THE FRIDAY SOCIETY – Adrienne Kress is an illiterate fuck

An action-packed tale of gowns, guys, guns –and the heroines who use them all

Set in turn of the century London, The Friday Society follows the stories of three very intelligent and talented young women, all of whom are assistants to powerful men: Cora, lab assistant; Michiko, Japanese fight assistant; and Nellie, magician’s assistant. The three young women’s lives become inexorably intertwined after a chance meeting at a ball that ends with the discovery of a murdered mystery man.

It’s up to these three, in their own charming but bold way, to solve the murder–and the crimes they believe may be connected to it–without calling too much attention to themselves.

Set in the past but with a modern irreverent flare, this Steampunk whodunit introduces three unforgettable and very ladylike–well, relatively ladylike–heroines poised for more dangerous adventures.

Shallow characters. Shallow understanding of racism. Shit plot. Shit prose. Weeaboo maggotry. This book is the epitome of what YA is really about: mass-produced illiterate fiction for illiterate people, encouraging them to read more of the same and to think that their consumption of illiterate media stands in for intelligence.

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Caitlin Kiernan’s SILK – in which a novel reads like a story arc from THE DREAMING

silk caitlin r kiernan

They are the young misfits…society’s castoffs…urban strays looking for a thrill. Something cheap, anything to get them through the night. Sleepwalking on caffeine, nicotine, and drugs, they wait out the dawn in death-rock clubs and shadowy back alleys…

Then into their midst comes the enigmatic Spyder. A patron saint of the alienated and lost, she invites them into her mesmerizing world-but has she been sent to redeem them or destroy them?

As the title indicates, this book reads very much like a story arc from The Dreaming, which should be of little surprise: that Sandman spin-off was, after all, taken over and solely directed by Kiernan after the first few issues. Not a bad thing. Outside of some questionable narrative choices, the gang-rape of Nuala (ugh, yes, I know), and racefail… well, that’s a significant but, but taken altogether I liked The Dreaming okay, more or less. Certainly it’s an improvement upon Gaiman in most respects.

Unfortunately, because it reads like something that’d fill up maybe a couple issues of The Dreaming it means that Silk goes on for far, far too long. Slim at 368 pages, it defied my expectation of being a quick read and turned into one of those books I wished would end at page 200-something. There are too many characters, and the horror plot alternates between faintly interesting and tediously uncompelling. And there’s racefail too, naturally.

You’ll be surprised to know that I will still recommend Kiernan and am willing to give her another try. Not that you’d be able to tell that from the meat of this review.

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STAR WARS: where feminism goes to die, racism goes to thrive, and Drew Karpyshyn continues to prove that tie-in writers are worthless

I wasn’t going to do anything with Karpyshyn’s Revan except treat it as another bit of evidence that tie-ins can’t be taken seriously and that Star Wars is, overall, kind of shit and utterly lacking in anything of merit. Two things made me review this, at least partially, because you can’t pay me to read every word of this juvenile tripe.

The first is that it is another bit of evidence that tie-ins can’t be taken seriously and its worth is somewhere in the region of subzero. Not a single word in this text hints at an imagination, originality, or that the writer is capable of writing at any level above “lowest common denominator Star Wars fanboy who only reads other Star Wars fanfiction and nothing but.” You could dig and dig, and not a single sentence would present itself as evidence that Karpyshyn has ever read anything more advanced than movie novelizations, D&D fiction, and possibly Eragon.

The other is that this book is what you’d get if Jim Butcher contributed to the turdpile of Star Wars tie-ins instead of his very own Anita Blake-derived turdpile.

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DECEIVED: how Paul Kemp deceived someone into paying him to write

The second novel set in the Old Republic era and based on the massively multiplayer online game Star Wars®: The Old Republic™ ramps up the action and brings readers face-to-face for the first time with a Sith warrior to rival the most sinister of the Order’s Dark Lords—Darth Malgus, the mysterious, masked Sith of the wildly popular “Deceived” and “Hope” game trailers.

Malgus brought down the Jedi Temple on Coruscant in a brutal assault that shocked the galaxy. But if war crowned him the darkest of Sith heroes, peace would transform him into something far more heinous—something Malgus would never want to be, but cannot stop, any more than he can stop the rogue Jedi fast approaching.

Her name is Aryn Leneer—and the lone Knight that Malgus cut down in the fierce battle for the Jedi Temple was her Master. And now she’s going to find out what happened to him, even if it means breaking every rule in the book.

I like that even in product descriptions you still get the copyright sign by “Star Wars” and the trademark sign by “The Old Republic.” I’m tempted to say that this is, really, all you need to know about this book.

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Kay Kenyon: ORIENTAIST COCKWAD’S TAKE ON FAKE CHINA

In a land-locked galaxy that tunnels through our own, the Entire is a bizarre and seductive mix of long-lived quasi-human and alien beings gathered under a sky of fire, called the bright. A land of wonders, the Entire is sustained by monumental storm walls and an exotic, never-ending river. Over all, the elegant and cruel Tarig rule supreme. Into this rich milieu is thrust Titus Quinn, former star pilot, bereft of his beloved wife and daughter who are assumed dead by everyone on earth except Quinn. Believing them trapped in a parallel universe – one where he himself may have been imprisoned – he returns to the Entire without resources, language, or his memories of that former life. He is assisted by Anzi, a woman of the Chalin people, a Chinese culture copied from our own universe and transformed by the kingdom of the bright. Learning of his daughter’s dreadful slavery, Quinn swears to free her. To do so, he must cross the unimaginable distances of the Entire in disguise, for the Tarig are lying in wait for him. As Quinn’s memories return, he discovers why. Quinn’s goal is to penetrate the exotic culture of the Entire – to the heart of Tarig power, the fabulous city of the Ascendancy, to steal the key to his family’s redemption. But will his daughter and wife welcome rescue? Ten years of brutality have forced compromises on everyone. What Quinn will learn to his dismay is what his own choices were, long ago, in the Universe Entire. He will also discover why a fearful multiverse destiny is converging on him and what he must sacrifice to oppose the coming storm.

Bright of the Sky is a soft sci-fi novel that can be roughly summarized as HELLO MY NAME IS KAY KENYON AND I AM A RACIST ORIENTALIST COCKWAD OF THE HIGHEST ORDER, NICE TO MEET YOU, CHINKS! 

Now that we’ve got that out of the way.

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DESIDERIA, Nicole Kornher-Stace

When Ange St Loup is brought unconscious to the madhouse of the Amaranth, she is outlandishly dressed, covered with scorches from the building she burned and bruises from jumping out one of its windows, and her mouth is sewn shut. And that is all she knows. Even as her memory returns to her, and she begins to piece together the puzzle of her life as an actress in the theatre Lady Minerva, every answer only raises further questions, and at the heart of them remain the ones she has no answers for. Answers that might explain what she was doing in an alley, by night, outside a burning building, with her face mutilated and her mind in tatters. Which version of the story is the truth? Is it Ange’s own, despite the amnesia that only gives back her past in fragments? Is it the madhouse warders’, which paints Ange as a murderer, or the prioress’s, which paints her as insane? Is it the one that returns to Ange piecemeal, over time, growing only more sinister as it inches toward completion? Or is the truth something more complex, more dangerous, than anything that Ange can even grasp?

It’s rare for me to read a novel to see what happens next. I usually read it for something else–setting, language, characters–but most novels don’t fill me with the need to know how it ends and what happens. It’s nice, but it’s incidental.

Desideria impelled me with I must know.
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Ellen Kushner is a talentless hack and SWORDSPOINT is undiluted tripe

I’m probably in the minority, but I couldn’t even bring myself to finish this piece of bore.

See, I really didn’t expect much of this book going in: serviceable prose, functional plot, shallow but fun characters with amusing banter–something on the same level as Lynch’s Gentleman Bastards novels, albeit with less flair and less wit. Hell, I kind of expected Swordspoint to be only slightly better than your average D&D-spinoff novel. Surely that’s not too demanding?

It manages to meet none of those expectations.
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Karen Lord’s REDEMPTION IN INDIGO

Paama flees her gluttonous husband, Ansige; two years later, he hires the master tracker Kwame to find her. Kwame reluctantly takes the job to finance his own wanderlust. These events draw the attention of the Indigo Lord, one of the powerful spirits called Djombi. He wielded the power of Chaos until it was taken from him and given to Paama, and he wants it back. An unnamed narrator, sometimes serious and often mischievous, spins delicate but powerful descriptions of locations, emotions, and the protagonists’ great flaws and great strengths as they interact with family, poets, tricksters, sufferers of tragedy, and—of course—occasional moments of pure chaos.
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