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netgirl_y2kFinal Girls - Riley Sager
The Last Place You Look - Kristen Lepionka
The Prey of Gods - Nicky Drayden
Wolf by Wolf - Ryan Graudin
Artemis - Andy Weir
Little Fires Everywhere - Celeste Ng
I already had Final Girls - a fairly generic thriller in which three 'final girls', the only survivors of previous massacres, find themselves the target of a new killer - out from the library when I read the thing about how Riley Sager is the pen name of a dude named Todd who was trying to cash in on the fact that female penned thrillers in the vein of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train seem to make real money. And while lots of authors write under more than one name, and it shouldn't necessarily be a big deal, something about this one left a bad taste in my mouth. I don't know if I would have liked it more had I read it without knowing about the author, but as it was a lot of the handling of the female characters made me think, yeah, this was written by a dude named Todd.
Luckily, I liked The Last Place You Look a whole lot more; plus I'm almost entirely sure Kristen Lepionka really is a woman. It's about a hard drinking bisexual private investigator called Roxane Weary. I really love it when these noir-ish sorts of of books are about women, and this was a good one. Apparently it's the first in a series, and I will certainly be back for more.
Prey of Gods is one of those books that's super hard to explain, so I'm going to talk about by means of a pro - con list.
Pros: the AI uprising, South African demigods, one protagonist is a super violent demigoddess nail technician, another is a transwoman, two more a teenaged gay couple, it is really fucking good.
Cons: phonetically spelled South African accents.
So, you know, you can make up your own mind.
The nazis won alternate histories are a dime a dozen, and while I've enjoyed some of them (The Small Change Trilogy comes to mind) Wolf by Wolf was not one of those. It's about a girl who is experimented on in a concentration camp and ends up with face changing powers. And first of all, the idea of someone getting superpowers from eugenics experiments was, I thought, in very poor taste. And then, of course, the assassination of Hitler is down to this teenaged girl, all the while she's caught between two boys, and oh god...
In the end, the tastelessness bothered me more than the generic YA-ness of it all, but both were offputting.
Artemis is a heist set on the moon. In the end, it's not quite as cool as that premise makes it sound. The nerdy, engineering details are a bit pasted on in places, and it doesn't quite have the same charm as The Martian. But it's still a heist set on the moon, and as such is very, very cool. I also feel like I want to give points to Andy Weir for making his new protagonist a woman of Saudi Arabian extraction, because I feel like it would have been easy for him to write white guy sci-fi forever.
I had really liked Celeste Ng's first novel, but Little Fires Everywhere, set in the US suburbs in the 90s and featuring class differences and cross racial adoptions, did very little for me. Maybe if I were more of literary fiction person...
(Graphic Novels of late have been: The Mighty Thor: Lords of Midgard, The Mighty Thor: The Asgard/Shi'ar War, Bombshells: Allies, Mockingbird: I Can Explain.
Jane Foster!Thor continues to be my favourite, and of the comics I've tried so far the one where the art style works best for me.
Bombshells with it's ladies kissing and no super dudes allowed clubhouse is so very much in my wheelhouse that I don't even care that the plot lurches around a tiny bit incoherently.
I'm not surprised Mockingbird was not long for this world, it was cute and funny and all, but it leaned too hard on the puzzlebox aspect which was not nearly as clever as it seemed to think it was.)
The Last Place You Look - Kristen Lepionka
The Prey of Gods - Nicky Drayden
Wolf by Wolf - Ryan Graudin
Artemis - Andy Weir
Little Fires Everywhere - Celeste Ng
I already had Final Girls - a fairly generic thriller in which three 'final girls', the only survivors of previous massacres, find themselves the target of a new killer - out from the library when I read the thing about how Riley Sager is the pen name of a dude named Todd who was trying to cash in on the fact that female penned thrillers in the vein of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train seem to make real money. And while lots of authors write under more than one name, and it shouldn't necessarily be a big deal, something about this one left a bad taste in my mouth. I don't know if I would have liked it more had I read it without knowing about the author, but as it was a lot of the handling of the female characters made me think, yeah, this was written by a dude named Todd.
Luckily, I liked The Last Place You Look a whole lot more; plus I'm almost entirely sure Kristen Lepionka really is a woman. It's about a hard drinking bisexual private investigator called Roxane Weary. I really love it when these noir-ish sorts of of books are about women, and this was a good one. Apparently it's the first in a series, and I will certainly be back for more.
Prey of Gods is one of those books that's super hard to explain, so I'm going to talk about by means of a pro - con list.
Pros: the AI uprising, South African demigods, one protagonist is a super violent demigoddess nail technician, another is a transwoman, two more a teenaged gay couple, it is really fucking good.
Cons: phonetically spelled South African accents.
So, you know, you can make up your own mind.
The nazis won alternate histories are a dime a dozen, and while I've enjoyed some of them (The Small Change Trilogy comes to mind) Wolf by Wolf was not one of those. It's about a girl who is experimented on in a concentration camp and ends up with face changing powers. And first of all, the idea of someone getting superpowers from eugenics experiments was, I thought, in very poor taste. And then, of course, the assassination of Hitler is down to this teenaged girl, all the while she's caught between two boys, and oh god...
In the end, the tastelessness bothered me more than the generic YA-ness of it all, but both were offputting.
Artemis is a heist set on the moon. In the end, it's not quite as cool as that premise makes it sound. The nerdy, engineering details are a bit pasted on in places, and it doesn't quite have the same charm as The Martian. But it's still a heist set on the moon, and as such is very, very cool. I also feel like I want to give points to Andy Weir for making his new protagonist a woman of Saudi Arabian extraction, because I feel like it would have been easy for him to write white guy sci-fi forever.
I had really liked Celeste Ng's first novel, but Little Fires Everywhere, set in the US suburbs in the 90s and featuring class differences and cross racial adoptions, did very little for me. Maybe if I were more of literary fiction person...
(Graphic Novels of late have been: The Mighty Thor: Lords of Midgard, The Mighty Thor: The Asgard/Shi'ar War, Bombshells: Allies, Mockingbird: I Can Explain.
Jane Foster!Thor continues to be my favourite, and of the comics I've tried so far the one where the art style works best for me.
Bombshells with it's ladies kissing and no super dudes allowed clubhouse is so very much in my wheelhouse that I don't even care that the plot lurches around a tiny bit incoherently.
I'm not surprised Mockingbird was not long for this world, it was cute and funny and all, but it leaned too hard on the puzzlebox aspect which was not nearly as clever as it seemed to think it was.)