RaveLocus MagOne of the best science fiction novels of the year ... Compelling.
Francis Spufford
RaveLocus\"...a rich and fluently imagined alternate history ... Ultimately Cahokia Jazz is most notable for the thought that’s gone into its thought-experiment. It demands the reader’s trust and faith as it unpacks its characters, plot, and ideas, and it invites debate about its choices ... Adding yet another layer, Kroeber is also notable as the father of Ursula K. Le Guin, to whom Cahokia Jazz is dedicated, and as the novel moves into its closing stages, the noir (and Christian) search for belief in a fallen world is married with a distinctly Le Guinian line of questioning: how should a good society be maintained? ... Perhaps Cahokia Jazz’s greatest achievement is the way in which it balances this symbolic potency with the hard reality of a living culture.\
Nikhil Singh
MixedLocusIt’s a story of invasion and transformation, and its mode is excess: memorable set-piece imagery, showy exploitation, and sometimes questionable taste ... Singh’s style is lavish, as excessive as the situations and actions it describes; narrative is something that happens to the characters every so often, in between descriptions, rather than being driven by the characters. While many of those descriptions are good, fresh and unexpected, without warning they veer into the cartoonish or questionable ... There aren’t that many SF novels being published with quite this level of commitment to sheer unironic pulpy invention, and taken at that level Taty Went West verges on the heroic, but it’s never a comfortable reading experience, and doesn’t always feel quite thought-through enough: it is perhaps ultimately a little more invasive than transformative.
