James Nicoll Reviews

2015’s The Just City is the first volume in Jo Walton’s Thessaly trilogy.

Astonished to discover that some of the women who flee from him flee because they most sincerely do not want to have sex with him, the god Apollo partakes in a social experiment with his wiser sister Athene. They will set up Plato’s Just City and see how it plays out.

Athene prudently remains a god. Apollo, wanting to better understand the human condition, willingly becomes a mortal for the duration of a lifetime.

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Jo Walton’s 2019 Lent is a standalone historical fantasy. 

Dominican prior Girolamo Savonarola of Florence is a man of many gifts. He can see demons. He can cast them back to Hell. He has profound powers of persuasion. He is a man who can shape history. 

He is also fated to be hanged and burned in May of 1498. 

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2006’s Farthing is the first volume in Jo Walton’s Small Change trilogy. This short novel was followed by 2007’s Ha’penny and 2008’s Half a Crown.

If British mysteries are any guide, England’s stately homes, rising very so picturesquely out of a verdant countryside, exist primarily to provide suitably isolated locations for spectacular murders, murders sufficiently puzzling to justify the attention of the Empire’s greatest minds. Farthing is no exception: not only does it live up to genre expectations by quickly presenting readers with a gruesomely murdered and artistically posed corpse, but the dead man is a man beloved by all England. He is no less than the great Sir James Thirkie, the architect of the peace between Britain and Nazi Germany.

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