Review: The Magician’s Daughter by H.G. Parry

Posted on February 21, 2023February 20, 2023 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A+ Reviews> book reviews

The Magician's Daughter by H.G. Parry
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: coming of age, fantasy, historical fantasy
Pages: 400
Published by Redhook on February 28, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A young woman raised on an isolated island by a magician discovers things aren’t as they seem and must venture into early 1900s England to return magic to the world in this lush and lyrical historical fantasy.
It is 1912, and for the last seventy years magic has all but disappeared from the world. Yet magic is all Biddy has ever known. Orphaned as a baby, Biddy grew up on Hy-Brasil, a legendary island off the coast of Ireland hidden by magic and glimpsed by rare travelers who return with stories of wild black rabbits and a lone magician in a castle. To Biddy, the island is her home, a place of ancient trees and sea-salt air and mysteries, and the magician, Rowan, is her guardian. She loves both, but as her seventeenth birthday approaches, she is stifled by her solitude and frustrated by Rowan's refusal to let her leave. One night, Rowan fails to come home from his mysterious travels. To rescue him, Biddy ventures into his nightmares and learns not only where he goes every night, but that Rowan has powerful enemies. Determination to protect her home and her guardian, Biddy's journey will take her away from the safety of her childhood, to the poorhouses of Whitechapel, a secret castle beneath London streets, the ruins of an ancient civilization, and finally to a desperate chance to restore lost magic. But the closer she comes to answers, the more she comes to question everything she has ever believed about Rowan, her own origins, and the cost of bringing magic back into the world.
For more from H. G. Parry, check out:
The Shadow HistoriesA Declaration of the Rights of Magicians A Radical Act of Free Magic
The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

My Review:

The story of The Magician’s Daughter is a case of not just two great tastes going great together, but three great tastes combining to form a delicious and occasionally bittersweet treat of epic proportions.

It begins as a coming-of-age story. Biddy is just 16 when we first meet her. Or she is finally 16, an age when she may not yet be an adult but she is certainly no longer a child, and no longer believes childish things.

It’s 1912 in her version of our world, and the situation has been going to hell in that handcart for 70 years. Because nearly all of the magic has leaked out of the world. Or has been closed off from the world. Or has been used up by the world.

Which is one of the central questions of the whole story.

But Biddy has grown up on the legendary, mystical, nearly-mythical island of Hy-Brasil off the coast of Ireland. An island that was, once upon a time when the world was new and magic was abundant, a fortress of the Tuatha Dé Danann in their nearly-endless war with the Fomorians.

Hy-Brasil still has a bit of magic left, the magic that keeps the island lost in fog and protects Biddy and her guardians, the wizard Rowan and his familiar-spirit Hutchincroft. The island protects them, but it also restricts them. At least it does Biddy, who sees her father-figure leave the island every night in search of more wisps of magic while she is forced to remain behind.

While Rowan’s excuses for why she cannot go to the mainland become more and more threadbare. As do most of his explanations about why the mainland is dangerous and what is going on in the world. The mask that Rowan uses to hide his very real worries about the fading of magic and the reasons behind it no longer conceal his fears or his hopes.

But it’s those fears that come true first, when the forces of the powerful, grasping Mages’ Council that he fled 70 years ago entrap him at last. And Biddy is forced to grab the reins of what little magic she can in order to spring him from their trap.

Which is when Biddy learns that she should have been much more careful about what she wished for. Rowan doesn’t merely let her leave the island, he deliberately removes her from its protections and seemingly sets her out as bait for his enemies.

Along the way, Biddy learns that the world is not remotely like what she dreamed of when she read all the books in the island’s vast library. It is much darker and infinitely more dangerous. And it holds secrets from her even as it exposes the secrets that Rowan has been keeping all her life.

The magic of the world is gone, leaving the world a dark and dismal place. Rowan has the glimmer of the hope of a plan to bring it back. All he needs to do is break open the magical secret that has been hiding, literally, in Biddy’s heart.

If he can find the way. If Biddy still trusts him enough to let him after all the secrets he’s been keeping from her for so long. And if they can keep one step ahead of the forces arrayed against them – even if they have to sacrifice everything along the way.

Escape Rating A+: At the top, I said this story encompassed three great tastes that go great together. The obvious is Biddy’s coming-of-age story. This is also very much a found family story – and a charming one at that. And it’s a power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely kind of story hidden under an almost gothic tale of politics and traps and plots and creatures straight out of the pages of the darkest of dark fantasy.

What makes Biddy’s coming of age story work so well is that she begins as a clean slate. She literally has not been in the real world and has no clue what it’s like. So we see her 1912 through the eyes of someone who had no idea what to expect and who has no built in “but we’ve always done it that way” set of blinders. She knows that so much of what she sees is just plain wrong even if she doesn’t know how to fix it. And she’s aware of the privilege that Rowan and Hutchincroft raised her in. Not a privilege of material things, and not even a privilege of always knowing where the next meal was coming from because that wasn’t always true, but the privilege of knowing that she was loved and that she could explore the island and any thought or idea she might have gathered from books or dreams or observation. And especially the privilege of safety at all times, until that safety was shattered at last.

The found family aspect of this tale is both sweet and bitter. Rowan and Hutchincroft see Biddy as their child, their daughter, even though they did not make her and did not bring her with them because they had any obligation to her. Instead, this is a love that grew over time, and care, and arguments, and impatience and rebellion and mending skinned knees and testing boundaries. And it’s a love that endures even after Biddy learns that Rowan has been keeping gigantic secrets from her about pretty much everything.

And then, on top of that beautiful foundation, there’s the story about magic going away and power corrupting. There’s always a question in Rowan’s mind, and in the reader’s mind as well, as to whether the decline in magic was natural or was caused by human activity. (Now that I think about it there’s a parallel to the climate change arguments I didn’t see as I read the book.) Coming out of that question about a natural decrease versus a man-made one there’s a follow-up question about whether the best use of the remaining magic is to hoard it so that it can be used for the ‘greater good’ – and who gets to define THAT – or whether the magic should be set free to help as it wills for as long as it can.

But if it is a human-made problem, should they hunt for a human-made solution, whatever that might be? Which is where all those questions about power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely come sweeping in on the wings of some truly horrible little flying monsters – and go out on the feet of one frightened young woman who is willing to sacrifice everything for the people she loves.

From beginning to end, an utterly charming story that makes the reader fall in love with its characters and their compelling need to fix their broken world.

One last thing that isn’t related but kind of is. As I read The Magician’s Daughter it reminded me of Freya Marske’s Last Binding series, whose first two entries are A Marvellous Light and A Restless Truth, which are both utterly charming and lovely. The world of the Last Binding is not bereft of magic the same way that the setting of The Magician’s Daughter is, but both are set in alternate pre-World War I Englands in which there is a Mages’ Council that is well down the path of the ends justifying the means because of the power corrupting. So if you’re a fan of one you might very well fall in love with the other, as I most certainly did.

Presidents’ Day 2023

Posted on February 20, 2023February 19, 2023 by Galen Charlton | Author : Galen Charlton | Holidays> Presidents' Day

As of the writing of this post, Jimmy Carter is at home receiving hospice care. However many hours, days, or weeks are left to him, he can rest assured of near-universal acclaim for having conducted the best post-presidency in the modern era.

A United States President nowadays commands awesome power, including quite literally the ability to instigate the end of civilization as we know it. That that power is wielded by a democratically elected official who can count on being held in contempt by a portion of the electorate is an irony of the modern age. Carter was of course not immune to that: Marlene recalls working as a librarian the 1980s and being asked for Rosalynn Carter memoir First Lady from Plains by a slightly different title: “First Lady Complains”.

Presidential power is not the domain of a Superman single-handedly changing the world; many hands are involved. What the President can do at best is to inspire, to lead, to exemplify, to cajole, to persuade, but almost never to directly do. Carter exemplified some of the best of that indirectness. Let us consider a few incidents.

Carter survived Admiral Hyman RIckover’s job interview – undoubtedly one of the toughest anywhere in the world – to serve in the U.S. Navy’s nuclear submarine service. In 1952, an experimental nuclear reactor in Ontario, Canada, the Chalk River NRX, suffered a partial meltdown that resulted in a radioactive mess. The cleanup took 14 months, and since the NRX was being used to test fuel for U.S. nuclear submarines, Canada invited the U.S. Navy to provide men to assist with the cleanup (and to supplement the Canadian reactor staff, many of whom were reaching their legal radiation exposure limits). Rickover, seeing an excellent training opportunity, sent them over, including a team led by Carter.

Carter’s team was responsible for performing some of the disassembly of parts of the reactor and had to move quickly. According to his memoirs, they had about 90 seconds apiece to do their work before reaching the maximum permitted exposure. They came, they planned, they did their work, and went back home. While it left an impression on Carter – having to test your urine for six months before it stopped registering as radioactive tends to do that to a person – the tale subsequently grew in the telling (by others). Some accounts published in recent years might give one the impression that he saved Ottawa (which wasn’t in danger) by personally leading the entire cleanup effort (he was responsible for just one team consisting of between one and dozen men as part of a much larger operation run by the Canadians). But Carter himself had a more accurate perspective: he did his duty bravely, as many others did, and ensured that the men he led did theirs.

One of Carter’s signature accomplishments during his presidency was the signing of the Camp David Accords that normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and Egypt. This time, Carter personally chivvied the negotiations along, including taking Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin on a tour of the Gettysburg battlefield to ponder the cost of war. While the Accords did not achieve all that Carter hoped for, as he had tried to get Syria and Jordan to participate, they led to a peace between Israel and Egypt that remains unbroken.

However, Carter’s best legacy may ultimately have nothing to do with nuclear power or high diplomacy. In fact, that legacy may be marked by an absence: specifically, that of Dracunculus medinensis, i.e., the guinea worm. In 1986, Carter’s foundation started an effort to eradicate the guinea worm. This project is the epitome of a group effort using boring means to achieve its aim. An eradication program inherently involves many international and national health agencies, and guinea worms do not lend themselves to extinction by the heroic efforts of genius medical research. Instead, the weapons are education, water filters, and patience. But nearly 40 years of patience can be enough: there were about 3.5 million cases of guinea worm disease in 1986. Last year, there were about 13.

Carter likely will not live to hear the World Health Organization’s proclamation of the end of the disease – but he can rest easy knowing that his efforts will outlive him and achieve a permanent solution to a major problem; the sort of legacy not every U.S. President is accorded.

The Sunday Post AKA What’s on my (Mostly Virtual) Nightstand 2-19-23

Posted on February 19, 2023February 19, 2023 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | The Sunday Post> Virtual Nightstand> Winner announcement

Lucifer gave us a bit of a scare this week, so we took him to the vet yesterday to see what was up. Or down in this particular case, as he wasn’t quite his usual grumpy but bouncy self. He’s going on 12 so he’s getting up there, and he has arthritis and is slowing down a bit. Still, he worried us this week and that meant a trip to the V-E-T. Today’s picture of is of his rather disgruntled self while waiting for his exam.

He seems to have had an arthritis flare-up, as we do, and was just uncomfortable for a couple of days. We have meds for him now if it happens again. Of course, he’s still peeved about the whole experience – but that’s just normal catitude.

This turned out to be a damn good reading week. Never Too Old To Save the World turned out to be an especial favorite, and I’ve been referring to it – as appropriate – in quite a few reviews, so I’m glad to finally get its own review out into the world!

Coming This Week:

Presidents’ Day 2023 (Guest Post by Galen)
The Weight of Command by Michael Mammay (review)
Full Exposure by Thien-Kim Lam (review)
Where Shadows Dance by C.S. Harris (review)
The Magician’s Daughter by H.G. Parry (review)

Stacking the Shelves (536)

Posted on February 18, 2023February 17, 2023 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | Stacking the Shelves

Fair warning, it’s looking a lot like the stacks are going to be getting bigger from here on out for a while. But the net will be cast wide over even more genres, so it should at least be interesting!

chain gang all stars by nana kwame adjei brenyah

odyssey of phillis wheatley by david waldstreicher

dear chrysanthemums by fiona sze lorrain

For Review:
Biting the Hand by Julia Lee
Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
City of Bones by Martha Wells
A Darker Wilderness edited by Erin Sharkey
Dear Chrysanthemums by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
Driving the Green Book by Alvin Hall
The East Indian by Brinda Charry
A Living Remedy by Nicole Chung
The New Guys by Meredith Bagby
The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley by David Waldstreicher
Pomegranate by Helen Elaine Lee
Unraveling by Peggy Orenstein
Walk Through Fire by Yasmine Ali
Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin

Purchased from Amazon/Audible/Etc.:
Illuminations by T. Kingfisher
The Midnight Circus by Jane Yolen
The Weight of Command by Michael Mammay

If you want to find out more about Stacking The Shelves, please visit the official launch page

Please link your STS post in the linky below:

Review: World Running Down by Al Hess

Posted on February 17, 2023February 16, 2023 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A Reviews> blog tours> book reviews

World Running Down by Al Hess
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: dystopian, post apocalyptic, science fiction
Pages: 299
Published by Angry Robot on February 14, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A transgender salvager on the outskirts of a dystopian Utah gets the chance to earn the ultimate score and maybe even a dash of romance. But there's no such thing as a free lunch...
Valentine Weis is a salvager in the future wastelands of Utah. Wrestling with body dysphoria, he dreams of earning enough money to afford citizenship in Salt Lake City - a utopia where the testosterone and surgery he needs to transition is free, the food is plentiful, and folk are much less likely to be shot full of arrows by salt pirates. But earning that kind of money is a pipe dream, until he meets the exceptionally handsome Osric.
Once a powerful AI in Salt Lake City, Osric has been forced into an android body against his will and sent into the wasteland to offer Valentine a job on behalf of his new employer - an escort service seeking to retrieve their stolen androids. The reward is a visa into the city, and a chance at the life Valentine's always dreamed of. But as they attempt to recover the "merchandise", they encounter a problem: the android ladies are becoming self-aware, and have no interest in returning to their old lives.
The prize is tempting, but carrying out the job would go against everything Valentine stands for, and would threaten the fragile found family that's kept him alive so far. He'll need to decide whether to risk his own dream in order to give the AI a chance to live theirs.

My Review:

World Running Down turned out to be my third climate-apocalypse dystopia in a row, after Junkyard War and Perilous Times. The world is going to hell in a handcart and it’s all humanity’s fault no matter how you look at it. But these three looks at the view from that handcart are quite different. And all, surprisingly, hopeful.

At first, Valentine Weis doesn’t seem to have much hope. Or, perhaps, hope’s all he’s got without any real way of making any of his hopes come close to realization. At least not until Osric drops into his life – just about literally – with an offer that Valentine probably should refuse.

Because anything that looks too good to be true generally is – especially with people who actually still have a conscience and at least an ounce of compassion for their fellow beings. However those beings present themselves and whatever they happen to be made of.

In his very post-climate apocalypse world, Valentine lives his life on the outside looking in. Someone is offering him the opportunity to finally be on the inside. The question is whether the price is one that he’s willing to pay.

Salt Lake City is one of the few remaining, functional cities in the U.S. It’s a place where healthcare and transportation are free, where it seems as if everyone has enough to eat and a place to live. It’s a place where the rich get richer and the poor peek through the glass at all the things they can’t have without citizenship. Or sponsorship. Or both.

Valentine has none of the above. Instead his only possession is a barely functioning van, his only friend is more of a frenemy, he’s just barely breaking even on the delivery and salvage jobs he takes to keep body and soul together. And he’s trapped in a body he knows is wrong, deals with regular and depressing bouts of body dysmorphia and keeps falling further behind in his quest to save up enough money to get admitted to the place where he can get the medicines and the surgery he needs to make his external appearance reflect his inner self.

Osric, on the other hand, isn’t even human. He’s a Steward, an elite artificial intelligence who has been placed in a mere android body by nefarious person or persons unknown and sent out by even more nefarious persons to rope Valentine and his friend Ace into a job that must have one hell of a catch – because the fee for doing it is beyond Valentine’s biggest hopes and best dreams.

Which he just might manage to make come true. Not by giving in to what either those nefarious persons or his best frenemy/business partner Ace might say is the best thing – but by doing the actual, honest-to-goodness right thing. No matter how much it breaks his heart.

Escape Rating A: Before I even attempt to get into any more detail, first things first. And the first thing is that I loved World Running Down. A lot. Which kind of surprised me, not for itself, but because it was the third climate apocalypse dystopia book I read in a row, and as a subject that’s kind of a downer.

But the book itself isn’t a downer at all, which is really all down to Valentine. He just so earnestly wants to be a genuinely good person in spite of the world running down. Given a choice between the right thing and the easy thing Valentine chooses the right thing every single time – quite often to his own detriment.

He’s not unrealistic – at all – about just how FUBAR’d his world has become. He just doesn’t let that affect his own decision making process. He knows that things overall are heading towards an even hotter place than the climate, and he’s cognizant that he can’t fix much of that. But he’s committed to making things a little better as he can to those whose lives he actually touches.

Which is what gives the story both its hopefulness and its poignancy.

Valentine himself is caught in a “catch-22”. He’s trans, he needs both meds and surgery to complete his transition – which he very much desires to do. To be able to do that he needs to get residence in Salt Lake City, and for that he needs to pass a citizenship test. Which is just as big a hurdle because Valentine has ADHD or some variant of it which hasn’t even been diagnosed, making it difficult for him to study and retain certain kinds of information. Math gives a lot of people trouble. It gives Valentine a double dose of trouble, and he needs to get it to pass the test. Doing the original job would be a shortcut to his dreams – but absolutely does come at much too high a price.

But this isn’t just Valentine’s story, although we see much of it from his perspective. It’s also Osric’s story, and it’s the story of the job they are contracted for and the huge cloud wrapped around the silver lining of the payoff for doing it. Both parts of which result in discussion of artificial intelligences and the definition of what makes a being of artificial intelligence intelligent enough to be self-aware and eligible for citizenship.

And then the whole story works its way around to just how much heartache and heartbreak can be caused by trying to do what you think is best for someone you care for and how demeaning it is to make those decisions without their input.

There’s more. There’s just so much more. More than I should get into here, no matter how tempted I am. Which is very.

Between the climate apocalypse, the dystopian elements, the so, so sharp divide between the haves and the have nots, and both the political and the romantic issues that are raised by the questions of sentience and artificial intelligence, World Running Down touched on themes that brought to mind (my mind at least) a whole shelf of books that a reader might find equally appealing and/or interesting and very much vice versa.

So if you’ve ever read any of the following, you will probably also find World Running Down to be running right up your reading alley. And if you like World Running Down, these may also appeal; A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers, In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune, Automatic Reload by Ferrett Steinmetz and The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson.

I wish you hours of joyful reading in some fascinating worlds gone very wrong that still have hope of things coming round right. Definitely starting with World Running Down. But don’t just take my word for it. World Running Down is in the midst of running on tour at the following sites. Check ’em out!

FEBRUARY
Tues 14 Curiosity Killed the Bookworm
Tues 14 Civilian Reader excerpt
Wed 15 @cklockwork
Thurs 16 @brittni.in.ink
Fri 17 @bookish_black_hole
Fri 17 Reading Reality
Sat 18 It Starts At Midnight
Sun 19 @dexterous_totalus
Mon 20  @TinasAlwaysReading
Tues 21 Scrapping and playing
Wed 22 FanFi Addict
Thurs 23  @intothevolcano
Fri 24 E. J. Dawson
Sat 25  @kevinscorner
Sun 26  @thespineofmotherhood
Mon 27  @Booksforscee

MARCH
Wed 1  @frommybookshelf
Thurs 2  @moyashi_girl
Fri 3  @chippyreads
Sat 4 SparklyPrettyBriiiight
Sun 5  JamReads
Mon 6  @sophi3saur
Tues 7  @bookstagramrepresent
Wed 8  @pufflekitteh
Thurs 9  @emilysarahart
Fri 10 FanFi Addict
Sat 11  @luchiahoughtonblog
Sun 12  @josephina_rae
Mon 13 superstardrifter
Tues 14  @bookwormescapes
Wed 15 @kevinscorner

Wish Big Giveaway Hop

Posted on February 16, 2023February 15, 2023 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | Blog Hops> Giveaways> Wish Big Giveaway Hop

Welcome to the Wish Big Giveaway Hop, hosted by Mama the Fox!

Right this minute, I have a VERY big wish at the top of my personal wish list. My sweet demon cat, Lucifer, is suddenly acting like his years have caught up with him all at once. When we adopted him five years ago we were told that he was six years old, but that was a bit of a guesstimate – albeit an educated one from the vet.

This week he’s been acting off, not moving through his usual routine of places to sleep and sunbeams to soak up. He may just be getting a slower start in the mornings than he used to, or he may just be having an ‘off’ couple of days. Or we might not have as much time with him as we’d hoped. He’s headed to the vet so we’ll know if there is something to be known. But it’s hard to go through this with them.

While it’s not always a bad thing that cats can’t tell us what’s on their mind – because they can seem really judgey based on their facial expressions, but when they’re not quite right we end up wishing that they could tell us how they’re really feeling. (When this picture was taken a couple of years ago, Lucifer was clearly wishing I’d stop chasing him around with the camera!)

So what’s at the top of your wish list right now? And if you have a wish to spare, Lucifer could use a few good ones.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

And if you’re wishing for more terrific prizes, be sure to visit the other stops on this hop!

MamatheFox and all participating blogs are not held responsible for sponsors who fail to fulfill their prize obligations.

Review: Junkyard War by Faith Hunter

Posted on February 15, 2023August 26, 2024 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A+ Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews

Junkyard War (Shining Smith #3) by Faith Hunter
Narrator: Khristine Hvam
Format: audiobook
Source: purchased from Audible
Formats available: audiobook
Genres: dystopian, post apocalyptic, urban fantasy
Series: Shining Smith #3
Length: 6 hours and 35 minutes
Published by Audible Audio on December 8, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

It’s find retribution or die trying in Shining Smith’s ultimate challenge, from the author of the “Jane Yellowrock” and “Soulwood” series.

Shining Smith and her crew have obtained the weapons they need to rescue one of their own from the grips of their mortal enemy, Clarisse Warhammer. But to mount an assault on her fortified bunker, they have to cobble together an army of fighters.

That could be the biggest battle of them all.

Shining will need to step back into the biker world she left behind to broker an uneasy peace, then lead rival factions into a certain death trap. Can Shining take Warhammer down without having to compel more and more people to do her bidding? And will her feline warriors, the junkyard cats, remain loyal and fight alongside her? Or will Shining have to become something and someone she hates, so that vengeance can finally be hers?

My Review:

“Bloody damn!” as Shining Smith would say. Bloody damn this was a wild ride in Shining’s sidecar. I meant brain – although occasionally also sidecar.

Because Shining’s post-climate-apocalypse AND dystopia is run by the biker gangs – or at least Shining’s little corner of it as well as her mental landscape are. Shining herself is famous and infamous – in equal measure – among the Outlaw Militia Warriors as ‘Little Girl’ – one of the first female ‘made men’ in that fiercely misogynistic culture.

When Shining was literally a little girl her daddy sent her inside the carapace of one of the enemy’s giant ‘mamabots’ with a nuke strapped to her back. Those mamabots were crawling, rolling factories of nanobots designed to infect and kill anyone or anything they came across. They were helping the enemy to conquer the West Coast of the U.S. one klick at a time.

Shining expected to die in that bot – and she very nearly did. Instead, she came out changed, infected by the bots’ poison and transformed by her own exceedingly stubborn will into the human equivalent of the mamabot – a queen constantly emitting a poison that turns anyone that touches it into her thrall.

Including the ever-increasing crew at her junkyard. Especially the cats. Her Cats, who have a queen of their own who is probably the person truly running the place.

But Shining is not the only human queen, because every true hero – especially if that’s not remotely what they want to be – creates their own archenemy – or the other way around. Clarisse Warhammer targeted Shining all the way back in Junkyard Cats, sending the dead body of her best friend back to her junkyard in the trunk of a rusted out car.

Shining has been gunning for Clarisse ever since.

Junkyard War is the final showdown between Shining and Warhammer, the culmination of every single thing that’s happened since the opening of Junkyard Cats. Shining has pulled every string, coaxed every friend, bribed every enemy she has in order to bring enough firepower to bear to have the best chance possible of crawling out alive after sending herself into the lair of someone much worse than that first mamabot.

This time she doesn’t even have a nuke. What she has this time is better. She has friends. And, more importantly, particularly from their point of view, she has the Cats.

Escape Rating A+: I picked up the audio of the first book in the Shining Smith series, Junkyard Cats, three years ago when the audio was all there was. And did I ever wish there was more.

I got that more in 2021’s Junkyard Bargain, and that still wasn’t enough of Shining Smith, her totally FUBAR’d world, or especially her telepathic battle cats who have probably been running things for a lot longer than Shining either knows or wants to think about.

It’s been a long wait but here we have the climax – sometimes in multiple senses of that word – or Shining’s story in Junkyard War. And I have to say that it has SO been worth the wait.

But it has been a hell of a wait because the three books in the series aren’t so much separate books as they are chapters in a continuing saga that now reads like it has skidded, heart first, into a WOW! of a conclusion.

Which means two things. First, the books pile layer upon layer building Shining’s world, so you really need to start at the beginning in Junkyard Cats. Fortunately, the first two stories, Junkyard Cats and Junkyard Bargain are both available as ebooks as well as audio, and they’re fast, compelling reads.

Second, this does feel like an ending, after an edge-of-the-seat thrilling battle that literally plucks at the heart – because the whole series has been told from Shining’s jaded, world-weary, all too often jaundiced and misanthropic point of view. So when she’s directing her friends, her people and the Cats around an ever changing battlefield and worrying over every single one we’re right in there with her, both because Shining’s voice is so singular and wry, and because the narrator who brings her to us, Khristine Hvam, has done a consistently excellent job of embodying Shining through this entire riveting series.

As this story ends, Shining is confronted with something she’s never really had before – the power to choose her own future. There could be new stories in Shining’s world from this point, but they’d be fundamentally different from what came before. So this is at least a break but also quite possibly as close to an HEA as Shining will ever get considering the state of the world she inhabits.

Either way, it’s a wild ride and a total rush and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Whether or not you’ll feel the same way probably relies on whether or not you are able to fall into Shining’s voice because you see everything from inside her head. I loved riding her journey with her but your reading and/or listening mileage may vary. I hope it doesn’t because she’s one hell of a character experiencing a fantastic and utterly absorbing story.

Review: The Scarlet Circus by Jane Yolen

Posted on February 14, 2023February 11, 2023 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A- Reviews> book reviews

The Scarlet Circus by Jane Yolen, Brandon Sanderson
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: fairy tales, fantasy, fantasy romance, Romance, short stories
Pages: 256
Published by Tachyon Publications on February 14, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The Scarlet Circus, the fourth volume in Yolen’s award-winning short fiction series brings you passionate treasures and unexpected transformations. This bewitching assemblage, with an original introduction from Brandon Sanderson, is an ideal read for anyone who appreciates witty, compelling, and classic romantic fantasy.

A rakish fairy meets the real Juliet behind Shakespeare's famous tragedy. A jewelry artist travels to the past to meet a successful silver-smith. The addled crew of a ship at sea discovers a mysterious merman. More than one ignored princess finds her match in the most unlikely men.

From ecstasy to tragedy, with love blossoming shyly, love at first sight, and even love borne of practical necessity―beloved fantasist Jane Yolen’s newest collection celebrates romance in all its glory.

My Review:

This ended up being my Valentine’s Day review because, to paraphrase the author’s forward just a bit, while the stories contained within are not “Romances” with a capital R, each story does contain a romantic element – even if that element is not the center of the story and seldom results in anything like a happy ever after.

Then again, one does have to kiss a fair number of frogs – and a few outright toads – in order to find the person they’ve been looking for all along.

Many of the stories in this collection are twists on familiar themes – or at least they sound familiar upon reading. “San Soleil” is one of those. It sounds just like the kind of fairy tale we all used to read – with the same kind of sting in its tail about listening to warnings provided by witches and sorceresses. It starts as a love story but is also a bit of a ‘just desserts’ kind of story. Not that anyone is evil. A bit TSTL but not evil.

As the opening story in the collection, it certainly sets the tone for the many and varied ways that love can go off the rails.

I had a sneaking bit of admiration for “Dusty Loves” in the way it takes off on Romeo & Juliet. This is one where the ‘heroine’ really is Too Stupid To Live, and consequently doesn’t. Which is pretty much what happens in Romeo & Juliet which is, after all, a TRAGEDY and not a romance. That the teller of this particular version of the tale has their tongue very firmly in cheek as they relate it makes the whole thing work a bit better than it would on its own.

On that favorite other hand, in “Unicorn Tapestry” the heroine is really a heroine, and most definitely not TSTL. If you like stories where the underdog wins the day, then this one will be right up your reading alley. It certainly left me with a smile at the end.

My least favorite stories in the collection were “A Ghost of an Affair”, “The Sea Man” and “The Erotic Faerie”. “Ghost” because it had so much promise but ended a bit ‘meh’. I felt like I was set up for a better and happier ending than I got. “Sea Man” felt like it didn’t belong here, it gave me vibes of other, more horrific tales than fit in this collection. And “Erotic Faerie” was an interesting concept rather than an actual story, a concept I’ve seen done better in Kenneth Schneyer’s “Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer” in his Anthems Outside Time collection.

Those initial stories were interesting and fun but didn’t quite touch my heart – although “Dusty Loves” certainly tickled my funny bone a bit. These next ones, however, got a bit closer to the heart of the matter – or at least my heart.

“Dark Seed, Dark Stone” takes the idea of a warrior’s child picking up their weapons to defend their king and country and changes that child from the usual son to a daughter who uses more smarts than skills to defend her homeland. This one isn’t so much a romance as it is a story about duty and purpose – and I liked it better for that. It’s more a romance in the older meaning of the word than the current commercial definition, and I liked it all the better for it.

“Memoirs of a Bottle Djinn” takes the usual Aladdin-type story and gives it a twist that’s been seen before – but does it well. In this case, the savvy but desperate discoverer of the bottle is wary about spending his wish foolishly and without thought. At the same time, as a slave he’s all too able to empathize with the djinn’s plight. So he makes a wish they can both live with, happily ever after.

“Peter in Wonderland” was a delightful surprise. It’s clearly a takeoff on Alice in Wonderland, but shows that the real Alice Liddell still travels to Wonderland even in adulthood, and gives her a fellow-adventurer on her trip that leads to a happy ever after a bit different from the one she experienced in real life.

As much as I enjoyed the above stories, my two favorite entries in this Scarlet Circus were wonderfully entertaining indeed.

“Dragonfield” was wonderful because all of its characters are so very flawed in such human ways, and yet they manage to pull each other up and together to defeat the all too real dragon that is terrorizing the town and achieve a happy ever after that neither of them expected or thought they could ever deserve. It’s a romance and an adventure wrapped into one shiny, magical ball of a story and it’s just lovely.

Last, but not least, because the Matter of Britain can never be least of anything, is “The Sword and the Stone”, a much different story than The Sword in the Stone that you may remember from either the novel by T.H. White (part of The Once and Future King), or the Disney movie or even the episode of the British TV series Merlin. For an inanimate object, Excalibur sure does manage to get around.

This version of the tale is told from Merlin’s point of view, and he’s getting pretty jaded at this point in his long life of meddling with Britain. Arthur himself is also a bit older in this version than the more traditional versions of the tale. While he’s trying his best, he’s clearly better, and happier, at some things than others. To the point where he’d much rather fight the wars than wrangle the peace that he needs to secure and maintain. Merlin cooks up the idea of the sword in the stone to give Arthur’s rule the final stamp of popularity and legitimacy it needs. Arthur thinks it’s all mummery, magic and cheating, which it most definitely is. Until it isn’t.

Which makes the ending just that bit more magical.

Escape Rating A-: Like most collections, the stories are a bit all over the map. I adored a couple, liked quite a few more, and a small number just missed the mark for me in one way or another – as the above descriptions show. But overall I’m very glad I picked this up, and enjoyed the ways that it played with romances of many types and stripes and definitions. That “love is all there is is all we know of love” doesn’t have to mean that all loves are exactly the same type.

The author has published three previous collections in a similar vein to this one, not necessarily romances but rather whole entire circuses of fractured and reinterpreted fairy tales like How to Fracture a Fairy Tale, The Midnight Circus and The Emerald Circus. I’m sure I’ll be visiting those circuses the next time I’m looking for familiar tales with just a bit of a twist in their tails.

Review: Never Too Old to Save the World edited by Addie J. King and Alana Joli Abbott

Posted on February 13, 2023February 14, 2023 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A+ Reviews> book reviews

Never Too Old to Save the World: A Midlife Calling Anthology by Alana Joli Abbott, Addie J. King
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: fantasy, science fiction, short stories, urban fantasy
Pages: 318
Published by Outland Entertainment on February 7, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Once every generation there is a Chosen One, who will stand between humanity and darkness.
But why is the Chosen One so often a teenager? Why do only children get swept through portals to save the fantastic world on the other side? Whose idea was it to put the fate of the world in the hands of someone without a fully developed prefrontal cortex?
In Never Too Old to Save the World, nineteen authors explore what would happen if the Chosen One were called midlife. What would happen if the Chosen One were:
a soccer moma cat ladya nosy grandmothera social workera retireean aging swordmaster?
The Chosen One could be anyone— because when the universe calls, the real question is whether the hero will take up the mantle and answer their midlife calling. Sometimes the world needs a hero who's already been in the thick of chaos and survived. In those cases, age does matter.

My Review:

What if you didn’t find a wardrobe to Narnia – or anywhere else – back when you were 8? And you didn’t get your Hogwarts letter at 11? And Gandalf didn’t even manage to come to take you on an adventure at 50?

Or perhaps, by the time Gandalf found you at 50, you thought you were too old to go on adventures – or – and much more likely – had too many commitments in the so-called ‘real world’ to run off and leave your responsibilities behind? After all, Bilbo very nearly did.

That’s what this collection is about. It’s all about people who pick up the mantle of the ‘Chosen One’ in some fantasy or science fictional world who are explicitly not children or teens. Who are a bit too tied down – or a bit too wised up – to be the fool that rushes in where angels rightly fear to tread. Or so they think.

This collection is for everyone who missed that wardrobe or that letter and still wonders whether or not they’d have what it takes – or have the willingness to feel the fear and do it anyway – if a white wizard or a mad man with a blue box came calling for them.

There are 19 fabulous stories in this collection – and I think I loved every single one. To the point where I can’t just pick one favorite. I have to pick two.

My favorite fantasy story is “Jackalope Wives” by Ursula Vernon – who also writes marvelously fantastic fantasy and horror as T. Kingfisher. “Jackalope Wives” is the only story in the book that has been previously published, originally in Apex Magazine and later in her short story collection Jackalope Wives and Other Stories.

This is the story that won the 2014 Nebula Award for Best Short Story and should have won the 2015 Hugo Award in the same category. But, well, puppies. I digress and I need to stop to keep from going there again. Because ARRGGGHHH. Still.

“Jackalope Wives” is one of those stories that surprises the reader with a twist at the end that is even more heartbreaking, in its way, than the story you thought you were reading – which was already heartbreaking enough. Grandma Harken is absolutely correct that “You get over what you can’t have faster than you get over what you could.” But the truth of that statement doesn’t make the getting over any faster or any easier.

As a counterweight to the bitter, bitter sweetness of “Jackalope Wives”, my science fictional favorite story is “Launch Day Milkshakes” by Jim C. Hines, which is literally laugh out loud funny. To the point where I started laughing and couldn’t get a breath OR stop as my spouse looked over at me like I’d lost my mind because I could not catch enough breath to explain the joke.

At first, “Launch Day Milkshakes” is a story about absolutely deliciously getting one over on a misogynistic asshat boss in the biggest and best way possible. It’s also a brainship story in the vein of Anne McCaffrey’s classic, The Ship Who Sang. But that’s not all it is, and neither of those things were the parts that made me laugh so hard – no matter how much I enjoyed the asshat’s comeuppance. Which I very much did. I’m not going to spoil this one because it’s just so much fun when you get the joke – and see it get batted around like the universe’s biggest ball of yarn.

I know I said two favorites, but my third is kind of a riff on Buffy, meaning that there’s some urban fantasy in here as well. “Lean In: The Lord of Hell is Coming” by Ericka Kahler starts out with the local representative for the equivalent of the Watchers coming to a CEO to tell her that demons are coming to her city and that she’s the ‘Chosen One’ who is supposed to vanquish them. It’s not news to Mary Ann because she already has, just not in the way that heaven expected or that hell can ever manage to fight. I think this one is funnier the longer you think about it.

Of the rest of the collection, there are considerably more fantasy stories than SF as fantasy does tend to lend itself more to ‘chosen one’ narratives. Not that there haven’t been more than a few famous SF stories in this vein (I’m looking at you, Luke Skywalker – ahem). But magical appointments, by their very nature, do find themselves a bit more comfy – while their protagonists are generally quite uncomfy – in fantasy.

Because I loved this collection so hard, I can’t resist a brief shout out to every single one of the stories in it. The SF stories are listed first because there were fewer of them and because I’m contrary that way.

“The M.A.M.I. Incident” by Guadalupe Garcia McCall reminded me a whole lot of Day Zero by Robert C. Cargill which makes for a great but uncomfortable story.
“Utopia” by Vaseem Khan about making a friend out of a very great enemy.
“All the World’s Treasures” by Kimberly Pauley about a family legacy that is just so much bigger on the inside than it first appears.
“Big Momma Saves the World” by Maurice Broaddus about the great power in bad macaroni and cheese.
“A Legacy of Ghosts” by Sarah Hans about exorcizing one’s very own demon family with the power of positive thinking.
“Adya and the Messengers” by Jaymie Wagner about the proper treatment of heavenly messengers and their steeds.
“Soccer Mom Saves the World” by Addie J. King, a story whose title does pretty much say it all.
“My Roots Run Deep” by John F. Allen about a social worker saving the multiverse and getting her groove back at the same time.
“It’s My Nature – A ‘Monster Hunter Mom’ Adventure” by JD Blackrose, another one whose title gives more than a bit of a clue about the story.
“Truthteller” by Linda Robertson, a historical fantasy about an object of power that isn’t quite what any of the parties seeking it imagined.
“Granny” by R.J. Sullivan about a neighborhood snoop who is way more than she seems.
“The Sunspear” by Alexandra Pitchford, about a young woman who believes she has a destiny and a middle aged woman who is running from hers.
“Once a Queen” by Alana Joli Abbott, a Narnia-like story with a much better ending.
“By the Works of Her Hands” by LaShawn M. Wanak, another Narnia-type story where the portal opens as a lure to pull the right person in chasing after the young fool who rushes in believing that they are ‘the one’ when they’re just bait for their mother.
“Strange Wings” by Kathryn Ivey about a warning that comes nearly too late.
And last in both the collection and this list: “The Mountain Witch” by Lucy A. Snyder about the uses to which both heroes and villains are put when they are both female.

Escape Rating A+: I don’t normally list every single story in a collection like this, but this collection frequently got me in the feels and gave me something to identify with in just about every story. Sometimes we all need that reminder that age is just a number and that everyone has it in them to save, if not the world, at least their corner of it.

I’m also still hoping against hope that Gandalf will finally get the hint!

The Sunday Post AKA What’s on my (Mostly Virtual) Nightstand 2-12-23

Posted on February 12, 2023February 11, 2023 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | The Sunday Post> Virtual Nightstand

I’m not quite sure whether to refer to Luna as “Sinkable Luna” or “Unsinkable Luna” in this picture. She’s in the sink but she’s not sinking. She’s still cute as a button no matter what we call her!

Speaking of sinking, however, I kind of sank my intended reading plan for this week. I shifted The Scarlet Circus because as soon as I started it I realized it was just a much better book for Valentine’s Day than I had originally planned. While just writing the review of Babel made me go running for a comfort read, leading me straight to The Cliff’s Edge. I’m still planning to read Firebreak, probably Presidents’ Day week.

Current Giveaways:

$10 Gift Card or $10 Book in the Heart 2 Heart Giveaway Hop
$10 Gift Card or $10 Book in the February Favorites Giveaway Hop
$10 Gift Card or $10 Book in the Winter 2022-23 Seasons of Books Giveaway Hop