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Book Reviews

The Blazing Star by Imani Josey

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Portal Fantasies. They take modern regular people and put them in crazy fantasy lands. You know, kinda like Labyrinth where some kids go into a magic place to see David Bowie in fantastically tight pants.

The Fifth Season

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The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

Ok, look. I haven’t done book reviews on this blog for a while. The reason is that as I move around in the publishing community, I’m meeting a lot of authors. It gets awkward talking about books written by people I have met or MIGHT meet.

So, don’t think of this as a review. Think of it as a recommendation. I read A LOT of books. Many of them are quite good. I plan on using this space to say nice things about books. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if any given book is right for you.

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

Yeah, yeah, The Fifth Season has exceptional worldbuilding and a fantastic magic system. I don’t care. I DON’T! (I kinda do) What I love about this novel is the depth of its characterization. Not only is it full of powerful, interesting characters, but these characters change during the events of the novel without becoming less compelling.

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Book Reviews: A Casual Reader’s Guide to Reviewing

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DeathtoStock_Medium4So, you’ve read a book and it made you have feels. Lots of them. Good ones, bad ones, confusing ones that are kind of fuzzy and a little bit disconcerting. What can you do about it? How can you make the world feel what you’re feeling? Book reviews.

Book reviews are the reader’s chance to stab back at the encroaching dark. They’re a chance to share beauty with the world or squash some putrid eggplant of a novel.

How do you go about doing it?

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The Edge of Nowhere by C.H. Armstrong

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Congrats to C.H. Armstrong for today’s news. She’s a local author and I feel confident posting this book release announcement for her because she’s super cool and actually quite talented. Yeah, The Edge of Nowhere is outside of my usual SFF reading preferences, but it’s important to me that I sometimes read outside of my comfort … Read more

Reading Recommendations: Cram Stories Into Your Head

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Cram stories into your head.

I’ve been reading a lot in 2015. I mean, a LOT. Not only did I spent significantly more time with my butt in a chair reading books, but I also picked up an Audible account. Listening to books allows me to cram more stories into my head and I love it.

This was partially for the sake of becoming a better writer. It’s hard to get good at writing without a whole lot of reading. What are other authors doing? What styles are effective, and which ones are popular? Is first person present tense really a thing?

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All Five Doctors

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I don’t believe my geek cred has ever been questioned. If it were, I believe the following ought to clear things up.

Recently, I visited my sister. She informed me that she had a box of books that she got from my parents. They were mostly hers, but she was fairly certain that a few of them did not belong in her collection alongside Nancy Drew and Little Women.

I’m fairly certain she was correct.

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