I am definitely a Fantasy girlie and not so much a Sci-Fi. It’s not that I didn’t like listening to this book but I had trouble getting into it. Since I started listening to it, I started and finished three other books. It started out pretty good with scenes of the cultural revolution and then it moved to the modern day and I stopped kind of paying attention. I noticed that points in the book when characters started talking about different scientific theories, I started to space out and then I had to go back because I had no idea what was going on. I think when I finally started to get into it was more than halfway through when Wang was finally starting to get understand how to the play the game. I’m not sure I will read or listen to the other books but I want to watch the TV show. I’m not sure I’ll be rushing to read another sci-fi book anytime soon either.
Final book in the series. I am not ready for this series to be over. That’s probably why I have held off reading it even though I bought it when it first came out 2 months ago.
Dragons, but set it in the time of the Napoleonic wars, this was so fun. So, this is the beginning of a series and follows Captain Will Laurence and Temeraire as they prepare to defend England from invading French forces. Temeraire is born in the first part of the book and Laurence is a naval captain and not from England’s air defense, so we’re introduced to the world of fighting with dragons as they are. Temeraire is born from an egg that was captured from a French vessel with very little documentation, so he doesn’t even know what kind of dragon he is. So many different types are explored and explained as part of this search (we also get to meet them when Temeraire and Laurence are training and deployed.)
Temeraire is the best. My friend who recommended this book to me said that he has baby boy energy, and she was right. He’s without ego, curious, hardworking, and caring. I only want what is best for him and I love when that happens with a character. Because we learn about the dragon world as he does, I got caught up in his interest in his kind and the world. When he was angry at something, I was angry at something. When he did well, I was proud of him. This first installment ended with an answer to a question and some implied future danger, so I look forward to reading the next one. It was a lovely read.
So, if you like historical fiction with elements of fantasy, dragons, characters with baby boy energy, or any and all of the above, I really recommend this. It was a fun and touching adventure!
I do love it when the sequel is just as much fun as it’s predecessor. Evie is really in her power. The shocks of the ending of the last book really has made Evie more of sure of who she is. She really is leaning into her evil side. Which could be good or bad depending on who you asks. Evie and the Villain are in a race with the King to fulfill the prophecy. To do that they must find Evie’s mother. For the Villain’s part, he is all for revenge while keeping his feelings for Evie in check. Not so easy. They ups and downs and humor really make this series. The supporting cast is still amazing. We get to know a little bit more about Becky and a new character point of view and really opens up the world so much more. I had so much fun reading the first two books. I can’t wait to read the next one.
Vampires set in New Orleans in the 1870s. This should be fun. A friend from book club mailed this to me well over a year ago. I should definitely have already read it, but here we are.
This post contains spoilers for the entire Three-Body Problem series by Cixin Liu: The Three Body-Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End. So, tl;dr, if you like taking a long, dark look into the abyss and/or the human soul plus there are space ships, have at this series. If you like rocket ships and clear heroes and villains, and good triumphing over evil, this isn’t your series.
This book starts, of all places, at the Fall of Constantinople. It tells us the story of a prostitute who is able to assassinate even the most heavily guarded people. The end of her story is tragic, of course, but it serves as a fitting preamble to the rest of the book. The prostitute eventually fails because of a passing 4-D fragment in the solar system. We come back to the idea of multiple dimensions and moving between dimensions many times in this book.
So, like with the Dark Forest where we started back in the Crisis Era with the Wall Facer project, we do same with this book. While the Dark Forest followed Luo Ji as he figured out cosmic sociology and how to destroy other star systems, this book mostly follows Cheng Xin, a crisis-era scientist. She is just a regular person who happens to be a physicist when the Trisolaran plot is discovered. She is recruited by Planetary Intelligence. She puts forward an idea in a meeting that seems far-fetched. One way for us to get intelligence about the Trisolarans is to imbed a human in the Trisolaran fleet. This is exactly what her boss, Thomas Wade formerly of the CIA, wants. That’s not her crazy idea, though. Her crazy idea is to use all the nuclear bombs that we have lying around in precisely timed explosions to push a probe up to 1% of lightspeed. She is about to be laughed out of the room by the other scientists when Wade decides they should go for it. Onward, no matter the cost, as Wade likes to say. This becomes the staircase project and it ends up having profound effects on the fate of the whole solar system.
One of Cheng Xin’s friends from school, Yun Tianmeng has always had a bit of a crush on her and is dying of cancer. He unexpectedly receives a big wad of cash and, since he’s dying, he decides to spend it on an extravagant gift for Cheng Xin. He buys her a star, but he makes sure that she isn’t told who bought it for her. Then, he decides to end his own life. Before he can do that, though, Cheng Xin reappears and persuades him to stay alive long enough to become the spy they send to the Trisolarans.
Then we jump forward era to era to era, meeting characters we’ve met before and we follow a dance the Cheng Xin and Yun Tianmeng have with each other across literal centuries. Because of his gift of the star, Cheng Xin is put into a position again where she has tremendous power over the fate of humanity. This could go better, for her and for humanity. Because of decisions she makes, she is given two more chances to massively affect the fate of humanity. We meet Thomas Wade again as he tries to position himself to be a shot-caller. We meet Luo Ji again. There’s a complexity here that is interesting, and even though I said spoilers, I don’t want to be to spoiler-y. Thomas Wade comes off as a selfish-arrogant asshat, but for the whole of humanity, there is a definite argument to be made that he should be a shot-caller. Luo Ji seems pretty sympathetic to Cheng Xin and how love seems to be the principle that drives her, but he can also be a devastatingly effective critic. This book, like the ones before it, revisits over and over again the themes of humanity and love. What does it mean to be human? What will we do for those we love? What will we do to protect those we love? These are, as it turns out, not always fun and uplifting questions. Cheng Xin, Luo Ji, Yun Tianmeng, and the other characters in the book are repeatedly put into positions where there are no good choices and there is no way to stop the suffering. You just maybe get a little bit of say in the kind of suffering.
Another theme that comes up is arrogance. And how choices made in arrogance can way more destructive than choices made from ignorance or weakness. When we assume we’ve learned all we can learn from something, we might miss a detail that could save our lives. And, if you’re like me, you might end up yelling at an audiobook in your kitchen while you make dinner because someone decides, “We don’t know what that is. It’s probably unimportant.” But it is important. I’m still internally screaming.
These books were good, but they were dark. Like, I need some feel-good sci-fi after this. But I can’t wait for Beth to finish the series so we can talk about it. And I love a book that sticks with you. So, if you’re okay with dark, super-long delves into the heart of humanity on a very long timescale, then I recommend these. If you’re looking for a fun little jaunt into space, give this a pass.
I don’t often DNF a book. If I pick something up and make it past the first few pages, I’m usually in it for the long haul. I used to try to finish everything I picked up, but I abandoned that policy a while back. I do a lot of reading for work, so if I’m not enjoying the stuff I read outside of work, I don’t make myself finish it.
Well, it would have been a real slog to finish Barbarian Alien by Ruby Dixon. the tl;dr on this is that it was a lot of the same conversation over and over again in which a human woman clearly states what she wants and an alien man disregards it and is surprised when she doesn’t ‘behave’. 0/10, not even for the spicy bits. This one is not for me. Everything from here has spoilers for both Barbarian Alien and its predecessor Ice Planet Barbarians.
These books are notorious on booktok and in romance circles. They have some pretty massive consent issues and there is sexual assault in them (if no longer on the page, it is certainly implied). In the first book, the heroine Georgie wakes up in a spaceship following an abduction. She and the other women have been taken from their homes and are going god knows where. They are the spares, and they know this because they aren’t in special hibernation tanks. Their spaceship crashes on an inhospitable frozen planet and after rebelling against their captors, they have to find food or help or both. Georgie is up for the task. On the planet, she meets Vektal an alien who is big and strong and immediately in love with her. All the aliens in Vektal’s tribe have a parasite,a khui, that helps them survive on the frozen planet. The khui also tells them who their perfect mate is. Isn’t that sweet? It’s like imprinting from Twilight only instead of it being something magical, it is a parasite! Anyway, the first book was fine because Georgie was pretty awesome, we get introduced to some of the ecosystems and wildlife on the planet and, despite how shitty it was she had been kidnapped and then left on a frozen world with a poisonous atmosphere, Vektal was pretty good about boundaries and she got to make her own choices. All problems aside, it was fluffy alien romance with some spice in it. It certainly isn’t the first time a ‘perfect pairing’ or ‘soulmate’ or something similar has been used as a conceit (see the Twilight reference above. Or, The Art of Seducing a Naked Werewolf or this nightmare of a book Dark Guardian.)
Barbarian Alien follows a different woman who was kidnapped, Liz. It starts where the first book ends, with the women being rescued by the aliens. They are then taken on a hunt so that they, too, can get parasites and survive on the planet. I might be misremembering this from the end of the first book, because it has been a while since I picked it up, but I thought it had been decided that the women got to choose whether or not they were going to take the parasite or accept a quick death on the ice planet. Well, Liz, who is also pretty awesome, tries to back out of getting a parasite but Raahosh, an alien whose parasite has already let him know she’s his lady, can’t bear the thought of her dying without one, so he forces it on her. Then, because he knows he’s in the wrong! He kidnaps her away to a secret cave so she can’t tell people what he’s done. He reasons that once she’s pregnant, they’ll be sufficiently far enough along in the mating process that no one would dare try to separate them.
So, Liz is a bow hunter, but she’s super precious to Raahosh and she can’t possibly hunt, she might get hurt! So, he keeps her confined in his cave. And she keeps refusing his advances because of course she would. She also says, repeatedly, I don’t care what the parasite says, I get a choice. And I don’t choose this! But Vektal told the alien dudes that they had to respect the human mating rituals and this is all part of the fun human mating ritual, right?
So, our leading lady has been kidnapped by aliens, crash landed on a different alien planet, had a parasite forced on her because *soul mates* or whatever, has been kidnapped again and separated from all the other humans, and for reasons Raahosh speaks English, but he doesn’t tell her that, just listens to her talking to herself and wonders at how chatty she is. I mean, he doesn’t really listen or engage with what she says and when she finds out he speaks English his statements can be pretty much boiled down to, “We’re mated, why are you fighting the inevitable?”
Because she said no. She doesn’t want this. This book is not for me. But! silver lining! That means the third book is also not for me, so I can unhaul it! This annoys me, however, because my mom bought me these books because I asked for them. They’re in perfect condition. Ugh. That makes me sad.
So, those two books are headed to the unhaul pile. And I need a palette cleanser.
This is not the feel-good sci-fi I was looking for. But it was at the top of the TBR pile. Look at me! Reading books out of a literal TBR pile! I’m so proud.
I know I gushed about the previous book in this series, but I have come to gush about this one, too. Y’all, this was so cute!
This book begins more or less at the climax of The Queer Principles of Kitt Webb. So, a few spoilers ahead. The tl;dr is that this is a little spicy with light sub-dom vibes, with good character development, humor, and hijinks. If you’re looking for something light and fun with a happy ending, this is for you.
This book starts with the answers to some questions. First, Where was Rob during the robbery? And where did Marian go when she disappeared at the end of Kitt Webb? We begin with Marian, post-robbery, taking the duke home and then skedaddling. She doesn’t know if the duke will live, so she also doesn’t know if she’ll be blamed for her part in any of the crimes. So, she does the sensible thing. She collects her blackmailer from where she left him and runs off with him to the countryside to her father’s. Once they arrive, she finds her father’s dementia has worsened and that his landlord is an absolute scoundrel and a thief. Having just righted one wrong with the duke, she obviously can’t stand by and let Sir John Fanshawe get away with his thieving ways. For one, it is not economical. They agreed on a price and he has gone back on his agreement making the house unaffordable. For another, he has stolen are manuscripts she translated. How dare he raise the rent and also take her work and the original Greek writings on vellum. From the title, we might expect that this is the main part of the plot, but it’s really just a side piece. A majority of the novel is two prickly people not sure that they want companionship, marriage, family, or regular work, falling in love and realizing that they want each other and that they can figure out the rest. I don’t know, maybe it is everything being topsy turvy in the world, but it was really lovely finishing up this series about found family.
The spiciness level is a two. Yes, there is sex and yes it’s great! It really fits the characters and isn’t your run-of-the-mill hetero pound fest. It’s thoughtful and a little sub-dom. It made the book a nice follow up to Kitt Webb.
So, if you’re looking for found family, angry women serving justice, light sub-dom vibes, and good humor, I cannot recognize this book enough.
2 Women, So Many Books 