The Blue Fairy's Bookshelf

The City We Became N. K. Jemisin, 2020 Premise: A city is more than a collection of buildings and streets. It's more than its people and cars. When a city grows large enough, sometimes it... wakes up. Would this book make sense to someone who never lived in NYC?  I'm glad that I'll never know. Reading this book reminded me of everything I loved about my time in the city that never sleeps.  That is, when it wasn't giving me almost-literal nightmares about everything I hate about modern-day America. The City We Became takes place in an explicitly Lovecraft-adjacent world where when a city is large enough it incarnates into a person who is literally the spirit of the city. But this is a process, and there are beings from outside this dimension who want to destroy and consume the cities before they fully wake.  Because New York is New York, it isn't one person, but multiple - one for each borough. They are all fascinating complex characters who exemplify aspects of the...

Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, Book 2) Tamsyn Muir, 2020 Premise: Sequel to Gideon the Ninth . Harrow has survived the trials of Cannan House. Sort of. Now she must train to fight a monster that can kill the God-Emperor of the Nine Houses... unless nothing is as it seems. Man, this book is awesome, but it asks a lot of you.  The first time I read it, it was like a fantastic psychological horror movie. The book switches back and forth between the present-day Harrow and flashbacks. Only the flashbacks don't match what happened in the previous book. You, the reader, know that something is wrong. Something is askew. Is it in Harrow's mind? What does this mean? What actually happened then? What is happening now? The answers are wilder and weirder than I initially could have imagined. It's fantastic. The third time I read this book, it was as an audiobook, which made me slow down and really appreciate all the details and character beats. The emotional payoffs in this one are...

The Graveyard Book Neil Gaiman, 2008 Hugo Winner - 2009 Honestly, I can't blame all of my review hiatus on Red, White, and Royal Blue . That book I liked so much I found it hard to review. This book I didn't like enough.  And here's the thing - I know it's personal. More a particular quirk of timing than most of my reasons for liking this book or that book. In the first few pages of The Graveyard Book, a family is murdered and a toddler is stalked by a killer through the streets of a small town. This is presented in a dark way, but it's all just the setup. It's all the "once upon a time" for the story of a boy adopted and raised by the ghosts of a graveyard and a series of intriguing (if never truly amazing) linked stories about the adventures he has. And I couldn't handle it. I couldn't handle the fact that a child (the main character's sister, who is barely spoken of for the rest of the book) and her parents were brutally killed in the fi...

A Study in Emerald (graphic novel adaptation) Original story by Neil Gaiman, adaptation by Rafael Albuquerque, Rafael Scavone, Dave Stewart, et. al., 2018 Premise: A certain notable detective and his partner try to solve a crime in a very different version of Victorian London. When I heard there was to be a graphic novel adaptation of "A Study in Emerald," I was immediately intrigued. Intrigued, and a little hesitant. It's a clever mashup story, combining Sherlock Holmes with Lovecraftian elder gods. I've read the original many times. The story is already a visual feast - there's a fantastic version laid out like a period broadsheet , complete with advertisements full of easter eggs. But the conceit of the story also hinges on what is not seen by the reader, so I was curious how well the art would balance the need to illustrate the story with the desire to maintain a certain ambiguity. Overall, I think it does very well. It helps that Rafael Albuque...

Into the Drowning Deep Mira Grant (aka Seanan McGuire), 2017 Premise: A ship went out, intending to film a shlocky “documentary” about mermaids. No one was seen again. The footage was discredited. Seven years later, another expedition is launching. This book has all the complex and diverse characters, gruesome horror, and scientific plausibility that I expect from this author. It’s a horror movie on the page: introducing characters and steadily building foreshadowing, then shifting into high gear for the lengthy sequence of action scenes that lead to the climax. Said climax is perhaps a tad anticlimactic, but still great. The cast is a complex ensemble led by Victoria, an underwater sound researcher looking for answers about her sister’s death on the earlier ship, and Olivia, a reporter for the entertainment network sponsoring the voyage. These two characters each have their trauma and their angst, but the way they find their way to hold onto each other in the face of all...

Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children) Seanan McGuire, 2017 Premise: Prequel to Every Heart a Doorway . Jacqueline and Jillian had the kind of parents who shouldn't have children, so when they stumble into a place that offers them mentorship and protection, they take it...for better or worse. It's been just long enough since I read Every Heart a Doorway that I didn't fully remember the roles that Jack and Jill played in that story. I'm not sure whether it's better to read this with the knowledge of their future fates or without it. I actually think the way I accidentally did it might be best, where I slowly remembered the original over the course of reading the prequel. Either way, this is a novella about children whose parents try to force them into roles that don't fit, and how their relationships with themselves and others are screwed up because of it. Sure, their temperaments aren't helped by spending years of their childhoods in...

Jane, Unlimited Kristin Cashore, 2017 Premise: Jane is grieving the loss of her Aunt Magnolia, the woman who raised her. She dropped out of college and doesn't know what to do with her life. Maybe that's why she accepts when an acquaintance invites her to stay at her family's creepy mansion. But eventually she'll have to make a choice. Wow. This was a very unique book, and very well-written, and intriguing. I didn't love all of it, but I did find it extraordinary and striking. I have to talk about the plot in order to explain. The first part of the book is lovely. It's dreamlike. Jane stumbles around the big strange house observing the strange behavior of its various inhabitants. There is clearly something going on. People sneaking around in the dead of night, oblique references and whispers in the walls, none of the family members or friends seem to like each other that much, a dog that won't leave her alone but doesn't like anyone else. ...

Krampusnacht: Twelve Nights of Krampus Edited by Kate Wolford, 2014 Premise: Twelve short stories about Krampus. Variously known as the Christmas demon, the punisher of naughty children, and the star of several recent horror movies, Krampus has been having a bit of a moment recently. Anthologies are generally hit and miss, and in attempting to please many tastes, this one definitely had some misses for me. Read the full review on Mainlining Christmas

Bird Box Josh Malerman, 2014 Premise: Malorie is finally bringing the children to what she hopes is safety. The only problem is, she can't look. I remember there being a good amount of buzz for this book early on, and then some backlash. So I know I'm not saying anything new when I say this book was rather disappointing. The idea is intriguing. Something mysterious is causing people to go mad, and you can only protect yourself by not looking, so people are barricading themselves in buildings and learning to navigate by sound. The book is intercut between Malorie's journey trying to bring two young children to possible safety, with all of them blindfolded, and how she came to be alone in a house with two children. The story is interesting and tense, but not especially scary until near the end. Of course this leads to a situation in which humans are worse to each other than the monsters are and some sections that were unnecessarily gross in my opinion. I unders...

Sunshine Robin McKinley, 2003 Premise: Rae is a baker with a career, a boyfriend, and a community. She knows not to go through the bad part of town alone. The lake near where her grandmother had lived should have been safe. There shouldn't have been vampires anywhere near there. This is one of the best damn vampire books I've ever read. It takes place in a fascinating world that is revealed only slowly and naturally. It's in first person, and there is almost zero info-dumping. Very little is revealed until it comes up directly, including important facts about the world and the characters' history. I loved the language in this book. Slang and conversation casually reflects the presence of everyday magic and myth. The world, as alluded to above, is a complex one. Vampires are the most dangerous paranormal critter, but not the only one. It's unclear how long they've been openly coexisting with humanity, only that there was a major conflict within livi...

The Girl with All the Gifts M. R. Carey, 2014 Premise: Melanie goes to class with a group of other kids. She likes their teachers, one in particular. She learns a lot in class, but she doesn't learn why she and her classmates live in cells on the base, or why no one is allowed to touch them, or why they only eat once a week... This book suffered a little for me from expectations that were one hundred percent not the book's fault. I had heard a lot of hype about this book, but on reflection, I only knew two things about it - it's about a little girl who is a zombie, but she doesn't know it, and it was really popular. I extrapolated from there that it would be a psychological book, full of unreliable narration, twists, and theories. I thought it would be entirely or mostly from her perspective, that the adults around the character might not know what was going on, that there would be a slow-burn reveal, and maybe she was the beginning of an outbreak. It...

Final Girls Seanan McGuire, writing as Mira Grant, 2017 Premise: A new technology for completely immersive VR promises extremely effective therapy by causing the patient to feel as though they lived through a specific traumatic experience. A reporter is determined to determine whether it's a hoax. I've liked all of McGuire's novellas so far, and this didn't break the streak. It's interesting that this was released under her horror pen name; it does fit that paradigm. The world created by the VR technology is less intriguing than the magic and ghosts in Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day  and a lot less inventive than the world of Every Heart a Doorway  (which just won a Hugo!), but it's enjoyable nonetheless. This one is a tense, short thriller in which, after everything predictably goes wrong, the main characters are trapped in an unreal dream that is trying to really kill them. It's more compelling than most spins on this premise, partially because it ...

Feed (Newsflesh Book 1) Mira Grant (aka Seanan McGuire), 2010 Challenge Book! Book Riot Read Harder Challenge 2016 - Read a horror book Premise: Georgia, Shaun, and Buffy are too young to remember a world without zombies. Their job: to go out and report on it. This has been the summer of Seanan McGuire for me, as I try a little bit of everything. Here writing as Mira Grant, she’s presenting a sci-fi horror story in the aftermath of a zombie outbreak. Society changed forever, but there are still politics and conspiracies and news. And there are bloggers. The three main characters: Georgia, the narrator, her brother Shaun, and their friend Buffy are a blogging team that goes into dangerous territory and reports on what they find. They are part of a community providing both news and entertainment to a population mostly hiding in fortified homes and enclaves. The story follows them as they get a huge opportunity: follow a presidential hopeful around. They jump at the chan...

Every Heart a Doorway Seanan McGuire, 2016 Premise: Nancy found the place she belonged. The place she loved more than anything. But she isn’t there anymore, and her parents have sent her to this school, because they don’t believe her when she tells them where she’s been. This fantasy-horror novella is lovely, both heartbreaking and uplifting. The story is about outsiders and belonging, about ideas of good and bad, about compassion and fanaticism. All in under 200 pages. Eleanor West runs a school for children who have returned from journeying in other realms. These latter-day kin to Alice and Dorothy don’t want to adjust to “real” life, they want to go back to the fairylands and underworlds. Each character is intriguing; they each have a reason they went traveling and were changed by their experiences. The ideas and abilities that followed them back to Earth are only part of what makes them different. Nancy can go still as a statue and subsist on little food due to her tra...

Paper Girls Brian K. Vaughan, Cliff Chiang, et.al., 2016 Premise: Erin delivers the paper in the early morning, but the morning after Halloween isn’t a good time to be out on the streets. There’s teenagers causing mischief, cops looking for teens to bust, and… monsters from another time? Four paper girls team up in this comic that’s part horror, part adventure, and totally 80s. Collects Paper Girls #1-5 I was really intrigued by an excerpt from this book, and of course I’ve enjoyed Vaughan’s work before, so I snapped this up in trade. I really like how firmly set in its time period it is. The fashions, the (offensive) language, the technology, everything is right. The plot is surreal, mysterious, and potentially really screwed up - so basically what I expected. The dialogue of some of the antagonists is very cleverly written. Erin, KJ, Tiffany, and Mackenzie are an appropriately diverse group for a piece written today and loosely inspired by the boys-adventure movies of t...

World War Z Max Brooks, 2006 (audio edition 2007) Challenge Book! Book Riot Read Harder Challenge 2016 - Listen to an audiobook that has won an Audie Award Premise: After the end of the Zombie War, journalist Max Brooks travels around the world to collect the stories of survivors, to keep alive the memory of an unprecedented struggle. Look, I finished an audiobook! It helps that a) I have a new commute that takes a long time, and b) this book is basically ideal to record as an audiobook. The structure of multiple narrators and interviews is perfect for this full-cast format. I can also understand both why Hollywood snapped it up for a movie and why the adaptation was reportedly terrible. This would be a fantastic fictional documentary, or a series of short films. It would not work as a single-character adventure vehicle. I really enjoyed listening to this book, although I went back and forth on how realistic I felt it was. The immediacy and detail of each account was n...

Those Who Hunt the Night Barbara Hambly, 1988 Premise: James Asher is a professor. He knows a little bit about a lot of things and a lot about linguistics and anthropology. He is also a retired player of the Great Game. This is why, when Simon Ysidro demands his help, Asher’s first response is to notice his unique accent. His second is notice that Ysidro isn’t breathing. Ysidro needs Asher to help him find out who is killing the vampires of London. Asher just needs to not get killed. A little fun with vampires for Halloween. I feel like it would be a little unusual today to see a novel that deals so well with the potential ambiguity of vampires. Even if they once were human, and retain some human qualities, that just makes them, at best, as untrustworthy as humans. Even when he becomes engrossed in the problem for its own sake, Asher never forgets that Ysidro might turn on him, or stops thinking about options should he need to turn on them. These are dangerous predators....

Unwept (The Nightbirds, #1) Tracy Hickman and Laura Hickman, 2014 New Release! I received a digital copy of this book from NetGalley for the purpose of review. Premise: Ellis wakes up on a train after a terrifying dream. She is sitting across from a woman with a baby, who tells her that she’s been sick, and she is going to stay with her cousin. She has no memory, only a sense that something is terribly wrong. This is one of those books where the discovery is half the joy. You, the reader, will figure out things faster than Ellis, who doesn’t have the ability to notice references and foreshadowing. I went back and forth while reading the book over which of a few possible reveals I thought it would be, and which I wanted. While I’m not 100% on board with the final reveal, I think the world could go interesting places from here. The setting, a tiny New England town, is perfectly creepy, and the build slow without losing tension. It helps that the book is rather short. ...

Locke & Key Volume 6: Alpha & Omega Joe Hill, Gabriel Rodriguez, 2014 (issues originally 2013) New Release: I received a digital galley of this book from Netgalley for the purpose of review. Premise: Sequel to Clockworks . The final chapter. Everything is in place. The Omega Key has been found. Evil forces are on the move in Keyhouse, and Tyler and Kinsey Locke are going to have to be very careful and very lucky to live through the end of the school year… Ack. What is left to say about Locke & Key? I wasn’t sure about this series at first, but it really grew on me over time. The horror grows slowly and steadily, the characters and the backstory are built piece by piece. This volume opens with a fully natural-feeling recap, just so you know where everyone is, and then launches full-tilt into the climax. Everything that happens was set up. It all makes sense (for the most part anyway) with each character’s established motivations, but all the plot twists and tur...

NOS4A2 Joe Hill, 2013 Crossposted to Mainlining Christmas Premise: Victoria “Vic” McQueen has a special talent: she can use her bike and a bridge that isn’t there to find lost things. Unfortunately, Charlie Manx has a talent too. Vic is the only child to escape from Manx’s one-way trip to Christmasland, but it takes more than luck to break an evil man, and every power comes with a price. I thought this book was good, but I’m not sure I actually enjoyed reading it. The tone wasn’t quite my cup of tea, and it needed to be more tightly written. Some positives: Vic herself is a great protagonist. She’s broken and flawed in completely believable and sympathetic ways. She’s brave when she has to be, even if she has to talk herself into it. The talents are interesting. Broadly and only vaguely defined, they hint at much more out of sight. The writing is quite good: the descriptions of the supernatural and creepy as well as the mundane and everyday were evocative and often poign...