Oct 272015
 

Cover for The Aeronaut's Windlass by Jim Butcher.The Aeronaut’s Windlass stays on the USA Today Best-selling Books list at #101!

Since time immemorial, the Spires have sheltered humanity, towering for miles over the mist-shrouded surface of the world. Within their halls, aristocratic houses have ruled for generations, developing scientific marvels, fostering trade alliances, and building fleets of airships to keep the peace.

Captain Grimm commands the merchant ship, Predator. Fiercely loyal to Spire Albion, he has taken their side in the cold war with Spire Aurora, disrupting the enemy’s shipping lines by attacking their cargo vessels. But when the Predator is severely damaged in combat, leaving captain and crew grounded, Grimm is offered a proposition from the Spirearch of Albion—to join a team of agents on a vital mission in exchange for fully restoring Predator to its fighting glory.

And even as Grimm undertakes this dangerous task, he will learn that the conflict between the Spires is merely a premonition of things to come. Humanity’s ancient enemy, silent for more than ten thousand years, has begun to stir once more. And death will follow in its wake…

Oct 272015
 

Cover for An Apprentice to Elves by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette. A white woman with long blond hair and dressed in Viking-esque armor looks prepared to go into battle with two vicious wolves as allies.B&N SF&F Blog: This is a rich, complicated, textured world, with a myriad of different people, different creatures, different cultures, coming together in both a hard clash and a harder understanding. This is the kind of fantasy that makes you slow down, sound out the unforgiving consonants of a foreign culture, so you can hear those uncomfortable vowels, both the familiar and the alien. We don’t have to be just one thing, but several, and in fruitful opposition. Winter isn’t coming. It’s already here.

Read B&N’s full review of An Apprentice to Elves here.

Oct 262015
 

Cover for Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson.Director Sharon Lewis will start shooting a film of Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson this fall. Produced by urbansoul inc, it tells the story of a dystopian Toronto where Ti-Jeanne is chafing under Mami hergrandmother’s overprotective rules. Mami refuses to loosen her hold on Ti-Jeanne until she “sees” her protector spirit, Jab Jab. Ti-Jeanne rejects the spirits and when Tony comes on the scene she falls fast and hard. Ti-Jeanne runs off with Tony to forge a life in the harsh reality of the Burn. A heart wrenching event forces Ti-Jeanne to “see” her spirit and return home…a grown woman.

Oct 262015
 

Cover for All the Difference by Leah Ferguson. Two engagement rings with boxes, one sitting upright in its box, the other sideways and fallen out.Publishers Weekly:  In her stirring debut, Ferguson takes inspiration from Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” and turns it into a moving story about the consequences of choices. As the story begins, it seems that public relations whiz Molly Sullivan has it all—good friends, a loving boyfriend, a job she loves. But a positive pregnancy test turns her carefully controlled world on its ear. Before she can tell her boyfriend Scott that they’re expecting, he proposes to her at a New Year’s Eve party. The choice to marry, at first, seems as if it has an obvious answer: yes. But for the remainder of the novel, Ferguson leads Molly down two separate paths, with chapters marked “If She’d Said Yes,” or “If She’d Said No,” month by month, as Molly’s body grows with their child. At the end of the book, which wraps up with another New Year’s Eve party, it’s abundantly clear to Molly—and readers—which choice was the right one. Sprinkled in are well-developed, sympathetic characters, including Molly’s best friend, Jen, and her husband, who are trying unsuccessfully to get Jen pregnant, and Scott’s over-the-top mother, Monica, as well as the hero and heroine themselves. Though the alternating parallel universe structure isn’t a new tactic, readers will nevertheless cheer right along with Molly as she finds the path she’s intended to follow. A bittersweet yet satisfying treat.

Oct 232015
 

cover for Amanda Downum's Dreams of Shreds and TattersNew York Times: In Amanda Downum’s novel DREAMS OF SHREDS AND TATTERS, Liz Drake is a young woman living on the East Coast with her devoted boyfriend, whom she seems a bit ambivalent about ­ which probably explains her rather casual attitude toward him, a casualness that extends to other things as well.

One thing she’s not casual about, however, is her psychic connection to Blake Enderly. When Liz has an intuition, she is absolutely certain that her friend Blake, who lives across the continent and has recently gone missing, is in trouble, so she crosses the country, boyfriend in tow, to help find him. The connection between the two is never fully, or even partially, explained ­ it seems ambiguously metaphorical, a symbol of the fervent tribal bonds of postadolescent friendship, and on that level it does have some resonance. Similarly, the connections between Liz and her other friends are more asserted than earned ­ as the story shifts perspectives, many characters feel like profiles or postures more than fleshy humans, an effect that may be symptomatic or intentional on Downum’s part, or both.

There are hints at a deeper story here, one of drugs and addiction, about getting lost and the depths to which you can go to save your friends. And there are moments of promise, in which Downum successfully blurs the boundary between reality and fantasy until the narrative takes on a dreamlike fluidity, resulting in the freedom of possibility, of real surprise.

Oct 232015
 

Cover for The Pleasure Merchant by Molly Tanzer. The Monitor: This fascinating novel subverts Pygmalion, rags-to-riches and boy-meets-girl tropes to memorable effect….The narrative style is a delightful pastiche of Georgian and Victorian suffused with striking sensuality and modern sensibilities, as if Charles Dickens and Jane Austen had a child together and raised her on shojo and yaoi manga.  The voice of the Pleasure Merchant’s apprentice will stay with you for days.

Read The Monitor’s full review of The Pleasure Merchant here.

Oct 222015
 

Cover for The Aeronaut's Windlass by Jim Butcher.The Aeronaut’s Windlass stays on the New York Times Bestseller’s List at #16 for hardcover, and on the USA Today Best-selling Books list at #16.

Since time immemorial, the Spires have sheltered humanity, towering for miles over the mist-shrouded surface of the world. Within their halls, aristocratic houses have ruled for generations, developing scientific marvels, fostering trade alliances, and building fleets of airships to keep the peace.

Captain Grimm commands the merchant ship, Predator. Fiercely loyal to Spire Albion, he has taken their side in the cold war with Spire Aurora, disrupting the enemy’s shipping lines by attacking their cargo vessels. But when the Predator is severely damaged in combat, leaving captain and crew grounded, Grimm is offered a proposition from the Spirearch of Albion—to join a team of agents on a vital mission in exchange for fully restoring Predator to its fighting glory.

And even as Grimm undertakes this dangerous task, he will learn that the conflict between the Spires is merely a premonition of things to come. Humanity’s ancient enemy, silent for more than ten thousand years, has begun to stir once more. And death will follow in its wake…

Oct 222015
 

Cover for Stinger by Robert McCammon. An enormous mutated scorpion creature crashes through a rocky mountain to get at a small car.Kirkus: I missed Stinger when in first came out in the late 1980s, but the new reprint from Subterranean Press is the perfect chance to correct that oversight. The story takes place over a 24-hour period in Inferno, Texas—a town that’s already primed for trouble because of racial tension, a poor economy, and gang violence. Things ignite when two unidentified flying objects land nearby, thus beginning a battle in an interstellar war that spells trouble for the small Texas town. The unidentified objects are actually visitors from another world. One of them is an alien bounty hunter known as Stinger, and the complete destruction of an alien town is a small price to pay to capture his deadly prey. Stinger may be science fictional, but, much like the film The Blob, it taps into 1950s pulp-style B-movie horror tropes. It also contains a large cast of fully realized characters and a plot that never slows down.

Oct 212015
 

Cover for The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson. A realistic porcelain mask of a feminine mask hits the ground, starting to shatter.Locus: Dickinson has taken the gender concerns of Delany, and Delany’s attention to economic/vocational matters and colonialism/imperialism, all set in a pre-technological milieu, and conflated them with some of the aforementioned Cherryh-esque literary/thematic tactics to create a truly fine and distinctively individual fantasy novel that delivers action and philosophy, economics and warfare, love and hatred, in equal measures. His voice, however originally influenced, rings out strong and clear as a new addition to the chorus of fantasists.

The conclusion to the rebellion leaves her in a highly unanticipated situation, as Dickinson masterfully inverts almost all of the reader’s expectations.

Read Locus’ full review of The Traitor Baru Cormorant here.

Oct 212015
 

Cover for Holly Messinger's The Curse of Jacob Tracy. The title on paper like an Old West wanted poster. Above, bats flying in front of a full moon. Below, the silhouettes of two cowboys surrounded by ghostly figures.Publishers Weekly: Stellar writing and a strong story define Messinger’s amazing debut. After Jacob “Trace” Tracy nearly died at Antietam during the Civil War, he became connected to the spirit world. He tries to hide his ability to see the dead, working as a hired hand guiding wagon trains out West in the late 1880s. When a girl is accused of murder, Trace is lured into using his gifts to protect the innocent, but the cost is high. Messinger’s writing is a clinic on how to immerse the reader in a historic setting (such as his details on how 19th-century newspapers operated) without drowning readers in facts. Psychological and visceral horror mix in set pieces that build to a climax as Trace is forced to confront his fears about his abilities. Trace and his partner, Boz, quickly endear themselves to the reader, bantering and battling in a manner clearly inspired by the old Weird Tales; their interracial friendship (Trace is white and Boz is black) is well written. Though there’s a satisfying closure to Trace’s arc, this should be the start of many more Weird Western adventures.