Fiction: The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison (galley) – I have known the author online for many years, though we’ve only met in person a few times, briefly. I loved this. Straight up loved it. And since now it’s been out a while, you can see from various reviews and award nominations that many others loved it as well, so it’s not just me. It’s rare to find a fantasy in which the hero is not constantly cleaving people with swords. I felt an emotional connection to the protagonist almost immediately, and that carried me throughout. After I finished reading, I pre-ordered the hardcover.
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie has won many awards, and I liked it for the most part, but was not all that wowed by the creative use of gendered language that so many people wrote about. It did give me some thoughts about colonialism, and the ways colonialism is portrayed in speculative fiction.
The Night Is Mine by M. L. Buchman is romantic suspense with awesome military details and a tough combat-helicopter-pilot heroine who ends up in one of those bizarre situations that come up in romance novels (chef/bodyguard to the First Lady), about which she is very disgruntled. It is first in a series.
The Case of the Missing Marquess by Nancy Springer is a mystery featuring Enola Holmes, the much younger sister of the famous brother. It didn’t wow me, but I read it out of a vague completist instinct.
Body & Soul by Jordan Castillo Price, third in the PsyCop series, delivered undemanding entertainment and some new twists on the ongoing romance.
Just One Damned Thing After Another (The Chronicles of St Mary Book 1) by Jodi Taylor is a time-traveling historians story that I didn’t entirely enjoy but was compelled to finish. The tone was a little too dark for me, I think.
Mrs. Pollifax, Innocent Tourist by Dorothy Gilman seemed not to have been edited; it was rife with run-on sentences, as if it had been written in a sort of stream of consciousness: thoughts were separated only by commas, and sentences were sometimes not broken up like you would expect them to be. It definitely did not match up to my memories of earlier books in the series.
