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...

Mother Ocean, Daughter Sea Diana Marcellas, 2001 Recent eBook release - I received a digital copy of this book from NetGalley for the purpose of review. Premise: Brierley is a healer by birth, in a land where the people who had magic in the blood were thought to have been all killed long ago. Her calling brings her into politics and danger, and she’s not sure where her destiny will lie, or what she wants it to be. There are things I really liked about this book. I like the way Brierley’s magic works. I love her connections with previous generations of witches, knowing them mostly through secret diaries. I really like her philosophical musings about the place of those with magic, the choices they make to hide themselves. I like the hints about what could have gone so wrong between two peoples long ago. I love love LOVE her relationship with a late-introduced character, Megan. But then there’s a romance and everything is terrible. Some spoilers follow. Sure, it was rela...

Death at Victoria Dock (Phryne Fisher, Book 4) Kerry Greenwood, 1992 Premise: Miss Phryne Fisher has been a magnet for trouble before, but it’s still startling to be shot at while driving down the street. After witnessing a killing at the docks, Phryne is determined to see the killers pay, no matter if it leads her and her household into further danger. No, you’re not seeing things, I didn’t review books two or three. I did read them. I’ve really been enjoying Kerry Greenwood’s work for the past year. It’s great light bus reading. I wanted to mention this one in more depth because while I liked books two and three, this one really brought the things I liked in the first book back to the forefront. In the intervening time since book one, Phryne has settled her new household, and even added to it, taking in two orphaned girls. The double plot of this novel follows both the investigation of the murder of a young anarchist and the disappearance of a well-off young woman. Bo...

Catwoman: Volume 3: Under Pressure Ed Brubaker, Paul Gulacy, Sean Phillips, Diego Olmos, 2014 Premise: Sequel to No Easy Way Down . Selina returns from her road trip to find that the East End of Gotham needs her help more than ever. But she’s standing alone against a tide… Collects Catwoman #25-37. And so Ed Brubaker's run on Catwoman comes to an end, not quite with a bang. The writing is still pretty decent, although the larger plotting feels disjointed and awkward. The art however, is just bad. Paul Gulacy more or less ruined this book for me. It isn't so much that the characters are ugly, although they are. It's that they change drastically depending on the angle and are unrecognizable. If you didn't tell me that was supposed to be Holly and Karon, I would never have known. All of the women are frightening face on, with weirdly grotesque shading. It made it really difficult for me to enjoy the story, especially when the prior volumes had such good art. ...

Tales from High Hallack, Volume 3 Andre Norton, collection published 2014 Recent Release. I received a digital copy of this book from NetGalley for the purpose of review. Premise: A collection of Andre Norton’s short stories. No real uniting theme. I read this book some time ago, but put off writing about it. Partially, honestly, under that old rule: “if you can’t say something nice…” Was it a bad book? No. Not terrible, but neither was it great. Maybe these are the leftovers and volumes one and two are stronger? This is just a set of middling stories. Andre Norton was extremely prolific, so some of her work is bound to be just 'fine'. A few of them were quite good, but nothing that really stayed with me. At this point, I don’t even remember which stories I liked or what they were about. I ate up her short novels as a teenager and have read and enjoyed a few in the past few years, but I guess her short stories don’t really work for me. 2 Stars - An Okay Book...