All my failings exposed

Happy Leap Day! I've got reviews! So does the rest of Clockwork Phoenix 5, which becomes commercially available on April 5th and is starting to garner advance press already.

"The Trinitite Golem" is the fifty-first story of the year at 365shortstories. Anthony R. Cardno calls it a "short, tightly-focused tale . . . a bullet of grief and regret but also a little bit of hope."

Nicky Magas at Tangent Online warns that "'The Trinitite Golem' requires a lot of foreknowledge in the history of the nuclear bomb and religious mythology to understand the story completely, however if readers are willing to do a bit of digging where their understanding is incomplete, the rewards are worth it. The two introductory scenes are snappy, with sharp, tone setting prose, giving the backstory of Oppenheimer in a linguistically pleasing style. The actual plot is much more subdued. The dialogue between the characters is almost incomprehensible if the aforementioned knowledge is lacking, but Taaffe gives readers enough of a sense of a man hopelessly dogged by his past that the emotion evoked becomes its own understanding." The reviewer placed it among their top five favorites of the anthology at Goodreads.

I am not mentioned in the starred Publishers Weekly review, but that doesn't mean it's not still cool.

As you may have seen announced elsewhere, on April 5th the New York Review of Science Fiction will be hosting the launch reading for CP5 at the Brooklyn Commons Café. New York-area people, I will be there! How about you?