Reviews and Comments

A very different book than The Space between Worlds, but equally good.

While TSBW kind of revolved around the interworld travel premise, Those Beyond the Wall is firmly rooted in "Earth 0"'s Ashtown. Mr. Scales has a wildly different perspective on the Ashtown oligarchy and culture than Cara did, and it's kind of fascinating to see some of the blind spots the author built in. Despite the very different plot foci, there are similar strong themes of antifascism, anticolonialism, and the struggle for justice.

It's even more gritty than the original, yet potentially more hopeful as well.

I would strongly recommend reading TSBW first, because a lot of the setting is taken for granted here.

#SFFBookClub

Original, innovative, grim, politically relevant, amazing

Next week, the earliest cookbook by an African American author will be issued in a new edition, drawn from the only known copy, in the collection of the Clements Library at the University of Michigan. www.lib.umich.edu/about-us/news/more-just-recipes #BlackHistoryMonth #Libraries

glammr.us/@overholt/114003542102833736

I've had this one on my to-read list for ages - I'd better start it now if I'm going to finish in time to read Those Beyond the Wall for #SFFBookClub February

Days of Shattered Faith does feel like a proper sequel to House of Open Wounds. It brings back a bunch of interesting characters from earlier installments, but also introduces some fun fresh faces.

This time around, we're dealing with diplomatic imperialism, integration, and free will, again through a lens of magic, gods, and demons.

It's a solid story, and I'd be interested to follow some of the characters a while longer and see what they get up to.

This feels like a big departure from the previous book. The first one was kind of a set of slices of life from a weird fantasy city under occupation, and this one follows one of the characters into an army field hospital.

The main theme seems to be exploration of what it would look like to attempt to rules-lawyer a world with magic, gods, and demons.

I enjoyed it, but I didn't get a real sense of continuity from City of Last Chances - they're essentially two distinct novels set in the same world.

ICMYI: I have a book out that's about found family, disaster sapphics, martial arts in space, neurodivergent shenanigans, and SPACE JELLYFISH (there's an entire chapter called "strobilation". If you know, you know)

us.macmillan.com/books/9781250324887/navigationalentanglements/

Get a copy now!

(cover art: Sija Hong)

wandering.shop/@aliettedb/113890128762483655

The #SFFBookClub pick for February 2025

Latrine digger named Pirisytes

This one takes a while to get going - after several chapters, I was convinced that this was going to be a slice-of-life novel about the glory days of the mexican movie industry as seen from the 90s. (Which it is not (I mean, it is, but there's also more))

It reminds me quite a lot of The Skeleton Key(2005), in a good way.

Good characters; fun, creepy, twisty plot; unique setting.

Blade of Dream is a very good sequel to Age of Ash. Instead of continuing the events from the previous book, it tells the story of different characters during the same time period. There are only a few points where events overlap, so it doesn't give that "ugh, I'm just reading a different flavor of the same story again" feeling that you can get from this approach.

I found it especially interesting that one of the main characters in Blade of Dream was a very marginal character in Age of Ash that one of the narrative characters had dismissed as a silly girl with no real agency (and thus the reader implicitly seeing her that way as well), and seeing the stark contrast here.

Based on the company it keeps hachyderm.io/@molly0xfff/113766219774899936

This is eldritch horror without the Cthulhu. It is weird and obscure and extremely obsessed with architectural minutiae. It rambles quite a bit in the middle, but that's honestly consistent with the tone of the world.

I feel like I don't know enough about architecture to read this book