by Barbara the Bibliophage | Nov 24, 2019 | RELAX: Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi
Jacqueline Simonds offers an urban fantasy with a side helping of Arthurian legend in The Midsummer Wife. It’s a tantalizing reading combination, especially in a time when we know our leaders by their tweets rather than by their ancestry. Set in the near future, the...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Oct 16, 2019 | RELAX: Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi
Joe Hill published his Full Throttle story collection just in time for the haunting season. And haunt me it did! Hill begins and ends with some lovely notes on his craft, growing up with Stephen King, and story inspirations. Everything between those two chapters is...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Sep 28, 2019 | RELAX: Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi
Rebecca Roanhorse crafts a unique fantasy tale in Trail of Lightning. The world she creates is in the near future, but has undergone some big physical and metaphysical changes. Heroine Maggie Hoskie survives The Big Water (catastrophic flooding caused by climate...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Sep 21, 2019 | RELAX: Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi
Calvin Demmer writes intense horror stories. Part of a series called Short Sharp Shocks!, this one is a ghost story. Journalist Sylvia Bernstein is looking for that “big story,” which will boost her career into hyperspace. She should be careful what she wishes for....
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Aug 14, 2019 | RELAX: Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi
Year One by Nora Roberts is an interesting choice to follow my recent reads by Tosca Lee and J. D. Horn. It combines elements of each book into a satisfying post-pandemic adventure with a magical twist. It’s more about escaping the big city than Lee’s focus on the...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Aug 12, 2019 | RELAX: Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi
The Final Days of Magic is my last shot at the New Orleans Witches series. And I’ve discovered that none of the characters matter very much to me. Even if author J.D. Horn writes another book in the series, I won’t be following along. I’m disappointed to be leaving...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jun 24, 2019 | RELAX: Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi
Sonia Faruqi writes her debut novel as a mash-up of mermaid fantasy and oceanic conservation information. Unfortunately, it’s more mashed than up. I abandoned it after 100 pages.The parallel story lines of a human and a mermaid are a trope that goes back to old-school...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jun 8, 2019 | RELAX: Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi
Jeffrey Ford wants to give his readers a creature feature, haunted house story in The Twilight Pariah. He also wants it to be quirky and funny, by virtue of the odd trio of college students involved. Problem is, it just fell flat for me. Not scary, and not especially...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jun 4, 2019 | RELAX: Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi
Stephen King doesn’t always write horror stories with gore and fear. Sometimes his stories are the horror of “what if.” In Elevation, he explores what would happen if a man kept losing weight even when his body shape didn’t change. It’s an odd thing to consider horror...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Apr 22, 2019 | RELAX: Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi
Madeline Miller tells a story replete with Greek gods, kings, warriors, battles, and death. And yet what it’s really about is the love between Achilles and Patroclus. Both young men are high born princes. Achilles is also half god, with a human father and goddess...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Mar 25, 2019 | RELAX: Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi
Ghost Gifts from author Laura Spinella was a good balance for my recent more serious reads. But it wasn’t much more than a fluff piece. Main character Aubrey Ellis is a journalist, working on real estate features at a small town paper. She’s also a medium, willingly...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Feb 23, 2019 | RELAX: Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi
This was my first Jennifer McMahon book, which I started because of a Litsy buddy read. Normally I read wintry books in the summer, when I need to feel cooler! Nevertheless, I dived in and enjoyed the storytelling.Fundamentally, The Winter People is about grief and...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Feb 14, 2019 | RELAX: Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi, RESIST: Feminism
A biographer, a wise woman, a wife, a daughter, and an explorer form the core of Red Clocks, from author Leni Zumas. They seem to have only one thing in common—being women living in a country where reproductive rights are more and more limited.Susan is a wife and...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Feb 5, 2019 | RELAX: Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi
In Angel Time, Anne Rice tells the story of a present-day hit man, a former parochial school student. The narrator is his guardian angel. After learning about his depressing descent from down on his luck school boy to a life of crime, we meet said angel. And together...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Feb 3, 2019 | RELAX: Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi
Christopher Moore is a master of the humor-filled, historical fiction with a fantasy twist novel. How’s that for a sub-genre? Sacré Bleu was my favorite read this January. BTW, you should know that the French expression “sacrebleu” is used to convey surprise,...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jan 26, 2019 | RELAX: Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi, RESIST: Feminism
Nikita Gill puts an adult, mostly feminist spin on common fairytales and legends in her collection, titled Fierce Fairytales: Poems and Stories to Stir Your Soul. For me, though, the content wasn’t as stirring as promised.Gill uses various points of view, including...
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