Author Archives: janicu

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About janicu

I'm a book blogger who reads lots of speculative fiction, young adult and books with romantic elements.

White Horse by Alex Adams

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This review is based on an ARC provided by the publisher, Emily Bestler Books/Atria.
 

White Horse
White Horse
Alex Adams

The Premise: Zoe is a woman traveling across Europe.  War and disease have decimated the world, and Zoe has to contend with the few survivors – the immune and those who mutated into something else.  There are dangerous people on the road, but there are also those who haven’t lost their humanity, including Zoe — which is why she rescues a young blind girl and brings her along. As they travel, Zoe remembers the past eighteen months that brought the world to where it is now. For her, all began when she worked as a janitor at Pope pharmaceuticals and came home one day to find that someone had bypassed her home security and left a mysterious jar in her living room.
 
Read an excerpt of White Horse here
 
My Thoughts:  The narrative in White Horse alternates between THEN, when Zoe first finds the malevolent jar in her apartment and the world slowly begins to slide into chaos, and NOW, when Zoe is traversing Europe on foot amongst the rubble and death. Both timelines promise to answer lingering questions as Zoe narrates – what is Zoe’s destination and why, in the NOW, and what was in the jar and what is this new illness in the THEN. These questions do get their answers, but in the meantime, Zoe is the pragmatic hero holding on to her sense of decency during a terrible time.
 

“When I wake, the world is still gone. Only fragments remain. Pieces of places and people who were once whole. On the other side of the window, the landscape is a violent green, the kind you used to see on a flat-screen television in a watering hole disguised as a restaurant. Too green. Dense gray clouds banished the sun weeks ago, forcing her to watch us die through a warped, wet lens.There are stories told among pockets of survivors that rains have come to the Sahara, that green now sprinkles the endless brown, that the British Isles are drowning. Nature is rebuilding with her own set of plans. Man has no say.

It’s a month until my thirty-first birthday. I am eighteen months older than I was when the disease struck. Twelve months older than when war first pummeled the globe. Somewhere in between then and now, geology went crazy and drove the weather to schizophrenia. No surprise when you look at why we were fighting. Nineteen months have passed since I first saw the jar.”

THEN, Zoe mops floors at her job at the drug company and has normal family – her two parents, and her married sister, Jenny. Zoe’s biggest problem was boredom and dealing with her relatives’ annoying matchmaking. Then the jar shows up, and Zoe begins to see therapist Nick Rose and has her friend James (a assistant museum curator) examine it. Acquaintances start to get sick, and seemingly incongruous events begin to take on alarming significance. NOW, Zoe is in Europe, trekking through gutted villages. She is determined to get to a specific destination, and her day-to-day worry is about survival. In both worlds, there are secondary characters that come and go, some making more of an impact than others, but everyone is dealing with the same things Zoe is. Relationships are sketched out quickly – there is the sense that they may be ephemeral once disease strikes, but it’s always clear how Zoe feels about the other characters, and it’s easy to empathize with her feelings.
 
THEN is filled with a sense of foreboding, that something terrible is beginning to happen. NOW is dreary and bleak – the horrors so many that Zoe has become somewhat numb. Both sides of the narrative are peppered with unsettling details. Like a lot of Horror stories, White Horse makes it impossible to feel completely comfortable with the story. Fire alarms along a white hallway are linked to menstrual blood on a sanitary pad, and crumbs flying from a mouth are described in icky detail. As for the gory stuff, we get glimpses of the monsters that were once men along Zoe’s journey, but the story doesn’t focus on them. The things people do to each other and to themselves is just as gruesome – there is a rape and assault within the first fifteen pages, plenty of death (some of it very brutal), and a creepy judgmental character stalks our protagonist through Europe.
 
While there is this pervasive thread of Horror throughout White Horse, Zoe herself manages to keep her moral compass, and she finds other people who do the same. There is a lot of hope in this story, if you can grit your teeth through the rest of it. There is even a love story in there.  Although it’s not delved into as much as I would like, the romance lifts the dark mood of the story somewhat.
 
Overall: White Horse is a post-apocalyptic survival tale focusing on a woman named Zoe before and after the world-wide cataclysmic event. Zoe’s tell-it-like-it-is voice and my curiosity about what happened and what will happen kept me flipping the pages. Although I wouldn’t normally pick a Horror-infused story for myself, there was just enough hope alleviating the darkness to appeal to me. That said, I give you fair warning — this is a very dark and often gruesome tale. It’s difficult for me to predict how much the unsettling bits will affect you.
 
Buy: Amazon | Powell’s | The Book Depository
 
Other reviews:
Let me know if I missed yours
 
I like the cover of the UK edition of the book:

On the Wishlist…

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I usually don’t do many cover posts anymore (maybe I should?) but I couldn’t resist posting about the recent cover reveals for two books from a couple of favorite series. I was just updating my 2012 Wishlist with these.

Ashes of Honor by Seanan McGuireAshes of Honor is book 6 of the October Daye series. From what I can tell from Seanan McGuire’s hints on her blog, this book will bring Toby and Quentin back to Tamed Lightening, and we will see April O’Leary and familiar characters from A Local Habitation once again.

Endgame by Ann AguirreEndgame is also the 6th book in a series (Sirantha Jax), but in this case it is also the final book. “As part of a grass-roots resistance, Jax means to liberate the La’hengrin. Political intrigue and guerrilla warfare are new to her; this will be the most dangerous game she’s ever played—spies and conspiracies, a war of weapons and hearts, and everyone might not make it out alive…” An excerpt can be found here.

Click for Ann Aguirre’s giveaway for the first 5 books!

I also found out about a new series starting and this is definitely going on my wishlist..

A Confusion of Princes by Garth Nix uk editionA Confusion of Princes by Garth Nix. “You’d think being a privileged Prince in a vast intergalactic Empire would be about as good as it gets. But it isn’t as great as it sounds. For one thing, Princes are always in danger. Their greatest threat? Other Princes. Khemri discovers that the moment he is proclaimed a Prince. He also discovers mysteries within the hidden workings of the Empire.”

* * * * *

I have created a Pinterest board for books I’m eying. Wishlist books are books I’m definitely buying, these books are books to be considered 🙂

So are you on Pinterest? If you are a book blogger, did you know there is a Directory of Book Bloggers on Pinterest at the Well Read Wife? Looks like a nice resource. I just asked to be added to it.

Pet Peeves: eBooks only available in one format and one place

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Ranting & raving is something I do periodically on this blog. Look for the “rants and raves” category for past rants and raves.

It is currently my review policy not to accept self-published books for review, but if I’m interested enough, I will go buy a self-published book.

What’s driving me crazy is I’m noticing that sometimes an eBook is only available in one place, in one format. Usually this one place is Amazon, and in their .azw format, which is incompatible with oh, most of the other eReaders on the market. Now, I don’t know anything about how difficult it is to sell your book elsewhere and provide different formats, but as a customer, I really don’t care. That’s a lost sale. I’m NOT going to buy a Kindle if I already have an eReader that isn’t a Kindle. And I’m not going to read the book on my computer or phone or some other device because I have an eReader to read my eBooks on! It doesn’t make sense to me to download something and then NOT read it on my eReader, so I won’t do it. I’m not going to go trying to convert an .azw file into what I want – I heard Calibre could do it but stripping the DRM is illegal, so there’s that pickle.

Limiting a customer’s choice of format and expecting a customer to jump through hoops in order to read a book is wildly optimistic, given all the other books I could be reading. It’s even more optimistic when you are a completely new-to-me author, and thus a risk in the first place.

Please, please, if you are self-publishing an eBook, make sure that you reach more readers by making it available in different formats! And while you’re at it, if you’re offering your book for free or discounted on Amazon, consider making the same offer for the other formats too, because that’s another rant.

Guest Posting for FantasyCafe’s Women in SF&F Month

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Today I am over at Fantasy Cafe talking about some of my favorite women authors in SF&F – actually my favorite female speculative fiction authors that write in the science fiction side of the spectrum. I think these are some authors that could lure you over to the dark side one of my favorite genres. Like all genres, I think it has plenty of variety, so if you look, you just may find something you adore within it. Take a peek at my post and check it out! I have highlighted books that…
 


…are gateway books for romance readers to be introduced to some space opera/science fiction…


…are books I think urban fantasy fans could get into…


…are character driven, coming of age stories…


.. amidst war and other trials and tribulations…


… or just cross genre boundaries.

Whiskey Road by Karen Siplin

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Retro Friday is a weekly meme hosted by Angie over at Angieville and focuses on reviewing books from the past. This can be an old favorite, an under-the-radar book you think deserves more attention, something woefully out of print, etc.
 

Whiskey Road
Whiskey Road
Karen Siplin

I started reading Whisky Road because it was the latest pick by my readalong buddies Chachic and Holly (of Chachic’s Book Nook and The Book Harbinger respectively). The previous couple of books that we’d chosen for our readathons ended up being a little darker than we were expecting them to be, but we were hoping Whisky Road would buck the trend, especially since it came highly recommended by Angie of Angieville, and has the subtitle, “A Love Story”. Thankfully, we were right.
 
The Premise: From the back blurb – “After one too many run-ins with irate A-list celebrities and their bodyguards on the streets of Los Angeles, paparazza Jimi Anne Hamilton has decided to throw in the towel. But when she planned to ride her BMW K 1200 motorcycle from California to New York, she didn’t count on having her cross-country adventure interrupted by a motorcycle thief. After the brutal attack, which sees both her motorcycle and camera equipment stolen, she finds herself left with only her helmet, a few clothes, and a bag of money she swiped from her attacker. Disillusioned and hurt, Jimi chooses to recuperate in a nearby town where she meets Caleb Atwood, a local contractor fighting his own demons.
 
Jimi and Caleb make a mismatched pair: black and white, highbrow and low. But in Caleb, Jimi believes she has found someone who feels as much of an outsider as she is. With Whiskey Road, Karen Siplin again succeeds in giving readers a story about opposites who manage to see what no one else can — that they’re right for each other.”
 
My Thoughts: When Jimi rolls into the coffee shop Caleb frequents, battered up by some unknown event and dressed in motorcycle leathers but without a bike, most of the people there don’t treat her very nicely. She’s a outsider and a black woman. The only person willing to be helpful is Caleb, but maybe that’s because he’s been treated as a Bad Boy in his hometown long past when he should be. For her part, Jimi’s recent experience on the road makes her wary of a man she sized up as harmless but has traits she associates with racist hillbillies.
 
Over the next few days, the small town of Frenchman’s Bend gives Jimi and Caleb plenty of opportunities to run into each other, and every time they do, they’re surprised. While they are both as different as two people can be — Jimi being a black city girl from a white-collar family, and Caleb a white country boy from a broken home, they are both so alike. Jimi and Caleb have not been perfect – Jimi questions the lengths she has gone to for a photo, and Caleb, reeling from a failed marriage, sleeps with an older married woman who reminds him of his wife.  Each of them are a little hardened and worn by life, but they quietly see things differently from the people around them, making them outsiders in their own communities, and drawn to each other.
 
The story flows very simply from there. Caleb and Jimi begin a subtle relationship where the smallest look and gesture holds vast meaning but hesitation and second guessing comes from both sides. The greatest danger to their fragile new connection is the people that surround them. Jimi’s affluent older brother loves living near Frenchman’s Creek but stays apart from the locals. He’s friendly to the contractors that work in his French-style country house, but would frown on one of them dating his little sister. Caleb friends’ problem is not so much about the class difference and more about Jimi’s race and outsider status. And then there are the things in their recent histories that could spell trouble for both of them if they were to mix: the reason behind Jimi’s bruises, and Caleb’s no good older brother, released from prison.
 
There was a quiet resonance to this story. Fragments stuck in my mind long after reading it: the commentary on racism in little rural towns; how easily one can be sideswiped by that selfish family member; how falling in love is like a beginning. There are some bumps along the way, but was happy when I finished it. The only thing that felt off to me was how abrupt the transition from the climax to the ending was, but I think I was the only one in the readalong that had that quibble, and it was a little one. But then, who hasn’t wanted a bit more time to say goodbye to characters they’ve gotten attached to?
 
Overall: I was pleasantly surprised by how much I ended up liking this contemporary novel. It’s a story that is deceptively quiet and slow moving at times, tense with the promise of unpleasantness at others. It was gritty and real, with small town flavor. And most of all, it has love story with an unlikely couple. Jimi and Caleb weren’t looking for or expecting each other, but it only made me root more for them that they found a kindred spirit in the unlikeliest package.
 
Buy: Amazon | Powell’s | The Book Depository
 
Reviews from my readalong friends:
Chachic’s Book Nook – “an under-the-radar novel that I’ll recommend to readers who like slow burn, complicated romances”
The Book Harbinger – “not-your-average contemporary romance in the best way”
 
Other reviews:
Angieville– I love what she says about the ending – “Not tied up with a bow, not unrealistic in its perfection, but touched with just the right amount of maturity, rightness, and possibility.”
 

So here’s the deal..

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Work has been taking up my mental cycles lately since I’m now officially on two teams. I’m trying to get used to jumping back and forth between two jobs that are not very much alike and involve completely different sets of people. It’s an adjustment.

Anyway, that’s the reason why my reading and blogging hasn’t been as consistent lately, but I have a plan. I’m going to start doing more fun shorter posts and bring back my rants and raves here (I have ideas saved up). I’m also considering doing a new feature. 🙂

Those life changes, they mess up the blog. Anyone else notice this?

* * * * *

I will now leave you with the back blurb of a book whose premise gave me the willies when I read it.

Bloggiesta Wrap-up

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This year I felt like I got more done for Bloggiesta, although it possibly doesn’t look like it when you take a look at this blog, I did a lot!

All in all, I’m very happy with this Bloggiesta. There is still a lot I want to do with the blog, but I feel like this event kick-started my actually doing those things. So it was a successful weekend!

#Bloggiesta: Goodreads Challenge

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For Bloggiesta, I’m hosting a mini-challenge which is about Goodreads. In my mind the reason why this site is pretty popular is because it has a lot of functionality and it has a social media aspect – you can follow what your friends are reading and comment as they read along. As a book blogger, you want to be able to network with readers. That’s my argument for being on Goodreads. 🙂

(My Goodreads profile)

To make things simple, my challenge has two levels – one for first timers and one for old timers. (If you have any questions – email me or leave a comment below)

* * * * *

FIRST TIMERS – If you don’t have a Goodreads account – create one! This is very straightforward: just go to goodreads.com and create an account with a name, email, and password. I found this youtube video that gives a great overview of signing up and using Goodreads to help you go through the steps, and, if you want to do a little more, it explains how to enter a review (you more likely than not don’t need to watch a video to figure it out, but it’s still nice to have the tutorial if you need it).

When you create your account, comment with a link to your Goodreads page!

* * * * *

OLD TIMERS – Below is a list of some tips and tricks I’ve learned over years from using the site. These aren’t that secret, but I’ve found them useful.

Your challenge:

  • Leave a comment with a tip or trick of your own OR
  • Tell me what you’ve done for Bloggiesta that involves Goodreads (did you put some of your reviews up there, linked your Goodreads account to your blog, or added a Goodreads widget to your sidebar?)

I encourage you to leave a link your Goodreads account too! This way bloggiesta participants can find and add one another if they want. 🙂

GOODREADS TIPS AND TRICKS:
1. Hiding spoilers
This is done by using the <spoiler> OMG, IT WAS THE BUTLER! </spoiler> tags. You can use this in your review, and you can put them in comments to other people’s status updates. Very nice when I’m having a readalong and don’t want to spoil someone that hasn’t read the book. But they don’t work in status updates, so I hide my spoilers in comments now that I discovered that.

Goodreads also allows other formatting (images, strikethroughs, links, etc).

2. General status updates
So above when I talked about status update, I meant when you’ve got a book on your currently reading queue and you click the link to update what page you’re on and what you have to say. Like so:

But did you know you could post a general status update, like say, link to your latest blog post on Goodreads? You just use the “add general status” link which is in the same area! It took me forever to figure this out!


3. Switching from page to percent and back
So along the same lines, it wasn’t obvious that you can switch if you want to record your reading progress in % or number of pages. The word “page” and the “%” character are links.

4. Other thoughts and suggestions

  • Have a link to your blog in your Goodreads profile.
  • Have a link to to your Goodreads in your blog.
  • If you like someone’s review, click “like” next to it in Goodreads. It helps raise it up to the top of the page for that book. That’s the kind of thing that gives someone a skip in their step.
  • Consider going into your account profile and into your email tab and make sure to select or deselect what you want to get emails for. Personally, I removed myself from getting newsletter emails and group updates because I was getting too many emails there, but I asked Goodreads to email me about pretty much everything else.
  • Consider getting the iPhone or Android Goodreads app. I have the Android app on my nook tablet, and I really like it for reading the status updates of my top friends. I don’t love it for adding books though – a little more complicated.
  • As with all social media, it’s about making genuine connections. So keep that in mind when you use the site. And have fun!

I also asked people on twitter about their tips or tricks and I got a couple of responses:

Discount Armageddon by Seanan McGuire

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Discount Armageddon
Discount Armageddon
Seanan McGuire

I’m a big fan of Seanan McGuire’s Toby Daye books so I’ve been looking forward to reading Discount Armageddonever since I first heard of it.
 
The Premise: Verity Price comes from a line of cryptozoologists — people who categorize those mythical beings and monsters that humans don’t think really exist. If such a creature (a cryptid) is a danger to people and won’t curtail its harmful nature on its own, her family steps in, but mostly they leave the cryptids alone. They believe in maintaining an ecological equilibrium — not a philosophy that the Covenant of St. George shares. Ever since the Healy/Price family broke off from the Covenant, they’ve been branded as traitors to the human race. After emigrating to America, they’ve kept their heads down to make it harder for the Covenant to find and hunt them down. The exception to the “no publicity” rule is Verity. No one really thinks of dance training as fight training, so she’s allowed to move to New York City where she can monitor the cryptid population there while trying to make it as a dancer. All goes well until a Covenant member is seen in town and members of the cryptid population begin to disappear.
 
My Thoughts: Although they are both classified as urban fantasy, the InCryptid series is very different from the October Daye books. Do not approach this series expecting something like October Daye. I had to do a mind-reset because I found myself comparing them, and it’s like comparing apples and oranges. The biggest difference is that this series is a lot less serious. Verity Price is a younger protagonist with no known baggage and a big dream. She just wants to dance. While she’s respectful of her family business and trained just as hard as her brother Alex and sister Antimony, her indulgence in her real passion, her blonde, blue-eyed look, high energy, and her Smart Aleck demeanor make her by far the least moody urban fantasy heroine I’ve ever met. Verity may not be what a lot of people expect in their urban fantasy, but I don’t think she’s a bad thing. She’s just a UF heroine coming from a different direction.
 
Since Verity is a more light-hearted character, if you guessed that other aspects of Discount Armageddon are light-hearted too, you wouldn’t be wrong. I wouldn’t call it light-hearted to the point of being a farce, because there is some gritty thrown in there (monsters and death and dark, damp, places), but it’s definitely a lot more fun than the UF I’m used to reading. Verity likes to let herself live in the moment with dancing her heart out at a club, free running across rooftops, or dropping into the dark from her kitchen window. She shares her apartment with a colony of talking, religious mice. Mice that worship her family, pepper her apartment with the word “Hail”, and enthusiastically celebrate mundane events as religious holidays.
 
The relationships in this book are blessedly uncomplicated by past drama. When she talks to her family she’s clearly happy and close with them, and they talk about killing monsters and have conversations where basilisks, crossbows, and “I’ll tell them you’re insane but being responsible about it.” are part of the conversation. Verity’s family isn’t in New York with her (with the exception of her cuckoo cousin Sarah), but we hear a lot about them from Verity, and they all seem great and kick butt in their own unique ways.  Verity approaches her romantic relationships without some dark past relationship clouding in her present. What you see is what you get with this girl. There is a blossoming romance in this book and I liked that Verity approached her attraction a straightforward way (although, whether things will work out remains to be seen).
 
The main plot here is the arrival of Dominic De Luca, a young member of the Covenant, to Verity’s turf, and the disappearance of cryptids not long after. Verity has to make a decision about the impressively trained but ill-informed Dominic, and she has to figure out what exactly is behind the missing cryptids. With the help of Sarah, Verity’s nerdy mathematician adopted cousin, who happens to be a Cuckoo (which means she’s got some amazing skills at blending in, including telepathy), the mystery feels relatively straightforward. OK, there are a couple of twists and turns, but I was so much more entertained by Verity’s life that the investigation took a back seat to that for much of the book before coming to the forefront at the end.
 
P.S. The cover – it matches the fun tone of the book, and I like that it’s different from the usual all-black, serious look of other UF covers, but still not in love with the scantily clad in stilettos look. Yes, Verity works as a waitress in a strip joint, and her uniform sounds like what she’s wearing on the cover, but still.
 
Overall: A refreshing urban fantasy that does not take itself too seriously. Discount Armageddon is full of fun and humor, but is balanced with just the right amount of grit. I thoroughly enjoyed Verity’s dynamo presence and her enthusiasm for being in the Now. She’s a kick-ass UF heroine who isn’t angry or angsty, doesn’t have a painful past, and comes with a supportive family. I recommend this one for urban fantasy fans that are looking for something that approaches the genre from a different angle.
 
Buy: Amazon | Powell’s | The Book Depository
 
Other reviews:
Starmetal Oak Book Blog – 6.5
Tynga’s Reviews – positive
Fantasy Cafe – 8.5/10
Fantasy and SciFi Lovin’ News & Reviews – 4.5 out of 5
Lurv a la Mode – 4.5 scoops (out of 5)
Calico Reaction – 9 (Couldn’t put it down) (LJ link, wordpress link)
 
Interesting Links:
The Cryptid Field Guide
 

Lunacon report

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Lunacon is an annual convention held by the New York Science Fiction Society. For the past few years, it’s held literally 15 minutes away from where I live in Rye Brook, NY. Unfortunately, I didn’t know this. It kills me a little, looking at past guests I could have met (Tanya Huff, Mercedes Lackey, Jacqueline Carey), but this year, I was aware, and I bought a weekend pass.

Lunacon has a lot of programming – filking, gaming, reading, writing, movies, anything to do with science fiction, you will probably find it (there were even panels on lifestyle and health). There’s enough there that I could pick a “bookish” track for myself. The only complaint I would have is that the programming schedule wasn’t put up until the weekend prior to the event, which made it tougher to plan things ahead of time, but I made do. Here are the highlights:

Saturday
Reading: Sara Beth Durst: This is a YA author I hadn’t read before, but I recall seeing the cover of her book, Enchanted Ivy, and loving it. She read from Drink, Slay, Love, which is out now, and from Vessel, which is to be released in September. Drink, Slay, Love is a teen vampire story about a vampire who is stabbed in the heart by a wereunicorn(!) – love the idea, but I think I am burned out on teen vampire books. On the other hand, I’m very interested in Vessel which his a fantasy centering on a girl who is supposed to be sacrificed to a goddess, but for some reason, her goddess never comes. Also there is an Asian girl on the cover, which gets bonus points from me.

vessel by sarah beth durst

Reading: Tamora Pierce: Tamora Pierce read a big chunk of her work-in-progress, and it was good. This was from Battle Magic and had Evvy, Rosethorn, and Briar in the court of Yangjing, and discovering the consequences of being seen as less than perfect before the Emperor and his guests. There is some cool magic involving plants described and I didn’t want her to stop reading. There was a bigger group (about 20 or so) of fans there and they had a lot of questions about the books and her writing in general. Currently she’s reading a lot of stories set in/after World War I, like Jacqueline Winspear’s books. About separating characters in her books: some of her characters had to go their separate ways and then come back together later. Someone in the audience said they liked that the characters were separated so they could grow, then come back and grow some more together. Pierce said that if you do it right you are always growing. I was very impressed by her answers to questions and her pro-girl stance.

Reading: Barbara Ashford: I read and liked Spellcast last year (my review here), so I was eager to see what she’d be reading this time. I also brought my copy of Spellcast just in case. Barbara is a friendly person and a very engaging reader. She did the voices of different characters (with accents) and spoke with the right emotions (it was great). She read from Spellcast, but the next book, Spellcrossed is coming out in June and there will be a third book after that. The POV will mostly be Maggie’s in the second book, like the first, but the third sounds like it will have more of Rowan’s POV. The plan is currently for it to be a trilogy but it could be continued after the third book. I also found out that she’s in an anthology that somehow didn’t hit my radar, The Modern Fae’s Guide to Surviving Humanity which I went and bought immediately afterward.

spellcrossed by barbara ashford

Crazy thing – only about 2-3 people at the readings (except for the Tamora Pierce one). I think if the book bloggosphere had been aware, there would have been a lot more. Next year I will try to see if I can do something about spreading the word.

Guests of Honor Speeches – John Ringo, Tamora Pierce
After the readings, I caught the tail end of John Ringo’s Guest of Honor speech. Another author I haven’t read but he was telling some funny stories about his Ghost series, and I’m sort of interested in them now even though he was adamant that they’re awful! Ha! It was interesting to hear that they came after writer’s block and he wrote one book and started the next within 5 days. Wow. He had a mostly male audience with a few women in the mix, which is amusing because after his speech was Tamora Pierce’s which had the opposite mix.

Tamora Pierce’s speech was one where she talked about the influences of her writing (her answer to “Where do you get your ideas?”) and that she’s discovered over time that her obsessions throughout her life showed up later in her stories. She told the story of her first series (the Alanna quartet) where a review said that she had depicted medieval life accurately – except she hadn’t done any research when she was writing those books. Then she remembered her obsession with the medieval when she was 8. She also uses a lot of real life in her books – a lot of characters are real people (she mentioned Brendan Fraser, Sigourney Weaver, her best friend’s mother), and pets have turned into fantastic creatures. Plots come from news stories and her life experiences.

Sunday
I got my copy of Trickster’s Choice autographed 🙂

The Alternate Regency (Byron P. Connell, Meredith Schwartz, Susan de Guardiola, Karin Rita Gastreich): this was a panel about the Regency period and stories that are based in this era. I found this to be a very interesting history lesson. They covered general history and dress of the time period, Jane Austen versus Georgette Heyer, common historical mistakes (confusing gentry with nobility, corsets were not very large or tight in this time period, surgeons were considered butchers and gentlemen were physicians, not surgeons), and corresponding periods in the world (Napoleonic in France, Federal period in the U.S). Just a very informative panel all around and it got a lot of discussion going between panelists and the audience (which was maybe 15 people).

What’s Hot – Alternate History (Alexis Gilliland, Carl Fink, Byron P. Connell): This was another panel about Alternate History, but this time not limited to one time period. I noticed in this panel they tried to give examples of books that were alternate histories that were also clearly science fiction – the story is based on science fact. It was interesting that steampunk and time travel were categorized as fantasy by panelists. I hadn’t seen it that way but they had a convincing argument. Anyway, there was a lot of discussion about Alternate Histories that have been based on a turning point event (in technology, leadership, etc), and how wars and their outcomes are often explored in Alternate Histories. World War II and the Civil War are particularly popular in American (U.S American) literature, but in France the Napoleonic Wars are very popular in Alternate History stories. There was some discussion as to why these wars are so popular as well as a lot of examples of books.

What makes Y.A, Y.A? (Tu/Lee & Willow Books, Esther Friesner, A.L. Davroe, Sarah Beth Durst, Tamora Pierce): This started off with what Y.A. was, which seemed to be basically stories about teens and their experiences, then it just grew into an interesting discussion about YA in general. This feels like a “you had to be there” discussion to report on, but highlights included the idea of taboo topics in YA (there really shouldn’t be any), the belief publishing seems to have that boys won’t read books about girls but girls will read books about boys (much scoffing), Harry Potter and justice – your government can fail you, current politics and women’s issues, and minorities in YA (including recent #racefails). I was interested in the books with minority protagonists, so I came away resolved to look into Esther Friesner’s upcoming Spirit Princess, which is about Japan’s Princess Himiko, and into Tu Books which is a YA imprint with multicultural protagonists.

spirit's princess by esther friesnerSo, I was an idiot and somehow brought my camera without my memory card in it. I took 3 pictures which were saved to the camera’s HD memory, but I can’t get it off my camera without errors. Fail! Next year I’ll do better. I did take pictures of my haul at home though:

  • A Modern Fae’s Guide to Surviving Humanity (Bought at dealer’s room. Signed by Joshua Palmatier and Barbara Ashford)
  • Trickster’s Choice (my copy, signed by Tamora Pierce)
  • Enchanted Ivy (Bought at dealer’s room. Signed by Sarah Beth Durst)
  • Yesterday’s Dreams by Danielle Ackley-McPhail (Bought from author at dealer’s room. She signed it for me – P.S. has a cooler cover than what’s on Amazon)
  • The Hidden City by Michelle West (Bought from dealer’s room)
  • The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells (Bought from dealer’s room)
  • Finder by Terri-Lynne DeFino (Bought from dealer’s room, signed by author – this looked like an interesting fantasy book. Didn’t get a chance to meet the author, but grabbed the book when I saw it for sale)
  • Not shown – my copy of Spellcast signed by Barbara Ashford