PositiveLitReactorLast Year undersells itself as the tale of a star-crossed romance in which a man from the past will stop at nothing to be with his love in the future. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to discover a fun time travel caper set in a meticulously crafted world populated with interesting characters ... but amidst all of the cool time travel hijinks is some serious rumination on our relationship to both our past and the future. Last Year is an enjoyable time travel story that hits all the right adventure beats so you can have a good time while still learning something about colonialism and romanticizing history.
Lee Clay Johnson
PanLitReactorNitro Mountain is one-third of a good book ... The book is split into three wildly uneven sections, and only the first is told from Leon’s point of view. While he is not a tremendously fascinating or even very likable character, he does have an interesting voice and is able to describe his desolate surroundings with a degree of poetry, finding a dark beauty in the ugliness ... So it’s a shame that Leon is murdered off-stage and then goes practically unmentioned for the rest of the book. The second, and longest, section, switches to third-person, and just randomly follows around the cast of losers Leon encountered in the first section. All of these people are considerably less interesting and likable than Leon, and none of them have a unique story or compelling voice ... Nitro Mountain feels like sixty polished pages stapled to another hundred of unedited notes.
