Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Author: Kelly Lasiter

A Princess of Roumania: A vivid cast of characters to love and hate

A Princess of Roumania by Paul Park

When I was a preteen, I was a sucker for books about everyday, average girls who turned out to be long-lost princesses of some obscure country or other. A Princess of Roumania is an original take on that old trope, looking at that girlish fantasy from a couple of new angles.

The story begins during a typical summer vacation for high-school student Miranda Popescu. She’s an average teenage girl in every way, except that she has hazy memories of an early childhood in a distant land and a handful of objects that seem to corroborate those memories.

The Sarsen Witch: Unusually nuanced view of a dated theme

The Sarsen Witch by Eileen Kernaghan

Since her family was killed by the invading horse lords, Naeri has lived a wild and solitary existence, surviving on what she can scrounge or steal. But when she is caught trying to steal a pig, she is caught back up again in “civilized” life. She falls in love with Gwi, a kindly smith, and rediscovers a long-lost cousin, the minstrel Daui, who senses in Naeri a gift for geomancy. Then she catches the eye of the local warlord, Ricca, who believes she will bring him good fortune and that her earth-magic abilities can help him build a great monument to immortalize himself.

June 22nd, 2010. Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 4 | Eileen Kernaghan | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Fair Peril: Riotously funny and sweetly touching

Fair Peril by Nancy Springer

We don’t have princes here. We don’t even have Kennedys.

Both riotously funny and sweetly touching, Nancy Springer‘s Fair Peril is a fun and wonderful fantasy novel. It’s set in modern times, in a sort of “Anytown, USA” — where the shopping mall is a portal into Fairyland, and anything can happen.

It all begins when Buffy Murphy discovers a talking frog who claims to be a prince. Buffy is a divorced and overweight woman, down on her luck,

Embers: Well-executed A-plot

Embers by Laura Bickle

In her debut novel, Laura Bickle introduces us to Anya Kalinczyk, a woman as troubled as her home city of Detroit. Like many of her sister urban-fantasy heroines, Anya has a tragic past and uses it as a reason to push people away. She works as an arson investigator with the Detroit Fire Department and moonlights with a ghost-hunting team. Anya is a Lantern, which means she has the rare ability to consume ghosts and demons. She also has a familiar spirit, Sparky, a fire elemental who takes amphibian form but acts more like a large dog.

June 16th, 2010. Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 3.5 | Laura Bickle | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Happy Hour of the Damned: Did Not Finish

Happy Hour of the Damned by Mark Henry

How to review a book that is unquestionably excellent at what it’s trying to do, but which I didn’t finish? Happy Hour of the Damned is, in short, shallow, disgusting, infuriating, and damned good at it.

Happy Hour stars Amanda Feral, a fashion-obsessed zombie. Zombies, in Mark Henry‘s world, can stay well-preserved forever as long as they eat a steady diet of human flesh. There’s only one other thing zombies can consume without getting violently ill: booze.

June 16th, 2010. Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 0.1 | Mark Henry | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |

The Snow Queen: Enchanting short YA

The Snow Queen by Eileen Kernaghan

The Snow Queen arrived on my doorstep on an unseasonably cold March day. I grabbed a blanket, curled up in my favorite chair, and read the book in a matter of a few hours. The Snow Queen is a short novel, a single-sitting book if you’re a fast reader like me, yet more enchanting than many longer works. Nothing is superfluous here; Eileen Kernaghan tells the story she has come to tell — a mythic reworking of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale of the same name — and that’s it.

The Stress of Her Regard: Haunting, creepy, and addictive

The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers

I thought I was sick unto death of vampire novels until I read this one. The Stress of Her Regard reminds me of Anne Rice at her best, some years ago, except with more action and less description of the carpeting.

The story centers around the nephelim, Lilith’s brood. Seductive, serpentine, and deadly, they are succubi and vampires, draining blood and vitality from their hosts even as they inspire them to creativity. One of these beings attaches itself to Byron and Shelley’s circle of expatriate poets,

Merlin’s Harp: For fans of lush prose and coffee

Merlin’s Harp by Anne Eliot Crompton

Reading Merlin’s Harp, I realized something about novels that portray the interaction between the human world and Faerie. They usually don’t tell the stories of fae folk in their own homeland. There are exceptions, of course, but authors tend to focus on faeries stuck in the human world, or humans encountering Faerie. I think I may know why that is. When writing about faeries living in Faerie, it’s all too easy to have nothing happen.

Anne Eliot Crompton uses beautiful,

The Keepers’ Tattoo: YA high fantasy with historical overtones

The Keepers’ Tattoo by Gill Arbuthnott

The Keepers’ Tattoo, previously published as The Keepers’ Daughter in the U.K., is a young adult high fantasy with historical overtones. While it is set in an imaginary world, the story revolves around the earthquake-ruined city of Thira and the highly advanced “Keepers” who once lived there. Gill Arbuthnott is clearly drawing on the real-life Thera and the mysterious Minoan culture that may have inspired the legends of Atlantis. I’ve long been fascinated by all things Minoan,

Red Hot Fury: Needs an iron

Red Hot Fury by Kasey MacKenzie

Look out, paranormal baddies; Marissa Holloway is on the job. Riss is a Fury, and her mission is to fight supernatural crime. Kasey MacKenzie bases her Furies on the ones from Greek mythology, but with a twist. In myth, there were three Furies: Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera. Here, these names represent not individual Furies, but classes of Furies. Riss is a Tisiphone. This means she wears red and deals mainly with homicides.

(Unfortunately, MacKenzie doesn’t do as much with this concept as one might hope.

June 8th, 2010. Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 3 | Kasey MacKenzie | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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David C Walton on Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil: Ambitious, atmospheric, and ultimately unevenJuly 3, 2025
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