Xiran Jay Zhao is a gem, and if you have not picked up their debut novel or stumbled upon their social media channels you are missing out. There is something so magnetic about Zhao, and I find that they always earn my undivided attention. Iron Widow certainly ensnared me, and I was hooked on this…
Before I start this review, a few orders of business must be addressed. First: we have an unwritten rule at The Quill To Live that we don’t review sequels unless we have reviewed previous installments. Look at me, shirking tradition, braving the unknown just like Clarke’s fictional spacefarers! Well, not quite. Though we never reviewed…
Fresh from our Dark Horse list for the first half of 2020 comes Lora Beth Johnson’s Goddess in the Machine. This YA-leaning debut hits hard with twists and turns galore, all neatly packaged in a far-future setting with a mysterious cast tangled in an intricate web of court intrigue. Andra (short for Andromeda) wakes up…
Continue reading ➞ Goddess in the Machine – An Otherworldly Sci-Fi Debut
It’s a little embarrassing to admit, but I’ve never read a Kate Elliott book before. I didn’t even realize how prolific a writer she is until someone recently pointed it out to me. While I consider myself pretty adventurous, this definitely feels like a glaring blind spot. Absent literally any other segue, what caught my…
Continue reading ➞ Unconquerable Sun – It Will Brighten Your Day with a Nuclear Radiance
I’ve had no small amount of difficulty deciding how to rate this book. Cold Storage, by David Koepp, is a horror novel that essentially takes Richard Preston’s nonfiction book, The Hot Zone, and jazzes it up with sentient mushrooms instead of Ebola. It’s a choice that should have fallen firmly within my wheelhouse but, spoiler alert, my…
Continue reading ➞ Cold Storage: More Like Lukewarm but Still Comfortable
After reading Broken Stars earlier this year, I became somewhat enamored by the idea of short story collections. I love that they can be incredibly focused while allowing the reader some room to explore outside the story. So when offered the chance to read Future Tense Fiction, a collection of works from well known contemporary…
Continue reading ➞ Future Tense Fiction – A Variety of Hope and Anxiety
Nearly two years ago, I sat in Chicago’s beautifully ornate Music Box theatre at the peak of the venue’s 70MM film festival eagerly waiting for the lights to dim and for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to begin. Next to me sat Ian Simmons, a friend, a coworker, and a movie critic/superhero capable of…
I have not engaged with a lot of horror on the written page. I enjoy watching horror movies, good or bad, and sometimes play survival-horror games, but I rarely read it. I have Edgar Allan Poe’s collected works and got turned onto Laird Barron by our resident horror reader Will, but beyond that, I am…
Continue reading ➞ The Luminous Dead – Dark, Bleak And Lively
The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite, created by My Chemical Romance frontrunner Gerard Way and brought to artistic life by Gabriel Ba, sits at a unique crossroads both within the current cultural zeitgeist and on my bookshelf. With the Netflix adaptation premiering tomorrow as of this writing, I can only imagine the book’s sales have received…
Continue reading ➞ Umbrella Academy – A Blunderous Bumbershoot
