US military to do their dirty work and assist their investigations into his special features, but there’s also a weird cult or two knocking around. There were lots of perspectives but each felt fairly same-y, across centuries and demographics. The immortal is very accepting of everything—curiosity is rare after all that time—and this certainly won’t get rid of the joke about Reeves being an immortal.
Stuart Neville, Blood Like Mine: Rebecca and her daughter Moonflower are on the run, because Rebecca is desperate to keep Moonflower alive, while an FBI agent is chasing a serial killer of child predators. Any ounce of genre savvy will tell you the situation. The most inexplicable thing to me was that the FBI agent was disbelieved and blamed for the resulting deaths, when he wasn’t even spouting X-Files theories, just identifying an obvious suspect. There could have been narrative fixes, but instead it just annoyed me.
C.S. Pacat, The Captive Prince: Well, that was a wild ride. Damen is a deposed prince, given as a slave to the prince of the neighboring, unfriendly country, a dissipated young man named Laurent. If anyone figures out that Damen is actually the rival prince, he’ll become unpleasantly dead, especially given that Damen killed Laurent’s beloved older brother on the battlefield, leaving Laurent as a ward of his uncle-Regent, which has not gone well for Laurent. So many delightful tropes; so much palace intrigue; so much slavery and a fair amount of forcible rape alongside. (Slavery does not seem to be hereditary.) Taboos on extramarital procreation mean that lots of sex is m/m or f/f and to have extramarital, p/v sex is quite taboo, which means that it happens a lot. The palace intrigue is delightfully twisty, and fits perfectly with the core trope, which is: Brainy, sneaky guy believes he’s fundamentally bad/broken, and somehow ends up with the devotion of incredibly skilled but not devious person who should be his enemy, so sneaky guy has no choice but to live up to the expectations of the one person who really gets him. But really bad things do happen, including extreme violence inflicted on Damen by Laurent’s order.
C.S. Pacat, Prince’s Gambit: Book two, in which we add in all the tropes (smooshed in a small space together; wound care; hurt/comfort; hurt/hurt; etc.) and a lot more banter, as Damen and Laurent work together to fight for their respective countries, knowing all along that it must end. And the closer they get, the more Damen fears that Damen’s secret identity will destroy Laurent when it’s revealed. So much more palace intrigue! So much angst! No reliance on miscommunication for plotting! (Though perhaps a little reliance on Laurent being able to think fifty steps ahead and nothing totally random happening.)
C.S. Pacat, Kings Rising: Book three, in which both Laurent and Damen have to try to claim their kingships, outwit the Regent, and confront Damen’s usurper brother. Very satisfying resolution.
Caitlin Rozakis, Dreadful: Gav wakes up in a room, missing his eyebrows and memories. Turns out he was a Dark Wizard, with a princess trapped in his dungeons, but he doesn’t really want to be a bad guy. Shenanigans ensue as he tries to figure out what kind of person he does want to be. Slight but entertaining.
Emma Newman, The Vengeance:I really love Newman’s sf, which tends to be quite brutal about the wrongs people are willing to do to others, but bounced off her earlier fantasy series. This is a new fantasy world with werewolves and vampires in the West Indies and pre-revolutionary France (the fantasy doesn’t come explicitly in until halfway through). The protagonist has been raised by her stern pirate captain mother, whose death early in the narrative prompts her to seek out the rest of her family in France. She’s basically unlettered and unmannered, to the consternation of many who encounter her, and what I really liked about the bewildering array of people who tried to kidnap her was that they were totally willing to “explain” just enough to get her to go along, and it wasn’t clear for a while whether she was hearing the truth—kind of like morally ambiguous situations in the real world. Unfortunately, then there’s an exposition dump by a character who it seems we’re just supposed to believe. I remain excited by Newman’s sf but I guess the way she does historical fantasy isn’t my speed.
James S.A. Corey, The Mercy of Gods: New series beginning. On a planet called Anjiin, humans have carved out some living space. Then a fascist species far more powerful shows up and enslaves humans, who will have to prove their worth to their new overlords to survive. But there’s a spy among the humans who may be able to complicate things. The action is mostly confined to a small human workgroup with some alien viewpoints, rather than the multiple-action-sequence experience of the Expanse series. I thought it was ok and will likely read the next book.
Craig Schaefer, Harmony Black: This is apparently a spinoff series. It features a witch who works as an FBI agent and is pulled into a secret group that deals with supernatural entities. The first major case she works with them turns out to involve the boogeyman who took her sister when she was a child. I found it basically uninteresting, but if you like the X-File/horror interface, it might work.
Madeline Ashby, Glass Houses: Shares a surprising number of plot points with Naomi Alderman’s The Future, though angrier and more feminist. Kristin, a survivor of the fire that killed her parents, now works in tech, trying to stop failures like the one that contributed to their deaths. The rich white guy/Elon Musk standin she works for is trying to monitor emotions and turn them into currency (don’t spend too much time thinking about it). The company’s sold for a huge price, but on the celebratory trip, the company plane crashes, and only ten of the fifteen passengers—all of whom were entitled to equity—survive. And there’s a mysterious glass house on the island where they crashed. Domestic abuse (controlling access to things needed for survival) is an important part of the plot, so avoid if you need to.
Naomi Kritzer, Liberty’s Daughter: Rebecca lives with her father on a libertarian seasteading complex; since he’s a stakeholder, they live pretty well. But when, at sixteen, Rebecca starts doing jobs to earn her own money, she discovers many dark sides, including the way that people are pushed into slavery for debt. At the same time, she’s been raised in the ideology and likes the freedom of action she has. It seemed a bit optimistic about the long-term chances of survival when whoever controls the water treatment plant can (a) charge what they like and (b) determines through their competence whether people will survive, but maybe that’s appropriate for a sixteen-year-old protagonist for whom everything is possibility.
Keanu Reeves & China Miéville, The Book of Elsewhere: Based on a comic book universe created by Reeves, I’m told in the description. Maybe reading the comic book would have helped me, but ultimately this is a story of an immortal—hard to kill, resurrects every time he does—who periodically goes into rages in which he kills everyone/thing around, and he’s been doing that for over 80,000 years. There’s an immortal deer-pig, a babirusa, following him around and trying to kill him, as well as other potential children of the lightning. Through much of the book, he’s working with the US military to do their dirty work and assist their investigations into his special features, but there’s also a weird cult or two knocking around. There were lots of perspectives but each felt fairly same-y, across centuries and demographics. The immortal is very accepting of everything—curiosity is rare after all that time—and this certainly won’t get rid of the joke about Reeves being an immortal.
Stuart Neville, Blood Like Mine: Rebecca and her daughter Moonflower are on the run, because Rebecca is desperate to keep Moonflower alive, while an FBI agent is chasing a serial killer of child predators. Any ounce of genre savvy will tell you the situation. The most inexplicable thing to me was that the FBI agent was disbelieved and blamed for the resulting deaths, when he wasn’t even spouting X-Files theories, just identifying an obvious suspect. There could have been narrative fixes, but instead it just annoyed me.
C.S. Pacat, The Captive Prince: Well, that was a wild ride. Damen is a deposed prince, given as a slave to the prince of the neighboring, unfriendly country, a dissipated young man named Laurent. If anyone figures out that Damen is actually the rival prince, he’ll become unpleasantly dead, especially given that Damen killed Laurent’s beloved older brother on the battlefield, leaving Laurent as a ward of his uncle-Regent, which has not gone well for Laurent. So many delightful tropes; so much palace intrigue; so much slavery and a fair amount of forcible rape alongside. (Slavery does not seem to be hereditary.) Taboos on extramarital procreation mean that lots of sex is m/m or f/f and to have extramarital, p/v sex is quite taboo, which means that it happens a lot. The palace intrigue is delightfully twisty, and fits perfectly with the core trope, which is: Brainy, sneaky guy believes he’s fundamentally bad/broken, and somehow ends up with the devotion of incredibly skilled but not devious person who should be his enemy, so sneaky guy has no choice but to live up to the expectations of the one person who really gets him. But really bad things do happen, including extreme violence inflicted on Damen by Laurent’s order.
C.S. Pacat, Prince’s Gambit: Book two, in which we add in all the tropes (smooshed in a small space together; wound care; hurt/comfort; hurt/hurt; etc.) and a lot more banter, as Damen and Laurent work together to fight for their respective countries, knowing all along that it must end. And the closer they get, the more Damen fears that Damen’s secret identity will destroy Laurent when it’s revealed. So much more palace intrigue! So much angst! No reliance on miscommunication for plotting! (Though perhaps a little reliance on Laurent being able to think fifty steps ahead and nothing totally random happening.)
C.S. Pacat, Kings Rising: Book three, in which both Laurent and Damen have to try to claim their kingships, outwit the Regent, and confront Damen’s usurper brother. Very satisfying resolution.
Caitlin Rozakis, Dreadful: Gav wakes up in a room, missing his eyebrows and memories. Turns out he was a Dark Wizard, with a princess trapped in his dungeons, but he doesn’t really want to be a bad guy. Shenanigans ensue as he tries to figure out what kind of person he does want to be. Slight but entertaining.
Emma Newman, The Vengeance:I really love Newman’s sf, which tends to be quite brutal about the wrongs people are willing to do to others, but bounced off her earlier fantasy series. This is a new fantasy world with werewolves and vampires in the West Indies and pre-revolutionary France (the fantasy doesn’t come explicitly in until halfway through). The protagonist has been raised by her stern pirate captain mother, whose death early in the narrative prompts her to seek out the rest of her family in France. She’s basically unlettered and unmannered, to the consternation of many who encounter her, and what I really liked about the bewildering array of people who tried to kidnap her was that they were totally willing to “explain” just enough to get her to go along, and it wasn’t clear for a while whether she was hearing the truth—kind of like morally ambiguous situations in the real world. Unfortunately, then there’s an exposition dump by a character who it seems we’re just supposed to believe. I remain excited by Newman’s sf but I guess the way she does historical fantasy isn’t my speed.
James S.A. Corey, The Mercy of Gods: New series beginning. On a planet called Anjiin, humans have carved out some living space. Then a fascist species far more powerful shows up and enslaves humans, who will have to prove their worth to their new overlords to survive. But there’s a spy among the humans who may be able to complicate things. The action is mostly confined to a small human workgroup with some alien viewpoints, rather than the multiple-action-sequence experience of the Expanse series. I thought it was ok and will likely read the next book.
Craig Schaefer, Harmony Black: This is apparently a spinoff series. It features a witch who works as an FBI agent and is pulled into a secret group that deals with supernatural entities. The first major case she works with them turns out to involve the boogeyman who took her sister when she was a child. I found it basically uninteresting, but if you like the X-File/horror interface, it might work.
Madeline Ashby, Glass Houses: Shares a surprising number of plot points with Naomi Alderman’s The Future, though angrier and more feminist. Kristin, a survivor of the fire that killed her parents, now works in tech, trying to stop failures like the one that contributed to their deaths. The rich white guy/Elon Musk standin she works for is trying to monitor emotions and turn them into currency (don’t spend too much time thinking about it). The company’s sold for a huge price, but on the celebratory trip, the company plane crashes, and only ten of the fifteen passengers—all of whom were entitled to equity—survive. And there’s a mysterious glass house on the island where they crashed. Domestic abuse (controlling access to things needed for survival) is an important part of the plot, so avoid if you need to.
Naomi Kritzer, Liberty’s Daughter: Rebecca lives with her father on a libertarian seasteading complex; since he’s a stakeholder, they live pretty well. But when, at sixteen, Rebecca starts doing jobs to earn her own money, she discovers many dark sides, including the way that people are pushed into slavery for debt. At the same time, she’s been raised in the ideology and likes the freedom of action she has. It seemed a bit optimistic about the long-term chances of survival when whoever controls the water treatment plant can (a) charge what they like and (b) determines through their competence whether people will survive, but maybe that’s appropriate for a sixteen-year-old protagonist for whom everything is possibility.
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I got the two books she self published and then bought the last one when the publisher picked it up so my set doesn't match, but it was quite a romp.
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Same with the Newman. Like you, I really love her SF and never tried anything else, but now I clearly won't :)
Craig Schaefer is one of those urban fantasy dude bros I don't usually admit to enjoying :) I did like the Daniel Faust series better than the Harmony Black spinoff, but if you aren't desperate for that kind of thing, I definitely wouldn't rec it. (Others in that would love to be Dresden category that I enjoyed recently has been Chris Tullbane's Murder of Crows series, which is a shade more post-apocalyptic and YA but his DNA is definitely make urban fantasy).
I'm looking fwd to the Ashby and Corey and am glad you liked them both.
Things I've come across recently that I'm not sure I've seen you talk about but might be up your alley: Virginia Black's No Shelter But the Stars, Megan O'Keefe's Bound World trilogy, David Ignatius's Phantom Orbit, and Elaine Cho's Ocean's Godori. (OK, I'm still listening to all of those but they are good enough that I haven't deleted them yet, so...)
As always, thank you so much for your reviews! I tend to take a lot of them as recommendations (or permissions to DNF :)
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