Review: The Fandom

The Fandom by Anna Day
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It was pretty good. A Hunger Games lookalike with a very interesting premise - if a fandom's belief is enough to create a world, but limits it to a Groundhog-day existence within the confines of a storyline, what do the inhabitants of that world do to escape?
That premise alone - looking out from neverending Narnia - is brilliant enough; the rest is fairly standard fare, or seems like it for a while until it gets a little twist.
Some nods to other relatively unknown classics, but overall pretty good.

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Review: Grey Sister

Grey Sister by Mark Lawrence
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

And it continues, and gets even better.

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Review: Red Sister

Red Sister by Mark Lawrence
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Well, here's a delightful new twist.
Mallory Towers with magic, murder, and myth.
It would have been a good girl's-school book on it's own.
It would have been a pretty decent dark Harry Potter.
It would have been a pretty good roguelike slumrat orphan revenge tale.
There's even a decent sci-fi angle that feels way bigger than the story.
But there's also a fantastic new system of magic, awesome characters, tense pace, and rich, sprawling, deep story that's nothing short of brilliant.

Would I read more? Can't wait.

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Review: The Core

The Core by Peter V. Brett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The CoreThe Core gets the series back on track and ends it with a bang. The previous versions were struggling like crazy with what felt like hundreds of side characters taking on life of their own and eating footage like there was no tomorrow till the point it had become impossible to track who was where doing what and related to who. They're all still there, but now there's a set of separate timelines that end, bringing a sense of clarity and closure, and the original team is back in the epic arc that ends with the kind of awesome struggle we had been waiting for all this while, Major channeling of LOTR's Mines of Moria happening here, and a really really awesome dad-level joke towards the end that settles the 'Who is the real Deliverer' question once and for all with no coming back.
This was a good series. Glad I stayed with it.

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Review: Nightwise

Nightwise by R.S. Belcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Nightwise is so Constantine it's hilarious. I can't imagine how RS Belcher forgot the trenchcoat, unless Jim Butcher had already appropriated it for Harry... either way, you end up with a prose version of John C. who out-Constantines Constantine, with added blood and gore and bites of reality and plot points that I honestly can't pinpoint but know have come up sooner or later in some Hellblazer: HauntedHellblazer series.
And it is still fantastic. You don't expect it to be, given the above, but it's really good, fast, readable, and a protagonist that skims just this close to being an actual villain and still remains empathetic, identifiable-with.
Why not that last star? The ending felt... off. Incomplete. Unsatisfying. There should have been more, somehow, more action, more drama, more... things. Given all that came before to get here, it was not up to the bar set earlier.

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Review: The Engines of God

The Engines of God by Jack McDevitt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This one was interesting because it's different from a lot of the standard stuff. There are still world-destroying godlike entities and action sequences and spaceships and killer crabs, but there's also a lot of human elements, dysfunctional and damaged people in redemption arcs, and a very nicely-modulated slow-pace archaeological approach to problem solving that's very new.
It's Indiana Jones in space, if Indiana Jones ever started acting like an actual archaeologist.

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