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in the way that you tell us to because we re special and we can do it in a special very old way because we ve been bred from preserved stock like so many showhorses and you think we won t refuse because of benefits we ve never been shown in a country we ve never properly lived in and have been lied to about every day of our lives does that make any sense to you tom needless to say that does not work out the reader ends up feeling sympathy and pity for these poor kids born into a strange world they know nothing about bred to spearhead some egomaniacal billionaire s revolution against all the progress made in those two hundred fifty years and at the end we find out he has more clones ready to go another fresh batch to replace these duds the ending is rather a downer as you realize there is a non zero number of people in this country some of them in the higher echelons of government who want to return this country to its mythical founding hierarchy when white land owning males were on top and everyone else knew their place this gives you a very uneasy feeling as you close the back cover which is exactly what the author intended maybe it s a good thing the book is short as it could easily have descended into a dystopian horrorshow but the broad brief sketches of what she draws here are more than enough view all my reviews posted by bonnie mcdaniel on 8 24 2026 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels book reviews books books read in 2026 goodreads august 14 2026 review emily wilde s map of the otherlands emily wilde s map of the otherlands by heather fawcett my rating 4 of 5 stars this second book in the emily wilde fantasy series continues the saga of professor wilde dryadologist who studies the many species of fae and her fellow professor secret exiled king of faerie wendell bambleby this could also be called a cosy fantasy series although this storyline gets a bit dark with a focus on the science of dryadology in this alternate universe where faeries and alternate realms exist the highlight of the series is the prickly sometimes hilarious relationship between the rational matter of fact emily and the fussy eccentric and often terrifying when he lets his faerie powers loose wendell wendell is trying to find a back door to return to his kingdom and his evil stepmother has sent assassins after him wendell has also asked emily to marry him which prospect occupies a good deal of the plot because as emily says marrying a faerie king would be most unwise nevertheless i suppose love in the end does conquer all as she agrees to marry him in between her efforts to open a door into his realm and the various hijinks that ensue these books are quite charming the author hadn t been on my radar before but now i am trying to track her books down that s one of the great delights of reading when you stumble upon someone you never heard of before and realize their books are right up your alley if you like something along the lines of marie brennan s memoirs of lady trent this series is similar and worth checking out as well view all my reviews posted by bonnie mcdaniel on 8 14 2026 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels book reviews books read in 2026 goodreads august 1 2026 review ode to the half broken ode to the half broken by suzanne palmer my rating 5 of 5 stars suzanne palmer has written several award winning stories including the hugo award winning the secret life of bots many of her stories involve robots and artificial intelligence and she excels at depicting nonhuman characters i ve read and enjoyed several of her stories but i haven t sought out her novels until now the quality of this story is such that she gets bumped up to my auto buy list this book is loaded with nonhuman characters it s in a near future setting about forty years from now when a combination of environmental collapse war famine and pandemics both natural and as we find out artificial have reduced the human population to a billion a post collapse society is in the process of being formed before the civil war that tore apart the us great breakthroughs were made in artificial intelligence courtesy of one dr milton milton is a genius but we also discover he is a ill tempered misanthrope who is disillusioned with the human race generally and also feels he has been screwed over by the corporation he has been working for this leads to him creating four war mechas which he names for the biblical four horsemen of the apocalypse death war famine and pestilence these are nigh unstoppable killing machines and he sends them out into the world with the express purpose of bringing the human race down twenty years later our protagonist is one of those war mechas who threw off its original programming control and tried to reverse the harm it did before it gained free will it has been living in isolation for twenty years as the story opens it wakes up in a bathtub in a trashed apartment in mostly abandoned new york city with one leg missing its quest to find its missing limb and the friends and purpose it discovers along the way is what makes up this lovely story of identity responsibility and coming to terms with one s past and changing the future this is mostly told from the first person pov of the war mecha who later names itself be and is a very good example of an author s thinking through how an artificial intelligence would think and react to the world another important character is the dog atticus who does not die by the way so you don t have to worry about that who is a cyborg a combination being with an artificial intelligence implant atticus true identity is revealed later on and ties in to the discussions about personhood and responsibility you could have told me i say tell you what i am not that mech you knew anymore even less so than you are the mech you once were why can t i just be me and you be you he says we can choose not to live in our pasts isn t that the very thing you and ver tried to convince me of back before everything went to hell be goes through quite the journey with its friends including some delightful rail mecha one of which ends up inhabiting an old vw bus along the way it discovers two of its siblings it thought was dead are not deceased at all one sibling formerly known as pestilence who created one of the artificial nanotech based pandemics still plaguing humankind has been captured and imprisoned by derek litchfield who used to be milton s boss this litchfield is a pretty nasty character who tortured be s sibling and forced it to use the manufacturing facility run by post humanity free mechas to manufacture chips that will be used to enslave them and bring them under litchfield s control be s quest to find both its sibling and litchfield and stay out of the clutches of one general sawyer representing the last remaining dregs of the us government come to a climax in dr milton s ruined underground lab where be was created this book is a little bit on the cosy side in that the new society the mechas are creating is based on cooperation and helping one another and helping the humans they associate with in fact one important point that be makes in talking to sawyer who keeps trying to kill it is that sawyer basically represents the past and the free mechas the future and she is the one who needs to change since i left my santuary i have had occasion to spend a lot of time contemplating the nature of my own existence and purpose i say i have also had time to observe the world and all the people in it and how much has changed since the days when you and i were on opposite sides of a war we still are she sawyer says no conversation is going to change that i also i say have observed many things that have not changed that should have please do not take offense but you are one of them and if you are going to save your people you need to evolve because i cannot stop what is happening to your people and fight you at the same time on the contrary i need your help and you need mine these are not terminator style artificial intelligences for the most part in fact be s other surviving sibling ver has a planetwide network dedicated to rebuilding a more ecologically friendly civilization and cleaning and rewilding the planet this is an altogether delightful story with complex characters and thought provoking themes and a triumphant satisfying ending i loved it it s one of the best books i ve read this year view all my reviews posted by bonnie mcdaniel on 8 01 2026 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels book reviews books read in 2026 goodreads july 23 2026 review emily wilde s encyclopaedia of faeries emily wilde s encyclopaedia of faeries by heather fawcett my rating 4 of 5 stars i hadn t read any of this series before or even heard of it but i ended up really enjoying this book that s one of the best things about voting for the hugos you find gems you might have otherwise overlooked this is in much the same vein as marie brennan s memoirs of lady trent a victorian era woman of science fighting sexism and studying fantastic creatures in this case it is fantastic magical creatures the fae emily wilde is very much a female scientist of her era rational and mostly unemotional twice as much to be considered half as good she is dedicated to the scientific method even in the midst of crises which makes for some pretty funny scenes sometimes wendell i lunged forward trying to wrench the roots away from him they showed no interest whatsoever in me nor shadow who pounced and worried at them until they fell away but more rose to take their place why does it want you i cried why do you think you cold blooded lunatic of a woman he yelled clawing at the ground this was followed by a series of curses in what i assumed to be irish i stabbed at the roots with my pocketknife at the same moment though my mind was racing through stories texts journals can you not can you not say it he gave me one of his impossibly green glares we were nearing the base of the tree where a hollow like a mouth had yawned open black and writhing with roots like white worms no oh i breathed my pocketknife was having little effect but i kept up the stabbing nevertheless i believe i stabbed him once accidentally for i had gone back into my mind you can t reveal to me that you re folk it must have been part of the enchantment that exiled you from your world isn t that it i ve heard of that yes that account of the gallic changeling and isn t it a peripheral motif within the ulster cycle bryston s theory was that oh god he moaned she wants to discuss theory at a moment like this i am doomed aren t i the wendell mentioned here is emily s colleague wendell bambleby a vain insufferable professor at cambridge who we eventually discover is an exiled faerie king wendell follows emily to her research assignment in the far off country of ljosland and adventures and hijinks ensue wendell and emily have a combative relationship with much exasperation on emily s part and plenty of razor sharp dialogue flying back and forth of course it comes out that wendell is head over heels in love with emily in a typical understated british stiff upper lip way and an even more traumatized king of faerie way and later on in the story he asks her to marry him emily doesn t turn him down and at the end at the scientific conference where they are presenting their joint paper about the discoveries they made in ljosland she seems to be entertaining the idea in between emily discovers more about faerie and makes actual friends in hrafnsvik the village where she and wendell spend the winter she is a curmudgeon at the beginning of the story and a curmudgeon at the end but she is beginning to understand the value of reaching out to other people i really liked this it s told in a meticulous journal entry style with footnotes as befits a serious scientist i doubt i would have paid attention to this had i not been reading it for the awards but now that it s on my radar i m going to pick up all three volumes view all my reviews posted by bonnie mcdaniel on 7 23 2026 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels book reviews books read in 2026 goodreads july 19 2026 review coffeeshop in an alternate universe coffeeshop in an alternate universe by c b lee my rating 2 of 5 stars this is another entry in the so called cosy trend as in cosy young adult fantasy romance the spoiler is right there in the title the two protagonists brenda nguyen and katherine kat woo live in parallel universes linked by periodic fluctuating portals brenda s universe is ours kat s is our world more or less with an industrial revolution of magic instead of the internal combustion engine which also means for kat s world the existence of dragons pixies and other magical creatures and nearly non existent climate change although capitalism is as rapacious in her universe as ours now this could have been a very interesting scenario with some thoughtful examination of the contrasts between the two universes and an appreciation of the roads not taken in the magical one unfortunately the author doesn t choose that route instead settling for a meet cute frothy romance between brenda and kat and some pretty thin superficial worldbuilding which is obviously the direction she wanted to take and more power to her but in the end that makes this story happy and bubbling with kambayas and utterly forgettable i did finish it but i spent all of the back half longing for some grit in the gears and a villain less cartoonish than the portal crossing shannon mayfield the book didn t necessarily need to be grim but it did need a little more darkness than the author wanted to give it also the silly subplot about reducing a dragon to the size of a cat and conversely making brenda s friend erica s cat fancy the size of a minivan nearly threw me out of the story altogether because really any house cat suddenly enlarged to be as big as a sabertoothed tiger would not be sweet and cute but utterly terrifying look i have two cats myself and i love them but i know for a fact if my fifteen pound mocha grew as large as a fucking smilodon maybe 1 000 pounds i would run from him screaming not try to ride him that s pretty much the problem with the cosies i ve tried to read i think they re okay while i m turning the pages and the characters usually hold my interest and they vanish from my mind the instant i close the back cover i like stories that are thought provoking and layered and take some effort to tease out all the subtleties and facets those kinds of books stick with the reader long after they re finished this one unfortunately didn t view all my reviews posted by bonnie mcdaniel on 7 19 2026 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels book reviews 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