I’ve been a fan of Buffy for a long time, but there was one thing I always wondered about. Namely, why would a vampire ever bother going to Sunnydale, knowing the Slayer lived there and was likely to dust the vamp as soon as he or she arrived in town? One would think a vamp could live a longer, more peaceful life simply by avoiding the Slayer’s stomping grounds, right?
After the first chapter of Jocelynn Drake’s Nightwalker, I think I get it.
June 23rd, 2008. Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 4.5 | Jocelynn Drake | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Plague of Spells by Bruce R. Cordell
Building on the success of his last novel, Stardeep (see my review above) Bruce R. Cordell continues the story of Raidon Kane, the monk with the Cerulean sign, in Plague of Spells. Cordell uses this novel as an opportunity to introduce fans of the Forgotten Realms to a novelized form of the spellplague. This terrifying event occurred after the goddess Mystra was murdered and rendered many wizards without powers, changed the landscape of Toril dramatically,
June 19th, 2008. John Ottinger (guest)´s rating: 4 | Bruce R. Cordell | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Lament: The Faerie Queen’s Deception by Maggie Stiefvater
First love: it’s scary and confusing enough even when there aren’t homicidal faeries involved. Add in the homicidal faeries, and a girl can get in over her head before she can say “cold iron.”
Maggie Stiefvater‘s Lament: The Faerie Queen’s Deception is an excellent YA fantasy that will appeal to anyone who likes stories of the fae as they appear in the oldest legends: dangerous, seductive, and sometimes deadly. Let me say right up front: Lament is downright frightening in places.
June 10th, 2008. Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 4.5 | Maggie Stiefvater | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no comments |
I’m not usually a sci fi reader. Call me a wuss, but whenever I would try to read sci fi, I usually got too distracted by all the sciencey stuff to remain focused on the story. But I had seen Grimspace advertised on a website and the cover caught my eye. At that point my reaction was about as intellectual as “Ooo, pretty colors…” but hey, attractive covers are a plus. Then the book caught my eye again, this time in the bookstore, and lo and behold,
June 2nd, 2008. Beth Johnson Sonderby (guest)´s rating: 4 | Ann Aguirre | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Iron Hunt by Marjorie M. Liu
“When I was eight, my mother lost me to zombies in a one-card draw.”
That’s the first sentence of Marjorie M. Liu’s The Iron Hunt, and it’s just about perfect as opening lines go. It’s the primary reason I bought the book. Not only does it draw the reader in, eager to find out how and why this happened, but I’m also pretty darn sure it’s an Angela Carter reference. I love Angela Carter.
It would be misleading to suggest,
May 29th, 2008. Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 4.5 | Marjorie M. Liu | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Mind the Gap by Christopher Golden & Tim Lebbon
Even though Mind the Gap is extremely fast-paced, the novel started out really slowly for me and it wasn’t until 160 pages in that I began to get excited about the book. The problem was that for almost the first half it seemed like Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon were just going through the motions, delivering a plot that was one recognizable convention after another:
The protagonist’s mother mysteriously murdered by shadowy people and forced on the run… Raised to trust no one,
May 25th, 2008. Robert Thompson´s rating: 3.5 | Christopher Golden, Tim Lebbon | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Queen’s Bastard by C.E. Murphy
On paper, The Queen’s Bastard is right up my alley. Court intrigue plus magic plus sex? Where do I sign up? I’ve seen comparisons to the Kushiel series and it’s not hard to see why; it’s partly the intrigue/magic/sex combination and partly the prose, which is lush and has moments of exquisite beauty. It was the prose that hooked me from the first page.
Unfortunately, other factors “unhooked” me later in the book, and now I’m three-quarters of the way through The Queen’s Bastard and not really feeling the urge to go on.
April 29th, 2008. Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 3 | C.E. Murphy | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Clockwork Heart by Dru Pagliassotti
I really don’t know what sort of story this is. It’s an adventure, it’s a mystery, it’s a crime novel, and a romance kind of all throw into one. It’s a complex blend of genres all set in a different world where technology is far behind our modern times in many respects, but has been carefully enough thought out that it makes sense.
At the center of the story is a young woman who works as an Icarus — basically the equivalent of a bicycle messenger,
April 1st, 2008. John Hulet and Kat Hooper´s rating: 3, 3.5 | Dru Pagliassotti | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
There’s nothing I love so much as sinking into a big fat book that combines the sweep of history with a dash of magic. This book is an adaptation of The Aeneid, from the point of view of the Sybil who, in the poem, guides Aeneas through the underworld.
She’s a lot more fleshed out here. Her name is Gull, later known as Linnea and as Pythia, and jumps off the page from the very beginning of chapter one with a self-introduction that reminded me a bit of Phèdre’s at the beginning of Kushiel’s Dart.
March 23rd, 2008. Kelly Lasiter, Ruth Arnell and Terry Weyna´s rating: 4, 5 | Jo Graham | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
Midnight’s Daughter by Karen Chance
Meet Dorina; she comes from perhaps the most dysfunctional family in existence. She’s the niece of Dracula, the bastard daughter of Drac’s older brother Mircea. Dracula, Mircea, and their third brother, Radu, are all vampires, and centuries of bad blood lie between Drac and the other two men. Dorina’s own place in the clan is shaky. She is a dhampir, the offspring of a vampire and a human, a creature subject to berserk rages and ostracized from both human and vampire society. Most dhampirs die early, violent deaths.
February 19th, 2008. Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 4 | Karen Chance | SFF Reviews | no comments |
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