Book Review: One Good Dragon Deserves Another by Rachel Aaron
After foiling one plot by a foreseeing Dragon, Julius Heartstriker, the nicest Dragon in the world, gets dropped into the maw of his family’s machinations by way of a reward in ONE GOOD DRAGON DESERVES ANOTHER, the second Heartstriker novel by Rachel Aaron. One Good Dragon is the sequel to Nice Dragons Finish Last [review here at S&F] and picks up the action a few months after the end of that novel. Julius and Marci have started their business of dealing with spirit infestations, living a financially precarious but independent life in the DFZ, the Detroit Free Zone, the independent state carved from the United States by the actions of Algonquin, the Lady of the Lakes. Julius and Marci’s defeat of Estella’s plans in the previous novel, however, means that Julius’ grasping, ambitious mother Bethseda might have a use for her most useless and undragonlike son, whether he likes it or not. And as the prologue makes clear, Estella, the dragon who Julius thwarted in Nice Dragons, is far from defeated, and like the Cylons, She Has a Plan. And poor Julius is at the center of that plan. As he is at the center of many other people’s plans as well.
In the Duke’s Sights: Books of Note for 8/7/15
In the Duke’s Sights returns with a belated book-heavy monster post (no, they won’t normally be this big, but I’ve been lazy, so…). From space opera to urban fantasy to epic fantasy to steampunk and beyond! Here’s a chunk of the stuff I’ve received in the last couple weeks that I may just have to read…now. Needless to say, my TBR pile just got exponentially taller… Included below are the descriptions of books from Tor Books, Subterranean Press, Harper Voyager, William Morrow, and Fairwood Press. Anything look interesting to you? Let me know in the comments!
Book Review – Ink and Bone by Rachel Caine
Imagine if the Royal Library of Alexandria had not been destroyed in flames. In Ink and Bone, Rachel Caine uses this alternate history speculation to craft a universe where the “Great Library” has survived and flourished through the centuries, expanded with satellite institutions around the world. The cultural influence and political power of the Library is significant, holding absolute control over written knowledge. Ownership of printed books is illegal, but Library-approved materials are ‘mirrored’ from the original texts through alchemy by Obscurists to personal blank ‘book’ instruments of Library design called Codexes.
Book Review: Dirty Magic by Jaye Wells
Alchemy-based magic gives a relatively mild supernatural flavor to what is otherwise a novel focused strongly on police procedural lines in Dirty Magic, a novel by Jaye Wells. Dirty Magic, the first in the “Prospero War” series, follows the story of Kate Prospero, police officer. The novel brings us to her story just as the scourge of dirty magic in her rust belt hometown takes a dangerous, and even deadly, turn. Genre mashups, or crossovers, are always a matter of balancing acts. Unless an author is truly ambitious, there usually is a dominant genre, and a secondary genre. Often for fantasy and science fiction readers, SFF is the dominant genre, with mystery, romance, or thriller elements as the secondary genre that is layered in. A relatively popular secondary genre as of late for layering into fantasy, especially urban fantasy, has the bones of the procedural. There are a lot of advantages for a writer to use elements of the procedural, especially in terms of structure and story beats, It provides authors a narrative framework to decorate with the genre elements, and everything else in the novel as well. Dirty Magic by Jaye Wells, then, runs with that last, as the secondary genre to her urban fantasy structure is most definitely police procedural.
Book Review: Radiant by Karina Sumner-Smith
Sitting squarely in the borderlands between science and fantasy, Karina Sumner-Smith’s first turn into novel length fiction (after a number of well received stories, including the Nebula nominated “An End to All things”) is the strongly crafted story of the ghost-seeing young woman Xhea in RADIANT, the first in the “Towers Trilogy”. The science fantasy city of the Lower City and the Towers floating above provides a secondary world urban fantastical environment for Radiant’s story. Class in this world is very much a function of the ability to use magic. Those who can and do practice magic competently live in the floating Towers that serenely hover over the ruination and post-apocalyptic state of the Lower City left behind. The dregs of society, on the other hand, live in those lower city ruins, in quarters ranging from makeshift shelters in ruined subway tunnels to skyscrapers that try and reach the sky.
Book Review: The Dragons of Heaven by Alyc Helms
In the darkened streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown, Missy Masters is struggling to take up the vigilante-hero mantle of her retired, estranged grandfather, Mr. Mystic. Missy shares his stubbornness, his intimate connections with Chinese culture, and his uncanny ability to cross into a realm of shadows and exert limited control over the creatures within. Just as she literally straddles worlds, Missy also dances a line of pretending to be an aged, but expert, male superhero while training to advance beyond her actual novice abilities. She aspires to the strength and moral right that her grandfather embodied while battling against memories of his emotional distance, his personal secrets, and the prejudices common of his generation. Typical of masked superheroes, she has two lives, the separate worlds of Missy Masters and of Mr. Mystic. And she has past experiences, a world away in China, that have led her to be the woman and vigilante of the present.
