I am slightly superstitious about announcing a book release date too early…but with the fall fast approaching, I think it’s time! The next novel in my Beyond the Tales series, The Lioness and the Spellspinners, will be available October 14th!
You could mark your calendar…but I’ll be sure to remind you! 🙂
In the meantime, read an excerpt here.
I’m making ever more headway on Newbery Medal reads (great options for audiobooks, which helps a lot!) and thought I’d hit two today. Both stories about boys in small towns, so they kinda fit each other. But the quality varied!…
Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos
In the tiny town of Norvelt, young Jack is looking forward to a summer of baseball, trips to the movies and other fun, until one bad decision and one wild injustice (more on that later) gets him grounded until school starts. He’s only allowed out to help elderly Miss Volker write obituaries…which comes up surprisingly often as a string of old women start dying.
I wanted to like this more than I did. An ordinary kid surrounded by slightly kooky characters in a small town sounds great! Dollops of history as Miss Volker looks to the past to expound on ideals of freedom and community, plus a hint of a murder mystery. What’s not to like?
Well, a few things. I never loved Jack; I don’t know why, I just didn’t. Usually I like kids who get a bad rap from adults, especially if they like to read, but somehow this one didn’t work for me. Maybe Jack liked to read a little too much about bloody history, harder to relate to than a Star Wars fandom. I hate (hate) to classify books as boy books or girl books, but this one did seem to be aimed at a certain age of boy, when blood and guts are so cool. That wasn’t a big part of the story, but it was an element. Personally, I could have lived without Jack’s perpetual bloody nose, or his love of war movies. Continue reading “Book Review(s): Dead End in Norvelt and Shiloh”
I was hunting for a bookish topic for this week, and as I often do, I went looking through the archives of Top Ten Tuesday from the Broke and the Bookish. Which led me to one of their past topics: authors I want another book from!
1) L. M. Montgomery, because, obviously–I’ve run out! But I’d settle for someone publishing the 200 unpublished short stories sitting out of reach in an archive (they’re real, and they’re unpublished!)
2) Edgar Rice Burroughs, not because I’ve run out of his or because I would expect anything new or innovative in one more novel, but–because he never finished John Carter and the Skeleton Men of Jupiter. I don’t want a new novel from him, I want that new novel. And similarly…
3) William Shakespeare. Love’s Labors Won, anyone? A play, not a novel, but close enough.
4) Harper Lee, but only in a perfect world where her second novel was not that terrible book I prefer to pretend doesn’t exist.
5) Terry Pratchett, because…Terry Pratchett! And even though the last Discworld book was satisfying, even though there are others by him I still haven’t read, it still makes me sad that there will be no more new ones.
6) Diana Wynne Jones, because she was the first author who died while I was actively following her work. And I am sad there will be no more new ones from her.
7) Susan Kay, because she only wrote two and one of them was Phantom and my favorite book ever, so what else might she write?
8) Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, who wrote three wonderful classic Star Trek books, then went off and wrote a bunch with William Shatner that I didn’t like as well. I’d love to see another one that’s just them.
9) Tamora Pierce, because her last book came out in 2013, and we’ve been waiting ever since for her next Tortall book, which has an ever-receding publishing date (some time 2017, currently).
10) Robin McKinley, because her last book came out in 2013, and we’re still waiting for her promised sequel to Pegasus. From what I can gather from reading her blog, she’d quite like to have a new book out too.
What author would you like to see another book from? Do you have hope it will happen, or is it just a wish?
My parallel universe reading has taken me back into some classic science fiction, to read what I believe is the very first published example of a parallel universe story. At least, that’s what the author’s introduction and Wikipedia say! Sidewise in Time and Other Scientific Adventures by Murray Leinster was an excellent collection of shockingly prescient stories from the 1930s and 40s, leaving me wondering why I’ve never heard of this author before!
“Sidewise in Time” is a novella, so I’m counting it as a read for my challenge. It features a collision between universes (I think—it’s technobabble), such that suddenly different patches of parallel universes are aligned. So as you move geographically across land, you also pass into patches of other universes. And just to make it even messier, nothing’s settled so the universes are still moving. The story mostly follows one group of explorers moving through portions of Virginia and in and out of universes, with intermittent sections on other chaos happening elsewhere.
It’s a good story in its own right, but I was fascinated by how complete this idea of parallel universes was, here in its first incarnation. Leinster has fully established the concept of different occurrences in the past spawning new universes, with subsequent different results in the present. Continue reading “Book Review: Sidewise in Time”
This week’s Book Blogger Hop question: Do you give books as gifts?
I do tend to default towards books and movies as gifts…those are typically the only things I want, and that’s what I think of giving too! I give my parents books for Christmas frequently, and my book club does a book white elephant swap every year. Another group of my friends also does a white elephant most years, and last year I brought a copy of Pratchett’s Hogfather to both exchanges. Well-received at both, because my friends are awesome.
Despite all that, my instinctive response is that books can actually be a very hard thing to give. Tastes are so particular! Predicting what book someone would like is more challenging than I think people often believe. (“Oh, you like fantasy, you will like any fantasy book!” And…no. Not really.)
I also think a downside to ebooks is that it removes the option of giving or loaning books to a friend. I mean, yes, there are ways to still do that with ebooks, but you can’t unwrap a digital book. And it’s more meaningful when a friend entrusts another with their own physical copy of a book.
Do you give books as gifts? Do you struggle with finding the right one for the right person?
Tales of the Marvelous 