The Bards of Bone Plain
A bard is more than he or she first appears. Certainly the beautiful music, impressive memory, and courtly manners are part of the trade. But there is magic in music, and in words–even the everyday variety.
THE BARDS OF BONE PLAIN (Amazon) is Patricia A. McKillip’s latest creation. You may recognize her name for her award winning THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD (Amazon) or her RIDDLER-MASTER TRILOGY (Amazon), among others. Her stories are subtle, beautiful, and full of magic. But the real magic in BARDS is McKillip’s prose, which is lyric and enjoyable; even after decades of delighting her fans McKillip hasn’t lost her touch.
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The Walking Dead – Book 1
It is natural that various art mediums look to each other for inspiration. The movie industry has been looking to novels for, well, ever. TV looks to movies and novels. Graphic novels, lately, has become to go-to source for new visual material. While watching AMC’s Mad Men and Breaking Bad, new ads began showing for a new show. A show about zombies. The Walking Dead. It looked fantastic.
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Up Jim River
You know what I’m getting tired of? Book covers that have absolutely nothing to do with the content of the book. I get the whole “first impression” bit. I understand the very essential concept of getting a potential buyer to just pick up the book. I also know that publishing books is a business. But honestly? The amount of false advertising present on book covers today just ticks me off. Then again, I have no idea what kind of cover might have persuaded me to pick this book up in the first place had it had only dealt with the concepts presented therein, and not been entirely based on a metaphor of the story instead. So, a quandary for you: False-advertising? Or no sales? Option number three, if you ask me.
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The Cardinal’s Blades
Come on. Historical France. Musketeers. Dragons. Magic. Spies. You can’t tell us you don’t want to read a book with all this awesomeness in it. Fortunately for everyone, all these things are in Pierre Pevel’s novel THE CARDINAL’S BLADES (Amazon), and for the most part this is a great read.
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Cryoburn
Miles Vorkosigan is reliable. Reliably clever. Reliably entertaining. Reliable at finding trouble. But does reliability equal excellence? For Miles it does because he’s reliably awesome, but for Lois McMaster Bujold, who can and has written better, CRYOBURN (Amazon) is merely better-than-average entertainment.
Something’s rotten on the planet Kibou-diani, and Miles is trying to sniff out the secret. Known for their use of cryonics to preserve the ill or aged until medicine advances enough for a cure, the crybobanks pretty much run the planet and are looking to expand and provide services for a new population on another planet. But there’s more to it than a business making money, and Miles is determined to get to the bottom of it–even if it means breaking a few rules and stretching beyond his own diplomatic immunity.
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Scar Night
It happens more often than you think. Sometimes we just don’t read certain books. It has to do with time, opportunity, cost, motivation or whatever. The end result is the same, and the book sits there in the “To Be Read” pile. It’s a shame, because we miss a lot of great novels this way. We were recently asked to review some of the various novels out there that don’t seem to get a lot of push, and this reminded us of those copies of Alan Campbell’s novels that we bought forever ago.
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James Barclay Interview
You all know by now that James Barclay has become one of our favorite authors. Action. Character. Tragedy. Humor. Love. He somehow manages to blend all these themes perfectly. So when we got the opportunity to interview James, we jumped on it with fanboy glee.
So here you have it…
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Shadowheart
We get asked all the time who our favorite authors are. Two years ago the answers would have been absurdly simple, but we read a lot more novels these days. A WHOLE lot more. As a result, who we consider our favorites tends to shift and slide. Barely more than a year ago we hadn’t yet read anything by James Barclay. Now with each novel of his that we read, he solidifies himself as one of our favorite authors.
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Lord of the Changing Winds
By chapter two of LORD OF THE CHANGING WINDS (Amazon) I began to worry that Rachel Neumeier would make me suffer through new-author syndrome: the first fifty pages stiffly sets up a predictable story, using too-formal prose, repetitive descriptions, and clumsy world building. But I kept reading, because despite a not very illustrious beginning, the prose has some delightful metaphors and turns of phrase that spoke to the author’s cleverness with words.
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The Horns of Ruin
We rarely read any novels from Pyr that could be deemed a “miss.” The number of stellar novels put out by Pyr since its inception is astonishing. But every now and again even they miss the mark. THE HORNS OF RUIN by Tim Akers (Amazon) is Sword & Sorcery/Steampunk hybrid. Sounds cool on the surface. In fact a lot of this story sounds fantastic on paper…unfortunately that paper doesn’t include the actual execution of the idea.
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