This review is based on an ARC received from the publisher.

Elise Dalriss hears her great-granddaughter repeating a story about a princess locked asleep in a tower, and finally tells the true story as she lived it, the princess's companion.

Do not expect too much Sleeping Beauty in this story. The broad outlines are there: a King and Queen who at long last have a child. A curse at the princess's baptism. Her being shut away in the tower. However, the story is really Elise's as she makes her way from the countryside to the palace and from chambermaid to lady in waiting, and about the friendships and romances she forms along the way. There is very possibly also no magic in this story, as it remains ambiguous whether royal aunts Millicent and Flora have magic powers or merely an amazing knowledge of herbs.

Call this historical fiction about history that never happened, to borrow a phrase often used to describe the A Song of Ice and Fire series. I would say the ideal audience for this book would be fans of Philippa Gregory who enjoy the court intrigue and aren't picky about whether the court in question existed.

Overall grade: B

While Beauty Slept will be available February 20

This review is based on a free promotional copy received from the publisher.

Archetype is set in a world in which fertility rates have dropped so low that fertile women are treated as property and sold as wives. Teenage girls are raised in wife training centers and the ones judged capable of bearing children are sold at age eighteen. It's into this world that Emma reawakes after an alleged accident with no memory, but with a mysterious voice in her head and vague dreams of another life. Her husband is there when she wakes and clearly loves her, but there's another man in her dreams, and she knows that one of them must be the man she loves and the other is her bitter enemy. She doesn't know which is which.

I have mixed feelings about this book, possibly because it invites comparison with The Handmaid's Tale. (Waters acknowledges that a scene she remembers of the handmaids in training in the movie version was an influence on this book, but that she only recently read the book after having written Archetype.) If I try to forget every other dystopia I've read, this book satisfies. Emma's development as she recovers her memory also lets the reader slowly into the light about how her world works, and her love for the husband who takes care of her while she also remembers a life with another man is believable and well executed.

In comparison with other dystopias, and especially The Handmaid's Tale, however, it falls short on the social commentary scale. It may be because of Emma's abridged memory, but although we are told that wives are the property of their husbands and must be branded because they are at risk of being stolen, we are shown very little oppression. Other than a couple of brief mentions about how pregnancy is not a choice and how birth control and abortion are both illegal, the day to day lives of the women we see doesn't seem to involve many negative ramifications. There is, of course, a secret horror to be revealed, but it appears to be a reasonably unimportant part of the system as a whole. It doesn't give the sense that Emma's daily life would be restricted at all if she weren't a patient. It's clear that she could not hold a job, but she paints and sells her paintings. Is the money they bring hers? Could she conduct business on her own? Does she even care if she has any control over money of her own? Would she want to hold a job if she were allowed to do so? Are there rules about where she can or can't go without her husband? Presumably adultery is illegal since men who buy wives to reproduce will want to be sure the children are their own, but are there any other rules about interaction between wives and men not their husbands?

Although the reproduction oriented rules of society immediately made my mind go to The Handmaid's Tale, I'm not sure that Archetype is about reproductive choice, or at least about the threat of increased legal restrictions on women exercising that choice. If that's the story Waters is trying to tell, then this result would be equivalent to writing a story about slavery and only showing slaves who worked skilled trades and had the opportunity to earn money and buy their freedom. The system would still be abhorrent, but the story would stop short of depicting the full horrors possible under it. But maybe Archetype is actually a social satire in the vein of The Stepford Wives, only with the SF elements visible all the way through, less about a systematic threat to take away women's control over their own bodies and more about how women can  lose themselves to the interests of their husbands and their children, often while being complicit in it. If that's the case, then the fact that the premise is so close to The Handmaid's Tale is unfortunate in that it invites what can only be an extremely unfair comparison, but the story as it advances from there is much more effective.

I'm not sure I will really know how I feel about Archetype until after I read the second book, Prototype, which I have an ARC of but am going to try to read some books coming out sooner first to make sure I get to them before the release date. (Prototype is due out in July.) For now, the Overall Grade is B.

Archetype will be released on February 6.

I'm at ALA Midwinter right now, so I have a ton of ARCs and will be reading a much higher percentage of new stuff for the foreseeable future, and I expect I'll be doing more reviewing.

So, yes, this review is based on an ARC received free from the publisher.

Penelope Sparrow wakes up after miraculously surviving a fourteen story fall. Although her injuries are comparatively far less than what would be expected, it's unclear if she will ever be able to resume her career as a dancer. Penny will have to recover and confront her memories while trying to rebuild her body and discover her new place in the world.

I have to fess up: I took this book because the woman in the Sourcebooks booth who was handing it out made it sound like more of a psychological suspense book than it is. I thought Penny's major challenge was going to be trying to fill in the gap in her memory of what exactly she was doing falling out of a window. Instead, it's primarily a story about Penny trying to deal with her issues about her body and her mother. I tried not to hold it against the book that the sales pitch made me think that it was something that it wasn't, but I remained unimpressed.

Penny's shutting her mother out of the events of her career might have been reasonable as herself; if she is so worried about impressing her mother that she doesn't want to tell her anything until after she has already succeeded, that's a reasonable character choice. However, when her roommate Angela's mother can't always come when her CF sends her to the hospital because of her work, Penny's reaction is judgmental. Not only is there a lack of understanding, before she finds out what Dara Reed does, that maybe her work and her finances don't let her get away as often as Angela has to be hospitalized, but there's an incomprehensible contradiction about how much Penny expects mothers and daughters to be involved in each other's lives. I also found the way that Penny gets her first post-dance job to be frankly ridiculous, as was the fact that Angela wanted her as a roommate to help pay the rent but didn't discuss what her share of the rent would be as soon as the discussion of her moving in for real came up. I kept reading because I did want to find out how Penny fell and what would happen when she remembered, but I found Penny not unlikeable, but unknowable, which is unforgiveable in a first person narrator, and all of the non-dance aspects of her world to be deeply unrealistic. (I know very little about the world of dance but I would consider that part of her life to be at least believable, although I can't speak for accuracy.)

Overall Grade: C. The Art of Falling will be released 1/28.

Angelic was the first Subterranean Press novella in the Women in the Otherworld series and was in extremely short supply. It took it this long for it to hit me that it might be available through Interlibrary Loan.

Eve has an arrangement with the fates; she serves six months as an angel and then gets to spend six months "off" as an ordinary ghost. She's supposed to be leaving on her vacation when they call her in to deal with a djinn uprising. Eve's getting tired of being expected to break the rules but then punished for it, and decides that she is going to get herself fired.

I know it's not fair to compare a novella against a full novel, but the bits of this book that seemed abbreviated were not the ones that one would expect. Summoning rituals aren't actually shown. Fights are glossed over. I can't help but think of the Pax Arcana short stories, which are much shorter, and yet which feel less condensed. Angelic was a decent way to spend half an hour, but it's short on action and doesn't advance the series, either, not that I'm sure I would want anything with major repercussions to happen in a limited run novella. It does clarify Eve's relationship to the Fates a bit. I don't regret reading it but I won't be buying it, even the more reasonably priced ebook, because I don't expect I'll feel the need to read it on subsequent series rereads.

Overall grade: C

From earlier books in the Brothers Sinister series, we know that Sebastian Malheur is both a rake and a scientist. His theories of inheritance alone are considered too sexual to discuss in public. Except that the theories he presents were actually developed by Violet, the widowed Countess of Canterbury, his lifelong friend and the honorary fourth Brother Sinister, along with Sebastian and his cousins, Robert and his half-brother Oliver. Nobody would read her first paper submitted under her own name, so Sebastian has learned everything necessary to discuss the work as his own and been her public face for five years. But Sebastian, at heart, wants to make people happy. He can't take the public hatred any more, and his brother, who is not expected to live long, won't make him his nephew's guardian.

This is not entirely the book that I expected it to be. From the cover text, I thought the conflict was going to rest on Sebastian's desire to give up presenting Violet's work as his own and Violet's need for somebody to be the face of her work in a time when she could not present it for herself. In fact, Violet does not particularly fight Sebastian when he says he can't do it any more, although it takes a while before they come up with a plan for her to present it for herself. The conflict is more about Violet's belief that she doesn't have any qualities that make her worthy of love. This is not my favorite trope of a romance novel, probably because I've seen it done too many times unconvincingly. If it has ever been done right, what Violet went through with her late husband is it, but that can't entirely undo how tired I am of it.

But I can forgive that, not only because at least this is an example of the trope done well, but because of everything else in the book. I love friends to lovers stories, mainly because I've lived one, but even though I know it's absolutely possible for two friends to fall in love, I also wonder if stories about women eventually falling in love with men who have been their friends forever are actually encouraging more angry self-dubbed Nice Guys who think that it is totally unfair that women whose friends they pretend to be don't want to have sex with them.  But if ever there were a friends to lovers story that didn't encourage the belief that it's unjust "friendzoning" for a woman only to want to be friends with a man, this is it. When Sebastian thinks that Violet wants to remain friends only, he makes it absolutely clear that he doesn't consider friendship any less valuable than love. He does tell her that he loves her, and not platonically, but he's also the one who says that they will go on as friends as they always did until she admits that she returns his feelings. I also love beta heroes, and Sebastian is the perfect beta hero, whose main ambition is making people happy and who has quite a talent for it. He lets Violet decide exactly what she wants their relationship to be, and if she's not thinking clearly he refuses to take advantage. There is a line involving her future prospects in the last chapter before the epilogue that sums up why I love Sebastian perfectly, but Courtney Milan's dialogue is so brilliant that quoting it feels like a spoiler, even though it doesn't reveal anything you wouldn't know from the back cover. And when, near the end of the book, the two come into conflict on how a crisis should be resolved, they don't fight over it in order to have a late chapter reconciliation; they each do what they need to do, and understand why the other one wanted to do what they did.

I can hardly wait for The Mistress Rebellion.

Overall Grade: A-