The Warbler Books

Motive For Massacre – Chris Philbrook

October 26, 2016 No Comments

The sequel to Wrath of the Orphans is, incidentally, much less wrathful than its predecessor. Motive for Massacre might sound like it gets hairy—and it certainly does—the plot of Motive follows the Everwalk twins along the path to discovering who orchestrated the destruction of their home and the slaughter of its two hundred-or-so citizens, and why. It’s a much tighter story than Wrath, owing to the fact that it didn’t have to do much world building, allowing Chris Philbrook to immediately focus on the characters and their challenges. It is also stronger as a result. I listened to Motive on Audible at double-speed, which rendered the problems I mentioned in my Wrath review obsolete. Kevin T. Collins’s narration is strong, if still a little one-dimensional. Motive spends considerably less time traveling, which contributes to its sense is focus, and lingers on description only long enough to give you a sense

Simone – André Brun

October 24, 2016 No Comments

André Brun must be some kind of masochist. The author of Lies and Deception (to be published by Inkshares some time next year), knowing the difficulty of crowdfunding a book, has gone back for more on multiple occasions. For the currently-running horror contest, he’s entered a book of connected short stories, Arcadia, the first of which he sent me for review. Simone is very short, and in a pretty rough state, but what it lacks in polish doesn’t detract from the content of the tale. Secret cults, monsters, and true fear creep into the periphery, seeding curiosity in the reader about what’s to come in the stories that follow. Though it might frustrate some readers, there’s a moment in Simone that I found greatly appealing. The character—presumably Simone—states that, while she was traveling, she came upon a pillar in a jungle cave. There’s something delightful about not knowing the details

The Show – Filip Syta

October 5, 2016 2 Comments

I read Filip Syta’s The Show (published by Inkshares) a few weeks ago, and it was the final nail in a coffin that’s been long in the making. I knew that I couldn’t review the book with any kind of honesty until I’d given it some time to marinate, and waited for certain changes in my life (detailed below) to take place. To be frank, I’m still not even sure if I liked the book. The writing didn’t pull me in, though it’s mechanically good, and the protagonist is, for most of the book, a patently shitty person. But the book does one thing exceptionally well, which earns it a high rating in my opinion: it is deeply—almost painfully—honest about the experience of working in the tech world. Vic, the star of The Show, picks up and moves to San Francisco, a gleam in his eye as he considers his

WarblerChat — An Interview with G. Derek Adams

September 22, 2016 No Comments

When I read G. Derek Adams’s Asteroid Made of Dragons, I became infected with a new love of fantasy. You can read all about how much I loved Asteroid as well as his first novel, Spell/Sword, in the linked reviews. What I’m sharing below is the content of our delightful conversation last weekend. Talking with Derek was a delight, and I hope to interview him again when he has a fantasy novel empire.

Dreams of Distant Shores – Patricia McKillip

September 12, 2016 No Comments

Tachyon Publications has a knack for putting out excellent collections of short stories—in fact, it seems to be their specialty. This week’s “flavor” is Patricia Mckillip’s Dreams of Distant Shores, an excellent anthology that spans modern fiction, slipstream, and urban fantasy. Dreams of Distant Shores contains five short stories and two novellas, and while you should certainly read the whole collection, I’d like to focus on the novellas in this review. The first, The Gorgon in the Cupboard, is emblematic of Mckillip’s strengths at imbuing characters with tremendous reality and honesty. The cast is made up of artists and their many models and muses, principal among them a painter pining for another painter’s wife, and a peasant who has undergone the deepest of personal tragedies—the loss of a child. Oh, and there’s a talking painting of Medusa, too. The flow of The Gorgon in the Cupboard is fantastic. It maintains

Binti – Nnedi Okorafor

September 8, 2016 1 Comment

Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti just won best novella at the 2016 Hugo Awards, after having won the Nebula Award in the same category. I had no idea what the book was about, but based on the cover art alone, I knew I wanted to read it. It’s part of Tor’s new effort to publish shorter fiction through their Tor.com imprint, and they’d been advertising heavily on sites I frequent, so I’d seen the cover of Binti a few hundred times before I finally picked it up. It was a bit serendipitous, actually. I walked into a bookstore I’d never seen before near my house while my parents—who were visiting—explored shops nearby. I love going to local bookstores and scoping out their genre fiction sections. More often than not, sci-fi, fantasy, and horror are poorly represented, but Diesel books in Oakland had a lovely section in the back with a great selection.

Wrath of the Orphans – Chris Philbrook

September 7, 2016 No Comments

A book that lives up to its name, Wrath of the Orphans is intense, gruesome—wrathful, even—and it stars a pair of orphans. Snark aside, It’s an intense ride. The pair endure the unthinkable: losing family, loved ones, home, and future in a single night. Truth be told, it was a bit cliché. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though. I’ll admit to a bit of groaning when the first act of the story took me down such a familiar path; I was ready to be bored by the story at that point. But given that this was an audiobook (from the kind folks at Audible) and that I had many a chore to complete, I kept listening. And I’m glad I did. After the methodical destruction of their entire lives, the orphans don’t go down the path of traditional heroes. Rather, they go pretty much berserk and vote violent revenge

Shadow and Light – Catherine Goldwyn and Phil Lewis

August 21, 2016 No Comments

Longtime visitors of this blog know that alongside book commentary, I occasionally dabble in music reviews. Those reviews were heavily context-dependent; I would hear something that was really compelling, something that drove my writing forward, that settled in my brain, giving the hamster in the wheel up there enough fuel to run his little heart out. Such is the case with Shadow and Light, an excellent jazz record by the duo Catherine Goldwyn and Phil Lewis. (Full disclosure, Catherine is a dear friend, and mother to some of my closest friends on this here planet. Don’t let that relationship fool you, however. This is really a wonderful record, and would be so even if I didn’t know Catherine and Phil.) Finding music to write to can be challenging. It has to fit the tone and mood of the scene just right while remaining in the background, allowing the creative part

Falling in Love with Hominids – Nalo Hopkinson

August 2, 2016 No Comments

I’ve been fortunate, over the last year or so, to have had my horizons expanded as a reader. For a while, my bread and butter were long-form fantasy epics, or space operas dealing with political games and good-versus-evil as a central theme. Don’t get me wrong; I love those books still, and they can get plenty “deep” to satisfy any curious soul. But the more I read short fiction and speculative fiction like Nalo Hopkinson’s Falling in Love with Hominids (published by Tachyon), the more convinced I feel of the power of science fiction and fantasy to tell deeply human stories with the capacity to elicit change. The term “visionary fiction,” introduced by the editors of Octavia’s Brood, has stuck with me, and it’s appropriate that I followed up that collection with the spectacular fiction of Nalo Hopkinson. It shares many of the visionary qualities of the stories in Octavia’s

Pet Human – Nannybot A3–4

August 1, 2016 1 Comment

Pet Human, by Nannybot A3-4, has to be one of the oddest pieces I’ve read in a while. It’s an instruction manual for the caring and control of pet humans. See, it turns out that sometime later this century, we create the first functional AIs, which leads to the subsequent development of TIs, Technological Intelligences (read: not artificial), which propels technology forward at an incredible pace. Cut forward a few thousand years, and we’re in something of an odd situation. Pet Human is written for an audience across space and time, and is thus comprehensible to the likes of you and me. It’s a strangely enthralling read, for an instruction manual. Between the lines of its matter-of-fact descriptions of a post-humanist universe, wherein humanity has been improved upon, but reduced to pets, lay a magnificently built world. But there’s something more to it. While the manual has me convinced of the

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