A.M. DellamonicaRecensioni

So what starts out as a simple (all right slightly stalkery) mission to track down her birth mother turns out to be a huge political fiasco that almost lands her birth family's world into total chaos. Honestly from what I read in the book about Sophie, it makes complete sense that she would nearly cause that.

To lay it out, as a child I absorbed and loved "portal" fantasies (or portal science fiction books, cause hey they exist). Blame [a:Pamela Dean|4106|Pamela Dean|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1207161079p2/4106.jpg] and [a:Joyce Ballou Gregorian|92610|Joyce Ballou Gregorian|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] (not oddly CS Lewis, I didn't read the Narnia books until well into my late late teens) as their books in particular sparked my interest (along with the "Unicorn Queen" books). CHILD OF A HIDDEN SEA fits that love of mine perfectly.

Granted there was a lot of doublespeak political mumbo-jumbo that occurred, making it sometimes hard to follow the narrative flow easily, but Sophie (and Bram and Verena and Parrish and Tonio...) were so enjoyable to read about. Sophie and Bram with their insatiable curiosity, Verena with her awkward discomfort of whether she should be happy she has a sister or bitter, Parrish with his tight-lipped honor and slight smiles, Tonio with his resigned attitude that no matter what Sophie is leading him towards angering Parrish. They were such fun to read about.

Sophie is an easy character to relate to. Though intelligent, personable and kind hearted a lifetime of wondering 'Why?' in relation to her birth family and the abysmal first meeting with her birth mother left her feeling inadequate. Add to it that her beloved younger brother is a certified child genius and a general feeling of not quite right, well it makes sense that she's searching desperately for something to ground her. Something that is hers irrefutably. Dellamonica doesn't shove into our face that Sophie is clever and quick. Bram (her brother) says it very often, but Sophie sees connections others didn't. Some of it is obvious stuff that people so close can't see--she knows so little about "Stormwrack" so for her the obvious connections stand out.

The books covers a lot of plots--the A plot being based around something that Gale knew and that would turn the tide of the Cessation with the biggest subplot being Sophie's birth family. Amazingly Dellamonica most of them into each other with the resolution solving the majority of the problems at hand. As mentioned earlier the doublespeak takes a little getting used to. Near the end it becomes really heavy--as legal concerns are tossed around and such stakes as honor are heaved out. Its rapid fire, twisty and with Sophie's despairing inner monologue coloring the reader's subjective perception it can feel endless.

Parts of the book felt more exposition happy then others. Sophie and Bram's curiosity meant they asked a lot of questions and did a lot of research. While this gave the reader a good idea of the world/culture, it sometimes felt redundant as the society at least was presented organically throughout. Also for a non-science lover like myself the more technical aspects of Sophie's observations went straight over me and had flashbacks of school running through my head.

Insofar as romance goes its light and doesn't really distract. Sophie is old enough to understand where flirtations lead and young enough to find it all an adventure. Though Verena comes off angsty at times, in regards to her object of affection, she's a legit teenager grappling with a whole boatload of issues so that's acceptable. I found the LGBT characters (there's two out and out gay guys, and an entire race who loves pleasure in any form) to be handled well and the general attitude towards such treated without fanfare. There's the haters, the indifferent folk and the supporters, and though we get very little background about why certain races felt one way or the other, Dellamonica never makes the discussion the focal point.

The ending can be seen as either an open invitation to more adventures or a satisfying conclusion to Sophie's journey. There's two short stories set in this world (that predate this novel - one is directly about Gale I believe, and is referenced obliquely by Parrish at one point and the other is more of a set in the same world deal I believe) and I hope to see more in the future.

Portal fantasy mostly taking place on an earth-analogous planet of mainly seas where government and jurisdiction is managed by a huge fleet policing the open seas connecting far flung small island nations with very different rules and cultures.
Interesting take on world travel, where the protagonist is a naturalist who tries to research the differences in the two worlds, dragging all sorts of equipment and samples across. At the same time as she is engaged in both a family dispute and uncovering a world-changing conspiracy.
Interesting read, but probably not enough to keep me reading the rest of the series.½

This was just the book I needed. Graceful prose pulling me into a different place, characters I love, doing things that make me care, and a wonderfully inventive world. With no infodumps, squicky stereotypes, or gratuitous whatever.

The first night, I stopped at page 102. The second night, I stopped at page 212. The third night, I didn't stop.

I need the next one. Now.

A fun, action-y portal fantasy with a little mystery as a side to a whole lot of world-building.

Sophie's adoptive parents have been tight-lipped about her birth family, so she's been stalking her birth mom while they're on an extended vacation. When an introduction goes down like a lead balloon, she tries her aunt...only to interrupt what looks like a mugging. In the middle of the scuffle, aunt and niece end up in the middle of a storm in an ocean that ought, by the stars and moon, to be on Earth, but which definitely isn't: a water world full of island nations with widely different societies, all tied together by the great Fleet of ships representing each nation, which has maintained peace for over a hundred years with the deterrent of a magical ship-destroying weapon. Politics are complicated, as you'd imagine, especially with an overarching strict code of honor and a tangled bureaucracy. Magic is prevalent in this world but it requires writing and a precise combination of materials, and cumulative magic takes its toll on the person or object on which the spell is cast.

Sophie is in absolute nerd heaven. She may not have the scientific degrees to match her professor parents and super-genius younger brother, but she's got a naturalist's eye and an ocean diver's drive to explore. Unfortunately, the Fleet send her packing back to our world. Fortunately (for Sophie's curiosity), her encounter with her aunt triggered a magical succession crisis, so when her new-found half-sister shows up demanding she hand over the rights of the family heir, Sophie happily agrees to go back and look around while ironing out the legal issues...as long as she can bring her equally nerdy brother along for the ride.

Her aunt's not happy. For reasons she won't disclose, Sophie isn't supposed to be in this world...which becomes an even bigger problem when her aunt is murdered and Sophie, as the reluctant heir to the family estate, becomes responsible for the inquiry into her death.

The book is packed full of action and world-building--the latter sometimes to the detriment of the former, when descriptions of island scenery or (admittedly, really cool) sea otters interrupt the flow of the story. The plot took a little time to rev its engines, too, as we had to get Sophie and aunt to safety, then back to San Fran, then back to the fantasy world before the plot proper could kick into gear. But once we were going, we were really going! It's hard to believe how much Dellamonica managed to fit into these pages, unspooling a pretty good politically knotty mystery while also giving Sophie chances to show off her diving skills. There are duels, storms, chases, treasure retrievals, and a courtroom showdown, but none of it felt rushed or crammed in.

It was fun, too, to have a more open portal between the fantasy and real worlds: Sophie's birth mother lives in San Francisco, her half-sister is considering university, her aunt travels between worlds freely, and a few other people in her aunt's circle have at least visited our world--so there are some people in the know, even if they don't fully understand Sophie's slang and her brother's technical language. With time to plan, Sophie also brings along diving, camera, and recording gear, though she's never obnoxious about her superior technology, even acknowledging when her own knowledge of, for example, wooden sailing ships is lacking. Her scholarly interest is the perfect excuse to give us readers details of the places she visits. Sophie's more modern phrasing was usually a fun contrast to the more typical fantasy-formal, though it did occasionally make her come off as much younger than 26--more around the age of her 17-year-old half-sister.

I mentioned that the action sometimes slowed to give way to the world building, and the same can be said of the character development. To me, it felt as though Sophie was the only character with real emotional depth. Though it seems that everyone mourns her aunt, there are few specific stories to share; Sophie's half-sister has no anecdotes about her childhood; the people who have visited our world don't have any thoughts about their experiences; and though everyone in polite circles distrusts and dislikes "Captain Tasty" (as Sophie privately dubs the attractive captain of her aunt's ship) no one hints at why he's so out of favor. Put another way, the characters do seem well fleshed-out in the moment, but aside from Sophie and the captain (who barely escape my "stupid romance" label) none of them feel like they have much history.

So, overall, a fun book to read on a sailing trip...but definitely more action-y than character-y.

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"You're using the official spy box to hide presents?"

Liked the 1st in the series, couldn't get into this

A well written and enjoyable short story.

Beckett, L. X. Dealbreaker. The Bounceback No. 2. Tor, 2020.
Set 20 years after Gamechanger, Dealbreaker stars Frankie, who was a child in the earlier novel. Much of the action involving her takes place on alien space stations humans call Sneezy and The Dumpster. Humanity has moved out into the solar system and through some borrowed alien technology into the edges of an interstellar culture. But most daily life is carried on in a systemwide holographic environment called the Sensorium. There are artificial intelligences, uploaded consciousness, and people whose consciousnesses have been downloaded into printed bodies. Some people are “botomies,” who have no will of their own. There are also several alien cultures, some of whom have rigid ideas about intellectual property rights. It is quite a world, but I am not sure I always followed the story that was set in it. It was sometimes hard to tell whether events were happening in meat space, in the sensorium, or in some other virtual environment. The problem was compounded because characters might have different instantiations of themselves. Finally, I have never read a story so full of pop technobabble. It is all very imaginative but often hard to follow, and it was annoying to have so many words associated with a hashtag or trademark symbol. To make it work, Beckett would have to be as good a stylist as Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange. As it stands, the book was a bit of a slog. It gets a B-. 3.5 stars rounded up for effort.½

Beckett, L. X. Gamechanger. The Bounceback No. 1. Tor, 2019.
I started L. X. Becket’s Gamechanger several times before it finally engaged me enough to finish it. But the book’s world finally hooked me. Set in the early 22nd century, it tells the story of a world on the cusp of a technological singularity called the Bounceback, following ecological and political disasters of the 21st century (called the Setback and the Clawback). The physical world is on a carbon economy, but most people spend their lives in a global virtual environment called the Sensorium, because that is where they can lead full lives without doing much damage to the biome. The virtual economy is based on positive strokes for prosocial acts and negative strikes for antisocial acts. Our heroine is a public defender and gaming star. There is a question about whether her current antisocial client may be an illegally uploaded consciousness or a rogue AI. But much of the book describes the interface between the gaming world and the meat world—think Ready Player One without so many allusions. My initial problem with the novel, I have decided, has to to with a figure-ground problem. It was often difficult for me to distinguish between details that were salient to the story and those that were simply filigree. 4 stars with reservations.

I just couldn't get into this one. The synopsis of the story sounded good, but after getting about halfway through the book, I was having a hard time keeping my attention focused (much like the lead character). I am not sure if it was just my mood when trying to read this, or the way the author wrote, that made me feel like I was reading something a grade-schooler wrote. Literally, it gave me a headache. I do admit, that I do like the idea of the story, but just couldn't deal with the writing style.

To cut to the chase, there were quite a few times when I wondered why I was persevering with this novel, as it's such a sprawl, and the main characters really don't achieve free-standing quality until very late in the game. This is without the added complication that more characters and conspiracies are being thrown at you up until the very end. That said, the reason you do continue is that the world Beckett has created in this work is the real main character, and to learn more about her setting is probably the real reason I continued forward.

As for Rubi Whiting, the apparent marquee character, I can see why some reviewers have described her as being a "Mary Sue." However, she is basically a politician running to be tribune of the people and she's true to type in terms of personality; that doesn't mean that I found her all that interesting.

Apart from that I could have also done without the RPG that's a story within the story and I still think that this book suffers from bloat, even if it's really two novels in one.

I'm still looking forward to the follow-up to see how Beckett deals with some of the conflicts she's set up. I applaud her for taking up the challenge of what comes after disaster and dystopia.½

Big sprawling cyberpunk novel. Feels heavily indebted to Stephenson, with a layer of climate-crisis-modulated utopia thing on top. Has some interesting things going on, but felt pretty awkward on a number of levels—insistence on using "#" and "@", even in dialog; introducing actual off-world aliens who are actively invading, but then not really centering that over the VR game tournament storyline; and I found the AI sub-plots really aggravating for basic computer logistics issues. Does a neat job of investigating AI-mediated trauma, transhuman family dynamics, and a few other things, but ultimately the annoying outweighed the interesting, for me at least. Still, an author to watch.

This is one of those stories where someone from the world we know is magically transported to another realm. Sophie was on a mission to find out more about the biological family who gave her up for adoption - she loves her parents and brother dearly, blood ties or no, but she’s curious. When she and her newly discovered aunt fall through a portal into another world, that curiosity continues to drive her, and it’s awesome. Usually the characters these things happen to just accept it or refuse to accept it, but when Sophie finds herself in this land of pirates and magic, she decides she’s going to science the shit out of this. She’s all “I don’t recognise those constellations, gotta take photos of every new species I encounter, please help me collect samples, hmm what language does this language resemble, tell me more about your culture!” and I love it.

Post-apocalypse, the recovery generations are trying to put the world back together using massively distributed referendum voting and pervasive surveillance to determine social credit (strokes for prosocial behavior like volunteering to help clean up a public space, strikes for abusive behavior). Rubi Whiting, a well known virtual gameplayer and would-be attorney, gets caught up in the case of an antisocial being who might not have a physical body, which would make him an illegal polter or even a more-illegal rogue AI. (Or maybe it's an alien!) Her love interest and game antagonist Gimlet, Gimlet’s child, and Rubi’s brilliant but heavily damaged father all get involved in various ways. I found the book sprawling and full of ideas about hope in a climate-ravaged world, but rarely connected with it, which may be either cause or consequence of the fact that it took me months to get through it. (Took it out of the library right before the coronavirus shutdown and so didn’t have to return it.)½

I want to love this book. It has elements of sci-fi concepts and tropes that are easy wins with me. Yet, I just can't bring myself to give a shit about any of the characters. I'm 80% of the way through and I would be quietly appreciative if someone took it away.

It's not a bad book, it's just painfully unmemorable. Low stakes. Again, you could kill anyone in this book and I would experience no emotional reaction. I keep realizing that my thoughts are drifting and I have to go back to re-read pages.

There's never anything important in those pages.

I unknowingly bought the second book, A Daughter of No Nation at the dollar tree... the covers are so pretty. I'm not into pirate stories, but I decided to get the first book because the covers are pretty and because the main character is a 24 year old woman (like me!) who arrives into an unknown land, sounds great right?
Well... it's not bad, but it's not that good either. If I had to describe this book with a single sentence, it would be "Lawyers at the Hidden Sea"
So, we have our MC Sophie, who searching for her biological mother ends up saving her biological aunt's life from some attackers and suddenly ends up in the middle of the sea with her injured aunt.
She is in a new land and has one of the most realistic reactions, she is curious about everything, mainly the biology of the place. What annoyed me a little is that she is too inteligent, it doesn't annoy me that she is intelligent, but that her skills match perfectly the story, she is a biologist, a diver, speaks several languages and whatever she doesn't know, she can make it up. The world was kinda confusing at first, because it seems like Earth, but in another time. The technology works fine, she can record things thou she doesn't have internet signal.
Sophie has a small adventure at the beginning of the book, and it was entertaining, she soon is forced to return to her own land and tells everything to her adoptive brother, a super genius. I enjoyed their relationship, I mentioned she is intelligent, but he is way more intelligent and she feels inferior to him in that sense... which made me feel hella dumb myself.
Things happen that force Sophie to return to the new land, she brings recording equipment and other stuff and her brother with her. Sophie's aunt is murdered and now Sophie must discover who did it (legally she is kinda forced to investigate). Everything sounds cool so far, but what I thought would become an intriguing mystery mixed with adventure and tons of action became a... legal investigation. There is lawyers, law, conspirations, trials, summonings, a lot of legal stuff happening, so basically the mystery lacks adventure and has the characters asking thing to suspects and looking for stuff.
The magic system is very interesting, in this magic world names are very powerful, anyone who knows your full name can make an inscription on you, a spell, which is obviously a bad thing, and the bad guys happen to know Sophies full name.
The climax of the book is a fucking trial. and their legal system is so stupid, if you don't have like a title or someone who backs you up, your testimony has no value, so Sophie uses her mundane technology to try to convince the judge to trust her word.
It was entertaining, slow in some parts, but the magic and the world are interesting. I want to continue, but I'm kinda wary, for the reviews I've read the second book is not the favorite.

This was amazing. Single mommy with a werewolf baby hires another woman to help soundproof her basement, and then attachments happen. Also, werewolf babies are adorable.

This is book 2 in the Stormwreck series by the author. I read the first book in the series back in 2016 and thought it was pretty good. This book probably suffered from second book syndrome. It didn't grab me like the first one did. However, in fairness, my reading time with it was not sustained, so that accounts for some of the disjointed feeling I had while reading it. The plot emphasis in this book is on the scientific method and the reasons why it is so important to be able to replicate and record results, as well as to do careful observations. There is an ecological mystery at the heart of this novel that is used to bring all of the plot points to a neatly tied up bundle, but the writing at the end just doesn't live up to those elements. It had all the elements of a very good YA fantasy and it fell just a little short.

I looooooved it. So sweet and fierce.

OH MY GOD I NEED MORE

Your heart will pound and you will feel that same indignant rage you get when you watch the news (and the whole thing will come to a very satisfactory close).

I am not crazy about this particular collection of Heiresses of Russ, but there are two stories I did find to be of particular interest and to be really, really, really good (spectacular, actually!!) still making the buy completely unregrettable: "Love in the Time of the Markov Processes" by Megan Arkenberg and "The Tip of the Tongue" by Felicia Davin.

For both stories, I feel like using "wow" is way too inadequate. The great thing about anthologies is that there is almost always something for everyone and if you are lucky enough you will find that one beautiful story that makes the entire collection worth it all.

This sentence from "Love in the Time of the Markov Processes" reminds me of why I like speculative fiction so, so, so much: "The universes are infinite, but that does not mean that all imaginable worlds exist. There are no two-sided squares. But perhaps somewhere she loves me, or someone like her loves someone like me."

** spoiler alert ** Really enjoyable and interesting—Stormwrack is such a fascinating place. I am always amazed at the unexpected places things go in this series. The characters are awesome—the whole aspect of Sophie being inscribed at birth added a real twist to her already trying to figure out her identity. I love the whole idea of inscriptions, and that Bram is studying them. Introducing 19th Century fingerprinting techniques in was a really cool idea. The frights were genuinely freaky. The political subtext and subtleties between the nations is so well done, as is the mystery of who was responsible for Gale’s death (TBD?). I know it is supposed to be a trilogy, but there’s so much to do... Highly recommend the whole trilogy.

I enjoyed this installment very much! Just the right amount of science, intrigue, romance, politics, psychology, ethical dilemmas...a whole lot pumped into one story. Much like life...only in a totally unique setting. Looking forward to the ending later this year!

3.5 stars... rounded up here. It was a solidly good story. Entertaining for sure. I gave it the half star for creativity and the sciencey bits with new species and geo-bio-diversity. Didn't give it the full star for the gigantic, unbelievable leap the main character made in accepting the time/space/magic travel. For a very scientific mind, her ready adjustment to what was right in front of her seemed too quick to me. I know it would have derailed the story, but it was a point that irritated me. Now I have to go back and watch more Doctor Who to see why the companions' acceptance of the Tardis didn't irritate me as much as Sophie's acceptance of Stormwrack. Plenty of open ends begging for a sequel.

This sea-faring alternative world fantasy starts out in modern day San Francisco where Sophie has gone to meet her birth mother and ends somewhere else. Just exactly where that is, is unknown. It seems like Earth, but it isn't the same. The plants are similar, but not the same. The animals are similar, but not the same, and some of them are so very different as to make Sophie think that she isn't even on Earth anymore. The plot is full of action and deeds of daring do, and the characters are sympathetic. Family appears and parents and children are united for the first time. It isn't a tear-jerker, but it is hopeful and engaging. The author doesn't spend too much time in world-building and gets right on with the story, making this an easy book to in which to become involved.