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outofrange

dylankuhn@bookwyrm.social

Joined 3 years ago

Reading for sanity, solace, meaning, meandering. Partial to mountains and desert, climate themes, balancing the heavy with the light.

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Hernan Diaz: Trust (2022, Penguin Publishing Group) 4 stars

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard …

Historical fiction fiction

4 stars

Not my usual fare, and I considered stopping in the first book. Glad I didn't! I didn't put a lot of effort into following all the hints, but I definitely enjoyed the gradual assembly of perspectives from the series of fictional authors. I feel like I got a few looks at Wall Street history, mostly unfamiliar to me.

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reviewed The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells (Books of the Raksura, #1)

Martha Wells: The Cloud Roads (Paperback, 2019, Night Shade) 4 stars

Moon has spent his life hiding what he is--a shape-shifter able to transform himself into …

Found Family in a delightfully imaginative setting

5 stars

Moon, the main character of the Raksura series, shares a great many characteristics with Murderbot: he's isolated, traumatized, often inspires fear in others through no fault of his own, and doesn't know where he belongs or how to fit in. Naturally, the first book is mostly concerned with reuniting Moon with his people and chronicling the joys and pains of integrating into this complex society. The plot is slightly predictable, but this is easily compensated for by the sheer originality of the setting: one of the few fantasy books/series I've read that does not bother with the conceit of fitting human society into a world where magic exists, but rather imagines a world where magic is just another routine natural force. There are no humans in this world but there are hundreds, possibly thousands, of sentient humanoid species, and just as many sentient non-humanoids. There are also floating islands, flying …

reviewed The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin (The Broken Earth, #1)

N. K. Jemisin: The Fifth Season (Paperback, 2015, Orbit) 4 stars

A SEASON OF ENDINGS HAS BEGUN.

IT STARTS WITH THE GREAT RED RIFT across the …

Exploratory, rocky

4 stars

The broken earth has a lot of appealing elements (sorry) with narrative experiments going on at different scales. Some worked better than others for me, none were total flubs. The power dynamics between characters are fairly well balanced, but sometimes the characters felt a little too imaginary to me.

Elizabeth Rush: Quickening (2023, Milkweed Editions) 5 stars

An astonishing, vital book about Antarctica, climate change, and motherhood from the author of Rising, …

A theme through many eyes

5 stars

We get an account of a groundbreaking scientific expedition to Antarctica from a writer grappling with understanding climate change while yearning for motherhood, and determined to break the Antarctic adventure tale mold by including as many perspectives as she can.

Barbara Kingsolver, Barbara Kingsolver: Demon Copperhead (Hardcover, Harper) 4 stars

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, Demon Copperhead is the story of a boy …

Beautifully painful

4 stars

I grabbed this without much consideration and got embarrassingly far through it before I got the Dickens heritage. If I read David Copperfield I've forgotten it, but if it explores real societal issues through the eyes of kids as well as this story does, it would be worth a comparison to get a sense of how the problems have evolved. It's not just problems though, they are lived by good characters.