Some Book News

• Looking for some info on J.R. Ward and her Black Dagger Brotherhood series?  The Obscured Vixen has a JR Ward Book Signing Recap from a few weeks back with quite a few interesting tidbits.

• Liza at Blogging by Liza, also has some spoilers for upcoming books.  Looks like Blay and Qhuinn's book will be happening after Tohr's.  From the blog:                                                         TEAM QHUAY!!!She said it needs to be next after Tohr’s book. 2 things have to happen in Tohr’s book to set it up – Team Qhuay won’t be happy with one of the things that happens. Both must happen for their book to be ready. FYI, this is the first time she called it a book rather than a novella. Not sure if that means we get an actual book, but kind of makes me wonder…                   You can read more here.

• There's a rumor going around that the Qhuinn and Blay book will be in hardcover.

• Orbit has posted an early look at some covers for books coming out in 2012.  Once a description has been posted, you'll see many of these show up on my Upcoming 2012 list but for now, check out some pretty covers.  Go ahead, it's art.

• All this week, Tor.com and Barnes and Noble are co-sponsoring a steampunk book appreciation week.  You can find book recommendations, sweepstakes and blog posts here.

• Booklamp is a website designed to help readers discover new books.  You put in the name of a book you read and enjoyed and Booklamp will make recommendations based storyline, themes, genres, and writing styles.  Personally, despite a super long TBR pile, I'm always interested in discovering new books so this could come in quite handy.

• Another good place to check out new books, as well as read the first chapters, is D. Renee Bagby Presents First Chapters.  You can search by authors, publishers, labels, and relationships.  It's a risk free way to dip your toes in before deciding whether a book is worth buying.

• F. Paul Wilson is ending his very successful Repairman Jack series.  He's at the point where he feels it is time to resolve the long-term story arc or else the series will begin to grow stale.  More here from Wilson on the decision.

• Orbit will be publishing Gail Carrriger's next adult series in 2013.  Called The Parasol Protectorate Abroad, you can read the announcement here.

• Abaddon Books is launching a venture for it's Pax Britannia series.  The next two installments will be published as ebooks and the readers will be able to vote on how the wish the series to continue.  Hellnotes has the details.

More Book Pimpin - Upcoming 2012

Geared for Pleasure: An Elemental Steam Romance by R.G. Alexander, Rachel Grace

The world of Theorrey runs like a well-oiled machine. The elements are in balance, passion is tamed and the young queen is the heartbeat of it all. But nothing is ever as it seems…

Earthly Desires
Demeter “Dare” Senedal is the Queen’s Chalice—her protector and closest companion. So when the queen goes missing Dare rushes to locate her, even though the search leads her straight into trouble. 

Gaming den owner Bodhan revels in carnal delights, but when a naked and bound woman appears on his shore, his hunger to possess wars with his need to protect. As Bodhan shares his knowledge of pleasure, Dare must decide if she can trust him, both with her mission and her heart. 

Fiery Temptations
Seraphina always lands on her feet. After all, she is a Felidae—more feline than human—and an excellent thief. There has never been a job Phina wouldn’t take or a man who could tame her…until she meets Cyrus Arendal. 

As the Queen’s Sword, Cyrus should have known better than to fall victim to a beautiful bandit. Now, to find the dagger that she stole from him, he’ll need to convince Phina not to judge a man by his station, but by how completely he can satisfy her desires.

Drops March 6, 2012

Royal Street (Sentinals of New Orleans #1) by Suzanne Johnson

As the junior wizard sentinel for New Orleans, Drusilla Jaco’s job involves a lot more potion-mixing and pixie-retrieval than sniffing out supernatural bad guys like rogue vampires and lethal were-creatures. DJ's boss and mentor, Gerald St. Simon, is the wizard tasked with protecting the city from anyone or anything that might slip over from the preternatural beyond. 

Then Hurricane Katrina hammers New Orleans’ fragile levees, unleashing more than just dangerous flood waters. 

While winds howled and Lake Pontchartrain surged, the borders between the modern city and the Otherworld crumbled. Now, the undead and the restless are roaming the Big Easy, and a serial killer with ties to voodoo is murdering soldiers sent to help the city recover. 

To make it worse, Gerald St. Simon has gone missing, the wizards’ Elders have assigned a grenade-toting assassin as DJ’s new partner, and undead pirate Jean Lafitte wants to make her walk his plank. The search for Gerry and the killer turns personal when DJ learns the hard way that loyalty requires sacrifice, allies come from the unlikeliest places, and duty mixed with love creates one bitter gumbo.

Drops 4/10/2012

Link Love

Boy, I've really dropped the ball on the Link Love posts.  Have you been feeling neglected?  Did you think it was 'cause I no longer care?  Not true, not true at all.  Let me prove my love.  See.  Look at all these nice links I have for you.  Some of these are a bit old, some are new but all are pretty interesting.  Check out what's been happening around the tubes....  and never doubt my love again.

• On the prevalence of US tropes in storytelling

• Sarah Kate on Censorship and Amazon Banning Her Book

• What's Wrong With Sex?

• Only 9% (and falling) of US internet users are P2P pirates

• Freaky Field Guide: Tokyo's Top 10 Mythical Beasts

• Falser Words Were Never Spoken

• Flick Chicks: A guide to women in the movies

• A Dialogue with Sarah, aged 3: In Which It Is Shown That If Your Dad Is A Chemistry Professor, Asking "Why" Can Be Dangerous

• Covers - You can't go wrong with a man in a hood

• Science, Naturalism, and Truth

• The Glory of Bad SF and Fantasy Cover Art

• The Science Behind Superheroes

• Top Ten Banned or Challenged Books of 2010

• What Does "Authentic" Mean, Anyway

• Amazon Is Nobody's Friend, Part One

• Across the Digital Divide

• Do We Have to Like Characters for Them to be Interesting?

• Everyone Can Promote Equality in Genre Writing

Bitty Reviews: Meh, Yay, Blah

Geist (Book of the Order #1) by Philippa Ballantine
I wanted to enjoy this book much more than I did. It's a complex story set in a complex world with complex characters but the end result was convoluted. The setting is one of those "days of yore" worlds commonly found in fantasy, sorta medieval but with some minor steam punk elements like dirigibles and guns thrown in which does give it a unique spin. There is a lot of detail here and the reader is introduced to some strong, flawed characters... and yet, I never felt that the characters developed any further as the story went along. 
The story moves quickly, perhaps too quickly for my tastes. We are often told details instead of shown, without the author ever laying down any real groundwork to explain the twists and turns within the character's relationships. I never felt that the characters came alive beyond their initial introduction, (as good as that may have been.) For example, trust is an issue between the three main characters. When this begins to change, I didn't buy it. Not because the characters were not worthy of each others trust but because the change in the relationships felt superficial. I accepted it because the author told us but I didn't believe it because it was not shown. I found it difficult to be emotional engaged by this story despite the fact that intellectually it is an interesting one. This is one of the few times when I felt like a book should have been longer so that the author's writing could match the depth of the world she portrayed.
Grade: C

Book News

• Ann Aquirre has just sold two new series.  The first is a science fiction trilogy  described as Prison Break in  space.  The second is a steampunk whodunnit written with Andres Aguirre.  Both are out in 2013.  You can read all about it here.

• From Meljean Brook's Really Infrequent Newsletter comes this:   In January 2012, "Mina Wentworth and the Invisible City" will be included in the mass market reprint of The Iron Duke and issued as a standalone ebook a few months later. I've also been given the go-ahead on a novella for Scarsdale -- look for that in Summer 2012.   HOORAY! Scarsdale!  I am so ready for his story. I wonder why it's a novella, though.  Lord knows Scarsdale has enough baggage for a full length story.

• This sounds like it could be interesting... From Lilith Saintcrow: I’m happy to announce that Orbit short fiction will be bringing out my “teenage Antichrist” short story, Unfallen, this fall. I must admit a great deal of the genesis of that story was reading Slacktivist’s awesome blow-by-blows of the Left Behind series. (He reads so we don’t have to! And really, we’re grateful for that.) Slacktivist articulates a number of things that have always made me incredibly uncomfortable about evangelism and Dominionism, and especially the current craziness swallowing evangelical Christianity in America as a whole. All that aside, however, the short story came from a very simple question: what if the Antichrist was just a teenager who wanted to be liked?

Review: Shadow Kin by M. J. Scott

Shadow Kin (The Half-Light City #1) by M. J. Scott

Back Cover Blurb:  On one side, the Night World, rules by the Blood Lords and the Beast Kind. On the other, the elusive Fae and the humans, protected by their steadfast mages...

Born a wraith, Lily is a shadow who slips between worlds. Brought up by a Blood Lord and raised to be his assassin, she is little more than a slave. But when Lily meets her match in target Simon DuCaine, the unlikely bond that develops between them threatens to disrupt an already stretched peace in a city on the verge of being torn apart...

This is a solid start to a brand new series trilogy.  And I think it is the first time I have read a gaslight fantasy.  What's that you ask?  Well, thanks to Wikipedia, I can tell ya.  It's a fantasy set during the Victorian era with a nod to the gothics.  (You can read more about it here.)  Scott does a nice job of creating a darkly evocative atmosphere in a world populated by the Beast Kind, the Fae, Vampires and Humans.  The story begins during what is known as a treaty year: that time when the four races negotiate the terms, trade and territories that allow them to co-exist in some semblance of peace.  Transgressions by any of the races can result in a loss of privileges.  Since the treaties will last for three years, each race has a lot at stake regarding the outcome of the negotiations and so must keep hidden any nefarious shenanigans lest they lose entitlements.  

Link Love

Links. You know what to do... (Psst... Read them)

• Convention vs, the Current Truths

• The Representation of Women in Fantasy: What's the Problem?

• Fairy Tale Girls Should Always and Never Do What They're Told

• This is what Feminist SF Looks Like: Big Finish, and Gallifrey

• One Darksider's Take on Steampunk with Bec Skrabi

• Kapow! Thwack! Zok! - writing fight scenes

• From Chandler to Gibson: How Noir Led to Cyberpunk

• Lady Superheroes Who Ought to Get Their Own Movie

• Six Authors Who Were Copywriters First

• Science Fiction's Increasing Stage Presence: Fringe Festival NYC

• Best Science Fiction Redux - in response to NPR's popularity contest

• The Top Ten Books That Influenced J. R. R. Tolkien

• Bad Romance: History's Ill-Fated Literary Couples

• A Message from J. L. Langley re: Plagiarism

Quick & Dirty Reviews: Lord of the White Hell - Books One & Two by Ginn Hale

Lord of the White Hell (Book One) by Ginn Hale
Book Blurb: Kiram Kir-Zaki may be considered a mechanist prodigy among his own people, but when he becomes the first Haldiim ever admitted to the prestigious Sagrada Academy, he is thrown into a world where power, superstition and swordplay outweigh even the most scholarly of achievements. 
But when the intimidation from his Cadeleonian classmates turns bloody, Kiram unexpectedly finds himself befriended by Javier Tornesal, the leader of a group of cardsharps, duelists and lotharios who call themselves Hellions.
However Javier is a dangerous friend to have. Wielder of the White Hell and sole heir of a dukedom, he is surrounded by rumors of forbidden seductions, murder and damnation. His enemies are many and any one of his secrets could not only end his life but Kiram's as well.


Ginn Hale is an adept writer and really has a way with evoking a fully realized fantasy world that sucks the reader right in.  The world building is complicated and very detailed but never difficult to follow.  This is a fantasy with a romance as opposed to a Romance Fantasy and it's kinda like a gay Harry Potter. Despite being an adult novel, Lord of the White Hell comes across more as a young adult novel.  (That's not a criticism, just an observation.)  This book is about first love and coming of age, that transition between young adult to adult and emotionally, the characters are quite complex.  There are some sex scenes in the book but they were not graphic, there more for the emotional payoff than to titillate.  (Not that there is anything wrong with titillation.) 
The reader is introduced to this world through the eyes of Kiram, a Haldiim and the first of his kind to be admitted to the Sagrada Academy, a prestigious school for affluent and elite Cadeleonian male youths.  Kiram comes from a matriarchal culture where all sexualities are accepted.  Kiram is gay.  He's never had to come out.  Being gay is accepted fully with no judgements.  But in the patriarchal Cadeleonian society being gay can get you stripped of everything and exiled.  Which makes his attraction to Javier dangerous for they both have much to lose.  The erotic tension in the story is just lovely and fully in line with the characters' emotional arcs.   Hale's characters are all fully realized, each one unique and individual. She has crafted a romantic relationship between the two main characters that rings true and is compelling to read.

Link Love

Hey gang!  Here's the best of the book blogosphere for this week.  Ok.  Maybe not the best... Just some stuff I found interesting.  You will too.  Trust me.  Click on a link and give it a try.

• Spec Tech: Born This Way (Thoughts on Sex, Genetic Determinism, and James Tiptree, Jr

• Swear Like A Librarian

• My Body Gallery - What Real Women Look Like

• Nnedi's Definition of Feminism

• Holly Black - Ladies, Ladies, Ladies

• The State of Zombie Literature - An Autopsy

• Tiger Beatdown - What Do You Mean When You Say You Want "Strong Female Characters"

• NPR's Top 100 Science-Fiction, Fantasy Books

• I Don't Mind Spoilers and Science Says I am Not Alone

• Ladies, Don't Let Anyone Tell You You're Not Awesome

• What If Male Superheroes Posed Like Wonder Woman

• The People You Meet When You Write About Race

• How Sexism Operates in Comics

More For Your Radar

The Demon Lover by Juliet Dark
Since accepting a teaching position at remote Fairwick College in upstate New York, Callie McFay has experienced the same disturbingly erotic dream every night: A mist enters her bedroom, then takes the shape of a virile, seductive stranger who proceeds to ravish her in the most toe-curling, wholly satisfying ways possible. Perhaps these dreams are the result of writing her bestselling book, The Sex Lives of Demon Lovers. After all, Callie’s lifelong passion is the intersection of lurid fairy tales and Gothic literature—which is why she finds herself at Fairwick’s renowned folklore department, living in a once-stately Victorian house that, at first sight, seemed to call her name.
But Callie soon realizes that her dreams are alarmingly real. She has a demon lover—an incubus—and he will seduce her, pleasure her, and eventually suck the very life from her. Then Callie makes another startling discovery: He’s not the only mythical creature in Fairwick. As the tenured witches of the college and the resident fairies in the surrounding woods prepare to cast out the incubus, Callie must accomplish something infinitely more difficult—banishing this demon lover from her heart.  Drops 12/27/2012


Wildcat (Shifters Unbound #3) by Jennifer Ashley

When Feline Shifter Cassidy Warden saves detective Diego Escobar from plunging to his death, the naked Shifter woman takes his breath away. But she'd been breaking all kinds of human laws, and Diego, to save her from termination, has to promise his department he'll watch over her. 

Diego finds the task harder than he thinks--Cassidy is trying to find out what kind of mysterious hunter killed her mate two years ago, a hunter that could bring danger to all Shifters. Plus Cassidy has scent-marked Diego--essentially telling all other Shifter females, "Hands off."

Diego risks his personal and professional life getting involved with Cassidy, but he realizes he'll do anything, even confront the deadliest of assassins and his own inner demons, to keep her safe.  Drops January 2012

Reviews: Blood of the Wicked & Lure of the Wicked by Karina Cooper

Blood of the Wicked by Karina Cooper

From the back cover:

When the world went straight to hell, humanity needed a scapegoat to judge, to blame . . . to burn.

As an independent witch living off the grid, Jessie Leigh has spent her life running, trying to blend in among the faceless drudges in the rebuilt city. She thought she was finally safe, but now she's been found in a New Seattle strip club—by a hard-eyed man on a mission to destroy her kind.

A soldier of the Holy Order, Silas Smith believes in the cause: trawling the fringes of society for the murderous witches who threaten what's left of the world. Forced into a twisting web of half-truths and lies, he has to stay close to the most sensuous and electrifying woman he has ever seen and manipulate her into leading him to the witch he has to kill: her brother. Silas doesn't know that Jessie's his enemy, only that he wants her, needs her, even as he lies to her . . . and must protect her until his final breath.

This is the first book in the Dark Mission series, set in the post-cataclysmic world of New Seattle.  At first glance, the author does a nice job of evoking the grim, paranoid, wet (Hey, alternate world or not – it’s still Seattle), world that has emerged after catastrophic events destroyed much of the city. It has a dark atmosphere and evocative, moody tone that I am a fan of.  New Seattle has been built over the ruins of old Seattle and what was once a diverse, vibrant city has been sharply divided between the haves and the have-nots.  The rich and well to do live in the soaring towers built over old Seattle, with security, sunlight and fresh air, while the poor and downtrodden live below in the ruins of the old city.  At least I think they do.  The book falls short when it came to describing the details that would have given me a fuller picture.  (WTF is the carousel?  Is it a futuristic highway?)  I really wish Cooper had given us more detail.  The world of Blood of the Wicked sounds kinda cool but I never felt like the descriptions went deeper than surface level and left me with only a vague picture of the setting.  I also had trouble grasping how this society works.  What exactly is the Holy Order?  How did they come into power? What is the philosophy the church has been built upon?  What’s the cause that drives them?  (Beyond killing witches, that is.) I really wanted to know more.

Kate Daniels News & a couple of links

If you know me, you know that I am a big fan of Ilona Andrew's Kate Daniels series.  Well, today over at her blog, Andrews announced that the next book in the series won't be out until February 2013.  That's right.  2013! 

I'm not completely surprised by this news.  Andrews had already stated that in terms of the story's timeline, Andrea's book needed to happen first.  That book will be out May 2012.

You can read Andrew's post on the subject here.

If you need a laugh after that news head over to The Hairpin for Favorite Books of the Secretly Jerky.

Also, over at NPR is a poll in which you can vote for the top 100 Science Fiction/Fantasy books ever.