Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley

#BookReview: Miss Amelia’s List by Mercedes Lackey

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Miss Amelia’s List by Mercedes LackeyMiss Amelia's List (Elemental Masters Book 17) by Mercedes Lackey
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: regency fantasy, fantasy, historical fantasy
Series: Elemental Masters #17
Pages: 336
Published by DAW on December 24, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The seventeenth novel in the magical alternate history Elemental Masters series follows Amelia Stonehold and Serena Meleva as they navigate property acquisition, marriage proposals, and other ancient horrors in Regency England, but with the help of elemental magicThe year is 1815, and an American, Miss Amelia Stonehold, has arrived in the Devon town of Axminster, accompanied by her "cousin" Serena Meleva. She’s brought with her a list to tick find a property, investigate the neighbors, bargain for and purchase the property, staff the property and...possibly...find a husband. But Amelia soon finds herself contending with some decidedly off-list trouble, including the Honorable Captain Harold Roughtower, whose eyes are fixed on her fortune. Little does Amelia know that his plans for her wealth extend far beyond refurbishing his own crumbing estate — they include the hidden Roman temple of Glykon, where something very old, very angry, and very dangerous still lurks. But Roughtower isn’t prepared to reckon with the fact that neither Amelia nor Serena are pushovers. And he certainly isn’t ready for the revelation that he has an Earth Master and a Fire Mage on his hands — or that one of them is a shapeshifter.

My Review:

Miss Amelia’s List is a lovely and charming story that will especially appeal to Jane Austen lovers who occasionally wish there was just a bit more actual magic in her stories – but do not want to go nearly as far as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

I’m pretty sure the above requires a bit of explanation. Maybe even more than a bit.

Amelia Stonehold and her cousin Serena Meleva arrive in London from the former – definitely and definitively former – American colonies in 1815. To set the historical stage, the War of 1812 was settled by treaty in December of 1814 – which means that some people are still a bit salty about it on both sides of the Atlantic. Jane Austen has published her first three novels, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park, under the pseudonym, ‘A Lady’. The Regency period is in the fullest of its flower. Napoleon is still in his first exile on Elba and has not yet ‘met his Waterloo’ and made that phrase into a cliché.

While this entry in the Elemental Masters series is number 17 in publication order, this series of magical retellings and reinterpretations of classic myths, legends, tales and historical events has not been published in ANY chronological order. The previous book in the series, The Silver Bullets of Annie Oakley, is set in the late 19th century. Annie Oakley wasn’t even born until 1860 – long after the events of Miss Amelia’s List take place.

Which, by a roundabout route, leads us back to Amelia and Serena by way of Jane Austen. I put it that way because Amelia’s and Serena’s introduction to the Regency reads very much like the ‘comedy of manners’ style of Austen. Or at least like Austen if Austen knew about magic.

While Amelia’s and Serena’s perspectives on Regency society are very much informed by their ‘colonial’ origins, the realities of life in a new world, and the existence of magic and their significant powers within it, their story, and the events in which they participate and/or are excluded from is very similar to the world Austen described in such loving detail.

Which means that a large portion of Miss Amelia’s List is, in fact and told in a much more lively fashion, about the list of things that Amelia Stonehold has come to England to accomplish, and about the progression of Amelia and Serena through the highly structured but often ridiculously stratified and stultifying ‘society’ in which they must play an exacting part in order to get things done.

It’s fun, it’s charming. It’s occasionally teeth gnashing but because of Amelia’s and Serena’s outsider perspectives that teeth gnashing is shared by the characters. They know the so-called ‘rules’ are OFTEN ridiculous while knowing they must at least appear to conform, so the reader is in charity with them when some high-stickler makes an ass of themselves in their presence – or behind their backs.

But it’s not a story of action – in spite of the blurb. (Yes, I know, I’ve not been ‘in charity’ with a lot of blurbs in the last few weeks.) Miss Amelia’s List is utterly charming, a delightfully well told Austenesque ‘comedy of manners’, but there’s not a lot of excitement. At least, not until the very end.

An ending which includes death, dismemberment, big snakes and small helpers, as well as a happy ever after that appropriately differs for each and every character.

Escape Rating B: Miss Amelia’s List is a story that I truly enjoyed while I was in it. Howsomever, right up until the very end I didn’t feel any compulsion to find out what happened next, because there’s not really a lot happening at all.

Amelia, surprisingly so for being an Earth Master in this particular magic system, is rather like a duck or better yet, a swan, seeming to float effortless on top of the water – or all the various social situations to which she of necessity must adapt – while paddling furiously under the water DOING all that adapting.

Which is where I circle back to Austen’s comedy of manners style, as a LOT of what Amelia does is observation and then tailoring her behavior to what she’s observed. She may be extremely ruffled on the inside – and in fact often is – but she must appear decidedly UNruffled at all times, which she does.

So not a lot happens because it’s her ‘job’ in effect to make sure that it seems like not a lot is happening. Even if, or especially because, the reality is that a lot is getting done. Which again, gets back to the story being charming and lovely and a delight to sink into much like a warm bath, BUT not exactly a page-turner.

You might very well be looking for something EXACTLY like this amidst, or after, the holiday bustle. I absolutely enjoyed my read of it and hope that the Elemental Masters series eventually returns to the setting and some of the characters of Miss Amelia’s List.

After all, finding a husband for Miss Amelia herself was explicitly NOT on her list. Maybe it will be if we have the chance to see her again. If you like the concept of the Elemental Masters, but want a story that’s a bit more of a page-turner, you might want to try either The Silver Bullets of Annie Oakley or the Sherlock Holmes subseries – my personal favorite – that begins with A Study in Sable.

#AudioBookReview: I Made It Out of Clay by Beth Kander + #Excerpt

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> blog tours> book reviews> C Reviews> Excerpts
#AudioBookReview: I Made It Out of Clay by Beth Kander + #ExcerptI Made It Out of Clay by Beth Kander
Narrator: Gail Shalan
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, Hanukkah romance, holiday romance, magical realism
Pages: 352
Length: 9 hours and 47 minutes
Published by Harlequin Audio, Mira on December 10, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In this darkly funny and surprisingly sweet novel, a woman creates a golem in a desperate attempt to pretend her life is a romantic comedy rather than a disaster.
Nothing’s going well for Eve: She’s single, turning forty, stressed at work and anxious about a recent series of increasingly creepy incidents. Most devastatingly, her beloved father died last year, and her family still won’t acknowledge their sorrow.
With her younger sister’s wedding rapidly approaching, Eve is on the verge of panic. She can’t bear to attend the event alone. That’s when she recalls a strange story her Yiddish grandmother once told her, about a protector forged of desperation… and Eve, to her own shock, manages to create a golem.
At first everything seems great. The golem is indeed protective—and also attractive. But when they head out to a rural summer camp for the family wedding, Eve’s lighthearted rom-com fantasy swiftly mudslides into something much darker.

My Review:

This is going to be one of those reviews where I write AROUND the book more than I write ABOUT the book, because my reaction was considerably more about the issues it raised than it was about the content – and that’s saying something because I have more than a few of those as well. Just that some of those issues are ‘me’ things that may or may not be ‘you’ things.

As always, your reading mileage may absolutely vary, so in this particular case I’m pleased that I have an excerpt from the book to include so that you can judge for yourself whether this will turn out to be a book for you.

I have an additional reason for including the excerpt. I want you to have a chance to see what the book actually IS, rather than what the blurb says it is. Because that’s very much a case of never the twain shall meet.

As the story opens, Eve’s life is far, far, far from being a rom-com. Also, the story is neither darkly funny nor sweet, surprisingly or otherwise. And she doesn’t create the golem until nearly the halfway point of things.

But the story is dark, because Eve’s is in the middle of a long, dark night of the soul. Her beloved father died suddenly just barely a year ago as this Hanukkah story opens, and she’s still utterly devastated. She’s never gotten over the death of grandmother a few years previously, so she’s grieving double while her mother and sister both seem to be breezing along. She has few friends, she’s terribly lonely, and she’s eating her feelings constantly. As if that weren’t enough, her employer is hinting strongly at layoffs AFTER the holidays if not before.

In other words, Eve is in a pit and hasn’t stopped digging. It’s hard to read about just how terrible she’s feeling and how much depression she’s dragging around.

Which is where the audiobook, read marvelously by Gail Shalan, made things worse for me personally because she did such a terrific job as the narrator. When a story is written in the first person perspective, and it’s narrated by someone who is a great match for the character, I get a bit too deeply caught up in the character’s emotions.

And that’s what happened in I Made It Out of Clay. Not just because Eve and I are both Jewish, but because her Chicago neighborhood is where I used to live, her parents’ synagogue is in the town where I used to work and I lost my own father exactly the same way she did. It all got a bit too close – at least before she magicked up that golem – and I got so into her problems they were depressing me.

So my feelings about the story went to places that the author couldn’t possibly have known or intended, but absolutely did affect my reading and listening of it.

The story does get, well, livelier, for lack of a better term, and does head into the sort of horror-adjacent dark I was expecting from that blurb, once the golem arrives on the scene. Eve’s frantic efforts to disguise her wedding date as a real person and not a magical construct gave the story a lot more oomph than it had up to that point.

But I was too mired in her depression to see whatever funny or sweet parts there might be until the very, very end.

Escape Rating C: If you’re looking for this to be a Hanukkah-themed romantic comedy based on that blurb, you’re going to be in for a bit of disappointment. Instead, II would recommend you take a look at Love You a Latke by Amanda Elliot, Eight Nights to Win Her Heart by Miri White to fill that particular holiday craving and Magical Meet Cute by Jean Meltzer if you think your Hanukkah romance reading won’t be complete without at least one golem among your eight nights of presents.

Excerpt from I Made It Out of Clay by Beth Kander

The soft growl on the train is coming from me.
I flush with shame at the insistent rumbling of my stomach. Thankfully, the Monday-morning brown line is too crowded with bundled-up commuters for anyone but me to notice the sound. If someone does somehow clock it, they’ll probably assume it’s coming from the pigtailed pregnant woman I gave my seat to at the last stop.
The train lurches, and I nearly drop my peppermint mocha. Technically, you’re not supposed to have open food or beverages aboard, but no one follows that rule. You’ll only get in trouble if you spill on someone. Nobody really cares what’s going on in the background until the mess impacts them.
When my stomach rumbles yet again, the pigtailed pregnant woman gives me a conspiratorial look. Everyone else on the train might think it’s her, but she knows it’s me. She isn’t judging, though; her expression is friendly. Surprisingly kind and intimate in a maternal sort of way. I take in her pert nose, amused hazel eyes, and the beautiful coppery shade of her two neat, thick braids. I want to tell her I bet you’re gonna be a great mother—but who needs to hear that from a stranger? Besides, maybe she already is a mother. This might not be her first rodeo.
Another grumble from my midsection cues me to return my attention to myself. I smile weakly, averting my gaze as I take a slow sip of my mocha, attempting to temporarily silence my stomach’s demands. While I’ve always had a healthy appetite, lately it’s like I’m haunted by this constant craving. I can take the edge off sometimes, but I’m never really satisfied.
My granddaughter Eve, oy, let me tell you, she can really eat, my grandmother used to say with pride. But it wasn’t a problem when I was a kid. I was just a girl who liked food. Now, it’s like I can never get enough. I’ve been trying to tell myself it’s seasonal. The weather. Winter cold snap making everyone want to hibernate and fatten up like all those rotund city squirrels. But I think it’s something more than that.
Like, say, losing my father a year ago.
Or my looming fortieth birthday.
Or my little sister’s upcoming wedding.
Or the growing conviction that I’m going to die alone.
Or, most likely, all of the above.
Rather than sift through all the wreckage, it’s easiest to just blame my hungry malaise on December—and specifically, Christmas.
Holidays make excellent emotional scapegoats, and I’ve always had a powerful love/hate relationship with Christmas. I’m pretty sure that’s just part of growing up as a religious minority in America. The holiday to end all holidays is an omnipresent blur of red and green, a nonstop monthlong takeover of society as we know it, which magically manages to be both inescapable and exclusionary. It’s relentless. Exhausting.
But at the same time, dammit, the persistent cheer is intoxicating, and I want in on it.
That’s why I do things like set my vintage radio alarm to the twenty-four-hour-carols station that pops up every November for the “countdown to Christmas.” It’s an annual ritual I never miss, but also never mention to any of my friends—the literal definition of guilty pleasure, which might just be the most Jewish kind of enjoyment ever.
From Thanksgiving all the way until the New Year, I start every day with the sounds of crooning baritones, promises of holiday homecomings, and all those bells—silver, jingling, carol-of-the. I can’t help it. My whole life, I’ve loved all the glitzy aspects of the season. The sparkling lights adorning trees and outlining the houses and apartment buildings throughout Chicagoland always seemed so magical to the little Jewish girl with the only dark house on the block. And as an adult, God help me, I cannot get enough of seasonal mochas. (At the same time, I feel a need to assert my Hanukkah-celebrant status, resenting the default assumption that everyone celebrates Christmas. Because humans are complicated.)
One of the best and worst things about the holiday season is how much more you wind up chatting with other people. Wishing total strangers happy holidays, commenting on their overflowing shopping bags, chitchatting with people in line for the aforementioned addictive peppermint mochas. I’m not in the mood for it this year as much as in years past, but once in a while I’m glad to take advantage of the holiday-related conversational opportunities.
For instance, there’s a new guy in my apartment building. He moved in a few months ago. He has a British accent, thick dark brows, muscular arms, and a charming tendency to hold the door for everyone. I haven’t crushed this hard on someone since high school. We said hello a few times over the fall, but December has opened the door to much more lobby banter.
Hot Josh—which is what I call him when he’s not around, and am absolutely doomed to someday accidentally call him in person—has been getting a lot of boxes delivered to our lobby. Which, for better or worse, has given me multiple excuses to make stupid jokes. Most recently, a huge overseas package arrived; it had clearly cost a fortune to ship. Hot Josh made some comment about the overzealous shipper of said holiday package, rolling his eyes at the amount of postage plastered all over the box.
It’s better than if they forgot to put on any stamps at all, I said. Have you heard the joke about the letter someone tried to send without a stamp?
Uh, no? Hot Josh replied, raising an eyebrow.
You wouldn’t get it, I said, and snort-laughed.
He just blinked. Apparently, for some of us, all those cheery holiday conversational opportunities are more like sparkling seasonal landmines.
At the next train stop, only a few passengers exit, while dozens more shove their way in. The handful of departing passengers include the pigtailed pregnant woman. She rises awkwardly from her seat, giving me a hey-thanks-again farewell nod as she indicates I should sit there again.
I look around cautiously as I reclaim my seat, making sure no new pregnant, elderly, or otherwise-in-need folks are boarding. It’s only after I finish this courtesy check that I notice I’m now sitting directly across from a man in full Santa Claus gear.
He’s truly sporting the whole shebang: red crushed-velvet suit with wide black belt and matching buckle, epic white beard, and thigh-high black boots. His bowl-full-of-jelly belly is straining the buttons on the jacket, and I honestly can’t tell if it’s a pillow or a legit beer gut.
I’m not sure how to react. If Dad was here, he wouldn’t hesitate. He’d high-five Santa, and they’d instantly be best friends.
But I never know where to start, what to say. Like, should I smile at the guy? Refer to him as “Santa”? Maybe, like, salute him, or something?
I gotta at least take a picture and text it to Dad. He’d get such a kick out of this guy—
My hand automatically goes for my phone, pulling it swiftly from my pocket. But my amusement is cut off with a violent jerk when I touch the screen and nothing happens. That’s when I remember that my phone is off—and why I keep it off.
My rumbling stomach curdles. Even after a whole year, the habit of reaching for my phone to share something with my father hasn’t gone away. I’m not sure it ever will.
Shoving my phone back into my coat pocket, I ignore St. Nick and just stare out the filthy train windows instead. Even through this grayish pane streaked with God-knows-what horrific substances, the city is beautiful. I love the views from the train, even the inglorious graffiti and glimpses of small backyards. And now, every neighborhood in Chicago has its holiday decorations up.
This Midwestern metropolis, with its glittering architecture, elegant lakefront, and collection of distinct neighborhoods sprawling away from the water, knows how to show off. Most people think downtown is prettiest. But if you ask me, it’s hard to beat my very own neighborhood, Lincoln Square.
In the center of the Square is Giddings Plaza. In summertime the plaza’s large stone fountain is the bubbling backdrop to all the concerts and street festivals in the brick-paved square. But in wintertime, the water feature is drained and becomes the planter for a massive Christmas tree. Surrounded by all the perky local shops, the plaza is cute as hell year-round. When you add tinsel and twinkle lights and a giant fir tree that looks straight out of a black-and-white Christmas movie, it’s almost unbearably charming.
We haven’t had a proper snowfall yet, so the natural seasonal scenery has been lacking a little. But even with the bare tree limbs and gray skies, the stubbornly sparkling holiday decor provides a whispered promise of magic ahead.
I really want to believe in that magic.
The light shifts as we rattle beneath looming buildings and trees, and I briefly catch my reflection in the dirty window. Dark curls crushed beneath my olive-green knit cap, round cheeks, dark eyes, no makeup except a smear of lip gloss I bought because it was called Holiday Cheer. The details are all familiar, but I barely recognize myself. I wonder if I’ll ever feel like the real-me again, or if grief has made me into someone else entirely.
Last month marked the one-year anniversary of losing my dad. A whole year, and it still doesn’t feel real. Most days, it seems like I’m in the wrong version of my life. Or like everything around me is just some strange movie set I wandered onto and can’t seem to escape. I keep waiting for things to feel normal again. For me to feel normal again.
Hasn’t happened yet.

Excerpted from I MADE IT OUT OF CLAY by Beth Kander. Copyright © 2024 by Beth Kander. Published by MIRA, an imprint of HTP/HarperCollins.

Grade A #BookReview: Mechanize My Hands to War by Erin K. Wagner

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: Mechanize My Hands to War by Erin K. WagnerMechanize My Hands to War by Erin K. Wagner
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: artificial intelligence, dystopian, post apocalyptic, robots, science fiction
Pages: 320
Published by DAW on December 17, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The debut novel from Erin K Wagner is a chilling nonlinear sci-fi that examines androids as a labor force in conflict with both human farmers and homegrown militias in near-future Appalachia
Deep in the hills of Appalachia, anti-android sentiment is building. Charismatic demagogue Eli Whitaker has used anger toward new labor policies that replace factory workers with androids to build a militia–and now he is recruiting child soldiers.
Part of a governmental task force, Adrian and Trey are determined to put a stop to Whitaker’s efforts. Their mission is complicated by their own shared childhood experiences with Whitaker. After an automated soldier shoots a child during a raid to protect Trey, both grapple with the role of androids and their use in combat.
Interrelated with the hunt for Whitaker, farmers Shay and Ernst struggle after they discover their GMO crop seeds have failed and caused a deadly illness in Shay. To help manage, they hire android employees: Sarah as hospice, and AG-15 to work the now-toxic fields. The couple’s relationship to the androids evolve as both humans get progressively more sick.
Timely and chilling, Wagner's nonlinear debut shares intimate narratives of loss, trauma, and survival as the emergence of artificial life intersects with state violence and political extremism in rural Appalachia.

My Review:

I picked this up because I fell hard into the author’s debut novella, An Unnatural Life, and was hoping for more of the same. I absolutely got it with Mechanize My Hands to War, as this was both more in its continued exploration of a future relationship between humans and sentient AIs, and more literally, as I wished that An Unnatural Life had a bit more time to explore its variations on that theme and this book is nearly twice as long.

Which it absolutely needed to be to get all the things it needed to, even as tightly packed in layers as it turned out to be.

The outer layer of this story is a bit of a near-dystopia. Or a could-be apocalypse. It’s 2061 and the U.S. is on the brink of a whole lot of things that could go really, really pear-shaped. That the setting of this story isn’t all that far out from when we are now is definitely part of the point.

The surface story is about two senior agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives – and it’s the “explosives” part of that mandate that has dragged the Bureau into this situation.

A private militia has been growing throughout the heartland, recruiting people who feel that the lives they have built have been stolen from them by a government that is poisoning the land of their farms with poorly tested chemicals and/or filling their factory jobs with robots.

They’re not exactly right – but they’re not exactly wrong, either. Howsomever, their methods are problematic in the extreme.

First, they’re stockpiling explosives, which always draws the ATF’s attention. Second, they are recruiting and training child soldiers, and that gets everyone’s attention even as it complicates every single one of the ATF’s operations.

Because no human wants to shoot a child – even if that child is aiming a weapon right at them.

The situation reaches a flash-point, figuratively and literally, when a robot DOES shoot a child while following its orders and its programming to the letter.

In the midst of the firestorm of controversy, no one is willing to even think the hard truth – that the problem, and the blame – rest not with the programmed unit Ora, but with the humans who programmed him.

Escape Rating A: The story, the outer layer of it at least, is deceptively simple. And then things get really complicated, both in the story itself and in what’s hiding underneath it. Whenever I stop to think about it for even a minute, more ideas pop to the surface and swim underneath.

On the surface, that single story is already multiple stories. The first is the story of the extremely uncivil war between the Civil Union Militia and the ATF as proxy for the entire U.S. government. But underneath that layer, there’s the breakdown of the U.S. into factions, an extension of the tension between the cities and the heartland, that already exists.

A conflict that is exacerbated by the presence of robots as factory workers, mail carriers, and home health aides, doing any job that can be programmed reasonably effectively. But also as soldiers – and cops.

And that’s where Mechanize My Hands to War does what science fiction does best. Because on the surface that story is simple enough. The robots ARE, in fact, replacing humans in a lot of jobs, displacing a lot of people who had work that did not require a higher education, and not leaving nearly as many such jobs behind as there are people who need them. It’s a fear that has been played out recently in both the Writers Guild of America/Screen Actors Guild strike of 2023 and the Dockworkers’ strike of October 2024.

But the robots and the AIs did not create and program themselves to do these jobs and replace those workers. (They might, someday, but that would be a different story entirely – or a later one.) The robots are merely an easier and more reachable target for those who have been negatively impacted by the changes.

They represent the scapegoat that people are supposed to focus on, so they don’t attack who is really responsible – the corporations who have studied the calculus of profitability and know that replacing five humans with one human and four robots is better for their bottom line.

And it’s easy to see the robots of this story as the immigrants in today’s screaming – and all too frequently erroneous – headlines.

Which is where the story turns back upon itself into that original SFnal premise. Just because the robots were intended to be self aware but not sapient, does not mean that they have not evolved beyond their programming. That the more that the programmers attempt to create a complicated enough decision making matrix for the units, one that would keep another robot from killing another child even though that child is a clear threat, the more independent thought processes the robots have to work with.

The place where THAT might lead gives the story an open-ended and very SFnal ending. But the points that it raised keep dancing around in my head. As the best science fiction stories absolutely do.

A- #BookReview: How to Steal a Galaxy by Beth Revis

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: How to Steal a Galaxy by Beth RevisHow to Steal a Galaxy (Chaotic Orbits #2) by Beth Revis
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction, science fiction romance, space opera
Series: Chaotic Orbits #2
Pages: 144
Published by DAW on December 3, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Sparks fly when Ada and Rian just-so-happen to find themselves at the same charity gala—but there’s something rotten behind the sparkling gowns and dazzling wealth on display

This heist turned rom-com from New York Times bestselling author Beth Revis is perfect for fans of sexy, romantic science fiction and readers of Martha Wells and Becky Chambers

Ada had no intention whatsoever to continue working for the rebel group that hired her to retrieve the government’s plans for a nanobot climate cleaner if they weren’t willing to pay her for it, but then they offer a different perk: an undercover mission to a charity gala where Rian will be in attendance. Rian, meanwhile, has volunteered his services for the gala believing that the rare items up for auction will attract Ada’s eye. Hoping to catch her in the act and pin her with a punishable crime, Rian has no idea Ada’s really after.

In a high-stakes game of theft and deception, Ada plays to win...and Rian will do anything to stop her.

My Review:

In this arresting follow-up to the first book in the Chaotic Orbits trilogy, Full Speed to a Crash Landing, mercenary hacker/thief Ada Lamarr is on the trail of a much more interesting quarry than a mere locked data box. This time she’s not after treasure, she’s after the person who has set himself up as the guardian of a whole, entire museum full of priceless antiquities.

Agent Rian White has his eye on Ada from the moment she arrives at the Museum of Intergalactic History, absolutely certain she’s planning to steal one of the Sol-Earth artifacts no matter how many times she’s says that she’s there for him.

She’s not even lying. She’s certainly toying with the man – but she’s not lying. Not that she wouldn’t like to steal one of the artifacts – and not that she wouldn’t enjoy tweaking the ego of the rich rat bastard who’s the star of this particular charity gala – but she really, truly isn’t there for either of those things.

She really is there for Rian White – for considerably more reasons than she’s willing to admit, even to herself. So all of Rian’s operatives are busy watching her, while she has her eye on her prize all along.

And not that she doesn’t put the dominoes in motion for a couple of secondary prizes along her way.

Ada may not be fooling with White – but someone else already has. Her job – for which she is being paid very good money – – is to remove the scales from White’s eyes and get him to come in on her saving the world caper.

She may be in it for the money, but he’s a true believer. All she has to do is get him to believe – in her.

Escape Rating A-: The caper – and it absolutely is a caper every step of the way – is delightfully frothy, light and sparkling, and filled with witty banter covering plenty of wry undertones and more than a hint of forbidden romance.

Ada is, after all, a thief, and it’s Rian’s job to keep her from stealing anything. But she’s also, in this particular case, the misdirection. He – and his fellow agents – are so busy following Ada that they miss entirely too much of what’s going on around them.

Which is what underpins the whole story of the series – and it’s a doozy once all the sparkling bubbles have popped.

Because White and his fellow agents believe that they are protecting the plan to save a world. This world, in fact. Earth-Sol, the cradle of humanity. They believe that the government that they work for is more-or-less on the side of the angels. That they are doing good while Ada and her employers’ efforts are getting in the way of something both righteous and virtuous.

But that’s not the way the universe works. Especially not when doing good gets in the way of making a really huge, neverending, profit.

The way that this particular story works is that Ada’s seemingly aimless wandering through the Museum Gala is meant to misdirect Rian White, any of his agents, the reader AND the story, all at the same time.

It reads like a bit of light froth, that she’s playing with him, while he’s doing his damndest not to play with her, and that she’s then playing with the scene around her and filling in time while something happens in the background.

And that’s somewhat true and also a bit of a tease for the reader. It makes the story seem much lighter hearted than it really is and keeps White guessing as well. We know Ada is wearing a mask, she even admits as much, but we don’t really see what that mask is in service of.

When she rips it off at the end it’s an ‘aha!’ moment for the reader and an utter shock to White – and that’s when we all get the shape of things to come – or at least we think we do. Ada may have fooled us all again and we won’t learn in exactly what way until the final book in the trilogy, Last Chance to Save the World, coming April. I can’t wait to finally see Ada put all of her cards on the table – and to see if Rian picks them up.

A couple of final notes. Readers who have played Mass Effect may find Ada’s infiltration of the Museum reminiscent of Kasumi Goto’s infiltration of Donovan Hock’s party in Mass Effect 2 – complete with sexy, high-end wardrobe. However, in comparison to Strom Fetor, Hock is fairly penny-ante even if he bears a strong resemblance to a certain real world tech billionaire, amasser of tech companies that he claims to have invented but then destroys, and all around teflon coated, egotistical, arsehole.

Your reading mileage may vary on that bit, but seeing Ada obviously set him up for some comeuppance at a later date did add a bit of just desserts to the impending evil in both worlds that added just an extra fillip of deliciousness to the whole story so far. The ending in Last Chance to Save the World looks like it’s going to be a doozy!

#BookReview: Eight Nights to Win Her Heart by Miri White

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Eight Nights to Win Her Heart by Miri WhiteEight Nights to Win Her Heart by Miri White
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: contemporary romance, Hanukkah romance, holiday romance
Pages: 304
Published by Alcove Press on October 15, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Bask in the warm glow of the menorah in this debut Jewish rom-com featuring a hard of hearing hero and a Chanukah meet-cute.
Andie Williams is not looking forward to spending her first Chanukah alone after her father’s death. About to lose her job, with her only prospect for another work opportunity across the country, she could use some chutzpah to make it through the eight nights alone.
Leo Dentz has had a crush on the girl across the hall from his apartment for years but has never had the courage to say anything—until she drops her grocery bags and he notices her drug store Chanukah candles. Ready to take a chance outside of his comfort zone, Leo offers to join Andie on the first night, sharing his dinner with her. As Andie and Leo fall for each other one night at a time, and the clock ticks down on Andie’s move, will this season of miracles light their way forward?

My Review:

As ably demonstrated by both this book and Monday’s Love You a Latke, the eight nights of Hanukkah represent the perfect amount of time for a relatively quick but totally not insta-romance between two people who already know each other but don’t really KNOW each other.

You’ll see.

Andie and Leo have been neighbors in their apartment building for a while, more than long enough for them to have crushes on each other that they’ve each been either afraid, or too busy, or both to even attempt to figure out if there might be more.

That neither of them knows whether the other is Jewish is a part of that hesitation – and not an unreasonable part. It’s just that the list of reasons is long on both sides – Andie and her father were a tight-knit circle of two after the death of her mother and estrangement from the rest of his family, and he just passed away earlier in the year.

Leo – along with his younger brother Dean – have been locked in a terrible cycle of grudges and retribution over the future of their family business for the past twelve years. It’s even worse than it sounds, as the incident that Glen Dentz has been holding over his sons for more than a decade happened when Leo was in his mid-teens and Dean was even younger. They should NEVER have been roughhousing in the back of the family’s antiques store. BUT dumb behavior and teenagers do go hand in hand.

They’ve been making up for it ever since and there has been absolutely no budging on even the possibility of forgiveness on the part of their father. To the point where Leo and Dean are ready to buy the family business from their father – just as he got it from HIS father – and dear old dad is so caught up in his own bitterness that he’d rather sell it to a stranger than his own sons.

Who have been the ones actually running the business – and making a profit at it – for several years at this point.

Both Leo and Andie are on the horns of very different dilemmas – which is what makes for the best kind of realistic tension in romance. Andie is a preschool teacher, and the program she works for and LOVES is shutting down at the end of the year due to a lack of funds. Leo needs to decide just how much he can keep giving 110% to a business that may never be his – and more importantly – to a father who will never let his adult behavior redeem a not merely childISH but outright childHOOD mistake.

Andie has to decide whether to accept a job offer in Ohio, far away from the Boston area she loves that holds her friends and all of her memories of her beloved father. Leo has to decide whether it’s time to strike out on his own – even if that strikes any possibility of reconciliation with his father.

After a chance meeting in the hallway of their apartment building over a broken bag filled with some equally broken Hanukkah candles, Andie and Leo both decide to make this Hanukkah one to remember. With each other. Even if whatever relationship they build comes with a limited shelf life.

But Hanukkah is the season of miracles, and with the help of a magic menorah and a conniving ten-year-old, Leo and Andie might just manage to get a great one.

Escape Rating B: As part of being one of the Elves for this year’s Ho-Ho-Ho Readathon, I was looking for stories that were not the usual suspects when it comes to ‘holiday’ stories. Meaning either romances that were wrapped around holidays other than Xmas that are celebrated this time of year, like today’s book and Monday’s Love You a Latke, or are holiday stories but specifically not romances, such as yesterday’s marvelous combination of Sherlock Holmes and Christmas in What Child is This? (Still not a combo I was expecting but all the more fun because of it!)

Today’s Hanukkah romance is exactly the kind of cozy, feel good romance with just the right amount of will they/won’t they (of course they will!) tension to spice things up. that readers LOVE for the holidays. Along with just the right amount of spiciness to literally heat things up during an inconveniently convenient overnight power outage.

I adored Andie and Leo as a couple, and it was easy to feel for both of their personal dilemmas. Andie’s choice between a bird in the hand – an actual job offer – and the HOPE but uncertainty that she’ll find something in the place she wants to stay was very real. She has no one to rely on but herself. She needs a job to support that self. And she’s not wrong to worry that cuts to all kinds of social services including preschools will make her job search MUCH more difficult.

Leo’s family, on the other hand, is very much the kind of warm, nurturing, teasing and loving family she’s always secretly wished to be a part of. Her mother died when she was three, so her late father was the only parent she knew. They were close, their relationship was very tight and her loss is still so recent that the gnawing grief is fresh.

While Leo’s family – as wonderful as it is on the surface – has a canker in its heart. As much as she wishes she could be adopted by all of them, the relationship between Glen Dentz and his two sons is the kind of cancer that will destroy the family if he can’t be made to see the damage he’s already done.

And that’s the hard part of the story in more than one way. Families do go sour like this. If you haven’t ever seen it happen in real life you’ve been lucky. Very much like Abby’s toxic parents in Love You a Latke, I really wanted to see Glen have a, pardon me, come-to-Jesus epiphany one way or another. Which he did – unfortunately in exactly the way I was expecting, which blunted things a bit for this reader.

But Glen’s change of heart – or mind – or both – came way too easily. It was a bit like Scrooge in that the spirits did it all in one night. Or all in the consequences of one act of profound hubris, blind greed and utter stupidity. Consequently, the resulting forgiveness didn’t feel earned. Some miracles may be just too big for even Hanukkah to encompass.

Still, there is a LOT to love in Eight Nights to Win Her Heart. Including, but absolutely not limited to, the utterly hilarious foam sword fight between the attacking little Maccabees and the defending ‘King Leo’ at the children’s Hanukkah celebration at the Temple. And Millie. Conniving, manipulating, plotting, planning and ultimately successful little Millie. Who feels so justified after her success at matchmaking for her Uncle Leo that she’s planning to work her wiles on her Uncle Dean NEXT Hanukkah – if not sooner!

#BookReview: Grimm Curiosities by Sharon Lynn Fisher

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B- Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Grimm Curiosities by Sharon Lynn FisherGrimm Curiosities by Sharon Lynn Fisher
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Gothic, historical fantasy, historical fiction, historical romance, holiday fiction, holiday romance, paranormal
Pages: 299
Published by 47North on November 5, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In Victorian England, a young woman inherits her father’s curiosity shop and all its ghostly secrets in a bewitching novel by the author of Salt & Broom.

It’s 1851 in old York. Lizzy Grimm struggles to save her late father’s charmingly creepy yet floundering antique shop, Grimm Curiosities. Then, during a particularly snowy December in this most haunted city in England, things turn…curiouser.

Lizzy meets Antony Carlisle, whose sister suffers from the same perplexing affliction as Lizzy’s mother—both stricken silent and unresponsive after speaking with ghosts. Working closely together to fathom what power has transformed their loved ones and why, Lizzy and Antony discover an important her father’s treasured set of rare books on ancient folktales, enchantments, and yuletide myths. Books that a persistent collector is awfully keen to purchase. Books Lizzy can’t bear to sell.

Every bewitching passage and illustration opens a doorway to something ancient and dangerously inviting. Keys to a mystery Lizzy and Antony are compelled to solve—even if doing so means unleashing one of this bright holiday’s darkest myths.

My Review:

To paraphrase a much more famous Victorian Christmas ghost story, Herbert Grimm was dead, to begin with.

And, while he has a chance to rectify his mistakes and failures from the afterlife, it’s a job that’s much too big for any number of spirits to handle in just one night.

It’s 1851 in cold, snowy, OLD York, and Lizzy Grimm has been doing her best to maintain the curiosity shop she inherited from her father – as well as somehow keep body and soul together for both herself and her mother.

The problem for Lizzy, the many, many problems for Lizzy, is that entirely too many of her father’s former customers and suppliers, both, are unwilling to deal with a woman, and her mother is ill and can’t help with the shop. Mrs. Grimm has disconnected completely from the world and can’t even help herself without supervision.

The rent is 10 weeks behind and getting more behind by the day, Lizzy can barely keep herself and her mother fed and prevent them from freezing to death in the winter cold. Christmas is less than two weeks away and, while business always improves BEFORE the holiday, it hasn’t improved enough to see them through the dearth of the bitter months after.

Which is the day when two men of considerably better means than Lizzy enter the shop and each present her with potential solutions to her woes. Collector Ambrose Stokes wants to purchase some mysterious books of myth and legend that her father set aside with a note not to sell. Antony Carlisle comes in seeking a present for his younger sister. A sister who is in the exact same walking somnambulance state as Lizzy’s mother.

It’s clear from the beginning that Stokes only wants to use her to get at something he covets badly and probably shouldn’t have. Meanwhile Carlisle is obviously searching for both help and friendship – even if he doesn’t recognize that the latter is only a small portion of what he seeks in Lizzy’s company.

Stokes can solve her immediate financial difficulties, while Carlisle is likely to only cause her heartbreak – even if that is far, far, from his intention.

Between them, they open up her world to the true legacy that her father intended to leave her. A legacy that holds the key to every question she’s ever asked, and every answer she never thought she’d need.

Escape Rating B-: I picked this up because it looked like it was just the kind of horror-adjacent story that I generally enjoy. And because it was set in York, the setting of one of my favorite historical mystery series. (If you’re curious about the York of four centuries before this story, check out the Owen Archer series of historical mysteries, beginning with The Apothecary Rose. Because if there is one thing that Lizzy Grimm is right about, it’s that York is absolutely rife with stories just waiting to be told!)

So I was expecting a bit more Halloween and got a whole lot of the Victorian Christmas season instead – mixed with a trip to Narnia and more than a soupçon of historical romance. Even though even a soupçon of actual soup is something that Lizzy has been forced to worry about a LOT.

Also, and I know this is a ‘me’ thing and may not be a ‘you’ thing, Lizzy’s straddle of the line between having agency as the protagonist while being a woman of her time was even more uncomfortable for me than it was for her – and it was plenty uncomfortable for her. It just wasn’t what I was in the mood for and your reading mileage may definitely vary.

What was absolutely fascinating was the way that the supernatural and paranormal crept into the story on ghostly feet, that the gift she thought had passed her by was doing its damndest to warn her that she was heading for her own damnation if she didn’t figure out what was going on on both sides of the actual, honest-to-supernatural, wardrobe before it was too late.

From the standpoint of this reader, it felt like this story had too many irons in its fire. Each of the individual parts had the potential to be a whole, fascinating story, from the ghostly visitations to the world inside the cabinet, to the myths and legends coming to life to the mystery of just who the collector was and what he was up to and last but not least to the class-barrier hopping romance between Carlisle and Lizzy with Carlisle’s overbearing father serving as second-villain.

There were a LOT of fascinating story parts trying to weave themselves into a whole cloth – but they didn’t quite manage it and/or there wasn’t enough book for them to manage in. It had the bones of a good story – but either not quite enough bones or not enough flesh for the story-creature it was meant to be.

A- #BookReview: Feuds edited by Mercedes Lackey

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews
A- #BookReview: Feuds edited by Mercedes LackeyFeuds (Tales of Valdemar#18) by Mercedes Lackey
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: anthologies, epic fantasy, fantasy
Series: Tales of Valdemar #18, Valdemar (Publication order) #59
Pages: 368
Published by DAW on November 26, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

This 18th anthology of short stories set in the beloved Valdemar high fantasy universe features tales by debut and established authors and a brand-new story from Mercedes Lackey.

The Heralds of Valdemar are the kingdom's ancient order of protectors. They are drawn from all across the land, from all walks of life, and at all ages—and all are Gifted with abilities beyond those of normal men and women. They are Mindspeakers, FarSeers, Empaths, ForeSeers, Firestarters, FarSpeakers, and more. These inborn talents—combined with training as emissaries, spies, judges, diplomats, scouts, counselors, warriors, and more—make them indispensable to their monarch and realm.

Sought and Chosen by mysterious horse-like Companions, they are bonded for life to these telepathic, enigmatic creatures. The Heralds of Valdemar and their Companions ride circuit throughout the kingdom, protecting the peace and, when necessary, defending their land and monarch.

Join a variety of authors as they ride with Mercedes Lackey to the beloved land of Valdemar and experience the many facets of this storied high fantasy realm.

My (very long) Review:

The individual volumes in the long-running Tales of Valdemar series (this is the EIGHTEENTH collection!) each center around a theme. The theme of this one is clear – as it says so right there on the label. Each of the stories herein centers on a feud. Not a battle, not a war, but a feud.

Think of the infamous Hatfields and the McCoys, names that we only still recognize because they had, you guessed it, a feud that lasted so long it made it into history and legend.

Feuds are usually not fun – and a lot of these stories are not. The collection is very good, but it isn’t nearly as lighthearted as the Shenanigans collection. Howsomever, there is still plenty to savor for repeat visitors to this fascinating world, while newcomers are sure to find something that will leave them thirsting for more – even if it’s not another story about food and drink as there are several of those in this year’s mix!

I picked this up because Valdemar is a world I knew I could slip into and be comforted as well as entertained – even though the theme of the collection isn’t necessarily comforting at all. And that’s exactly what happened.

Because I had such a good time – and ripped right through the whole thing without even bothering to come back to the ‘real world’ until I was finished, this is one of those times when each story is going to get a rating of its own and then I’ll attempt some very fudgy math to rate the whole.

“The Price of Anger” by Brigid Collins
This was a great story to kick off the collection of feuds because it’s a story about the costs of feuding. It’s also a story on two levels, as a young Farseer keeps seeing the ghosts of earlier students feuding while she dodges current students who can’t stop trying to exploit her gift. It’s only when she sees the results of the old feud that she understands that she’s falling into the same trap. Escape Rating A-

“Consequences” by Dylan Birtolo
It’s a stupid feud and an even stupider fight. Not that the story is remotely stupid, but the reader gets the same urge as the Herald – to knock some heads together in the hopes that some sense will break loose. It’s only when we see how things got this way, that a good idea once upon a time is having terrible consequences in the present that we see exactly how this particular road to hell got paved. Escape Rating B because it takes a bit to figure out that we’re seeing the story peel back in history for the point to come through.

“A Bad Business” by Jeanne Adams
A direct follow-up to the book Take a Thief (which I admit I have not read yet), this is a story about what happens in the aftermath of a horrific case. Just because the central villain has been removed from the equation it doesn’t mean that there aren’t still a whole lot of dirty loose ends to clean up. Even though I hadn’t read the case being wrapped up, this story is complete in itself and an appropriately messy clean up to a horrific case. Escape Rating B+

“A Tale of Two Cooks” by Charlotte E. English
This was one of the few relatively light-hearted stories in this collection and it made a refreshing change from the darker stories. Not that this couldn’t have turned dark as well, as it’s a case of too many cooks deliberately spoiling the soup – and the rest of the meal – in ways that could have been deadly. But the poisonous plans of the feuding foodies are thwarted by the quick decisions of one smart and able assistant and her cousin – a savvy Herald. Escape Rating A- because of the excellent way it relies on wits and banter to see its way clear to the solution.

“A Bite and a Pint” by Louisa Swann
Home may be the place that when you have to go there, they have to take you in. But that doesn’t mean they have to listen to you, not even when you come home after a year’s absence as a Herald Trainee on your way to the Collegium in Haven. A feud has broken out between the new Brewmistress of Petril’s tiny village and, unfortunately for him, his own mother. Each believes the other woman has poisoned her best goods, and it’s up to a boy that no one is quite yet willing to acknowledge is a man to find his way to the truth. This was another light story, the solution wasn’t really a surprise but it was a lot of fun getting there. Escape Rating B+

“Dueling Minstrels” by Jennifer Brozek and Marie Bilodeau
This is one of several stories about minstrels and minstrel rivalry in the collection. Minstrels Ozan and Aimar bring out both the best and the worst in each other. The worst behavior, and the best of their Bardic Gifts. But those gifts, combined with their ever-present feud, threaten to set their town literally on fire if they can’t find a way to make their rivalry work for them instead of against each other. Escape Rating B

“A Scold of Jays” by Elisabeth Waters
This is a story about karma being a right bitch – and deservedly so. A nobleman basically throws away his older son after an injury that will leave him with a limp – and not a single bit of other damage. That the nobleman disowns this boy as useless while continuing to indulge his self-indulgent, utterly villainous and downright murderous younger son results in exactly the situation one would hope for. Everyone involved gets EXACTLY what they deserve – many times over. This story is a direct follow-up to one that appeared in the earlier collection, Shenanigans, “A Cry of Hounds” and is even more fun as the karma continues to flow exactly where it should. Escape Rating A.

“Future-Proof” by J.L. Gribble
The feud in this particular story is a tragedy based on a fraud – with two young men paying the price for their elders’ evil deeds. Duri Phran and Cam Aylmer are both persona non grata among the unaffiliated noble students in the Collegium, forced to pretend to hate each other to keep their respective families from punishing them further. It’s only when they’re forced to work together that they realize that there is more wrong in both of their terrible situations that either imagined – and that salvation is waiting for them both if they can just manage to reach beyond what they’ve been taught. I had mixed feelings about this one because the ending felt a bit more deus ex companion than I wanted so Escape Rating B

“A Single Row of Vines” by Brenda Cooper
The setup for this story is similar to the one in Future-Proof, but this time it’s two young women on opposite sides of a village feud who are afraid to put that feud aside as Herald Trainees in Haven. This one worked better for me because the Companions refuse to solve their humans’ problem, instead the girls have to work it out in spite of the tremendous amount of indoctrination they’ve heard for their entire lives. Two girls alone can’t end 40 years of feuding – but they can make a start – and they do. Escape Rating A-

“Most True” by Kristin Schwengel
This one combines the minstrel rivalry of “Dueling Minstrels” with the “consequences” of the story of the same name. In this story, however, it’s those consequences that bring about the ending of the feud, as two gifted bards learn that they are only gifted enough to reach mastery if they reach for it together, and only AFTER the consequences of their feud have nearly ended one if not both of their careers before they’ve truly begun. Escape Rating B.

“Detours and Double Crosses” by Angela Penrose
A story about the cleverness of Bards, the foolishness of people who try to use those Bards in their own nefarious schemes and the stubbornness of one Bard Trainee who proves to herself that she’s more than good enough to become a full bard by saving a young heir from a deadly plot by chasing a villain down no matter how fast he runs. This story was typical of these collections in all the best ways and I fell right into it. Escape Rating A-

“Trade is Trade” by Fiona Patton
As an earlier story was all about food – it’s fitting that this one is all about drinks. Or at least the bragging rights thereto. The feud is entirely predictable – as are the results. The Crown is planning to give a plaque to the oldest pub in Haven. The Guards really, really, really want the Crown to get on with it, because the rash of trouble-making and sign-stealing is driving them to more drink than they can collectively afford. As this story reminds me a great deal of the Discworld  City Watch  subseries AND it’s a loose follow-up to one of my favorite stories in the Anything with Nothing collection, “Look to Your Houses”, Escape Rating A.

“By the Ticking of My Thumbs” by Rosemary Edghill
A really interesting take on feuding as the feud is, literally, all in their heads. There’s no precipitating event, no history, and the participants have never even met. But they really, really should have. The whole feud is based entirely on their assumptions about each other, and those assumptions have thoroughly made asses out of both of them. It’s sad but fascinating to watch them assign motives to each other that have no basis in anything – and such a beautiful catharsis when they finally figure out where they both went so terribly wrong. Escape Rating A.

“Harmony” by Anthea Sharp
Another story about feuding, dueling bards, there isn’t much harmony in this story – which is the point. Because this is very much a story about pride going before a really, really big fall, and how beautiful music can only be made out of, well, harmony. Not just the harmony of the notes and the melody, but the harmony among the people – ALL THE PEOPLE – who take part in the performance. That age and experience manage to outwit youth, skill and hubris added just the right bit of tartness to an excellent story. Escape Rating A

“Playing Peacemaker Once More” by Dee Shull
Considering the title, it’s a bit of a surprise that this is actually a story about boundaries. Specifically about defending one’s own even as one does their best to get others to examine the placement of theirs. Like the final story in this collection, Uncivil Blood, there’s a bit of a Romeo and Juliet aspect – or perhaps that should be Romeo and Tybalt – to this one that gets worked out much better than Shakespeare’s famous tragedy. Escape Rating B

“Pairmates” by Ron Collins
This one didn’t quite work for me, which I was really sad about as it’s the one story in this collection that features nonhuman protagonists. I think it just passed me by a bit because I couldn’t place it in Valdemar history and wasn’t quite sure how it fit to the overall world or when. I wanted to like it more than I did but I had too many nagging questions at the end. Escape Rating C.

“Battle of the Bands” by Dayle A. Dermatic
This battle of the bands is a family feud, as brothers Eldriss and Davon haven’t spoken to each other in years because Davon claimed that Eldriss stole his sweetheart and married her. Beyond the fact that Shalna isn’t an object to be stolen, that claim is more of an excuse than a reason. Eldriss just wants his brother back, and a mixup at a musical contest – where the brothers enter as the leaders of competing bands – gives them the opportunity they’ve been waiting for for over a decade. A good story with a happy but not surprising ending. Escape Rating B.

“Tangles” by Diana L. Paxson
The feud in this particular instance is a feud between rival shopkeepers who are determined to keep far away from each other in spite of being located in the save Haven district. However, this is also a story about two determined – and somewhat magical – pieces of furniture that make a matched set that are equally determined to be put back together. To the point where they throw a bit of magic in the way of the best person to untangle a web that goes back decades. There are several Romeo and Juliet-type stories in this collection and this one is another, but it’s marvelously twisted because the feud happened because they didn’t marry – although it’s still not too late to fix things the way they should have been! Escape Rating A

“Payment in Kind” by Stephanie Shaver
The title is in reference to what happens when a cheating landholder stiffs a bard for her fee. But underneath that is the saddest story in this collection on multiple fronts as the problem set before that bard and her Herald twin-brother is about a whole village being oppressed by that rapacious landholder – who is also a liar and a cheat – a healer caught between her oaths and her duty, child labor and child murder, and one woman with cancer who wants one last day in the sun – even as she keeps her condition a secret from those she loves the most. Escape Rating A+.

“A Determined Will” by Paige L. Christie
This is a story about going home and discovering that the things you remember aren’t quite what you thought they were – unless they are and someone is trying to swindle you. This one was surprisingly fun in spite of itself, as Guard Trainee Teig has come home to bury the closest thing she had to a father. That he left her everything he had isn’t really the point – it’s more of the last note of a memory. But when someone arrives out of nowhere and attempts to cheat her out of it, she puts all of that Guard training to excellent use! Escape Rating A.

“The Ballad of Northfrost” by Phaedra Weldon
This is a hard, bitter story with an excellent satisfying ending. Reyes fate reads like many of the videogames I love. He’s wounded, near death, in the dark, between a rock and a very hard place, determined to get justice for people long dead who once saved him and set him on his path. That his own ghosts rise to help him take the final steps to safety, freedom and resolution was a bright candle in a very dark story with just the right and necessary ending. Escape Rating A+

“Uncivil Blood” by Mercedes Lackey
A much better version of Romeo and Juliet, with more political shenanigans, considerably fewer deaths, a more sensible ending, and the reappearance of one of Valdemar’s favorite characters who has not graced the stage for entirely too many years. This was my favorite story in the collection, Escape Rating A+.

Escape Rating Overall A-: This was as grand a trip to Valdemar as I hoped it would be. My favorite story in the collection was “Uncivil Blood” by Mercedes Lackey herself, followed by “The Ballad of Northfrost” by Phaedra Weldon and “Payment in Kind” by Stephanie Shaver. If you’ve EVER visited Valdemar this is a great time and a great way to go back for a return trip!

#BookReview: Buried Memories by Simon R. Green

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Buried Memories by Simon R. GreenBuried Memories (Ishmael Jones, #10) by Simon R. Green
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: horror, mystery, paranormal, urban fantasy
Series: Ishmael Jones #10
Pages: 219
Published by Severn House on October 25, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads


Returning to the small town where he crash-landed in 1963, Ishmael Jones is in search of answers. But his investigation is de-railed by a brutal murder.

"I think something very bad and very dangerous has come to your little town, Inspector . . ."
As long-buried memories from his hidden past begin to resurface, Ishmael Jones and his partner Penny feel compelled to return to the small country town where Ishmael crash-landed in 1963; the place where his memories began.
Norton Hedley is no ordinary town. Apparitions, sudden disappearances, sightings of unusual beasts: for centuries, the place has been plagued by a series of inexplicable events. Ishmael's first task is to track down local author Vincent Smith, the one man he believes may have some answers.
Ishmael and Penny aren't the only ones seeking the mysterious Mr Smith. When their search unearths a newly-dead body in the local mortuary - a body that's definitely not supposed to be there - Ishmael becomes the prime suspect in the ensuing murder investigation. His only hope of discovering the truth about his origins lies in exposing a ruthless killer.

My Review:

Ishmael Jones is as he has always been. The problem is that he’s been the same, absolutely unaging, for 60 years now. And he doesn’t remember who – or more likely what – he was before that. Before 1963, when his alien space ship was blown out of the sky over Earth and crashed in a field near the tiny village of Norton Hedley.

Which doesn’t seem to have changed much either in the intervening 60 years.

A situation that is quite a bit more worrying than Ishmael’s own unchanging face, because he at least knows why THAT’s happening. Or not, as the case may be.

But Norton Hedley, a place where people come and go and live in hope for a good tourist season every year, seems to be a haven for the uncanny. After all, that’s what has brought Ishmael and his partner Penny to the village.

Because Ishmael and his unchanging appearance began – at least as far as his memory goes – with the crash landing of his alien spacecraft in the woods surrounding Norton Hedley in 1963. He’s returned because his previous two cases, Night Train to Murder and The House on Widows Hill, have provided him with some scattered but ominous clues about who and what he used to be.

And he needs to know. Because he needs to know if he’s a danger to Penny. Or anyone else on Earth who doesn’t deserve it.

In his research about Norton Hedley, or the research the coyly named black ops group, the Organisation, has done on his behalf, he – and they – have learned that Norton Hedley has been weird central for years. Not just the years since his ship crashed in 1963, but for centuries. Millenia even.

Something in, on, or more likely under – like the thing that was under The House on Widows Hill – has been creeping its creepy way along into the lifeblood of the town for eons uncounting. It might have the answers he’s been searching for for decades.

And it might not want to let him know.

Escape Rating B: This series has been one of my Halloween reads since I first discovered it, so it seemed appropriate to finish it up this Halloween. As I’ve already read the final book in the series (so far), I’ll have to pick something else horror-adjacent next year.

The author is an acquired taste – one that I acquired decades ago. It’s the snark. It’s always been the snark no matter what the ostensible genre or subject of ANY of his many series might be. If you like his voice, then when you’re in that mood nothing else will do. But if you’re not, you bounce off, and bounce hard. Your reading mileage may vary.

The concept of this particular series throws a whole bunch of speculative fiction tropes into one hell of a blender. The series began, back in The Dark Side of the Road, as English country house mysteries where the supernatural agencies turn out to be merely human – but with a touch of the paranormal or extraterrestrial for spice and added bodies.

Over the course of the series it has turned into Ishmael’s quest to learn enough about who or what he used to be to figure out just how he can continue to stay one step ahead of all the various secret agencies that would like to use him up in one way or another. Even more important, he’s thoroughly invested in keeping Penny safe – if necessary from himself.

At first, what made this series work as well as it does – at least for this reader – was the revelation in each case that no matter how weird things got – often very – that the enemies were always human after all.

What has kept me going this far have been the questions about Ishmael’s past and Penny’s future. While Ishmael has been unchanging for 60 years, the series has been set in a sort of ‘perpetual now’. Days and weeks pass but seemingly not years. This entry in the series is one of the first that confronts head on the problem of Ishmael and Penny’s relationship.

Not that they have problems, but that together they have a problem. Penny is an ordinary human, she will age, and Ishmael will not. Short of a deus ex machina – and not that there haven’t been plenty of powerful machina around over the course of the series – this can’t end happily. Howsomever, I already know that it does not end in the next book, Haunted by the Past. And in spite of the ominousness of that title, it doesn’t dive nearly as deeply into Ishmael’s past as Night Train to Murder, The House on Widows Hill and Buried Memories have done.

So, I have begun to wonder if the author is planning to end this series at all. I wonder even more whether or not he should. I’d rather just think of Ishmael and Penny in that perpetual now, continuing on their quest to find evil humans at the heart of supernatural hoaxes, raging together against the dying of their light.

#BookReview: The Mountain Crown by Karin Lowachee

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: The Mountain Crown by Karin LowacheeThe Mountain Crown (The Crowns of Ishia, #1) by Karin Lowachee
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: dragons, epic fantasy, fantasy
Series: Crowns of Ishia #1
Pages: 150
Published by Solaris on October 8, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Méka must capture a king dragon, or die trying.
War between the island states of Kattaka and Mazemoor has left no one unscathed. Méka’s nomadic people, the Ba’Suon, were driven from their homeland by the Kattakans. Those who remained were forced to live under the Kattakan yoke, to serve their greed for gold alongside the dragons with whom the Ba’Suon share an empathic connection.
A decade later and under a fragile truce, Méka returns home from her exile for an ancient, necessary rite: gathering a king dragon of the Crown Mountains to maintain balance in the wild country. But Méka’s act of compassion toward an imprisoned dragon and Lilley, a Kattakan veteran of the war, soon draws the ire of the imperialistic authorities. They order the unwelcome addition of an enigmatic Ba’Suon traitor named Raka to accompany Méka and Lilley to the mountains.
The journey is filled with dangers both within and without. As conflict threatens to reignite, the survival of the Ba’Suon people, their dragons, and the land itself will depend on the decisions – defiant or compliant – that Méka and her companions choose to make. But not even Méka, kin to the great dragons of the North, can anticipate the depth of the consequences to her world.

My Review:

This story feels like it began LONG before the book does. This story reads like it has been years in the making, and that the slice of it that we are getting is a bit in the middle in a world that has been going to hell in a handcart for quite some time, and has now reached a level of FUBAR that STILL isn’t anywhere near as bad as things are likely to get before the end.

And that’s a fascinating way to write a story, because worlds generally DO exist before a particular story in them gets told, and go on existing after the last page of a particular story in them gets turned.

Méka has returned to the land where she was born. A land that once belonged to her people, but no longer does. Even worse, a land that has been conquered by a rapacious empire that has chosen to act as if her people aren’t people at all – merely slaves for their use.

Including the dragons that her people, and only her people, have the capacity, not to control, but to bond with. A bond that the greedy, rapacious Kattakans exploit in order to use both Méka’s people, the Ba’Suon, and the dragons, the Suon, to strip mine the land for gold.

The Kattakans have turned a beautiful place into a steaming, belching wasteland on a par with Mordor. (Auditions for the part of this world’s Sauron are possibly ongoing – I jest but not nearly enough.)

Méka has come to this once-home for a right of both passage and preservation. It is her time to bond with one of the Suons that still live free in the mountain crowns far to the north. Both to refresh the dragons in her adopted homeland and to prevent a single king dragon from taking over too many herds and reducing the genetic diversity in the crowns.

Of course, the powers that be to rape and pillage interfere with her quest – even though it has been sanctioned by her adopted country and the court of the, shall we say, greedy bloodsuckers.

She is duty bound on a quest to bond a dragon. She is being coerced to retrieve a dragon for a criminal’s nefarious purposes. But control of any dragon is illusory at best – and a dangerous illusion at that. As the greedy bloodsuckers are about to discover in fire and blood.

Escape Rating B: The Mountain Crown is an ‘in media res’ story. In other words, it feels like it starts in the middle of things. It’s a method of storytelling that CAN get the reader caught up in the action from the very first page. Howsomever, it can also give the reader the feeling that they’re missing something, or a whole lot of somethings, and not feel like they have what they need to get stuck into the story.

The Mountain Crown read like it straddled that fence, where the problem with straddling a fence is that one gets splinters in the ass. I had a difficulty time, at first, getting into the story because I didn’t feel like I had enough to figure out how the situation reached this pass in the first place. It does not help at all that the primary characters of this story, Méka and her companions Lilley and Raka, are all parsimonious with their words – even when they are speaking to one another.

There’s a LOT that doesn’t get said – even when something is being said at all.

All of which led to my brain attempting to spackle over the bits that were missing with analogies to other stories and other places. The ramshackle mining monstrosity where Méka first arrives sounds a lot like the gold rush encampments of the Klondike, including the weather conditions. The nomadic nature of Méka’s people read like an amalgam of many nomadic cultures around this globe – even if this story isn’t set on any version of our world.

In the end, what brought the story together was the way that it reflected on colonialism and empire, shone a light on cultures whose fundamental principles are greed and acquisition and then explored the possibilities of another way – a way of stewardship and community.

And took the problem of might making right to a whole different level by adding dragons into the mix in a way that both put a temporary check on the ‘evil empire’ AND sowed the seeds for further contention between peoples who were once one.

I have to say that by the end, I really did enjoy The Mountain Crown and that I’m looking forward to the next book in the series, The Desert Talon, coming in February, as well as the third book, A Covenant of Ice, arriving in June. (There’s an irony that the desert book is coming in the depths of winter and the ice book is coming as summer heats up.)

I’m hoping that the rest of this novella trilogy will not just continue this fantastic story but also fill in the blanks and answer my many, many questions about this particular world came to this particular pass – because it has to be a doozy. I can’t wait to find out ALL the answers

 

A- #BookReview: Murder of a Suffragette by Marty Wingate

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: Murder of a Suffragette by Marty WingateMurder of a Suffragette (London Ladies' Murder Club #4) by Marty Wingate
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy mystery, historical mystery
Series: London Ladies' Murder Club #4
Pages: 331
Published by Bookouture on October 28, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble
Goodreads

Women from all around the country have joined together to fight for the vote. But when one of them is killed, only amateur sleuth Mabel Canning can halt a murderer’s campaign…Fellbridge Hall, England: Mabel Canning is thrilled to be organising a suffragette conference. But when all the women are settled in the sprawling country mansion, she barely has time for a sip of gin before chaos ensues. Leading suffragette Annie Harkin has been found murdered in her bed, clutching a white feather in her outstretched hand…As the guests clamour for justice for Annie, young police officers Ned and Ted arrive in time to trip over the banners and be roundly ignored. And with a killer on the loose, the suffragettes swiftly vote for Mabel and her pals to take control. When it comes to solving mysteries, there’s nobody equal to the London Ladies’ Murder Club!But soon it’s clear many a suffragette is hiding a secret under her sash. Eccentric veteran of the cause Dorothea Goose is acting rather flighty; why is she so afraid of the police? Would Annie’s rival go this far to replace her as leader? Or has someone taken a life to stop the cause of women’s lib?Then Mabel uncovers what happened to Annie’s closest comrade in the years before the war, and she is sure the answers lie in the past. But will Mabel be elected as the killer’s next victim? Or can she crack the case and save the fight for Votes for Women?A totally addictive whodunnit bursting with suspense and sparkling with wit, from USA Today bestseller Marty Wingate. Perfect for fans of Agatha Christie, Richard Osman, Verity Bright and T.E. Kinsey.

My Review:

As much as it makes Mabel Canning’s father worry about her when she’s on her own in London, it’s clear from this fourth entry in the utterly charming London Ladies’ Murder Club that her home, the tiny village of Peasmarsh and its surrounds, are better off if Mabel is in London.

Not because of Mabel herself, but rather because she seems to have a fortunately unfortunate knack for finding herself in the midst of murder investigations. Peasmarsh’s population is much too small to survive the number of deaths that Mabel and her ‘club’ become involved with on the regular!

As this case is a, well, case in point. Mabel has returned to the Peasmarsh area to serve as the personal secretary to Lady Emma Fellbridge at nearby Fellbridge Hall. Lady Emma has known Mabel all of Mabel’s life, and Mabel was a frequent guest at the hall as her dearest childhood friend was Lady Emma’s daughter-in-law until the Spanish Flu took her much too soon.

Lady Emma was one of the heroines of the suffragette movement, and has convened a meeting of her fellow campaigners at Fellbridge Hall to consider the next phase of their work. At the time this story takes place, 1922, women 30 years of age and over who were property owners or householders, or married to men who were either of the above, or occupiers of rental property over a certain rate, or university graduates had the right to vote, while men could vote from age 21 with considerably fewer restrictions. These women, who once chained themselves to gates and went on hunger strikes in prison, are determined to continue the fight for equality into a new generation.

Mabel and her ‘Murder Club’ have arrived at Fellbridge Hall under the auspices of Miss Kerr’s Useful Women’s Agency for which Mabel works and of which her ‘Murder Club’ is an active part. She’s not expecting for the club to be active at the suffragette meeting – but that’s exactly what happens when one of the suffragettes, in fact, one of the women in contention to become the next leader of the movement, is murdered.

Mabel has more experience with murder investigations than the local police do – and Detective Inspector Tollerton of the Met is just far enough away in London and snowed under with urgent cases in the metropolis to leave Mabel temporarily in charge. Somewhat to his own surprise – and even occasional chagrin – Tolly is forced to leave Mabel leading the investigation, seconded by WPC Hildy Wardle, several members of her Murder Club, and two local constables who desperately need someone to give them orders.

When a second suffragette is murdered, and Mabel herself is attacked twice, she’s certain that she’s on the trail of a murderer – but the clues are misleading at best and confoundingly conflicting at worst. She’ll need the wits, and the skills, of every single member of the London Ladies’ Murder Club to catch the killer – before he strikes again.

Escape Rating A-: I’ve been looking forward to reading this latest entry in the London Ladies’ Murder Club since the minute I finished the previous book, A Body at the Dance Hall. And it absolutely was worth the wait! My one regret about having finished this book is that I don’t know for certain that there will be a next book in the series – or when that MUCH hoped for book will be published. (I have my fingers crossed!)

I’ve fallen for this series because I’ve taken to Mabel Canning as the protagonist. The charm of the series rides very much on her shoulders – and it’s just terrific to follow the investigation from inside her thoughtful, intelligent head.

What makes this series work for me is that Mabel does an excellent job of straddling the line between being a woman of her own time and not ours, while still having a realistic amount of agency to go about her business – which in Mabel’s case is investigating murders.

She does have to reckon with the attitudes towards women’s roles and women’s place, but because of her particular era, just post-World War I, she’s part of a time when things were still in flux because of the war – and because the war killed a generation of young men leaving many women without the prospects of marriage even if they wanted it.

The series does not shy away from the fact that some didn’t, including Mabel’s friends Skeff and Cora, as well as, it turns out, both Lady Emma and the first victim, Annie, even though the earlier generation did follow tradition – at least to all outward appearances. And it’s the degree to which lip service was given to those outward appearances that creates one of the sets of misunderstood clues and red herrings that makes this particular case so juicy.

Another part of the series that works particularly well is the way that it dives into women’s experiences and women’s history. In this particular case, the suffragette movement, its sister movement, the suffragists, and the contention between the two. Suffragettes were the considerably more militant arm of the movement – while suffragists preferred to conduct their campaign via entirely legal means. There existed tension between the two as well as an acknowledgement that some women switched from one to the other (and back and again) over time.

Voting rights for women on the same terms as men was finally granted in 1928, but at the time of this story the fight was not yet won. The question before the gathered women centered on just who would be the best person to lead that fight. The strong personalities of many of the women involved made leadership of the movement a possible motive that Mabel was forced to consider – no matter how much she wished it was not.

Part of what makes Mabel such a fascinating protagonist is the way that she navigates her world, and the push and pull of loving her father and wanting to remain in his good graces – he’s a good man and has been an excellent father – but still NEEDS to live her own life on her own terms gave this entry in the series a very personal touch as well.

Her father wants her to be safe – but he recognizes that safe on his terms is not what his daughter was built for. It was wonderful to see a supportive father-daughter relationship in a female-led historical mystery – as opposed to the more usual situation, where dear-old-dad has often been the impetus for his daughter’s flight from conventionality in one way or another. If not several.

In other words, there are a LOT of reasons why I enjoy the London Ladies’ Murder Club series and this entry is certainly an excellent example of why. I did figure out WHOdunnit a bit early, although the WHYdunnit took a bit longer. I’m here for Mabel Canning, and I hope you will be too. If you haven’t discovered her yet, start with A Body on the Doorstep to see just how the London Ladies’ Murder Club got its start!