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It is 1915 and twins Bolt and Eleanor are on the run from an uncle that might just kill them both. They run into Mr. Jengling, the founder of the the Emporium of Wonders - a circus of oddities that travels across the often treacherous America. Despite the strangeness of many of those with the Emporium (there's the three-legged woman; a clown with no nose; the woman who can foretell anyone's death) Bolt and Eleanor find these people to be a family. There's more than just the oddness of the collective - there's a darkness that hovers around the Emporium that strikes Eleanor as uncomfortable. Her brother, however, grows closer and closer to the group. This, itself, is uncomfortable for the girl - the pair have been as close as any pair of twins could possibly be. But now as they come of age they appear to be going their separate ways. But when the uncle (who may or not actually be an uncle after all) is back on their trail and wanting them back to do his bidding, both Bolt...

 In Joe Abercrombie's The Devils , we have a strange twisting of our familiar reality. In this dark fantasy,   Abercrombie gives us a Catholic Church which only has female priests and a female pope (who is barely more than a child). Her friends and protectors include vampires and werewolves. In this world, the Crusades are being waged against Elves - a race thought to eat the flesh of people. Brother Diaz arrives in the Holy City, intent on serving Pope Benedicta to the best of his abilities. He is thrust, unceremoniously, into a position higher than he's really capable of serving, tasked with helping Pope Benedicta seat a long-lost child on the recently vacated Serpent Throne in Troy. When the sorceress, Empress Eudoxia, died, her sons were fighting across the land, each vying for their own power.  Having a foothold in Troy would help the Christian movement but it's going to be a tough haul putting this distant claim on a throne when the sons, who are accustomed to ...

I knew/(know) nothing about this character Minky Woodcock. and I've never read anything by Cynthia von Buhler, but I was in the mood for something in the noir vein and a Hard Case Crime book is usually good to meet that need! Following the death of Harry Houdini (with whom Minky had a close relationship), Minky works with both Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Aleister Crowley to  help Crowley who's been accused of murder. This association brings Minky into a dark world of occultism. This was ... this was unexpected. I went in to this book completely blind to the character and to the ongoing storyline. And honestly, at the start, I didn't like anything about the book. I didn't like the art, I didn't like the characters, and I didn't like the story.  But as I read on, I reached a point where everything clicked. I can't say where that was, but I went back, started again, and I just really got into this. The art seemed to fit well with the story and setting, and Mi...

 Cork O'Connor is having a crisis of self. He's about to 'celebrate' his sixtieth birthday when he gets a disturbing call from his son, Stephen. Stephen works with non-profit organization that seeks to help secure the release of people who have been unjustly imprisoned. One of the latest is an Ojibwe man named Axel Boshey who was sent to prison for a brutal murder that he did not commit - sent by a then newly-elected sheriff, Cork O'Connor. Cork is determined to re-investigate, but that's not easy. In addition to the murder now twenty years past, Axel Boshey isn't willing to help. Axel has come to accept his life in prison - made himself comfortable. And his truth is, he doesn't remember what happened. He could have killed the woman. He does admit, however, that the details he provided when he plead guilty, came to him from a deputy on O'Connor's staff who clearly didn't like 'Indians' and let a number of details 'slip'. The ...

Emily and Sam are scientists, currently in the wilderness, with guide Bash leading them through remote areas that they want to study. They encounter eighteen year old Hazel and her younger brother, Caleb, who don't seem at all prepared for walking in the remote woodlands. At about the same time that they meet the young siblings, Emily, Sam, and Bash make a very startling discovery - all the local water - from streams to ponds - are poisoned. Some strange, killer algae has appeared in the water and it's killing everything that drinks it. Suddenly this hike in the wilderness has turned into a fight for survival! The adult trio convince the siblings to stay with them so that they can look for water to survive and the try to get more information from the odd youngsters. It turns out that Hazel and Caleb have just run away from a camp of cultists that was planning to marry Hazel to an older man and send Caleb away to live with a different family. But Hazel refuses to let anyone sepa...

The 19th book in the October Daye series! October (Toby) Daye is pregnant and she's been confined to the house and it's driving her crazy. When a chance comes to leave, she takes it, even though it is a potentially very dangerous mission for the Queen, and even though Toby is getting close to her due date. Some valuable artifacts have been stolen from the Queen's vault. Artifacts, which, in the wrong hands, could mean a lot of trouble for everyone in the realm. Of course this is a job for Toby - it's just the sort of thing she does on a regular basis, but she's not usually 8-1/2 months pregnant. With her usual combination of skill and recklessness, Toby tracks down both the artifacts and those involved in stealing them, putting both herself and her unborn child in mortal danger. Just as I was beginning to wonder if it was time to stop reading the October Daye series, author Seanan McGuire pulls some magic out of her word processor and delivers another exciting story...

The nanotech drug Glow is everywhere.  Rex remains in hiding as he's still recovering from his addiction. Every day is a different challenge. But there are bigger problems to face – a new alliance threatens the balance of power in the world again, and a dangerous enemy from Rex's past tracks him down. Is it really possible that Rex is the cure for the plague? Or is he, more likely, the root of humanity’s downfall? Rex must decide if he really is a prophet... or just a coward. I did not care for the first book but I had received the second book to review before I'd started Glow . I decided to give it some time and come to this book fresh and I was really, really intent on giving this a good read and hoped it would enjoy it more. Unfortunately, I did not. As I noted in the review of the first book, this does not feel new or fresh. Science fiction and drugs have been a pretty common idea. Philip K Dick was a master of this, and more recently (like ten to twelve years ago), bot...

Having recently read and been enamored with Christopher Moore's Anima Rising , I was in the mood for a little more supernatural and art combo and viola, up popped this book, Love Sucks by Cynthia St. Aubin. This was clearly going to be more humorous and more of a romance (thank you, cover artist) but that doesn't matter to me. The storyline was interesting: Someone is killing werewolves and that has a number of people concerned. People like Vincent Van Gogh.  Yes, THE Vincent Van Gogh. It so happens that Van Gogh (among many famous artists) has a bit of the paranormal about him. He turns to Mark Abernathy's art gallery for help. Abernathy is an alpha Were, who then goes missing. All of this is nearly beyond comprehension for gallery worker Hanna Harvey. What she can understand is that the detective who is looking into these strange deaths is one heart-fluttery handsome guy. But what's the bigger deal? The hunky cop or meeting her all-time favorite artist, Vincent Van G...

Here's what I knew about Cole Porter prior to reading this book: 1) the lyrics in all the songs in Anything Goes were often repeated by my fellow theatre students back in my college days, 2) Cole Porter was my theatre professor's favorite composer & lyricist, 3) I thought he was only a Broadway artist whose work was then brought to the big screen. Shows you what I know! I had recently read a book about Harold Arlen which was incredibly packed with information and had me in the mood for more musical theatre related reading. This was interesting, informative, but slightly disappointing. ... But disappointing how? I've listened to various versions of Anything Goes countless times. I love the Kiss Me Kate  and High Society films and I'm familiar with Can-Can , Silk Stockings , Nymph Errant , and Out of This World . And with my old professor always talking about Cole Porter, in my mind, Porter was one of the big names of musical theatre, like Rodgers and Hammerstein, ...

It's about time someone wrote this book! I have been reading tie-in novels since the mid-1970's. I'm not sure if the first one was a Partridge Family novel (oh, yes, they had them and I read them!) or one of the two Gerry Anderson UFO novels (why only two!?) or, quite likely, one of those James Blish Star Trek adaptations. I don't know how far back tie-in novels go, but for me, they go back to my earliest reading days. What a lot of younger readers don't quite grasp is that back before the internet was easily accessible (possibly in your own parents' day), if we wanted to experience more adventures of our favorite characters, we couldn't just stream any tv show we wanted, but we could (maybe) get a book and enjoy an entirely new adventure. So, tie-in novels have been around for awhile, but while there is no shortage of how-to-write books and magazines I'm not aware of any other book that speaks specifically to the task and challenges of writing a tie-...

This was beautiful. Milena Jesenská was a Czech journalist, writer, editor and translator. It was in the latter role that she rose to some small fame as she was one of the first to translate the works of Franz Kafka from German to Czech. She'd discovered one of his stories which made an impact on her and she wrote directly to him and asked if she could do the translation. This letter started an intense and passionate exchange between them. Milena was married to Ernst Pollak, a literary critic. His income was poor, which was why Milena began translating. But through the letter exchange with Kafka, Milena lived a vicarious affair. They did meet twice to consummate the affair.  But as neither of them could commit (at the same time) to leaving the safety of their known lives, their relationship - both romantic and epistolary -weighed heavily on them and their attitudes turned colder. Later in life, as a dictator rose to power in Germany and began eradicating Jews, Milena, who...

Rushmore McKenzie might just be my favorite literary P.I.  I definitely look forward to a McKenzie book more than any other mystery detective ... and I like Longmire and Cork O'Connor and Will Trent and ...! McKenzie is approached by Angela Bjork, an old friend, with a request - help her find her missing dinosaur head. Angela was working in the Southeast corner of Montana excavating for dinosaur bones on private land, but on behalf of a university. She and her team made an extraordinarily unique discovery, finding not only the skull of an Ankylosaurus, but a complete skeleton! Such a find is so rare that the skeleton could be worth upwards of $6-million. Transporting something like this could only be done in pieces and the team carefully prepared and bundled the skull first for transportation to the University of Minnesota, but the moment the bundle was put on the truck the group was attacked and the truck hijacked and now the skull is gone. McKenzie recognizes that this has to be ...