The Blue Fairy's Bookshelf

Ancillary Justice  (Imperial Radch Book 1) Ann Leckie, 2013 Hugo Winner - 2014 Premise: A narrator on a mysterious mission finds a body in the snow, makes a spur-of-the-moment decision. Flashbacks to another life eventually illuminate all. Questions of perception, consciousness, humanity and morality on an interstellar scale. Gender-as-performance. I loved this book, and I especially loved what it did to my mind as I read. The narrator, who goes by Breq, comes from a society that doesn’t use gender the same way other human cultures do. So she refers to every person she interacts with, as ‘she’. By the middle of the book, almost all the characters were occupying this androgynous place in my mind, where their relationships to the plot and to each other were almost uncolored by their physical gender. It’s amazingly cool, and deserved the Hugo win for that alone. Happily, there’s more! The plotting is clever and tense, all the characters are interesting even when we’r...

Dreaming Spies (Mary Russell, Book 13) Laurie R. King, 2015 New Release! I received a digital copy of this book from NetGalley for the purpose of review. Premise: Follows Garment of Shadows. Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes meet acrobats, aristocrats and blackmailers while on route to Japan, and more mysteries await on that island. I had seriously mixed feelings about this book. I’ve had sadly mixed feelings about the series since The God of the Hive , but I enjoyed the two books after it quite a bit. This one… I liked aspects of. I had to read it twice, actually, because it really rubbed me wrong the first time. It’s not badly written, the story is fine, but the connection, the spark… for me it was just missing. There are a bunch of new characters, friends and foes, although the main character is Haruki. When I say that, I’m not being poetic. This is her story, her plot, her character arc, even though it’s told completely from the perspective of Mary Russell. I think t...

Hawkeye: Little Hits (Volume 2), Hawkeye: L.A. Woman (Volume 3) Matt Fraction, David Aja, Annie Wu, Javier Pulido, et. al. Premise: Follows My Life as a Weapon . Clint and Kate continue to kick ass separately and together in between getting their asses kicked. Collects Hawkeye #6-11 and Hawkeye #14, 16, 18, 20 and Annual #1. I know I’m bundling these reviews, but I need to talk about them both separately and together. Little Hits is a collection of single concept issues that are connected to what came before and what came after. Meanwhile L.A. Woman is one story, a story that is happening concurrently with a story that will be collected in the next volume (The missing Issues 12, 13, 15, etc.) I like both, although I liked them quite differently. The first two issues in Little Hits were both issues I bought when they came out. Issue 7 was rushed to print for a very good reason: it was written in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, about the hurricane, and all author’s royal...