Library Journal: When she doesn’t hear from her friend Blake for months, Liz Drake travels with her roommate Alex to Vancouver where Blake had been living with a circle of artists that included his boyfriend Alain. She finds that Blake is in a coma, Alain is dead, and the artists, especially gallery owner Ranier, are keeping secrets. And Liz has been dreaming of Blake, trapped under water, visions that also reveal a secret world and a yellow king. VERDICT This unusual […]
Library Journal: A tropical setting on a slave plantation adds interest to the world Kowal has made in which magic called Glamour is real and manipulated by those with special skills. Jane and David should be enjoying the happiest time in their marriage when they discover she is pregnant, but they must endure the fraught situation with Vincent’s father and the many troubles they find on his estate. Through it all, Kowal paints a lovely picture of a couple who truly […]
Camille Griep’s debut Letters to Zell was named one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Summer Science Fiction/Fantasy books. Griep’s captivating debut weaves together traditional fairy tales with scenes of 21st-century Los Angeles to create an exploration of the conflicts between destiny and desire. Readers will dive into the rich and realistic depictions of modern-day versions of Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Rapunzel, and their touching efforts to navigate old and new relationships in a changing world.
Locus: Vermilion: mingling the Western past of mining towns and migrant Chinese railroad workers with fully sentient bears and sea lions who deal with us as they ply their trades – and no one blinks an eye. Many genres meet in this first ‘‘Adventure of Lou Merriwether, Psychopomp’’. Lou is described as ‘‘a gunslinging, chain smoking, cross-dressing Taoist… who keeps San Francisco safe from ghosts, shades, and geung si’’ (entities feared in Chinatown), and her profession has aspects of exorcist, alchemist, and private detective. As Tanzer puts it, psychompompery […]
Associated Press: Owen Laukkanen’s “The Stolen Ones” concerns human trafficking and follows two Romanian sisters, Irina and Catalina, who have been kidnapped to sell as sex workers. Irina escapes, triggering a sequence of events that further threaten Catalina. Special Agent Kirk Stevens of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and his FBI partner Carla Windermere are called in to find the sister and the other kidnapped women. Language barriers (Irina speaks very little English) and a crew of slippery villains well-versed […]
Library Journal: Old West steampunk has another appealing heroine in Lou (pair her with the equally winsome female lead of Elizabeth Bear’s Karen Memory) to go along with the delightfully over-the-top villains. The pages turn themselves in this debut novel from a small press that deserves a big audience. When several young Chinese men who left San Francisco to seek work on the railroad disappear without any word to their families, psychopomp Lou Meriweather is asked to investigate. Half Chinese and […]
School Library Journal: VERDICT An excellent book with loads of cross-genre and cross-format appeal. Highly recommended. May and Libby created Princess X on the day they met in fifth grade. That was before Libby and her mother died in a car crash. Now May is 16 and looking at another long, lonely summer in Seattle when she spots a Princess X sticker on the corner of a store window. Suddenly she starts seeing Princess X everywhere, including in a webcomic at […]
Holly Messinger’s forthcoming debut THE CURSE OF JACOB TRACY, to Steve Feldberg at Audible, by Katie Shea Boutillier , on behalf of Amy Boggs.
NPR: Molly Tanzer’s imagination is keener than almost anyone’s. Her new novel, Vermilion is a work of alt-history that finds a fresh kind of magic in the mingling of fact and fantasy. … Make no mistake: For all its thematic gravity,Vermilion is a blast. Lighthearted and downright rollicking, the book veers from progressive activism to pulpy adventure without skipping a beat. Read NPR’s full review of Vermilion here.
Publishers Weekly: In Lee and Miller’s sprawling and satisfying 18th Liaden Universe novel (after Trade Secret), the spacefaring Clan Korval settles into its new home on the crime-ridden planet of Surebleak after being exiled from Liad. The pilots, traders, and rogues of Korval approach a wide variety of problems with calm determination and cunning resourcefulness, imposing their rules and customs on the natives of Surebleak while countering the corrupt Liaden Department of the Interior and its brainwashed agents. Lee and Miller […]