The month's reviews have been archived and cross-linked at the main Brightdreamer Books site.
And yet another year is coming to a close, so it's time for yet another reading year in review. My real life has been in a holding pattern (with a distinct downward glide, for various reasons - another year when "at least I'm not completely on fire yet" is about as close as I am to things being "good"), so reading provided a welcome escape.
January kicked off with V. E. Schwab's much-lauded The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, which did not entirely live up to its own hype but was nevertheless a decent read. I also finally got around to the classic Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov, whose style and very retro-feeling future aged far worse than its general ideas. This is also the month when overtime at work and general burnout/lack of other viable employment options prompted me to either gnaw a limb off to escape or turn to audiobooks via the local library and Overdrive (appropriate, as I work at the local library shipping center) for distraction, with Becky Chambers's thought-provoking novella To Be Taught, If Fortunate as my successful test drive. High points of January included A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking, by T. Kingfisher, and Jordan Ifueko's impressive young adult fantasy Raybearer. The month's low point, unfortunately, was Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton, an initially fun and intriguing post-zombie-apocalypse animal odyssey that overstayed its welcome and overplayed its Message by the end.
February, though the shortest month of the year, ironically was my most prolific one insofar as reading, though the titles were a mixed bag. Standouts were Seanan McGuire's Across the Green Grass Fields, Wonderstorm's The Art of The Dragon Prince, and P. Djeli Clark's novella The Haunting of Tram Car 015. I also enjoyed the exploration of racial tensions during a city riot in I'm Not Dying With You Tonight, by Kimberley Jones and Gilly Segal, and the third volume of Jeff Lemire's Ascender graphic novels. February's biggest disappointment was Jenifer Ruff's tale of Arctic survival When They Find Us, which squandered its potential. Also, Amparo Oritz's Blazewrath Games lacked the fire that a dragon-themed story should have... not unlike Patrick Ness's overlong alternate history tale Burn.
March opened with a bang in Tochi Onyebuchi's brutally gripping sci-fi tale War Girls, about a future Nigerian civil war fought by mech pilots and cybernetically enhanced soldiers on an increasingly uninhabitable Earth. I also enjoyed Kelley Armstrong's middle-grade fantasy adventure A Royal Guide to Monster Slaying, and Daniel Abraham's slow-burn The Long Price Quartet showed the value in sticking out an iffy first volume for greater rewards down the line. Low points could be found in Diane Les Becquets's tale of a woman lost in the Colorado wilderness, Breaking Wild, Marie Brennan's listless Driftwood, and Timothy Zahn's Night Train to Rigel, which embraced the throwback vibe too heartily by including some of the cringier aspects of old sci-fi pulp adventures. I also finally tried the prolific Adrian Tchaikovsky with the self-narrated audiobook novella Walking to Aldebaran, which was enjoyable enough for me to keep an eye peeled for other works by him when scrolling through Overdrive.
April opened with an unfortunate dud, one of the worst of the year, in The Loneliest Girl in the Universe by Lauren James, and ended with the decently adventurous (if inevitably dated) classic swashbuckler Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini. In between were several ups and downs, of which the top reads were P. Djeli Clark's horror fantasy Ring Shout, Margaret Owen's The Merciful Crow, and the final two books in Catherynne M. Valente's lyrical Fairyland series. Rob Hart's dystopian near future in The Warehouse was depressingly plausible (not just because I was listening to the audiobook while working in a warehouse, if not a big box store warehouse), and I was sadly disappointed in the first installment of the much-lauded Rivers of London series, Midnight Riot, by Ben Aaronovitch.
May was mostly a good reading month; even the lowest point (Heidi Heilig's The Girl From Everywhere) wasn't terrible, just meandering and with characters I never connected with. Angie Thomas's The Hate U Give tempted me out of my usual genre comfort zone, as did Jason Reynolds's free verse poem Long Way Down. An impulse buy of Suzanne Palmer's sci-fi adventure Finder proved an excellent choice. I also returned to Megan E. O'Keefe's exciting Protectorate space opera trilogy with Chaos Vector, and I finished off Margaret Owen's fantasy duology with The Faithless Hawk. Sarah Gailey's dark exploration of cloning and identity and generational abuse in The Echo Wife and Sarah Beth Durst's tale of monsters and reincarnation Race the Sands rounded things out.
June opened with the mildly disappointing Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo, read after watching the Netflix series based on the Grishaverse. I ventured back to the classics with Joe Haldeman's landmark indictment of the perpetual human habit of combat in The Forever War, finally got to the second in Mira "Seanan McGuire" Grant's Newsflesh trilogy with Deadline, and enjoyed the middle-grade fantasy adventure of Have Sword, Will Travel, by Garth Nix and Sean Williams. Liane Moriarty's Nine Perfect Strangers, unfortunately, never lived up to the promise of its premise, and Valerie Valdes's Chilling Effect was an overlong sci-fi joke whose punchline failed to make me so much as chuckle.
July included one of my favorite audiobook surprises of the year, Libba Bray's searing satire Beauty Queens. I finally got around to the much-lauded Joe Hill with the appropriately terrifying Heart-Shaped Box, and I returned to the Finder Chronicles with Suzanne Palmer's fine follow-up Driving the Deep. Adrian Tchaikovsky's Made Things also impressed, though Greg van Eeekhout's promising premise of osteomancy in California Bones never quite came together for me, and S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders suffered somewhat with age.
With only three reviews, August was my least productive reading month, and while none were outright terrible, none were particularly great. Of the lot, the best would be Kit Rocha's sci-fi adventure/romance Deal with the Devil, which actually remembered to put the "danger" in its dangerous post-apocalyptic future.
September kicked off with Django Wexler's Hard Reboot, a tale of battling mechs that didn't quite land its punches for me, and ended with the unexpectedly intriguing tale of haves, have-nots, prejudice, and plague in Sparkers by Eleanor Glewwe. In between, I enjoyed the harrowing young adult survival tale Adrift by Paul Griffin and the quirky, surprisingly dark middle-grade fantasy Cold Cereal by Adam Rex (after which you'll never look at a cartoon cereal mascot the same way again). I returned to Seanan McGuire's Ghost Roads with The Girl in the Green Silk Gown and enjoyed the trip... something I could not say, unfortunately, for my time with Zach Jordan's The Last Human.
October began and ended with horror, first with T. Kingfisher's chilling story of another world behind the walls of a small-town curiosity museum in The Hollow Places, and last with the conclusion to the original Newsflesh trilogy in Mira Grant's Blackout. I also wrapped up the excellent, fast-paced Protectorate sci-fi trilogy with Megan E. O'Keefe's Catalyst Gate, and was delightfully surprised by Beth Bernobich's imaginative fantasy Fox and Phoenix (which sadly has yet to see a sequel). Adrian Tchaikovsky again proved the range of his imagination with The Doors of Eden, examining alternate evolutionary paths.
November brought me back to P. Djeli Clark's marvelous alternate-1912 Cairo (which I first visited in the novella The Haunting of Tram Car 015) with one of my favorite reads of the year, A Master of Djinn, and the novella A Dead Djinn in Cairo, which was good, but which I probably would've enjoyed a little more had I read it before the novel. (Clark's prose seemed more polished in the novel, and there was more time to explore the great ideas.) The dystopian future New York City of Lincoln Michel's The Body Scout was unexpectedly gripping and depressingly plausible, and I returned to Adrian Tchaikovsky yet again with the first volume of his Bronze Age shapeshifter fantasy Echoes of the Fall series with The Tiger and the Wolf. I finally got to the fourth of Marie Brennan's A Natural History of Dragons series with In the Labyrinth of Drakes, and mostly enjoyed TJ Klune's ghostly love story Under the Whispering Door. I was less impressed, unfortunately, with Teagan Hunter's modern romance Let's Get Textual and Scarlett Thomas's middle-grade fantasy Dragon's Green.
December saw me returning to Tchaikovsky (what can I say? He has several audiobook titles through my library on Overdrive, so one is almost always bound to be available) to finish off Echoes of the Fall with The Bear and the Serpent and The Hyena and the Hawk. Mira Grant's Rolling in the Deep crossed mermaid lore with deep sea predators and sensationalist "documentary" network ethos for a terrifying tragedy. James S. A. Corey wrapped up the landmark Expanse space opera series in a suitably epic fashion with Leviathan Falls (even as the criminally overlooked televised adaptation kicked off its final six-episode season on Amazon Prime), and Neil Gaiman sent an unnamed narrator on a surreal trip down memory lane in The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
Overall, there were some great reads and discoveries this year, along with the disappointments. I hope 2022 offers some pleasant surprises in my reading, too (because, to be honest and with apologies for the grammar, it ain't lookin' great on the reality front, and not just because of the lingering pandemic).
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