Reviews :: Book Genre :: Alternate Historical Fiction :: Page 4

A good while ago, I had my first run at buying sushi. I’d sampled it before with friends and such, but had never purchased any myself. Apart from initially mistaking the twirl of wasabi for some tasty guacamole (How? Looking at it from this side of things, I honestly have no idea) it was a great experience. When I was finished, I decided to try the other interesting-looking thing on the plate. The one that looked like marinated flower petals. I found that it was sweet and actually pretty good, but then arose the over-powering taste of… soap? Later, a good friend told me what I had actually ingested.

The connection? My impression of this book in two words: candied ginger.
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Emma Bannon is a sorceress in the employ of the Queen herself, tasked with protecting Archibald Clare, an unregistered and failed mentath. Why? Because other mentaths all over Londinium are dying unexplainable and grisly deaths and there’s more to it than a serial killer.

Set in an alternative Victorian England, THE IRON WYRM AFFAIR (Amazon) blends magic and steampunk with enthusiasm. Known for her Urban Fantasy series, Lilith Saintcrow tries something different with a steam-sorcery-mystery tale that threatens Britannia herself.
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What are they putting in the water down in New Mexico?  Seriously!

There are two books that I’ve read this year (and I really read my share of books) that I’ve gotten to the end and thought, “WOW!”  The first was Daniel Abraham’s excellent THE KING’S BLOOD (EBR Review). THE COLDEST WAR by Ian Tregillis (Amazon) is the second.  The weird thing is they both hail from New Mexico.  They seem to be in the same writing group or something down there.  You can see each other’s names in the acknowledgment section of their books.  Whatever they are doing down there, keep it up.
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THIEFTAKER by D.B. Jackson (Amazon) is one of those books that leaves me with confused impressions. This novel has a lot going for it–Urban Fantasy in  a historical setting, a fun protagonist, a mystery, magic…you get the drift. There is some great potential here. But there are some things that are juuuust off.

The best way for me to describe my feelings to to go at it like I would when I read people’s manuscripts for the purpose of feedback.
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At first glance THE MIRAGE by Matt Ruff (Amazon) struck me as irreverent and offensive. I was offered a chance to read the book for free through the Amazon Vine program and I passed it up. A couple weeks later I ended up coming across a review of THE MIRAGE that made me pause and think. From there the desire was planted and I ended up purchasing a copy, reasoning that even if it turned out to be a terrible novel at least I could write a scathing condemnation of it. As it turns out, not only is THE MIRAGE an excellent novel, but it is also everything a thriller should be.
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History, steam-punk, and the Wild Wild West. What’s not to love, right? I tell you, Lou Anders and Mike Resnick absolutely had an awesome brain-child of an idea when they decided to run with this one. There’s so much possibility with this mixup. So much real estate at your fingertips. And yet the first book was a bit iffy. Being fun and fast but not necessarily the awesome read I had hoped it would be.

THE DOCTOR AND THE KID (Amazon) is the second of those “Weird West” tales by Resnick and continues the story of Doc Holliday and his life in a Wild West twisted by the power of steam and electricity. The three main characters from the first story, THE BUNTLINE SPECIAL (EBR Review) — Doc, Ned Buntline, and Thomas Edison — have all moved to Leadville, Colorado where they hope to escape the after-effects of the OK Corral. Doc wants to set up shop as a dentist and drift into retirement/consumption-driven-death, and Ned and Tom follow him to have a quiet place to continue their research.
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In my experience, history is a dry and rather boring subject that has made me more prone to “study by osmosis” than other, obviously more effective, methods of gray-matter absorption. There has been but one exception to that rule in my short lifetime, and that exception was my high school AP history teacher. History was not just another subject for her. History was LIFE. It had substance, it had breath; it had body and it had soul. Her passion for the stories of history and the people that populated those tales made me open my eyes and want to learn–not just to get a good grade in the class, or to see what I might glean from mistakes of the past, but to feel and know what it was like to be a part of that past. She made me love History, and no one else has ever had that same effect.

Until now.
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Admittedly, there are some great perks to being a reviewer. The lavish lifestyle includes all-expense-paid trips to foreign countries, supermodels, perfectly cooked steaks…OK, none of that. I get books. Lots and lots of books. Some are awesome, and some are terrible. One of the greatest perks is reading a novel I’d never have picked up on my own and discovering how fantastic it is. That happened to me last year when I read Marie Brennan‘s A STAR SHALL FALL (EBR Review). Set in historic London, the novel unexpectedly shoved me down in my comfy reading chair and didn’t let me up until I had finished the novel. Understand, that sort of thing rarely happens to me anymore.
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Why do all good YA novels have adults in them that are either incompetent, abusive, or otherwise inattentive to the point-of-view children? Easy answer: because any rational adult seeing children in such horrific and/or dangerous circumstances, would without a second thought step into the story, hide the kids in the basement, and call the SWAT team to take out the bad guys. How on earth does that even remotely apply to an alternate historical fantasy based on WWII German superhumans fighting magic-wielding Warlocks? Stick around and find out.
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Every once in a while I come across a book, or series of books, that totally yanks the carpet out from under me. I don’t expect more than the ordinary when I pick ‘em up (other than, perhaps, noticing the amazing cover art). I plop myself down in a chair, open the thing up, and quite simply just get to it. Then it reaches out, smashes me in the face with its awesomeness, and says, “You love me!” Leaving me with naught to do but obligingly respond, “Yes. Yes I do.”
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