Annihilation Aria by Michael R. Underwood

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don’t know if it’s from reading this book right after Becky Chambers Wayfarers series, but this book did not pull me in the way the other series did. It was fine, but I just finished it more out of obligation to finish than because I wanted to know what came next.

I think the best thing the book had going for it is that the antagonist was a 3D, fleshed out character rather than an out-and-out villain. He had rational motives that had more to do with the culture he was born into and political ambition than with mustache-twirling evil. The fact that he was part of a faction advocating more peace and financial gain than war also kept his species from being from a Planet of Hats.

The Breaking Light by Heather Hansen

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I got this book as part of Amazon’s Kindle First Reads where Prime members get a free ebook from a selection of ebooks each month

I didn’t like this book for 2 reasons:

1. It’s derivative in all the ways that don’t work for me. It’s got a Fritz Lang Metropolis setup that I’ve seen done a million times before from books like Red Rising to a half dozen anime. It tries to draw lots of parallels to Romeo and Juliet, but in that play, the families are equals. Here our Juliet is a poor girl in a gang and our Romeo is a rich boy who is trying to fight the city’s corruption. It IS a YA book. Maybe it works better for young folk who don’t know where the book cribs from.

The Boys, Volume 3: Good For The Soul by Garth Ennis

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Things are a little less profane and a little more of the story gets revealed. Maybe Ennis felt he had to be edgy in the first 2 volumes just to shock an audience into interest? That said, there’s still plenty juvenile gross out humor (Little Hughie’s face after a certain event) and the continued use of homophobic language to an extreme amount I haven’t heard since the middle school playground.

The Boys, Volume 2: Get Some by Garth Ennis

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This continues the feeling that Ennis is simply trying to be as profane as possible just because. The first story revolves around a super hero (kind of like a Batman crossed with Iron Man) who suddenly is unable to keep from having sex with anything living around him. The second story is actually a good, fun mystery but Ennis has a main plot point revolve around the main antagonist constantly having to use a vibrator.

Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I got this book for free from Tor.com’s ebook club. I highly recommend it - in exchange for your email address you get access to free books from Tor.com’s catalog; a new one each month. (Currently it’s a Brandon Sanderson book from Mistborn Era 2)

As I’ve mentioned in previous reviews, I usually don’t go back and read the descriptions of books I’ve added to my “Digital On Deck” list and lots of these books have been on that list for 1-2 years. So I had no idea what this book was going to be about. The title of the series, the artwork on this book, and some general buzz I’d heard about it gave me some idea. But they were the wrong ideas - IN THE BEST WAY!

Jumanji by Chris Van Allsburg

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Interestingly enough, I heard an audiobook of this picture book. It was on sale recently at libro.fm and I was curious about how a picture book became one of the first live action/adventure movies I saw as a kid. This book basically reads as a less whimsical, less rhyme-y version of The Cat in the Hat. The kids are left alone (oh, the freedom of kids in kid-lit) and they find Jumanji at the park. The parents leave them with the admonition of “not one thing out of place” because they’re coming back with more adults for an adult party. The game has the same effects in the book as it has in the movie.

Phenomenons: Every Human Creature by Michael Jan Friedman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What if you took Wild Cards and started off from a more modern place than the 1980s. What would you have? Well, for one thing, less gay slurs and stereotypes. For another, starting with a less sleazy, more modern NYC. I Kickstarted (at the level to get a Tuckerization) because I was a big fan of Mary Fan’s writing. As I mention below, during the Red Sky in Mourning review, my only real criticism of this shared world anthology is that the stories seem too short. Maybe it’s something about the way these authors write compared to the Wild Cards authors, but I feel like I’m just getting into the grooves of the stories in this anthology before they’re over. They’re currently working on a second anthology and I’m hoping things can expand a bit the second time out. I also think it would be neat to have them maybe have tighter intertwined stories like Wilds Cards 2 and 3. Or maybe a full-length story like later Wild Cards volumes. If you’re a fan of superhero comics, but wouldn’t mind experiencing it as prose, this is a good anthology for you.

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

We have reached the end of the Wayfarers series. As has been the case throughout the series, this is less about a specific plot than it is about getting to spend time with the characters that inhabit Chambers’ Wayfarers universe. As soon as I heard the prologue (for I was listening to the audiobook version) I had a strong suspicion this was going to be a Closed Circle plot. This suspicion was strengthened when it was revealed that we’d have a bunch of different aliens that, if it WAS a Closed Circle plot, would be stuck depending on each other and having to work past each others’ differences.

Set My Heart to Five by Simon Stephenson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is my favorite book of 2022 so far. I don’t remember what it was about the write-up on the Big Idea section of Scalzi’s blog that caused me to add this book to my TBR pile, but I’m glad I did.

As the description of the book says, our main character is a bot who suddenly finds himself experiencing emotions. What made the book an almost non-stop read for me was the voice in which the story is told. It’s as if Jared is telling us, conversationally, the story of what happened to him. To imagine the tone of this narration, imagine if Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation and the alien from Resident Alien were combined and then wrote their descriptions of humanity and all the weird things we do as we navigate the world. One example:

Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Chambers continues to make each book in this “series” a standalone that’s tangentially related to the other books. The second book continued with a couple characters from the first book, but otherwise did not interact with them at all. This book is related to the others in that one of the protagonists we follow is the sister of the first book’s captain. It doesn’t appear to have any connections to the second book unless I missed it.