Grey Sister
This is another one of those books that got buried a little too deep in my TBR pile last year and got lost. I am ashamed. Thankfully, I have awesome friends that remind me about missing out on books like this and then telling me that I’m running out of time before the sequel is released. You just can’t put a price on friends like that. Because seriously, if you start doing things like that, pretty soon all your friends are six feet under and no one new wants to be your friend anymore because they know what happens to those that happen to say the wrong thing…
Okay, maybe that got a little dark, but after all, what good is a book review about an awesome dark fantasy novel without a little morbid humor to kick us all off in the right direction. 🙂
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Dead Moon
So, despite what Goodreads might seem to imply, this isn’t the third book in any kind of connected series. It’s a single novel that may or may not be the first in a series, and that might be in the same loosely bound universe as other books that the author has written. But that’s about it. I spent the entirety of my time listening to this one believing that this was the third book in a series and wondering what story might have been told in the first two books. It’s not written like the follow-on to any kind of other story.
Now I guess I know better than to blithely accept the information I’m given on Goodreads.
This is also another one of those books that doesn’t look like it’s going to get a dead-tree release any time soon, if at all. <<sideways glance>> I just don’t get that. Part of the book market, I guess, that doesn’t include me. Still, I was more than happy to give the thing a listen, as I had a hole in my audiobook schedule.
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Wrath of Empire
Here’s another one of those late reviews that totally should have been up last year, but that I just didn’t make it to. On the whole I’ve kind of been a late-comer to the Powder Mage world. What I found in this series was fun, and interesting, and engaging to say the least. Was hoping to find more of the same, when diving into this one. Especially after mentioning that we expected goodness from the short list of missed reviews in 2018 and being so disappointed in the first one of those books that I got to.
Thankfully, I found that this book was just as good as I had expected.
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How To Be a Good Book Fan 101
I was perusing Twitter recently and was reminded by Sam Sykes (Twitter) just how important it is to “Be a Good Book Fan” these days. There is SO much data that can be collected and aggregated and analyzed that it’s all too easy for your favorite author to suddenly find themselves kicked to the curb (or kerb, for you folks across the pond — yeesh, I love the British variation of that word so much it gives me the giggles). The most recent instance of this happening in my mind happened to F. Paul Wilson (Author’s Website), author of the popular Repairman Jack series. That one hit us Elitists pretty hard.
Sykes’s tweet had a pretty simple message: First week sales are very important! That’s the truth. There are a bunch of other things that you can do when you love a book, a series, or an author though, and that got my ol’ gray matter turning. Pretty soon I had enough bouncing around in my head that I figured I’d better put some of it down, so it wouldn’t all be wasted. So here it is.
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Best of 2017
2017 was just as awesome of a year as we’d ever had, but the first part of 2018, which is when this page should have first been published, was a wicked wild ride. What with launching off on our own and pulling in some new reviewers, things were busy around here to say the least. Suffice it to say that this annual update to the site was overlooked at the time, possibly pushed to the back burner. Thinking back about that time of our lives and the life of our website… I don’t blame us at all for skipping over this one. 🙂 We can only hope that you’ll forgive us for this small indiscretion and accept our humble apologies along with our list of favorites for the year.
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Blood of Ten Kings
This is one of the books on our makeup list from last year that I just didn’t have the time to get to. Actually, it kind of took me by surprise. The most recent book in the series, THE LOST PRINCE (EBR Review) came out more than 5 years ago, and I guess the possibility of seeing this sequel had completely fallen off my radar. Still, I was really excited to finally see it. THE LOST PRINCE was an absolutely brilliant book, and I was so looking forward to seeing how it would all come together for the Guardians from Aandor.
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Sakura: Intellectual Property
We like good causes here. Especially when they involve books and authors. One of those I distinctly remember was the Unfettered anthology (Amazon) from Shawn Speakman. Looks like the third one of those is about to get released. Well, this is another one of those type of books.
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The Antidote
THE ANTIDOTE by Shelley Sackier reads like a fairytale–and not one that the Brothers Grimm recorded; there is no real peril here in Sackier’s stage-set world building. With a lively protagonist and a plenty of twists, THE ANTIDOTE should be a bubbly little read, but a fumble on some story fundamentals makes it more frustrating than fun.
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All Systems Red
Last week in my interview with S.K. Dunstall (see it here), they mentioned loving Martha Wells’ Murderbot stories. With such high praise from an author-duo I enjoy, how could I resist?
I’ve been missing out. Murderbot is totally worth reading.
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The Fever King
To borrow a phrase from The Princess Bride, Victoria Lee isn’t writing to the death in THE FEVER KING — she’s writing to the pain. So when I characterize this novel as dark and unsettling, I have to believe that Lee would take that as a complement.
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