mothumn's Reviews (377)

fun! but sel running at superhuman speed with bree on his back is giving edward and bella

Thank you to Netgalley and Tor Books for the arc of this book in return for my honest review!

Africa Risen is a great anthology of stories spanning many different genres. There is fantasy, sci-fi, horror, and more, I’m sure there’s a story for everyone in here. There is a large quantity of stories in here so no doubt you will enjoy at least one, however I did find that it also had a range of quality. I wouldn’t say that any story was bad, however there were a good number that either failed to capture my interest, I failed to connect with, or with a few of them, I felt were meant to be longer stories, perhaps even full length novels. In the last case, I found that particularly for the sci-fi stories, often many terms and technology were introduced that it became hard to follow for just a short story. 
Aside from these minor issues I had, I found the stories to be very well written and interesting, they touched on many real world issues and history in a very unique way, and there were a lot that I thought were really good. I would highly recommend this to anyone, particularly fans of sci-fi and horror who are interested in looking into a short story collection. 
I think this is a great way to showcase many very talented authors and for readers to get an introduction to their writing.
I gave this 3.75 stars, rounded up to 4.

To anyone interested in the audiobook, I thought the narrators did an excellent job of bringing to stories to life. Some maybe more than others, mainly just because I think certain stories would have been better suited to one of the other narrators, but they still did a good job. I appreciated that they did alternated through the narrators every story, I think it really helped to separate them.

Thank you to Celadon Books for the review copy of this book in return for my honest thoughts.

Locust Lane follows a small town community in the aftermath of the murder of a teenage girl. Through the many twists and suburban drama, the story overall shows how easily injustice against marginalized people and outsiders can take place. Anyone who doesn’t fit in or isn’t willing to protect the community even when it isn’t right is at risk.

While I thought the message behind the story was good, I wasn’t very drawn in by the actual mystery. It didn’t have me hooked or particularly interested but I continued reading just to find out the ending. For most of the book I seemed as though it was pretty obvious what happened and so the twist definitely surprised me. Looking back, the twist definitely makes sense although I didn’t feel there was much of a build up or enough hints as to that being the answer.

One problem I did have however was the amount of characters, while I get the importance of them, I just found there were too many to keep track of. It wasn’t until I was more than halfway through that I really started to remember who was who. I think the problem was that nothing really stood out about each individual character, and they all had fairly generic names.

Aside from that however, I think the book was good, just not really anything special. If you like crime novels I would definitely say go for it, it’s just not something I would pick up again.