Penric’s Fox

Lois McMaster Bujold
Completed 5/14/2026, Reviewed 5/19/2026
3 stars

The third chronological book in the Penric and Desdemona series (fifth in publication order).  This story is a murder mystery with foxes.  Like its predecessors, it’s a rather cozy read.  It had a very slow start, but halfway through it picked up, making for a satisfying ending.  Unfortunately, I had the same basic feelings about this one as I did the previous two.  I like the characters but plot is thin.  And like Penric and the Shaman, there wasn’t enough interaction between Pen and his demon Des.  In the first book, Penric’s Demon, I loved their interaction.  In the succeeding books, Des occasionally pops up with interesting tidbits and hints.  Inglis the Shaman and Oswyl the Locator are in this book and provide more interplay as well as a little levity here and there.  

Penric and Inglis are called by Oswyl to help investigate the murder of a young sorceress.  She was devout and well-liked by many.  It turns out she already had a demon inhabiting her.  However, when the death of a sorcerer is expected, there is usually another chosen to become the demon’s new home.  In the case of the murder, the demon either entered the body of the murderer or a nearby animal, whatever was nearby.  For instance, a fox as there are tons of foxes in the woods where the sorceress was found.  There is a danger, however, when a demon bonds with a lesser animal.  The demon may overwhelm the animal and lose some of its “humanity.”  Penric and the others take up the challenge of finding the demon and the murderer.

Penric still stands out for me as the bookish, accidental sorcerer.  His demeanor is sweet; I really like him.  However, I still find the book to be awfully straight-forward.  There isn’t much tension to make the book gripping.  And there aren’t enough humorous moments to make it really cozy.  Instead, it feels a little flat.  I keep wanting to be blown away by something, but instead, feel like I get melodrama.  

I don’t have much else to say about the book.  It’s a pleasant read, prettily written in a world already developed by quite a few previous books.  It’s a meh, but on the positive side.  If I wasn’t reading this series with my friend John, I don’t know if I’d stick with it.  In the context of the book club, however, I look forward to finding out how deep the stories get and if I can become more emotionally involved.  I give this book three stars out of five.

Shroud

Adrian Tchaikovsky
Completed 5/6/2026, Reviewed 5/6/2026
4 stars

This is another excellent book by Tchaikovsky.  Like Children of Time, it’s dense, perhaps denser.  The first few days, I could only read about twenty pages at a time before it felt too heavy.  It’s another tale of an encounter with aliens, this time on the moon of a gas giant in a distant solar system.  The moon is named Shroud because it has a densely clouded, toxic atmosphere, much like our Venus.  The pressure of its atmosphere is many times that of Earth and the gravity is twice Earth’s.  One would think it wouldn’t sustain life.  But when two people from a mining exploration ship are stranded on there, they must survive not only the 2g and high atmospheric pressure, but the creatures they discover living there.  This book was nominated for a 2026 Hugo for Best Novel.  

Juna is the assistant to the project director on board the ship.  Her task is basically to be the calm intermediary between the disparate personalities on the ship.  While the others write her off as little more than a secretary, she does most of the hard work the director takes credit for.  Also on board is Mai, a brilliant and confrontative engineer who doesn’t play well with others, like most of the rest of the crew.  When an accident occurs ripping open the project’s part of the ship, the two end up on a pod together and plummet to the moon’s surface.  They can’t communicate with their ship because of the dense atmosphere and the high amount of electromagnetic interference.  They can’t see much more than ten to fifteen feet because of the thick and obscuring atmosphere.  To survive, they realize they need to go halfway around the moon to get to the anchor that reaches up to the ship.  Monsters of various types are in their way.  The dominant monster is a strange slug-like thing encased in what appears to be a constructed exoskeleton.  Nicknamed the Shrouded, they continually try to take apart the pod, the only thing separating Juna and Mai from a certain crushing and toxic death.  The two must find a way to reach the anchor through these monsters if they are to survive.

This book is similar to “Children” in that after about a hundred pages, when Juna and Mai are stranded on Shroud, the chapters alternate between them and the monstrous aliens.  It’s a bit derivative, but the circumstances are very different.  In this case, the aliens’ main source of input and output is echolocation and electromagnetic waves.  None of the creatures, including the Shrouded, have eyes, since the atmosphere is obscured by clouds.  So communication between the humans and the Shrouded is non-existent, as neither understands how the other exists, let alone communicates.  

The human perspective chapters are narrated by Juna.  She’s quite the brilliant person for being relatively non-technical.  At first, she and Mai butt heads, but as time crawls, they learn to communicate with each other and figure out how to survive.  It took me quite a while to get inside Juna’s head due to the denseness of the prose.  I think I finally broke through once she and Mai were on better terms.  I actually related more to the Shrouded.  I think that was because of my general distaste for the humans in the beginning.  They were belligerent towards each other and quite xenophobic towards the Shrouded.  

The themes running in this book were xenophobia (naturally) and corporate greed.  Humans are in stasis on the spaceship until they’re needed, much like tools in a shed, and are treated as little more than that.  It also explores the problems with a very style of communication much different than humans and even the spiders from “Children.”  

This book requires a lot of concentration.  It’s not that technical, just, again, very dense in its prose.  The world building is phenomenal, as Tchaikovsky always is.  It’s because of the denseness as well as the similarity to “Children” that I give it less than 5 stars.  It gets four out of five.  I’m not sure how I’ll vote in the Hugos yet.  I have four more books to read.  Then I’ll see how this compares to the others.

400,000 Hits!!

Well, another six months have gone by and I've had another 100K hits on my blog.  Total: 400,000!! 

Big thanks to all who have visited and read my reviews.

I'm starting on the Hugos Nominees packet, so I'll be immersed in those books for the next three months.  I'll be voting in every category in which I can read or watch all the nominees.  So look for those reviews in upcoming posts.  The WorldCon this year is in Anaheim in August.  While there, I'll be getting to San Diego to visit an old roommate I haven't seen in 30, no wait, almost 40 years.  We're hoping to visit Joshua Tree National Park at that time.  Woohoo National Parks!!

I hope everyone who reads my blog finds a review or two that inspire them to read the books.  And remember, Reading is FUNdamental 😁

Role Model

Rachel Reid
Completed 4/48/2026, Reviewed 5/6/2026
4 stars

I am so loving these Heated Rivalry books.  Each one features a new couple with cameos from the characters of the other books.  The stories are all quick reads and soooooo romantic.  But they also deal with external and internal homophobia.  This one particularly focuses on the internalized homophobia of the main character Troy.  His coming out process is amazing to watch.  It’s slow and very frustrating at times, but that’s what makes the book so good.  Yes, it’s also spicy.  But I can see why fans are clamoring for a seventh book.  This one is the fifth in the series.  And it’s actually called the Game Changer series. 

Troy Barrett is the main character.  After an intense confrontation with his former best friend Dallas Kent, who has been accused of sexual crimes by women, Troy is traded to Ottawa, the worst team in the league.  Incidentally, it’s also where Ilya Rozanov plays.  However, most everyone in the league is against Troy because of the “bro-code” dismissing the women and supporting Dallas the perpetrator.  Except for his new team.  Unlike other teams, they have a camaraderie he’s never felt before.  Their coach also has a less abusive style, unlike most hockey coaches in the league.  He hates it all, though, and just wants to get through the season and try to get onto another team.  His plans all fall apart when he meets the team’s social media guy.  Harris Drover is very out and the team loves him.  Troy doesn’t get it, but he finds this slightly paunchy bear irresistible.  And Harris, who has kept his sexual relationships out of the locker room gets tons of mixed signals from Troy.  But Harris decides to make Troy his project and get him better integrated into the team.  And then…

I loved Harris.  He’s not a super-hot guy.  He’s a rather normal looking guy, which is a great change.  The problem with most M/M romance and romantasy books is that all the guys are stunners.  Not this time.  And not only does he manage the team’s online presence but is basically their cheerleader and best bud.  It’s a great relationship.  So it only makes sense that he makes a project out of Troy.  

Troy on the other hand, is a mess.  He feels isolated because many in the league hate him for what he did to Dallas.  Plus, he feels deeply guilty for all the gay slurs he used to cover up his own identity.  He doesn’t want to be a bro anymore but doesn’t know how not to be one.  Enter Harris.  And as time goes on, the signals between them get more and more mixed.  They become friends, but will there be benefits?

Ilya has some nice scenes with Troy.  Ilya is not publicly out at this point, but he does see the chemistry between Troy and Harris.  As the team captain, he takes it upon himself to give Troy advise and push him a little.  He also helps him feel a part of the team, as the captain should, giving Troy support and encouragement.  They are great scenes, showing a gentler side of Ilya that is rarely seen by the public.  

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, zipping through it in about two and a half days.  Once again, these books are not great literature, but they are so fun and so romantic, they simply suck me in.  I give this book four stars out of five.  It may be a while before I get to the sixth book as I now have all the Hugo nominees to get through before late July.  But I will get to it and report back, hopefully before season two of Heated Rivalry hits streaming.

More Than Human

Theodore Sturgeon

Completed 4/26/2026, Reviewed 4/27/2026

4 stars

I first read this book in college.  I picked it up at a supermarket in their paperback section.  I thought it was brilliant.  After rereading nearly fifty years later, I still find it brilliant, but it wasn’t as earth-shattering.  Perhaps it’s because it was a reread, or perhaps I’ve been exposed to so much science fiction since then.  I love the basic theme of the next step in human evolution being communal and psychic.  However, I found some of the delivery tough to follow.  And of course, this being from the early fifties, it has some cringy stereotypical male/female behaviors.  Overall, though, I thought the inclusion of girls and boys, white and black persons, and the sentiment against inequality was great.  At a time when sci fi was read mostly by white boys and men, Sturgeon made a concerted effort to reach beyond that demographic.  This book came out in 1953, and it won a 2004 retro Hugo.

The story begins with a “half-wit,” basically, a person living on the street with no speaking ability and limited intellectual development.  He begins to get visions and messages from someone else, which he doesn’t understand.  Eventually, he meets this person and makes a connection.  That goes awry, forcing him to flee.  He finds a farm with a couple who have lost a child.  They take him in, treat him like the son they lost, teach him to speak, and to become their farmhand.  He accidentally takes the name of Lone.  When the couple becomes pregnant, he leaves and eventually finds a girl named Janie with telekinesis and mute twin girls named Bonnie and Beanie who teleport.  His own psychic abilities mesh with theirs.  Later, he goes back to the farm and finds the couple did have a baby boy, but it is mentally disabled.  The woman has left “to go east,” and the man is failing at keeping things together.  Lone takes the baby back to the cave where the little group lives and they discover the baby is like an adding machine, that is, a high-powered AI computer.  Together they form an entity that interacts psychically.  It is a new level of human development: Homo Gestalt.

The book is in three chapters, each like a related short story.  In the second chapter, they meet a boy named Gerry who can use all the gifts of the others to accomplish what he wants, namely, power and control.  His own gift is the ability to control other people’s psyche through power of suggestion, absorb everything they know, and wipe their memories to hide the evidence.  In the third chapter, they meet a man who can also psychically connect, but unlike the others, has a sense of morality and social ethics.

I remember being in awe of the coming together of a group of psionics to create a singular entity.  I still find it fascinating and generally found the book very intriguing until the third chapter.  Titled “Morality,” the first part of the third chapter is very hard to understand what’s going on.  The main character of this chapter is roaming around with a huge chunk of missing memory trying to find a “dimwit” and some children, but he can’t quite put his finger on who or why.  This section was incredibly complicated in trying to describe what he’s going through mentally.  And physically, he’s a mess.  It takes Janie to help him remember everything.  But then, like many early sci-fi stories, Janie goes through a huge exposition to explain all the events up to that point.  The saving grace is that the reader is so frustrated with the chaos of the main character’s thoughts or lack thereof, it comes as a welcome relief when Janie explains it all.  

The character development is pretty good.  The lumbering Lone is perhaps the easiest to like.  He’s sort of a gentle giant who is basically the head of this new psychic body.  Janie is brash, the twins are mischievous, and Baby is like a wild supercomputer.  Gerry is dangerous and we learn about him in flashbacks during a psychiatric appointment.  Hip Barrows, the main character of the third chapter is the most “normal.”

There are some memorable positive moments, such as when the group goes to live with Miss Alice, whom Lone knew from his past.  She tries to force the twin black girls to eat with her maid while the others eat with her.  Janie and Gerry threaten Alice until they are allowed to eat together.  On the other hand, like in several classic sci-fi stories, there’s a scene where Hip shakes Janie, as is also depicted in a lot of old books and films.  This is so cringy and it happens several times.  I felt this went against character for Janie who was such a brash and precocious young child.  I think it would have been more in character to have her throw off his arms and be more aggressive.  

I really like the prose, something I’ve said of the previous books of his I read about 10 to 12 years ago.  Godbody, Venus Plus X, and E Pluribus Unicorn are all very well written.  I give this book four stars out of five, mainly because the first part of chapter 3 felt almost unreadable because of Sturgeon’s portrayal of missing memory.  I’d like to read more of his short stories; an award for excellence in short fiction was named after Sturgeon.  I remember when he came to our Fantasy Lit class in 1981.  He read a story about a pleasuring toilet seat.  It was very bawdy, reminding me he was also a dirty old man.  But he was also a great writer and visionary, as this book demonstrates.

Katabasis

R.F. Kuang
Completed 4/20/2026, Reviewed 4/22/2026
3 stars

I was so disappointed in this book.  I loved Kuang’s previous Babel, with its rich world building and prose.  I was expecting more of the same here.  Instead, the prose felt bloated, the world building tedious, and the plot buried under the main character’s constant brooding and dwelling on her fears and self-doubt.  The only parts of the book I enjoyed were the revelation of Alice’s part in the demise of their advisor and the exposition of her rival Peter’s background.  Katabasis is ancient Greek for a hero’s journey to the underworld.  With a title like that, I thought I would be enthralled.  Instead, I wanted to get out of the book as much as Alice and Peter wanted to get out of Hell.  This book was nominated for a 2025 Nebula and several smaller awards.  

The book begins with Alice, a graduate student in magick at Cambridge, rushing to cross into the Underworld to bring back her sadistic and morally reprehensible advisor, Professor Grimes, who died in a tragic magical accident.  Alice believes she was the cause and it is her duty to bring him back.  She’s interrupted by her rival Peter who has the same mission.  Together they travel through the different areas of Hell based on the Seven Deadly Sins.  Their only guides are the “accounts” of Dante, Orpheus, and other figures who supposedly traveled to and returned from Hell.  They encounter many different Shades, including some who help, some who deceive, and some who want to eat them.  

It was tough liking either Alice or Peter.  Alice’s reason for going to Cambridge and studying under Professor Grimes is that it will ensure her a job and success after school.  She’s obsessed with Grimes, basing her self-esteem and talent on his every word and action.  Everyone else is competition and everything else is a distraction.  Her biggest rival is Peter who also studies under Grimes.  Everything seems to come easily to him.  In the year leading up to the events of this book, she sees him usurping her position.  Grimes himself is a morally reprehensible slave driver with no regard for anyone else, including his students.  Alice takes it because of her obsession.  Peter seems to not mind Grimes, taking everything very casually and still landing himself on top.  So when he appears while she’s opening the portal to the underworld, she’s reluctant and resentful about letting him join her.  Through most of their time in Hell, they are at odds, despite Peter being most helpful and generous.

I tried to read Dante’s Inferno in high school on my own and was very lost.  I understand the basic concept of the book as well as Orpheus’ journey to bring Eurydice back from the underworld.  Alice and Peter refer to these and other tales during their journey.  But most of the time is spent in Alice’s head, hating and second-guessing Peter and recounting her relationship with Peter and Grimes up to that moment.  This was the part I disliked.  It was very repetitive.  My reaction was always, let’s just get on with the search for Grimes.  It didn’t help that Hell was mostly a wasteland with days and days of nothingness.  Even when they met Shades, good or bad, the action was constantly interrupted by Alice’s manic mind.  

The only parts I really liked were the chapters where we got the full concise disclosures of Peter’s past and Alice’s more recent disenfranchisement from Grimes.  They explained all the motivations and truths they both were hiding from each other.  However, this was not enough to make up for the first four hundred or so pages and didn’t make the last hundred and sixty any better.  

I thought the magick system was somewhat interesting.  Everything was based on chalk drawings of pentagrams, symbols, and magick words.  There’s even amusing references to the differences between brands of chalk and academic loyalty to each one.  The world building, however, was not interesting.  I quickly grew tired of the underworld.  The features like the river in which shades go to forget their previous lives and reincarnate, the reflection of the living world, the market, and even the eighth level home of Hades aka King Yama, all got tedious as the scenes progressed.  I simply could not get into it.

One other positive thing about the underworld was that it was mixed with the stories and myths of different cultures.  It wasn’t all Greco-Western.  It included some Chinese and other cultural myths as well.  

I give this book a very low three stars out of five.  Two stars implies bad.  It wasn’t bad, just very boring.  The prose is beautiful but dull.  The characters are very well developed though Alice is quite whiny, misguided, and not very likeable.  The Shades they meet in Hell are interesting.  And there’s a cool cat named Archimedes who pops in and out, occasionally helping them.  I’m not turned off by Kuang, though.  I hope to eventually read her Poppy Wars trilogy, which is supposed to be excellent.  

Into the Void

Ronny Valtonen
Completed 4/11/2026, Reviewed 4/11/2026
2 stars

This was a tough book to review.  I know the author and this is his first work.  I like to give new, self-published authors the benefit of the doubt.  Unfortunately, this book is much like my own early attempts at writing, which I can look at with a more critical all these years later.  Valtonen chose a form that is difficult to be anything but exposition.  It’s the journal of the commanding officer of a mission to find a new habitable planet for humankind.  A lot happens on the trip, but there are no real details.  As one would expect in a journal, it’s just the highlights.  I never felt much empathy with the characters.  Instead, it just felt like a manifesto for an idealistic search for a new home rather than a work of fiction.

The crew consists of four members: Jonathan the commander, Jebidiah the security officer, Ellie the scientist, and Polly the photographer and documenter.  They are on a five-year mission to Proxima Centauri B, the most likely candidate for a new home.  On the planet they find ruins that contain a portal.  They opt to go through the portal and meet a race of beings that are far more advanced than humans.  They offer the crew the opportunity to travel farther in their search for the best planet to homestead.  This takes them up to a place known as the Void, where physics fails and new insights into the universe and its inhabitants are revealed.  

These journal entries were all about telling, not showing.  They were all recaps of what had happened aboard the ship.  There is almost no dialogue, no details of the characters’ interactions.  The entries are pretty strictly reports, not recounts.  It made for tiresome reading.  Jonathan praised the characters almost completely throughout.  There was almost no conflict.  The closest we get is that Jeb and Polly try to have a secret relationship which everyone figures out, and then Polly gets pregnant.  Even when the crew meets the extraterrestrials, everything goes super smoothly.  The crew does have differing opinions on things but always comes to a level-headed consensus.  

I also noticed issues a proofreader could have caught.  For example, some measurements are given in metric, others in imperial units.  I was also confused by the speed of light usage.  They were supposedly traveling at 5c, which would be five times the speed of light.  With Proxima Centauri B being about five light-years away, it should only have taken them about a year.  Valtonen throws in some calculations that are little suspect as well.  I didn’t do the math myself, but it seemed like there was some confusion of kilometers/hour versus miles/hour and the value of c as well, either 3 x 108 m/s versus 186,000 mi/s.  Finally, there’s the matter of time dilation.  Valtonen says that it was disproven in 2019.  However, I remember reports that experiments have proven relativity several times since the seventies.  Without time dilation or delay, they are able to communicate instantaneously with Earth most of their trip, like with an ansible.  But, I guess use of an ansible implies faster-than-light communication, which implies general relativity is still in effect, which contradicts the 2019 assertion.  

I think Valtonen could also have used a good editor to help flesh out the characters, adding more humanity, checking for continuity, and flagging hyperbole.  Once the crew make it to the Void, you get the sense that all they do is gaze in awe at their surroundings.  There are no descriptions of what they saw.  Then, Ellie does lots of interacting with the extraterrestrials and analysis of data input from their surroundings.  Polly takes a lot of pictures.  Jeb watches for everyone’s safety.  

When the crew finds the perfect habitable planet, it seems that there are already settlers for the planet.  So either I missed the description of the ship as carrying a chunk of humanity, or they arrived very soon after.  There’s a second wave of settlers as well, but the journal entries only cover about nine months.  So one would have to assume that the extraterrestrials taught us an even faster form of travel.  

My last big criticism is the handling of Polly’s pregnancy.  There’s no mention of any of the common issues she should be experiencing, like morning sickness, mood swings, swollen feet, and frequent urination.  In fact, we don’t hear about it again until the baby’s birth.  Then, there’s no mention of Polly being okay when the birth takes place.  She’s not mentioned again until two entries later, and then it’s about her work on the mission.  

I give this book two stars out of five.  I try to go easy on new authors, but this was the best I could do.  What I can say is that Valtonen has a marvelous vision for and faith in the goodness of humankind.  This could have been a terrific novel with more writing experience, beta readers, and a good editor.  I realize these are luxuries for the beginner indie writer.  But I believe he would find a lot of value and grow as a writer with this outside input.  I have his second novella, the sequel to this one.  I’m still going to read it because I believe indie authors have something to say, even if it’s rough at first.