Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Month: September 2019

Frostfire: A good MG adventure with lots of derring-do

Frostfire by Jamie Smith

Frostfire (2019), by Jamie Smith, is a middle-grade fantasy set in the mountainous land of Adranna. Adranna lies in the shadow of the great peak of Aderast, and all of its magic comes from the shimmering glacier that flows from it. A handful of young people are chosen each year to climb to the glacier and claim a small piece of it, a frostsliver, which gives them special abilities and marks them as people of importance in Adranna’s society.

Sabira is a fourteen-year-old girl who has been chosen to receive a frostsliver.

The Girls at the Kingfisher Club: Twelve dancing princesses meet the Roaring Twenties

The Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine

As far as fairy tale retellings go, mingling the tale of The Twelve Dancing Princesses with the 1920’s New York speakeasies makes a lovely kind of sense. The prohibition, the dance halls, the high society – it all fits perfectly with the story of twelve princesses who sneak out of their rooms every night, much to the bewilderment of their father when he sees their worn-out shoes every morning.

Genevieve Valentine transports the familiar beats of the story to a Fifth Avenue townhouse in the Roaring Twenties,

Sunday Status Update: September 15, 2019

Jana: This week I read Lisa Goldstein’s upcoming novel Ivory Apples, a novel about creativity, trauma, inspiration, and obsession that doesn’t quite explore any of those themes to their fullest potential. I started reading Sam J. Miller’s latest novel, a YA stand-alone called Destroy All Monsters and which features teens, trauma, mental illness, and dimension-hopping. (Reviews to come.) On the non-speculative fiction side of my week, I’m reading Patton Oswalt’s Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film,

September 15th, 2019. Tim Scheidler | Status Update | 2 comments |

Mapping Winter: A character and a world that will stick with me

Mapping Winter by Marta Randall

Mapping Winter (2019) is Marta Randall’s reworking of her 1983 novel, The Sword of Winter. (Randall talks more about the story behind the book here.) Its release as Mapping Winter was followed shortly by the all-new sequel The River South, with the two novels making up the RIDERS GUILD series. It’s a secondary-world fantasy, but without magic; I was about two-thirds of the way through the book when I realized,

September 13th, 2019. Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 4 | Marta Randall | SFF Reviews | 11 comments |

Aluminum Leaves: There are other worlds than these…

Aluminum Leaves by Marion Deeds

Aluminum Leaves (2019) is the debut novella by Marion Deeds, who is also part of the review team here at Fantasy Literature. Because Marion is one of our own, we are not going to give Aluminum Leaves a star rating — but we still wanted to highlight her work in the field of speculative fiction. We are very excited to see her share her work with the world.

Aluminum Leaves begins with a house fire;

Salvation Day: Multiple issues, some bright spots

Salvation Day by Kari Wallace

In the prologue to Kari Wallace’s debut adult novel, Salvation Day (2019), we witness the fate of the huge spaceship House of Wisdom after a biological weapon killed every member aboard except for a 12 year old boy named Jaswinder Bhattacharya, whose mother engineered his escape.

Now it’s a decade later and Jaswinder is a young man, well-educated, talented, and famous for his survival. A group of cultish separatists who are angry at the way they’ve been treated by Earth’s government plan to kidnap Jaswinder so they can gain access to House of Wisdom and get away from Earth.

Thoughtful Thursday: Favorite fictional libraries

They’re all the rage; hidden libraries, secret libraries, magical ones, forbidden archives and lost collections. They’re locations and plot fuel for books, stories, movies and television shows. And we all have our favorites.

Genevieve Cogman’s Invisible Library, in the series of the same name, spans realities and dimensions; some libraries, like the Vatican Archives in Dan Brown’s ROBERT LANGDON series, are firmly rooted in one world, but go back centuries. One of the most popular libraries, the library at Alexandria, has been gone longer than it existed, but it still grabs our imaginations.

September 12th, 2019. Marion Deeds | Giveaway!, Thoughtful Thursday | 17 comments |

The Confession: As magical as The Miniaturist

The Confession by Jessie Burton

After the phenomenal success of The Miniaturist (and The Muse after it), the buzz surrounding Jessie Burton‘s latest release should come as no surprise. Whilst The Confession (2019) might seem like a very different kind of book (gone are the elements of the fantastical and the uncanny), Burton’s signature tension, suspense and an intricately characterised female cast remain.

In the winter of 1980, Elise Morceau meets Constance Holden on Hampstead Heath by chance.

Priest of Lies: Is Tomas going down the wrong path?

Priest of Lies by Peter McLean

Priest of Lies (2019) is the second book in Peter McLean’s WAR FOR THE ROSE THRONE. You’ll need to read the first book, Priest of Bones, first. This review will have some spoilers for that first novel.

It’s been six months since the events that happened at the end of Priest of Bones. Tomas is now married to Elsa, the Queen’s Man who has been (unbeknownst to the rest of the Pious Men) directing his behavior in service of the crown.

WWWednesday: September 11, 2019

Awards:

File 770 posted this year’s Dragon Award winners. Brad R. Torgerson won best SF novel for A Star-Wheeled Sky, and Larry Correia won best fantasy novel for House of Assassins.

Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu won the Barry Ronge award in South Africa for her book The Theory of Flight. The award honors writers whose works “enthrall with their imagined worlds.”

Books and Writing:

BookExpo will return to an old format for its 2020 event.

September 11th, 2019. Marion Deeds | World Wide Wednesday | 2 comments |

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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