Magic and Culture Thrive in Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse tor.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tor.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
While a number of Black bookstore owners said they were grateful for the increase in business, they worried that this sudden interest in certain books would only put a temporary Band-Aid on the much more pervasive problem of systemic racism in the U.S.
Some authors are masters of worldbuilding and Joanne M. Harris continues her reign as one them. Like the ever-present honeybees who buzz through her fantasy hybrid novel through stories,
Honeycomb, carrying stories from world to world, protecting the Honeycomb Queen and her son, the Lacewing King, Harris constructs a magical universe, called the Nine Worlds and ruled by the insect-like Fae Silken Folk, as intricate as the beehives internal lives and delicate hexagonal walls.
As if each small room of the hive contains a small story,
Honeycomb is comprised of mostly two-to-three page stories that begin as if wholly separate beings and as the book continues on, we see a cast of complicated, beautiful, and terrible recurring characters, all centering around the Lacewing King as we follow him on his adventures and his own complicated emotional maturity throughout his life of near immortality. Amplifying the book’s magic even more are the illustrations of Charles Vess, who never cea
Brenda Peynado’s debut book,
The Rock Eaters, a short-story collection that bounces around genres such as speculative fiction, science fiction and straight fiction, will definitely leave you deeply unsettled, though perhaps not always in a good way.
Peynado’s is a gifted, imaginative writer and I admit I was prepared to be blown away after reading the book’s introductory story, “Thoughts and Prayers,” a stunning, ironic piece about a world where angels perch on people’s roofs, their actual physical presence akin to cows as they chew “cud from the grasses and bugs they scavenged during the night,” while in the morning the people emerged from their houses to shout “thoughts and prayers” at them to prevent bad luck overtaking them. Centering around a young girl who lives in one of the most “blessed” houses who is best friends with another girl whose family’s angel is next to worthless and is continually beset by tragedy. When Rima’s kind, seemingly lucky o