Locus: It’s surprising that Cherie Priest hasn’t made the jump into full-on young-adult fiction before. Many of her previous books, like Boneshaker, Dreadnought and the rest of the Clockwork Century, could easily be marketed to a younger audience. I Am Princess X, however, is the first one that is explicitly aimed at the 12 and over set.
The story itself is fairly straightforward. Libby and May meet in elementary school and become BFF. The friendship ends, however, because Libby is killed in a car accident as a young teen and May moves away from their shared pocket of Seattle. May comes back to visit her old stomping grounds and starts spotting Princess X stickers everywhere, which wouldn’t be a big deal except Princess X is a character she and Libby created as kids. Libby, it turns out, might not be as dead as May has been led to believe.
May’s hunt for her lost friend isn’t told simply with words. Interspersed with a straightforward narrative are comics-style pages that fill in the gaps in the Princess X story; we learn about how this mysterious, katana-wielding, webcomic-starring princess found herself on the search for four keys and how May realizes that the keys are actually aimed at her. It’s a refreshing take on a standard “magic ticket” story.
What’s also refreshing is the lack of a romantic subplot. Priest’s Princess is about the lasting power of friendship, rather than about finding a boyfriend. It’s a fun, oddly cheerful murder mystery that pushes against some of the restrictions of straight-up words on a page.
Locus: Of Noble Family, book five of Mary Robinette Kowal’s “The Glamourist Histories”, concludes the sequence with emphatic proof that her world-building and her characters can’t be constrained by the standard tropes of alternate-historic magical fantasies or variations on Regency Romance. There’s a sharp irony in the epigraph, from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park: “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody not greatly in fault themselves to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.”
Audio rights to Molly Tanzer’s VERMILION, to Haila Williams at Blackstone Audio, at auction, by Katie Shea Boutillier on behalf of Cameron McClure.
Tor.com: Dreams of Shreds and Tatters is a baroque, creepy, gorgeous, atmospheric book. I keep wanting to find more adjectives, for there’s a layered, textured depth to the prose here, rich and velvety and dark. … I loved Downum’s other work, but I didn’t expect to enjoy Dreams of Shreds and Tatters half as much as I did. Unexpectedly, I adored it. It’s darkly gorgeous, tense, and gripping, with compelling characters and a subtle, unnervingly psychological element to its fantasy-horror turn. And, delightfully, not without a sense of humour. I recommend it highly. Please tell me there’ll be another novel like this.