Release Week: 2 January 2024
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Release Week: 2 January 2024
Posted on 2024-01-02 at 12:00 by Samuel Montgomery-Blinn
Took a while off, and this very quiet week to start the year seems like a nice time to tiptoe back in here. The books that most caught my eye this week:
Gunflower by Laura Jean McKay, read by Casey Withoos for Recorded Books -- Published in the UK by W.F. Howes last October, now available in the US. "The brilliant new short story collection from the Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning author of The Animals in That Country. A family of cat farmers gets the chance to set the felines free. A group of chickens tells it like it is. A female-crewed ship ploughs through the patriarchy. A support group finds solace in a world without men. With her trademark humor, energy, and flair, McKay offers glimpses of places where dreams subsume reality, where childhood restarts, where humans embrace their animal selves and animals talk like humans. The stories in Gunflower explode and bloom in mesmerizing ways, showing the world both as it is and as it could be."
Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth by Natalie Haynes, read by the author for Harper -- "A female-centered look at Olympus and the Furies, focusing on the goddesses whose prowess, passions, jealousies, and desires rival those of their male kin."
The Storm We Made: A Novel by Vanessa Chan, read by Samantha Tan for Simon and Schuster -- "A spellbinding, sweeping novel about a Malayan mother who becomes an unlikely spy for the invading Japanese forces during WWII—and the shocking consequences that rain upon her community and family."
Scorpio: Frontlines: Evolution, Book1 by Marko Kloos, read by Arielle DeLisle for Brilliance -- Kloos returns to his "Frontlines" sf series some years later, as Alex Archer returns from war to find that fitting in with humanity's survivors is... something. She does, however, have "Ash", a threat-sensing black shepherd, to keep her company amidst a growing alien threat.
Just Happy to Be Here by Naomi Kanakia, read by Bilal Baig for Harper Teen -- "Tara just wants to be treated like any other girl at Ainsley Academy. That is, judged on her merits—not on her transness. But there’s no road map for being the first trans girl at an all-girls school. And when she tries to join the Sibyls, an old-fashioned Ainsley sisterhood complete with code names and special privileges, she’s thrust into the center of a larger argument about what girlhood means and whether the club should exist at all."