The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey.

This book is: an extremely cool take on the global pandemic SciFi trope.
Other elements: Almost-zombies, scientific experiments, David Attenborough, fungus, survival.
Read it: if you love flawlessly-crafted narratives and fascinating fictional science.
Overall rating: 8.5/10

This book is not at all the kind of thing I normally read.

It’s Science Fiction. More than that: it’s Science Fiction that takes place in a future version of our world where things are not going well. It belongs on the same shelf as Cronin’s The Passage, except that the world in The Girl with All the Gifts is more like our own.

When I reviewed The Passage, I told you that I could tell it was a good book but that I didn’t enjoy it because it’s not the kind of book I enjoy. The Girl with All the Gifts isn’t the kind of book I normally enjoy, either…but I thought it was awesome. 

Part of my enjoyment was being able to slowly learn more about what was happening as events unfolded, so I’m not going to reveal much here. I’ll give you the publisher synopsis that prompted me to give this book a chance:

“Melanie is a very special girl. Dr Caldwell calls her “our little genius.”

Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don’t like her. She jokes that she won’t bite, but they don’t laugh.

Melanie loves school. She loves learning about spelling and sums and the world outside the classroom and the children’s cells. She tells her favorite teacher all the things she’ll do when she grows up. Melanie doesn’t know why this makes Miss Justineau look sad.

THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS is a sensational thriller, perfect for fans of Stephen King, Justin Cronin and Neil Gaiman.”

This book is vivid, engrossing, original, and very tightly written. If it sounds interesting to you at all, you should definitely give The Girl with All the Gifts a chance. It’s great.

My thanks to NetGalley and Hachette Book Group for providing me with a review copy of The Girl with All the Gifts.

The House of the Four Winds by Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory.

This book is: a creative story that lacks pizazz.
Other elements: Magic, swordfighting, princesses seeking adventure, pirates, evil sorceresses, ships, sailors.
Read it: if you like fantasy, adventure, and pirates, and don’t mind very tame romances.
Overall rating: 6.5/10

Even now that I’ve finished reading it, I’m surprised I didn’t enjoy The House of the Four Winds more than I did.

There’s a brave young princess who disguises herself as a man to venture forth into the world and build her reputation as a sword-fighter. There’s an island inhabited only by pirates and ruled by a cruel and powerful sorceress. There is ship-board intrigue (somewhat Pirates of the Caribbean crossed with The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle). It’s written by fantasy superstar, Mercedes Lackey, in collaboration with someone I know nothing about but have no reason to think ill of.

The writing is solid, the worldbuilding is consistent and interesting. But there’s something missing; something important. The story doesn’t pop. It proceeds at a reasonable clip, not dragging or bogging itself down with unnecessary information – but it just never leaps off the page. I blame the characters, who always felt the slightest bit stiff to me.

Speaking of the characters’ stiffness*: the romance at the center of this novel has some of the worst fictional chemistry I’ve ever encountered. By which I mean: no chemistry at all. Either this book is supposed to be safe for young readers who aren’t supposed to know that physical attraction is a thing, or our hero and heroine are swashbuckling adventures with no interest in sex. Or the authors planned to go back later to add the sexual tension and forgot.

Either way, the entirely cerebral romance between the brave, aspiring sea captain and the swordfighting princess masquerading as a man – which should have been crackling with hottness – is instead so chaste that it’s pretty shocking at the end when they decide to get married.

All in all, this is a perfectly good book that just didn’t feel like anything out of the ordinary.

*Ha.

My thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan-Tor/Forge for providing me with a review copy of The House of the Four Winds.

Shards of Time by Lynn Flewelling.

This book is: not as bad as the worst books in this series, but also not in the top 3.
Other elements: Familiar characters, sarcasm, magic.
Read it: if you love the first three books of the Nightrunner series and need another Seregil and Alec fix, even if it’s going to be a watery, diluted one.
Overall rating: 6.5/10

This book is the 7th in a series that is very dear to my heart. Or, rather, the first 3 books of it are very dear to my heart. They’ve become some of my favorite comfort books (meaning I reread them over and over and over again) and they played an important role in the formation of some of the most important friendships in my life. (With actual people, not fictional ones.)

I can’t talk about Shards of Time without talking about its predecessors, many of which I love too much to review in any coherent manner. Here is an overview:

Luck in the Shadows: 10/10
Stalking Darkness: 10/10
Traitor’s Moon: 9/10
Shadows Return: 5/10
The White Road: 4/10
Casket of Souls: 7.5/10
Shards of Time: 6.5/10

Shards of Time is supposed to be the last Nightrunner book, at least for a while. And I think that’s a good thing. The characters, the universe, the adventures: they all feel thin and stretched by this point. The characters have stopped growing and changing. The plot is small: really, the title of this book could be “Alec and Seregil Solve a Ghost Story.” I think it’s the most compartmentalized of their adventures yet, and it’s sad to see our heroes working in isolation away from the pulse of Skalan politics. When Seregil complains that he’s bored with life in Rhiminee, I suspect it’s actually Flewelling talking.

We do get some amazing scenes with characters whose roles were smaller in the earlier books, and that’s a lot of fun. Flewelling also shows that she remains gifted at creating really creepy monsters/bad magic. The new baddies in Shards of Time are delightfully creepy and impressively well thought out, just as I would have hoped.

Shards of Time is more than somewhat enjoyable, but it’s hard not to see it as a step down from the crackling wit and extensive and fascinating worldbuilding of the earlier books in the series. It’s also less complex and less successful at making all its disparate elements feel like part of the same whole. So it could have been much worse, but I was hoping it would be better.

My thanks to NetGalley and Random Random House Publishing Group – Del Rey Spectra for providing me with a review copy of Shards of Time.