This week brought two unsolicited review copies, both of which I’m very excited about. One of these books has actually already been reviewed here since I picked up an ARC at BEA – The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge, the sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep. I haven’t read it myself yet (John read and reviewed it), but I am planning to since I really enjoyed A Fire Upon the Deep when I read it earlier this year. Now I can read the lovely finished copy and preserve the signed ARC – and the finished copy is gorgeous! It will be on sale in hardcover/ebook starting October 11.
The other book is:
This is a debut novel that sounds really good to me – a steampunk adventure set in Victorian London that is inspired by Twelfth Night and The Importance of Being Earnest. Like the former, it has a girl who dresses up like a boy, except she does so in order to get into an all-male school for the sciences. It sounds very fun and I’m excited to read it! All Men of Genius will be released in hardcover/ebook on September 27.
Inspired by Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, All Men of Genius takes place in a Victorian London familiar but fantastical, where mad science makes the impossible possible.
Violet Adams wants to attend Illyria College, a widely renowned school for the most brilliant up-and-coming scientific minds, founded by the late Duke Illyria, the greatest scientist of the Victorian Age. The school is run by his son, Ernest, who has held to his father’s policy that the small, exclusive college remain male-only. Violet sees her opportunity when her father departs for America. She disguises herself as her twin brother, Ashton, and gains entry.
But keeping the secret of her sex won’t be easy, not with her friend Jack’s constant habit of pulling pranks, and especially not when the duke’s young ward, Cecily, starts to develop feelings for Violet’s alter ego, “Ashton.” Not to mention blackmail, mysterious killer automata, the way Violet’s pulse quickens whenever Ernest speaks to her, and a deadly legacy left by Ernest’s father. She soon realizes that it’s not just keeping her secret until the end of the year she has to worry about: it’s surviving that long.
