If this election season isn’t freaking you out enough about the future of America, then you need to read Alexander Weinstein’s short stories, Children of the New World. Thankfully, unlike this election, these stories are not real, but they are brilliant in their take on how we’ll be living in the not-so-distant future. And, depending on your perspective they’ll either ... Read More...
The Mime Order
I don’t read a lot of young adult science fiction but when Samantha Shannon’s first book The Bone Season came out I was intrigued enough that I was curious about the next chapter in the life of her protagonist, Paige Mahoney. Shannon returns Paige to London after she escapes from Sheol I, a penal colony, in The Mime Order. As what is known as an Unnatural (a human with ... Read More...
Gold Fame Citrus
Nature refused to offer herself to them. The water, the green, the mammalian, the tropical, the semitropical, the leafy, the verdant, the motherloving citrus, all of it was denied them and had been denied them so long that with each day, each project, it became more and more impossible to conceive of a time when it had not been denied them. Gold Fame Citrus opens in ... Read More...
The Water Knife
Those places had dreamed of being different from what they were. They’d had aspirations. And then the water ran out, and they fell back, realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed, and there would be no more coming. It can be dicey to open a review with a strong declarative sentence but I’m taking a chance with The Water Knife and stating that I have never read a ... Read More...
Station Eleven: A Novel
I read a fair amount of dystopian fiction this summer- either set in the U.S. or global and I would have saved myself a lot of time if Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel had come out first because it is the best. Big words, I know but, while not garnering the level of publicity of other recent books in the genre, it is a novel that should be noticed for its portrait of an ... Read More...
The Bone Clocks
David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks begins in 1984 with sixteen-year-old Holly Sykes running away from home in a fit of rage over her mother’s refusal to let her move in with a man she loves and then finding that man in bed with her best friend. While on the road Holly meets a very old woman who asks her if she will give her refuge if she needs it. She says yes and unknowingly ... Read More...
