Sci-fi, I guess, of the 15-minutes-into-the-future variety. A group of oddball friends and the new kid in school, a girl who was a minor celebrity because her mother left her right after she was born to be part of the crew of the first ever space mission to leave the solar system – a long, …
Middle-grade. Contemporary. The book opens with the 12 year-old Sunny St. James about to enter surgery for a long-awaited heart transplant. With a penchant for gallows humour, rash decisions, and secret poetry, Sunny is committed to seizing the opportunity presented by her new heart – in the face of painful friend-drama, the sudden return of …
A collection of short stories by one of the current giants of speculative fiction. A pretty wide range of lengths, tones, and kinds of stories. I think novel length work actually shows off her brilliance more effectively, but I definitely enjoyed this. One good measure of that is the fact that even with short story …
Contemporary fiction. Picked it up because I saw a few bookish people online speak well of it and I thought it might be a pleasant diversion, even if it’s a bit outside my usual range, and it mostly was. The story was pretty predictable but engagingly told. The writing did once in awhile go for …
Short stories. Weird, creative, clearly influenced by both literary fiction and sci-fi. Pretty queer. The stories explore things like history and memory on a generation ship, a working-class teen on a cross-country road-trip with a rich woman in a car shaped like a whale, escaping anti-semitism in Europe and moving to America with a mechanical …
I don’t pay a lot of attention to literary awards for the most part, but the one exception that I regularly make is what used to be called the Tiptree Award and is now the Otherwise Award, the tagline for which is “an award encouraging the exploration & expansion of gender.” I picked this book …
Based on stories of the rogarou, a figure something like a werewolf that haunts Metis communities. Set in such a community on Georgian Bay in Ontario, following a woman whose husband suddenly disappeared almost a year ago. At the beginning of the book, she encounters someone who looks just like him but seems to be …
YA contemporary. Co-written by two fairly well known authors in the genre. A white Jewish boy and South Asian Muslim girl, both US American and both seventeen, fall for each other while volunteering on the campaign of a progressive candidate for state senate in a special election (which is what they call by-elections down there, …
I don’t normally post reviews or do anything beyond silently note it on Goodreads when I re-read something, but for some reason a week ago I was seized with the impulse to re-read this specific Iain M. Banks novel set in his “Culture” universe — which I originally read somewhere between 10 and 20 years …
Sci-fi. Time travel. Near-future (and near-past, and distant-past, and really-distant-past) almost-Earth. Feminist. Very clever – in world-building, in how it deals with time-travel, in its politics. Quite liked the writing too. But it was a bit disappointing in terms of storytelling. In particular, there were a handful of scenes, mostly early on but a couple …