Erin Larson: Book Reviews & Essays

New Releases: 2019, Part Three Four Mini-Reviews   Exhalation – Ted Chiang   I was perhaps the only person on the planet who was less than enamored with Ted Chiang’s debut collection of short fiction, Story of Your Life and Others (you are likely familiar with the title story because it was adapted into Denis … [Read More]

New Releases: 2019, Part Two Two Mini-Reviews   Disappearing Earth – Julia Phillips   Disappearing Earth begins with the abduction of two young girls in Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula. Is it a mystery? Nope. Thriller? Nope. Each succeeding chapter takes place during one month of the following year; these chapters are self-contained stories, each told from … [Read More]

New Releases: 2019, Part One Two Mini-Reviews   Black Leopard, Red Wolf – Marlon James   Black Leopard, Red Wolf defies reviewing; it exists in its own world, far beyond the conventions of modern literature. It’s tempting to tear it down because it doesn’t do what you expect a novel to do, but it’s equally … [Read More]

I won’t bother you with a lengthy preamble, but I would like to clarify one thing before I begin: this is a list of the best books I read in 2018, not a list of the best books published in 2018 that I read. I tend to stay away from new releases because they oh-so-rarely … [Read More]

The Fall of Gondolin By J.R.R. Tolkien Edited by Christopher Tolkien with illustrations by Alan Lee   I’m going to start out by saying something which probably won’t encourage you to keep reading: this is a pointless review. It’s pointless because The Fall of Gondolin is a Tolkien deep-cut, targeted to the most die-hard of … [Read More]

Endling: The Last By Katherine Applegate   It’s time to declare Katherine Applegate our greatest living children’s author (greatest of all time isn’t entirely out of contention, either; she has perhaps a half-dozen serious rivals, most of whom are no longer with us). Her latest novel and the first of a trilogy, Endling: The Last, … [Read More]

Children’s and Young Adult Literature in 2017 (Pt. 2): Three Mini-Reviews Summer 2018   Anyone who dares to transcend those fussy demographic delineations when choosing their reading material has likely realized by now that high-quality non-genre adult fiction has been largely nonexistent since the ‘90s; if you want good books, you’ll have to go genre…or … [Read More]

Children’s and Young Adult Literature in 2017 (Pt. 1): Three Mini-Reviews Spring 2018   Anyone who dares to transcend those fussy demographic delineations when choosing their reading material has likely realized by now that high-quality non-genre adult fiction has been largely nonexistent since the ‘90s; if you want good books, you’ll have to go genre…or … [Read More]

Author Spotlight: Paolo Bacigalupi Winter 2018   There are a few authors, not many, who excel in every aspect of storytelling. These are your Faulkners, your Fitzgeralds, your George R.R. Martins, your David Mitchells. Most, however, excel in one specific area, and that’s enough to patch over their weaknesses: Rowling’s strength is in structure, Tolkien’s … [Read More]

Like China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer got his start as a pioneer in the genre of New Weird; although he had decades of experience publishing novels and story collections (not to mention editing anthologies), his work remained highly niche until the release of the Southern Reach trilogy gained mainstream traction in 2014. This is where I … [Read More]