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REVIEW: Clockwork Heart by Heidi Cullinan
Alt history, yay! Airships! Steampunk that’s more than just fashion! Austrian princesses who need their own books ASAP! This was pretty different from her other books, actually. Which is great, because authors should try new things. For instance: the sexytimes vocabulary was way different than her usual, possibly because she was going for a dated/historical feel? I liked this book, on the whole, though I’m not into exhibitionism/gang-bangs/etc. and the two leads here totally are into it which made it a little awkward. They were very sweet, though, and I liked how it had action/espionage mixed with a romantic plot. Read: January 15, 2016
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Tournament of Losers by Megan Derr
Previous attempts at Megan Derr’s older books have been somewhat hit-or-miss, but the summary for Tournament of Losers sounded like something right up my alley, so I decided to give it a go. And that was an EXCELLENT DECISION, y’all! Tournament of Losers is the BEST Megan Derr book I’ve read yet! I think it’s a combo of increased writing skills + many tropes I adore + completely adorable characters + wonderful worldbuilding. One of my complaints about MD’s earlier books was the treatment/lack of women characters, how everybody’s white, and sometimes-weird chemistry between the leads. With her newer books, many of those things have been addressed. For instance, in…
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The Philosopher Kings by Jo Walton
The Philosopher Kings gets off to a bad start, tbh. The Just City has separated into multiple cities, all with differing ideas about what Plato Really Meant, Aristotle-the-fly disappeared, Pallas Athene never came back, and worst of all Simmea, my favorite character from The Just City, dies. She’s murdered during an art raid. She’s dead! And that really hurt. Apollo didn’t much like it either, and he spends the majority of the book trying to come back from his overwhelming grief. Maia is also dealing with things, including her rapist from The Just City wanting to apologize and be friends again. Everybody’s depressed from the raids and people dying and…
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The Just City by Jo Walton (2015)
I’ll be honest: my philosophy 101 class was so boring and terrible I’ve mostly forgotten everything about it. The only thing I DO remember is the thing about the caves, and that’s only because it came up in some of my other (non-philosophy) classes. So when I saw that Jo Walton had written a book about a city built based upon Plato’s Republic, I was super worried it’d be dry and boring. Even though I LOVE Jo Walton’s writing! I was still worried, because of the subject matter. My darling readers, it was not dry or boring and it was WONDERFUL. SO WONDERFUL.
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Prosperity by Alexis Hall
Memory wrote an excellent review of Prosperity back in October, and it was SO excellent that I went on NetGalley and found Prosperity and requested it for review myself! And I’m so glad I did, because I LOVED it. There is steampunk (or maybe gaslamp)! There is alternate history (kinda)![1. It’s actually set in an alternate universe! Love love love alternate universes.] There are air ships and monsters living behind the sky and lesbians and a bisexual protagonist and crime lords and a nonbinary ship captain and a floating city and, really, the only thing missing was a band of sky pirates. (Maybe they’ll be in another book.)
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The Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine
I love GV’s previous book, Mechanique, and I absolutely adore fairy tale retellings, so I was fairly certain The Girls at the Kingfisher Club would be a huge hit with me. No surprise: it was! It’s not just the fact that it’s a retelling of one of my favorite fairy tales, the 12 Dancing Princess. It’s because the writing was so beautiful, the setting so interesting, the characters so lovable in a tragic kind of way. True, the father-villain was over the top with his nutsoid views about family and heirs (surely 12 healthy daughters are better than any nonexistent son?) but such is the world of the fairy tale…
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Steampunk and court intrigue: a review of The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison
Shout out to Memory, who first drew my attention to the existance of this book on NetGalley. This is one of those books I would never have found on my own if someone hadn’t pointed it out to me. And that would have been a real shame, because The Goblin Emperor is amazing and lovely and I love it and OMG OMG I read it all in one day! It’s a pretty big book and actually not all that fast paced, but I adore court intrigue (especially in fantasy settings) so I was basically glued to my Kindle from start to finish. I actually had a hard time NOT rereading…