The House of Sorrowing Stars by Beth Cartwright
(Penguin Random House, 2022)
Reviewed by Estelle Roberts
This beautiful and atmospheric novel, the second by author Beth Cartwright, has a very magical realist feel and sensibility. Despite beginning in a city which could very much be in nineteenth century western Europe, it has the elements of magic being alive within a seemingly normal and mundane world.
Liddy Harchwood is the daughter of a marchpane maker. Despite her young age, she has learnt much from her father, and is almost as accomplished as he is. She also delivers the sweets to homes around the town, allowing the reader to become acquainted with some of its residents, including Lady Chamberlain, who holds an annual party which she never attends, preferring to listen from her sickbed. Liddy sits with her on these occasions, providing comfort and company.
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Review from BSFA Review 18 - Download your copy here.
Embertide: A Fallow Sisters Novel by Liz Williams
(NewCon Press, 2022)
Reviewed by D.A. Lascelles
Embertide is the third in the Fallow Sisters series that began with Comet Weather and continued in Blackthorn Winter. If you are coming to this book having not read both of these, it would definitely be worth looking at these first otherwise you will get lost.
In Comet Weather we were introduced to the Fallow sisters—Bee, Stella, Serena and Luna—as they searched for their missing mother, Alys, and came to understand something of their family’s occult legacy. Bee lives in the old family home in Somerset, Stella and Serena work in London and Luna lives on the road with her Romany boyfriend, Sam. Throughout the previous books, each sister faces challenges and discovers things about themselves, in particular each one learns about their magical abilities.
The Girl Who Fell Beneath The Sea by Axie Oh
(Hodder & Stoughton, 2022)
Reviewed by Ksenia Shcherbino
Axie Oh’s The Girl Who Fell Beneath The Sea is a sweet and neat fairy tale about coming of age through the encounter with the fantastic.
In a village by the sea they have a cruel tradition. Every so often a maiden beautiful, or skilled in crafts, or intelligent and otherwise distinguished, is thrown into the sea to become Sea God’s bride and ensure her people’s safety. Mina is neither, but she is brave, strong-willed and devoted to her family. So, when her brother falls in love with a girl who is chosen for this year’s rite, she secretly follows them to the sacrificial site and jumps into the water to take the bride’s place. This is Mina’s entry into the Spirit world, and for some inexplicable twist of fate, or rather, red ribbon of fate, she is tied to the Sea God. The Sea God is no monster, but a young boy under a deep spell. His sleep is affecting not just the human world, but the Spirit realm as well. Our self-appointed bride is determined to protect her village, but finds herself in the centre of palace intrigues, shape-shifting dragons, shifting identities and shuffled allegiances. She embarks on a journey to break the spell and wake the Sea God, and the truth she uncovers changes her life forever.
Only a Monster Can Kill a Hero by Vanessa Len
Reviewed by John Dodd
Girl meets Boy, something special about him, first date soon results in mass murder…
Well, it’s not Twilight, that’s for sure.
Joan doesn’t believe that she’s a monster. She thinks that her gran is just saying those things in the way that misguided older relatives often do, and so she makes her way in the world till she finds someone who’s interested in her and takes the chance of going out to see them, to take her first steps in the adult world. Things don’t quite go to plan. Joan realises that her gran was telling the truth, and that she is in fact a monster and worse, that the boy she went to see for the first time is a Hero.
The Hero.
Nettle and Bone by T. Kingfisher
(Titan Books, 2022)
Reviewed by Anne F. Wilson
“Three tasks the dust-wife had given her. Sew a cloak of owlcloth and nettles, build a dog of cursed bones, and catch moonlight in a jar of clay. Three tasks, and then the dust-wife would give her the tools to kill a prince.”
Marra is the third daughter of a King and Queen whose kingdom stands between two much bigger rival kingdoms. Through years of diplomacy Marra’s mother has managed to balance the competing claims of their neighbours and stave off war. Now Marra’s eldest sister Damia is of age, she can marry the son of the Northern Kingdom and bring peace and stability. Unfortunately, a few months after the wedding, Damia dies, and her second sister Kania is lined up to marry the prince. Marra is safely tucked away in a convent in case of need. Then on a visit to the Northern Kingdom she discovers that the prince is a sadist, he murdered Damia, and Kania is suffering though repeated pregnancies and stillbirths to avoid the same fate.
The God of Lost Words by A.J. Hackwith
Reviewed by Kate Onyett
This final book in a trilogy about the ultimate Library is a romping, endearing, emotional roller-coaster of a ride with a crunchy, biscuity base of non-conformist love and learning.
First understand that every song, story, poem, dream and communication—in fact every creative imagining a human can make—is never totally lost. The greater number of such things are abandoned—intentionally or unintentionally lost to memory—but find their way to the various Wings of an arcane Library that stores these outpourings. Each wing being hosted in various realms of the after- (between?-) life.
Disnaeland by D.D. Johnston
(Barbican Press, 2022)
Reviewed by Dan Hartland
The late American comedian George Carlin once joked, “The planet is fine…the people are fucked!” When we speak of the end of the world, then, what we most often mean is the end of civilisation. It is of course a dangerously freighted word, carrying as it does a wide load of assumptions, prejudices and sins. This is the tension at the heart of D.D. Johnston’s Disnaeland, a novel narrated in an Anglicised version of the Scots dialect that focuses on the central Scottish town of Dundule in 2023—the year in which, in the alternative reality of this novel (and which, according to the author, is “just as real as our own”), the world ends.
Cosmogramma by Courttia Newland
(Canongate, 2021)
Cosmogramma is a kaleidoscope of a book, or rather, a kaleidoscope of worlds fuelled by sadness, and alienation, and hope that, against all odds, we will somehow make it all work. The settings of his stories are all very different, but the main themes are repeated over and over: dislocation, displacement, non-belonging, marginalisation, self-destruction, (self)-rejection and a vehement, almost frantic, wish to be understood—and to understand how you and your world came around. There are no answers in this book, yet it asks the right type of questions, questions that, even in a democratic society, we rarely ask out aloud. Who are we? Where do we belong? What if we do not fit in? Where do we go? And who comes after us? In the post-Brexit, post-pandemic world, with the raging war between Russia and Ukraine that bares—again—very inconvenient truths about human beings, Newland stories, though post-apocalyptic and clearly speculative, hit a nerve.
Out of the Ruins edited by Preston Grassmann
(Titan Books, 2021)
Reviewed by Andy Sawyer
Apocalypses and end-times are among the most popular sf subjects, but there’s always something slightly odd about the combination of anxiety and pleasure in reading them. “Apocalypse” is more than “disaster” or even “catastrophe”. It really is the underlining finality of everything. Hence, a collection of “apocalypse” stories is bound to be uneven and challenging. There is almost certainly going to be an overload in a series of stories which rip up and throw away human history in inventive ways.
Randalls Round: Nine Nightmares by Eleanor Scott
(British Library, 2021)
Reviewed by Maureen Kincaid Speller
The 1920s were a rich period for ghost story writing, exemplified by the stories that appeared in Cynthia Asquith’s Ghost Book series, the first volume of which came out in 1927. That featured work from familiar names, such as Algernon Blackwood, Oliver Onions, Hugh Walpole, and May Sinclair. Other writers producing work at this time included E.F. Benson, H. Russell Wakefield, and William Fryer Harvey. M.R. James himself was still occasionally publishing short stories, and a collected edition of his short stories would appear in 1931.
In the midst of all this, in 1929, without much fanfare, the publisher Ernest Benn issued a collection of nine short stories by Helen Leys, writing as Eleanor Scott. Randalls Round was described as a collection of ‘weird and uncanny’ stories but marketed very poorly so that it sank almost without trace. Needless to say, copies of that edition are not easily come by. Scott’s fortunes were revived, to a degree, in the 1970s and 1980s, when Hugh Lamb and Richard Dalby included some of her stories in their anthologies but it was not until 1996, when Ash-Tree Press produced a new hardback edition of the collection, that it was possible to properly see what the fuss was all about. Now, nearly thirty years later, the British Library has published a reasonably priced paperback edition and a new generation of ghost-story aficionados can see what the fuss is all about.
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