Kevin Hearne – Heir to the Jedi

Hey! Usually I don’t do spoilers. Herein be spoilers! Although perhaps not completely unanticipated spoilers. Most of the way through I thought this was enjoyable space opera/caper novel, set in the gap between the original “Star Wars” and “The Empire Strikes Back,” that gives Luke Skywalker a chance to mature a little, both personally and

Elia Winters – Hairpin Curves

This book was a tiny bit slow to grab me, but once the actual roadtrip got going I was all in. The logistical details of getting from place-to-place were credible and anchored the story for me. Winters’ prose is light on physical description, so I found the portrayals of the places they visited evocative more

Ruby Lang – House Rules

I’m going to out on a limb and guess that Lang’s brief for herself with the “Uptown” series was to write using core romance tropes, but consciously alter some standard pillars of each. So the first portrayed a not-quite fake relationship and the second featured not-really-enemies-to-lovers, and here we have a nonstandard second chance (They

Grady Hendrix: Horrorstör

The physical design of this book is fantastic. The faux-Ikea descriptions and illustrations are pitch-perfect, right up to the point they turn sinister and twisted. I enjoyed the earlier, funnier, half more than the second, but a lot of that is due to my personal preferences. I wanted the protagonists’ economic stresses to play into

Mark Z Danielweski: House of Leaves

House of Leaves, is more or less, a purported transcription by a guy named Johnny Truant of a manuscript he finds in a dead man’s apartment. He gradually becomes convinced the work of transcribing it is causing a malevolent supernatural presence to manifest in his life. Truant is nothing if not an unreliable narrator. He

Rachel Lynn Brody (ed.): Hot Mess – Speculative Fiction About Climate Change

The handful of stories in Brody’s collection clearly have an agenda of raising consciousness of and concern about the implications of climate change. Socially or politically motivated art is tricky: it can succeed in communicating its objectives without necessarily exhibiting the general hallmarks of literary merit. In literary terms, I found Hot Mess a mixed

Robert Jeschonek: Heaven Bent

Heaven Bent was published as a weekly serial ebook, a format which intrigued, but ultimately disappointed me. Perhaps I’m being unfair and it was tightly plotted from the get-go. But it felt like it could actually have been written week-by-week, with many plot threads introduced and then discarded, ill-supported twists late in the game, and

Jack Matthews: Hanger Stout, Awake!

Hanger Stout, Awake! arrived to my library hold shelf after I’d lost all recollection of what had called it to my attention. It was written in 1967, and was my first exposure to Jack Matthews. Superficially, it doesn’t seem like my kind of book at all. Clyde Stout, who involuntarily assumes the nickname Hanger, is

Suzanne Collins: The Hunger Games

I struggle with how useful it is for me to comment on popular works. A lot of people obviously love this book. I’m statistically quite unlikely to ever write anything as many people pay attention to, what gives me the right to judge it? But maybe it’s useful for me to explore whether this is

Janna Levin : How the Universe Got Its Spots

How the Universe Got Its Spots is either the most unusual science book I’ve ever read, or the most science-oriented memoir. I was delighted by both aspects. Levin, a no-nonsense, for-real, theoretical cosmologist grapples with, among other things, the shape of the universe, her acknowledgedly irrational preference for it to be finite, and a relationship