The Relic Master giveaway is now over and random.org has spoken (or displayed a number anyway). The winner is:
Gina from Pennsylvania, US
Congratulations, I hope you enjoy the series!
For those of you who didn’t win, there are more chances to win at Janicu’s Book Blog and Grasping for the Wind!
First, a quick update since it’s been quiet around here lately: Yesterday I finally finished the 1,000 page hardcover behemoth A Dance With Dragons! That means hopefully I’ll be getting back to writing more here now that I won’t be spending almost every spare moment reading it very slowly and trying to catch as many of the details as possible.
This week brought one review copy.
This debut novel is also being released under the name The Straight Razor Cure in the UK. It will be available in hardcover and as an ebook on August 16th. It sounds like a fun sort of darker noir story, and you can read an excerpt here.
Drug dealers, hustlers, brothels, dirty politics, corrupt cops . . . and sorcery. Welcome to Low Town.
In the forgotten back alleys and flophouses that lie in the shadows of Rigus, the finest city of the Thirteen Lands, you will find Low Town. It is an ugly place, and its champion is an ugly man. Disgraced intelligence agent. Forgotten war hero. Independent drug dealer. After a fall from grace five years ago, a man known as the Warden leads a life of crime, addicted to cheap violence and expensive drugs. Every day is a constant hustle to find new customers and protect his turf from low-life competition like Tancred the Harelip and Ling Chi, the enigmatic crime lord of the heathens.
The Warden’s life of drugged iniquity is shaken by his discovery of a murdered child down a dead-end street . . . setting him on a collision course with the life he left behind. As a former agent with Black House—the secret police—he knows better than anyone that murder in Low Town is an everyday thing, the kind of crime that doesn’t get investigated. To protect his home, he will take part in a dangerous game of deception between underworld bosses and the psychotic head of Black House, but the truth is far darker than he imagines. In Low Town, no one can be trusted.
Daniel Polansky has crafted a thrilling novel steeped in noir sensibilities and relentless action, and set in an original world of stunning imagination, leading to a gut-wrenching, unforeseeable conclusion. Low Town is an attention-grabbing debut that will leave readers riveted . . . and hungry for more.
We have a winner! The winner of the signed copy of A Dance With Dragons is:
Ashley from North Carolina, US
Congratulations! I hope you enjoy the book as much as I have been!
Today I am pleased to announce I have a giveaway for all four books in the Relic Master series by Catherine Fisher. While I haven’t had a chance to read it yet myself, I have been rather interested in reading The Dark City, the first book in this series, which has a spot on Mount TBR.
About the Relic Master Series:
Welcome to Anara, a world mysteriously crumbling to devastation, where nothing is what it seems: Ancient relics emit technologically advanced powers, members of the old Order are hunted by the governing Watch yet revered by the people, and the great energy that connects all seems to also be destroying all. The only hope for the world lies in Galen, a man of the old Order and a Keeper of relics, and his sixteen-year-old apprentice, Raffi. They know of a secret relic with great power that has been hidden for centuries. As they search for it, they will be tested beyond their limits. For there are monsters-some human, some not-that also want the relic’s power and will stop at nothing to get it.
RELIC MASTER is a four book series. Each book will be released over four consecutive months this summer:
Each book will include a piece of the map of Anara, the world of RELIC MASTER, on the reverse of the jacket. Collect all four books and you will have the complete map.
About the Author:
Catherine Fisher is the author of the New York Times bestselling duology Incarceron and Sapphique and in the Relic Master series has created a world equally as developed, dynamic and dangerous as that of Incarceron. Visit her at www.catherine-fisher.com.
Giveaway Rules: One entry per person. This giveaway is open only in the US and Canada and will run through the end of the day of Monday, July 25. A winner will be selected using random.org on the following day. If I do not hear from the winner 48 hours after contacting them, a new winner will be selected. That winner will then have 48 hours to get back to me or a new winner will be selected, and this will continue until a winner responds to the email.
To enter the giveaway, fill out the form below. Please Note: Email addresses are only used for the purpose of notifying the winner. All email addresses will be deleted once the giveaway is over and there is an address to send the book to.
Update July 26: The form has been removed now that the giveaway is over.
Good luck!
This week brought some pretty exciting books since I finally got my copy of A Dance With Dragons, the fifth installment in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. Better yet, I got it signed along with a new hardcover copy of A Game of Thrones (because I really needed a third copy of this book, but oh well – it’s signed and it’s one of two books in the series I didn’t already have in hardcover other than the Science Fiction Book Club version).
I’ve already talked about this plenty and included the usual information on the giveaway page, so all I’ll say about that now is that I’m almost halfway through it, loving it, and wishing I could read faster because I want to know what happens (especially since my husband finished it early this morning and is taunting me with knowing what happens).
I also got two review copies, one of which I’ve already talked about since I got it at BEA this year. Since I already talked about it, I’m not going to include the cover and blurb again, but if you are interested in learning more about Blood Rights by Kristen Painter, you can read more about it here.
So that just leaves one book:
That sounds like quite a problem, having a blight of mages. This is a stand alone book set in the same world as The Innocent Mage. Although it says it’s available in August, it appears to already be shipping on Amazon. A Blight of Mages is available both in hardcover and as an ebook.
Hundreds of years before the great Mage War, a land lies, unknowing, on the edge of catastrophe…
Barl is young and impulsive, but she has a power within that calls to her. In her city, however, only those of noble blood and with the right connections learn the ways of the arcane. Barl is desperate to learn-but her eagerness to use her power leads her astray and she is banned from ever learning the mystic arts.
Morgan holds the key to her education. A member of the Council of Mages, he lives to maintain the status quo, preserve the mage bloodlines, and pursue his scholarly experiments. But Barl’s power intrigues him-in spite of her low status.
Together, he realizes they can create extraordinary new incantations. Morgan’s ambition and Barl’s power make a potent combination. What she does not see is the darkness in him that won’t be denied.
A Blight of Mages is the new novel set in the world of Karen Miller’s bestselling debut The Innocent Mage.
The Uncertain Places is a fantasy book incorporating fairy tales set in Berkeley, California, in the 1970s and some of the 1980s. The author, Lisa Goldstein, won the American Book Award for her novel The Red Magician. She has also been nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and several other awards, including the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the World Fantasy Award.
Ben Avery and Will Taylor have been friends for years so it’s no surprise that when Ben begins dating Maddie Feierabend, he tries to hook Will up with her sister Livvy – and is correct that his friend will hit it off with her. Will continues to get to know Livvy while they both attend school at Berkeley, and both Will and Ben look forward to their visits with the entire charming family at their farmhouse in Napa Valley.
Yet as Will spends more and more time in the Feierabend home, he begins to notice strange occurrences. When he gets up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, he finds a man cleaning the house. While exploring the woods one day, he overhears a conversation about a mysterious bargain but only sees crows nearby. He’s also noticed Livvy’s entire family seems to get uncomfortable whenever fairy tales are mentioned, and when he tries to assuage his curiosity about these matters, he gets the feeling he’s not getting the entire truth.
One day when Will is supposed to meet Livvy, she doesn’t show up. After he gives up on her coming by, he goes home and calls her. Livvy says she’s felt strange all day so they keep the conversation short and Will says he’ll call her tomorrow. The next day he keeps calling only to be told by her roommate that she is sleeping. Every time he calls to check on her, he receives the same response until it’s been long enough that he’s really worried about her. He goes to her apartment and then calls her mother to inform her about the situation and ask what she wants him to do. She asks him to bring Livvy home, and when he shows up with her the family seems very upset but not particularly surprised. As days go no with no change in Livvy, Will determines to discover the secret that the Feierabends are hiding – and do whatever it takes to get Livvy back.
When I was first offered a review copy of The Uncertain Places, I couldn’t believe I’d never heard of Lisa Goldstein before. A dark fantasy involving fairy tales sounded right up my alley and I love to discover new-to-me authors, so I was really looking forward to reading this book. It ended up being one of those books that’s hard to describe, though. It was not a bad book by any means or a struggle to get through, but it wasn’t quite for me, mainly because it didn’t really engage me while I was reading it or keep me thinking about it after I was finished, either. That special spark that moves a book from merely readable to truly enjoyable was missing, and this was largely due to a lack of any sort of emotional connection with any of the characters.
The best part of this book was the fairy tale of the bondsmaid, which as far as I can tell is an original tale with a lot of common fairy tale story elements. It was first set up as a mystery, starting with the general strangeness of the behavior of the entire Feierabend family and the different strange occurrences Will noticed as he spent more and more time at the farmhouse. Then Livvy began acting strangely as well and lapsed into sleeping for days on end. Soon, the entire story of the family’s bargain was revealed and the mystery became discovering more of the details of the past and just how to change the bargain. I loved this part of the story with its deals and tricks and how it fit in with Grimm’s Fairy Tales, as well as some of the little clues. However, there were times where the research and interviewing that went into solving the puzzle lagged down the pacing a bit.
The fairy tale would have worked a little better for me if it was a little bit creepier, though, and I think that having some sort of affinity with the characters would have gone a long way toward that. As is the case with Grimm’s Fairy Tales, this was a dark story, but it failed to disturb me at all. Both Will and Livvy felt like characters in a story instead of real people with depth, and if I could have really cared about them or believed in either of them as more than a fictional creation in a tale, it would have had enough tension to do that. We were told some about who the characters were and their hopes, dreams, aspirations, and beliefs – Maddie with her anti-war political agenda; Livvy with her enjoyment of chemistry and cooking; Rose with her history; and Will with his new feminist outlook, psychological studies, determination, and that love for Livvy that fueled his fierce determination. In spite of that, they never seemed to come to life with vibrant personalities, though. There were conversations with banter that seemed to be trying to give them more of that personality, but a lot of it fell flat for me and seemed to be trying too hard with some punning and some lame jokes. (Fortunately, the bad puns were limited to the first chapter.)
Overall, The Uncertain Places was a decent book with a mysterious fairy tale merged with 1970s California, but it could have been a lot better if only the characters were less bland and some of the pacing was less uneven. It has not left me averse to reading another book by Lisa Goldstein at all since the actual story told was enjoyable, but it also hasn’t left me excited about the possibility of looking up her backlist of work.
My Rating: 6/10
Where I got my reading copy: The publisher sent me an ARC.
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