Review: Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

May 112016
 

Cover for Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer. A flying car in the foreground heads towards a glittering city on a massive cliffside, the orange and pink sunset glowing in the background.NPR: The world Palmer creates is extraordinarily intricate, with forces and organizations forming a delicate web of tenuous coexistence. It’s a thrilling feat of speculative worldbuilding, on par with those of masters like Gene Wolfe and Neal Stephenson. […] The next book, Seven Surrenders, is due in December. That may be just enough to fully savor and digest this first installment, a novel that’s one of the most maddening, majestic, ambitious novels — in any genre — in recent years.

Read Jason Heller’s full review of Too Like the Lightning at NPR.

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

May 102016
 

Cover for Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer. A flying car in the foreground heads towards a glittering city on a massive cliffside, the orange and pink sunset glowing in the background.Mycroft Canner is a convict. For his crimes he is required, as is the custom of the 25th century, to wander the world being as useful as he can to all he meets. Carlyle Foster is a sensayer–a spiritual counselor in a world that has outlawed the public practice of religion, but which also knows that the inner lives of humans cannot be wished away.

The world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours would be to a native of the 1500s. It is a hard-won utopia built on technologically-generated abundance, and also on complex and mandatory systems of labelling all public writing and speech. What seem to us normal gender distinctions are now distinctly taboo in most social situations. And most of the world’s population is affiliated with globe-girdling clans of the like-minded, whose endless economic and cultural competion is carefully managed by central planners of inestimable subtlety. To us it seems like a mad combination of heaven and hell. To them, it seems like normal life.

And in this world, Mycroft and Carlyle have stumbled on the wild card that may destablize the system: the boy Bridger, who can effortlessly make his wishes come true. Who can, it would seem, bring inanimate objects to life…

Review: Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

May 062016
 

BCover for Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer. A flying car in the foreground heads towards a glittering city on a massive cliffside, the orange and pink sunset glowing in the background.&N SF/F: The plot is dense in a way that can be almost challenging, but the sheer invention carries you through. […] Once you adjust to the unique rhythms of the story, the rewards are many. There an intriguing mystery at the heart of Too Like the Lightning, and a love of history and language that bleeds through from the very first page.

Read B&N’s full review of Too Like the Lightning here.

Starred Review: Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

Apr 132016
 

Cover for Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer. A flying car in the foreground heads towards a glittering city on a massive cliffside, the orange and pink sunset glowing in the background.RT Book Review: This debut is astonishingly dense, accomplished and well-realized, with a future that feels real in both its strangeness and its familiarity. Trying to follow what goes on in this world is roughly as easy as following what’s happening in ours, but also as rewarding, with an incredibly colorful (and often ambiguous) cast of characters, truly skillful layering of plot and incident in ways that can spin your head around and a milieu pitched perfectly between utopia and dystopia that feels so complete you may be momentarily tempted to try to Google some of the fictional (future) historical figures mentioned.

February Subsidiary Rights Deals

Feb 292016
 

a pair of black ear budsHolly Messinger’s CURIOUS WEATHER, Book 2 in the Jacob Tracy series, to Steve Feldberg at Audible, by Katie Shea Boutillier on behalf of Amy Boggs.

Jane Haddam’s ACT OF DARKNESS and QUOTH THE RAVEN, to Michael Olah at Dreamscape, by Katie Shea Boutillier.

Ronald Malfi’s THE NIGHT PARADE, to Haila Williams at Blackstone, by Katie Shea Boutillier, on behalf of Cameron McClure.

Starred Review: We Are the Ants by Shaun David Hutchinson

Feb 222016
 

Cover for We Are The Ants by Shaun David Hutchinson. A photo of a yellow sunrise, the sky going from teal to navy as the stars blur in a their circular rotation.Shelf Awareness: Shaun David Hutchinson’s bracingly smart and unusual YA novel blends existential despair with exploding planets.

We Are the Ants deals with loss, and it doesn’t pull any punches. There are no easy solutions, and the book is refreshingly upfront about the fact that some kinds of pain–like Henry grieving his boyfriend’s suicide, his father’s absence and his grandmother’s Alzheimer’s–just have to be slogged through. However, Ants is not depressing. It’s wonderfully written, and humor is woven throughout, including an aside on the uselessness of alien nipples. Henry is gay, but there’s no angst over that at home. His family is completely fine with it, even his macho, difficult brother. The novel is occasionally brutal–the opening line is “Life is bullsh*t”–but Henry is a thoughtful and compassionate protagonist. As the threads of the story come together, he slowly starts to realize how many people in his life care about him. He may even consider the possibility of caring about himself.

Winterwood by Jacey Bedford

Feb 022016
 

Cover for Winterwood by Jacey Bedford. A lady pirate with long brown hair and a sensible green coat holds a small wooden box, a white wolf looking on and the sea in the distance.Set in 1800 in Britain, Mad King George is on the throne with Napoleon Bonaparte knocking on the door. Unregistered magic users are pursued to the death, while in every genteel home resides uncomplaining rowankind bondservants who have become so commonplace that no one can recall where they came from.

Meanwhile, Rossalinde Tremayne is satisfied with her life as a cross-dressing privateer captain on the high seas. But a bitter deathbed visit to her estranged mother changes her life completely when she inherits a magical winterwood box. Now, not only is she confronted with a newly-discovered brother, and an annoyingly handsome wolf shapeshifter, Rossalinde has to decide whether or not to open the box to free rowankind and right an ancient wrong—even if it brings the downfall of Britain.

This brand-new series is perfect for fans of Elizabeth Bear, D.B. Jackson, and Marie Brennan, as well as readers of historical fiction who are looking for an accessible gateway to fantasy.

We Are the Ants by Shaun David Hutchinson

Jan 192016
 

Cover for We Are The Ants by Shaun David Hutchinson. A photo of a yellow sunrise, the sky going from teal to navy as the stars blur in a their circular rotation.Henry Denton doesn’t know why the aliens chose to abduct him when he was thirteen, and he doesn’t know why they continue to steal him from his bed and take him aboard their ship. He doesn’t know why the world is going to end or why the aliens have offered him the opportunity to avert the impending disaster by pressing a big red button.

But they have. And they’ve only given him 144 days to make up his mind.

Since the suicide of his boyfriend, Jesse, Henry has been adrift. He’s become estranged from his best friend, started hooking up with his sworn enemy, and his family is oblivious to everything that’s going on around them. As far as Henry is concerned, a world without Jesse is a world he isn’t sure is worth saving. Until he meets Diego Vega, an artist with a secret past who forces Henry to question his beliefs, his place in the universe, and whether any of it really matters. But before Henry can save the world, he’s got to figure out how to save himself, and the aliens haven’t given him a button for that.

Review: Winterwood by Jacey Bedford

Jan 042016
 

Cover for Winterwood by Jacey Bedford. A lady pirate with long brown hair and a sensible green coat holds a small wooden box, a white wolf looking on and the sea in the distance.RT Book Reviews: Top Pick! The first book in Bedford’s new historical fantasy series, Rowankind, seamlessly blends history, magical lore, high-seas adventure and romance into one fantastic story. Bedford crafts emotionally complex relationships and interesting secondary characters while carefully building an innovative yet familiar world. Skilled, brave and smart, the heroine, Ross, bust untangle a web of competing loyalties, hidden agendas and self-delusion in order to decide how to act. The ending satisfies while enticing readers to return to explore the world further.

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