Sep
2014

Genre Blend New Releases for October 2014

categories: New Releases

Every month there is another batch of new books that don’t fit neatly into one genre. Here are some of the genreblended books coming out in October 2014.  Usually there is a bias towards books with a SF, Fantasy or Horror element, but this month these is also a bonaza of romance coming out, especially regencies. Genres are listed in my best estimation as to the order of prominence to the story. For example, if the first genre listed is SF, that is probably the first audience for the book. What are you most looking foward to?

           (more…)


Sep
2014

Banned Books Week

categories: Uncategorized

banned venn

 

This is one of those things that isn’t true, but feels true. If someone thinks a book is the best book every written, there is someone who wants it banned from schools and libraries.  If there is a book that has been banned, it is someone’s favorite book of all time.

Because it is Banned Books Week, and as I librarian I’ve always loved this annual time when we celebrate the freedom to read, I was checking over the list of most banned and/or challenged books.  ALA has a lot of nice resources on their banned books week site including a list of the 100 books most challenged in the first decade of the 21st century.  In other words, RECENTLY.  And as usual, it makes me so sad that there are so many marvelous books that people want to surpress.  I grew up in a house full of books where I was allowed to read anything I wanted, whether it was appropriate for my age or not.  I WAS NOT HARMED.  I’m a (mostly) well-adjusted functioning member of society.  No book ever hurt me or scarred me. So yeah, I think banning books is just about the most pointless thing a person can do with their time and energy. (more…)


Sep
2014

GIVEAWAY: The Witch With No Name by Kim Harrison

categories: Giveaway

witchwithnonameI am a lucky, lucky girl.  As part of my work reviewing for Library Journal, I get a lot of books sent to me.  As much as I would love to keep them all, I don’t live in a TARDIS. So I’ve decide that occasionally I will cull the shelves and give away some books to readers of the site. Sometimes they will probably be galleys, but I thought I would kick things off with a lovely, pristine finished copy.  The Witch with No Name is the 13th and last book in Kim Harrison’s fantastic Hollows series.

Fans of the series have been following Rachel Morgan since she first stormed out of Inderland Security with a bounty on her head in Dead Witch Walking and they will be anxious to see how it all ends for Rachel, Ivy, Jenks and Trent.  Although the proportions vary from book to book, the series is a blend of fantasy, mystery and romance. Author Harrison had a lot of loose ends to tie up after playing in the same universe for 13 books and she does a good job of giving long-time readers satisfying answers. With all the humor and heart fans expect, as well as high-stakes action, this is a great end to one of the best series in urban fantasy. I reviewed it over at Library Journal in the August 15 issue.

My thanks go out to HarperCollins, who sent me the book.  If you would like to enter to win this book, just be sure to leave comment by Friday, September 26 and I will use a randomly pick a winner.  Since I’ll be mailing this out myself, this giveaway is limited to the U.S.


Sep
2014

Pirate Week: Space Pirates

categories: Featured Blend

I’ll end this series of posts with some of my favorite pirates — space pirates.  Science fiction has a marvelous subgenre known as space opera.  The name comes from both soap operas and also from horse opera, which was a nickname for westerns. But for me, what space opera most resembles are nautical adventure stories.  Most of the time the action takes place in and around spaceships, with the nomenclature and hierarchies of naval life that haven’t particularly changed from the 17th century. And like any good shipbound adventure, sometimes you’re gonna get pirates. In some of the “space navy” series the pirates are a traditional foe that the naval forces are trying to control. Sometimes the pirate forces are more like mercenaries that have crossed a line. As tempting as it was to include mercenaries (especially my favorites, The Dendarii Free Mercenaries from Bujold’s Vorkosigan books) I wanted to stick to those operating truly outside the rules. So as your last homework for Talk Like a Pirate Day, here are some science fiction pirates. (more…)


Sep
2014

Pirate Week: Romance Pirates

categories: Featured Blend

gentlerogue2There’s something irresistible about a pirate.  They live outside the law, they have ultimate freedom to sail about wherever they please, and they take what they want.  I mean, sure… those can be the characteristics of a fantastic villain as well. Romance novels are full of villains.  Alpha-type anti-heroes with what would be a poisonous level of testosterone in real life are perfectly acceptable in a romance novel, as long as they never hurt animals or children. And romance is the bastion of the misunderstood hero in villainous clothing. When pirates appear in romance novels (and good gravy, do they appear), the seeming villain often turns out to have a secret squooshy soft center, at least where the heroine is concerned.  Romance pirates are often trapped by circumstances in the piratical life, and perhaps all they need is the love of a good woman to retrieve them to the bosom of polite society.  Or maybe that loving woman will sail off happily over the horizon with her pirate.  Either way, there are probably dozens of pirate romances out there.  Let me introduce you to a few:

windflowerThe Windflower by Laura London Top Pick!
Written by husband and wife team Tom and Sharon Curtis, this is the one.  If you’re only going to read one pirate romance (and yes, I know most people will never EVER read romance, much less pirate romance), this is the one to read.  I had heard about this book for ages on romance sites like Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and never could find a copy (paperback copies, USED, were selling for almost $100, if you can believe). I finally borrowed one, and got to read the story of Merry Wilding and the crew of The Black Joke. Merry is a terribly sheltered young woman as the novel starts in 1813. She plans a trip to Europe and sets sail from New York only to fall into the clutches of pirate Devon Crandall. Crandall thinks Merry is the mistress of his greatest enemy (cue the misunderstandings!) and yet finds her irresistible.  What seems like the epitome of Old Skool romance with the milksop innocent and the rape-threatening hero (oh yeah, that happens) is elevated by its execution and by the marvelous full cast of characters that the authors assemble on board this unconventional pirate ship. So, so happy this has been re-released and is available for new readers. (more…)


Sep
2014

Pirate Week: Fantasy Pirates

categories: Featured Blend

Yesterday I pulled together a list of traditional historical fiction pirates.  While they might not have been as plentiful in the real world as they are in the novels of naval adventure, there is no doubt that pirates really did sail the seas of history. But the idea of pirates is too irresistible not to borrow for other genres. So how about some piracy on imaginary seas? Fantasy has a long tradition of stories of high adventure, with swordplay and settings that hint at history while taking all the imaginative liberties the genre is known for. And some of these action-packed, magical tales even include pirates.

wakeofthebloodyWake of the Bloody Angel by Alex Bledsoe
The series of novels featuring sowrd-for-hire Eddie LaCrosse are always fun, and all feature action and swordplay.  It was inevitable, I suppose that he would cross paths (and swords) with pirates one day.  That day arrives when the woman who runs the bar where he has his office asks him to find the pirate she loved and lost. His ship, The Bloody Angel, disappeared years ago and Eddie enlists the help of a pirate queen to search for the pirate’s fate. This series is funny, fast and a little ridiculous, but in a good way. (more…)


Sep
2014

Pirate Week: Historical Fiction Pirates

categories: Featured Blend

Yes, this Friday is National Talk Like A Pirate Day!  In honor of the day your coworkers go around saying “argh!” without provocation, I knew I had to pull together a list of pirate books. I was going to do a post on just space pirates, because good golly are there a lot of them.  But I thought it would be fun to round up all my favorite genre pirates. Sometimes the pirates are the heroes of the story — misunderstood rogues with hearts of gold.  Sometimes they are the cutthroat villains of a novel — the thing that our hero is running from. The best thing about adding a pirate to a story is that you almost automatically get a blend. Pirates bring adventure, danger, and excitement to a plot. Since there are so many books of all different genres that feature pirate, I’m breaking it up into a few posts.  Today will be your traditional historical fiction pirates. Then later in the week I’ll round up three of the other genres that pirates most often makes an appearance: fantasy, romance and SF. So avast ya scurvy bilge rats, put down yer grog. I’ve yer tastiest tales o’ the jolly roger afore ye.  (Sorry — I’ll stop.)

Historical Fiction Pirates

captainblood1 (1)The most traditional way to encounter pirates in fiction is in the historical fiction genre.  Even in that broad category, there’s a lot of variety in these stories.  For as long as people have sailed the planet’s oceans, there have probably been pirates, so you can get pirate stories set in many time periods. The stories are often full of colorful locations, bigger-than-life characters, and lots of action.  In other word, these books are often great adventure stories.  That’s probably one reason that pirate stories have been successfully made into successful Hollywood movies, from classic Errol Flynn vehicles like Captain Blood to the more recent blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. I’ve collected some of the most popular historical fiction novels featuring pirates, but let me know if I missed one of your favorites. (more…)


Sep
2014

Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding

categories: Review


ADVENTURE/FANTASY/SF

TITLE: Retribution Falls
AUTHOR: Chris Wooding
PUBLISHER: Gollancz, 2009 (Spectra, 2011)
SERIES: Tales of the Ketty Jay, Book 1

THE BOOK:
Darian Frey captains the airship Ketty Jay, scraping up jobs of dubious morality and legality but usually staying on the lawful side of piracy. The crew of the Ketty Jay are of dubious morality as well, each hiding secrets and running from the past. When Frey takes a job to hijack a trunk of gems from another airship he know this is both bigger and more illegal than anything they’ve pulled before, but the payday is too good to resist.  When everything inevitably goes wrong, Frey and the rest of the Ketty Jay crew will face piracy and murder charges. They need to find who set them up if they want to survive to fly another day. (more…)


Sep
2014

Featured Blend: Epic Fantasy and Mystery

categories: Featured Blend

If you use the Genre Blender to combine Fantasy and Mystery you get one of the bigger sets of results, over 75 books. It’s a popular blend, because adding a mystery plot to the landscape-heavy fantasy genre is a great way to give a fantasy a structure other than “let’s go save the world!”  But browsing those titles shows that most of the blender results are urban fantasies — books set in out world, with magic layered in. Why should urban fantasy be the only ones to get the awesome dead bodies and murder investigations? Some of these are closer to caper novels than traditional murder mysteries and there is a wide variety in worlds depicted, but they are all NOT our world. Here are some epic fantasy novels that include a mystery plot: (more…)


Sep
2014

Genre Blend Covers

categories: Uncategorized

Probably the first way a lot of readers will interact with a book is through the cover.  Even in today’s online world where the covers are thumbnail images much smaller than a cover you would browse in the bookstore or library, the cover is still so important in creating the first impression of what’s inside. Genre blended books have a lot of challenges when it comes to marketing, including what cover to put on the book. Do you emphasize one genre?  Another?  Go for something neutral? One of the good things about the change we made with the Genre Blender to host cover images locally rather than serve them from Amazon is that I got to choose which cover to include in the database.  For all the titles here I saw the first cover served up and said….nope, that’s not it.  Sometimes it was because the cover was different from the one on my shelf, but sometimes the covers were surprisingly, completely different from what I expected, knowing what was inside the cover.

Less Genre-y Covers

Publishers sometimes change a genre over different editions to try to attract different audiences to a title.  Here are a few covers that started out more obviously genre and end up with fewer genre cues on the cover, perhaps to make them an easier sell to non-genre readers.

DoomsdayBook2   doomsday3sm   doomsdaybook          

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
One of my favorite genre books, this is the first of Connie Willis’ fantastic time travel SF/Historical blends. (more…)