Book reviews
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Belladonna U by Tansy Rayner Roberts
Review of series Belladonna U by Tansy Rayner Roberts including Unreal Alchemy, Holiday Brew and Practical Witching. Belladonna U is a series about a group of university students studying magic at an Australian magical university while living in a shared house and making geeky music and playing role-playing games. It’s wonderfully geeky, whimsical and fun.…
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Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
Review of Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer. Too Like the Lightning is a science fiction book that plays with the idea that utopias are always a utopia for who? It is a deeply philosophical book that borrows much from 18th century philosophy. I have read Too Like the Lightning twice and I don’t…
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Tempests and Slaughter by Tamora Pierce
Review of Tempests and Slaughter by Tamora Pierce. Tempests and Slaughter is the first book in the The Numair Chronicles duology set in Pierce’s Tortall universe. Numair is a beloved character from the Wild Magic series who has gotten his own prequel series as a spinoff.
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A Deadly Education & Scholomance by Naomi Novik
Review of A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik and the rest of the Scholomance trilogy, including The Last Graduate and The Golden Enclave. Why would you send your children to a magic school where multiple students die every single year? Where as many as a fourth of the students die? That’s the question that sparked…
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Milkweed Triptych by Ian Tregillis
Review of the Milkweed Triptych series by Ian Tregillis including Bitter Seeds, The Coldest War and Necessary Evil. “It’s 1939. The Nazis have supermen, the British have demons, and one perfectly normal man gets caught in between”
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Cookie Cutter Superhero by Tansy Rayner Roberts
Review of series Cookie Cutter Superhero by Tansy Rayner Roberts. A machine is decided who will be the superheroes in each country on Earth via lottery rotating the heroes out on a set schedule. Each story deals with different aspects of this idea.
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The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
Mary Robinette Kowal is rapidly becoming a must buy author, so when I head that The Calculating Stars was coming out I preordered it right away! The idea of mixing retro futurism and and the same optimism and science approach that you found in The Martian was really intriguing to me and I of course…
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The Planetfall series by Emma Newman
When I picked up The Planetfall series I was hesitant, because Emma Newman makes me cry. Or to be more fair, her writing tends to make me cry, because I get so invested in her characters that I get ALL THE FELLS. The crying to go bad with her Split World series, that I had…
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The Lotus Palace by Jeannie Lin
The Lotus Palace is set in a historical China, which is unusual for historical romance. When you read as much historical romance as I do, you often end up reading things mostly set in Victorian or regency England. I asked around for recommendations set from other settings and Jeannie Lin’s work came up. Historical China…
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All Systems Red by Martha Wells
Murderbot has become one of my all time favourite characters and by far my favorite artificial intelligence. When I first read All Systems Red by Martha Wells I didn’t read many novellas, yet. But this book kicked up a whole novella reading spree for me. Today it is one of my favourite format of books,…