Tag Archives: Novella

October 10, 2024 · 1:00 am

A Review of I Found a Circus Tent in the Woods Behind My House

Title: I Found a Circus Tent in the Woods Behind My House

Author: Ben Farthing

Publisher: Self-Published (I think?)

Publication Date: January 23, 2023

Genres: Horror, Paranormal, Halloween, Contemporary

Length: 106 pages

Source: I borrowed it from the library

Rating: 3 Stars

Blurb:

Lost in a labyrinth of circus tents…

Dave and his four-year-old, Jacob, find a circus tent in the woods behind their house. A strange voice invites them through the dark doorway.

When they refuse, the tent swallows them.

What follows is a nightmare fleeing through a maze of circus tents. Strange performers lurk inside. They want Dave and his little boy to put on a show. The a shifting figure on a platform high above the trapeze wires.

With Jacob perched in the crook of his arm, Dave determines to outsmart the boss of this dark circus, and escape this horrifying tent.

Content Warning: Clowns. Blood. Murder.

Review:

The woods aren’t as safe as one might think.

It was interesting to see how parenthood had changed Dave. He gave several examples of what he used to do on the weekends before becoming a dad and how he had to give those hobbies and volunteer hours up due to having two young children to raise. Most of the fiction I read focuses on mothers, so I liked seeing what parenthood can feel like from a father’s perspective. Despite his other flaws, Dave seemed like an attentive and loving dad who was genuinely trying to give his children the best childhoods he could.

I struggled with the repetitive nature of this novella. Dave kept sharing the same thoughts with the audience over and over again, and he didn’t always make the most logical decisions. While I wouldn’t expect a character in his situation to be eloquent by any means, I did find myself wishing that he’d spend less time talking to the audience and more time either getting himself and his son out of that creepy circus tent or figuring out why the circus performers were so keen on luring humans into their world. As much as I wanted to give this one a higher rating, this issue prevented me from feeling comfortable to do so.

With that being said, I did appreciate the writing style of this piece. It reminded me of an adult version of the old television show Are You Afraid of the Dark. That is to say, it was a little cheesy in a good way and gave the characters plenty of opportunities to escape. The scenes that included scary moments were not emphasized the same way they probably would have been in, say, a Stephen King story. Honestly, I could see a preteen reader who loved horror being into this just as much as the adult audience it was written for, so it could be a good stepping stone into the horror genre for people who don’t mind brief references to blood but mostly want to be scared by imagining what might happen next.

This is the first instalment of a series that can be read in any order. If you do decide to read any of the books in it, though, be sure to check out the author’s explanations of where his ideas come from after the final chapter. The two I have read so far helped me to see their storylines in a new light and were well worth my time. (I will be reviewing I Found Puppets Living In My Apartment Walls in a few weeks, so stay tuned).

I Found a Circus Tent in the Woods Behind My House was a fun Halloween read.

A Review of The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion

Title: The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion

Author: Margaret Killjoy

Publisher: Tor Books

Publication Date: August 15, 2017

Genres: Fantasy, Horror, Paranormal, LGBTQ, Contemporary

Length: 120 pages

Source: I borrowed it from the library.

Rating: 3 Stars

Blurb:

The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion by Margaret Killjoy pits utopian anarchists against rogue demon deer in this dropkick-in-the-mouth punk fantasy that Alan Moore calls “scary and energetic.”

Searching for clues about her best friend’s mysterious suicide, Danielle ventures to the squatter, utopian town of Freedom, Iowa, and witnesses a protector spirit — in the form of a blood-red, three-antlered deer — begin to turn on its summoners. She and her new friends have to act fast if they’re going to save the town — or get out alive.

Content Warning: Brief reference to a previous suicide and a death by drug overdose. Dead and dying animals (livestock and wild animals, not pets). Blood. A demon. Murder.

Review:

Good intentions aren’t everything.

Some of the most memorable scenes to me were the ones that described how the residents of Freedom lived their lives. They were squatters who had banded together to create an ecologically-friendly commune where nothing was wasted and everyone’s basic needs were met thanks to a combination of gardening, gathering wild plants, visiting food banks, dumpster diving, and occasionally dipping into less legal forms of procuring food and supplies. Honestly, I would have read another hundred pages that described how their community worked and how they dealt with members who took more than they gave.

I struggled with the plot holes, especially the ones that protected Danielle and the other protagonists even when they were playing around with dangerous ideas that had gotten other characters killed off. Of course I wanted them to live happily ever after, but by protecting them from things the plot had repeatedly hammered home were terrible choices to make it watered down the message of it and left this reader feeling confused.

It was cool to realize how many of the characters in this tale were part of the LGBTQ+ community in part because of how it inverted the assumption that most characters should be cisgendered and heterosexual with only the occasional side character who breaks that rule. Representation is important, and I loved the fact that the characters identities were shared in ways that didn’t make a big deal out of any of them and quickly moved on to furthering the plot. That, too, makes a difference to those of us who are not cisgendered heterosexuals. Not everything needs to be announced with bells and whistles. Sometimes we just exist and go about our normal lives…albeit hopefully without seeing any supernatural deer causing havoc in the real world.

The themes in this novella were interesting but undeveloped. There was so much more the author could have done with ideas like the corruptive side effects of having power over others and how people who seek out positions that give them more power over others should be viewed with suspicion. I didn’t always agree with their thoughts on those topics, but I was intrigued and wanted to learn much more than I did about why the narrator – and maybe the author, too – feels this way.

After reading the last few pages, I wondered where this new series is going next. While I can’t go into a lot of detail about those scenes for spoiler reasons, there was obviously time spent setting up the characters for what was to come for them. While I thought some of the directions the end was hinting at didn’t mesh well with the themes that had been already established, I’m very open to being proven wrong about that. You never know what twists and turns might be ahead for a character, so it will be interesting to see what the author has up their sleeves.

The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion was creepy.

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Filed under Science Fiction and Fantasy

Tagged as 2010s, Book Reviews, Contemporary, Dark Fantasy, Horror, LGBT, Margaret Killjoy, Novella, Paranormal, Tor Books

July 18, 2024 · 1:00 am

Supernatural Business: A Review of Iago Wick and the Vampire Queen

Title: Iago Wick and the Vampire Queen (Lovelace & Wick #1.5) by Jennifer Rainey

Author: Jennifer Rainey

Publisher: Self-Published

Publication Date: August 30, 2017

Genres: Fantasy, Paranormal, Historical, LGBTQ

Length: 79 pages

Source: I received a free copy from the author.

Rating: 3 Stars

Blurb:

As a demon, Iago Wick has made quite a career out of conjuring mischief and mayhem in the name of Hell, but this time, perhaps he’s gone a bit too far.

After deliberately foiling the plans of a spoiled vampire—all in the name of fun, really!—Iago discovers that the vampire in question is no ordinary bloodsucker. She’s the newly-appointed matriarch of one of the oldest vampire families in America, and she’s very angry.

Soon, Iago is caught in a war with the vampires and their cyborg servants. Will he settle his score with the clan of bloodsuckers or will Iago find himself at the mercy of the Vampire Queen? What precisely is the matter with those strange cybernetic servants, anyway? And most importantly, will Iago ever get the smell of garlic out of his clothes?

“Iago Wick and the Vampire Queen” is a 17,000-word short story prequel to The Lovelace & Wick Series.

Content Warning: Murder and kidnapping. I will not mention these topics in my review.

Review:

Supernatural business is nothing to mess around with.

I enjoyed the quiet and unassuming small town setting. Honestly, the residents of Marlowe probably wouldn’t have believed what was going on behind closed doors in their sleepy community even if one of the main characters had decided to reveal their true identities to everyone. Peaceful places are a good option for hiding in plain sight, and I liked the way the author showed the many ways in which awful deeds can done right under the noses of people who think they know all of the local gossip already.

This novella had a dry sense of humor that I struggled to connect with due to the terrible things that were simultaneously happening to so many of the human characters. I’d read about either one of these things on their own, but the combination of them simply didn’t work for me as a reader. It felt a little too flippant to move between an edgy joke and another description of the ways in which vampires harm the humans around them. This is a subjective piece of criticism, of course, and I’m sure there are a lot of readers out there who love this sort of dark writing style. I’m simply not one of them, and I found myself wishing I could stick to the more lighthearted elements of the plot and skip over the rest.

With that being said, Iago’s personality was such an interesting one. There was a strong, sharp sense of danger surrounding him due to the fact that he’s (obviously) a demon and therefore not exactly the most wholesome fellow around. He had his own moral code that often didn’t match up to what a human might consider a reasonable or kind thing to do, but I did admire the way he stuck to it no matter who or what might have tempted him to break the rules of hell just once.

Iago Wick and the Vampire Queen was a playful read.

4 Comments

Filed under Science Fiction and Fantasy

Tagged as 2010s, Book Reviews, Fantasy, Historical, Jennifer Rainey, LGBT, Novella, Paranormal, Self-Published, Vampire

April 4, 2024 · 1:00 am

A Review of When Stars Move and Other Stories

Title: When Stars Move and Other Stories

Author: Shannon Rampe

Publisher: Self-Published

Publication Date: December 11, 2020

Genres: Science Fiction

Length: 63 pages

Source: I received a free copy from the author.

Rating: 4 Stars

Blurb:

A princess outside of time and history puts her trust in a rusty artifact instead of her treacherous family. The captain of a disintegrating war ship rushes toward a resolution for both human guilt and extreme augmentation. A young woman who has been “reignited” confronts a system that does not work at all in the way she has been conditioned to believe. In these three stories of death and rebirth, Shannon Rampe invites readers to immerse themselves in fantastic worlds and accompany their memorable characters on journeys of discovery and re-creation. Shannon Rampe’s work has appeared in Speculative City, Abyss & Apex, and on The Gallery of Curiosities podcast, amongst others. His hobbies include yoga and craft cocktail-making, though not (usually) at the same time.

Review:

Content Warning: Murder, sexism, religion, mental illness (post traumatic stress disorder), and genocide. I will not discuss any of these topics in my review.

Survival is about more than continuing to breathe.

I smiled at Anusha’s courage in ”When Stars Move.” As a princess, her freedom was virtually nonexistent, but she still had the urge to explore the world around her and learn as much about it as she could. The world building was handled nicely, especially when it came to how her Imam’s interpretation of how constellations moved across the night sky influenced everyone’s lives. I also enjoyed the conflict between Anusha’s inquisitive and stubborn personality with the pliant and obedient young woman she was expected to be.

Hermes, the dying warship in ”Ghost Parade,” made me curious to see what would become both of the ship itself as well as the heavily augmented protagonist. The most interesting part of this tale for me were the descriptions of how a small number of soldiers had received brain implants that allowed them to share thoughts and plan complicated battle techniques. This is one of the few tropes from militaristic science fiction that I find intriguing to think about. The melding of machines and human flesh was frightening enough, but using the violent result of it in order to better figure out how to wipe out entire civilizations made it even more horrifying for me. I will leave it up to other readers to discover how a soldier might cope with such an experience, but it it was thought provoking and made me think about the brutality of war even for the victors.

As interested as I was in the unique blending of religion and science in ”Reignition,” I struggled to emotionally connect with the characters. There wasn’t a great deal of time dedicated to character development or to describing what made the protagonist so interested in breaking the rules of her religious community, so I had a hard time predicting what Karma might do or say next. This pattern was repeated with everyone around her, too, which meant that I ended up being far more interested in the world building than in who lived in those settings or why certain topics were forbidden.

When Stars Move and Other Stories has piqued my curiosity about Mr. Rampe’s writing.

A Review of Only the Living Feel Remorse

Title: Only the Living Feel Remorse – A Ghost Story

Author: Ash Deza

Publisher: Self-Published

Publication Date: September 1, 2023

Genres: Horror, Paranormal, Contemporary

Length: 136 pages

Source: I received a free copy from the author.

Rating: 4 Stars

Blurb:

Some mistakes will haunt you to the end.

Imagine being haunted by a ghost. In life, he was your best friend. Now he wants you dead.

Who would you turn to for help? How far would you go to escape? How much would you be willing to sacrifice?

This is the gripping story of a flawed man who finds himself in a deep well of misery, haunted by his past, desperate for a way out. Will he be able to save himself? Or will the price prove to be too high?

“Only the Living Feel Remorse” is a suspenseful yet fast-paced horror novella. It tells the story of a friendship gone bad, a vengeful ghost and neo-pagan blood rituals which end up costing you much more than you bargained for.

Review:

Content Warning:Violence, death, (attempted) rape, classism, sexism, suicide attempts, blood, self-harm, alcohol abuse/alcoholism, trauma, and toxic masculinity. I will not discuss any of these topics in my review.

Life isn’t fair…and neither is death.

The main character was a violent, dangerous, and deeply flawed man who I nonetheless still found fascinating due to his creativity and resourcefulness. While many people are able to rise above difficult childhoods, he’d never had the time, money, or social support as an adult to seek the professional help he needed to do the same. This is in no way an excuse of his actions, but it did help to explain why he had such a short temper and often assumed the worst of others. It’s definitely not easy to strike a balance between writing an unlikeable character and giving the audience something about that individual that makes us want to get to know them better , so I tip my cap to Mr. Deza for pulling it off so nicely.

It would have been helpful to develop the supernatural elements of the storyline more thoroughly. I’m specifically thinking here of Father Perry’s reaction when the protagonist went to him for an exorcism and what the priest had to say about his church’s modern approach to the subjects of hauntings and demonic possessions. There was a room there for expansion, and I would have gone for a full five-star rating if all of that had been explained more clearly.

This novella had excellent world building that did not show up immediately. Most stories begin working on it from the opening scene, so it was a pleasant surprise to be about halfway through the plot and suddenly realize just how much I had left to learn about this world. I admire authors who take risks like these, especially when they work so well with what has already unfolded in the storyline. Would I have loved to dive even more deeply into how neo-pagan blood rituals work in this universe? Absolutely, but there was more than enough information provided here for me to understand what was going on and why the main character was tasked with such bloody objectives. Leaving a reader yearning for more is a good thing!

Only the Living Feel Remorse is a great choice for horror fans who are looking for something sobering and well written.

Summer Lessons: A Review of Modern Parables

Title: Modern Parables

Author: Alex Sonifrank and Richa Sonifrank

Publisher: Self-Published

Publication Date: July 16, 2022

Genres: Fantasy, Contemporary

Length: 82 pages

Source: I received a free copy from the authors.

Rating: 3 Stars

Blurb:

You may be familiar with the tortoise and the hare, but have you heard of the king and the sage?

A collection of short stories about the challenges we face each day in the modern world.

Stories that would take you all around the world to different cultures, times, and places. From ancient kings to modern mayors, from vast farmlands and forests to present day offices and from sages to priests.

Review:

Story time is for everyone.

Improving one’s character is a complex task that never ends. Some of my favorite stories in this book were the ones that featured people who genuinely thought they were doing the right thing in life. Good intentions don’t always translate to helpful choices, though, and I nodded along as they realized that sometimes you can be too nice, too eager to give others unsolicited advice, or too quick to judge without knowing someone’s history. These are the sorts of lessons that work better when repeated in a lot of different ways in my experience, so I was glad to see so much attention paid to them here.

I had mixed feelings about the fact that the lesson each story was teaching was written after the end of it. Yes, some readers probably need to have such things pointed out directly to them, but I also think that there’s a big benefit to discussing what you’ve just read and allowing the audience to come to their own conclusions about what it all means and how it should apply to our daily lives. Sometimes one can learn more from a conversation about a work than the tale itself, after all! With that being said, I’ll leave it up to other readers to come to their own conclusions about how well this worked. Just because it didn’t resonate with me doesn’t meant that everyone else will necessarily feel the same way!

One of the strengths of this collection was how varied it was. The characters in it came from a wide array of ages, backgrounds, and places. That isn’t necessarily something that’s common in traditional parables or fairy tales, so it was refreshing to discover here. One specific parable might be more meaningful to a certain person based on their previous experiences in life, but there were so many different types of them that I think anyone will be able to find something that appeals to them. I appreciate authors who pay attention to such things and try to reach out to all sorts of different people in our modern age.

Modern Parables was a thought-provoking read.

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Filed under Science Fiction and Fantasy

Tagged as 2020s, Alex Sonifrank, Book Reviews, Children's Books, Fairy Tales, Fantasy, Middle Grade, Mythology, Novella, Parable, Richa Sonifrank, Self-Published, Young Adult

June 1, 2023 · 1:00 am

A Review of Employment Interview With a Vampire

Title: Employment Interview With a Vampire

Author: J Bennett

Publisher: Self-Published

Publication Date: January 8, 2014

Genres: Fantasy, Contemporary

Length: 65 pages

Source: I received a free copy from the author.

Rating: 4 Stars

Blurb:

Deidre finds herself out of a job, out of luck, and out of time. The rent is past due, and the list of her employable skills is smaller than the balance of her checking account. Deidre has one shot at staying out of a fast food restaurant uniform.

A mysterious gentleman with certain “peculiarities” is seeking a housekeeper.

Deidre squeezes into her only nice pair of slacks, tames her wild orange hair, and starts off for the job interview that will either change her life… or end it!

Get ready for a very different kind of vampire story… While Deidre’s potential boss possesses a wicked set of fangs and a hankering for a certain ruby refreshment (preferably served fresh and hot), he’s also got a fashion sense that hasn’t been cool since the 1800s. Nathaniel adamantly prefers the telegraph over the telephone, votes for Eisenhower in every election, and isn’t so sure these horseless carriages will catch on.

Can Deidre survive her employment interview with a vampire and somehow convince her potential boss that corsets and petticoats aren’t the fashion of the day?

Oh, and what’s she going to do about that geriatric vampire hunter sneaking around the haunted mansion?

If you’re looking for a fun and funny supernatural story with a relatable (and often exasperated) heroine, then you’ve found it! Welcome to the first funny vampire novella in The Vampire’s Housekeeper Chronicles series!

No one does funny new adult vampire fiction like J Bennett.

Review:

Content Warning: A few mildly sexist comments. A little bit of body shaming involving the style and cut of clothing Deidre was wearing.

No one has been exasperated to death by a vampire yet, but there’s still time to change that.

Deidre was one of those characters that is hard to explain in a few short sentences. Most of the vampire stories I read are fairly violent, so I spend the first few scenes worried that her naivety and stubbornness was about to lead to her untimely and terrible death. Luckily for her, those traits turned out to be assets when dealing with this particular vampire. I appreciate the way the author flirted with the various interpretations of what a vampire is like as well as the reader’s expectations of what a heroine should do in this genre. Deidre sometimes joined in with the gentle fun that was being poked at certain tropes, and that made me like her even more. She understood the absurdity of her situation, and she leaned into it so hard that I can’t imagine how campy and delightful her future adventures might be.

While I understand that this is the introduction to a series, I would have liked to see more conflict included in this tale that didn’t involve Nathaniel making inappropriate comments about Deidre’s clothing and marital prospects. As much as it made sense for someone who was a few hundred years old to say those things, I found them a little repetitive as time wore on and wished the author had included other examples of how wildly out of touch he was with modern times. There were plenty of other things he found baffling about our era, and I would have gone with a full five-star rating if his rants had included a wider range of topics or if some other sort of conflict had been brought up to reveal the many differences between him and Deidre.

With that being said, Nathaniel was a refreshing take on what a vampire might realistically be like. Of course he would struggle to adapt to changing times, especially given how socially isolated vampires must remain in order to avoid the sun and people who want to kill them. Honestly, I could see Nathaniel being much more offensive than he turned out to be, so it was interesting to think about the perspective changes he had made over the years and who might have encouraged him to rethink his expectations of what various types of people ought to do. There is so much more room here to explore, and I’ll be curious to see how his relationship with Deidre evolves over time.

Employment Interview With a Vampire was a clever twist on vampire fiction.

2 Comments

Filed under Science Fiction and Fantasy

Tagged as 2010s, Book Reviews, Contemporary, Fantasy, Humour, J Bennett, Novella, Self-Published, Vampire

April 6, 2023 · 12:00 am

Creating Consciousness: A Review of MARiiMO

Title: MARiiMO

Author: Tyrel Pinnegar

Publisher: Self-Published

Publication Date: November 17, 2018

Genres: Science Fiction, Romance, LGBTQ+

Length: 124 pages

Source: I received a free copy from the author.

Rating: 3 Stars

Blurb:

This is the journal of Tammy Maheswaran, a reclusive roboticist living with undiagnosed autism. It documents the creation of Mariimo, a developmental robotics platform through which Tammy subconsciously externalizes her issues with isolation, anxiety, and touch. Upon the machine’s activation, Tammy gradually begins to realize that in the act of constructing Mariimo, she’s been unknowingly deconstructing herself.

Review:

Content Warning: Detailed descriptions of what it feels like to have anxiety, phantom pain from a limb amputation, and brief flashbacks to a car accident during which the main character was seriously injured.

Not everything can be planned out in advance.

I enjoyed Tammy’s character development. She told the audience almost nothing about herself when we first met her, so it was refreshing to see her slowly evolve into sharing more details about her personality and interests as the storyline progressed. I liked the process of exploring parts of her life she’d been completely silent about before. My opinion of her was fairly neutral in the beginning, but it swung over to something warm and positive once I had a stronger understanding of how her mind worked and why she made the choices she did.

The pacing was very slow, especially during the first third of the book. While I understand that this was done on purpose due to the fact that Tammy had undiagnosed autism and was meticulous about how she created MARiiMO, I did have some trouble remaining interested as the narrator gave me so many chapters on the many different materials she used (or, in some cases, decided not to use) to make her robot come to life. I was glad I stuck through with it to the end, but the pacing was enough of a deterrent for me as a reader that it did have a negative affect on my rating.

Some of the most memorable scenes were the ones that compared the differences between how a human and a robot may react to the same unexpected event. Even Tammy’s thorough planning phase in this experiment couldn’t predict everything MARiiMO did after she was created. I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but I thought this subplot was one of the most realistic and well-developed ones of them all. The author pushed everything to its logical conclusion and wasn’t afraid to extrapolate even more plots twists from the tiniest wisp of earlier ideas.

MARiiMO was a thoughtful read.

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Filed under Science Fiction and Fantasy

Tagged as 2010s, Artificial Intelligence, Book Reviews, Hard Science Fiction, LGBT, Novella, Robots, Romance, Science Fiction, Self-Published, Tyrel Pinnegar

March 9, 2023 · 1:00 am

A Review of The Old Man at the End of the World

Title: The Old Man at the End of the World

Author: AK Silversmith

Publisher: Self-Published

Publication Date: February 15, 2017

Genres: Science Fiction, Horror, Humour, Contemporary

Length: 67 pages

Source: I received a free copy from the author.

Rating: 3 Stars

Blurb:

The end is nigh…. and Gerald Stockwell-Poulter has had quite enough of it already. Pesky business altogether. All this hiding and running about. Makes Brexit look like a doddle.

After 87 largely well-behaved years as a model citizen, less than four hours into the ‘zompocalypse’ and he has already killed a neighbour, rescued a moody millennial drug dealer and forged an unlikely allegiance with a giant ginger Scotsman. And it isn’t even tea time.

Join Gerald as he and his newfound allies navigate the post-apocalyptic English countryside in their hilarious bid to stay off the menu.

Review:

Content Warning: Blood, gore, and (obviously) zombies. I will be discussing these things briefly in my review.

This isn’t the quiet retirement Gerald was hoping for.

The character development was well done. Gerald’s default emotional range fell somewhere in the vicinity of various shades of grumpiness, and he certainly had a lot to be annoyed about about here when the plot gave him opportunities to express his feelings. I enjoyed contrasting his reaction to the sudden appearance of zombies with how other people reacted, especially since Gerald didn’t pay attention to the news and had no idea what was happening in the first scene. It was amusing to see him essentially shrug his shoulders at such a momentous shift in human history and get on with his life as best as he could.

It would have been helpful to have more plot development. I started this not realizing it was the beginning of a serial, so it came a surprise to me to see how long it took anything to happen and how abruptly everything ended. Yes, serials need to end on an exciting note in order to keep their readers hooked, but in this case the storyline evolved so slowly that I struggled to remain interested even though I was initially thrilled by the thought of describing a zombiepocalypse from the perspective of someone in their 80s.

I chuckled at the dry British humour in this novella. Gerald and his allies were far less afraid of zombies than most characters are in this genre. If anything, it was a nuisance for them to have to run away from such creatures on such a beautiful day when there was so much gardening to do. They often didn’t have strong emotional responses to what was happening to them, and that lighthearted exaggeration of British culture worked nicely with the text. It certainly helped them make logical decisions in the heat of the moment as well.

The Old Man at the End of the World was an intriguing introduction to this series.

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Filed under Science Fiction and Fantasy

Tagged as 2010s, AK Silversmith, Book Reviews, Contemporary, Horror, Humour, Novella, Science Fiction, Self-Published, Serial, Zombies

February 9, 2023 · 1:00 am

A Review of The Cybernetic Tea Shop

Title: The Cybernetic Tea Shop

Author: Meredith Katz

Publisher: Soft Cryptid (Self-Published)

Publication Date: July 30, 2019

Genres: Science Fiction, LGBTQ, Romance

Length: 118 pages

Source: I borrowed it from the library. Thank you to Berthold Gambrel for reviewing it and bringing it to my attention!

Rating: 4 Stars

Blurb:

Clara Gutierrez is an AI repair technician and a wanderer. Her childhood with her migrant worker family has left her uncomfortable with lingering for too long, so she moves from place to place across retro-futuristic America.

Sal is a fully autonomous robot. Older than the law declaring her kind illegal due to ethical concerns, she is at best out of place in society and at worst vilified. She continues to run the tea shop previously owned by her long-dead master, lost in memories of the past, struggling to fulfill her master’s dream for the shop while slowly breaking down.

They meet by chance, but as they begin to spend time together, they both start to wrestle with the concept of moving on…

A F/F retro-future sci-fi asexual romance. A story about artificial intelligence and real kindness, about love, and the feeling of watching steam rising softly from a teacup on a bright and quiet morning.

Review:

Content Warning: Arson.

It’s never too late to try again.

Some of my favourite scenes were the ones that explored how Sal’s programming nudged her to make decisions that many humans would not. For example, her idea of terms like lifespan or forever were not the same as they were for Clara. The author did an excellent job of digging deeply into the psychology of artificial intelligence and showing the audience how a robot might really think about and interact with those around them.

I did find myself wishing for more world building in this story. This was set at least three hundred years in the future, yet most of the technology and culture was fairly similar to what we have today. That struck me as odd and pulled me out of the plot. It would have been helpful to either have a good explanation for why things had advanced so slowly or to see more examples of how their world was different from ours.

This was such a refreshing take on the romance genre. Whether you read a ton of romance novels or tend to avoid that genre altogether, I suggest going into this one without any assumptions about what’s going to happen next. It broke so many of the rules about how falling in love is supposed to look that I honestly couldn’t say for sure what would happen from one scene to the next. That’s the sort of thing I love to discover when trying out new authors, so I will definitely be keeping an eye out for what Ms. Katz comes up with next.

The Cybernetic Tea Shop was a cozy and romantic read.

8 Comments

Filed under Science Fiction and Fantasy

Tagged as 2010s, Asexual, Book Reviews, F/F, LGBT, Meredith Katz, Novella, Robots, Romance, Science Fiction, Self-Published, Soft Cryptid, Soft Science Fiction

Tag Archives: Novella

A Review of I Found a Circus Tent in the Woods Behind My House

A Review of The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion

Supernatural Business: A Review of Iago Wick and the Vampire Queen

A Review of When Stars Move and Other Stories

A Review of Only the Living Feel Remorse

Summer Lessons: A Review of Modern Parables

A Review of Employment Interview With a Vampire

Creating Consciousness: A Review of MARiiMO

A Review of The Old Man at the End of the World

A Review of The Cybernetic Tea Shop

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