Michael Barnes

The final book in the 'Her Majesty's Royal Coven' series. Our five witches introduced in the first book, Helena, Leonie, Elle, Niamh and Ciara have since divided (one died FFS, don't worry she got better) but with the prophecy of 'the Sullied Child' and the coming of the end of days in this book chapters come with different perspectives from these witches and others.

The prophecies, the demons, the cracks in the relationships were all leading in one conclusion. I the preceding two books led to satisfyingly conclusions stories of their own whilst contributing to a wider arc.

What we have this time round is an evil-genius level of meticulous planning to bring together threads from the previous books that you wouldn’t have even realised were important. All in all a very satisfying conclusion for our friends and as corny as it sounds the lesson - love has the means to conquer fear.

A Zombie novel similar in style to Colson Whitehead's 'Zone One' and Carrie Ryan's The Forest of Hands and Teeth where as I am more a Mira Grant's Newsflesh zombie reader.

Our protagonist Orpen is a young woman who has grown up in the zombie apocalypse kept safe on an island off Ireland raised by her mother and Maeve. Her mother dies from a bite when Orpen is 12 then years later her other mother Maeve is bitten and she sets off on the mainland. Years into the apocalypse it is a desolate place, ravaged by a frightening and grisly foe, the skrake (Zombies). These demonic creatures infect a human with a poisonous bite, gradually transforming that person into one of their own.

The parallel story of Orpen's up bringing runs alongside chapters with her current situation carrying the slowing turning Maeve searching for a place called Pheonix City. The authors language evocates melancholy longing in a landscape both beautiful and brutal, and in the distinctive voice of Orpen a narrator who is both confident in her abilities and filled with fear and grief.

Orpen's tale continues in Sarah Davis-Goff's 2023 novel 'Silent City' which I shall read as soon as the Glen Waverley Public Library opens it's temporary collection while it is refurbished.

This was the book picked for my book club and if you are looking for a fast paced, well crafted LitRPG that has a bit more depth to it than the average Isekai adjacent genre then I recommend Dungeon Crawler Carl. Please remember it’s to be a 10 volume series first volume self-published in 2020 and when picked up by a publishing house exploded in popularity – even a live-action series is in production so I don’t need to say much more about it that hasn’t already been said. I am looking forward to reading the rest of the series. This book ends a natural conclusion but it does make you want to pick up the next volume immediately.

I will offer the words of Meed Touzani over at book summary

“Conclusion: The Verdict on This Beautiful Train Wreck Dungeon Crawler Carl shouldn’t work. It’s a book where a man kills monsters with his bare feet while his ex-girlfriend’s talking cat negotiates sponsorship deals, and somehow it also manages to say something real about corporate power, performative suffering, and what we’re willing to do to survive. “

All Hail Chaos is the second in the Time of Iron series in which of protagonist Rae dying from cancer finds herself in her sister’s favorite fantasy series. In the body of a villainess who in the original doesn’t live long, so Rae kinda had to change the story, just more changes than she expected.

Rae now betrothed to the dread forever Emperor (who she loved when she read about him, even loved the young man Key who he came from) now desperately wanting to change him to be less dreadful. The strength of this second outing in this meta-narrative series was the attention given to all the other characters were given the opportunity in the spotlight not just Rae and Eric. I especially enjoined the brief, but dramatic appearance of Merel the minstrel towards the end.

My only regret, the final in the trilogy isn't out yet.

There is a thriving genre of stories about female real world characters falling into another world as the hero of their favourite fantasy book or more recently in their favourite video game, there is now a number of those where you end up taking over the body of the major antagonist or villain. I first encountered this in the anime 'My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!' In that story our villainess avoids her doom by being unfailing positive, supportive and with an impressive gardening ability attracting all the characters to fall in love.

In this first in the Time of iron Trilogy our snarky rather than plucky Rae, instead leans into the role as sexy villain seeking only what she needs return to her world by stealing the Flower of Life and Death, which with her infinite knowledge of the story. That is, until she wakes up in the body of Rahela, the evil stepsister to the heroine, who is due to be executed the next day. Together with a motley crew of the most wicked characters, she starts scheming to pull off this deadly heist and maybe, possibly give the villains a chance at a happy ending, if they can survive until the final page.

A strong driver in this anrrative is Rae's growing awareness of the rest of her crew, she has named the vipers, who she initially considered she could use and disregard since they are just figures in the story. Long Live Evil is ridiculously entertaining, campy, and extremely meta, and somehow it just works? I love the narrative device of Rae not remember some of the details of the first book because it didn't get interesting until the Once and Forever Emperor appears.

The other characters are also interesting plays on the fantasy stereotypes with many readers really cheering for Key (the unhinged and slightly sociopathic guard with a dangerously seductive grin) and The Cobra (a rakish spymaster with a heart of gold despite his interestingly traumatic backstory). The second point of view, in the story is given by Marius, was an interesting take on the stoic, vow-restrained bad arse character with a tragic backstory and a merciless heart—yet somehow a hero.

The story involving Rae's cancer in our world is especially heart wrenching when I learned of the authors own struggles with cancer.

The ending left me leaping straight into the next volume All Hail Chaos.

The first novel The Blighted Stars is a fast paced thriller of a space opera with a war between cunning fungus, AI spinning into madness, ecological critique, explosions, banter, and challenging romance. The Fracked Dark is the bridge book in the trilogy and in many this is where the story can struggle but I found this sequel as enthralling as the first.

The tale continues the Canus as metaphor … Capitalism. So I like Alex Tas at Quil to live "dove into The Fractured Dark, commie senses tingling" and the realisation that you can even know about the infection, know it is influencing you decisions and you still fall for it.. Alex again "Extraction, environmental degradation, personal relations, the structure of society and the relations of the people within it are all tainted by this unseen force".

Other reviewers mentioned they found the story mor confusing than the first. I think the parts that could have been the most confusing though, were deftly handled by O’Keefe’s writing ability.

I also like how the author 'reset' the relationship between Naira and Tarquin partly feels like retreading old ground, with similar difficulties in the matter of power, ethics, and responsibility to negotiate but this time its is Tarquin knows more about Naira than she does about him, which reverses the dynamic from the first novel. This relationship is the emotional heart of the story so far.

Looking forward to reading book 3 The Bound Worlds.

I was engrossed by Dolki Min's story of a shapeshifting alien. Such a character is of course going to challenge our binary categorisations of identity and gender. In our introduction to our narrator, whose name we only learn in the final page, cleverly drops information about themselves at the beginning of the story, and lets the reader assign a gender to the creature based on their own biases. This is, of course, a lesson to the reader, as the alien confronts our expectations of gender and our desperate need to gather data and slot someone neatly into a well-defined category.

Throughout the novella we are made aware of how much hostile attention is draw when they fail to successfully imitate a “normal” human, and the way this contributes to body conformity

“They can’t wait to ogle a monster. Without monsters, how would they withstand the unrelenting futility of their days?”

As a cis white able male I am unsure of how clearly this tale speaks to the experience those who society judges as non-conforming but even I can see how arbitrary and performative gender is. The alien labour under the earth's gravity and their old and constant enemy stairs I feel the story also makes pointed observations about ableism.

The translator has mentions she had to develop a different method to highlight the more alienesque thoughts than in the original Korean and her choice in the variable spacing font did a brilliant job conveying the difference.

In a far future where Earth exists but as a barely inhabitable abandoned husk and humanity lives in constructed artificial stations dominated by a corporate alliance known as MERIT (the initials of the surnames of the five constituent families) the reach of humanity is every expanding and yet impoverished all the time, their continued survival pegged to a rare mineral called relkaktite, first found on Venus and now mined everywhere, its presence in the artificial golden pathways that line everyone with added strength, knowledge and skills, the key, so it is said, to humanity’s future progress and success.

The Mercator family patriarch Acaelus is the archetypical controlling corporate tyrant/mafioso tolerating no failure or deviation in his orbit, including his gentle, geologist son Tarquin, whose frequent observation of the nature of this sixth cradle (the term for human sustaining planets) I was intrigued by and wish I knew more geology to know if it was through research or just sounded sciencey.

In this sci-fi world, humans have achieved a longer lifespan by “printing” their neural map into a new body when the old one dies. Reminiscent of Richard K. Morgan's of 'Altered Carbon'.

The book opens with exploding starships and the action from there never lets up. We meet one of our protagonists Naira Sharp who used to be a highly expert body guard called and Exemplar before she began to suspect that the Mercators were causing the planets to collapse.

Through in a mystery about TWO competing fungus, walking dead like missprints of people from these neural maps, Ais and space opera with cyberpunk corporate noir.

Consider two themes of this story

turning a blind eye to the ecological impacts of advancing technology. the danger of allowing a handful of individuals or families to control most wealth.

Can't imagine why this might resonate with readers

I have yet to read a T.Kingfisher novel that I haven't enjoyed, her mixing of the horrific and charming and the her focus on female characters who in other stories or even history have long made her a favourite of mine.

And whilst I initially struggled with A Sorceress Comes to Call I realised it was nothing to do with Kingfisher but it is set in a period of history I personally find a bit blah. I have a similar issue with some of Shirley Jackson's short stories set in mid-century USA, it's not them it's me.

This story, a retelling of Grimm story of Goose Girl, soon entranced me with the tale of fourteen year old Cordelia whose mother is the titular sorceress Evangeline who seeks a position of security through the control of a wealthy man by marriage. She can brutally compel others to do her bidding, often forcing her daughter into complete, docile obedience whenever she does anything that annoys her. Their house has no doors, and Cordelia is allowed little privacy and fewer dreams of her own, frequently left isolated with no company beyond Falada, Evangeline beautiful, but deeply creepy horse/familiar.

The story is told through dual narratives Cordelia’s voice is balanced by that of the sardonic Hester, a crotchety spinster with a bum knee who brings a mature, sensible spirit to the story and serves as a stoic balance to the timid, socially awkward younger girl who has never been allowed to imagine a life of her own. Neither of these women is what anyone might call a traditional fantasy heroine.

Kingfisher’s male characters are also remarkably multifaceted and emotionally vulnerable in ways this genre is often loath to allow.

I was chuffed to determine a possible timeline to the story as the book Cordelia often refers to on how to behave is "the ladies book of etiquette and manual of politeness' was published in 1860 and a one part of the story references the concern that someone will develop 'Lockjaw'. Since a vaccine for Tetanus was first synthesised in 1890 and the inactive tetanus toxoid in 1924. The more effective adsorbed version of the vaccine, was developed in 1938, so can't be earlier than that.

Before reading this I recommend reading The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi first, it covers the story of our protagonist Amina al-Sirafi retired pirate legend dragged out of her quiet life by the promise of a big payday and a sense of old loyalty (there is also some blackmailing at play). Reassembling her old crew: Dalila, the unnerving Mistress of Poisons; Tinbu, her devoted first mate; and Majed, her sharp-eyed navigator. The book ends with Amina having traded one retirement for a new, stranger kind of life, sailing the seas on Peri (sort of gods of the air) business collecting 5 artifacts that are too dangerous for the world and destroying them. Amina seems to have actually found a decent rhythm. She gets to sail, do the occasional dangerous errand for the Peris and still come home to her daughter Marjana. It's not exactly the peaceful retirement she'd imagined, but it's manageable.

Then after Raksh, the spirit of discord she is unhappily magically bound to in marriage, goes and causes a scene with the peri council. The results in her next tasks on an inescapable island with a reality altering spindle possessed by a tyrannical embodied spirit if vengeance

The heart of this story is the friendship between Amina and Dalila. TDalila is someone we've always seen as composed, sharp, slightly terrifying with all cool efficiency and deadly competence. In The Tapestry of Fate, Shannon peels back those layers and shows us who Dalila actually is underneath all of that armor. Her past, her vulnerabilities, her deep and complicated love for Amina.

Another fabulous Mideastern adventure with a final line hooking me in to find out what happens in the next book.

This one certainly falls into the 'unreliable narrator' genre, but unlike most not because they are a psychopath or a narcissist, far from it. In fact Elenor's unrelentingly critical inner voice is one of the challenges of this debut novel. Elenor is acerbic, aloof, unbearably awkward, rude, and a complete lack of social skills and as her character and background is revealed and you begin to see the nightmare she was living and the horror she has lived as a child you only want to see her achieve some measure of happiness.

The book follows Eleanor Oliphant, a thirty-year-old finance clerk in Glasgow whose life is governed by rigid routines: work, weekly phone calls with “Mummy,” and weekends blurred by vodka.

The way the story is revealed, a detail here a memory there of what Elenor is hiding from herself (and therefore, the reader) as it shades in the rest of her world. The discussions of loneliness, trauma, and the life-saving power of ordinary kindness resonates. Eleanor’s journey from isolation to connection is neither easy nor sentimental, which makes her eventual hope feel genuinely earned.

This is Space Odyssey crossed with chosen family where four young friends (late twenties, though if you read them as younger that's fine as the emotional intensity of the characters would be consistent) who whilst investigating the mystery of the disappearance of all the crew on the launch day of the Providence 1 the first dark matter powered spaceship twenty years earlier mission to Proxima Centauri B on a near-future earth stumbling towards environmental and societal collapse.

But at its heart it’s a sapphic romance where the lead character Cleo, who’s long dreamed of becoming an astronaut but maybe not like this thank you very much, falls in love with the resident hologram Billie created by and from the mental engrams of head of the mission, Captain Wilhemina Lucas.

I thought her fellow accidentally crew mates Kaleshia, Abe, and Ros who are a breath of race and gender and sexual orientation more reflective of where I hope our culture will be by 2061, and frankly where our society should be already. I wish we had got more time with these other characters who were interesting and complex but had too little time in the story.

The title comes from a poem 'The Old Astronomer' by Sadie Williams.

"Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night"

Six years after the publication of Hench where we read the story of Anna Tromedlov's journey from office temp learning the cost of superheros and joining with villains at first for work and then because the superhero organisation and in particular the world greatest superhero SuperCollider who injured her and at the end of the book saw her be the engine of his demise.

Well this book I enjoyed even more than Hench (which I enjoyed a lot) but it does get darker as you would expect from Anna's arc. Sia at 'Every Book a Doorway' seems to have enjoyed it as much as me and provides an excellent description/warning "realistic, morally grey, awfully complex complexity continues; it’s Villain’s defining characteristic. Which makes perfect sense, because while Hench didn’t feel morally complicated (in the sense that, yes, Anna and her team were doing awful things, but they were doing them to unmitigatedly awful people!) Villain is a darker read, with Anna progressively taking more and more steps that fewer and fewer readers will be willing to cheer on. This is a natural continuation on from Hench’s ending – which was much darker than the rest of it – so if you flinched at that ending? Then you probably do not want to pick up the sequel".

This book like Hench also end on a dramatic cliffhanger and I hope I don't have to wait six years for the next but even if I do I am sure it will be worth it.

This is Kiersten White‘s second Dracula book, after her remarkable Lucy Undying, I am here for it and hope she continues to explore the mythology of Dracula. Set in closing years of 19th century Europe. Our remarkable protagonist is consulting detective Anneke who has been pursuing the figure at the centre of her famous father Abraham Van Helsing's murder. Anneke does not believe in the supernatural. She is a scientist, a seeker of truth that she can observe and note and study. I appreciated when Anneke reviews who fathers notes with her keen scientific method sensibilities was a crap vampire hunter. In her eyes, her father didn’t discover vampires in his later years, but spiralled into madness, keeping journals full of mythical creatures that do not, and never did, exist. Anneke’s journey, then, parallels her father’s own discovery that the world is darker, stranger, and more frightening than he could have imagined.

Another standout was the cast of characters that surround Anneke. They encourage her, challenge her, and provide skills of their own that Anneke lacks. While David and Maher were great, Inge the determined younger woman that Anneke saw so much of herself in. But it was the romance between Anneke and Diavola who she thinks murdered her father is where much of the strength of the narrative progresses.