Fantasy – Page 17 – Everything Is Better With Dragons

Review: A study in silks by Emma Jane Holloway

Random House Publishing Group – Del Rey Spectra
24th September 2013

ISBN 9780345537188
$7.99
EditionMass Market Paperback

I recently had the pleasure of reading an uncorrected proof copy of this, the first title in Emma Jane Holloway’s trilogy ‘The Baskerville Affair’. The next part, ‘A study in darkness’ will be published later this month and the final part ‘A study in ashes’ will be published in December. I have already started reading the second book and have requested the third.

But what are these novels about?

As the title suggests, these are a riff on the Sherlock Holmes canon (for my friends in the fandom it’s an AU fanfic). Set in an alternative Steampunk Victorian England ruled by ‘Steam Barons’ who control the power supply and ruthlessly suppress competition using any and all means possible. Eveline Cooper, the orphaned daughter of Sherlock Holmes’s disgraced younger sister and the army captain she eloped with, is making her entrance into Society with her dearest friend Imogen Roth, daughter of Lord Bancroft, former Ambassador to Vienna.

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Review: ‘Dead Ever After’ by Charlaine Harris

2013

Gollancz

The final adventure of Sookie Stackhouse begins the day after the penultimate novel ended: Sam the Shapeshifter lived and Eric the Vampire is not happy that Sookie used the fairy gift from her great-grandfather to bring Sam back and not to get him out of a sticky political situation. Everyone is upset. And then an old enemy comes back in to Sookie’s life, an instrument of unknown enemies. When she is murdered the police would quite like it if Sookie were the murderer. It all gets very stressful for Sookie as more enemies come out of the woodwork and Eric divorces her. Sam is distant and confusing, Bill a little too friendly.

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Review: ‘The Woken Gods’ by Gwenda Bond

Not yet published – Publication date 3rd September 2013

Angry Robot Ltd

Recently I joined www.netgalley.com, as I mentioned in a previous post, and this is one of the first books I have had the pleasure of reading and reviewing. It, like most of the books on Net Galley, is an ARC, or advance reader copy. Therefore I shall restrict this review to the plot and characters, and not discuss any perceived faults in the text, just as the author has asked. I’m nice like that.

‘The Woken Gods’ is set in Washington D.C. in the near future where all the gods have been woken from an eons long sleep. The Society of the Sun, which effectively rules the world now, as they were the ones who subdued the gods, keeps everything under control, with the help of magical relics.

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Review: ‘The Warring States: Book II of the Wave Trilogy’ by Aiden Harte

2013

Quercus

Not too long ago I read a book called Irenicon, the first book in the Wave Trilogy. The adventures of Sofia Scaligeri and the fractious city of Rasenna continue in ‘The Warring States’.

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Review: ‘Tethers Book One of the Tethers Trilogy’ by Jack Croxall

5th February 2013

Karl and Esther live in a small village in Lincolnshire in the nineteenth century. Karl is the son of a German architect, dead for many years, and is brought up by his mother and aunt. Esther’s family runs the village pub. They are best friends. By sheer accident (and Karl’s inability to listen to his mother’s warning) they get drawn into the machinations of a secret organisation trying to find an artefact which will allow them to see the future. Travelling by yacht and narrow boat they make it to Nottingham and help interrupt the conspirator’s plans, gaining, and losing, several new friends along the way.

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Review: ‘The Ocean At The End Of The Lane’ by Neil Gaiman

2013

Headline Publishing Group

The unknown narrator, escaping from a family funeral, returns to his childhood home, but not finding what he sought he carries on down the Lane, to the Hempstock Farm, home of his only childhood friend Lettie Hempstock, her mother and grandmother. While there he remembers the bizarre events that happened in the spring just after he turned seven, forty odd years before. Then, he forgets again.

The genius of Neil Gaiman’s storytelling is his ability to weave myth, memory and fantasy into original narratives. His unique take on stories that have been around forever makes them fresh and new, where a less inventive writer would be dull and repetitive.

The Ocean At The End Of The Lane is another fine example of his creativity, and is currently fighting with ‘American Gods’ for first place on my list of favourite Neil Gaiman books (Mr Wednesday and ‘Lo-key’ Lyesmith are such wonderfully devious bastards – I love them), and by the end of the book I was crying. I felt so sorry for the narrator, and Ginnie Hempstock. I have a sneaking suspicion that the Hempstock ladies are based on the weird sisters. Whoever they are based on though, they are archetypal characters – the wise old lady, the motherly farm-wife, the wild country girls – without being caricatures. The narration, with it’s changing perspective, is a seamless reflection on memory; what is real? Which of our childhood memories do we forget and why?

This is a thought-provoking, beautifully written book. At 243 pages it isn’t huge, but I read it in four and a half hours. I couldn’t put it down.

Rose

Review: ‘The woman who died a lot’ by Jasper Fforde

It’s 2004 and Thursday Next is in semi-retirement after a terrible accident which has left her unable to visit the BookWorld and means she has had to give up her Jurisfiction job. Her old mob SO-27 are back in business, but she’s not getting the job of leading them. Instead she becomes Wessex Chief Librarian.

Unfortunately, Swindon is due to be smote by a pillar of holy fire, unless Thursday’s daughter Tuesday can fin a way to get the anti-smiting shield to work. Then of course there is the additional problem that Friday Next is going to kill Tuesday’s boyfriend Gavin.

Jasper Fforde’s seventh Thursday Next novel is as surreal and entertaining as the first, with the additional bonus that it us internally consistent, so it makes marginally more sense, because I’ve been there before. Thursday as got older and wiser, the characters are developed further and the plot is as unique as ever.

Review: ‘The Eyre Affair’ by Jasper Fforde

2001

Hodder

This book was Jasper Fforde’s debut novel, and the first to feature Thursday Next as heroine. A surreal adventure set in a 1985 where literary theft has become a terrible problem, the Crimea is still being fought over by England and Russia, Wales is a secretive Socialist Republic, the mega-corporation Goliath bank roll the economy and the biggest controversy is who really wrote the plays of Shakespeare.

Thursday Next is a LiteraTec in Special Operations 27. Based in London, but originally from Swindon, a veteran of the Crimea and desperately seeking a way out of the Literary Detectives and into a more interesting Spec Op department, she takes a temporary assignment to Spec Op 5 and is thrown against an enemy more deadly than Russian Howitzers, Acheron Hades. Hades has stolen the original Martin Chuzzlewit manuscript but nobody can work out how.

Grievously injured in an operation that sees her losing all her colleagues, Thursday opts to take a job with Swindon’s LiteraTec department, on her own advice. Convinced that Hades is still alive despite everyone believing otherwise, Thursday is up against the Goliath Corporation and their representative Jack Schitt, who’s after a marvellous new weapon that will win the war in the Crimea, as well as Hades.

When Thursday’s eccentric but brilliant uncle Mycroft and her aunt Polly go missing, Hades is the first to be suspected. Thursday must rescue her aunt and uncle, defeat Hades, regain the Chuzzlewit and Jane Eyre manuscripts and outwit Jack Schitt. And all before her former-fiancé gets married at 3pm a week Saturday.

I’ve read one of the later Thursday Next books, and it definitely makes slightly more sense now. As much as anything makes sense in Jasper Fforde’s novels at least. This novel was highly praised when it was first published 12 years ago and it still stands as an excellent piece of literature; full of wit, bibliographic in-jokes, with unique characters and an incredibly inventive plot.

Review: ‘The Science of Discworld IV Judgement Day’ by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen

Ebury Press
2013

I had plans for this afternoon, then I thought ‘I’ll just read a bit, I need to finish it before Thursday’; the afternoon disappeared. If that’s not the best compliment to a book I don’t know a greater one.

This is the forth installment of the ‘Science of Discworld’ books, the first was published in 1999 and as the authors point out things have changed in the last 14 years.

Theories have been tested in new ways and been modified as new information had been made available. And that is the central argument of this book. Science is uncertain and ever questioning. Faith does not question, it merely ignores data that doesn’t fit.

Interweaving this discussion with a short story about Roundworld, the pretty bauble accidentally made when the Wizards of Unseen University made a booboo in the first Science of Discworld book, the authors illustrate their arguments using the best method possible when trying to explain concepts to Pan narrans : storytelling.

A radically fundamental sect of the Church of Om demands that the wizard hand over Roundworld. The Patrician decides to hold a tribunal into the matter. Into this milieu comes Margery Daw, librarian of Four Farthings, London, England, Earth. Highly educated and intelligent, with a firm belief in truth, and also the best runner at Roedean in her day, Margery has been transported to Discworld by the Unseen University’s Great Big Thing. Purely accidentally.
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Review of several e-books

I had a bit of a foray in to Amazon the other day and found several free e-books (thanks to the freebie page at http://www.everythingbooksandauthors.com) and read them quite quickly. Most were short stories but one,‘Georgiana Darcy’s Diary’, is probably more of a novella. Since I took the time to read to them I thought I should probably review them.

Georgiana Darcy’s diary: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice Continued

Anna Elliott, with illustrations by Laura Masselos

2011

Wilton Press

It’s 1814 and the war with Napoleon is coming to an end, Elizabeth and Darcy have been married a year, Georgiana is 18 years old and still living at Pemberley with them, and their Aunt De Bourgh has organised a house party. She’s trying to marry Georgiana off too some suitable gentleman.

Georgiana feels the need to start writing a diary again, and starts writing about her life. Sick of the fawning fortune hunters, Georgiana is in love with her cousin Colonel Fitzwilliam. Unfortunately rumour tells her he is engaged to someone else, and when he returns to Pemberley to recover from a wound taken at Toulouse she is determined not to give in to her feelings.

‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young lady of rank and property will have packs of money- or land-hungry suitors yapping around her heels like hounds after a fox.‘

In the interests of not giving the whole plot away, all I’ll say is the denouement of the storyline is fairly obvious. I mostly liked the story but was slightly unsatisfied by it. I would be interested to read the other two books in this Pride and Prejudice Chronicles, Pemberley to Waterloo, and Kitty Bennet’s Diary.

3/5

Cait the Cat Burglar (55 Portobello Road)

Christine London

2013

Cait is a waitress, stranded in London as she tries to earn money to send home to her sick mother and sister in America. Bribed and threatened in to becoming a thief by the sinister Rothwell, Cait tries to steal the work of an Australian musician. The first time she fails miserably. There were croquet hoops involved.

At work the next day her target comes in for a meal and Cait finds herself questioning her resolve.

This short story is entertaining, although I found it a little too soppy for my taste and too much ‘fairy-tale ending’. I’m not sure I’d bother to read the series of books that this short story is a part of.

2/5

How to talk to girls at parties, A short story

Neil Gaiman

2006

Headline

Originally published 2006 and republished as an e-book 2013 with an exclusive first chapter from Neil Gaiman’s new book, ‘The ocean at the end of the lane’, due out mid-June. Vic and Enn are going to a party Vic heard about from his friend Alison, unfortunately they end up at entirely wrong party with interesting consequences. It’s a fun little story, but then I like Neil Gaiman’s work, having read a couple of his books. He’s a truly original writer.

4/5

A Little Bit of Everything for Dummies 20th Anniversary Edition

John Wiley & Sons, Inc

2011

This book is exactly what it says on the cover, a sample of their published work since the first …For Dummies book in 1991. Covering everything from Windows 7 to Puppies to Sex, this book is an interesting one to flip through.

3/5

And that’s the lot for now.

Bye,

Rose