What we're reading, the SFF edition

ULTRAGOTHA

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I just finished The Ten Thousand Doors of January and I liked it a lot until the Protagonist did something stupid a little over halfway through. I realize given >gestures widely< that people doing stupid things is not unrealistic. But that just put me off. I finished the book, though. And overall I found it quite good.

Now re-reading The Graveyard Book because it was available in Libby.
 

Brightdreamer

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What they hey, will procrastinate/update...

Last Read SF/F:
Updraft (Book 1 of The Bone Universe series, Fran Wilde, F): In a skypiercing city of living bone towers, where the ground is a distant rumor hidden by perpetual clouds, a teen girl and her best friend are on the verge of earning their wings, and with them the apprenticeships that will make them full-fledged members of society... but Kirit has a run-in with the feared Singers who enforce the towers strict Laws that endangers her future. Coerced into joining their ranks, she discovers wonders and secrets she never imagined - and dangers that could bring the towers tumbling down...

An imaginative concept well executed with decent, imperfect characters. Kirit is never guaranteed her wins, and often the prices she pays are steeper than she initially realizes. It moves fairly well, though the buildup to the climax feels a bit rushed and jumbled. Overall, quiet enjoyable.

The Stars Now Unclaimed (Book 1 of The Universe After series, Drew Williams, SF): A century ago, the pulse washed across the galaxy, striking worlds with random force. Its lingering radiation targets advanced technology, with some planets marginally affected while others have been knocked back to the Stone Age. But the radiation also has been producing strangely gifted children of all species, with powers like telekinesis. Jane, an agent for the Justified and the Repentant sect, seeks these children out to gather them at the stronghold Sanctum, believing them to be a potential bulwark against the pulse's return. Others know of the children, too, such as the Pax, an army of fascist zealots bent on galactic domination; broken and brainwashed like all their members, such children would be formidable weapons. When Jane went to pick up the telekinetic girl Esa from an unremarkable backwater planet, the Pax were there, too... but their behavior is unusually aggressive even for the Pax. The power dynamics in the galaxy are about to shift, and the Justified may see their tenuous toehold destroyed.

The cover promises a smart, sassy, action-packed space opera, and Williams delivers. At times, the pace is almost too hectic - the timeline is a little cramped, with everything happening almost right on top of each other - and the action and violence is almost numbingly extreme in some instances. Still, the characters are decent and the crew has decent working chemistry, even if some elements feel a bit telegraphed. Overall, and enjoyable, larger-than-life space adventure.

Currently Reading SF/F:
Feed (Book 1 of the Newsflesh trilogy, Mira Grant, SF/horror): A generation ago, two scientific breakthroughs - a cure for the common cold and a panacea against cancer - collided to spawn the worst pandemic in history: reanimated dead, driven by viral imperative to bite and feast on the living. Actual zombies, in other words. Overnight, the world turned upside down, but now it's just the new normal. Twentysomethings Shaun, Georgia, and Buffy are part of the blogging revolution that rose when traditional news sources failed. When they're picked to cover the presidential campaign of a promising candidate, their future is looking bright... but the campaign trail is about to turn deadly, when it becomes clear that someone is dead set on the man never surviving to reach the election, let alone the White House.

I got the trilogy on discount on my Nook, and so far I'm enjoying it (as I'd expected: "Mira Grant" is a pseudonym for Seanan McGuire, who has yet to disappoint me.) Some of it reads almost eerily prescient: large gatherings are a thing of the past, sensation and clicks count at least as much as actual objective truth, a general loss of faith by the public in traditional institutions in the face of fumbled crises, how the religious right pounces to turn it all into a power play under the guise of "divine punishment for straying from the path," etc.
 

kwanzaabot

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I'm reading Philip Pullman's The Secret Commonwealth.

I... can't get into it. Been stuck about halfway through since December.
I loved His Dark Materials, but Secret Commonwealth and La Belle Sauvage are just... not that exciting.

By book two of HDM, Lyra was traveling through parallel worlds, having amazing adventures. Now she's... arguing with Pan about a book he doesn't like.

Going smaller in scope after setting up an amazing, expansive setting never interests me. I wish writers (and games, cough cough Dragon Age II) would stop doing it.
 

Conrad Adamson

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The Last Policeman is one of the best books I've ever read. A meteor is destroying all human life in 6 months and the main character, an investigator who won't give up, is working the hell out of a hanging that looks like a suicide to all the checked out people (which is most everyone else). The author (Ben W. Winters) really works the premise and the world building feels accurate to this scenario. Great characters, great flow, and a mystery plot that never gets too thick.

Seveneves is a very long book and I'm finding the maximalist writing is just not for me. I loved Snowcrash and The Rise and Fall of DODO, but this one has been a struggle. There's a lot of things I have enjoyed in this, but the minutia of logistics covered has been exhausting. If you go crazy for details, this is your book. I might be on a break for a while with Neal Stephenson.

Reading the TLP and listening to the audiobook for SE was a weird combination, especially during COVID-19 shutdown. It was reading two books about the apocalypse while getting a tiny taste of it in the real world. Overall, the way people dealt with the impending disaster felt much more real and visceral in the TLP.
 

Kjbartolotta

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Seveneves is a very long book and I'm finding the maximalist writing is just not for me. I loved Snowcrash and The Rise and Fall of DODO, but this one has been a struggle. There's a lot of things I have enjoyed in this, but the minutia of logistics covered has been exhausting. If you go crazy for details, this is your book. I might be on a break for a while with Neal Stephenson.

Yanno, I adore Stephenson but couldn't get into this one either.
 

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I just finished S.A. Chakraborty's The Empire of Gold, book 3 in The Daevabad Trilogy. This trilogy is an epic fantasy based in Middle Eastern mythology.
 

Jason

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Just finished Ready Player One and absolutely loved it! It helped that I was able to listen on audio book while doing other things (workouts, commutes, etc.) but was pretty quickly hooked. Plus, I think Wil Wheaton has an excellent voice for narrating. Even better that he's reading a science fiction novel. The irony was not lost on me either when he read one line where the MC said that he was going to vote in the Oasis elections but not the real elections, because "Wil Wheaton has been doing a good job protecting Gunters Rights" Beautiful!

Just started Ender's game (also audio book). 15 minutes in and not hooked yet, but getting close... :)
 

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Currently reading The Red Knight and The Night Circus...having a hard time sinking into the latter. Red Knight is pretty good, almost done but it is quite long...probly could have shaved a quarter of the book off and get rid of some characters. Most recent book Fantasy book I've enjoyed is The Blade Itself by Joe Ambercombie...the other two books in the series is good too
 

DorianFrost

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I just finished The Dream Thieves (second book in The Raven Cycle series). I liked it better than the first one, mainly because I really liked Ronan's perspective.
Now I'm rereading The Picture Of Dorian Grey (I'd say it counts as fantasy even though it only had one fantastical element to it - it is the core element after all). I am forever in awe of Oscar Wilde's narrative voice and clever turns of phrase.
 

mwritesdragons

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I have about 100 pages left in R.F. Kuang's The Poppy War. I like it, the beginning thoroughly hooked me primarily because I'm a sucker for anything that involves an academy-training-school plot. I don't absolutely love it, but depending on how the last hundred pages go, I'll likely pick up book 2 and see where the series goes. It is definitely grimdark fantasy, thought it's not needlessly graphic. The Chinese-inspired fantasy is a refreshing take, and I enjoy that this book is another example of why your protagonists age doesn't necessarily determine your book's age category. Actual content and themes my friends, content and themes.

I'm going to finally get into This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone next. I've almost read it about three times this year... It's "time".
 

Ari Meermans

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I don't normally post here I know, I know. (I devour books but I don't talk about them much, which is a shame.)

I'm in the middle of Jo Walton's among others, which I somehow missed along the way, which is also a shame but I am glad I finally found it. The disabled teenaged MC Mor (Morwenna) has the strongest first-person voice I've seen in a long, long time. The novel is slow-paced, yet it is compelling and is rather deeper than one might realize while reading. The novel's treatment of natural magic is unusual but it mirrors the understanding of magic I had as a child, and because of that it feels more real than fantasy.

ETA: I had shut down the 'puter and settled in bed to read and almost immediately hit the first "bump in the road" (page 162)—all I have to say is, "Shame on you, Jo Walton, for messing with an old woman's mind this way."
 
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AW Admin

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I love Jo Walton's writing, and this book is much more than it appears.

I loved recognizing the covers of the books she read; so much of what I was reading "back then".
 

Ari Meermans

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I love her writing, too. Even when the story itself doesn't quite resonate, her books are mini writing courses—the language is plain but deeply layered with meaning, which goes to show how important word choices are.

I noted a couple of Amazon reviewers took issue with the naming of so many SF books and authors and what the character thought of them; I love it, though, it reminds me of my counterculture days at university and how we'd sit around in the evenings talking about many of those same books.
 

Drascus

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I just read Gideon The Ninth, and holy cow it was good. A love it or hate it book for sure, but I loved it. Burned through it so fast I was done with it 12 hours after I bought it.

Now I have to buy the sequel (which is what caught my eye in the bookstore) and it's all Tamsyn Muir's fault.
 

Brightdreamer

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Poking thread with a procrastination post... don't mind me...

Recently Read SF/F:
Over the Woodward Wall (Book 1 of the Up-and-Under series, "A. Deborah Baker", CH/MG fantasy, hardcover): Zib is a girl of uncombed hair and mismatched socks. Avery is a boy of shiny shoes and perfect spelling tests. The two live on the same street, but have never met before... until the day they must take detours to their respective schools and find themselves facing a wall that neither has ever seen before. Climbing over it, they discover a strange woodland of blue ferns and glass-leaved trees - and a talking owl who tells them that they cannot go home until they complete their Adventure, traveling the improbable road to the Impossible City to find the Queen of Wands.

This was written by Seanan McGuire, her first book aimed at younger readers, as a spinoff of her dark (not for young readers) fantasy Middlegame, an in-world beloved fantasy series. (One does not need to have read one to enjoy the other, though.) It is both an homage to classic portal fantasies like Oz and its own tale, establishing a strange and wondrous world that presents real peril to the children - who, as often as not, cannot trust what guides they find. I read it in an afternoon and greatly enjoyed it.

Steel Crow Saga (Paul Krueger, fantasy, hardcover): For many years, the Tomodan empire ruled with an iron fist, using their metalpacting magic to dominate other cultures and drag them into a modern age under their Steel Lord... also working to stamp out barbarous practices like eating meat and shadepacting, the enslavement of animal souls. But rebellion finally threw off their yoke. Now, the only chance at a lasting peace is for the heir to the Steel Throne to return to Tomoda and work toward a cooperative future - but the mission runs into many complications. Now the Tomodan heir, a low-ranked Shang princess, a downtrodden Jeongonese thief, and a Simbu soldier with a dark secret may be all that stands in the way of a divided and bloody future.

This has some decent concepts and it moves well, set in a multicultural and complex world with modern trappings, but at some point there's a whiff of contrivance about the plot. It also feels like it wants to set up a sequel, to the detriment of this volume. Still, I generally enjoyed it.

Emergency Skin (Part of the Forward collection, N. K. Jemisin, SF, Kindle): In the far future, humanity survives on far-flung colony worlds under the strict guidance of their Founders, the technocrati who foresaw Earth's collapse and saved a lucky few. But even these worlds need to revisit the ruins of Earth now and again for biological material. A lowly servant, promised the reward of their own skin and other luxuries, makes the light-years trek to the planet, guided by an AI assistant in their brain... but what they find is not a wasteland. How is it possible anything survived - and what does that mean about the colonies?

This is a fast-reading novella that puts a twist on the old idea of colony worlds as the sole salvation of a dying human race. It's hopeful in an increasingly hopeless world. I liked it.


Currently Reading SF/F:
The Bone Shard Daughter (Book 1 of the Drowning Empire series, Andrea Stewart, fantasy, hardcover): In a world of floating migratory islands, the emperor collects shards of bone from the people to power magical constructs... but lately, disasters have been mounting and the emperor increasingly turns inward to his obscure studies. Now rebellion is in the wind and islands are sinking, and still the emperor fails to notice or care about the danger.

I'm fairly early in, but so far I'm enjoying the concept and the setting (what I've seen of it so far, at least.) Looking forward to seeing where this is going; I already have a few guesses.
 

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Just gonna chime in here...

Fourth Mansions by R.A. Lafferty (absurdist fantasy with incredible characters)

I'm finally making my way through Ursula K Le Guin's novels.

Just finished The Dispossessed and flying through the Earthsea Trilogy. What can I say other than here was an author who grasped the sensitivity of being while also creating complete worlds. Although a bit binary in her conceptions of alternate realities (i.e. Dispossessed), her words spiral in my mind for weeks on end, inspired.

For those who haven't yet read her short story 'The Author of the Acacia Seeds,' I very strongly recommend. The story of an anarchist ant who rejects the system she is part of in a delicately powerful way.

Ted Chiang's The Story of Your Life is beautiful and heartbreaking. (what Arrival was based on)
 
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UntoldStoryteller

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Late to the party, but just put down the Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern. World with in worlds, book about a book with some gorgeous writing to boot. Didn’t love her first book, The Night Circus, but glad I decided to give this one a go. Maybe one of the best fantasy books I’ve read in years. If you haven’t read it ......... stop what you’re doing immediately. :)

On to Hench now by Natalie Zina Walschots. Only have the synopsis to go on until I start, but sounds like a story about a temp agency for super villains. Sounds funny and quirky.
 

Brightdreamer

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Been over a month, time for another procrastination post...

Recently Read SF/F:
Sentient (Jeff Lemire, graphic novel/SF, hoopla): The USS Montgomery is a spaceship traveling to a colony world with new settlers... but a violent separatist slaughters every adult on board before the shipboard AI, Val, kills her. Now, it must raise the orphaned children while continuing its journey - and, in doing so, must grow beyond the limits of its programming, even as the children must grow up fast to assume responsibilities that never should've been theirs.

Possibly the start of a new series, Sentient has some familiar parts but puts them together well. It's not just the story of an AI forced outside of its programming, but of the girl Lilly, oldest and presumptive leader/captain of the crew of children, and Isaac, who is ostracized because his mother was the murderous separatist. An encounter with another ship controlled by separatists puts everyone to the tests, even as the schisms between the children threaten to tear them apart. Violent and harrowing, but reasonably satisfying.

The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
(The Fairyland series Book 3, Catherynne M. Valente, MG/YA fantasy, paperback): The girl September cannot wait to leave Nebraska behind and return to Fairyland, as she was promised... but it's been a year, and there's been no sign of anything remotely otherworldly. Perhaps she is too grown-up for such adventures; after all, she's fourteen now, and has even driven a motor car, which is as grown-up as a girl can get this side of marriage. When she finally finds her chance, she slips through the barrier between the worlds - but in the company of a less-than-agreeable companion, the rogue Blue Wind. September finds herself branded an official criminal and rebel (a not-entirely-unearned reputation) and sent on a quest before she quite knows what's happened. Along with the neighbor's run down old Model A, which takes on unusual characteristics in Fairyland, she's soon on her way to the Moon, where more adventure and danger await.

This is just as fun and fast-paced as the previous two volumes. September is growing up, and - as before - her adventures in Fairyland reflect her real-world troubles. She meets a variety of strange new people and reunites with her old friends the Wyverary and the marid Saturday. Valente has a way with words that I love, with wonderful imagery. The only drawback is that, unlike the last two, it ends on a cliffhanger, right in the middle of a very tense and dangerous moment.


Currently Reading SF/F:
The Cloud Roads
(The Books of the Raksura Volume 1, Martha Wells, fantasy, paperback): For most of his life, Moon has been alone, moving from place to place and groundling tribe to groundling tribe, but he never manages to fit in for long. He doesn't even know what he is, only that he can shift to a scaled and winged form. When he finally discovers someone of his own kind, it's a rough and awkward meeting at best. The stranger Stone tells him he is a Raksura, a shapeshifting race that has been dwindling of late, plagued by the Fell who have destroyed more than one species in the wild Three Worlds. Stone takes him back to his home, but Moon has been alone a long time, and the others are distrustful of outsiders - especially as they're dealing with internal schisms and a threat to their very survival, one that Moon's arrival only exacerbates.

This is a very strange sort of fantasy. The wildly imaginative world feels like something out of an old serial, with countless species (extant and extinct) in a land strewn with peculiar ruins and relics and shadows of things past. There are no humans in this world, only humanoid species of various shapes and sizes and colors and makeups. It's both fascinating and distancing, especially as I'm not that fond of Moon and am having trouble connecting with him and the Raksura, who are a rather complex race that's difficult to wrap one's head around. I don't hate it, but I don't necessarily love it.
 

Pallandozi

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Yanno, I adore Stephenson but couldn't get into this one either.

I enjoyed reading the second half.

While I appreciate the world-building aspect in the first half trying to set up a logical explanation for how the second half came about, I think it could have been greatly shortened.
 

Woollybear

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Rereading Interview with the Vampire. (I poked through bits of The Vampire Lestat earlier this year.)

Amazed by Rice's prose. Amazed at how she humanizes Louis the Vampire. He is struggling. Is he damned? How do we not all ask this question? We do. it seems he thinks he is not damned, because he can recognize beauty. Lestat argues that he is a killer, he must kill, he must come to peace with killing, it is who he is, he must redefine death as the most beautiful part of life.

On this re-read, with humanity killing so much of the natural world on a daily basis, I'm seeing that she was really onto something here.

Perhaps we are damned. How would we know?
 

TheKingsWit

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I'm part way through Brandon Sanderson's Rhythm of War Right now, book four of The Stormlight Archive. If you're a fan of epic fantasy and haven't read the series yet, it's definitely in my all-time top favorites, expansive world-building and complex characters and plots on all levels. I can't recommend this one enough.

Before that I read Uprooted by Naomi Novik, which has a lovely atmospheric fairytale feel to it, even if the ending was a bit rushed. All in all, an enjoyable read.

Oh, and I can't forget about An Unkindness of Magicians by Kat Howard, I read the entire thing in one sitting because it has such killer pacing that you can't put it down, A dark yet ultimately hopeful spin on urban fantasy full of great characters, mesmerizing magic, and great female friendships.
 

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I finally got around to reading Ernest Cline's "Ready Player Two". It's been sitting here since the day it came out, I just haven't had time. I don't really know how impressed I am with it yet, the whole first part of the book is extremely "tell, don't show" and that isn't blowing smoke up my skirt.
 

benbenberi

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I just finished Harrow the Ninth (Tamsin Muir). What a wild ride! I had read Gideon the Ninth immediately before it, so I was initially confused/disoriented by the opening of this one. Then I figured out what was going on and read it right through with So. Many. Questions to be answered. All the questions were finally answered. The grand climax was very grand, and very climactic, and then -- whoa! I have absolutely no idea what actually happened at the very end. WTF??!? It's going to be a loooong wait for vol.3.
 

katfeete

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I'm making a determined effort this year to
a) get through stuff I bought years ago and then... just never read for some reason
b) read enough of last year's releases to make some good, educated choices on the various polls and awards voting
c) stop hoarding books I'm really, really looking forward to reading for "special occasions" because at this point I have more special occasions covered than I'm likely to get in all of 2021.

So my first book of the year was the third Murderbot novella (a hoarded book, which was just as delightful as expected). The second was Riot Baby, a shiny 2020 release which I liked, but slightly less than I'd hoped. It had interesting energy and I liked the characters, but it's got a bit of a Neal Stephenson ending, by which I mean the dang book just stopped and left me flipping pages in the desperate hope someone'd put the acknowledgements in-between chapters because SURELY that isn't IT.

I'm now in the middle of The Constantine Affliction: a slick steampunk mystery-adventure with an interesting conceit, replacing the spectre of syphilis with an STD that gender-swaps the sufferers. The premise sounded fascinating, but it took me a good while to pick this up because comics have taught me there's a whole MINEFIELD of tone-deaf objectification and fetishization hiding behind the gender-swap motif. Luckily, it's walking the tightrope well so far. The writer isn't really examining stuff like gender dysphoria (this isn't ownvoices, so that's probably just as well) so much as picking apart what a fantasy-land "disease" like this would do to a heavily gender-stratified society like Victorian England. Paralleling syphilis, the Constantine Affliction is primarily passed from prostitutes to their johns, who were then going home and unwittingly infecting their wives, meaning the disease hits heavily in the rigidly segregated aristocracy; the men seeing their male privileges vanish like smoke as their bodies changed, the women seeing new opportunities opening up, and all of it specifically and irrevocably tied to that most antithetical and hypocritically treated of Victorian activities: sex.

So I'm very much enjoying the worldbuilding, and the characters are providing plenty of the witty psuedo-Victorian banter that is as crack to my reader-brain, and the plot is moving along engagingly. As long as we don't faceplant into any of those landmines in the last half of the book, I'll be glad I circled back to this one.
 
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Brightdreamer

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*pokes older thread because procrastinating*

Been a while, so thought I'd update...

Currently Reading:
Lagoon (Nnedi Okorafor, SF, Kindle): When a UFO lands in the waters off Lagos, strange things start to happen... and three people may determine the ultimate fate of the planet.
I'm not that far into it - keep being distracted - but so far it's a nice first contact story with a refreshingly non-American/European cast and perspective.

Ashes of the Sun (book 1 of the Burningblade and Silvereye series, Django Wexler, fantasy, paperback): In a world riddled by relics of ancient races and a forgotten war, a brother and a sister find themselves on opposite sides of the Republic and the powerful Order that controls and censors access to old magic and tech.
So far, it's an entertaining read, if thus far not hugely deep. Some nice and intriguing details in the worldbuilding make it stand out somewhat from the ordinary epic fantasy tropes otherwise in play.

Recently Read:
Have Sword, Will Travel (book 1 of a series, Garth Nix and Sean Williams, MG fantasy, audiobook): Friends Odo and Eleanor were hunting eels in the dwindling waters of the river near their village when they find an enchanted sword stuck deep in the mud... and Odo's blood accidentally wakes it. It decides that Odo must be a great knight (or at least has the makings of one) - which upsets them both, as Eleanor is the one who dreams of being a knight like her late mother, while Odo's content hauling sacks of flour around his mother's mill. But enchanted swords aren't easily dissuaded. They set out to explore why the river is drying up before it declares war on the whole of their village... only to stumble into an adventure bigger and more dangerous than any of them, even the sword, imagined.
This is a fun, solid read (or listen), with characters who truly struggle for their victories and learn from their mistakes. Even a magic sword isn't infallible, it turns out... but both Odo and Eleanor learn they have more to give the world than either previously thought. There's adventure and danger and a little bloodshed, great fun for the target age and decent for the rest of us.

Chilling Effect (book 1 of a series, Valerie Valdez, SF, audiobook): Captain Eva Innocente was trying to go legit - she really, truly was this time - until her sister is abducted by The Fridge, a shadowy intergalactic crime organization that blackmails and bullies people into doing their dirty work. Now she has no choice but to drag her oddball crew into danger... but she's not about to take this lying down.
This is trying to be a parody of sorts, but never really gels or follows through on much. Flat characters, obvious bouts of stupidity and the author dangling/withholding info, scenes that go nowhere (existing to parody or poke other things, I guess). There's also a sadly one-note subplot where Eva blows off an amorous fish-alien emperor, who spends the rest of the book tracking her to untrackable places and killing everyone and everything between him and the object of his desire - a subplot that screamed for a payoff that never happened. Lots of to-do about ultimately nothing.