I am not having the best of days, and words are failing me at the moment. This was well written, but it was also dark, bleak, and just too high a price for the short story it was.

The Executioness is a side-by-side novella paired with The Alchemist by Paolo Bacigalupi. In the forward, much is made of the idea that the Heroine is "different," because she's an older woman. I'm really glad they pointed it out, because there really wasn't anything in the story to establish that by her character, except that she had chidren already, and her father was old. Well, really, those two points don't exactly convince me that Tana is an older woman.So while I really liked this story, I...

http://www.rantingdragon.com/the-exec...Any time a spell is cast, bramble will sprout up somewhere in the world. Bramble that cuts and promises a poisonous sleep to any who don’t give it a wide enough berth. There’s no way to predict where the vines might pop up, it might sprout on your house or a thousand miles away. This bramble has slowly wrought decay upon the world, overrunning cities, destroying farms, and killing people.Tara lives in this bramble-filled world and has recently taken up her...

A group of " I drank too much kool aid " extremists kidnap Tana’s two sons to show them the "right" way to live. Wrong move. She hunts the kidnappers down with an executioner's ax and brings with her an entire mob of equally protective mothers that have lost their children to the same cause. Lesson learned: Do not mess with a woman’s offspring. More than that, this short is story well written and should appeal to the Sci-Fi crowd. The only disappointment for me is the length. I wish it were long...

One day, Tobias Buckell and Paolo Bacigalupi decided to write a pair of novellas set in a shared world. They obviously put a lot of thought into this fictional landscape, a place where magic exists, but its use carries a terrible price -- every time a spell is cast, a shoot of cursed bramble sprouts from the ground; one prick of its poison thorns will send you into a deep sleep from which no mere prince's kiss will awaken you. It's a neat idea, rife with juicy metaphorical implications to go alo...

An odd little book. Buckell was attempting to tell a pretty big story in novella form, so naturally it all felt a bit underdeveloped and rushed.

After Tana's father and husband are killed and her children taken by raiders, she goes on a one-woman mission to regain the remnants of her family. Her courage and will inspire others, and soon she comes to the attention of an army commander. He tells her that they have to wait the raiders out, but Tana is impatient. She raises an army of women, armed with peasant weapons (and the occasional arquebus), and they march on the raiders' city.I really wish this had been twice as long, because there's...

Amateurish, lazy, unimaginative writing. The plot never even bothered with causality. Instead the main character (who is a boring, empty two-dimensional shell) is acted upon. The story itself suffers from an identity crisis: what could very well be a coming-of-age story is instead covered up by a tacked-on "women's empowerment" story that comes off as shallow and clichéd. There are no real obstacles in the story; opposition (both external and internal) is dealt with in a few sentences and then i...

2.5 starsNothing remarkable here except that the main character is a middle-aged woman, a widow and a mother, who wields an executioner's axe and unwittingly becomes a legend and a symbol of resistance. The rest is not memorable, even though world-building and story are decent.

This is a novella-length work, and shares a world with another novella by Paolo Bacigalupi, a world in which magic is outlawed, as its use leads to the spread of deadly bramble. It’s a great setup, as is the premise of the story: Tana’s home is attacked by a neighboring power. Her husband and her father (an executioner) are killed, and her children taken. So she takes up her father’s axe and hood and sets out to save them, beginning a quest “that will change lives, cities, and even an entire lan...

The Alchemist and The Executioness caught my eye as soon as it went up at Audible.com. (Both novellas are now available in print from Subterranean Press.) Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias Buckell offering linked fantasy novellas that take place in a shared world? Bacigalupi's story read by Jonathan Davis? What could be more promising? (It turns out that had I been familiar with Katherine Kellgren, who read Buckell's story, I would have been even more excited about this one!)In this shared world, the

A short novella with a powerful female lead. Feels somewhat nihilist, but we'll written

No fooling folks...a middle-aged MOM kicking some serious fantasy rump and raining pain and destruction on the assbozos that stole her children...can you say Now, if that doesn’t sound like an appealing (and long overdue) premise to a fantasy story than may I please take a moment to remind you of the following: HI…I AM ONE OF THE COOLEST MOVIE HEROES (MALE OR FEMALE) OF ALL TIME AND I WASTED AN ENTIRE COLONY OF SLIMY, ACID-BLEEDING, DEADLY-PROJECTILE-TEETH-SPEWING, TOUGH AS NAILS ALIEN M...

The Executioness is a fun novella set in a shared world fantasy. I haven't read the other book, by Paolo Bacigalupi, yet; I'm not sure if this is the best order to read them in. I guess I'll report on that later, because I do have the other one too!Anyway, apparently the seed of the idea was in having a middle-aged female protagonist, and all the different motivations and problems that would give her. I can only think of one other like this, and that's Boneshaker, but both of them do have the wo...

This is the companion volume to Paolo Bacigalupi's novella, "The Alchemist" which I have reviewed separately. This is set in the same world as "The Alchemist" and it doesn't matter which one you read first. Where "The Alchemist" focused on getting rid of the "bramble", the thick thorny vines that increase their presence and their suffocating and isolating effect the more that practitioners us magic, this volume focuses on the story of Tana, daughter of an executioner and along with Tana, the onl...

The story follows a mother of two who was first forced by circumstance into the role of a one-time executioner, and then forced by other circumstances into a conqueror, bearing the blown-up reputation of an "executioness". *blink* *blink* Yes, that the transition.I think perhaps this short story would really have been better off as a longer novel. The actual idea, and the rather strong female lead, was pretty good. Things just seemed to escalate a little too quickly and I haven't quite lost that...

This is a shared-world novel with Paolo Bacigalupi's The Alchemist, and I'm glad I read the latter, first. Had I read this one, first, I might've been disappointed in The Alchemist. I wouldn't say it's better, exactly, but it is more epic in scope, with a heroine I can relate to better than in Bacigalupi's story.The Bramble plays less of a role in this story; it's more of a setting than an antagonist. But that's understandable; Tana, the title character of Executioness, has plenty to deal with w...

At least this time I was prepared for the short length of the novella. Still I think I preferred this book to it's companion novella. The surprising aspect to me was how little the characters interacted. This could have been two stories in an anthology. outside of a vague reference to "a blue city" and the acknowledgement of a bloody execution in The Alchemist, there's not much that links the stories together. I would love too see a third story link the main characters our even take a new charac...

I read both this book and its companion novella The Alchemist side by side (almost) because they follow two different paths that give a wider view of the world. The Executioness follows Tana as she leaves Lesser Khaim (the more or less 'poor folk' district) while The Alchemist follows Jeoz as he fights to save Khaim from the Bramble.In his introduction Paolo mentions that part of the genesis for this combined world came from a writer's friend's lament that there were not more middle-aged women p...

Reading the introduction, I think I was hoping for more. So often, women are sidelined as heroes, that it is great to see an author deliberately addressing that. However, it is disappointing that so often when this happens, it is framed as reliant on their status as a mother and undertaken very reluctantly. That isn't to say that Tana is not a formidable and interesting hero, I just wish that women were allowed the same latitude of reason for their heroic journeys.Having first read "The Alchemis...