Horror review: Penny Reeve on A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge
Although she’s been a name within the young adult horror/fantasy scene for a while now, Frances Hardinge was recently projected into the mainstream public gaze when her novel The Lie Tree won the 2016 Costa Book of the Year Prize. After such a bar was set with her last novel, Hardinge’s fans waited with bated breath for her newest, A Skinful of Shadows. Luckily it is an intricate and masterfully told coming-of-age tale, full of intrigue and more than a little creepy, which lives up to expectations. Plus, it was nominated for the Waterstones Book of the Year Award 2017. Take that, Costa. A Skinful of Shadows is a dark fantasy novel, set during the English Civil War. We meet our protagonist, Makepeace, as a young girl who lives in the attic of her Puritan uncle’s house, along with her mother. She is haunted by very realistic dreams of ghosts and other terrifying things, and to help her deal with her strange affliction, her mother often forces her to stay in a church overnight to deal with the demons in her head.
Signal Boost #28: Claudie Arseneault (City of Spires Trilogy) and Brandon O’Brien
http://media.blubrry.com/skiffyandfanty/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/archive.org/download/SandFSignalBoost28ArseneaultOBrien/Sandf–SignalBoost28–ArseneaultObrien.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | Podcast Index | Email | TuneIn | Deezer | RSSIn today’s episode of Signal Boost, Jen talks to Claudie Arseneault about her work, including the recently released second book of the City of Spires trilogy, City of Betrayal. They discuss the mosaic narrative of City of Spires, found families, the solar punk genre and her first book, Viral Airwaves, and what inspired Claudie to create the Aromantic and Asexual Speculative Fiction Database. Then Brandon O’Brien, speculative poet and poetry editor, joins Shaun to talk about what draws him to poetry as a medium, his classical and local influences, how he explores the African diaspora from a Caribbean perspective in his work, and about FIYAH Magazine and what he looks for in a good speculative fiction poem. We hope you enjoy the episode! Note: If you have iTunes and like this show, please give us a review on our iTunes page, or feel free to email us with your thoughts about the show! Here’s the episode (show notes are below):
Book Review: Prey of Gods by Nicky Drayden
Artificial Intelligences, Gods and Goddesses, tailored viruses gone wrong, mind-expanding drugs, political and social turmoil and more, all in a near-future South Africa, is the matrix where Nicky Drayden embeds an assortment of disparate and diverse characters in her debut novel Prey of Gods. The author’s penchant for mixing a variety of characters and a variety of genre elements that do not seem to match together or work together at first makes the novel one of the most intriguing and unpredictably diverse novels I have read in 2017. There are a number of threads and plots and stories going on through the novel in what at first appears to be a discordant tangle, but in truth is a layered and complex story that eventually comes together. The author slowly allows the silos of stories and characters and their individual genre elements to come together and mix, and recombine in the latter portions of the novel. It’s probably easiest to describe the individual silos and what’s going on, one by one, as a sense of what Drayden is trying to do in the novel.
Book Review: City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty
City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty is as elusive and complicated as its main character, Nahiri. When we meet Nahiri, it is 18th century Cairo under tenuous French control. She lives in a poor section of the city, not far from the Necropolis. She’s a healer, a con artist, and a thief who is willing to rob places while the owners are away. And yet she has power and ability she herself does not quite understand, a nature that is fragile as is her position. This sets up the novel starting off, anyway, as a historical fantasy, a historical urban fantasy at that. The novel switches gears, however, when Nahiri accidentally summons a djinn. Soon on the run, Nahiri and the djinn, Dara, are traveling across the Middle East to a hidden city of the djinn, Daevabad. There, they encounter Prince Ali, already chafing under the reign of his father and the future reign of his brother, and a city on the edge of change, or destruction. We get intrigue, political agitation, ancient secrets and much more within the bounds of the city.
Signal Boost #27: K. Arsenault Rivera (The Tiger's Daughter) and Stacey Berg (Echo Hunter 367 Duology)
http://media.blubrry.com/skiffyandfanty/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/archive.org/download/SandFSignalBoost27K.ArsenaultRiveraStaceyBerg/Sandf–SignalBoost27–K.ArsenaultRiveraStaceyBerg.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | Podcast Index | Email | TuneIn | Deezer | RSSIn today’s episode of Signal Boost, Jen talks K. Arsenault Rivera about her debut novel, The Tiger’s Daughter. K talks about the narrative structure of the novel, the importance of queer representation, how her Kung Fu film obsession helped her write the action sequences, and gives us a great break down of the important characters. Then Stacey Berg, author of Dissension and Regeneration, joins Paul to tell us about her character driven, post-apocalyptic Echo Hunter 367 Duology, how they were shaped by a very specific scene and what inspired the post-apocalyptic secular society she created. We hope you enjoy the episode! Note: If you have iTunes and like this show, please give us a review on our iTunes page, or feel free to email us with your thoughts about the show! Here’s the episode (show notes are below):
Signal Boost #25: Mike Brooks (Dark Deeds) and S.A. Chakraborty (City of Brass)
http://media.blubrry.com/skiffyandfanty/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/archive.org/download/SandFSignalBoost25MikeBrooksS.A.Chakraborty/Sandf–SignalBoost25–MikeBrooksS.a.Chakraborty.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | Podcast Index | Email | TuneIn | Deezer | RSSIn today’s episode of Signal Boost, Jen talks to Mike Brooks about the third installment of his Keiko series, Dark Deeds. Mike gives us a recap of the the first two books, which he calls dirty space opera, and sets us up for the crew’s shenanigans as they try to pull off a heist and save a crew-member. He also discusses how he worked to make this series his own given its Firefly inspired origins. Then S.A. Chakraborty, debut author of The City of Brass, joins Jen to tell us about the medieval middle eastern inspirations of her novel, how it started out as historical fan fic, how a djinn (not the Disney version) might be influenced by a long-view of human history, and how Nahri is forced to make her way in Daevabad, the City of Brass. We also get a glimpse into how The City of Brass found a home through the #DVPit pitch process! (Apologies for the audio; sometimes the internet just doesn’t want to cooperate!) We hope you enjoy the episode! Note: If you have iTunes and like this show, please give us a review on our iTunes page, or feel free to email us with your thoughts about the show! Here’s the episode (show notes are below):
