REVIEW SUMMARY: A Salvador Dali painting in prose form.
MY RATING: 
BRIEF SYNOPSIS: John Finch, detective, must solve a double homicide of a human and gray cap, even as the city of Ambergris slides into chaos.
MY REVIEW:
PROS: Surreal tone; emotionally powerful; great mashup of the real and unreal
CONS: Anti-climactic ending; early difficulty in understanding sentence structure
BOTTOM LINE: The vibrant storytelling of a perversely beautiful city and its hard-boiled detective is well worth the reading.
In this gritty crime noir/fantasy mashup, World Fantasy Award winner Jeff VanderMeer creates a narrative that is distressingly real, and yet so unreal as to be absurd. Like a Salvador Dali painting in prose, Finch mixes the mundane and the fantastic and then melts them together into one surreal but powerful work.
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Lavie Tidhar grew up on a kibbutz in Israel and lived in South Africa and the UK. Most recently he’s lived in the Banks islands of Vanuatu, in the South Pacific, one of the most remote and isolated places on Earth. He currently lives in South East Asia. He is the co-author (with Nir Yaniv) of The Tel Aviv Dossier a supernatural thriller that explores the nature of belief, as well as An Occupation of Angels, a Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2006 Fiction Honorable Mention, and Hebrew Punk, a collection of his best short stories, which have appeared in Apex, Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, Chizine, and other publications.
He recently signed a three book deal with Angry Robot Books for “a steam-powered take on V for Vendetta, rich with satire and slashed through with wild adventure” and is the editor of The Apex Book of World SF which collects stories from around the globe. Tidhar maintains a website at lavietidhar.co.uk/ and a personal blog at cybermonklives.livejournal.com/. He also maintains a companion blog to The Apex Book of World SF at worldsf.livejournal.com/.
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REVIEW SUMMARY: Bone Dance is a science fiction novel that maintains a sense of the spiritual.
MY RATING: 
BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Psychic killers stalk the landscape of Earth after a nuclear apocalypse in which hoodoo and the tarot are the dominant belief system.
MY REVIEW:
PROS: Clever integration of the tarot; intriguing look at identity; fast pace.
CONS: Simple worldbuilding, significant philosophical bent; jolting chapter transitions.
BOTTOM LINE: Bone Dance is an appealing, well-written, and thoughtful story, but is best suited to readers of a philosophical nature or reading temperament.
Psychic killers stalk the landscape of Earth after a nuclear apocalypse in Emma Bull’s Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award nominated Bone Dance. Bull crafts a strange yet compelling story of identity and prophecy by basing the story on the ancient tradition of African folk magic known as hoodoo and the still widely practiced oracle of the tarot.
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