In high school, Nolan was a skinny, awkward nerd and Darcie ran with the in-crowd. Now, Nolan is heading up a project for a billionaire determined to colonize Mars, and Darcie appears in the audience at his lecture at Space Expo. Nolan has matured and gained confidence (as well as having gotten in shape, since he hopes to go to Mars himself), and Darcie has learned to embrace her own nerdy and offbeat tendencies in her career as a professional astrologer. Things are looking good for them to be just right for each other as adults (if Nolan can accept the astrologer part), but it looks like a member of the team working on a rival project might be threatening Nolan.
Vicki Lewis Thompson's contemporaries are among the few I read,and I particularly appreciate the later books in the series, including this one, in which both leads have at minimum some distinctly nerdy traits, and they aren't treated as things that need to be fixed. I can happily say that Nerds are from Mars continues that trend from the last of the original print series. I was a bit put off by Darcie's need for Nolan to let her put together a chart for him at first. Wouldn't nonjudgmentally listening to her discuss her work without having to participate in it have been enough? Insisting on somebody who doesn't believe in astrology taking part in it seemed on par with knowingly beginning to date somebody of a different religion and insisting on them converting, and right away at that. However, as the book went on, Darcie didn't try to convince Nolan to consult astrological charts so much as she encouraged him to trust his intuition more. And since good intuition, for a person who isn't inclined to believe in psychic phenomena, can also be explained in terms of a person drawing conclusions based on data of which they may  only be subconsciously aware, I don't think she made him abandon his scientific approach to life, there. It's acknowledged that her crystals might have more of a Dumbo-feather effect than "working" on their own, and she's not making him check to see if the stars are right before the Mars mission launches, so I had no reason to fear.
Vicki Lewis Thompson does have some writing ticks that bother me, like her habit of having characters think of having had sex (or engaged in any non-PIV sexual behavior) has having "had a sexual experience." Has anybody, ever, thinking of the great time they had the night before, thought "I had a great sexual experience with [fill in the blank]"? It's that kind of usage. No. You'd either think "had sex," or the name of the particular sexual activity involved. That said, her books are still great fun starring characters I enjoy spending time with, and this is an enjoyable, fast read.

Overall grade: B

This is the third book in the Immortal Empire series, and it's really impossible to talk about without spoiling a rather late revelation in the first book, God Save the Queen. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Xandra lives in a world in which the plague in Europe had the effect of turning the members of the aristocracy who survived it into vampires and werewolves and goblins live underground. It's the twenty-first century, but Queen Victoria, a vampire, still sits on the throne, and Churchhill was still alive when the series began. As a result, contemporary style and technology is mixed with the Victorian- the long-lived vampires and werewolves don't change their ways easily- and much of history is different. (I recall a passing reference to a German painter named Adolf something in one of the earlier books.) These creatures share the world not only with ordinary humans, with whom they don't mingle much and who have in the past risen against them, and with "halvies," the offspring  who are faster and stronger than humans but don't have the full abilities of the supernatural races.
Since God Save the Queen, Xandra discovered that in spite of her halvie appearance, she is actually a goblin, in spite of her ability to go out in daylight and her lack of fur, and at the request of the goblin prince William and the rest of his "plague" (or pack), she has taken the throne as the Goblin Queen. Naturally, this makes for a difficult relationship with Queen Victoria, who still rules over all the races of the empire. Now, a genetically engineered killer has escaped from a lab that briefly captured Xandra in the last book for experimentation, and since she did a serious number on Vex, the alpha werewolf and Xandra's lover, it's obvious that it will take everything Xandra and her friends can bring in order to stop her.
I love this series. Yes, Xandra is a bit of a special snowflake, but I like so much else that I'll let her specialness slide. Although she's overly impulsive sometimes, Xandra is  genuinely kickass, and I love that if she says she has to do something alone, it generally means that she knows that she can handle it and isn't setting up for her to be rescued later. In the series as a whole, she and Vex both come to each other's rescue at various times and their relationship is refreshingly equal in a way that doesn't normally come to mind when authors start tossing the phrase "alpha werewolf" around. Her relationship with her family is complicated, but her love for her sisters is always clear, and even the people with whom she has difficult relationships come across as believable, complicated people rather than pure villains. Plus, I just generally like the inventive worldbuilding in this series, which resembles no other urban fantasy series I know. (It gets marketed as steampunk a lot, and although I think it would appeal to a lot of steampunk fans, I actually think it is backwards steampunk. Steampunk is Victorian setting with more advanced technology mixed in; Immortal Empire is the contemporary world with aspects of Victorian life retained.)
There were some writing ticks that bothered me in this one that I hadn't noticed before, or maybe they're new. For example, how many times does Xandra need to talk about how often she raises an eyebrow? It's one thing to do it a lot and another thing to have her in the narration talking a lot about how she does it a lot, sometimes because somebody else in her family is doing it. That aside, I still heartily recommend it.
Overall Grade: A-

Yes, I'm still here; I just spent a week rereading Neil Gaiman books while waiting for something new to come in at the library, and at this point there really isn't anything left for me to say about Neil Gaiman that I haven't said before, so I couldn't review those. But now I've just finished Medea, which I have read was the last of Greenwood's Delphic Women trilogy although it was the first to be published in the U.S.

This retelling covers Medea's life from childhood through her flight from Corinth to Delphi, from there to Athens and Herakles, and finally back to Colchis to restore her father to the throne.

If everything you knew about Medea came from Euripides, with perhaps a bit about the quest for the Golden Fleece itself throne in, you would find this to be a very different story. But a reader who has read at all about the background of Euripides's play will know that there are older versions of the story in which the people of Corinth were the ones who killed the children after Medea killed Creusa, for whom Jason was leaving her, and Creon. In light of that, this is very much a retelling, in the sense that there is little new for those who are already familiar with the other legends. It's told well, narrated half by Medea and half by Nauplios, one of the Argonauts, but there is little surprise in the plot, or indeed in the conception of the world for anybody who has read other historical fantasy set in ancient Greece or its neighbors.

Medea was one of my favorites when I was taking Classics courses as part of earning my Latin BA and I was excited by the prospect of something new when the reviews for this book began to appear. But while it was a satisfying way to spend some time, it was not particularly inventive, nor did I feel that anything new had been revealed to me.

Overall Grade: B-