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My previous exposure to urban fantasy has been mostly limited to Christopher Moore's "Death Merchant Chronicles" series, and this new offering from Dan Moren reminds me greatly of Moore's books. Luckily for Dan, the Death Merchant Chronicles are some of my favorite books ever.

The humor is more subdued than Moore's books, more like Dirk Gently than Hitchhiker's Guide on the Douglas Adams humor scale. The setting was compelling, feeling like the world we live in with additional layers just out of reach of most of us. The protagonist seems like someone I'd like to know and hang out with (carefully). The surrounding cast of characters was three dimensional, and the antagonists had believable motivations.

I saw the twist coming about two hundred pages before it hit and ... I did not care. It was still delightful, maybe even moreso because I'm immersed in the big tech world the plot intersects. The resolution was equally delightful, and I found my reading sessions grew longer as I approached the end of the book.

Moren wrote some of my favorite books I read last year -- I tore through his series of sci-fi spy thrillers -- and I enjoyed his style applied to a new genre. I hope there's more in this series!

This sequel could easily have gone sideways -- the first book came close to overstaying its welcome and more of the same would not have been welcome.

So, where the first one focused on Mickey finding his place in the world, the second was more about the world with Mickey in it. Mickey is still the main character, but we see more of the world and personalities around him. We learn a great deal more about the greater human society that created expendables, we learn more about the history of galactic colonization, and we learn bits about times humanity found other sentient life. None of this is dry world-building, as it's fed to us in bits as it relates directly to the events at hand.

I enjoyed reading this as much as I did the first, and it was in many ways more satisfying. There is still plenty of story that could be told in this setting, and I hope Edward writes more.

"The crew of the Rosebud are, currently, and by force of law, a balloon, a goth with a swagger stick, some sort of science aristocrat possibly, a ball of hands, and a swarm of insects."

This sentence got me to add this novella to my to-read pile. Nothing in the story is less weird than that, so buckle up!

There's a lot packed into this little story. Tiny spaceships, time travel, parallel universes, corporate overreach, and a fierce defense of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness -- even if the person pursuing their happiness happens to be trans.

It was a slow read for me, partly because it took my brain a while to process all the weirdness, and partly because I wanted to savor it. I've not read anything quite like it before, and I'm going to hold onto it and read it again. Maybe even soon.

If that sentence I quoted above has you intrigued, then by all means give it a go. I don't think you'd be disappointed.

I had a hard time rating this one. It's at its heart a pulp western, and I don't have much experience in that genre. The writing style was simple (lots of short declarative sentences) and in the third person, and that contrasts greatly with the more complex first person sci-fi I've read a lot of lately. It's probably not something I would have picked up, except for two things...

One, it's got a lot of steampunky alt-history elements to it. It's set in the late 1800s in the US Southwest (mostly), and it's nice to see steampunk stories that aren't set in Victorian England. Apart from an alien intelligence with mind control, it's a plausible alt-history. The alien influence affects why this history diverges from ours, but it does it through affecting people's motivations, not through introducing future tech. I liked that idea.

Second, it's largely set in a very specific area of the US Southwest I know very well, the central New Mexico Rio Grande valley. The author went to college in the same very small town I did and he used not just the town but specific canyons, buildings, and even courtyards that are still there and I have spent lots of time in. Near the beginning of the book, for example, there is an attempted witch trial on a courtyard behind a church surrounded by a low adobe wall. I spent many hours in that courtyard leaning against the adobe wall watching over recess at the little school attached to the church where I taught. There were references and word play and scenery that felt like he was writing just for me.

In the end, it was a fun romp with characters that grew and were nice to get to know. There are more books in the series, and I've already bought the next one. The writing style wasn't my current taste and would have earned the book three stars, but the personal connection I felt earned it five. I settled with four -- it was, as I said, a fun fast read and I'm glad I found it.

I figured going in I'd either love or hate this. The notion of being a disposable person with cloned versions of yourself waiting in tanks is familiar enough to me (such as the "troubleshooters", the player characters in the RPG Paranoia) that I've seen the possibilities for how surprisingly dull it can get.

Mickey7 did not fall into those traps. Through cleverly timed breaks for exposition and world building, mixed with just the right amount of gallows humor, I was never caught wishing the story would just move on already or felt the need to take breaks to escape the darkness.

In an interesting science fiction setting of humans trying to establish a beachhead colony on an inhospitable world, Mickey7 shows us how we can process trauma, how our past selves shape but do not define who we presently are. I see a movie is being made from it, and I fear it will lose a lot of what I love in the translation. I did pre-order the sequel book, though, and am looking forward to more of Mickey.

She is a fourth daughter of royalty with no hope of advancement in station, determined to invoke the promise of aid given to her ancestor generations ago by a powerful wizard when her mother refuses to engage a demon threatening the kingdom.

He is a long-lived exo-socialogist, sent to observe these people but not interfere. He broke that directive once before, many years ago, and now another of them has shown up at his outpost door...

I've never seen a story play with Clarke's Third Law ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.") like this before. Each chapter alternates POV between the two main characters, so it is half science fiction and half fantasy. Sometimes the same events are told both ways. The story is interesting on its own, but told this way it also becomes a lesson on empathy and understanding.

It surprisingly also became a story about severe depression, persevering through grief and trauma, methods of self care, and how mental anguish can appear from the POV of both those suffering and those around them.

And that will always endear this story to me.