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WoGF Review: Love and Romanpunk by Tansy Rayner Roberts
Emily Sandoval (ersandoval) is a bookaholic, whose poison of choice is fantasy and science fiction. At her day job, she’s an engineer working on satellites, and in her spare time she writes epic fantasy novels. She blogs irregularly about writing and the genre, and joined the Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge to force herself to slow down between books and write the occasional review.
Editor’s Note: This review counts for November.
I’m not a big reader of short fiction—I guess my sense of appreciation isn’t calibrated for the usual hit rate of a good anthology—but this collection by Tansy Rayner Roberts was wonderful.
Love and Romanpunk begins with “Julia Agrippina’s Secret Family Bestiary,” in which, Julia says, “I have arranged the secrets of my family in alphabetical order, beast by beast.” These family tales, told in Julia’s wonderfully dry voice, weave together into a fantastical and very unexpected version of Roman history where the monsters not only plagued Julia’s family, they were her family.
The second story, “Lamia Victoriana,” was probably my least favorite of the collection, though still quite good. I think I’d have enjoyed it more if I was better versed in the classics. The story is narrated by Fanny Wollstonecraft, as she and her sister Mary run away with an unnamed poet and his sister. They are, of course, the titular lamia, seductive vampires in the old Victorian sense, and a lovely, spine-chilling change from the modern kind. There’s an unexpected tie to Rome at the end, which I didn’t entirely understand at the time, but which sets things up nicely for the last two stories.
WoGF Review: Havemercy by Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett
Emily Sandoval (ersandoval) is a bookaholic, whose poison of choice is fantasy and science fiction. At her day job, she’s an engineer working on satellites, and in her spare time she writes epic fantasy novels. She blogs irregularly about writing and the genre, and joined the Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge to force herself to slow down between books and write the occasional review.
Jaida Jones was my random author pick for the Women of Genre Fiction challenge, so I went into Havemercy pretty much cold.
And I loved it. I did have one major issue with what was missing from the book, but what was there was a helluva story. Volstov and Ke-Han have been at war for over a hundred years. They’ve both got their magicians, but what really gives Volstov an edge is its dragons, made of metal and brought to life and fueled by magic.
More than the war, though, or even the magic, Havemercy is really the story of our four protagonists—a magician, Royston; a tutor, Hal; a student-cum-professor, Thom; and the dragon Havemercy’s pilot, Rook—and the relationships between them. The book opens with Royston being exiled from Thremedon, the capital of Volstov, for having an affair with a foreign prince whose culture is unaccepting of homosexuality. I admit I had a moment of doubt, especially when this was followed up by Rook’s blatant bigotry (not to mention his misogyny), but it was handled beautifully as Royston’s, and later Hal’s, viewpoints developed.
WoGF Review: Sword of Fire and Sea by Erin Hoffman
Emily Sandoval (ersandoval) is a bookaholic, whose poison of choice is fantasy and science fiction. At her day job, she’s an engineer working on satellites, and in her spare time she writes epic fantasy novels. She blogs irregularly about writing and the genre, and joined the Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge to force herself to slow down between books and write the occasional review.
Editor’s note: This review counts for the July review poll.
Sword of Fire and Sea by Erin Hoffman was a light, fun book. By no means perfect, but quite enjoyable.
Captain Vidarian Rulorat is commissioned by the fire priestesshood to transport one of their own to a place of safety, beyond the reach of the Vkortha who are hunting her. Thus, he sets himself a course that will change his life and change the world.
The magic system is one of elements—earth, air, water, and fire—the source of which are the four goddesses. Most magic users are women, priestesses, and can wield only one element, but during the course of saving the fire priestess Ariadel’s life, Vidarian finds himself suddenly in possession of both fire and water magic, and the subject of prophecy. The magic is never described in much detail, but I enjoyed seeing Vidarian stumble through discovering his own, rather than having a teacher on hand to give him all the answers.
WoGF Review: Ironskin by Tina Connolly
Emily Sandoval (ersandoval) is a bookaholic, whose poison of choice is fantasy and science fiction. At her day job, she’s an engineer working on satellites, and in her spare time she writes epic fantasy novels. She blogs irregularly about writing and the genre, and joined the Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge to force herself to slow down between books and write the occasional review.
When the 2012 Nebula Award nominees were announced, I was pleased to find I had read (and enjoyed) four out of six in the Best Novel category. The fifth has been on my reading list for a while. The sixth, the only one I’d never heard of, was Ironskin by Tina Connolly.
I picked it up so quickly in part because of some idiot comments floating around the web about the genre becoming too girly, and it made me happy that books like this are starting to get serious recognition. Once I read the description, I was curious about what made this book so special that both it and Mary Robinette Kowal’s Glamour in Glass were included on the shortlist (both being alternate histories in the regency era).
Ironskin is a retelling of Jane Eyre with fey. Unlike Glamour in Glass, where society is practically unchanged by the addition of magic, Connolly’s world is dramatically different. Society had become dependent on fey technology, powering everything from lights to motor cars with magical “bluepacks”—until the Great War. The story starts five years after the war’s end. The fey are gone, but the country is left devastated, and scrambling to make do with coal and steam. A generation of young men is slaughtered, and many unlucky survivors are left with fey curses that can only be suppressed by covering the scars with iron. Jane Eliot is one such ironskin, hiding her deformed face with an iron half-mask.
WoGF Review: Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear
Emily Sandoval (ersandoval) is a bookaholic, whose poison of choice is fantasy and science fiction. At her day job, she’s an engineer working on satellites, and in her spare time she writes epic fantasy novels. She blogs irregularly about writing and the genre, and joined the Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge to force herself to slow down between books and write the occasional review.
Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear is the story of an empire falling apart. The Old Khagan is dead, and his nephew Temur is left for dead on the battlefield. However, in a land where each of the Khagan’s living heirs has his own moon in the sky, his survival is no secret, and his uncle is determined to hunt him down. His first instinct is merely to get away, but when an enemy sends the ghosts of his people to capture his bedmate, he sets out on a quest to reclaim her. Along the way, he joins with the wizard and once-princess Samarkar to stand against a hidden cult that seeks to play Temur and his uncle against each other and conquer their people.
The language in this book was beautiful. Not overly showy, but fluid and graceful, effortlessly leading me through the story. The love scene early on is one of the most poetic I’ve ever read.
Lots of great female characters: wizards, warriors, horsewomen, grandmothers, princesses, an even a female king. And horses; Temur’s mare Bansh truly was a character in her own right. I always love seeing a range of strengths. Looking back on it now, this book was actually very heavily populated with women. Given that a lot of the men all killed each other off before the story started, that makes a lot of sense.
