Lightspeed Column: UPROOTED, LAST FIRST SNOW, WICKED + THE DIVINE vol 2, ZER0ES

My review column for Lightspeed magazine is available online today! I look at Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, Max Gladstone’s Last First Snow, Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s The Wicked + The Divine: Fandemonium, and Chuck Wendig’s Zer0es.

Here’s some thematic rationale:

We’re approaching the harvest time of year, and I’m thinking a great deal of roots and branches, literal and metaphorical: the depths and thirsts of growing things; heritage as both burden and inheritance; root servers; and the distances we bridge between past and future through the choices we make and the paths we pursue.

The following books partake of all these things; they’re also all utterly immersive, gripping as ivy, impossible to put down once begun. I recommend approaching them with caution and several hours to spare.

Worth noting: I turn the columns in about 2-3 months before they appear, so when I say “best book I’ve read so far this year” the cut-off point is somewhere in July. The reading doesn’t stop! It never stops! I’m really glad the books are so great.

In other reviewing news, I finished Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant recently (apparently The Traitor in the UK?), which comes out today, and it’s thoroughly, painfully brilliant; that review’s forthcoming from NPR Books sometime this week. Meantime you can read an excerpt of the novel here.

#SFWApro