Big Audiobook Dynamite: Three Great SFF Listens

What fun! This is a doorstopper start to a trilogy, so I decided to go with the audiobook, which is 24 hours long. But every minute is a fantastic time! It’s an epic high fantasy involving different factions named after animals, with court intrigue and politics, betrayal, love, a contest to become the next emperor, and more. It’s also really, really funny (Cain is the best!), and the voice Daphne Kouma does for the ravens is so great, especially when they are feeling indignant. I am surprised by how little attention this got when it came out, but maybe people are intimidated by the page count? So this is me officially saying, “Don’t let that stop you!” Like The Will of the Many, I think this is an amazing first in a series that, while off to a slow start in terms of readership, will eventually garner a huge following. I am desperate for the next book!

And last, but not least, this exciting first contact novel from the author of the Robopocalypse series. (Daniel H. Wilson really likes to destroy the world in his books!) I loved that it used several narrators, because there are several important main characters, so having the different voices was helpful. Pertaining to the arrival and landing of a UFO in Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, the novel follows a single dad on the reservation trying to keep his estranged teen daughter safe; the scientist who first identified that the space craft was headed to Earth and her wearable tech, which goes bonkers after; a government man with a comically large backpack sent to investigate the invaders; and an unnamed man in a basement, referred to as the Man Downstairs, who is kept there specifically to identify threats to the United States and alert the higher ups. It’s an action-packed novel and went in directions I was not expecting!