Books. Cats. Nonsense.
I'll be honest, "gender-swapped Alexander the Great retelling set in space" was all I needed to know about Unconquerable Sun when it originally crossed my path -- it immediately got added to the "most anticipated books of the year" list. Having only read, but absolutely adored, one book by Kate Elliott before, I knew she'd be able to pull of a book with such an epic scope.
You all know how passionately I love Becky Chambers’ books -- she’s one of my favourite authors and consistently puts out incredible stories. When her next release was announced, I was initially a little disappointed that To Be Taught, If Fortunate wasn’t going to be a continuation of her Wayfarers books. However I completely trust Becky to give me the gorgeous, quiet stories I crave. My faith in Becky Chambers remains -- To Be Taught, If Fortunate is the beautiful, gentle tale of human exploration that I never knew I needed.
Embers of War first came onto my radar when it won the British Science Fiction Award for best novel in 2018. Curious and craving some good sci-fi, I decided to pick it up and see what all the fuss was about. To my surprise and delight, it features one of my absolute favourite tropes in science fiction -- sentient spaceships! I ended up really enjoying this fun sci-fi romp -- in many ways it captured the fun and essence of the Star Wars films and translated it onto paper.
You all know I love a good heist novel, and while I’ve read a fair few fantasy heist books, I don’t think I’ve ever found a science fiction book that fits in this category. You can only imagine how excited I was to hear about Shattermoon.
I feel like I say this every month, but I cannot believe how quickly time is passing! April has absolutely flown by and spring is well underway. April has been an amazing month for me: I went to the Harry Potter studio for the first time, chaired my first book event, hosted my first readathon, and I read some fanastic books. I feel like the start of the year was a bit slow to start in my little corner of the internet, but I'm really getting back on my feet in terms of writing reviews, posting videos, and taking photos.
I rarely review books that I DNF (did not finish), however I really wanted to talk about this one. Why? Because I'm so upset that it didn't deliver. Space Opera sounded like the absolute perfect book for me -- it's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy meets Eurovision. I wanted to love this book so badly, but it just didn't work for me.
I absolutely adored Becky Chambers' debut novel The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet and was so excited to discover that a sequel was already out. I finally got a chance to read A Closed and Common Orbit this month and I couldn't be more happy with it.
The best opening chapter ever. ARC review of John Scalzi's The Collapsing Empire
