Microbiota and the Masses: A Love Story by S.B. Divya


Microbiota and the Masses: A Love Story by S.B. Divya
Publisher: Tor Books
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Contemporary
Length: Short Story (33 pages)
Heat Level: Sweet
Rating: 3.5 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

Moena lives in a world of her own making, sealed off from the deadly pathogens of Bangalore in her own personal biome. But when she meets Rahul, a beautiful man working to clean up his city, her need for him draws her into danger. She will risk her health and her work to satisfy her lust for Rahul, and may find love along the way… in S.B. Divya’s Microbiota and the Masses, a Tor.com Original.

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The romantic subplot was handled beautifully. I was initially a little surprised at the thought of someone who lived such an isolated and restrictive lifestyle having any chance at all of falling in love, especially since the main character had many other pressing problems to deal with at the same time. Ms. Divya balanced the romance and science fiction portions of her story perfectly, though, and I loved seeing the protagonist move between her personal and professional lives with such ease. It brought a lot of nuance to her personality that I wouldn’t have otherwise gotten a chance to see.

Moena’s reasons for sealing herself off from all of the pathogens in Bangalore weren’t easy to figure out. My original theory about why she chose to do this turned out to be completely inaccurate. Given how important this was for the plot, I wish she’d been much more clear early on about why she made such a drastic decision for herself. It wouldn’t have given away any spoilers, and it would have helped me understand what sort of science fiction tale I was actually reading.

One of my favorite parts of this scene had to do with Moena’s scientific research. She lived in an area that was heavily polluted and full of germs that could make even a healthy adult dangerously ill. The exact nature of her research wasn’t revealed until later on in the storyline, but I was fascinated by the thought of one scientist attempting to solve a problem that entire teams of experts had yet to figure out.

Microbiota and the Masses: A Love Story should be read by fans of the romance and science fiction genres alike.

The Autobiography of a Traitor and a Half-Savage by Alix E. Harrow


The Autobiography of a Traitor and a Half-Savage by Alix E. Harrow
Publisher: Tor Books
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Paranormal, Historical
Length: Short Story (49 pages)
Rating: 4 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

Oona’s blood is a river delta blending east and west, her hair red as Tennessee clay, her heart tangled as the wild lands she maps. By tracing rivers in ink on paper, Oona pins the land down to one reality and betrays her people. Can she escape the bonds of gold and blood and bone that tie her to the Imperial American River Company?

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Oona’s character development was amazing. Not only did I get a perfectly clear understanding of why she’d decided to do things that violated her moral code, I had a great deal of sympathy for the reasons that lead to her making these choices. She was a complex and sympathetic person from the first scene to the last one. The only thing better than getting to know her was seeing how she evolved over the course the of the plot.

It would have been helpful to have clarification about which Native American tribe Oona was supposed to have come from. While I understood why some parts of her family tree were so mysterious for her, not knowing about such an important detail about her life was a little disappointing to me as a reader because of how much else I’d been told about other parts of her life that were much less significant to her.

The ending was as poetic as it was satisfying. I’d come to appreciate the protagonist’s sometimes whimsical approach to describing her past and present. Seeing her continue this trend even to the end of the final paragraph was delightful. It was exactly what I’d expect from Oona, and it left me feeling quite pleased with how her conflicts were resolved.

I’d heartily recommend The Autobiography of a Traitor and a Half-Savage to new and longterm fans of the fantasy genre alike.

A Human Stain by Kelly Robson


A Human Stain by Kelly Robson
Publisher: Tor Books
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Horror, Historical
Length: Short Story (40 pages)
Rating: 3 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

“A Human Stain” by Kelly Robson is a disturbing horror novelette about a British expatriate at loose ends who is hired by her friend to temporarily care for his young, orphaned nephew in a remote castle-like structure in Germany.

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This was one of the creepiest things I’ve read in ages. It was creepy to think of Helen, the protagonist, living in a crumbling mansion with a child who kept doing alarming things and other staff members who refused to confirm or deny anything about why the boy behaved that way or whether his actions were a sign of something even more horrifying from his past.

What this story needed more than anything was a much more detailed description of the secrets that Herr Lambrecht and the people he employed at the mansion were keeping from Helen. This was by far the most important part of the plot, so I was surprised by how it was handled once she realized there was something very odd about her young charge. I was intrigued by what was shared, but I had enough trouble putting all of the pieces together that I didn’t feel justified in giving this book the higher score I’d originally thought it deserved.

Helen was a likeable main character whom I desperately hoped would be okay once she realized exactly how much danger she was in. I marvelled at all of the hints about her past that poked through as she adjusted to her strange new home and job. It was the sort of position that wouldn’t appeal to most tutors or nannies, so it was nice to know why she was so in need of a job that she overlooked red flags more observant and less desperate employees would have picked up on early on.

If you love the horror genre, give A Human Stain a try.

Sleepless by Melissa Frost


Sleepless by Melissa Frost
Tales from Esteria 3
Publisher: Evernight Teen
Genre: Action/Adventure, Historical, Sci-Fi/Fantasy
Length: Short Story (64 pages)
Age Recommendation: 14+
Rating: 3.5 stars
Reviewed by Orchid

This Sleeping Beauty won’t take things lying down…
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After being shoved from a high castle balcony into the moat below, Princess Talia searches for the man responsible for saving her from certain death. After much digging, she is surprised to find that her rescuer is none other than an outlaw named Phillip Aurora—an enemy to the crown. Once she tracks Phil to the castle dungeons and helps break him out, the two unlikely allies must band together to take down the crime lord responsible for the attempt on her life.

As the two battle bandits and take on impossible odds together, Talia finds herself falling for the rogue at her side. If they can survive the challenges in front of them, perhaps she’ll be able to put to the test that they aren’t all that different after all.

Sleeping Beauty with a difference. Talia is a feisty young princess who is frustrated with life as a royal in the castle. She likens herself to a hermit, hidden away from the world.

After an attempt on her life she has a unique way of finding who rescued her, she kisses every possible candidate for her hero. Together they set out to find the actual assassin.

I found this book to be delightful, but it didn’t really grab my attention. The hero and heroine were strong characters but the storyline didn’t really have any true excitement until the end. The first part dwelt on her kissing to search for her rescuer, but I felt it went on for too long.

However, the end came through with excitement and in the last page or two humor came to the fore. Definitely a cozy read for a rainy afternoon in front of the fire.

The Story of Kao Yu by Peter S. Beagle


The Story of Kao Yu by Peter S. Beagle
Publisher: Tor Books
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Historical
Length: Short Story (29 pages)
Rating: 3 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

“The Story of Kao Yu” is a new fantasy short story by the legendary Peter S. Beagle which tells of an aging judge traveling through rural China and of a criminal he encounters. Of the story, Beagle says it “comes out of a lifelong fascination with Asian legendry — Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Indonesian — all drawn from cultures where storytelling, in one form of another, remains a living art. As a young writer I loved everything from Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee mysteries to Lafcadio Hearn’s translations of Japanese fairytales and many lesser-known fantasies. Like my story ‘The Tale of Junko and Sayuri,’ ‘The Story of Kao Yu’ is a respectful imitation of an ancient style, and never pretends to be anything else. But I wrote it with great care and love, and I’m still proud of it.“

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Figuring out whether I thought the criminal was guilty or innocent of the things she’d been accused of intrigued me. There was evidence to support both answers, and it wasn’t entirely clear at first which one the audience or Kao Yu, the judge, were supposed to think of as the correct one. I enjoyed the process of weighing the various factors the author shared with his audience and deciding what I thought probably happened before the judge came to town.

It would have been helpful to have more details included in this story. Kao Yu’s interactions with the criminal he kept meeting up with fascinated me, but they were described so rapidly that it was hard for me to imagine what was happening in those scenes. This pattern repeated itself over and over again.

The ending fit the tone of this tale well. There was so much conflict happening in the main character’s mind and life that I looked forward to seeing how it would all be resoved. The fact that the author figured out how to tie everything together in a way that made sense and fit the beautiful imagery of the earlier scenes made me smile. I didn’t want it to end so soon, but I was also quite satisfied by how it was all wrapped up.

The Story of Kao Yu should be read by anyone who likes legends or fairy tales. While it was written recently, it feels much older than it is in a very good way.

Paths to the Stars by Edward Willett


Paths to the Stars: Twenty-Two Fantastical Tales of Imagination by Edward Willett
Publisher: Shadowpaw Press
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Paranormal, Horror, Contemporary, Historical
Length: Full Length (327 pages)
Rating: 4 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

From Edward Willett, Aurora Award-winning author of Marseguro, The Cityborn, and Worldshaper (DAW Books), among many others, comes twenty-two tales of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, drawn from a long career of telling fantastic tales.

A young musician dreams of playing his songs among the stars…A Broadway performer on the lam is forced to direct aliens in The Sound of Music…Strange vegetables with dangerous properties crop up in small-town Saskatchewan…A man with a dark secret gets his comeuppance on a windy night on the prairie…An elderly caretaker on the Moon preserves the memory of the millions who died on Earth’s darkest day…A woman and a bat-like alien must overcome their own prejudices to prevent an interstellar war…

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Time to go exploring…

From dusty, old-fashioned farmhouses from generations ago to gleaming space ships who will fly around in the distant future, there’s something in this collection for a wide variety of tastes.

“Strange Harvest” showed what happened to the community of Drinkwell, Saskatchewan when the farmers and gardeners there began noticing that their crops didn’t look, taste, or behave like anything they’d ever seen before. I was fascinated by the thought of something as ordinary as a potato becoming dangerous for humans to be around. It made me think about farmer’s markets in an entirely different way, although I can’t say much more else about it without giving away spoilers. While I was satisfied with how this one ended, I also would have loved to know what happened to the characters after the final scene.

All of the stories in this anthology had attention-grabbing premises and were a pleasure to read. With that being said, there were a few of them that I thought could have used a little extra development. For example, it took me a while to understand what was happening in ““The Mother’s Keepers.” The protagonist, Praella, didn’t have a good understanding of how her society functioned at all. While I wouldn’t expect a drone like her to know everything, I was surprised by the gaps in her memory, especially once I got to know more about her insect-like race and began to make my own assumptions about how their society was structured and how they reproduced. This tale would have been one of my favorites if I’d had a better understanding of what her species was like and why she knew so little about the practical details of their lives.

Carl, the main character in “The Wind,” was haunted by his memories of his dead wife. Little did he know that a metaphorical haunting might not be the only thing he had to worry about. The plot twists in this tale were as clever as they were fun to read. While I did see them coming in advance, I was still quite curious to know if I’d made the correct assumptions about what the clues in the beginning were hinting at. It was rewarding to find out if I was right and see what happened to this character next.

Paths to the Stars: Twenty-Two Fantastical Tales of Imagination was a creative collection that I’d highly recommend to anyone who appreciates the occasionally humorous side of this genre.

Excerpts from a Film (1942-1987) by A. C. Wise


Excerpts from a Film (1942-1987) by A.C. Wise
Publisher: Tor Books
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Horror, Paranormal, Historical
Length: Short Story (37 pages)
Rating: 3 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

“Excerpts from a Film (1942-1987)” by A.C. Wise is a disturbing horror novelette about a young woman, who like many others, goes to Hollywood to become a star and is haunted by the murders of several other aspiring actresses. And of her influence, rippling up through the years, on the man who “discovered” her and on film itself.

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Not every ghost has the same agenda, and not every ghost story unfolds the same way. One of the most interesting parts of this tale for me was figuring out what the dead wanted and how they decided they were going to try to accomplish their mission. At times I wasn’t even sure that they knew what they wanted, but that was a good thing. There was a lot of room for interpretation here, and that was a great choice for this particular storyline.

I figured out the plot twist for this story almost immediately. There were quite a few clues about what was really going on, and they popped up pretty early in the storyline. It would have been helpful to hold off on some of them for a few scenes so that I would have needed to work harder to figure out what the author was trying to hint at. I was disappointed at how easy it was to piece everything together right away.

Switching between two different narrators who were living in eras set a few decades apart was a smart decision for this tale. Both of them were well developed and revealed portions of the plot to the audience that the other narrator couldn’t possibly have known. I enjoyed reading about their interpretations of the same events, especially later on once they began to experience or remember the darker scenes.

Excerpts from a Film (1942-1987) should be read by anyone who has ever been haunted by their past or wondered what such an experience would be like.

Living Proof by Michelle L Levigne


Living Proof by Michelle L Levigne
The Neighborlee Ohio Series Book 8
Publisher: Uncial Press
Genre: Contemporary, Holiday, Inspirational, Sci-Fi/Fantasy
Length: Full length (271 pages)
Rating: 5 stars
Reviewed by Orchid

With their adopted parents out of town researching their next book, her brothers, Harry and Pete, are staying with Lanie. Christmas is approaching, and that means shopping–which she hates. Even worse, Charlie and Rainbow have missed their last check-in call. While that has happened before, this time Lanie is starting to get worried.

Then the newspaper where she works gets a new owner, and Lanie gets shifted from the school sports beat to the lovelorn column. Despite all she does at her snarky best to get fired from the column, Lanie just can’t win. Even worse, her new boss is a fan and wants to be friends.

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Someone is out to get her, and as Lanie and her friends put the clues together, the mystery and the attempts to harm her just get more intense. She is living proof that no good deed goes unpunished.

Lanie and her brothers are worried when her parents disappear in the Bermuda Triangle. They also have troubles of their own. Lanie has a new boss at the newspaper who angers her by putting her in charge of the Agony Aunt’s column and taking away her sports column. On top of that someone seems to be trying to kill her.

Luckily her family live in Neighborlee where the weird is the norm and the community rallies round to take care of their own.

Did I mention Lanie is in a wheelchair? This doesn’t stop her doing exactly what she wants, and anyone who knows her tends to ignore her disability. People who don’t have an annoying habit of treating her like an imbecile. Lanie is a very strong character and her life tends to revolve around family and friends. Friends like Felicity who can fry any electronics if she loses her temper near them.

Magic, fantasy and the mystery of who is trying to kill her all weave together to make this another fabulous Neighborlee book.

These books always entrance me and, as usual, I read this one in one day. I can’t seem to put them down once I start reading them.

Z-Bot by S. C. Mitchell


Z-Bot by S. C. Mitchell
Publisher: Soul Mate Publishing
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy
Length: Full Length (239 pgs)
Heat Level: Hot
Rating: 4 stars
Review by Rose

Chris Johnson never really started living until he died. Orphaned, fostered, and drifting through life, the twenty-seven year old programmer had no family, little money, and few friends. But he also had no enemies. So, who the hell killed him? After an experimental process brings him back from the dead as a zombiebot, he gets the chance to find out.
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Heather Logan’s latest process uses nanobots to reanimate a corpse. Half robot, half something raised from the dead, Chris is her first successful resuscitation. Questions abound. What is it? Is it truly alive, a machine, or some kind of zombie-hybrid?

But someone wants to steal Heather’s secret process and put her out of the picture permanently. Chris, with his new superpowers, is the only thing standing between Heather and an assassin’s bullet. Is he enough of a hero to save her?

This is the first book in the author’s Xi Force series and it is scorching – in more ways than one! I loved the concept and could so see this as a Netflix or HBO series.

The characters were very cool… you have a female scientist who has developed the nano-technology to bring people back to life as “zombie robots”, a really hot guy who is the subject of her experiments, and a lot of good old fashioned action (not to mention the hot sex). And, it’s the perfect set up for the new series.

I loved the way the story is told from both Chris and Heather’s points of view… it allowed for some very entertaining moments. A nice light touch in a book that’s otherwise filled with non-stop action. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the books in the series. Good job, Mr. Mitchell.

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin


Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Genre: Action/Adventure, Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Middle Grade
Length: Full Length (278 pgs)
Age Recommendation: 8+
Rating: 5 stars
Reviewed by Poinsettia

This stunning fantasy inspired by Chinese folklore is a companion novel to Starry River of the Sky and the New York Times bestselling and National Book Award finalist When the Sea Turned to Silver

In the valley of Fruitless mountain, a young girl named Minli lives in a ramshackle hut with her parents. In the evenings, her father regales her with old folktales of the Jade Dragon and the Old Man on the Moon, who knows the answers to all of life’s questions. Inspired by these stories, Minli sets off on an extraordinary journey to find the Old Man on the Moon to ask him how she can change her family’s fortune. She encounters an assorted cast of characters and magical creatures along the way, including a dragon who accompanies her on her quest for the ultimate answer.

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Who knew a goldfish could set Minli on the adventure of a lifetime?

Minli’s family works hard but are very poor. Yet Minli still finds joy in her life. She is captivated by the stories her father, Ba, tells every night. While Minli delights in her father’s tales, her mother, Ma, does not. Ma sees little use in telling stories of magic and treasure when their life is so dull and dreary. I found it extremely sad to watch Ma’s bitterness taint the happiness Minli found in the stories. In an attempt to change her family’s fortune, Minli buys a goldfish, which only further upsets Ma. Even though it is done unintentionally, Ma’s sour attitude has deeply affected Minli. Determined to change her family’s life and make Ma happy, Minli sets off on a quest to find the Old Man of the Moon and ask him how to change her family’s fortune. Can one small girl find the Old Man of the Moon?

Minli is a great heroine and role model for children. She is smart, resourceful, kind, and brave. She cares deeply for her parents as well as the friends she makes on her journey. When she leaves home, she isn’t running away from her parents or her life. She’s searching for a way to make it better. I must add I am extremely glad to see parents portrayed in a positive and loving manner. I have read too many books for children and teens in which parents are absent, indifferent, or neglectful. It is clear Minli’s parents love her very much and are anxious for her return.

Minli’s story is broken up by many small stories which are relevant to her journey, and I love how Ms. Lin wove all these tales and together. As I read, I began to see links forming between them. It was interesting to see how they all connected not only to each other, but also to Minli’s story.

Minli began her quest with the desire to change her family’s fortune. However, when she finally meets the Old Man of the Moon, she faces an unexpected dilemma and a difficult choice. I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say Minli’s response to the situation is beautiful, and I couldn’t have asked for a better ending to such a lovely story.

I had so much fun reading Where the Mountain Meets the Moon. It is a wonderful tale of family and friendship. I highly recommend it to readers young and old alike.