Category :: Review :: Page 32

When Henry Day was seven years old he was stolen by hobgoblins, one of their own changlings taking his place in the real world, while he joined the band of children living in the forest. They are both interlopers in their respective worlds, the real Henry Day now known as Aniday, and the changling Henry Day being raised by parents not his own, his parents long dead

Changling Henry Day was abducted 100 years previously, and spent the intervening years learning the ways of the hobgoblins, surviving the forest with eleven other children of various ages, waiting his turn until he could take the place of another child and return to the real world. As Henry Day grows up he is constantly reminded of his origins, while everyone around him is oblivious to his inner turmoil, his resentment that the hobgoblins have stolen his past. While another lives the life he should have, Aniday must learn the ways of the forest and how to survive among a band of wild children who are older than they look.
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There’s this unfortunate but sometimes entirely true analogy I’ve heard about how particular kids can be a kind of birth control for their parents. If the kid is especially difficult or energetic, they’ll entirely remove the desire of the parents to have another one anytime soon. Despite this, it is also true that time is the great eraser of memory, and after long enough even the trauma of those months and years can fade away and parents will find themselves diving back into the shark pond of parenthood once again. I found myself in a very similar state of mind, and yet completely cognizant of the decision that I was making, when I picked this book up. After all, I had been less than satisfied with the previous book in the series, but still I found myself wanting to read this next one. Thus, it came as no real surprise to me that it had been something like five years since THE WHITE-LUCK had been released, and I was able to uncheck the mental box that was pleading insanity and instead was able to chalk it up to good old memory loss given the ravages of time. And yet, once I got into the book, I found much of my same feelings about the previous book rushing back in to fill the supposed void of time. So much for memory loss.
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Cherie Priest has written YA steampunk (BONESHAKER — EBR review), zombie fiction (MAPLECROFT — EBR review), historical horror (WINGS OF THE KINGDOM — Amazon), and Urban Fantasy (HELLBENT — Amazon). Now she takes on… the salvage business? I admit, I’m a fan of the TV show Salvage Dawgs, and it turns out Priest is, too, because of course people who tear down old houses for a living must run into ghosts now and again. This time, however, the salvage crew of Music City Salvage run into a poltergeist with a vendetta.

Dahlia is heading up this salvage operation for an old Victorian that’s slated to be demolished. When she arrives she sees a house that’s been neglected, but should be fixed back to its former glory. Unfortunately its owner can’t get rid of the house fast enough. Dahlia and her crew have a week to get their money’s worth out of the house, or else the family business may go under. The pressure is on Dahlia to get her cousin Bobby to cooperate despite his well-known laziness, Bobby’s son Gabe and new employee Brad up to speed in a kind of work they’re not used to.

It doesn’t help that not long after they arrive at the estate, they start seeing ghosts.
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This book is good. Really good. I am not a huge fan of this genre, and really have only read MLN Hanover’s Black Son’s Daughter series in full, because I am very picky when it comes to urban fantasy. I think all the sexy vampire books of the last several decades have conspired to form my jaundiced opinion, some of which found their way into my cozy little house-full-of-children despite vain protestation. I have yet to crack open a Dresden Files–been meaning to–but I will read everything Mishell Baker decides to write. Because she is that good.
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I was first introduced to the works of Gene Wolfe through the Books of the New Sun and the torturer Severian. Found the first of those on one of the random, wandering trips I took through the college library during my graduate school years. There were lots of those, and now it seems like they were longer ago than they actually are. I got through the first book in that series and then half of the second from what I remember. They were interesting enough, but didn’t really keep my interest, so I moved on to something I liked a little better. Funny enough, this book obviously included a library and I hadn’t read any Gene Wolfe in a while, so I was fairly excited to dive into it.
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Let’s call this whole series my summer guilty pleasure. Maybe it will be yours for the fall season. Guilt and surprised delight were some of the many emotions I migrated through while reading most of The Outlier Prophesies, but for more than the first half of ROMANCING THE NULL, I’d say impatience was the primary. If I had not felt obligated to give it a go, per the contest, I think I would have abandoned this urban fantasy/romance/crime novel long before the two-thirds point, but that’s when things started to get interesting. By the end, I was hooked… though I dreaded what was to come in the follow-ups. I needn’t have worried.
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We first met Essun in THE FIFTH SEASON, as she discovers that her husband has murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Of course Essun must follow, because her daughter Nassun is a magic-wielding orogene like her mother–and that was the reason her husband killed their son in the first place.

If you haven’t read the first book, there are all sorts of revelations I’ll be talking about here, so you may want to spare yourself spoilers. THE FIFTH SEASON (EBR review) is worth reading, and I don’t think THE OBELISK GATE will make much sense unless you do. You’ve been warned.
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I was intrigued by Catherine Cerveny’s attempt to combine sci-fi with romance as I began THE RULE OF LUCK. The protag is smart and sassy and the opening pages are good.  Bujold did scifi/romance well in MILES IN LOVE, after all. How awful could this be?  I was blissfully unaware that, these days, “romance” almost always means “porn.” At least semi-porn, except for the most-excellent offerings from Carol Berg and Mary Robinette Kowal and a few others.  The sci-fi element in this case was just a pretense for creating the most ridiculous perfect-man trope I can remember. This guy’s only flaw is not realizing just how awesome he is. Yeah, I know. 
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Bernard Cornwell is one of the master storytellers in historical fiction today. I first learned about Cornwell via his Sharpe series based on his books, which take place during the Napoleonic wars (when the show first came out–this probably dates me). Sean Bean played the title character, and after watching the first episode I was hooked, watched the rest of the series, and then had to go back and read Cornwell’s books. When I learned he was writing a series about the formation of a unified Anglo-Saxon England in the 9th Century, I started with THE LAST KINGDOM and have been keeping current with the series ever since.

So imagine my glee when I learned there is a TV series for these books, too.
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It is unsurprising and yet somewhat telling that when I received this book in the mail from Amazon, I was completely surprised not only by the fact that it was a small book but also that it was a collection of short stories. When I’d found out about “Abercrombie’s next book” I instantly pre-ordered the thing and eagerly anticipated the date of its arrival. Unphased in the slightest (though slightly disappointed, if I’m being honest, by the fact that it wasn’t a full novel) I dove into it’s pages and lost myself in the world of the First Law.
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