Author: packetcat

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Review: Woodworking by Emily St. James

A square crop of the front cover of Woodworking by Emily St. James.
I really like the cover design of Woodworking, it captures the feelings and themes of the book very well.

She could no longer fantasize about being with a woman without simultaneously fantasizing about being her, the two thoughts intrinsically bound up in each other. She longed to dissolve into a diaspora of herself, her molecules, a part of every woman she had seen on the sidewalk or in the store or on a magazine cover, every woman she had longed to understand on some level she felt frustrated in her inability to articulate. She wanted to tell them how lucky they were. She knew they wouldn’t get it.

page 125, Erica
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Review: The Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri

A square version of the front cover of The Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri.
This is the standard cover design for The Isle in the Silver Sea, I really like the cover design of the Illumicrate special edition but couldn’t find a good image file for that particular design.

Simran was warm in her arms, her lips soft. Her hair under Vina’s hands was silk. She smelled of smoke and sweat and of herself–of skin, heat, the promise of velvet under Vina’s mouth. Simran gasped against her mouth as their lips parted for a brief heartbeat. They met again like the tide touching the shore.

page 204, Chapter Sixteen: Vina, The Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri
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Review: Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky

A square crop of the front cover of Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
Shroud has two different cover designs, the above cover design is the better of the two and was the front cover design on the hardcover edition I read.

The background of the recording was just sections of monster shifting past one another, but in the foreground was the best view yet of a single creature as it reached for the drone. That blind spiral face opening out like a fractal, always with more and smaller arms unfolding from its heart. To a human eye there should have been some commonality there. They were not so infinitely alien, surely. And yet the blindness of them, the weird asymmetry of their bodies, the bizarre intricacies of their construction, like mechanisms, like toys, all spoke of a queasy wrongness.

page 62, 1.5 Light, Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky
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Review: Private Rites by Julia Armfield

A square crop of the front cover of Private Rites by Julia Armfield. There is a topless woman facing away towards open door into a red void.
This cover design is from the first publishing which was in June 2024 by the publisher Fourth Estate. The edition I read is from December 2024, published by Flatiron Books and has a more subdued painterly cover. I find this cover to be more striking.

The first time you lose a parent, a part of you gets trapped there, trapped less in the moment of grief than in the knowledge of the end of childhood, the inevitable dwindling of the days.

page 84, Private Rites by Julia Armfield
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