About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Kate Hope Day
Positive The Seattle Times If philosophy is a science, then Kate Hope Day’s first novel is science fiction ... But advance publicity compares If, Then to mainstream titles such as The Immortalists and Little Fires Everywhere. Certainly the depth and extent of the author’s character analysis feels literary. But that alone doesn’t disqualify its inclusion in the genre ... Small-scale seismic events occur before the mostly minute shifts in reality the book’s four narrators experience, yet the connection there comes across as almost coincidental. A hospitalized philosophy professor’s theory of parallel universes relates a little more clearly — not causally, but as a model of what’s happening.
Ann Leckie
Positive The Seattle Times Leckie’s readers have come to expect and enjoy this sort of experimental voice in her work ... The omniscient strangeness imparted by this latest adventure in viewpoint is perfectly suited to conveying the reality of an immortal being ... The end of The Raven Tower comes crashing down with the weight of both inevitability and surprise.
Neil Gaiman
Rave The Seattle Times There's not one piece of prose or poetry in Fragile Things that won't repay re-reading. As Gaiman points out, our seemingly fragile hearts are our bodies' toughest muscles, eggs can remain intact when dropped from planes, a butterfly's wing beat can cause a hurricane. And words, when they're as well-chosen and deftly arranged as those in this book, can perform miracles of strength, staying with their audience long after the breath and ink that gave them birth have vanished.
Dan Simmons
Rave The Seattle Times \"Dan Simmons\' new novel, The Terror, may be the best thing he\'s ever written: a deeply absorbing story that combines awe-inspiring myth, grinding horror and historically accurate adventure … Simmons\' skill goes beyond making readers feel his characters\' pain and accept their heroic fortitude. He introduces into this harsh, beautiful milieu a monster born of the elements, yet more cunning than any natural creature … Told from multiple perspectives, The Terror answers many questions arising from the loss of the historical Franklin Expedition, inventing satisfactory explanations of its fate where the real details long ago were lost to history. It examines other questions along the way: the nature of evil and how to confront it; the nature of courage and how to find it.\
China Miéville
Positive The Seattle Times China Miéville's new science-fiction novel is a rich concoction of multiple strangenesses, and it bears repeated savoring. Like the aliens on whose revolution Embassytown focuses, this book speaks simultaneously with more than one voice: It's both a far-future adventure into the weirdness of far-off worlds, and a mind-expanding philosophical excursion into the whatness of words … These ideas aren't just fantastic visions; they're reasoned extrapolations from real-life forms of religion, technology and sociology. In patented genre fashion Miéville defines his terms on the fly and via context, so readers unused to this approach will probably want to revisit the book's first pages after they've absorbed these new words' meanings. And anyone who isn't a linguist will have at least a little difficulty absorbing the author's arguments about what can and can't be said, and why. None of these are reasons to skip Embassytown; all of them are reasons to read and reread it.
Joe Hill
Positive The Seattle Times NOS4A2 is his longest and most ambitious work yet. Besides fussy, strait-laced evil­doer Manx; fierce, fragile, stubborn McQueen; and her confident yet vulnerable son Wayne; Hill gives us a host of other involving characters. There’s Bing Partridge, a misogynistic murderer with a handy supply of psychotropic gases. There’s Maggie Leigh, a librarian and self-mutilator with a set of oracular Scrabble tiles. There’s my favorite, Wayne’s father Lou Carmody, a morbidly obese Klingon scholar and comics geek who fights to save his family come hell or heart attacks. Very few of NOS4A2’s 700-plus pages are static descriptions of these folks; most of the time Hill tethers us to their viewpoints and has them tow us along as they blunder or slink or sleuth their way through the story. Their actions reveal their essences.
Margaret Atwood
Positive The Seattle Times This is a complicated scenario. Atwood handles it well. Repetition becomes recursiveness, and she writes with insight and no pretension about how narratives work with and through one another: ‘There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told.’ She tells all these sorts of stories in MaddAddam satisfyingly, and of course, beautifully … Eventually, toward MaddAddam’s conclusion, birth and decay, death and growth bring about quite a different world than the one in which the trilogy began. But tales are still told, and in this, the third and final book, Atwood presents a moving and convincing case for our stories’ continued existence long after we’re gone.
Joe Hill
Rave The Seattle Times In scenes sometimes gorgeously sensual, sometimes wrenchingly grotesque, Horns ranges between flashbacks of Ig's childhood and first experience of love to his hate-filled quest for revenge ...Richly allusive, Horns references not only classical mythology, but Biblical texts, pre-Christian folklore, and such rock 'n' roll legends as Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels … Evil and suffering exist, Horns postulates, so whoever created the world can be either all-powerful and given to random cruelties, or good and merciful, but with limited capabilities. And devils, evil's personifications, can be seen in dizzying perspective as servants of good when, like Ig, they punish sinners.
Margot Lee Shetterly
Mixed The Seattle Times Hidden Figures author Margot Lee Shetterly, herself the daughter of a black NASA engineer, has written a detailed account of the women who broke through race and gender barriers to become key factors in the U.S. space program’s success ... Most important to the heroines of Hidden Figures were assumptions about who could ask the right questions concerning aeronautic efficiencies and potential flightpaths, and who was best suited to translate those questions into mathematical equations others would solve ... Unfortunately, at times she seems unable to meld her material into a smoothly flowing storyline ... This hardworking, earnest book is the perfect foil for the glamour still to come.
Jeff VanderMeer
Positive The Seattle Times Gradually, the narrator realizes she herself has been contaminated by spores inhaled as she examined a mosslike growth that spelled out gloomy poetry on the walls of a living shaft plunging deep into the earth. The biologist’s persistence in calling this shaft a tower, despite the fact that it rises only 8 inches above the ground, is one way VanderMeer shows the extent of her disorientation: up is down, in (toward the heart of the mystery) is out — toward the border between Area X and normalcy … VanderMeer ups the book’s eeriness quotient with the smoothest of skill, the subtlest of grace. His prose makes the horrific beautiful.
Susanna Clarke
Mixed The Seattle Times If Jane Austen had written fairy tales, they might read like Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell ...creates a world in which the pastel remnants of a much wilder medieval magic are studied by eccentric country gentlemen ... Strange is 782 pages long. And it's the result of more than 10 year's imagining, writing and research, a creation so densely detailed that the footnotes with which the text is larded pique rather than satisfy the reader's interest ...in a novel of Strange's scope there are other themes, other subplots, other finely drawn characters... but Clarke's most impressive show of authorial skill is in how she resolves this tension without destroying it.
Jeff VanderMeer
Rave The Washington Post VanderMeer’s undeniable skill as a writer keeps what could be an unwieldy blur of a plot from devolving into grim melodrama or atmospheric nihilism ... Rachel, a brown-skinned, kinky-haired refugee woman, will also satisfy readers eager to see marginalized figures move to the center of an ad­ven­ture novel. And there’s enough allusiveness in this story to satisfy a whole conference of literary critics. Ultimately, though, these heady delights only add to the engrossing richness of Borne. The main attraction is a tale of mothers and monsters — and of how we make each other with our love.
Connie Willis
Rave The Seattle Times Ever alert to change’s human impact, Willis explores the always humorous and sometimes frightening consequences of heroine Briddey Flannigan’s awareness of exactly what those around her think. Willis also provides convincing explanations of telepathy’s advantages and the likelihood of its survival as a genetic trait. But the novel’s screwball elements, and especially the klutzy-cute interactions between Briddey and maverick nerd C.B. Schwartz, are what charmed me. Rapier wit and sparkling ripostes form the heart of the romantic comedies Willis praises at public appearances, sharing her love for the art form. They’re very much in evidence here.
China Miéville
Positive The Seattle Times [Mieville] dices up and disposes of narrative continuity with the flair of a collage artist. The resulting portrait of a city outside of time entices and rewards readers, even as it rebuffs traditional ideas about how stories should be told ... At once old-fashioned and unconventional, Miéville’s novel transcends expectations of modernism raised by its recent publication.
Claire Vaye Watkins
Rave The Seattle Times [Watkins's] story toys with supernatural explanations for the survival of outcasts living in the super-dune’s shadow, but ultimately rejects them. Rather than the wild imaginings that members of SF’s community of writers have trained themselves to give voice to, and have nourished by reading the work of fellow imaginers, Watkins’s depictions are grounded in an almost fatalistic view of our current situation ... All the strength and utility of Gold Fame Citrus come from the unrelentingness of its author’s well-schooled gaze. But that gaze encompasses more than tragedy, more than the chaos of civilization’s gradual collapse. It also shares with us the feverish glow of a world lit only by fugitives’ fires, the hallucinatory shimmer surrounding each individual grain of pulverized stone, each tiny tributary to an overwhelming flood of uncontrollable forces: heat, wind, dreams.
Ken Liu
Rave The Seattle Times Like childhood, these stories are simple — but far from simplistic. Besides making compelling points about subjects such as domination and empowerment, responsibility and freedom, they leave lingering impressions of smooth-gaited water buffalo; sky-filling solar sails; proto-sapient, lemurlike aliens; and camera implants disguised as prostitutes’ eyes. Long after the book has been read, these telling details continue to lend their subtle heft to stories that pierce to the core of what’s right.
Matt Ruff
Positive The Seattle Times \"Though white, Ruff writes plausibly from the viewpoints of his black characters. Their concerns — whether they confront faceless mobs or respond to surprise invitations from scions of America’s unacknowledged aristocracy — seem genuinely driven by their own agendas, not the author’s. Ruff also avoids the common error of homogenizing the thoughts and feelings of these black \'others.\'\