Looking for Your Next Book

 Olav Audunssøn and Ingunn Steinfinnsdatter were betrothed as children and raised together as foster children.  They are madly in love with each other, though Ingunn was raped by another man while Olav was absent.  A child came from that event, Eirik, which Ingunn gave to a foster family. But Olav sees the depression Ingunn suffers from and brings Eirik back to Ingunn and adopts the boy as his own child. Now they are returning to Olav's ancestral home and Olav looks forward to settling in and putting the past behind them. Here, no one knows about the shameful, unwanted pregnancy or Eirik's actual parentage. But a moment from the past haunts Olav - something he hasn't even confessed to his priest. Olav is the last of his family line and he and Ingunn would like to have children of their own, but Ingunn suffers from a series of miscarriages and stillbirths. Olav is convinced it is punishment for his secret. Ingunn does finally deliver a child from their union - a girl, Ceci...

 For the longest time, I thought publisher Angry Robot was putting out some of the best science fiction and fantasy on the market.  Exciting, cutting-edge works were coming out of this press quite regularly.  Then a couple of years ago I began to get disappointed with what I was reading - for the first time in a decade there are books that I am not requesting from them because I didn't like the first book in a series. Though I am always willing to try a new book and a new author, I was starting to wonder if it was worth it. And then a book like Spidertouch , by Alex Thomson, appears, renewing my faith in the fantasy field and in Angry Robot books. To the book...  An alien race called The Keda have ruled over the city known as Val Kedic for hundreds of years. They are cruel and ruthless, keeping the locals in line by punishing the children for parental slights, and sending the children off to the mines for back-breaking, cruel work at an early age.  Razvan was s...

 Debbie Reynolds Biondi is the creator of a comic book series called  Sputnik Chick: A Girl With No Past . Debbie lives in different timelines.  The comic book series has been an outlet for Debbie to detail her experiences in Atomic Mean Time. In Earth Standard Time, Debbie travels with her apprentice, Unicorn Girl, and Cassandra - an AI who knows all about pop culture. There are over 2,000 alternate timelines - each created by the detonation of an atomic bomb in Earth Standard Time - and Debbie and Unicorn Girl and Cassandra travel through them, collectively known as the Sisters Sputnik. Debbie's storytelling skills has her treated with celebrity status throughout the realities and in one particular world, where all books and music have disappeared, Debbie is in bed with an old Earth Standard lover, and he begs her to tell him a story. This book is ... really unusual; highly unique; a pop-culture jambalaya; a literary paella; psychedelic fiction. Think Harlan Ellison and...

 I don't know what I was expecting with this book (well ... maybe I do) but this definitely wasn't it. While I have never read a book by Mary Roberts Rinehart prior to this, it was my understanding that she was a mystery writer, so imagine my surprise at this collection of humorous short stories! The stories center around a middle-aged spinster woman named Letitia ("Tish") Carberry. I say 'middle aged' even though she and her friends call themselves 'old.' The stories are narrator/described by one of Tish's friends, Lizzie. Tish is one of those spunky older women who is seemingly oblivious to danger, gets into all sorts of humorous, sticky situations, and manages to come through in the end, having achieved her goal - whatever that might be. Everything will work out for Tish and her friends, but there will be some bumps and laughs along the way.  The friend, Aggie, seems to come away bearing the brunt of Tish's escapades. The story that stands o...

 One more entry for the PM Outspoken Authors series for my review blog, this time featuring Joe R. Lansdale. While the other books in this series that I read and reviewed had a very similar feel, Lansdale bucks the trend and makes this short collection much more personal and therefore, in many ways, much more interesting. The other books in the series (that I've read) have carried forth a trifecta of sorts - one short story, one essay, and one interview.  Lansdale gives us four short stories, the interview, and five short essays. I can't say that I'm a huge Lansdale fan, though I like his work enough that I requested to read this (there are a number of books in the PM Outspoken Authors series that I am not interested in reading). And along these lines, I'm familiar with Lansdale's popular Hap and Leonard books (I've read only two books in the series) but I'm not an ardent fan. This collection does have a Hap and Leonard story which, to me, is just a fine sho...

Second grade teacher Penny Wanjiru encourages her students to follow their dreams, so when the surprising opportunity for Penny to become a Mars Colony astronaut comes her way, she knows she must follow her dream. It is not a cut and dry decision, however, as Penny's grandmother (who she's quite close to) is having health issues. It isn't giving anything away to say that Penny will make the decision to go and she'll have her students in mind the entire time and have regular video chats with them and answer questions and share with them what she experiences. I've read and review a couple of Cidney Swanson books previously and I really like her writing.  She's one of the few self-published authors whose work is outstanding and I'm not sure why her books haven't been picked up by a commercial publisher yet. Most of Swanson's books are YA books with strong young female protagonists, This book technically isn't a YA book, but it's about as close a...

 Ronan Truelove is just an ordinary thirteen year old, with very ordinary parents - or so he believes, until one day when his mother 'abducts' him from school and tears off on a high speed car chase. His father, she informs Ronan, has been kidnapped, and those kidnappers are now after Ronan as well. Kidnapped? His boring, nerdy dad? Ronan's mother is not the ordinary soccer mom that Ronan thought.  She is actually a member of an ancient, sword-wielding order of knights known as the Blood Guard, bound to protect the Pure - a specific number of individuals on whose shoulders lie the fate of the world. Suddenly Ronan understands why his mother had him enrolled in after-school classes of gymnastics, martial arts, survival training, etc.  He has been groomed to take on the mantle of a Blood Guard! His mother sets him off on his own and he joins forces with two unlikely individuals - Greta, a girl from his school who he never really liked very much, and Jack, a teenaged pick-po...

In a small village in La Mancha, Spain, the noble Alonso Quijano has become completely consumed by the stories he's read of knights and their valiant chivalry and so he imagines himself one of these knight, renames himself Don Quixote, and with his loyal servant Sancho Panza, sets off on a series of (mis)adventures, battling imaginary foes and treating common women as a knight would treat a duchess, all in the name of chivalry. I have a literary bucket list of classics I've been wanting to read and this has been high on my list.  I have been glad that a number of publishers have been reissuing classics (often with new translations) as most of what I read lately are ARCs. Not having read this before, and really, not knowing as much about it as I thought I did, I was a little surprised by the episodic nature of the book. I was expecting a longer story with a series of mishaps along the way. And while that could be an interpretation of this book, this came across more as a series...

 Morgan Mason has just arrived in Virginia City, Nevada (from San Francisco) to hopefully put his skills to use and find a job. Morgan is an assessor with a geology background and Virginia City has large cadre of millionaires thanks to some silver-rich mines in the area. But the one local assay office doesn't want to take on anyone new and definitely doesn't want any competition. Mason is feeling pretty down on his luck with alarm bells sound - there's a fire in Virginia City! Thanks to his knowledge of chemistry (important in being an assayer) Mason recognizes the signs of an arsonist-started fire and makes sure the head of the volunteer fire brigade knows.  He is more convinced of it when more fires are lit up in the town over the next few days. He manages to find a couple of lost kids and gets them to their mother (an attractive single woman [hmm, where could this be leading?]) who  is grateful for his kindness. He rescues a minor from sure death in a fire, helps that ...

 Evie Von Rathe lives with her aunt Desdemona in the seventh most haunted town in America - Blight Harbor. Desdemona is Blight Harbor's local paranormal expert. Living with Desdemona ("Des") has been an interesting experience and pleasant enough, And Des hasn't had too many rules for Evie, the main one being "Stay away from the abandoned slaughterhouse at the edge of town" (as if Evie had any interest in being in an abandoned slaughterhouse!).  The ghost of John Jeffrey Pope - a serial killer who hunted in the streets of Blight Harbor a hundred years ago - is said to dwell in the space. But when Des goes into that building and doesn't return, Evie knows it will be up to her to get her aunt back - if she can even find her! But John Jeffrey Pope isn't the only strange creature to exist in the shadows of the slaughterhouse. Evie meets The Clackity - an unusual creature that seems to live in more than one reality - a bridge between worlds. Evie strikes a...

 Once again I managed to select a book that is the middle of a series without realizing it.  That's a problem with ARC's sometimes - you don't see a cover boasting "Book Two" or ""Continuing the Saga." We are in Victorian era Ireland following the Wildenstern family. Brothers Nate (who has been traveling), and Berto (now the patriarch of the family after the death of their older brother, Marcos) are considering a new path for the family, but not everyone is on board with their thoughts. They are a powerful family and they regularly work with supernatural (perhaps magical) elements. Witches and necromancy, secret societies and the power to raise from the dead are just part of an ordinary day for the Wildensterns. They also have a slave labor force called 'enigmals' -part animal, part machine - at their command. Life gets a bit dicey when women who may or may not have a connection to the family are found dead by mysterious circumstance. If the...

There is no shortage of 'how to' books on writing. Some retailers have a specific section in their stores for these kinds of books. So why do we need another? Author J. Michael Straczynski addresses that right at the start, offering what he feels other 'how to' writing books neglect to talk about (I'll let you read up on that). Straczynski focuses quite a bit on writing from the Hollywood perspective, though he does touch on his experiences in comics and fiction/non-fiction books, as well as his very early days (college). He offers up some of the traps that young (ie inexperienced - not just age) writers often fall into so that the hopeful can be aware of, and hopefully steer clear of such pitfalls, but with sections of the book that discuss the best (and worst) ways to pitch stories to television producers, I think it's safe to say that a strength of the book is its appeal to television and screen writers. Although Straczynski has already written a memoir/autob...