The nitty-gritty: Like all the best fairy tales, this story is both magical and foreboding, a cautionary tale of the pitfalls of gender stereotyping, told as only Seanan McGuire can. Just as she did in Every Heart a Doorway, Seanan McGuire captures a mood of nostalgia and sadness in her follow-up, Down Among the Sticks […]
The nitty-gritty: A fascinating taste of alternate history involving hippos, full of grit, danger, romance and plenty of humor. And teeth, plenty of teeth. Readers have been buzzing about this novella for months, and I was so excited to finally sit down and read it. What fun this was! Sarah Gailey has created something unique: […]
The nitty-gritty: Disturbing, violent, weird and hallucinatory. This story is tough to handle. How can I even begin to describe Waggoner? He looked and sounded exactly like me. He was also a fourteen-year-old schoolboy. When Mum had laid out my uniform on the bed that he and I had started sharing a week before, he […]
The nitty-gritty: Weird and wonderfully terrifying, and written in stunningly beautiful prose, this short alien invasion story—based on scientific fact—will scare the hell out of you with its creeping terror. We have to carry her up to and down from the roof now, the girl from Seattle. In the gray light from the television, her […]
The nitty-gritty: Not my favorite of the books so far, but still a very funny and imaginative installment in the Sin du Jour series. At some point I thought maybe Matt Wallace’s series would start to feel “been there, done that,” but thankfully, he seems to have an unlimited supply of humorous fodder up his sleeves, […]
The nitty-gritty: A short but emotional story about life and death, with ghosts and witches and cats. And rats. We talk about the knives in her kitchen. She agrees to lock them in the closet for the night. Too readily: she’s not a knife girl, not Vicky. I listen to the despair and weariness in […]
The nitty-gritty: A strong concept that should have worked, but for this reader, there just wasn’t enough emotional connection for me to enjoy the story. Alex was a survivor. Alex wanted the fix, and that was the deal, the box of Turkish delight to sweeten the work of professional betrayal: half a century. Standard offer […]
The nitty-gritty: A strange and thought-provoking story about loneliness and what it means to be human. For me, memory is not only at times flawed and corrupted but also overlapped and confused, one personality hiding parts of another, blending too, so that the selves within my head sometimes seem many-headed and monstrous or deformed and […]
The nitty-gritty: Another clever, uproariously funny entry into the Sin du Jour series, with even more non-stop action and supernatural craziness. “Tag, you know ‘half-and-half’ is a pejorative use of an ableist term,” Jett chastises. “Both the minotaur contingent and the centaur contingent find it highly offensive—” “Oh-my-god-Jett-whatever,” Dorsky groans. “They’re a bunch of dudes […]
The nitty-gritty: An original world-building idea that just didn’t get off the ground for me. Perhaps a novel might work better? I was excited to check out a shorter piece of fiction by Fran Wilde, whose Updraft I really enjoyed, and so when Tor.com announced The Jewel and her Lapidary, I jumped at the chance […]