Reviews and Comments

Saints of Storm and Sorrow is the #SFFBookClub book for July 2025. If you're at all interested, please read along and post your thoughts to the hashtag! See sffbookclub.eatgod.org/ for more details.

This plot-driven scifi book about the power of memory felt better suited to be a beach thriller or a movie (which apparently it might be). Largely, the character arcs feel flat and other than a neat core idea, I'm not sure that the plot machinations hold up that well for me.

Some minor negatives: the time loop-esque conceit of future selves saving past selves, which always falls flat. It's also hard for me to suspend my disbelief about the idea of perfect memory, when it is always intermediated and misremembered. I also give a huge side-eye to this British author using Australian Aboriginals and their mythos as context for some plot elements.

On the positive front, for a story about memory, I appreciate that it is structured as a frame story where one person forces somebody else to recount their own memory of events, in which the story can nest further into other memories. I also appreciate the foreshadowing of the pick up artist who asks enough people out through persistence until somebody says yes. There's also a few good SCP-esque lines in the Lazarus Institute that made me laugh. But all of this was not enough to carry it for me.

I added this to the July poll for #SFFBookClub.

The SFFBookClub is our informal fediverse science fiction and fantasy book club. Everyone reading this is welcome to participate. More details: sffbookclub.eatgod.org/

If you're interested in reading along, please help choose a book for next month: weirder.earth/@picklish/114683873892058550

This sf novella centers on Damira, a conservationist who fought back (sometimes violently) against poachers, and whose mind was put into a mammoth's to help them relearn old behaviors and live again in the wild. It's a story about human greed, vengeance, memories, and identity.

I really enjoyed the writing here, but the more I reflected on this story after reading it, the more hollow it felt. It's hard not to cheer along with the book against different types of human greed, and the storytelling was enjoyable; at the end, I don't know that I came away with much more than that.

It's also unfair to critique a book by juxtaposing it with another, but I'm going to do it anyway. Having already read Lee Mandelo's Feed Them Silence it's impossible not to feel like that book tremendously overshadows this one, especially thematically. I think I would have enjoyed Tusks of Extinction more had I read them in the opposite order.

This is the final book in the Lady Astronaut series, with Elma York landing on Mars to help establish a base. This book has the mix of space stuff, politics, relationships, and technical trouble that you would expect from the rest of series, but fundamentally, this book is about Elma learning to be a leader and it's a good capstone on her emotional and professional journey.

Unfortunately, most of the action in this book takes place off page. Early on Elma realizes people are covering something up, but that event has already happened. There's some feint that maybe more problems from Earth First terrorists could happen, but this does not materialize. And sure, there are some real consequences from the coverup, but the majority of them also happen off page. It is not as if I am reading the Lady Astronaut series for action and adventure, but it's hard not to feel like there's a more engaging story being told next door. (To that end, I wonder if this book would have been better told from Leonard's perspective.)

One thing I do really appreciate about this book is seeing Elma and Nathaniel's relationship continuing to grow. For me, Mary Robinette Kowal's writing excels at telling a story with believably married characters who each have their own foibles and needs, and I feel like that's the case both here and in her Glamourist Histories series. It's nice to see the two of them care about each other, but also argue and disagree and be understandably frustrated with each other in a way that I don't see many books engage with.

This cozy starship mystery novella was billed to me as "Becky Chambers meets Miss Marple" and, sorry book, but I'm going to go with no on both counts. It has vibes of all of these things, but no depth to the mystery, characters, or worldbuilding.

The worldbuilding is a bit wild. I appreciate (but also laugh at) the way that the starship quite explicitly has no cops, only detectives with investigative power as a way to get around cop-centric detective fiction. The book also has UBI, which is a weird concept to extend forward in time to an intergenerational starship that has mind upload. It's all just a little too light that it doesn't hang together.

Ultimately, the mystery is too easily unraveled by the protagonist, but the details are not something the reader could have known about ahead of time. Largely, this feels like it comes from the complication of telling a light science fiction story in the space of a novella, and needing to explain the parameters of the world to the audience (as well as that of the mystery) in that small space.

Tangential musings: * is it a requirement of a cozy mystery to include knitting, even if it's on a spaceship? * furthermore, where does fiber for a knitting shop come from on an interstellar generational starship? * surely other people see the horror in "oh well my previous body died I'll just download into another body with a copy of my memories"? * how do you simultaneously have a world with (faulty) memory-based replicators (hope you remember all the zipper, pleat, and hem details for your clothing!) but also (somehow trustworthy) mind backup of your memories?

The Tomb of Dragons is the third book in the Cemeteries of Amalo trilogy. The first book in this series felt like a straight mystery in a fantasy setting, but by the time we get to this third book, the mystery portion gets balanced out by more politics and interpersonal growth and the story is stronger for it. I appreciate the way a number of plot points and characters from the previous books (including Goblin Emperor) all get woven into this story. The plot is just messy enough in a way that's believable, but tight in a way that makes events (especially of the first book) feel even more relevant. I loved it enough that I finished it and immediately reread Goblin Emperor because I wanted to be in the world a little bit more and revisit Thara back at the beginning.

In the previous book, Thara has lost his ability to speak with the dead, and this book is partially about him dealing with understanding who he might be when he is unable to do the work that he has been called to for years. But, it's also about witnessing for a dragon genocide against an overwhelmingly powerful mining corporation, and about Thara learning to accept being cared for. It's got a lot going on.

One thing I always forget about these books are how name dense they are. Everybody has fantasy titles and surnames and personal names and get referred to in multiple different ways. It makes the world feel much more real, but foof does it create some friction to get back into it after a while away. Sometimes it also breaks out fantasy words like "revethvezvaishor’avar" which I can only assume is meant to be half joking, but it can feel like a lot.

If I have any real quibble with the book, it's that the legal climax of this book is a little underwhelming; however, the personal and emotional elements land perfectly for me. (The multiple hand holding scenes!!!)

On this note, the conversation with Iäna midway through the book is absolutely incredible. This moment has been building the entire trilogy, between Iäna's escalating kindness to Thara and Thara's inability to accept care for himself. It gets to be too much for Thara, where he just can't understand why Iäna is being so nice, and it turns into an incredible conversation hashing out what they mean to each other, the nature of friendships, and love. Honestly, Iäna is such an incredible role model.

This book reminds me a lot of the second book in Robert Jackson Bennett's Divine Cities trilogy. Both are set out in the hinterlands, with a different focus and locale than the first book, but crucially both are there to establish the thematic question for the series. Here, that question is around the human nature of kings and emperors, and the complicated human desire for them.

Unsurprisingly, this series continues to be solidly in the mystery genre despite being blended with kaiju fantasy worldbuilding. It opens with a locked room murder mystery (and a missing body), has a brilliant Moriarity-adjacent mastermind, and ends with a dramatic reveal. This was true in the first book as well, but I quite appreciate how the details and clues are meticulously laid out for the reader to spot; even when there is a "our investigator must go into a fugue state to find answers" moment, her revelations are all something the reader could have intuited themselves.

One friend who has been reading this series (and crucially has not read any mystery books) has been disappointed at the "small-ness" of the plot threads, where the climax is a mystery rather than a fantasy escalation, and the terror of the leviathans only looms in the distance. These books certainly do not have the escalation of ideas from his previous series The Founders Trilogy. However, following the Divine Cities example above, my prediction is that the final book is going to satisfyingly tie together the themes from the first two books while answering our questions about the nature of the leviathans and the silent Khanum emperor.

Overall, I love this novel's ideas but the genres it mixes together work against each other rather than being stronger for the combination.

(also please name your protagonist, it's so awkward, thank you)

I found the writing here to be surprisingly funny and engaging. The dialogue between the protagonist and Graham continually made me laugh, and the book is peppered with delightful drive-by analogies like "he looked oddly formal, as if he was the sole person in serif font" or "I lay in my own body like a wretched sandbank".

The strongest part of the book to me (and the part that I found the most engaging) was the relationship and dialogue between the protagonist and Graham. A 19th century sailor is a great foil for modern London life; however, it also does a good job of making both the protagonist and Graham real, fallible characters who each make incorrect assumptions about the other. One other way this relationship also works for me is that it lets the book delve into the parallels of being an expat forced into a new time versus a new place work really well, or of not being be able to go "back".

However, the construction seams of this novel show, and that's where it gets weak. The more "serious" time travel and time war shenanigans feel tacked on, and thematically don't really integrate with the rest of the story (tonally or thematically). As a time travel story, it's not doing anything particularly novel here, and these bits weaken the rest of the novel.

(This was the #SFFBookClub book for May 2025.)

I hate to review a book by comparing one book to the previous by the author, but I enjoyed this horror novel a good bit less than I enjoyed Ghost Station and I'm trying to pick apart why. Like Ghost Station, I really appreciated the way this book slowly reveals character backstory while what the protagonist is running away from catches up with her, both thematically and literally.

The initial pacing slowly ratcheted up the tension via mysteries, dreams (or was it?), and "jokes". However, after the moment when everything comes mask off, I felt that the tension disappeared (even in the moment it should have been the opposite) and then it ended a little too abruptly for me.

It's a mix of ages, genders, gender identities, and ethnicities.

incredibly minor pet peeve from a one-off line: differentiating "gender" and "gender identity"

This book is a follow-up novella to Nghi Vo's The Chosen and the Beautiful which follows Nick Carraway after the events of the prior book (itself a retelling of The Great Gatsby).

Nghi Vo's writing (as always) is incredible here, and I love the horror-adjacent worldbuilding here of demons and wax women and paper soldiers on top of 1930's New York. This was a fun read, but in retrospect the story as a whole was too thin for me.

Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children series is always a bit hit or miss for me. Usually the non-ensemble books are more to my taste, but this one just didn't hang together for me.

(Sorry for mostly negative review, I'll try to keep this brief.)

This one is backstory for Nadya (who we've met in earlier books) and we get to see her water world of Belryyka that she falls into. I love the wild worldbuilding in all of the portal worlds of this series and this one didn't disappoint. However, plot-wise, (and it's possible that I am misremembering), it felt like the book set out some rules about how this world and doors worked and then violated them.

Sadly, the writing here leans heavy-handed and didactic to me. Yes, we get it, we know that Nadya does not have a right hand, but this book takes such pains to elaborate how much that's ok, but also it's ok when she can choose to use a prosthetic, that it deeply overshadows any other character traits that Nadya has. (Insert some spoilery quibbles around the nature of choices here.) Additionally, sometimes the narrator sounds like the child she is, and other times she sounds like an adult with years of therapy who understands self-kindness and social models of disability. The combination is that it's hard to understand who Nadya is.

Mostly, it just doesn't feel thematically as tight as something like Lost in the Moment and Found where the protagonist, ideas, and plot all resonate together. Because Nadya doesn't really have much characterization past "helpful" and "curious", the narrative arc feels abrupt and unjustified.

This book was a potential book for the #SFFBookClub poll for a while, but I ended up reading anyway because it looked intriguing.

As a reader, it seems like a novella is a hard length to hit; it's hard to have the space for both pacing and sufficient worldbuilding, and it's also hard to have enough runway for the resolution to resonate and feel satisfying. The short of it is that I feel like this novella nailed it for me.

The worldbuilding here is brutal. The book kicks off with idyllic introduction of Raquel working for the Global Institute for the Scientific and Humanistic Study of Pocket Worlds. Pocket worlds are small offshoots of reality, much smaller than our own universe--maybe the size of a meadow or a room or a bag even--and they can run at different time rates to our own universe.

After the protagonist Raquel falls into a fast time pocket world and comes back forty years later (while only a few moments have passed relatively for herself), the world has changed for the worst. Her institute is no longer doing scientific studies, her daughter has died, and capitalism has moved in to colonize the new spaces of these pocket worlds. The implications for labor when corporations have access to nearly infinite time and space goes exactly where you think it might; people signing up for a decade of work to then come back before breakfast, extra dumping grounds for garbage, or even locking rioters into these worlds. These are just a couple examples, but woof this book captures the capitalist extraction of time and space from a new technology.

Raquel is an archeologist of pocket worlds, and believes the Quisqueyan Taino people might have escaped into a pocket world to avoid genocide and is looking for clues to their past. She is the descendant of the Taino but also of conquistadors, and in some ways is at the intersection of both. What really works for me in this book is how her personal history and struggle parallels the larger story about colonialism and capitalism--she has her own insatiable wants for knowledge and family, especially around grief about her archeological work and her lost daughter.

"Well now," Dieno said. "That's a finale."

Maybe it's childhood nostalgia, but every once in a while I get that urge to read a giant fantasy tome, and Brandon Sanderson's work always hits that mark for me. It's never going to be world shattering fiction for me, but it's fun to get lost in the adventure, intricate worldbuilding, and large cast of characters.

Overall, my feelings are that Wind and Truth is a quite solid final book for a five book fantasy series. It sticks the landing on major character arcs and themes, and hits quite satisfying expected (and unexpected) plot moments. One thing it does really well is touching back on previous moments to show new information, as plot points, or as a foil for character changes. On the negative side, this book is an incredibly hefty tome and while it feels like it had a lot of editing and the pacing is consistent (but arguably slow), it's hard not to wonder what else could have been trimmed.

That's the summary. Here's a lot more rambling if you need a jumble of other opinions:

This book may be book five in a five book series, but if we zoom out it's series one of two, and if you zoom out further there's a constellation :drum: of other series and series of series that interconnect in Sanderson's cosmere universe. Personally, I am neutral (at best) and often negative on the costs of these inter-book connections. Sure, your universe has magical world hoppers, but I don't need them showing up in a story that's not about that.

I value "tight" stories and closure, where pieces have a purpose towards the aim of the story at hand. Characters and concepts from different stories make the immediate story feel loose. They are literal loose ends, with characters that we don't know and who don't show up again. If you were writing this series to end conclusively and stand independently on its own, you would absolutely make drastic edits. In this book alone, you would hypothetically cut the Shattered Plains entirely, arguably Zahel and friend, Thaidaker and the Ghostbloods, the Iri people, the dawn shards. However, this additional constraint of plot hooks for other stories or to tease tiny world building details feel like a fundamental part of the structure of Sanderson's cosmere fiction. For some readers who read and wiki-ify every lore crumb, I'm sure these are exciting to puzzle or theorize about.

On the positive side, Ben Kelly makes a great point that Sanderson writes with "fractal detail", such that if you miss some or even all references you can still appreciate the larger thrust of the story. The flip side is that to make that fractal possible, these referential and out of band world building details necessarily can't be important to the story at hand. Even in rare cases where side characters get to be part of the plot (Wit mostly, Zahel sorta), there's no room for character development because it just ain't their story. At best, readers can go "hey, I remember that guy". It's a subset of the extended universe problem or "the gang's all here" problem where you have too many characters and can't focus on all of them (and so one might ask why are they there, and what purpose are they serving).

Length-wise, this book is quite the hefty tome, weighing in at some 1300 pages and a 300mb epub, and that's with no appendixes or extra story tacked on. I still think there were some good editing choices here, although I wonder if readers who want their power fantasy action scenes will be disappointed by the number of elided events and the focus on feelings. For example, to me it's a point in the story's favor that we only see Adolin's reaction to (spoiler elided) or how one chapter opens with a "so yeah we beat Yelig-nar again, aaanyways moving on". Neither of these action scenes would likely have furthered the themes of the story or added characterization (that couldn't have been done elsewhere).

Although there's many point of view characters, each book in this series prioritizes a different one to focus on their back story. In this one, we get to see Szeth's childhood and his path to becoming truthless. Sadly for me, the whole Szeth storyline past and present is probably the weakest point of view. Some of this is due to the delineated path his present self is on and the limited amount of revelations we get about his character or the world through his view. It's not that I didn't enjoy it or I thought it was bad, but it just felt a lot weaker in comparison to Dalinar or Shallan's back story. Thematically, the ideas around laws, oaths, and choices resonate well with the rest of the book, but the plot itself didn't capture me as much as I would have wanted in the final book in a series. I think some of this is also the heavy handedness of the language around Kaladin trying to literally be a therapist to Szeth. (Maybe also it's just jarring for me for books to use the word "therapist" and "boundaries" in a fantasy world.) This is not the only part of the book that feels heavy handed and moralizing, it's just the one that sticks out the most to me.

My memory is poor, but I think also that this is the first book that has had queer (or at least gay) characters. It feels a bit like Sanderson is trying to stretch a little bit as a writer (especially one who is very publicly Mormon). Some bits work less well for me, in that there is an aside about some trans Azish recruits that we never hear from again. I don't need every story where characters have some minority identity to revolve around that identity, but I think I'm a little sensitive as a reader to anything that feels adjacent to a diversity checkbox, where that fact isn't integrated into the rest of the story very well and feels tacked on. On the positive side, I think the major gay relationship in this book works really well, as those characters have plenty of other things going on such that they are not the "gay" characters. If anything, I'd say thematically them being gay adds to their feelings of being othered in different ways that really works.

(I would be incredibly curious to read a take from plural systems or autistic folks about representation in these books.)

That's all the non-spoilery thoughts I've got.