Monday, June 11, 2007

Blog in Exile: Reviews for 6/11

The Contra Costa Times reviews Nebula Awards Showcase 2007, Elizabeth Bear's Carnival, Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora, and Elizabeth Moon's Command Decision.

Blogcritics brings us:
  • a review of David Keck's In the Eye of Heaven
  • a review of Tanya Huff's The Heart of Valor
  • a review of David Anthony Durham's Acacia
  • a review of Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box
  • a review of Lisa Trumbauer's A Practical Guide to Dragons
  • a review of Colleen Gleason's Rises the Night
  • a review of Lisa Shearin's Magic Lost, Trouble Found
  • a review of Christopher Moore's Practical Demonkeeping
  • a review of Tanya Huff's Heart of Valor
  • and a review of Holly Lisle's Night Echoes.
Living the Scientific Life reviews Kim Stanley Robinson's Fifty Degrees Below.

The Star Online (of Malaysia) reviews Robin Hobb's Forest Mage.

The Agony Column features:
  • a review of Charlaine Harris's All Together Dead
  • a review of Gary Gibson's Stealing Light
  • a review of John Marks's Fangland
  • a review of Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible
  • a review of John Scalzi's The Last Colony
  • a review of Richard Gavin's Omens
Fantasy Book Critic reviews Dean Koontz's new (non-supernatural, as far as I can tell) thriller, The Good Guy.

Fantasy Book Critic also reviews Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible.

FantasyBookSpot reviews Karen Hancock's The Shadow Within.

Monsters & Critics reviews Guy Gavriel Kay's Ysabel.

Monsters & Critics also reviews Haruki Murakami's new novel After Dark.

And, also from Monsters & Critics, comes this review of Guy Gavriel Kay's Ysabel.

Neth Space reviews Scott Lynch's Red Seas Under Red Skies.

Pat's Fantasy Hotlist reviews Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman's Dragons of the Dwarven Depths.

From the current update of Scalpel Magazine:
  • a review of Marianne de Pierres's Dark Space
  • a review of Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind
  • a review of Jonathan Green's Pax Brittanica
  • a review of Ian McDonald's Brasyl
SciFi Weekly has new stuff:
  • a review of Scott Mackay's Phytosphere
  • a review of John Scalzi's The Last Colony
  • and a column by Michael Cassutt about recent apocalyptic books and movies.
New at SFReviews.net:
  • a review of William Gibson's new novel Spook Country
  • a review of William Gibson's classic first novel Neuromancer
  • a review of William Gibson's nearly as classic third novel Mona Lisa Overdrive
  • and a review of Thirteen (aka Black Man), which is not by Gibson, but by Richard (K.) Morgan.
SFF World reviews Peter David's The Darkness of the Light and also reviews David Bilsborough's The Wanderer's Tale.

SF Signal presents:
  • a review of Terry Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters
  • a review of Cormac McCarthy's The Road
The June issue of SF Site has:
  • a review of Elizabeth Moon's Command Decision
  • a review of the Lou Anders-edited Fast Forward 1
  • a review of Eliot Fintushel's Breakfast With the Ones You Love
  • a review of Sue Lange's We, Robots
  • a review of Minister Fausts's From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain
  • a review of the Mike Resnick-edited Alien Crimes, a wonderful all-original anthology published by a certain organization best known by its initials
  • a review of John Birmingham's "Axis of Time" trilogy
  • and a review of Worldcon Guest of Honor Speeches edited by Mike Resnick and Joe Siclari.
Stainless Steel Droppings reviews Colleen Gleason's Rises the Night.

Newish at Strange Horizons:
  • a review of Andrew Butcher's The Time of the Reaper
  • a review of The Coyote Road, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling
  • a review of Lucius Shepard's Softspoken
  • and a review of Ken MacLeod's The Execution Channel.
Locus has posted the Graham Sleight review for John Crowley's Endless Things.

Locus also posted the Gary K. Wolfe review for Ken MacLeod's The Execution Channel.

The Washington Post reviews John Crowley's Endless Things.

The San Francisco Chronicle reviews Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Children of Hurin, and Philip K. Dick's Four Novels of the 1960s.

Black Gate reviews the competition, looking at stories in Greatest Uncommon Denominator and Darker Matter.

From SF Revu's gala 10th Anniversary June issue:
  • a review of the Mike Resnick-edited anthology Alien Crimes
  • a review of Kay Kenyon's Bright of the Sky
  • a review of Ian McDonald's Brasyl
  • a review of Scott Lynch's Red Seas Under Red Skies
  • a review of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union
  • a review of Karen Chance's Claimed by Shadow
  • a review of Peter David's The Darkness of the Light
  • a review of Sarah Beth Durst's Into the Wild
  • a review of Jay Lake's Mainspring
  • a review of Greg Bear's Moving Mars
  • a review of Diana Wynne Jones's The Tough Guide to Fantasyland
  • a review of Laurell K. Hamilton's The Harlequin
  • a review of The Alton Gift by Marion Zimmer Bradley and Deborah J. Ross
  • and many more.
And at Book Fetish, you may find:
  • a review of Colleen Gleason's Rises the Night
  • a review of the Mike Resnick-edited Nebula Awards Showcase 2007
  • a review of Why I Let My Hair Grow Out, a romance or YA (or possibly both) novel with fantasy elements by Maryrose Wood
  • and a review of the first in a new paranormal romance series, Immortals: The Calling by Jennifer Ashley
Bookgasm reviews Jason Light's The Taken.

CA Reviews has some new things:
  • a review of Lori Handeland's Midnight Moon
  • a review of Handeland's Crescent Moon, the preceding book in the same series
  • a review of Mario Acevedo's X-Rated Bloodsuckers
  • and a review of Stephanie Rowe's He Loves Me, He Loves Me Hot.
Powell's Book Blog has a Rain Taxi review of Daniel Pinkwater's new YA novel The Neddiad (which I, coincidentally, read just a couple of weeks ago).

Publishers Weekly publishes a lot of reviews, and some recent ones of interest include:
  • the 6/11 fiction reviews, with Matt Ruff's Bad Monkeys, Joe Haldeman's The Accidental Time Machine, Sherrilyn Kenyon's Devil May Cry, Kat Richardson's Poltergeist, Kage Baker's amazing series-ending The Sons of Heaven, and Jennifer Roberson's Deepwood
  • the 6/4 fiction reviews included John Saul's The Devil's Labyrinth, David Wellington's Monster Planet, and Harry Turtledove's Settling Accounts: In at the Death
  • and the web-exclusive reviews from 6/4 include a review of Ellen Klages's debut collection, Portable Childhoods.
OK, sit down and get your thinking cap on, because this one is complicated. Leonie Swann wrote a very interesting murder-mystery called Three Bags Full, in which the sleuth is a flock of sheep. Swann wrote it in German, and Anthea Bell translated the book into English; it was published in the UK to great acclaim, and is just coming out in the US now. Deutsche Welle seems to be a German-language book-review site which occasionally reviews books in English (that is, publishes English-language reviews and reviews books written in the English language, and sometimes both). And Deutsche Welle has now just reviewed the English translation of Three Bags Full. Confused yet?

At Endicott Redux, Midori Snyder reviews Cassandra Clare's first novel, City of Bones.

From that most friendly and forgiving of reviewers, the estimable SF Diplomat, comes:
  • a review of the second issue of Death Ray, dated July 2007
  • a review of the current issue of SFX (#158, also dated July 2007)
  • and a review of Laurell K. Hamilton's The Harlequin, of all unlikely things.
Tobias Buckell quotes from a positive Romantic Times review of his new novel Ragamuffin.

Matthew Cheney reviews Brian Francis Slattery's Spaceman Blues.

David Louis Edelman, continuing his extended sojourn in Middle-earth, reviews J.R.R. Tolkien's posthumous "novel" The Children of Hurin.

The Globe and Mail reviews Robert J. Sawyer's Rollback. [via Sawyer]

Also via Mr. Sawyer is this Romantic Times review for Rollback.

In-Forum suggests a couple of books for summer reading: a historical novel I'm not familiar with and Robert A. Heinlein's posthumously-published first novel For Us the Living.

The Guardian reviews Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union.

Edward Champion, in the LA Times, reviews Blaze, the newly-published posthumous novel by Richard Bachman.

Visions of Paradise is reading the A. Bertram Chandler omnibus John Grimes: Survey Captain in part because of me, and has liked one of the two novels he's read so far. (I have two responses: 1) Ah, the feeling of power! and 2) I think that's actually the second omnibus in the series, not that it matters, since all of the novels stand alone anyway.)

North Carolina's Journal Now lists and reviews a few classic YA fantasy novels, to tide eager readers over until the next "Harry Potter" book arrives.

The Star has a similarly Potter-ized round-up of YA fiction.

Fantasy Book Critic reviews Thirteen by Richard K. Morgan (which is the same book as Black Man by Richard Morgan, for those who may be confused).

OF Blog of the Fallen reviews David Anthony Durham's Acacia.

SciFi Weekly reviews Tobias S. Buckell's Ragamuffin.

John Clute, at SciFi Weekly, reviews The SFWA European Hall of Fame, edited by James and Kathryn Morrow, and finds it veiled to within an inch of its life.

The June issue of Bookslut brings a couple of things of interest:
SkullRing reviews the Stephen Jones-edited The Mammoth Book of Monsters. (Yes, Antick Musings sees even SkullRing. The all-seeing eye of AM is inescapable.)

Karl Schroeder reprints part of Russell Letson's Locus review of Schroeder's new novel Queen of Candescence.

Lou Anders, Grand Exalted Lord of the Pyr, reviews Grey by Jon Armstrong, 9Tail Fox by Jon Courtenay Grimwood, and a couple of movies.

Farah Mendelsohn has a very interesting review of Susan Beth Pfeffer's Life As We Knew It (which was a Andre Norton nominee this year); she's pretty negative towards the book...but in a way that makes me want to read it. (That's a good review.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good lord, that is a lot of reviews.

Two notes: one, Scalpel went down shortly after posting that update, so none of your Scalpel links will work at the moment. And two, the Guardian has a second review of the Chabon. (Though the one you've linked is more interesting, I think.)

Anonymous said...

Hello,
I just noticed your comment about Chabon, and peronally, I thought this was an extremely moving story. I belong to an online book rental club, BookSwim and I received it in the mail a couple days ago- I couldn't put it down. I´d heard a lot of good things about this story. Personally, I don't think the review even did it justice!

Did anyone happen to read it yet?


Dorothy Lang

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