Everything Is Better With Dragons
Book blogger, Autistic, Probably a Dragon
Editor: Steve Haynes
Salt Publishing
2013
Contributors:
Jon Wallace Lavie Tidhar Joseph D’Lacey
E. J. Swift Carole Johnstone Cheryl Moore
Steph Swainston Kim Larkin-Smith Mark Morris
Cate Gardner Sam Stone Alison Littlewood
Simon Kurt Unsworth Lisa Tuttle Simon Bestwick
Tyler Keevil Adam L. G. Nevil
‘The Bride’ by Kacie Taylor. Ms Taylor contacted me a few weeks ago and asked if I’d be interested in reviewing her take on the ‘beauty and the beast’ fairy tale. Of course I love to read new authors and I was intrigued by the premise so I said yes. So far I’m enjoying the story. I will post a review once I’ve finished the novel.
Continue reading “And my next review will be”
Transworld Publishers
2013-11-07
In the 40th Discworld novel it’s steam engine time.
I know I said I wasn’t reviewing any books this month because I’m concentrating on my novel but I got to 43000 words yesterday so I took some time off to finish reading an ARC I’d got from http://www.netgalley.com and another book I’d borrowed from the library. My reviews follow.
29th October 2013
Del Ray
After the events of A study in silk Eveline Cooper was exiled to her Grandmamma Holmes’ Devon estate, Nick has given up the circus and his horses to become a pirate, captain of the Red Jack, Imogen Roth is fending off unsuitable suitors and Tobias Roth is engaged to the Gold King’s daughter Alice Keating, who is pregnant. Desperate for her company in Scotland Imogen persuades Alice to invite Eveline to visit them at the Keating shooting estate. After a joyous reunion all is turned upside down by Tobias’s unexpected arrival. The Gold King manipulates all concerned and Eveline is once more exiled, this time to Whitechapel. Her mission is to seek out the Blue King’s ‘maker’ – the person designing and creating his weapons and war machines.
2013
Passing4Normal Press
Ursula has never had a orgasm, she has drank an awful lot of wheatgrass juice though. She belly dances badly and keeps bowls of mushrooms all over the house.
Donny lives alone with his comic book collection, and has never touched wheatgrass. Until he meets Ursula.
Continue reading “Review: Donny and Ursula Save the World by Sharon Weil”
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.
Continue reading “Review: A study in silks by Emma Jane Holloway”
Linnet Pelham, genteel but impoverished, has lost her job as a schoolteacher and moved to London to live with her sister, former actress Jessica Landry. Jessica is sickly and engaged to her aristocratic lover Lord Cairngorm. But his Lordships’s brother Dominic Barton does not approve and is determined to prevent the disgraceful union which will damage the family name.
Continue reading “Review: Reforming the rogue by Donna Lea Simpson”
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (UK & ANZ)
Esme Garland is an English girl in New York. She is studying art history at Columbia University after gaining a first from Cambridge. After a shaky start she’s loving life in New York. She has made friends, met a wealthy boyfriend, Mitchell van Leuven, and more importantly found a great second hand book shop, The Owl. Unfortunately she gets pregnant and dumped before she can tell Mitchell. Desperate for work she gets a job at The Owl. Staff and regular customers help her through the trials and tribulations of the next year.
Originally: 2010 – Lyrical Press
Edition reviewed: 2013 – Momentum
In forty years a new underground craze will start – splash parties. Time travellers known as ‘bricks’ will be thrown back in time, ‘lobbed’, and their actions in the past will cause a ‘splash’ as their presence disrupts the timelines. The back wash from the ‘splash’ mixed with the new drug tempus causes a high. It’s marginally illegal; police forces concentrate on controlling the drugs and noise caused by the splash parties, after all the timeline can’t be changed because it fixes itself.
Everything Is Better With Dragons 