#sffbookclub

See tagged statuses in the local Outside of a Dog community

Saints of Storm and Sorrow (2024, Titan Books Limited) 4 stars

In this an enthralling Filipino-inspired epic fantasy, a nun concealing a goddess-given gift is unwillingly …

Saints of Storm and Sorrow

4 stars

I don’t hate you. I hate that I don’t have better answers to all that’s wrong in my city. The only choices shouldn’t be bloody vengeance or doing nothing. I hate that the Codicíans’ ‘gift’ of empire is generations of trauma.

Overall, I think I'm a bit mixed on this book. I was most intrigued in the messy middle, where all of the characters are caught between competing and interesting tensions. It felt impossible for any character to do right by another while being caught in such structural traps. The focus of the book also (surprisingly?) felt firmly on these relationships between people who care about each other, and the messed up ways that colonialism warps their love.

I also quite enjoyed a character whose magic is tied to her emotions, and so she quite literally has to repress her anger and sadness in order to survive and hide.

It's …

Saints of Storm and Sorrow (2024, Titan Books Limited) 4 stars

In this an enthralling Filipino-inspired epic fantasy, a nun concealing a goddess-given gift is unwillingly …

Saints of Storm and Sorrow

4 stars

Content warning spoilers

A few chapters further in and I'm enjoying this a lot more. I think it front-loaded a lot of zoomed-out worldbuilding, which is not the most interesting part of the book. Now it's much more a story of a few characters in that context, and the magic aspect is being developed in a way that adds more than I thought it would at first. #SFFBookClub

Saints of Storm and Sorrow (2024, Titan Books Limited) 4 stars

In this an enthralling Filipino-inspired epic fantasy, a nun concealing a goddess-given gift is unwillingly …

#SFFBookClub July.

One chapter in I'm a bit frustrated with how transparently it's a skin on the colonised Philippines--if it stays this literal I'll end up wishing I were reading a straight historical novel instead of fantasy--but there are some interesting ideas here that I'm hoping the author will start to play more freely with.

In Universes (2024, Cornerstone Publishing) 5 stars

For fans of Emily St. John Mandel and Kelly Link, a profoundly imaginative debut novel …

A fascinating fractal

5 stars

This is the book version of the theme-and-variations composition structure used in classical music and sometimes techno. The first chapter is a lovely and sad story in its own right; it almost feels like what Chekhov might have come up with if he'd been writing with today's gender and sexuality sensibility. Each thereafter takes mostly the same set of characters but with progressively larger twists - at first it's very much "what if protagonist had made a different choice at this key moment?", but it gradually shades over into wilder sci-fi speculations.

Strangely, it was the wilder variations that really made the book click for me. Before things got really weird I was starting to question how the book was going to sustain interest for 11 chapters, but North answered that question very effectively. I don't think it would have worked to go directly to those, the smaller variations feel …

The Ministry of Time (Hardcover, 2024, Simon & Schuster) 4 stars

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and …

A delightful read, with a bit of a frustrating ending

4 stars

Content warning Vague discussion of ending

Saints of Storm and Sorrow (2024, Titan Books Limited) 4 stars

In this an enthralling Filipino-inspired epic fantasy, a nun concealing a goddess-given gift is unwillingly …

The Ministry of Time (Hardcover, 2024, Simon & Schuster) 4 stars

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and …

Enjoyable.

3 stars

I found this to be enjoyable, but it jumped around between the genres too much for my liking.

It really irked me that the MC never gets named. It was at least bearable due to the perspective being almost entirely from her point of view, but with how much she interacts with the other characters, it drove me a little bonkers that she was never called by any name.

I'm glad that I read this still, but it's not one that I'm ever going to have an interest in revisiting.

#SFFBookClub May 2025