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

Exhausted by her two small children, Emma isn't sure what put-together Nina sees in her. Unknown to her, Nina remembers her from the past, and is now playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse with her life. The description was intriguing, but the details and the execution were lacking.

For the first third of the book, although we learn that Nina remembers Emma from somewhere and that she orchestrated their new "meeting," Nina and Emma barely interact. Once they finally become a regular part of each other's lives, the tension does increase somewhat. But when the reader finally learns what it was that Emma did years before that makes Nina want revenge even though Emma doesn't even remember her, it's anticlimactic. It turns out that the thing Emma did wasn't deliberately cruel. She probably didn't intend to do it and it's entirely possible that she was never even aware it happened. Most of the book's chapters from Nina's perspective build suspense over how she knew Emma and why she wants revenge, and when it's finally revealed.... nothing. Then it ends abruptly without Emma apparently ever having found out what Nina was doing to her or why. This book is in need of a catharsis it's lacking.

Overall: C

Her will be available in the U.S. in January 2015.

This review is based on a free copy provided by the publisher.

This book attempts to mix show business memoir with career advice book, and it comes off better as the former than the latter. It's a perfectly nice book but don't let the title or the bits of the description that treat it as a how-to to fool you into thinking it will be useful.

Most of the advice is the incredibly basic sort that's only appropriate for people who are new to the job market, like be on time for interviews and shower first. I was hoping that Leifer, as a woman in a largely male dominated field, would also put more depth into advice specifically for women regarding how society's perception of gender roles can create extra workplace challenges for them. Alas, her thoughts there are pretty much limited to the find-a-way-to-make-it-help-you level.

A pleasant read but far less valuable for practical information than I was led to believe by the marketing.
 
Overall: C

This review is based on an advance reading copy received from the editor.

The Confabulist follows two plot threads, one about Houdini and his quest to reveal the fraud of spiritualists, and one about Martin Strauss, who supposedly threw the punch that killed him. The Houdini thread is engaging, even if some chapters that rapidly shift back and forth between two different times left me confused about the order of events, and could have stood on its own if it was given a different ending to wrap it up. Martin Strauss, however, is suffering from a medical condition in which he is not only losing his memory but it's being completely replaced by false ones. I enjoy a good unreliable narrator as much as anybody. I adored Mind of Winter, and Drood by Dan Simmons is one of my standby books for the staff picks display at the library. However, the best part of those two books is trying to work out if the narrator is losing touch with reality or if they are describing the actions of somebody else who is, or if there might even be something supernatural going on. In this case, we are told in the first chapter about Martin Strauss that he remembers things that are completely untrue. Knowing that, I saw the reversal in the last chapter coming instantly, rendering all of Martin's chapters pointless because I knew it was more likely than not that most of it was never supposed to have happened.

Overall Grade: C

The Confabulist will be available May 1.

This review is based on an advance readers copy received from the publisher.

In the last years of the 17th century, Zummo arrives in Florence and receives a commission from Grand Duke Cosimo. Zummo mostly sculpts images of disease and decay, but the Grand Duke has a top secret, completely different commission for him.

The concept was intriguing, but the book never seemed to settle into what it was supposed to be. The story of the commission ends a hundred pages before the book does, nor does Zummo's work - either on the commission or on his usual subjects - ever receive enough attention to make this a book about sculpting wax. Zummo and Faustina's romance is never compelling enough to carry the book on its own. The court intrigue, although it ultimately propels what there is of a plot, doesn't actually seem to be on the page that much. The setting feels underestablished- for example, Faustina and Zummo's affair is underway well before we are told that it's dangerous for a man to be seen leaving the home of an unmarried woman. It would have given us a better understanding of the place and gotten us invested earlier in the risks they were taken if this had been revealed first.

I finished this book, but I'm not overly impressed with it.

Overall Grade: C

Secrecy will be available April 22

I've long been unsure of if Vicki Lewis Thompson's books are as good as those by other romance authors that I follow; in fact I relegated her to the borrow-from-the-library-first list long ago. I usually at least find the books that I read by her funny, though.

Luke's sister, Cynthia, and Giselle's brother, Bryce, have both run off. Cynthia has dropped out of college and wants to be a showgirl at the family's casino. Bryce is shirking his responsibilities as the future alpha of the werewolf pack. Luke and Giselle team up to look for their siblings.

What struck me about this book was how absolutely unnecessary the werewolf aspects were. Obviously somebody has to be a werewolf in order for the book to be in this series, but most of the plot has absolutely nothing to do with the secret of Giselle's species. All it does is provide a little additional justification for Giselle's reluctance to continue the relationship after she goes home, but distaste for long distance relationships and a belief that Luke wouldn't want to leave Vegas would have been just as reasonable considering how easily she ultimately gives up her stance against werewolf/human mating. The werewolf playground under a bar has no role apart from providing a pretty setting. And Luke and Giselle have very little reason to be believable as soul mates apart from sex so good and states of arousal so constant that it must be A Sign. At least nobody thought about having "had a great sexual experience"?

I was particularly disappointed because I really wanted to love this book when I realized that Giselle was the werewolf and Luke was the human. All of the other stories in the series either featured male werewolves with human women or couples that were both werewolves, and I thought it would be a wonderful subversion of the stereotypical alpha male werewolf dynamic for the heroine to be the dominant wolf-type. VLT hinted in this direction a bit with the short story "A Werewolf in Greenwich Village," in which both protagonists were werewolves but the heroine eventually challenged her brother for the alpha-ship of the pack and the hero was more of the supportive beta-wolf type, but I was hoping to see it explored more in a full length book and with a "mixed" couple. Sadly, this wasn't to be either, since Luke in spite of being human showed as many alpha stereotypes as was possible without descending into total alph-hole status.

Let's just say this was one I was happy I borrowed from the library, because I won't be needing my own copy.

Overall Grade: C

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

In Black Moon, civilization has collapsed in the face of a worldwide insomnia epidemic. It follows a handful of people whose stories intersect here and there, most of whom are among the lucky few who can still sleep. I thought this sounded like an inventive new approach to the apocalypse, in the vein of the impending doom of The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters.

It took a few cases of the insomniacs attacking sleepers, though, before I realized what this book actually is. The first time it happened, I accepted it as the reaction of somebody who has completely lost self control, enraged with envy when she sees somebody who can still sleep when she can't. But then teenage sleeper Lila's insomniac parents test her: they pretend to sleep, and when she doesn't attack them, they know that she is still secretly sleeping. I can buy a worldwide insomnia epidemic destroying society, but it doesn't logically follow for me that the insomniacs, even unhinged, are guaranteed to attack people they see sleeping. I could accept that it happened sometimes, but if we were just talking about people who were beyond all self control, I would expect that although some might react with violence, some would be overwhelmed by despair and weep uncontrollably, some would be too catatonic for the sight to register, etc. That they all react the same way makes them seem less like humans dehumanized by duress than like creatures that are genuinely not human, or like people who are under some kind of external control. The realization that it's so guaranteed that an insomniac will attack a sleeping person that Lila's parents could use pretending to sleep as a test made me realize: this is a zombie novel.

Metaphorically, I mean. Nobody comes back from the dead. Insomnia isn't transmitted by biting. Nobody says the zed-word. But the utter mindlessness and predictability of the insomniacs after they hit the poor-syntax stage in effect makes the threat in this book approximately the same as that of a zombie story, except with less explicit gore and when the affected kill the unaffected, they don't eat their brains.

Maybe I find a mindless enemy too uninteresting, but the zombie stories that I like are the ones in which the threat comes from the unaffected humans. I like the ones where the apocalypse brings out the worst in people, like 28 Days Later or Zombie, Illinois. Or I like the ones in which sentient zombies narrate and are symbolic of various marginalized human groups, like Breathers or Zombie, Ohio. But in this insomnia epidemic, everything is strictly insomniac vs. sleeper. Most of the systems of civilization appear to have collapsed more or less by the time the book begins, although one character's storyline begins when the epidemic is just a rumor. If curfews were instituted or any civil liberties curtailed before everybody was just too delusional to keep the world running, we don't hear about it.

If I'm giving the impression that this is primarily a book about sleepers hiding from and fighting off attacks by insomniacs, I don't mean to. The main activity in all of the storylines is wandering, in search of refuge or loved ones while the men ponder their sexual and/or marital baggage.There are female point of view characters, but their thoughts seemed more focused on the basics of finding safety/finding loved ones, if possible. The men also search for and think about their loved ones, but those thoughts involve a lot more wallowing in uncertainty about their relationships or sexual prowess. I have read romance novels that spend less time discussing the state of somebody's penis. Erotic romance novels. If you are a fan of a certain kind of low key "literary" novel that is mostly about the protagonist worrying about his masculinity, then I have the apocalypse for you.

It is entirely possible that I'm just not the audience for this book. If I liked zombie stories in which the main threat was the zombies, or books that deal with male anxiety re: impotence/priapism/feeling distant from their wives, I'll allow that this book might be a wonderful new twist on my favorite thing. I also didn't care for The Road, which proves that my taste in the apocalypse might be far different from the public at large. I'd like to give this book to somebody who did like The Road to see if they like it more than I did. It certainly wasn't badly written, but going solely on my own opinion, this book is not nearly as original as the description made it appear.

Overall grade: C


Black Moon will be available March 4

This review is based on an uncorrected proof received free from the publisher.

Next disclaimer: This is book two in Anne Bishop's The Others series. I didn't read the first one, Written in Red, before I picked this up at ALA Midwinter. I think I got the hang of the world well enough.

Meg Corbyn is a blood prophet living among the terra indigene, or the Others, in the Lakeside Courtyard. Blood prophets see prophecies when they are cut, and it's believed that they can only be cut so many times before they die or go insane. But the urge to speak prophecy is coming to Meg more frequently, and two drugs are beginning to spread throughout the cities leading to the deaths of both humans and Others. Meg and her friends must juggle the need to keep her safe, both from cutting more than necessary and from the man who owns the compound from which she escaped, the need to stop the violence caused by the drugs, and the need to keep the fragile peace between the humans and the Others.

What I liked about this book, and what kept me reading, was the history of the world and the relationship between the people in it. There are a lot of series in which the paranormal races like vampires and shapeshifters live in secret among the human race and some in which they are known to the human population, but there are very few in which the vampires and shapeshifters (the Others of this series) rule the humans. The different societies and even the humans with some supernatural abilities or other human subcultures interacting with each other, or trying to avoid interacting with each other as much as possible, was a fascinating exercise in worldbuilding.

However, I was less comfortable with the concept of blood prophets. A race whose only power requires slow self-destruction (assuming they are lucky enough to be able to make their own decisions about when to cut, and not held in a compound where customers can buy a cut) and that craves the euphoria of speaking prophecy makes me uneasy, especially considering that they are all women. Men can only be carriers. The emphasis on Meg's sweetness and innocence, although she seems perfectly likeable, also doesn't exactly make her come across as somebody with strength and agency aside from what she is able to do through self sacrifice.

There was also quite a bit of will-they-or-won't-they between Meg and Simon Wolfgard, the head of the Wolves, especially in the first half of the book. I'm rapidly losing my patience with will-they-or-won't-they, especially early in a series. I think I accept it in Dresden Files because 1) both major examples of it didn't come up until well into the series, when there was lots of history to explain why it wouldn't be settled quickly 2) in both instances, Harry and the woman in question have actually talked about the issue. This is the second book in a series, other people are wondering if Meg and Simon are having sex, and there are a large number of characters including Simon who can smell if somebody is feeling "lusty," and the two of them are ignoring it because of... reasons. This is a major plot thread of the first half of the book and in the second half nobody is even thinking about it, and I think that will-they-or-won't-they that moves backwards in intensity might even be worse than ordinary will-they-or-won't-they stretched out over a series unnecessarily. I'm also wondering if people who read Written in Red will be disappointed in this element, since several reviews that I read on LibraryThing for it praised the lack of romance as one of the things that they liked about it.

I liked most of the world except for the magical race to which one of the main characters belongs, and I'm not so sure about her story, either.

Overall grade: C


Murder of Crows will be available March 4

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

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