I knew that this and Parable of the Sower were two books in what was supposed to become a trilogy but never did, but I couldn't remember which came first. So my husband and I were at The Strand book store on vacation, I couldn't leave without buying something, I'd been meaning to read more Octavia E. Butler, and this was the only one on the shelf. Therefore, I went ahead and bought it only to determine later that it was the second. However, it stands so well on its own that I'm a little worried that I'll be disappointed when I go back and read the first book.

Olamina is struggling to build a community and a new faith called Earthseed in a post cataclysmic California in which the government is in the process of being taken over by a fundamentalist denomination known as Christian America, education has become a luxury or something that must be arranged privately, and the poor routinely find themselves sold into slavery, and all of it is frighteningly believable. I can't comment on how possible it all seemed when it was first published, but thirteen years later it strikes me as one of the most prescient books that I've ever read. Earthseed teaches that God is Change, the only lasting truth, and that people can shape Change just as Change shapes them.

And yet, as dark as the book is, so full of violence and despair, it ends with hope. Olamina begins to find supporters at the end of the book's main timeline; in the farther-future timeline, in which her daughter pieces together bits of her mother's journal along with occasional additions from her father and her uncle in order to tell the story, we are told that Christian America is now just one denomination among many. Although Olamina's daughter explains from her experience that a CA family might believe that a woman who moves out of her parents' house before marrying is more or less a prostitute, there's no law that keeps her from doing so. She's not the property of her father until she becomes the property of her husband, and neither does a male guardian have to manage her finances or own/rent the place where she lives. In short, America did not go the way of The Handmaid's Tale. And if the chaos just sort of passing and normality returning might seem narratively strange, without the drama of massive resistance movements, it also seems quite natural in its way that the country would just reject the CA movement when it became clear they did not have the answers.

Butler said that she planned to write a third book about the Earthseed communities who colonize other planets. Although I wish that there was much more of her work to read and that she was still alive and writing more of it, I actually do not miss the opportunity to read that particular book, and it makes perfect sense to me that Butler turned her attention to writing Fledgling instead. We know that Olamina herself did not go to the stars. Her story is over, and over so perfectly that I'm afraid any more might detract from it.

Overall Grade: A+

Garrison Keillor writes two kinds of books; actual novels, and books that function more like a collection of short stories even if they're billed like a novel. This one falls under the "actual novel" heading, with occasional tangents that could have been chapters in the other kind of book.

I'm a faithful listener of A Prairie Home Companion, and I've always gotten a kick out of Guy Noir's sendup of the classic detective caper and the sort of descriptions you'll find in it. (My favorite of all time is "She was wearing a brown UPS uniform and what a parcel she was.") This story, mostly about Guy being hired to serve as security for a weight loss pill company run by a former stripper turned women's studies professor who may not have his best interests at heart, has all of the screwy action and laugh out loud narration that I've come to expect. It also has the strange fascination with alliteration that I've never quite understood the purpose of in the Guy Noir radio sketches, and there are the occasional moments that seem to be going on longer than necessary, as if Keillor was just fitting in a vignette that could have been its own story in a separate collection. Still, all in all, this is a fun romp and a fine way to spend a few hours.

Overall Grade: B

The only thing that I don't like about the Pax Aracana series is that I can't seem to find a website for it or its author, Elliott James, and I can't find out if any more full length novels are lined up yet to follow Charming. There are several digital exclusive short stories that I've been putting in as purchase requests at my library as they become available on Overdrive, and I see that there are a couple more of those coming after the new year. So far I've gotten the first and the third, "Charmed, I'm Sure" and "Pushing Luck." (The second, "Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls," managed to be checked out and have another request on it before I saw that it had been added to our Overdrive collection, so I'm still on the waiting list.)

One question that has to be asked about short stories that are part of a series is what the purpose of them is. Are they strictly fodder for the fans? Or are they meant to serve as an introduction to the series to lure new fans in? Both of these series are set before Charming, and if I understand correctly the other shorts are as well, and some of them were published before the novel. However, while they manage to pack most of the things I loved about Charming into twenty-five and thirty pages, respectively (folklore, snark, and action), they didn't do much in terms of explaining the world. Terms like geas are used in both with minimal explanation. "Charmed, I'm Sure" is slightly better at getting across the idea that John Charming is both a knight who protects people against supernatural creatures who threaten the illusion that they don't exist and that he is also a sort-of-werewolf. But if I read either story without having read Charming first, I'm not sure I'd understand how this universe works or who Charming is. Granted, I had to skip "Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls," so it is possible that all of the short stories are meant to be read in order, in which case I would have gotten a bit of exposition in "Charmed, I'm Sure" and a bit more in Waterfalls before understanding everything by the time I got to the third one. But whether the stories are meant to be read after the novel or read all together as a unit, they don't individually act as good introductions to the world. But they are wonderful for holding me over while I wait for the day when I know another novel is coming.

Therefore, I recommend that if you enjoy The Dresden Files or really any other magic detective style Urban Fantasy (even though that's not exactly what this is, it hits the same buttons), you read Charming ASAP, and then proceed to read the shorts.

My previous review of Charming can be found here: http://unreachableshelf.weebly.com/1/post/2013/10/charming-by-elliott-james.html

Overall Grade: A

Maeve, the daughter of Lord Sean of Sevenwaters and the sister of the two most recent heroines in the series, has been living with her Aunt Liadan and Uncle Bran in Cumbria for the last ten years, since shortly after a fire in which she lost use of her fingers as well as acquiring scars on her face while attempting to rescue her dog. Now she is returning to Sevenwaters escorting a fine but difficult horse which her father may give to a chieftan of the Ui Neill. A party of his men recently went missing while traveling on the border of Sevenwaters, including his two sons, and there is reason to believe that the faerie prince Mac Dara is responsible. Maeve and her young brother Finbar, who was abducted by Mac Dara once as an infant, are lured into the Otherworld, where they may have the chance to assist in his overthrow.

Flame of Sevenwaters is a departure from the Sevenwaters series as a whole, more straight up quest fantasy than romantic fantasy. Although Maeve does find love in the end (not a spoiler for anybody who has read any of Marillier's work before), the relationship does not become a romance until nearly the end of the book and is harder to predict. In a way it seems too sudden, but on another level it is an inversion of the classic fantasy scenario in which the hero saves the day and is rewarded with the love of the heroine, whether or not there was any sign of it before. And before our heroine saves the day, at least she and the man whose love serves as the reward had spent some time in each other's presence.

I don't know if Flame of Sevenwaters is the end of the Sevenwaters series. It is the third book about this generation, so it's the natural conclusion of a pair of trilogies. If it is the end, it also ties the entire six book series together as the story of Ciaran, Maeve's great uncle, who was born during Daughter of the Forest to Maeve's great-grandfather and a faerie woman, who reappeared in Son of  the Shadows, whose daughter was the heroine of Child of the Prophecy, and who in the end plays a pivotal role in the defeat of Mac Dara.

The end of this book seemed to drag on a bit long, perhaps to give us more time to see Maeve and her fiance as a couple, perhaps to give us more time with the entire family as the series ends. That aside, this is an excellent story about family, fate, and the capacity to do things that you thought were impossible.

Don Tillman is a genetics professor who recognizes that he doesn't quite fit in with most people, but who was once told by one of his few close friends that he would make somebody a great husband someday. (Don shows many symptoms of Aspergers, but although he has read the research and a friend asks him during a discussion of it if the description sounds like anybody they know, the possibility only crosses his mind near the end of the book.) Having decided that conventional dating isn't working, he decides to create a questionnaire in order to find the best candidates, based on criteria such as not smoking, not being a vegetarian, and being able to do the math to answer the BMI question.

Don's friend Gene sends PhD student Rosie to Don to settle a bet, but because Gene is sorting through the questionnaires, Don assumes that Rosie is a candidate for The Wife Project. He quickly determines that she is unsuitable - unpunctual, a smoker, and a vegetarian who only makes exceptions for sustainable seafood - however, he finds himself agreeing to help her with DNA testing to find her biological father. As Don and Rosie spend time together in pursuit of The Father Project, they come to realize that logic and genetics are not enough to predict love.

Although this book does fit in the Romance genre (being a book in which the romantic relationship between the protagonists is the primary focus of the story), it doesn't feel so much like other romance novels that I've read as it does like a great romantic comedy movie told in novel form. I was not at all surprised to see in the acknowledgements that it went through a phase as a screenplay, but neither did it feel as if I were reading a pitch for a future movie in the form of a book, as I sometimes have with writers who, although they have a good sense for what works on screen, have less skill with words *cough cough Dan Brown*. I read most of this book in public and had a very hard time not laughing out loud like a madwoman on multiple occasions, particularly about one incident involving a skeleton.

I also loved how Simsion reveals more to the reader than Don knows, even though the entire book is from Don's POV. We are often shown enough of his friends' actions and hear enough of their dialogue to put things together that are beyond Don's ability to interpret social situations, although he may be getting closer as the book goes on and he gets more practice with more different people.

There is the occasional moment that seems off, such as a scene in which Don shows uncharacteristic social subtlety in getting a woman to reject him. However, on a whole, The Rosie Project is a pure delight.

Overall Grade: A

Ok, I'm late to the game, but I'm a paperback reader and in this case the paperback release date kept being pushed back because the hardcover was still selling so well.

At this point, how do you review one book in A Song of Ice and Fire? I think the only way I can is by saying upfront that nobody should start here, and nobody should stop here with the impression that it's over. I've seen a lot of complaining about this entry in the series, and I don't understand it. Does it have huge explosions that will totally traumatize people who haven't read the books when HBO gets around to filming it? No. But things are developing and the plot is still moving forward.

Tyrion, Daenerys, and Jon Snow were much missed in A Feast for Crows. And each of the characters GRRM saved for Dance with Dragons has a significant journey in this book, even if we have reached a stage in the series where one book isn't really self contained. But that's ok. It's very much a middle book, but it still captured me and made me not want to put it down. And although I don't want to say too much about it, GRRM has also demonstrated once again how much sympathy he can wring from his readers for not-very-sympathetic people.

The only thing that irritates me about this book is how GRRM frequently gives an alias for the POV character as the heading of the chapter, often a different one each time that character appears, and then you have to figure out who you're with this time. There are enough POVs to keep track of, I don't need to spend the first page of a chapter figuring out which one I'm in because he didn't use their given name.

Also, now I have to wait until Winds of Winter to figure out to what extent one of my favorite characters might be dead. It would be an easily mitigated death, but it's GRRM, and I don't trust him not to kill people. See also this:

http://www.collegehumor.com/picture/6894741/all-my-friends-are-dead-in-game-of-thrones

GRRM has done serious damage to my faith that the good guys in completely different series by other authors will live. Pretty much any series that deals with multiple narrators, I'm thinking that they don't all have to make it to the end. (As a consequence, I have become the easiest person to fake out in those situations where you're supposed to think that a character is dead but he isn't. Unless that character is Sherlock Holmes, because that cat has been out of the bag forever.) And I think the fact that he has changed something about how I read fiction speaks for itself.

Overall Grade: A

This review is based on an advance copy provided by the publisher.

Some seven hundred years or more in the future, the human race has colonized the galaxy, but has divided itself into "colors," castes which determine everybody's job and place in society. Darrow is a Red, the lowest of the colors. Although some High Reds serve the other colors while working among them, he is a low Red, digging below the surface of Mars, unaware even that the planet is already habitable and that others are enjoying the fruits of his labor. Then his wife, Eo, is killed, and Darrow is recruited for a mission to infiltrate the Golds, the highest ranking color.

I had trouble getting a read on the audience for this book. Darrow is sixteen when it begins, but he has been married for several years, so his life experience makes him more of an adult than a teen, the same way that the heroines of fantasy novels with psuedomedieval settings are often teenagers by today's standards but functioning as adults in their world in a way that don't exactly make them YA books. I've seen it compared to The Hunger Games, for the obvious reason that both are dystopias featuring arena combat, but a Suvudu blog post from August 7th listed books of social science fiction to read while waiting for Red Rising that included all of the classic dystopias from 1984 through The Handmaid's Tale, and while I enjoyed most of those books as a teenager, nobody would say that any of them are YA books. On the other hand, while the book is brutal, much of it lacks the philosophical depth that I would expect from an adult book.

Darrow, having undergone a long and excruciatingly thoroughly described process to be able to pass for a Gold, makes it into The Institute, in which the students are drafted into twelve houses, each represented by an Olympian god, which fight until one has conquered all the others. It seemed to me that it took rather a long time for Darrow to come around to the conclusion that it would be more effective to win supporters and make alliances rather than attempting to gain power through brutality. There's also rather a lot of rape in the book, most of it as a weapon of war. Although Darrow eventually attains a position in which he can punish rapists within his House, it had been going on as an apparently normal part of the process at the Institute regularly before then, with one member of a faction of the house having to tell another (referring to the women captured by the leader of another faction) "what if they were our girls?" as if the fact that they are human isn't self evident reason that stopping a serial rapist shouldn't be the first order of business. There's also very little discussion of the Pinks, a color which seems to consist primarily of sex slaves. Adding in the fact that there are only two significant female characters in the book, one of whom dies well before we meet the other, and there is an awful lot of sexual subjugation of women and comparatively little evidence of women with power and agency of their own.

There is a reasonable adventure story here, but so far the psychology is lacking and it has a serious case of Smurfette syndrome. Red Rising will be released on Jan. 28, 2014.

Overall Grade: C

The Suvudu blog post referred to can be found here: http://sf-fantasy.suvudu.com/2013/10/get-ready-for-the-dystopian-world-of-pierce-browns-red-rising.html