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14. The Rook by Daniel O'Malley. 5. Waking up with no memory in a dangerous situation is a running trope, but this one adds superpowers and shadowy government agencies in a particularly delightful way.
15. A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar. 3.5. Dreamy and wandering, this fantasy kind of reminds me of Wild Sargasso Sea in tone and disillusionment.
16. The Afterward by E.K. Johnston. 3.5. I liked the characters, and I really liked the hook of the aftermath of the big fantasy battle against the evil god. But the two plots really had nothing to do with each other, and one resolved so incredibly conveniently for the character that it felt a little cheap.
17. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan. 4.5. Really fascinating historical overview trying to take the Middle East and Central Asia as the center of the story instead of Europe. (I say "trying" because it's still unbalanced - we get a bunch of asides about what's going on in backwater England, with surprisingly little about what's going on in China or Southeast Asia to balance.) Still, it's phenomenally well done and a perspective Western audiences don't usually get exposed to.
18. The Oracle Glass by Judith Merkle Riley. 5. Hidden history in which the fortune-tellers of Louis XIV were real magicians. It's not a spoiler, since his name is in the cast, but the demon who shows up towards the end and is petulantly funny is my favorite.
19. The Silk Road by Captivating History. 2.5. Bought this by mistake when I was trying for Frankopan's book. Reads kind of like a lot of Wikipedia articles strung together. There's some interesting info here, but it's rather slim for the topic, especially given that about half of it is about Ghengis and Kublai Khan. (Poor Timur/Tamerlane and Zheng He each get, like, a paragraph, in comparison.)
15. A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar. 3.5. Dreamy and wandering, this fantasy kind of reminds me of Wild Sargasso Sea in tone and disillusionment.
16. The Afterward by E.K. Johnston. 3.5. I liked the characters, and I really liked the hook of the aftermath of the big fantasy battle against the evil god. But the two plots really had nothing to do with each other, and one resolved so incredibly conveniently for the character that it felt a little cheap.
17. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan. 4.5. Really fascinating historical overview trying to take the Middle East and Central Asia as the center of the story instead of Europe. (I say "trying" because it's still unbalanced - we get a bunch of asides about what's going on in backwater England, with surprisingly little about what's going on in China or Southeast Asia to balance.) Still, it's phenomenally well done and a perspective Western audiences don't usually get exposed to.
18. The Oracle Glass by Judith Merkle Riley. 5. Hidden history in which the fortune-tellers of Louis XIV were real magicians. It's not a spoiler, since his name is in the cast, but the demon who shows up towards the end and is petulantly funny is my favorite.
19. The Silk Road by Captivating History. 2.5. Bought this by mistake when I was trying for Frankopan's book. Reads kind of like a lot of Wikipedia articles strung together. There's some interesting info here, but it's rather slim for the topic, especially given that about half of it is about Ghengis and Kublai Khan. (Poor Timur/Tamerlane and Zheng He each get, like, a paragraph, in comparison.)
