The Affinity Bridge
If you are like us, when you go to a bookstore you let your eye wander. If you already know what you want to buy, and you walk right to it and pick it up, you’ve missed a golden opportunity. When you let yourself browse the bookstore, you get the opportunity to let books choose you, in a sense. This is how we discovered THE AFFINITY BRIDGE by George Mann. The art design on the cover is incredible–some of the best we’ve see this year, in fact–and we knew right away that we wanted to read it. So, we each picked up a copy…
… and remembered that, unfortunately, we are poor. So we put the copies back, and went to the library. It was a bummer.
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Diving into the Wreck
Every now-and-then a novel surprises us. For whatever reason, we have preconceptions about a novel before reading; it could be we’ve read the author’s previous novels, it could be the cover-art, or really anything else for that matter. What we love is when a novel shatters all of our unfounded notions, and completely sucks us into the story (if this were a vampire novel, we would insert a mandatory pun here, but alas…).
Kristine Kathryn Rusch has been writing SF for a while now (not to mention every other genre under various pen-names). You may have heard of her, and you may have even read her Retrieval Artist series. It is a decent series, and good for beginners in the SF genre, but nothing that made us squeal and say, “Wow!” That was our exposure to Rusch, and really the basis for our opinions of her writing. We figured that her new novel, DIVING INTO THE WRECK (Amazon), would be more of the same.
Wow! (See what we did there?) We were seriously mistaken. Take a screen-shot of that last sentence, ladies and gentlemen, because it rarely happens.
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Skinwalker Review and Faith Hunter Interview
We have another special treat for you all today. One of the absolute highlights of WorldCon 2008 was our encounter with (actually repeated encounters with…she may have been stalking us) Faith Hunter. She is one of the most down-to-earth, witty, and genuinely warm people we have met. So of course we wanted to keep in touch. When our website went live one of the first things we wanted to do was set up an interview. So, here it is. Enjoy.
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Noonshade
Remember that guy, James Barclay, whose book DAWNTHIEF (EBR Review) we reviewed a few weeks ago? If you don’t remember, shame on you! That first novel was one of the higher quality novels we had read all year, so we had some fairly high expectations for NOONSHADE. Do we ever not?
The story of NOONSHADE picks up, literally, minutes after the first book, DAWNTHIEF, ends and throws us right back into the exploits of the mercenary band, The Raven. In the first few pages we are given a brief, “Hey, look! There’s a big-A hole in the sky as a consequence for saving the world in a dangerous way in the last book.” summary. Then BAM! (Emeril, not only are we more attractive, we even say your catchphrase better. Eat your heart out.) we get right into the events of the current book. Salvation brings its own can of worms in this worms. Actually it isn’t a can of worms, so much, as a rift in the sky through which all manner of destruction can manifest. By, “all manner of destruction” we mean interdimensional dragons that want nothing more than to obliterate everything, and kick your dog. Twice.
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Tom Lloyd Interview
After spending the weekend hanging out with agents, editors, and authors, as well as fans, we think this is a pretty good time to post an interview with one of our favorite authors. As you probably already know, we have a lot of respect for Tom Lloyd and his writing. We are pleased to give you this little interview with one of the new, great minds of current fantasy.
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METAtropolis
How about something new and different for our review here at EBR? We read and review novels pretty much constantly, but we have yet to discuss any short fiction. The thing to be wary of when reading short fiction, in our opinions, is that you can’t treat it like a novel. Where novels have several fully developed ideas that all contribute to the plot, setting, and characters, short stories and novellas typically only have one or two fully developed (sometimes) ideas. If you go into a collection of short fiction with the right mind-set, you will find that it can be a refreshing change from the novels that you have been reading.
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Dexter by Design
So. DEXTER BY DESIGN (Amazon). The fourth novel by Jeff Lindsay that follows the exploits of Deviously Deadly Dexter — if you followed our advice earlier and read the first novel DARKLY DREAMING DEXTER (), you know why we use the alliteration… and it should be fairly obvious anyway. To be quite honest, we are getting tired of the novels, and are turning more towards the Showtime Series for our Dexter fix.
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Soulless Review and Gail Carriger Interview
We have a special treat in addition to our Monday review today. It is our honor to have Gail Carriger, the author of the newly released SOULLESS (Amazon), answer a few questions for us to lead into our review.
We first met Gail at WorldCon 2008, where she properly chastised Nick for not wearing a suit while speaking to agents and editors about his book. She soon realized just how awesome Nick was (Right Gail?)and the two quickly became friends.
Gail’s sense of humor is a treat for all, so when SOULLESS was released we new that we HAD to have her as an interview guest for the review. We know you will love her as much as we do. So without further introduction, here is the interview.
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R.A. Salvatore Interview
RAS: We were approached by Sara Easterly to do this interview at the same time as she asked us to do participate in Margaret Weis’ blog tour. Needless to say, when R.A. Salvatore, much like Weis, comes-a-knocking for a tour, there is only one answer you can give. Of course! And when they say we can give away 5 free copies of Salvatore’s latest novel, THE GHOST KING? Sounds like a deal for YOU! All you have to do is post a comment. So, without further ado, here you go:Read the rest of this post »
A Cavern of Black Ice
A CAVERN OF BLACK ICE (Amazon), by J.V. Jones, was published back in 2005, and is the first in the Sword of Shadows series. The most recent entry to the series was A SWORD FROM RED ICE (Amazon) in 2008 and we are expecting the fourth book soon. When we tell people that J.V. Jones is one of our favorite authors, the most common response is, “Who?” So, instead of reviewing the latest book, we thought we would do this first book as an introduction to a series that doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. And it deserves a ton.
Before Steve explodes from holding it in (it’s not what you think…), we need to say that we absolutely hate the covers for this series. All three of the books have ridiculously terrible covers, and we attribute part of the series’ obscurity to that fact. Books are judged by their covers all the time, and these covers scream “DON’T BUY US!!! WE ARE GENERIC AND TERRIBLE!!”
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