PositiveThe B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog84K’s title deliberately invokes 1984 ... But the dystopia Claire North builds here is a uniquely British one, with callbacks and allegiances to everything from Brave New World to The Children of Men ... Even in our existing world (whether it qualifies as a dystopia or not depending on your point of view), the neighborhoods and waterways of London and its surrounding communities are laid out like a map of the social order ... Though 84K is clearly part of a tradition, I don’t mean to imply it’s some humdrum regurgitation; it has its own unique voice. The narration is deliberately off-putting, written in a form of stream of consciousness that sometimes requires you to double back, or just let go and flow forward ... This is a challenging novel, with an uncomfortable protagonist written in a way that’s distancing and divisive. You’re going to have to work for it, and what it’s worth is no easy equation. Not like life and death in this near future, where everything has a price.
John Crowley, Illustrated by Melody Newcomb
RaveBarnes and Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy BlogThey are fascinating birds: garrulous, social, intelligent, creative. The eponymous crow narrator from Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr, the newest novel by John Crowley (revered for Little, Big), certainly exemplifies these characteristics ...novel is swatched in mythology and the epic...political dynasties, the great tide of history, a clash of kings. Ka certainly contains some of these elements — the broad sweep of time, the bird’s eye view of humanity (if you’ll forgive the metaphor). But something about its manner of telling invokes an older meaning of 'epic': poems sung around the hearth... Eventually, its hard to tell whether or not Dar Oakley is actually a product of the man’s ailing imagination — a prognostication and memory of the long life of humanity, told in a dying place by a dying man ... This novel contains all of it.
N. K. Jemisin
RaveThe Barnes & Noble ReviewThe Fifth Season was absolutely dazzling in its complex structure and origami plot; I shivered as it folded to reveal itself at the end. The Obelisk Gate is no less effective, but its impact is felt at a deeper level—down under the skin, deep in the viscera of this broken earth.
