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Time travel stories usually follow the exploits of someone rocketing through time to change history. This person ponders the various time travel paradoxes or wrestles with the implications of an ever-splitting multiverse. All of which is to say that Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time is a unique look at the perils of time travel. Instead of travelers deliberately injecting themselves into history, a mysterious British Agency has used a recovered time machine to “rescue” five Britons from the past from their inevitable deaths by pulling them into a future ravaged by climate change. Our narrator is one of the few civil servants in on the secret, selected to help acclimate one of the “expats” to life in the twenty-first century...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

There are very clear rules about being an assassin and Eveen the Eviscerator (it was one time, she says) follows them very carefully. After all, being an assassin is the only reason that she’s alive…well, not actually alive. She’s undead. In her first life, she made a promise to serve Aeril, the Matron of Assassins, for one hundred years. In P. Djèlí Clark’s beautifully plotted and highly entertaining novella, The Dead Cat Tail Assassins, we get to witness Eveen’s greatest caper...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Story-gatherer Chih returns to the Singing Hills in this fourth volume in the series, Mammoths at the Gates, by Nghi Vo. We previously visited Chih and their neixin companion Almost Brilliant on their adventures around the empire. Their mission was to gather as many stories and as much information as they could to bring back to the Singing Hills, to save for posterity. But every journey has to end someday and it’s been years since Chih was home...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

The Road to Roswell, by science fiction legend Connie Willis, kept me up way past my bedtime on a work night. Readers, you have been warned...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Gretel Fernsby has a secret, one that she’s been keeping for most of her long life. it torments her. She knows that, if it were to get out, the secret has the potential to ruin her life and her son’s life. In All the Broken Places, John Boyne’s sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, we find Gretel at the age of 91, still guarding her secret. When a new family moves into the flat below hers, Gretel is pushed to act at the risk of her ability to hide her parentage and her father’s crimes from the world.

Read the rest of my review at abookishtype.wordpress.com/2022/11/22/all-the-broken-places-by-john-boyne/

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley for review consideration.

Gretel Fernsby has a secret, one that she’s been keeping for most of her long life. it torments her. She knows that, if it were to get out, the secret has the potential to ruin her life and her son’s life. In All the Broken Places, John Boyne’s sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, we find Gretel at the age of 91, still guarding her secret. When a new family moves into the flat below hers, Gretel is pushed to act at the risk of her ability to hide her parentage and her father’s crimes from the world...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type: abookishtype.wordpress.com/2022/11/22/all-the-broken-places-by-john-boyne/ . I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

I wish that all my history classes had been taught by Emma Southon or someone who has her talent for highlighting the absurd and revivifying long-dead people. Even though A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is all about death and the gruesome ways that it found people during the Roman Republic and Roman Empire, Southon’s gift for discussing Roman foibles really brought the historic figures to life in a way that just talking about their triumphs can’t. Books like this one feed my love of history and I plan to recommend it highly to anyone who expresses even the slightest interest in ancient Rome in my proximity...

Read the rest of my review at abookishtype.wordpress.com