Today’s reviews are about two books on the Nebula Award finalist list. The Nebula Awards recognize the best works of science fiction and fantasy published in the United States as selected by members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Amberlough by Lara Elena Donnelly Amberlough is a difficult-to-categorize book. I was expecting science…
Set in 1812, Arabella is a young woman who has grown up on Mars but now is expected to marry and live the life of a society woman in England. That doesn’t go over so well, and Arabella is desperate for the freedoms she enjoyed as a child. When her brother’s life is threatened, she…
Ghost Talkers is an ideal summer vacation read if you like historical and paranormal fiction. Set in Le Havre during World War I, it’s about a team of women who are helping the British troops by serving as mediums. Their role is to channel the dead, collecting the last messages and more importantly, the last observations of…
My husband and I disagree about Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series. He wanted to like them but didn’t find that the alternative history involving the dragons made sense, and that bothered him enough that he didn’t continue reading. The issue is basically this: a world where dragons exist would be radically different, and yet the Napoleonic…
Spring-Heeled Jack is pretty much what you’d expect it to be – it’s good, fun steampunk set in an alternate version of Victorian England. The “twist” is that it actually explains how the alternate reality came to be. It also involves a whole cast of real-life characters, including the explorer Richard Francis Burton, the poet…
In my last post, I recommended a book called Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld. Westerfeld is one of my favorite YA writers. He’s written the Uglies and Midnighters series, and this latest series is set in 1914 in a steampunk version of World War I. Behemoth is book 2 of this series. In Leviathan, the first…
The Book Stop 