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In the jianghu, you break the law to make it your own.
Lin Chong is …
A mostly female, partially LGBTQ cast (on the hero side anyway) sees a former arms instructor in ancient China join a bandit camp in the vein of Robin Hood. Quite a fun read! Much adventure and swashbuckling as well as fighting for justice from oppression, sexual assault, classism etc.
Really loved this one. Emi and her dad are pretty happy with the status quo now the world has reached “net zero” emissions, but her mom is still very dissatisfied with the state of things, feeling like it could all collapse back into rule by the “destruction class” and also feeling like they haven’t been punished sufficiently for their crimes.
We see a lot of gritty flashbacks to what it took to get from our present day to this positive outcome future via The Transition. And on the journey, also get to explore the family dynamics with the primary focus in a lot of ways being in is it okay to relax and enjoy the life they’ve built or not and should familial love or “global awareness” take priority. Can the movement rest on its laurels or not?
At any rate I was all in for the world building and …
Really loved this one. Emi and her dad are pretty happy with the status quo now the world has reached “net zero” emissions, but her mom is still very dissatisfied with the state of things, feeling like it could all collapse back into rule by the “destruction class” and also feeling like they haven’t been punished sufficiently for their crimes.
We see a lot of gritty flashbacks to what it took to get from our present day to this positive outcome future via The Transition. And on the journey, also get to explore the family dynamics with the primary focus in a lot of ways being in is it okay to relax and enjoy the life they’ve built or not and should familial love or “global awareness” take priority. Can the movement rest on its laurels or not?
At any rate I was all in for the world building and the story as well. Very much enjoyed it all.
I quite enjoyed this book but did find it slightly heavy on messaging about various political issues from LGBTQ to gender to patriarchy/matriarchy to environment to native rights. All of which I support but which did drag me out of the story slightly from time to time just with the frequency of their introduction and/or discussion.
Still well worth a read though. Sort of in the vein of a Harry Potter fantasy mixed with a story of resistance to cultural assimilation. And with interesting dragons and quite well done characters.
When you set out to make a paradise, first make sure you aren't making a new special variant of hell seems to be the moral of A Stranger In The Citadel. We follow a young princess as she discovers things aren't quite as simple as she imagined and ends up going on an unintended voyage of discovery about her world. Pretty well paced and tantalizes with just enough detail to keep you going to the big reveals near the end.
And any book that starts with the line “Thou shall not suffer a librarian to live.” has already got a pretty interesting hook!
Arthur C. Clarke winner and Sunday Times bestseller Adrian Tchaikovsky's triumphant return to fantasy with …
This is actually a really good book, but for some reason I struggled a lot with the format, in which each chapter is told from a different character's perspective and frequently only a character that we meet for one or two chapters. Yes, there are a few "main" characters that we get to come back to again and again, but you don't really start revisiting them until later in the book and so for the first part it's kind of an endless parade of new points of view. Took me quite a while to wade through those to where everything clicked for me and I was able to keep my attention on the book for more than a single chapter at a time.
Overall, it has a good arc, a good plot, good character development etc though and I enjoyed the story quite a lot by the time I reached …
This is actually a really good book, but for some reason I struggled a lot with the format, in which each chapter is told from a different character's perspective and frequently only a character that we meet for one or two chapters. Yes, there are a few "main" characters that we get to come back to again and again, but you don't really start revisiting them until later in the book and so for the first part it's kind of an endless parade of new points of view. Took me quite a while to wade through those to where everything clicked for me and I was able to keep my attention on the book for more than a single chapter at a time.
Overall, it has a good arc, a good plot, good character development etc though and I enjoyed the story quite a lot by the time I reached the end. Just tough going at the start, and possibly only for me?
A dark and witty story of environmental collapse and runaway capitalism from the Booker-listed author …
This is a bleak and satirical look into one possible future that seems all too real, but also still kind of hilarious, as our two main characters bounce around the world looking for any remaining examples of the Venomous Lumpsucker fish while encountering every kind of corporate strangeness that the concept of "environmental credits" has spawned. (Environmental credit: a parody of carbon credits such that you need at least three of them to be allowed to cause the extinction of a species during a project; seven if its proven to above a certain intelligence threshold.)