Someone’s Read it Already

This was another book I picked up on the recommendation of The Ben (my fiance, for those not caught up). Gerald Morris is a born-Californian who now lives in Wisconsin, which may explain some of the appeal to Ben. He has written a series of perhaps a dozen books for middle-grade readers about Sir Gawain, mostly through the eyes of Sir Gawain’s squire, Terence. He’s just recently started a second series for even younger readers (according to Wikipedia).

Terence is living with a hermit with memories of the future when a young man of great knightly skill stops by. After a very bizarre fight involving a frying pan, the young man — Gawain of Orkney, shortly to become Sir Gawain of the Round Table — agrees to take Terence on as his squire. They travel to Camelot and, after Gawain is knighted, receive a quest from King Arthur. They leave, and go around the countryside having adventures that range from the truly dangerous to the truly bizarre to the truly fantastic. (more…)

I reviewed book 1 of this series on Monday, and I have very little new to say about Tanya Huff or her “Blood”/”Darkest Night” series. In any case, to recap, Ms. Huff wrote five books featuring Vicki Nelson, a former cop turned PI; Henry Fitzroy, a vampire who writes romance novels; and Mike Celluci, Vicki’s old partner on the force. Tony Foster, a recurring character, has finally grown up enough to get his own series, and here it is. Ms. Huff, at one point in her life, worked at Bakka Phoenix Books in Toronto, and I’ve been there. Of course, it was five or ten years after she worked there, but hey, good enough, eh?

Tony Foster is a PA on a low-budget Canadian show about a vampire who also happens to be a detective. One of the crew found an old house that everyone decided would be perfect to film a haunted-house episode in, so the entire cast and crew is somewhat outside Vancouver on location. It’s called Caulfield House, and was formerly owned by Creighton Caulfield, a mining and timber millionaire. It’s a little bit spooky to start with, and when Tony thinks he’s seen a ghost, he’s not that surprised. Of course, everyone is surprised when, at sundown, the house manages to trap more than a dozen members of the cast and crew — including Tony, Mason the star, and Lee the costar — inside. Can they survive the malevolence that lives in the house until morning? (more…)

Alice Hoffman has written a good deal of books, including one that was made into a movie (Practical Magic) and another (Here on Earth) that was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. Apparently two of her other books were made into movies as well, and she wrote the script for a movie called Independence Day from 1983 (obviously not the one starring Will Smith). She lives in Boston; apparently five or six of her novels are for young adults, and she has even written a few for children.

Rain is the daughter of the queen of a tribe of women that may or may not be the Amazons. However, since she was a child born of rape, her mother pays very little attention to her. Their world is a nomadic one; they move around during the summer and, very often, have to fight. The land they control involves a river, and quite often male-dominated groups see the women as easy prey. Rain, though, has been preparing herself to be queen, which is difficult, as her mother doesn’t seem to want her to be around. Will she be able to succeed? (more…)

Last season on Lifetime (and a couple Canadian stations), there was a program called Blood Ties, that featured a PI named Vicki Nelson, her former police partner Mike Celluci, and her vampire sometimes lover, Henry Fitzroy. It’s based on a series of books with “Blood” in the title by Tanya Huff, but they seem to have replaced the book’s character of Tony Foster, street kid and sometimes lover to Henry, with Coreen, who does appear in the first book but not after that. I kind of understand why they did that, because being bisexual would not be cool on network television. In any case, all of that is to say that this book is the first volume in a companion trilogy to the “Blood” books; it contains Henry as a character, but it follows Tony Foster. Tanya Huff is Canadian, by the way, and has written a couple dozen fantasy and science-fiction books.

Tony Foster is a PA for a third-rate Canadian show, shot in Vancouver, called “Darkest Night.” It’s about a vampire detective named Raymond Dark, and the show is heavy on bad dialogue and special effects, and light on actual facts. In any case, he’s learning a lot, because someday he wants to be a director. But then, while on the set, the shadows start acting strangely. Shortly after that, the ‘victim of the week’ (on the show) turns up dead in her dressing room. Other weird things start happening on the set, and eventually Tony asks the special effects wizard, Arra Pelindrake, if she knows what’s going on . . . since she seems to. Why is that? And why are the shadows behaving so weirdly? (more…)

[Happy Independence Day, for my American readers, and happy fourth of July, to everyone!]

Charles de Lint, one of my favorite authors (a review here), went through a spate of writing horror and dark fantasy (more like slightly fantastic horror) novels under a pen name (Samuel M. Key) in the late 80s/early 90s. This novel is one of them, along with Mulengro and From a Whisper to a Scream. I enjoyed the latter of those two quite a bit, despite the darkness of the story, so for a little light reading I picked up Angel of Darkness. Oh, not a good idea. Due to the graphic nature of this book, I’m cutting all plot discussion. (more…)

Some of you may recall that I reviewed books 1 and 2 on Tuesday, and announced that book 3 had been released. Yes, it took me two days to read all 600 pages of King’s Shield. I am not embarrassed by this at all. I might have finished it, had Ben not plucked it out of my hands the minute he got home, with the entirely reasonable suggestion that I finish it tomorrow while he was at work. I grumbled, but let him read. I finished it about twenty minutes after he got home from work on Wednesday, but that was close enough for jazz, right?

I’m going to admit up front that I have a bit of a conflict of interest in reviewing this book; I got to read it in draft form. However, it’s not as if I’m getting paid to review books, and I didn’t get paid to read the draft, so I’m just not going to give it a number of stars at the end. Since book 2 ended with a bit of a cliffhanger and book 3 starts right where it left off, though, I’m going to cut the plot discussion. (My apologies for those reading it on Livejournal.) (more…)

[Jenny Davidson's The Explosionist was released yesterday. Sorry for forgetting it!]

I’d been looking for a good copy of this for a while; someone else had reviewed it (I’ve forgotten whom, unfortunately), and it piqued my interest. Ms. Ibbotson was born in Germany in 1925, but moved to England shortly thereafter. She published her first novel in 1965, and has gone on to publish quite a few since. I’m rather confused that I’d never manged to read anything by her before this, considering that she writes YA and children’s fantasy and other kinds of novels. Her books have even been mentioned as similar to J. K. Rowling’s, in that way where she was writing English children’s fantasy many years before JKR and just got the boost recently from having, “If you like Harry Potter, try these!” put near her books. (Rather like Diana Wynne Jones, that way.)

Anna was the oldest child of Count Grazinsky in St. Petersburg, but then the Russian Revolution came, and they moved, penniless (an old maid had disappeared with all their jewels), to England. Eventually their small stock of money runs out, and Anna decides she must get a job to support her mother and brother. The only jobs available (this being just after the war ends) are as maids, so she accepts a job as a temporary housemaid to the Earl of Westerholme. The earl is coming home from the hospital he had been in (he’d flown planes in the war), and he is engaged to be married shortly. Anna has tried to hide the fact that she is a countess; she’s not conventionally attractive, but she has endeared herself to the entire staff and all the neighbors. And, perhaps unfortunately, the Earl of Westerholme . . . (more…)

[King's Shield, book 3 of Inda, comes out today. Review soon!]

I’m normally not a fan of ‘epic’ fantasy (as evidenced by the fact that I could not stomach the works of the late Robert Jordan, although many of my friends quite enjoyed them). Generally an author who makes a globe of her world out of a beach ball and has been building and writing in the same world since the mid-60s would be considered an epic fantasy author. Quite often a trilogy quartet set in a time of global war and chronicling the life of the greatest king of the world would register as an epic fantasy. Somehow Sherwood Smith avoids a lot of that, and I mean it as a compliment. Epic fantasy can also often mean characters that are gods or in many ways godlike and just not terribly accessible. I don’t know how she does it, but she writes very human fantasy on an epic scale. Or perhaps epic fantasy on a human scale. In either case, one might have guessed by now that I enjoy Sherwood Smith’s works quite a bit.

Indevan-Dal Algara-Vayir of Choraed Alger, in Iasca Leror (later called Marloven Hesea, and then Marloven Hess) is the son of a prince, but not a royal prince. He’s a second son, which means that he is expected to conduct the home defense of the lands for his older brother, once that brother becomes the Adaluin (territorial prince). When he is ten, the rules somehow change and all the second sons are called into the capital to undergo the same strict military education as their older brothers. Inda (as he is called) goes gleefully.

Unfortunately, politics are afoot. Iasca Leror is expecting at least three kinds of attacks – the Venn, mighty sea warriors; those from Norsunder, evil magicians; or pirates. The king’s younger brother is hoping for one of these, since it’s what he’s trained his whole life for. Said younger brother, the Shield Arm, also hates the Algara-Vayirs with his entire soul. This is a bit problematic, as Inda’s older sister Hadand is engaged to the royal heir, the king’s older son. The royal heir (Sierlaef) is the Shield Arm’s favorite person in the world, since he feels he can control him and thereby retain power for a longer period of time. Inda and his older brother Tanrid both have difficult times at the military academy. Tanrid is never quite close to the Sierlaef, but Inda becomes good friends with the younger and less-favored royal son, the Varlaef (called Sponge, for his reddish hair). An incident, engineered by the Shield Arm and abetted by the Sierlaef, happens in Inda’s second year at the academy, and Inda’s entire life changes.

The Fox starts immediately after the end of Inda; it contains a similar format to the last half of the first volume. (more…)

I don’t very often review romance novels, but I was out of town all weekend and this was the only book I read in four days. (My apologies for how late it is.) In any case, it’s a paranormal/fantasy romance, so I’m claiming it. Nora Roberts, as a lot of people know, is one of the dominant forces in romance novels. She’s written a little bit of everything (except, I think, historicals) — suspense, fantasy, sf, southern, northern, eastern, western, etc. She’s famed for her strong storytelling and excellent dialogue. Her online persona is also a genuinely nice person, as evidenced by the boards at Dear Author and the Smart B*tches (see sidebar for links).

In this book 1 of 3, Malory Price is an art dealer/gallery manager in small-town Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, she and the boss’s new wife have issues, and she’s on the verge of losing her job when she gets invited to a reception at an amazing historical house in the area. When she gets there, only two other people — both women — have been invited. She, Dana, and Zoe were invited specifically by the couple who has rented the house because they are linked. The three of them are the only women alive who have a chance of finding three specific keys which can save three women from the fairy-tale hell they’ve been trapped in. This is literal, not metaphorical: actual physical keys to unlock the box that contains their souls, or something like that, so the young women can be awakened like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty. Unfortunately, there are a few things working against her, primarily lack of information and, oh yeah, the guy who put them there in the first place . . . (more…)

The recently-deceased Lloyd Alexander, of the Chronicles of Prydain fame, was actually an American author. I’d always assumed he was British, but he was from Pennsylvania and was born just before the Great Depression. He wrote dozens of books, mostly children’s and YA fantasy. The Chronicles of Prydain were vaguely based on Welsh mythology; many of his books contain elements of mythology from the British Isles, which is probably what led me to believe he was English. In any case, he published novels until his death (two weeks after his wife passed away); this novel was from 2002.

Lidi is a magician, of the stage and sleight-of-hand variety. Her father was, too; he taught her the majority of what she knows. However, he told her she would never be a real magician until she knew the Rope Trick, and there was only one man in the world who could teach it to her: Ferramondo. While she is searching for him, though, Lidi has been traveling as a show; her stage manager is a man named Jericho, and they travel in a wagon. After an aborted show in an inn, a small girl follows Lidi home. Her name is Daniella, and she wants to join Lidi and get away from the abusive innkeeper. Shortly after Daniella (who proves to be a savant about numbers and even mild future-telling) joins the troop, a man on the run named Julian joins as well. Can Lidi find Ferramondo and keep Daniella and Julian safe? (more…)