If you’re anything at all like me, you probably can’t hear the words “the Little Mermaid” without immediately having a cartoon crab start singing “Under the Sea” in your head. But then again, if you’re anything at all like me, you’ll also probably find Jim Hines’ The Mermaid’s Madness a strong cure for that particular earworm.
Book 2 of his Princess series does indeed adapt that particular fairy tale, and to particularly good effect. This time around we’ve got our three heroines, Danielle, Snow, and Talia, having to delve into why the local undine are attacking human ships and sailors–and why their leader, the mad young queen Lirea, has nearly murdered Queen Beatrice. Lirea’s backstory, which tells how she gained the power to transform into human shape out of love of a human prince but then lost him, is darkly tragic and an easy match for the original Hans Christian Andersen version of the tale.
I appreciated that the main male characters weren’t quite figureheads here, either, even as the primary focus remained on the women. King Theodore and Danielle’s husband Armand remained primarily off-camera, but on the other hand, they were also doing things, which is all I ask. Better still, we got some delightful developments about Talia and Snow, about which I shall not expound because oh my yes spoilers. Points as well for Danielle succeeding in being both a mother and an effective warrior and heroine; that’s a pretty rare thing in fantasy novels, still.
Definitely worth checking out if you like your heroines of the mold of Wicked Girls Saving Themselves (h/t to ), and keep an eye out for the dryad ship captain who will, if you’re a filk fan, very likely remind you of Tricky Pixie’s “Dryad’s Promise”. Four stars.
I’ve heard Jim Hines’ Princess novels described as “Disney Princesses meet Charlie’s Angels”, and yeah, that’s pretty much right on the money. Say what you will about the Disneyfied versions of fairy tales–but okay, yeah, I have a soft spot for them as well as the original tales from which they sprang. So plowing into a series that draws elements from both forms of the classic tales was deeply satisfying indeed.
In this particular fantasy universe, all the traditional fairy tales we know and love actually happen in one form or another. And in this universe, “Cinderella” is known as Danielle Whiteshore, who’s just married her beloved prince. But when her stepsisters try to assassinate her in revenge, she discovers to her amazement that her mother-in-law, Queen Beatrice, has two seemingly unobtrusive “servants” whose stories are every bit as renowned as hers: Talia, a.k.a. “Sleeping Beauty”, and the young witch Snow, who is of course “Snow White”. Talia and Snow are entrusted with not only defending Danielle and teaching her to fight, but helping her rescue her husband as well.
Danielle, Talia, and Snow are all wonderfully realized characters, and in particular I very much liked how Talia comes from a culture that’s clearly Arabic in design as opposed to the more typical European-flavored cultures that usually show up in fantasy novels–including, well, this one. Her backstory is hands down the darkest of the three, though, and a far, far cry from Disney’s Princess Aurora, that’s for sure. I get great amounts of glee though thinking of “Sleeping Beauty” as the fiercest warrior in Beatrice’s entire kingdom.
The only place the book felt a bit shaky to me though was that for all the truly excellent women in this story, Danielle’s husband felt like an afterthought and got barely any camera time at all. The fact that I can’t even remember the poor guy’s name even as I write this is probably a testament to how little presence he actually had in the story, which was mildly disappointing to me given that his kidnapping is what drives most of the plot. I’m all for girl power in my fantasy novels, but not at the total expense of the boys! (Fortunately, Hines improves on this later on in the series, and both Danielle’s husband and her father-in-law become better developed characters.)
Still though, very strong start to a very strong series. Four stars.
If you love zombie novels, and you’re looking for a light, fast read, you should greatly enjoy Robin Becker’s Brains: A Zombie Memoir. Which is pretty much right what it says on the tin: the “autobiography” of sorts of a man who falls victim to a zombie outbreak, only to retain his sentience, the ability to write, and the blossoming ambition to gather other zombies like him and eventually confront their creator with the fact that they still are thinking beings!
A great deal of the book’s Funny comes from how our protagonist, Jack Barnes, is a pompous blowhard of an English professor–and he knows it and is at peace with it. He tells the reader straight up that he has a messiah complex, which for me made him delightfully straightforward, and after a while I couldn’t help but root for him and the other zombies he gathered around him, each with their own special ability. There’s Joan, the former nurse who patches up her fellow zombies’ rotting corpses with whatever she can find; there’s “Guts”, a boy who retains the ability to movie at human speeds; and “Rosencratz”, a former soldier who amazingly retains the ability to speak (and thereby providing the impetus for some great doubletakes out of the human characters who encounter him later).
The ending is not terribly surprising, certainly not if you’ve seen at least a few zombie movies–and if you have, it’ll fit in quite nicely as a twist on those for you. Me, I found the route TO the ending more satisfying, especially with bits like our band of plucky zombies shuffling along the road trying to sing “Silent Night”. It was, indeed, to laugh! Buy it in ebook form if you can; the print form’s in trade, but it’s so short a book that it’s almost not enough book for that price. Either way, check it out. Four stars.
Since I haven’t actually been buying books for any of this month, you’d think I’d get caught up faster on my reading and reviewing, right? Not so much. See my previous posts about all the shenanigans involved with our shiny Great Big Sea contest entry!
That said? I did want to do a quick summary of everything I’ve read lately. Full reviews will be coming, but this is to let you know what’s on the way! And now, recent Book Log entries, the short form:
#47 – Brains: A Zombie Memoir, by Robin Becker. As you might guess from the title, we’re talkin’ zombies here, folks. Short, quick, and hilarious. Four stars.
#48 – The Stepsister Scheme, by (Jim C. Hines). First of Hines’ Princess novels, introducing his versions of Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty. Think Disney Princesses meet Charlie’s Angels and you’ll get a very good feel for what this series is about. Highly entertaining! This one sets up what happens to this version of Cinderella after she gets her prince–and her stepsisters refuse to take this lying down. Four stars.
#49 – The Mermaid’s Madness, by . Second of his Princess novels. This one is the series’ take on the Little Mermaid. Darker of tone and overall, IMO, more cohesive than the first. Four stars.
#50 – Dark and Disorderly, by Bernita Harris. This is the first book I’ve read from Carina Press, and I gotta say I enjoyed it quite a bit. Nice urban fantasy, with the romance angle handed with a light touch–exactly how I like it. This particular UF heroine dispatches ghosts, and she knows she’s in trouble when the corpse of her dead husband attacks her in her own bathroom. Four stars.
#51 – On Her Trail, by Marcelle Dubé. This was also from Carina Press, although I actually won it as part of their launch promotion, which was pretty nifty. ^_^ This one is romantic suspense with just a touch of paranormal involved, and while it didn’t pack as much punch as I might have liked, I nonetheless found it a good read. Three stars.
#52 – Fatal Affair, by Marie Force. Another Carina, this one also romantic suspense, although with a political angle to it rather than a paranormal. A young Senator has been murdered, and the detective who has to work the case turns out to be the ex of the Senator’s assistant. Three stars.
#53 – Red Hood’s Revenge, by . Third of the Princess novels, just out a few weeks back. I LOVE his take on Red Riding Hood–who in this universe is a dread assassin who goes by the moniker Lady of the Red Hood, and whose red cape is magical and can give her wolf-shape. Also, great backstory here for Talia, the Sleeping Beauty character. Four stars.
#54 – Carnal Innocence, by Nora Roberts. One of her standalone romantic suspense novels, and yet another one with the formula of “outsider settles in a small town she’s got family ties to and is soon embroiled in MURDER ohnoez”. Nothing hugely unusual for Roberts but as usual, nicely executed. Three stars.
#55 – Uglies, by Scott Westerfeld. YA. This of course is the first of Westerfeld’s acclaimed dystopian YA series, and I’d gotten a free PDF of it a while back as part of his promotion of another recent book, Leviathan. Wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Found it more simplistic than I would have liked, but hey, it’s a YA novel–and his worldbuilding was fun. I’ll probably be buying an actual copy of this eventually. Three stars.
#56 – Matters of the Blood, by (Maria Lima). First of her UF series set in Texas, with a heroine who comes from a supernatural family and who’s just starting to come of age–and into her powers. Yet another UF series with a vampire love interest, although I do totally give Lima props for her colorful Texas setting, and I found the overall plot engaging. Four stars.
#57 – Blood, Smoke and Mirrors, by Robyn Bachar. This one was reviewed very well by the ladies over at Smart Bitches, so I had to check it out on general principle. Straddles the line between UF and paranormal romance, but for me slides more towards the latter since there’s heavy emphasis on the heroine’s relationship with her ex–as well as with the obligatory Mysterious Vampire. I found the heroine a bit too mouthy for the sake of being mouthy, but on the other hand, also liked that aside from being magically gifted, she was pretty much a regular girl. Three stars.
#58 – Crocodile on the Sandbank, by Elizabeth Peters. This is me beginning my Great Amelia Peabody Re-Read! :D I do of course have a long history of loving these books, and this one in particular, in which our heroine Amelia Peabody meets the irascible archaeologist Radcliffe Emerson–and in between arguing like crazy with him, must solve the mystery of a mummy’s appearances around their archaeological dig. Five stars. Because I love it so.
#59 – The Curse of the Pharoahs, by Elizabeth Peters. Book 2 of the Amelia Peabodies, mostly notable for me by the initial introduction of Amelia and Emerson’s son Ramses–who at this point has only a brief appearance to lay the groundwork for his later catastrophic precociousness. ;) Four stars.
#60 – The Mummy Case, by Elizabeth Peters. Book 3 of the Amelia Peabodies, in which Ramses for the first time actually accompanies his parents to Egypt, and general chaos ensues, surrounding a stolen mummy case as well as Emerson’s fury at being stuck with a dig site not worth any time or trouble. Muaha. Ramses is a bit too twee at this point of the series with his constant mispronunciations of “th”, but on the other hand, I love to death that he’s as eager to excavate as his parents are. Four stars.
#61 – Disturbed by Her Song, by Tanith Lee, Esther Garber, and Judas Garbah. This is an anthology that came out via Lethe Press, and which Outer Alliance members were invited to review. The latter two names are actually characters of Tanith Lee’s, and she’s using a conceit of “channeling” them, making all of the stories in the anthology theirs. While I found the conceit not to my taste, I very much admire that the stories by “Esther” have a much different feel to them than the ones by “Judas”. Both characters are queer, and so their stories all generally focus on same-sex love and desire. None of it is overtly erotic–but there’s some truly seductive language in here, and that’s almost eroticism enough. Will definitely be posting a fuller review later. Thanks to Craig Gidney for letting me review it!
I was quite amused to see this post by the agents at the Dystel & Goderich Literary Management site about compulsive book buying and reading. ‘Cause yeah, I do love me the books.
As y’all know I’m on a book buying hiatus this month, and you’d just know that this is timed with the drop of at least FOUR new books I’m interested in picking up: new ones by katatomic, rachelcaine, AND mizkit, not to mention the shiny new Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal, about which I’ve been seeing quite a bit of buzz.
So even though I’m not actually buying any new books this month, I’m still totally adding things to the To Read list. As of the last round of adds, I’ve now got 586 things on said list, most of which I own already and some of which are intended re-reads, like the Great Amelia Peabody Re-Read I’m in the middle of right now as we speak!
Which of course brings me to the question of how fast I’ll pass the 600 mark. I turn to you, Internets, for the answer!
‘s third Jig the Goblin book, Goblin War rounds out the trilogy quite nicely. In this final installment, we’ve got a strong callback to book one as Princess Genevieve, the sister of the princes who’d hunted the Rod of Creation, has been ordered by her father to recover that artifact herself. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Brilla the Bloody, an orc general, has organized the orcs and goblins of the realm to go up against the human armies–and she’s doing a damn fine job of it. Since Jig’s home lair is been invaded by the humans and he and several of his people are captured by Genevieve’s troops, he’s ready and raring to escape and join Brilla’s forces…
Until he learns from his god, Tymalous Shadowstar, that Brilla’s got a divine connection of her own. And that divine connection is none other than the winter goddess who used to be Shadowstar’s own wife.
And, yeah. There’s a great deal of fun with the backstory here on Shadowstar and how he became one of the Forgotten Gods, as well as more of the same wry humor that made the first two books of this trilogy so much fun. The bit with the horse was especially snickerworthy, and I’ll say no more because of spoilers. I will say though that I was especially charmed that this time around, we even got a hint of something like a romance as one of Jig’s devoted new followers, the goblin Relka, was partial to him to a degree poor Jig didn’t really get for the longest time. Even goblins need love!
All in all, a delightful conclusion to the trilogy and not to be missed. Four stars.
The second Jig the Goblin book by does what any good second book of a fantasy trilogy ought to do: it shows you what’s happened to your protagonist as a result of Book 1’s events, and upped the stakes this time around to get him in even more trouble. In this particular installment’s case, it does an excellent job as well of taking traditional fantasy tropes and subverting them.
Now that Jig’s become “Jig Dragonslayer”, if anything, he’s almost more miserable than he was before. It is nifty that he’s gotten the ability to heal his fellow goblins of their injuries, but oi, the singing they’re doing about him! Not to mention how he’s coming perilously close to being chosen as chief. One goblin, though, is convinced that Jig’s not all he’s cracked up to be: Veka, who’s adamant that SHE is far better hero material, and who is bound and determined to win the acclaim that ought to be hers. Jig would quite cheerfully let her do her thing–only their lair is threatened by a pixie invasion, and it becomes the job of Jig Dragonslayer to go do something about it. Even if he’d much rather run the other way.
All in all this was a lovely followup to Book 1. I very much liked the character of Veka, her almost-a-romance with the hobgoblin nicknamed “Slash”, her struggle to master magic–and ultimately, even though she’s not about to admit it, to live up to Jig’s example and become a true hero. She gets significant point-of-view time, making her plotline as important as Jig’s all throughout the book, and her character arc does not disappoint.
Other high points of the book are Jig’s developing relationship with his god Tymalous Shadowstar, and the “duh OF COURSE” giggle-worthy way Jig finally wins the day. Four stars.
Standing down from silent running for this, because I gotta admit, I’m intrigued by this problem. This is how you tell I’m a QA engineer, people: I’m intrigued by the problem to solve, rather than pissed off that a product I’ve purchased is not behaving as it should. ;)
Here’s the backstory. The other day, as y’all may remember from my (endless, I know) reports of what books I buy, I grabbed an ebook copy of Jessica Andersen’s Nightkeepers. When I pulled it down from B&N, though, I noticed that when I tried to open it up in my Mac-side eReader app, I was prompted as per usual for my name and credit card # to unlock it, and then the program immediately crashed. All subsequent attempts to open the book failed, showing me nothing but a blank page 0, and not prompting me anymore to unlock it. I noted as well that three other books purchased on the same day worked correctly.
Note also that this very same book worked absolutely correctly when I tried to open it in three other places: on my Nook, on my iPhone in the B&N app, and when I pulled it into Windows to open it on the PC version of the B&N reader program. This told me, okay, the book itself is not corrupted, it’s readable by other programs. So something about the wrapping on the book just happens to be confusing the hell out of the Mac version of the reader.
I was able to repro the problem again tonight, on three different purchases. Two of them came from the same publisher as Nightkeepers (since the first book I tried tonight was book 2 of that series, Dawnkeepers), which was Penguin. The third, Cyberabad Days by Ian McDonald, was from Pyr.
Barnes and Noble is using the same eReader app, essentially, that Fictionwise uses and which Fictionwise in turn acquired from eReader.com. The main change that B&N has made to it, at least on the Mac side, is to make it able to load epub format books. The version I’ve got is 1.1, the latest version, and the Mac version hasn’t been updated in months. So I’m quite sure that isn’t the problem.
What HAS changed with B&N lately, though, is that they’ve started making all of their downloads be epub format, whereas before they were predominantly using PDB format. So this made me think, “hrmm, so what if I go back and re-download one of my earlier PDB purchases, see if it comes down in epub, and if I can load it correctly?” I was in fact able to do that with my ebook copy of mizkit‘s Demon Hunts, which opened up all nice and shiny-like.
So at this point I’m wondering a few things. One, who does the DRM wrapping? If that’s on B&N to do, it sounds like for some reason, some subset of the DRM wrapping they’re doing is breaking their version of the eReader. Two, what might have changed lately that this problem has only recently cropped up? If it’s because of the shift over to epub files, are there potentially different types of epub files they could be working with that could be breaking the reader app for some books, but not all?
I don’t know enough about the epub format to make a really solid guess, but I thought one of its major advantages was its universality. Anybody out there able to enlighten me on potential gotchas on epubs files produced by different sources?
Now I’ve got four books all exhibiting the problem, but since I’m able to read them on my Nook and iPhone, I’m way more intrigued than I am annoyed that they’re unreadable right now on my computer. It helps as well that really, reading on my Mac is maybe 10 percent of the e-reading I do, at most, so it’s not really an inconvenience, more just an intriguing problem to solve. Yep folks, if books are involved, I can even wear the QA hat when I’m not at work!
If you’re tired of the common tropes of the traditional fantasy genre, you can’t do much better than turning to Jim Hines’ books about Jig the Goblin. This has been hands down one of the more entertaining fantasy trilogies I’ve read in some time.
Jig is the smallest, scrawniest, runtiest goblin in the entire goblin lair–and he’s nearsighted to boot. He’s constantly harassed by the bigger and stronger goblins, and made to do all the worst chores. So it just goes to figure that he’s the one who winds up getting captured by a party of adventurers, two human princes, a dwarf cleric, and a young elven thief, all of whom are looking for the fabled Rod of Creation. Jig’s fast-thinking claim that he could guide them deeper into the caverns keeps him from getting killed on the spot by the arrogant prince leading the party, and he has to spend the rest of the book frantically trying to find a way to keep from getting killed by not only the adventurers, but everything else they encounter and fight along the way. He’s even desperate enough to commit to following one of the Forgotten Gods, if that’ll keep him alive. And to his surprise, that Forgotten God is in fact listening.
This is pretty much a D&D adventure from the goblin’s point of view, and it’s quite charming. I especially liked Jig’s forming a tentative… if not friendship, really, than at least less hostile alliance… with the young thief who’s just as much a captive of the adventurers as he is. His partnership with the Forgotten God Tymalous Shadowstar’s also a highlight, since Shadowstar’s so desperate for worshippers that he’ll even take on a goblin, the lowliest of the low. And overall, the goblin society is just hysterical, refreshingly straightforward in all its backstabbing, cowardly chaos. Four stars.
ETA: Correcting the first sentence, since I’d said “can’t do much worse” when what I really meant was “can’t do much better”. PhrasingFail! Thanks to for the catch.
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect going into this novella, Doranna Durgin’s shortest installment in her Sentinels paranormal romance series. The description of the story makes it sound like it’s erotica, since the main character, Tayla Garrett, must be initiated by another Sentinel before she can gain full command of her abilities. And by “initiated”, I mean “she needs to have sex with another Sentinel”.
In this case, that other Sentinel is Mark Burton, after whom she’s been pining for ages. Burton is pretty much ordered point-blank to initiate Tayla by none other than Nick Carter, the male lead from Wolf Hunt. Cue the obligatory “wait you’re only having sex with me because you were ordered to” angst on Tayla’s part.
However, the story is more than just that, happily. Yes, these bits are there–but as is the case with all of Durgin’s writing, it’s nicely low-key. And there’s a larger plot in play as well, one which relies upon Tayla’s specific abilities as well as on the fact that Mark is a rare Sentinel who does not in fact change shape. (Something I liked about him, in fact; he was described a lot with leonine imagery, despite the fact that he’s not a shifter at all.)
Plus, the short length of the story, a mere four chapters, meant that what angst there is here just doesn’t have time to get too drawn out and therefore overbearing. Instead, it blows over very quickly, letting the story get on with it. Very much appreciated, that. Three stars.
