The Melusine contest is now closed and the winner has been selected with the help of random.org. The winner is:

Hunter Lily Troy

Congratulations! I hope you enjoy Melusine!

It’s Saturday again so it is time to announce giveaway #2 of the month! I’ve decided not to go in order of favorites each week even though I did my very favorite books of the year first (mostly because favorite book #2 is one of the four books I haven’t found time to review yet between work and the holiday season). Last week’s giveaway was fantasy so it’s time to give away a science fiction book.

This week’s book is The Player of Games, one of the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks (review). Even though this book is technically part of a series, it is a stand alone book with a beginning, middle and end. The Culture books are loosely connected since they take place in the same universe but follow different characters. This was the first book in the series I’ve read and my favorite so far (although I’ve only read one other). The Player of Games blew me away with its depictions of society, the way it drew me in in the first half a page, and the layers and depth it contained while being a very readable, fun story. I also enjoyed that the main character was an extraordinarily intelligent professional strategy game player instead of an action/adventure hero.

Contest Rules

To enter, send an email with the subject “Games” to fantasycafe AT novomancy.org. Please include your mailing address. Addresses will only be used for sending the book out quickly and all messages will be deleted once the contest is over.

The contest is open to anyone, no matter where you live. One entry per person is allowed.

Entries for the contest will be accepted through 11:59 PM on Saturday December 20. The next contest will be announced sometime that day.

You can also still enter to win a copy of one book of your choice from Sarah Monette’s The Doctrine of Labyrinth series until midnight!

Thanks to Mulluane from Dragons, Heroes and Wizards for the reminder!

John over at Grasping for the Wind started this meme for helping everyone find new blogs. His original post is as follows:

My list of fantasy and sf book reviewers is woefully out of date. I need your help to fix that. But rather than go through the hassle of having you send me recommendations or sticking them in comments, what you can do is take the following list and stick it on your website, then add yourself to the list, preferably in alphabetical order. That way, I will be able to track it across the web from back links, and can add each new blog to my roll as it comes along. So take this list, add it to your blog, and add a link to your blog on it. If you are already on the list, repost this meme at your blog so others can see it, and find new blogs from the links others put up on their blogs. Everybody wins! Be sure to send the list around to others as well. There is an easy to copy window of all the links and text at the bottom of this post to make it even simpler to do.

I would be ever so grateful if you would help me out.

So I am just adding to the list! There are a lot of new blogs here to check out.

A Dribble Of Ink
Adventures in Reading
The Agony Column
Bibliophile Stalker
BillWardWriter.com
Blood of the Muse
Bookspotcentral
The Book Swede
Breeni Books
Cheryl’s Musings
Dark Wolf Fantasy Reviews
Darque Reviews
Dave Brendon’s Fantasy and Sci-Fi Weblog
Dragons, Heroes and Wizards
Dusk Before the Dawn
Enter the Octopus
Fantasy Book Critic
Fantasy Cafe
Fantasy Debut
Fantasy Book Reviews and News
Fantasy and Sci-fi Lovin’ Blog
The Fix
The Foghorn Review
The Galaxy Express
Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review
Galleycat
Jumpdrives and Cantrips
Literary Escapism
Neth Space
NextRead
OF Blog of the Fallen
The Old Bat’s Belfry
Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist
Post-Weird Thoughts
Realms of Speculative Fiction
Rob’s Blog o’ Stuff
ScifiChick
Sci-Fi Songs [Musical Reviews]
Severian’s Fantastic Worlds
SF Signal
SF Site
SFF World’s Book Reviews
Silver Reviews
Sporadic Book Reviews
Temple Library Reviews
The Road Not Taken
Un:Bound
Urban Fantasy Land
Vast and Cool and Unsympathetic
Variety SF
Walker of Worlds
Wands and Worlds
The Wertzone
WJ Fantasy Reviews
The World in a Satin Bag

Foreign Language (other than English)

Elbakin.net [French]

It’s the end of the year again which means I’ve been thinking a lot about my favorite books I’ve read this year. I’m going to do a giveaway of four of my favorite books from this year (new copies, that is, not mine – no way am I parting with these ones!). New giveaways will be announced on each Saturday in December with a deadline of 11:59 PM of the following Saturday for entering. Winners will be announced the day after the deadline.

This week’s book is Melusine, the first book in Sarah Monette’s The Doctrine of Labyrinth series (review). All three books in this series about the wizard Felix Harrowgate and the assassin Mildmay are excellent with exceptionally well developed characters, but my favorite is actually the second book The Virtu (my #1 favorite book of the year). I liked Melusine almost as much, though, and that’s definitely the place to start, so that’s my choice for giveaway #1! Plus Monette did an amazing job of writing from the first person perspective of an insane character in this particular book.

Warning: I would not recommend this book to anyone offended by bad language, rape, sexual content, and/or homosexuality. Monette is one of those authors that writes by asking herself what the worst possible thing she can do to her characters is and then does it – so it’s not a light, happy story but is rather dark.

Edit: I am changing this contest to any book in the series. So if you already have Melusine and want The Virtu, you can choose to get The Virtu instead. Or if you have both but don’t have The Mirador, you can get that one if you win.

Contest Rules

To enter, send an email with the subject “Melusine” to fantasycafe AT novomancy.org. Please include your mailing address. Addresses will only be used for sending the book out quickly and all messages will be deleted once the contest is over. If you already have this book but want either The Virtu or The Mirador, please specify which of these two books you would like instead.

The contest is open to anyone. One entry per person is allowed.

Entries for the contest will be accepted through 11:59 PM on Saturday December 13. The next contest will be announced sometime that day.

Good luck!

The book trailer for Hope’s Folly, the third book in the Dock Five/Gabriel’s Ghost series by Linnea Sinclair, is on her site. It will be released in February of 2009. I am so excited about this book! The first two books in this science fiction romance series, Gabriel’s Ghost and Shades of Dark, recently made it to my favorite books list and I’ll be reviewing both of them soon. Until then, let’s put it this way… I couldn’t put down the last half of Gabriel’s Ghost and once I finished it, I wanted more so badly that I rushed out to the bookstore to get Shades of Dark just a couple of hours later. By the time I went to bed that night, I was halfway through that book and in the end, I loved it more than the first one. Those are ones I’ll be definitely be rereading.

The third book will be about Philip Guthrie, a character from the first two books. Although I’m looking forward to Hope’s Folly, I am going to miss the two main characters from the first two books since they are really what made me love the series so much. Even so, I’ll be going to the bookstore to get that one the day it comes out.

All the Windwracked Stars
by Elizabeth Bear
368pp (Hardcover)
My Rating: 8/10
Amazon Rating: 4.5/5
LibraryThing Rating: 4/5
Goodreads Rating: 4/5

Elizabeth Bear’s latest novel, All the Windwracked Stars, is the first book in The Edda of Burdens trilogy. As a big fan of her Promethean Age series as well as A Companion to Wolves (co-written with Sarah Monette), I was very much looking forward to this book. While I did not enjoy it quite as much as the other novels, it was still very good with a fantastic backstory steeped in Norse mythology.

The tale begins with the end of the world. The dead bodies of the children of the Light are buried under the falling snow – all except for the smallest one, the historian and poet Muire, who ran away instead of facing her fate with her sisters and brothers. Muire returns after the battle, where is she is found by the badly injured Kasimir, the last remaining valraven whose Valkyrie rider is among the fallen. The two keep each other alive throughout the night, and the next morning Kasimir chooses Muire as his new rider, despite her protests that she is unworthy because of her cowardice. However, Muire leaves him once he is healed, fearing the changes he underwent as he was forged into a metallic steed of war in preparation for the world to come.

Approximately 2300 years pass and the world is decaying once again. Two hundred years before, a mere two cities remained and now the final city is beginning to ebb, kept alive only by the efforts of the Technomage. Muire has survived throughout the years and now resides in this last city, Eiledon. One night she encounters a dying man and chooses him, which gives her some of his memories and a desire to avenge him. In doing so, she realizes that one of the tarnished children of the Light still walks the earth in these final days and determines to find this ancient enemy.


All the Windwracked Stars is one of those books that is not clearly science fiction or fantasy but some of both, although it felt more like a fantasy book to me. The setting is in a future more technically advanced than ours and when the second chapter mentioned humans using their science to destroy themselves, I expected it to have more emphasis on the destruction of the world by its residents than it actually did. There was more emphasis on the mythological elements and magic and the book reminded me very much of a fairy tale with its lyrical prose and the complete immersion in a fantastic world that is not entirely our own. Magic occurs all the time but it just seems to fit and is shown instead of being over-explained.

As with A Companion to Wolves, which also was based on Norse mythology, a lot of difficult to pronounce Nordic words are thrown around without a lot of explanation on their meaning, if any. Personally, I enjoy this style and find looking up details on the background of the various terms to be a part of the fun of reading a book by Bear, but some readers may find it jarring to encounter expressions such as “waelcyrge” and “einherjar” regularly. Usually there is enough context to get the general idea, though.

All the Windwracked Stars is not a light, mindless read, although it is not a particularly difficult book, either. It does require some attention since it is not as straightforward as many novels and does not always spell everything out (and contains a lot of unfamiliar terms, as mentioned previously). I suspect this is another one that would still be interesting to reread and that I’d catch many subtleties that I missed the first time around.

The characters are good but not great, which is mainly why I did not enjoy this book as much as the other books I have read by Bear. Reflecting on it, I liked all the characters – just not as much as some of the ones in her other books (even though the characters in A Companion to Wolves other than the main character and his wolf were not well drawn, I very much enjoyed those two). Kasimir, the valraven, was my favorite. His rejection by Muire immediately after the death of his previous rider made me feel badly for him, especially since he chose to serve her and did it so gladly. Muire’s yearning for redemption was interesting and I did enjoy reading about her. There were a couple of other characters who had their own chapters but fewer of them than Muire, a gigolo and a cat-person in the service of the Technomage. The animal-people in general were fun to read about and the Technomage’s view of their obedience or disobedience – that, as their creator, it was her own failing if they displeased her.

The writing is gorgeous and the opening lines really drew me in to the story. Actually, the entire first chapter had this wonderful cataclysmic yet melancholy feel to it when it described the end of the world and Muire and Kasimir’s survival. The next two or three chapters, which took place far in the future, had a different tone completely and did not keep my attention quite as well. However, after that, I could hardly put the book down.

All the Windwracked Stars is not the strongest book by Elizabeth Bear, but it is still a very good story. I definitely look forward to reading the rest of the series.

8/10

Read an Excerpt

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