ambershelf's reviews
1295 reviews

As a black man who grew up poor in rural North Carolina, Ray McMillian doesn't have a lot of choices. If he's lucky, he'll graduate high school and work a minimum-wage job at a grocery to support his family. Never mind his enthusiasm and talent for playing the violin; becoming a musician is simply out of the question. When the old fiddle his grandmother left him turns out to be a Stradivarius, everything Ray had ever dreamed of suddenly seems possible until someone stole the violin before the Tchaikovsky Competition. Ray must do everything he can to prove himself as a great musician while recovering his lost violin.

The Violin Conspiracy is a phenomenal book on racism and poverty in the world of classical music. Brendan Slocumb is masterful in writing about Ray's struggles and describing the music vividly while not losing the urgency of a mystery thriller. I enjoyed the book immensely and could almost hear the music while reading it—a truly remarkable and unputdownable work.

Claudia Lin is not your typical "nice Asian girl." She doesn't want a conventional career at Fortune 500 companies, nor does she want a Chinese boyfriend. In fact, Claudia works at a stealth online-dating detective agency as a "verifier," and she prefers girls. In this mystery debut, Jane Pek weaves an intriguing story of an amateur sleuth on a mission to find her missing client while reflecting on her identity and balancing family expectations. I find the author's examination of how we have informed artificial intelligence and how algorithms have changed human behaviors, albeit inadvertently, refreshingly fascinating. As a debut novel, some sentences run a bit long and bulky, but I enjoyed Jane Pek's humorous and, at times, sarcastic style. Very excited about her future work!

Two agents on the opposite side of a time war, Red and Blue, start their correspondence as a dare. But the letters turn into something beautiful, romantic, and dangerous, so dangerous that it might cost them to lose their past and future. This Is How You Lose the Time War is a captivating story about forbidden love and what we risk to protect that great love. It is incredibly light on the science behind the world at war and focuses instead on the romantic development through letters between Red and Blue. For avid science fiction readers, the mystery behind the time war was easy to figure out and was a bit of a disappointment for me. Nonetheless, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone delivered a stunning novel of an epic love with breathtaking prose.