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- Novel written by Heather Fawcett
- Published in February, 2025
- Part two of the Emily Wilde series
This is the third (and final?) entry in the Emily Wilde series. Finishing book two didn’t leave me, like, desperate to read the third, but I just don’t think that’s a reasonable expectation for a cosy fantasy series. This truly is one I read for the vibes.
I wasn’t obsessed with this book. Ultimately, I think the first book in the series was definitely the best.
Character wise, I wasn’t blown away. While I liked Emily as a protagonist in book one, I found myself not particularly caring for her at this point. I certainly didn’t hate her, I just felt very ambivalent about her. I also found myself enjoying Wendell a lot less this time around. There are some good side characters, but they are far and few between.
The plot once again isn’t super deep, but like I said in my reviews of the previous instalments, we’re not here for an elaborate plot. Nor do I want to nitpick about some other stuff that I didn’t really vibe with.*
Ultimately, that’s the saving grace of Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales. It’s the third book in the series. We all know we’re mostly here for the cosy vibes. And on that count, the book delivers! Not quite as well as Encyclopedia of Faeries, but definitely enough to make this an overall enjoyable read.
*Yeah, I’ll say it. I’m tired of footnotes in fiction books. I also just finished Babel, and I don’t like it! If the information is relevant enough that I need to read it, put it in the text. If it’s not, then don’t! I keep reading these footnotes out of a sense of obligation. I GET that it makes sense for Emily as a character to include them because she’s an academic. But that doesn’t mean I want to read them.
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- Novella written by Arkady Martine
- Published 8 November 2023
- Standalone
Listened to the audiobook with Raquel Beattie, going against my own advice to read Arkady Martine on paper. I think the narrator did fine, but this novella too is just better suited to paper than audio format.
I really liked the Teixcalaan Duology so I was excited when I found a novella by Martine on my audiobook app. Unfortunately, Rose/House didn’t really work for me.
I like Martine’s atmospheric writing style, even if it tends to be a little opaque and fuzzy around the edges. Reading the Teixcalaan Duology took some brain power, but it was well worth the reward.
Rose/House is written in a very similar style, but unlike Teixcalaan, it was mostly just confusing to me.
My feeling is that the problem is the type of book that Martine was writing. Rose/House is a cyberpunk noir. We’ve seen that before – Morgan’s Altered Carbon is probably the most obvious example – and the genre can work very well.
However, for me, a core requirement of a detective story is that the plot works.
I grew up reading Agatha Christie and watching Midsummer Murders. I do not mind a convoluted story – that’s part of the fun. But I do want the ‘oh, of course!’-moment at the resolution.
I won’t spoil Rose/House for you, but suffice to say that I didn’t have that feeling at the end of the novella. The focus on atmosphere and mystery in the writing style let down the actual mystery in the plot at the core of the detective story.
Moreover, because Rose/House is quite short, I never really got invested in any of the characters, though I do think they did have potential. But if the plot isn’t doing it and the characters don’t reel me in, the atmosphere Martine creates simply doesn’t carry the novella on its own.
I think A Memory Called Empire is one of the best sci-fi books of the past decade. So a slight miss in a novella won’t put me off reading the next thing Martine puts out. But it is interesting how a style that works great for one type of story is quite frankly detrimental to another.
It has been a while since Martine has put out a longer form work, so I am really curious to see what she is working one. You can be sure that I will review it on this website!
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- Novel written by Leigh Bardugo
- Published on april 9, 2024
I picked this book up while trying to claw my way through Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series. I wanted to read something easy and fun. I’m not sure this book is necessarily intended to be “easy and fun”, but I finished it in three days, so it’s doing something right.
I liked the setting – it’s historical fantasy, though I’m sure Peter would absolutely hate this for whatever inaccuracies I didn’t personally spot.
I wasn’t super blown away by the main characters or by the side characters, to be honest. Valentina was probably my favourite, and definitely had the most character growth. Luzia and her love interest (whose name I’ve already forgotten, which probably is an indication of something…) are a little bit forgettable. Bardugo is certainly capable of writing “better” characters than this, but I sort of didn’t mind it, to be honest. The romance was fine as well. Once again, a little bit forgettable but not outright bad.
Overall, if you ask me anything about The Familiar in a year or two, I won’t be able to tell you a single thing. However, I found myself sitting back down to read a bit several times a day, so it’s a solid 3.5-star rating from me.
- Novella written by Ray Nayler
- Published 16 January 2024
- Standalone
Listened to the audiobook with Stefan Rudnicki and Gabrielle de Cuir. Fine narrators.
With the relatively recent news concerning the de-extinction of the dire wolf, I thought it would be fun to review a novella by Ray Nayler on the de-extinction of the woolly mammoth.
The Tusks of Extinction isn’t so much a fun story as it is a thoughtful one, with a literary style and themes. It is a science fiction story on paper, but I would argue that the story might be more about the threatening extinction of the elephant than it is about the de-extinction of the mammoth.
That is not unusual of course, many science fiction stories are meant to reflect on the present by presenting a possible future. But The Tusks of Extinction makes the link rather explicit by incorporating the experience of rangers protecting the last elephants into a story about the mammoths – in a very interesting way.
I don’t want to give away the ‘twist’ that happens early in the story, but The Tusks of Extinction personifies the mammoths in a very literal way. I will have to say that the twist made the start of the novella a little confusing – it does get cleared up, but after the first 30 minutes or so I thought I missed something so I rewound back to the beginning to double check.
Overall, the de-extinction angle of The Tusks of Extinction is a good hook, but the science fiction elements are honestly not that special. The novella is most worth reading for the little melancholy vignettes of the three main characters’ origins. I like how Nayler gives us an very neutral view of each of their lives and allows the reader to decide on their morality for themselves. I am not sure there are good guys or bad guys in The Tusks of Extinction – but I did like asking myself that question.
- Novel written by R.F. Kuang
- Published 16 May 2023
- Standalone
Listened to the audiobook with Helen Laser. Well-read.
I know this is website is supposed to review speculative media. Last week’s Kindred was kind of cheating, though it is arguable that that is portal fantasy. Yellowface, though, is definitely cheating. The only reason I’m uploading it anyway is because it is written by an author that also writes fantasy.
So, if Yellowface is not a fantasy book then what is it?
Yellowface is a book about authorship and plagiarism, about lying to yourself and starting to believe your own lies, about race and perceptions of race. And it is also an absolute page turner. I finished the 9-hour audiobook in less than a weekend because I was actively looking for things to do that I could combine with listening. Sure, I’ll go for another run! Sure, I’ll clean the kitchen!
The book’s hook – one author stealing another’s manuscript – is good, but what makes this book so interesting is that Kuang uses the premise to write a scathing satire on the publishing industry. In particular, she explores tokenism and racial attitudes, the idea that certain stories can only be told by certain people, and the idea that a certain descent can be a advantage or a disadvantage in publishing.
I don’t view myself as particularly well placed to contribute to the debate on race and representation in media, but I can see that there are extremes on either end of the spectrum that might be worth satirising. Kuang certainly takes a position, but she does so with subtlety, provoking thoughts rather than sparking outrage.
Yellowface is told by and focusses on June Hayworth/Juniper Song, who is both the story’s main villain and protagonist. Even though the premise of Yellowface isn’t exactly close to my own experience of life, Kuang does an impressive job of making June a character I could empathise with. So good, in fact, that I found that I had to remind myself a couple of times of who actually was the perpetrator and who was the victim in this story.
The one thing that takes Yellowface from 5 to four-and-a-half stars is that Kuang – like her fictional June Hayworth – seems to struggle just a little with how to wrap up the story. With how good this book is, though, I didn’t mind at all.
Overall, Yellowface is one of the best books I’ve read recently, and I heartily recommend it: it is a literary book without pretence, and if you recommend it to your non-speculative fiction-loving friends, it might serve as a gateway to Kuang’s other work!
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- Movie directed by Francis Lawrence
- Starring Tom Blyth, Rachel Zegler, Hunter Schafer, Jason Schwartzman, Peter Dinklage, Josh Andrés Rivera and Viola Davis
- Released in November, 2023
- Runtime: 157 minutes
I was expecting this movie to impress me a bit more, with how much attention it got. I’ll say this: The Hunger Games is really popular again, and I’m not sure why. I’m all for nostalgia, but the world was different when the original Hunger Games trilogy came out. Aren’t things bad enough in the real world at this point?
That said, I enjoyed this movie – sort of in the way that one can enjoy cheap cookies. There’s a lot missing, but if there’s sugar in it, I’ll bite.
In this case, the “sugar” comes mostly from my familiarity with the world of the Hunger Games. The overall production value is amazing, but that’s only to be expected for a movie of this scope. I keep trying to think of other good qualities of this movie but I genuinely can’t!
I’m pretty sure everything I didn’t like about the movie could have been fixed by fixing the pacing. This movie is TWO AND A HALF HOURS long. At one point I expected the movie to be nearing the end, only to realise I wasn’t even at the halfway point. In a world where everything seems to need a sequel, I’m baffled by the choice to turn this into a single movie instead of splitting it up into two movies. You could have the first movie be about the Hunger Games, and the second movie be about the events after the Hunger Games. This way, both stories could have been developed further. The romance would have worked better, and the events of the second half would have gotten more time to breathe, making the ending feel way less rushed.
The characters didn’t really do very much for me. Lucy Gray felt pretty two-dimensional, and Coriolanus Snow didn’t have much going on other than being an ambitious but overall good guy. Of course, he ends up as the Big Bad of the Hunger Games, but despite this movie being about him and his rise to power, we never really get the sense of him having the potential to be a ruthless dictator until the very end.
There’s quite a bit of singing in this movie, as being a performer is Lucy Gray’s whole thing. While I’m a big fan of musicals, the singing in this movie doesn’t quite work for me. I think you can really only go for the full musical route if singing is such an important part of your character’s arc. Anything less than that is just kinda cringe and won’t work.
I may end up reading the book to see if the pacing issues are purely a result of the adaptation to the big screen. I just don’t get how in a world where they turned The Hobbit into a trilogy, they decided to stuff this much material into one movie!
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Review: Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales – Heather Fawcett
Emily Wilde is a researcher specialising in dryadology, the study of faeries. Having previously managed to escape a faerie realm by tricking their king, she now finds herself facing a new conundrum entirely: finding her place in the realm of the faerie king she loves, and helping him defend his home.
Review: Rose/House – Arkady Martine
Rose/House is an AI, a smart home governed by an artificial intelligence. When its designer died, he left specific instructions that only one particular person be allowed to visit Rose/House, up to 7 days a year. But when the local police precinct receives a mandatory duty of care call from Rose/House informing them of a dead body on the premises, that one person allowed to visit is half the world away. This raises two questions: who is the murderer, and who is the victim?
Review: The Familiar – Leigh Bardugo
Hidden away in the kitchen of her not-quite-rich employer’s house, scullery maid Luzia is hiding a gift that could have her burned at the stake by the Inquisition. When her mistress finds out and starts parading her around to gain favour with the wealthy elite, Luzia suddenly finds herself entangled in a dangerous web of magic, power and love.
Review: The Tusks of Extinction – Ray Nayler
In the near future, the de-extinction of the woolly mammoth has been successful. Groups of the great beasts now roam the tundra. Not only must they learn to survive in the wild without the generational experience of the ancient herds, but they are also threatened by the hunters and tusk poachers that led to the extinction of their cousins, the elephants. The Tusks of Extinction follows a hunter, a poacher and a mammoth and their interconnected story on the tundra.
Review: Yellowface – R.F. Kuang
June Hayworth is a struggling author. Her Asian-American friend Athena Liu, on the other hand, is a critically acclaimed and commercially successful industry darling. One day, Athena dies in a freak incident while hanging out with June at Athena’s apartment. June takes a manuscript on Chinese labourers in the First World War from Athena’s apartment and publishes it under a pseudonym suggesting Asian descent. Over time, the lies she built up around the manuscript start to completely control June’s life.
Review: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes – Lionsgate
Decades before Katniss Everdeen even volunteered as tribute, president Coriolanus Snow is a promising young student selected to mentor one of the tributes during the annual Hunger Games. His mentee is Lucy Gray Baird, a young woman who is as feisty as she is musical. Could Lucy Gray possibly win the games?
