Women in SF&F Month: Kim Wilkins
Apr
11
2018

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Today, I’m thrilled to welcome Kim Wilkins! She’s a five-time Aurealis Award–winning author, having received it for The Infernal (which won both Best Fantasy Novel and Best Horror Novel), The Resurrectionists, Angel of Ruin, and “The Year of Ancient Ghosts.” Several of her other works have also been finalists for this award, including Giants of the Frost and both currently published books in her Blood and Gold series. Daughters of the Storm, the first Blood and Gold novel, is an engaging, character-centric book focusing on a royal family with five sisters with very different personalities and interests at its heart—and it was just released in the United States for the first time last month!

Daughter of the Storm by Kim Wilkins Giants of the Frost by Kim Wilkins

PRINCESS LEIA AND BEYOND

How I loved Princess Leia.

When my brother and I played Star Wars games, the year the first movie was released, he was sometimes Han, sometimes Luke, sometimes my supervillain-nemesis Darth Vader. (The dog always had to be R2-D2, but was rarely compliant.) But I got to be Leia and that was great. Easy enough to pin my hair in buns over my ears. I asked a couple of times to be Han, but my brother was always clear on this: I was a girl. I had to be Leia.

When I was in junior high school I read Tolkien for the first time. The weird, cool new girl in class who introduced me to his books insisted I read The Hobbit first, which I did. When I said I liked it but why couldn’t at least one of those thirteen dwarves have been female, she said you just have to pretend. She handed me The Lord of the Rings and told me, “Merry and Pippin are girls.” You know what? LOTR works just fine if Merry and Pippin are female. In fact, so well that I was almost surprised to see them cast with male actors in the Peter Jackson film adaptation.

Predictably, I started writing my first epic fantasy around the time of my first encounter with Tolkien. It was a cheesy quest narrative called Trek Into Freedom, in which the lowly seamstress Kai-Ann joins with the defecting senator Tamerlan to form a group of assassins with the goal of taking out the evil queen Lavinga (jet black hair, widow’s peak, cape with a high collar, commanded an army of bats: you get the picture). Along the way, they picked up rebel leader and wayward daughter of a nobleman Hila, magician Antara, a farm-girl (whose name escapes me but was likely equally improbable) with big hands great for strangling wolves, and assorted other assassins with fantastic skills and powers: all but one of them female. My token male, Antara’s brother Akturan, existed solely to be Kai-Ann’s love interest. I was barely into my teens when I started writing this, so I was making it up as I went along. I had no idea what I was doing in terms of gender representation or class representation (I was from a poor part of town, so apart from Hila, everyone had grown up without shoes). I just knew I wanted a story about girls like me because I was a girl like me.

Sadly, after 200 typewritten pages, the Trek Into Freedom fizzled out about twenty miles from Lavinga’s castle. I was flooded with adolescent cynical hormones and put aside my epic fantasy story to take up cutting class and smoking on the jetty with my friends, but I look back now and feel proud to remember how that story allowed female characters to be defined as more than just “female”. It bucked the Smurfette trend of the 80s, where all the male smurfs were named for what they did, but Smurfette only got to be a girl.

There is a lot of talk about this idea of “strong female characters”, and too often it means characters that act in traditionally male roles. That can be awesome: we all loved seeing Wonder Woman cross no-man’s land deflecting bullets with her wrist bands. But it’s complex female characters I’m interested in. Female characters with agency who respond to that agency differently from each other. They can kick ass, sure; that’s never going to not be fun. Or they can be conflicted. Or sneaky. Or annoying. Or frightened. Or defiant. Or eccentric. Or think with their vaginas instead of their heads. Or too loyal. Or not loyal enough. Or, or, or…. You get the picture.

When my daughter was 10, I took her to see The Force Awakens. At the end of the movie I said to her, “Wasn’t it great to see a young female character in the main role, making stuff happen?” She gave me a look that said, “Well, of course.” She’s grown up on Katniss Everdeen and Hermione Granger and Tris Prior and Clary Fray, and all those books and films where there’s more than one woman (one Smurfette), and they all do cool stuff for different and complicated reasons. When she and her friends play, she has plenty of roles to choose from. It only took one generation.

I still love stories about women. It’s not that I don’t like men: I actually think they’re awesome. I like good characters across the board, but it’s women’s lives I’m most interested in. That’s why Daughters of the Storm has five female protagonists—all sisters, all different. I don’t play make-believe games anymore, but as a writer I still have to imagine what it’s like inside other people. And the best part of my job is having a cast of many complicated, conflicted, strong, weak, and in-between women to choose from.

Just like in real life.

Women in SF&F Month: Cass Morris
Apr
10
2018

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Today, I’m delighted to welcome Cass Morris! From Unseen Fire, her debut novel and the beginning of a new epic fantasy series based on Roman history, will be released on April 17—exactly one week from today. While waiting for its approaching publication date, you can read an excerpt from the opening of From Unseen Fire on the Penguin Random House website (as well as her essay below, of course!).

From Unseen Fire by Cass Morris

Historical Resonance

Politics deeply divided between two parties. Rampantly rising inflation, and wages failing to keep pace. Armies hopelessly entrenched in foreign wars. Concern over the ability of the state to provide food and healthcare for the poor. Complaints from venerable elders about a degenerate and hedonistic younger generation. An influx of immigrants fueling the economy and unsettling the protectionists.

America in the 21st century? No, I’m talking about Rome in the waning decades of the Republic.

When I began writing From Unseen Fire in 2011, I had little notion how resonant some of its themes would feel a few years later. The book takes place in what would be, for us, the 60s BCE, the final decades before the collapse of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire. The politics focus on economic insecurities, on a diversifying population, on the impact of colonization, and on women finding ways to make their voices heard in the public sphere. Those issues are perennial, of course, but they’ve all been magnified in the past couple of years, to the point where my editor and copy editor both commented on parallels they saw to figures from the 2016 election cycle. I didn’t intend that—no character in From Unseen Fire is meant to be an analog of anyone in the present—but I’m not sorry for it, if readers nonetheless see in them a reflection of our modern world. On the flip side, while nothing in From Unseen Fire is taken directly from history, it does all have historical precedent of some kind, none of it anachronistic by more than a couple of decades. The arguments in Aven’s Forum draw from those made in Rome’s by Cicero, Cato, the Gracchi brothers, and, yes, Julius Caesar himself.

It’s the job of sci-fi and fantasy to hold a slightly warped mirror up to reality, to show us ourselves through a tarted-up lens. It’s easier, sometimes, to swallow a political message when it’s wrapped in wizard’s robes or loaded into the cargo bay of a spaceship. It’s how Tolkien could get us to contemplate the purpose and nature of warfare, how N. K. Jemisin asks us to examine prejudice and power structures, how Terry Pratchett poked at nearly every aspect and assumption of society. Any number of articles have been written on the effect of the “Harry Potter generation”, positing that kids who read fantasy fiction grew into adults with a keener sense of social and political awareness. Think about the signs at any large protest from the past few years: chances are good you’ll see references to everything from The Handmaid’s Tale to The Hunger Games. At the same time, though, that fictional distance can also let people willfully ignore the message while taking on the aesthetic: witness the occasional attempts to co-opt the Rebel Alliance or Resistance out of Star Wars by people whose platforms are those of the Empire or the First Order (or worse, the subset claiming that the Imperials are the good guys and blowing up a planet was a totally justifiable response to a perceived threat).

The grounding that history can add to the SFF mix, I think, is a sense of just how often we as humans grapple with the same problems.

I’m something of a magpie historian, interested in many different eras and places, and I’ve noticed that again and again, the whole world over, the same questions crop up. Do we roll with cultural shifts, or resist them? What traditions are worth preserving, and which are inhibiting growth? How do we weather economic tides, both in our private lives and in the public state? Who gets to control our government: the wise, or the mighty, or the wealthy? How far can a political pedigree get you—and how far should it be allowed to? Democracy is great in theory, but what do you do when the people make choices that are less than stellar? Is some divine force guiding our nation and its destiny, or are we on our own?

There’s a trap here, too, though. History is largely written by the victors, and that’s not just about the victors in war: it’s also about socioeconomic victors. We know the most about the folk on the top rungs of the ladder.

There are prominent women in Roman history, of course, but because the histories were all written by men, it’s hard to sort out truth from propaganda. Women in the Roman historical record, whether Roman themselves or foreign, tend to fall into one of two categories: untouchably virtuous matron (Cornelia Scipionis, Octavia, Julia Domna) or power-hungry deviants (Livia, Agrippina Major, Plotina, Sabina, Boudicca), the latter often with a side of sexual intemperance (Messalina, Agrippina Minor, and of course Cleopatra). Creating fictional characters from a historical base often means stripping back layers of embellishment, then piecing together what’s left and patching the holes with guesswork, supposition, and invention. Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra: A Life does a wonderful job picking this apart from a historian’s viewpoint; the fiction author then has to apply that kind of work inside a narrative context.

The same problem crops up with other groups of people, too. Much of what we know about the Celts, for example, comes from what the Romans—their enemies—wrote about them. Caesar found the Gauls barbaric but thought they had the potential to be civilized (by, of course, Roman standards), but decided the Germans were beyond redemption. Diodorus Scaurus wrote that the Irish Celts ate their fathers, slept with their mothers and sisters, and generally believed them “complete savages [who] lead a miserable existence because of the cold”. Even the name we know them by was likely bestowed upon them by the Greeks, who called them the Keltoi, rather than being anything they called themselves.

Not exactly what we would call unbiased source material.

And then there are the people no one bothered to write about at all. Rome’s poor and slaves were by far the largest classes of its inhabitants, but they leave the least behind in the historical record. To find out what their lives were like, you have to go past written sources and into the real guts of archaeology—making inferences from the stories left on tombstones, from graffiti unearthed in long-buried walls, from the detritus of everyday life ground into the earth and forgotten for centuries. Mary Beard’s documentary series “Meet the Romans” is a wonderful example of a historian determined to bring social history to life rather than relying upon the broad, blinding strokes of the “great men” model of viewing the world, as is Alberto Angela’s book A Day in the Life of Ancient Rome.

I’m using Roman history for my examples here, because that’s where my mind has been living for several years, but the same holds true no matter what the place and era we’re talking about. In the author’s notes for The Girl in the Tower, Katherine Arden talked about facing similar challenges and excitement when re-creating the world of medieval Russia. Rowenna Miller’s recently-released Torn, though it takes place in an invented world, is clearly based upon meticulous research into the lives of average citizens in 1780s/90s France and England, just as Lara Elena Donnelly’s Amberlough invokes the atmosphere of 1930s Berlin. Any author dealing with historical inspiration, even at a tangent, has some wrangling to do.

SFF and history are often seen as separate genres, separate fields, fact versus fiction and never the twain shall meet. I’m not sure that’s ever really been true. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was a social commentary as much as the progenitor of science fiction, and Tolkien based the cultures of Middle Earth on those of Europe throughout the centuries. But I have a sense that the intersection of the fantastical and the historical is becoming even more potent here in the dawning decades of the new millennium.

Maybe it’s because the world we’re living in is one that puts the art of storytelling into a particular kind of crucible, where readers and writers alike are reaching for truth in a narrative that is part-cautionary tale, part-reflection, part-aspiration—and, perhaps, where we might be able to find the key to keeping our own republics from collapse.

Cass Morris Cass Morris currently lives and works in central Virginia and on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. She completed her Master of Letters at Mary Baldwin University in 2010, and she earned her undergraduate degree, a BA in English with a minor in history, from the College of William and Mary in 2007. She reads voraciously, wears corsets voluntarily, and will beat you at MarioKart. From Unseen Fire is her debut novel. Find her on Twitter: @CassRMorris.
Women in SF&F Month: Renay from Lady Business
Apr
09
2018

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As has become the tradition since she first began the ongoing recommendation list project in 2013, Renay is once again opening this month’s series of guest posts! Renay writes for the wonderful blog Lady Business, the 2017 Hugo Award winner for Best Fanzine and one of my personal favorite sites for science fiction and fantasy-related recommendations. She also co-hosts the Fangirl Happy Hour podcast—one of this year’s Hugo Award finalists for Best Fancast!

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My journey with diversifying my reading started small—read more women—and it worked perfectly. I had several tactics to offset the noise from Culture, like adding two books by women to my TBR when I added a book by a man, checking out a book by a woman from the library if I checked out a book by a man, and a similar tactic with bookstores (although that became dangerous fast because romance ebooks are Tempting).

Times have changed, though, and my understanding of people and their complicated, fascinating, messy experiences became deeper. I found myself in the comfortable position where I read lots of women, but they were white women, cis women, and straight women. And worse, I would reread the same comfortable authors in these categories, diving into back lists and rereading books I loved. There’s no wrong way to read; I’m always adamant about that. But for me (and maybe for other people) reading is a kind of continuing education, helping me imagine the world more complexly. When my reading stagnated, spinning its wheels in the diversity grooves I had worn trying to make my reading more equitable between cis men and cis women, I knew I needed to change something.

The last two years, I’ve been challenging myself to read differently in a way that has been incredibly successful and rewarding. I do a challenge each year to read new to me women writers, with a focus on women of color and trans women (my goal is 30 but I recommend smaller goals to start). Now more than ever I believe it’s important to make it a priority to listen to voices so drastically different than mine, hear the stories they want to tell, and meet the characters they imagine. Reading, more than anything else I do, is the way I open the world and its vastness up to myself. Nonfiction is relevant to this, too, but fiction even more so, because of how powerful stories can be in humanizing other people and communities.

For so many of us, our understanding of who women are has shifted and changed over the last decade in ways we could have never have predicted. The way we think about gender itself has expanded. That means the way we engage in list-making, reccing, and reading will shift too, if we approach the change with curiosity and make space for different perspectives.

Here, on Fantasy Book Cafe, Kristen has worked so hard to create a space like that over the years, following the seed of idea I had that she has made into a massive recommendation list of women writers—over 2500 recs! The Giant List of Books by Women in Science Fiction & Fantasy started small, but because it’s our list—the people who read SFF and love rec lists and follow projects like this—we can make it a priority to choose recommendations that reflect our changing world. So this year, as you go to submit books you’ve loved over the last 12 months, consider the marginalized women writers writing speculative fiction that you’ve read and loved and share them with us. Let’s keep working on inclusivity, reading new-to-us voices, and then celebrating those voices when we find work we love.

Women in SF&F Month 2018 Begins Tomorrow!
Apr
08
2018

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Since 2012, the month of April at Fantasy Cafe has been dedicated to highlighting the wonderful work women have been doing in speculative fiction. When closing last year’s series, I mentioned that it may be the last series of April guest posts—but I’m happy to say that 2017 will not be the last one and the seventh annual Women in SF&F event begins tomorrow!

However, it will be slightly different since I did make the possible adjustment also mentioned in that post from the end of 2017: keeping it a little smaller than it has been during the past six years. This year, it will be taking place on weekdays during the second and third weeks of the month plus part of the fourth week instead of extending across all four full weeks of April.

Next week’s schedule is below, but first, here is some background on Women in SF&F Month in case you’re not familiar with it:

For the last few years, I’ve set aside reviews and other book coverage during the month of April and instead held a month-long series of guest posts highlighting some of the women doing amazing work in speculative fiction. Throughout the month, guests will discuss a variety of topics—many of which will be related to women in science fiction and fantasy but not necessarily all since the goal is simply to gather a group of women invested in the genre in one place for a month and showcase the wonderful work they are doing. Past contributions have ranged from women discussing their own work and process to what they find best about the works of other women to issues of representation and equity in fandom.

Before the first Women in SF&F Month, I had been making an effort to read and review a lot of speculative fiction books by women on this blog—but it wasn’t always that way. After I started reading fantasy and seeking more book recommendations online, I found that very few of the books I heard about the most were written by women. I didn’t actually notice this for quite awhile since I just read the books that were supposed to be good without giving much thought to who wrote them beyond whether or not I considered them an author worth reading.

It wasn’t until I saw an online discussion about women writing science fiction and fantasy that I realized I found it a lot easier to name men writing books in these genres than women. After that, I started paying more attention to women’s names when they were mentioned (which was usually here and there instead of everywhere like a lot of well-known fantasy and science fiction authors). I discovered there were all kinds of women writing speculative fiction that I’d missed out on since I read a lot of the (mostly male) authors praised all over the Internet. While many of these recommended authors do write books I enjoy, there are also many women who deserve to be read and lauded just as often.

Once I realized women’s books did not seem to be discussed as much, I turned to reading and reviewing more books by women to try to make my small corner of the Internet a place where some of these books were featured. Then, in 2012, there were a couple of discussions on the Internet about both review coverage of books by women and the lack of blogs by women suggested for Hugo Awards in the fan categories. After these discussions and some of the responses to them (one of which was that women weren’t being reviewed or mentioned because they weren’t writing and reviewing science fiction and fantasy), I wanted to show that there were lots of women writing, reviewing, and discussing speculative fiction whose work should be recognized. I decided to see if I could pull together enough guest posts to spend about a month highlighting women in science fiction and fantasy. At the time this decision was made, it seemed most reasonable to aim for an April event—and that’s how April became Women in SF&F Month on Fantasy Cafe!

I’m looking forward to the next few weeks, and I’m thrilled to announce this week’s schedule:

Women in SF&F Month 2018 Week of April 9 Schedule

April 9: Renay (Lady Business, Fangirl Happy Hour)
April 10: Cass Morris (From Unseen Fire)
April 11: Kim Wilkins (Blood and Gold, The Infernal, Giants of the Frost)
April 12: Peng Shepherd (The Book of M)
April 13: Rowenna Miller (Torn)

Review of Daughters of the Storm by Kim Wilkins
Apr
04
2018
Daughters of the Storm
by Kim Wilkins
448pp (Hardcover)
My Rating: 7/10
Amazon Rating: 3.8/5
LibraryThing Rating: 3.75/5
Goodreads Rating: 3.76/5
 

Daughters of the Storm, a sequel to the novella “The Crown of Rowan,” is the first novel in the Blood and Gold series by five-time Aurealis Award–winning author Kim Wilkins. Both this and Sisters of Fire, the second book in this epic fantasy series, were finalists for the Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novel during their respective publication years. About four years after its initial release in Australia, Daughters of the Storm was released in the United States for the first time just last month—and I’m so glad it was since otherwise I may not have discovered this engaging, character-driven tale centered on the royal family of a kingdom called Almissia.

When the king fell ill, his wife tended to him in secret, hoping that he would recover before it was necessary to tell even his counselor of his condition. However, he did not improve and the queen summoned her physician, who confirmed her terrible growing suspicion: the king is dying.

To make matters worse, the physician’s visit was noticed by those closest to the king, who decided they must send for his eldest daughter, Bluebell—a mighty warrior who despises her stepmother.

After Bluebell visits her father, she becomes convinced that his sickness is not natural and blames the queen. She requests that her sister Ash, who has the sight, use her ability to check for magical influence, and Ash discovers that Bluebell’s instincts were correct: their father is elf-shot. Only a powerful magician could possibly cure him, but Bluebell is hesitant to entrust a stranger with her father’s life. When her sister Rose reveals that she once received a true warning about the future from one of these magicians claiming to be her aunt—whom their father never spoke of and refused to speak of when asked about her directly—the sisters resolve to seek her since she may be their only hope of saving their father.

Daughters of the Storm starts slowly as it introduces the various characters and their situations, and though the king’s illness is immediately revealed in the opening, it takes time to bring together the five sisters who are the heart of the novel. The smooth, adept prose and intriguing glimpses into the lives of the main characters were enough to keep me reading despite the plodding beginning, and though it did ultimately seem to me that this book was setting up a larger story to be continued in the following installments, these siblings and their relationships are captivating enough that I do want to find out what happens to them next.

It primarily follows six main characters—the five sisters and their stepbrother—with a couple of brief sections from the perspective of the queen, all written from the third person point of view. This is a novel in which plot and the world, which is not particularly fleshed out but also has enough tensions stemming from cultural and religious differences to keep it from being thinly built, come after character. Each of the six has their own story, and it’s about these individuals, their relationships, and how they drive each other. All of these characters are changed by the end of the novel, whether that’s due to ending up in a different position or learning that their world or someone within it is not as they’d always believed—or both.

Although there are multiple main characters, I consider Bluebell to be the most central character: she’s the first of the five sisters we meet, she’s the one who drives the main story most, and she’s the best developed. Bluebell thinks the world of her father and wants to follow in his footsteps; she is a short-tempered, allegedly unkillable, coarse, fierce warrior princess (but don’t ever refer to her as a princess in her presence—she hates that!). Her main priorities are duty to family and kingdom, and she thinks she knows how her family members can best serve their kingdom, constantly making plans for them without considering their feelings. She has a soft spot for each of her sisters, but she also finds some of them frustrating since she doesn’t understand why they are not as dutiful as she or why they don’t simply resign themselves to unhappy marriages to keep peace between kingdoms. (Bluebell probably thinks that if her sisters did not want to be married off as peace offerings, they should have done as she did: on her sixteenth birthday, she had a friend break her nose in order to make her an undesirable bride.) Everything revolves around Bluebell—there wouldn’t be much of a story without her, and love her or hate her, the other characters all have strong feelings about her.

Bluebell is the most compelling of the sisters from a characterization standpoint, but my favorite character is the sister she herself likes most, Ash. Ash is a kind, gentle, curious soul and the only sister who doesn’t clash with her oldest sister’s force of personality. She doesn’t particularly mind Bluebell’s bossiness, but she can also understand her other sisters’ perspectives and serve as a mediator between the two sides. In addition to having an amiable nature, Ash also has the most interesting problem and potential destiny, making her sections particularly captivating. She has strong magic powers that she does not know how to control since others refuse to help her, as they fear her or choose to disbelieve that one as young as she could have such abilities, and has even had a vision of her own death. Much of her journey is discovering that it does no good to try to smother this part of herself and learning more about her talents.

Rose is, in my opinion, the most sympathetic character. She was married to a king in return for peace with his kingdom, and she’s miserable since she is in love with her husband’s nephew—who is, unknown to her husband, the biological father of her three-year-old daughter. Though he has his flaws, Rose does believe her husband to be a good man and a good father even if she does not love him, further fueling her guilt about the past and her inability to stop wishing to be with his nephew. Rose has a complex relationship with motherhood that I think makes her the best developed sister after Bluebell, and she also has a complicated relationship with her older sister. Bluebell cannot understand how Rose could be so selfish as to put peace between two kingdoms for love, and this is often a source of friction between the two—yet it’s also clear that the two do care about each other despite their frequent arguments.

Ivy and Willow, twins and the youngest of the sisters, are more separate from the rest of the family since they are teenagers who have been living with an aunt and uncle. They are very different in some ways, but they are similar to each other in that they both have obsessive, narcissistic personalities: Ivy pursues the admiration of handsome men, and Willow pursues the blessing of a god of which her family would not approve. Ivy is the least likable, sympathetic, and interesting character, but though she is spoiled and self-serving, she is not malicious. When she causes trouble, it’s because she’s young, naive, and thoughtless, and she didn’t yet understand that society does not hold men and women to the same standards. Willow does worse things than her twin, but I found her more sympathetic since she converted to her religion due to hearing the voices of angels, and the impression I got was that she was being manipulated. On the other hand, she is rather quick to believe that her god has a special purpose just for her without much examination, so like her sister, she is ultimately rather thoughtless.

The five sisters’ stepbrother, Wylm, is actually the one I consider to be the most complex and compelling of the six characters, yet I didn’t find reading his perspective as engaging as the others since it was not as connected and the relationships between these five different women were the main reason to keep reading. Wylm is a villain and a murderer, but he does have lines he will not cross and even shows some sympathy for children and animals at times. Though he’s partially motivated by greed and power, it seemed to me that he probably would not have gone down such a vile path if not for the motivation of preservation of his own family, driven by a (rather valid) fear of Bluebell.

As much as I enjoyed reading about these different characters and did not think any of them were one dimensional, I also would have liked to see a little more dimension from some of them—especially considering that Daughters of the Storm is not a plot- or world-heavy book and suffers from some sluggish pacing. However, I did appreciate the variety of characters and their ties to each other, and I am eager to find out what happens to them in Sisters of Fire!

My Rating: 7/10

Where I got my reading copy: Finished copy from the publisher.

Read an Excerpt from Daughters of the Storm

The Leaning Pile of Books
Apr
01
2018

The Leaning Pile of Books is a feature where I discuss books I got over the last week–old or new, bought or received in the mail for review consideration (usually unsolicited). Since I hope you will find new books you’re interested in reading in these posts, I try to be as informative as possible. If I can find them, links to excerpts, author’s websites, and places where you can find more information on the book are included.

Happy Easter to those who celebrate, and happy April!

I spent much of last week unexpectedly buried under work projects with tight deadlines so I did not get to finish my review of Daughters of the Storm like I had hoped, but I’m hoping maybe I’ll have a chance to complete it soon.

The week after next will a busy week here, though: it marks the beginning of the seventh annual Women in SF&F Month!

More about that to come later, but for now, here are the most recent books in the mail—starting with one from my anticipated books of 2018 list!

From Unseen Fire by Cass Morris

From Unseen Fire (Aven Cycle #1) by Cass Morris

Cass Morris’ debut novel, the beginning of a new epic fantasy series based on Roman history, will be released on April 17 (hardcover, ebook).

The publisher’s website has an excerpt from From Unseen Fire, as well as a tour schedule for Cass Morris that includes events at bookstores in Richmond, VA; Kitty Hawk, NC; and Corolla, NC.

 

From Unseen Fire is the first novel in the Aven Cycle, a historical fantasy set in an alternate Rome, by debut author Cass Morris.

The Dictator is dead; long live the Republic.

But whose Republic will it be? Senators, generals, and elemental mages vie for the power to shape the future of the city of Aven. Latona of the Vitelliae, a mage of Spirit and Fire, has suppressed her phenomenal talents for fear they would draw unwanted attention from unscrupulous men. Now that the Dictator who threatened her family is gone, she may have an opportunity to seize a greater destiny as a protector of the people—if only she can find the courage to try.

Her siblings–a widow who conceals a canny political mind in the guise of a frivolous socialite, a young prophetess learning to navigate a treacherous world, and a military tribune leading a dangerous expedition in the province of Iberia—will be her allies as she builds a place for herself in this new world, against the objections of their father, her husband, and the strictures of Aventan society.

Latona’s path intersects with that of Sempronius Tarren, an ambitious senator harboring a dangerous secret. Sacred law dictates that no mage may hold high office, but Sempronius, a Shadow mage who has kept his abilities a life-long secret, intends to do just that. As rebellion brews in the provinces, Sempronius must outwit the ruthless leader of the opposing Senate faction to claim the political and military power he needs to secure a glorious future for Aven and his own place in history.

As politics draw them together and romance blossoms between them, Latona and Sempronius will use wit, charm, and magic to shape Aven’s fate. But when their foes resort to brutal violence and foul sorcery, will their efforts be enough to save the Republic they love?

Kill the Farm Boy by Delilah S. Dawson & Kevin Hearne

Kill the Farm Boy (The Tales of Pell #1) by Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne

This novel, the first book in a comedic fantasy series by New York Times bestselling authors Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne, will be released on July 17 (hardcover, ebook, audiobook).

 

In an irreverent new series in the tradition of Terry Pratchett novels and The Princess Bride, the New York Times bestselling authors of the Iron Druid Chronicles and Star Wars: Phasma reinvent fantasy, fairy tales, and floridly overwritten feast scenes.

Once upon a time, in a faraway kingdom, a hero, the Chosen One, was born . . . and so begins every fairy tale ever told.

This is not that fairy tale.

There is a Chosen One, but he is unlike any One who has ever been Chosened.

And there is a faraway kingdom, but you have never been to a magical world quite like the land of Pell.

There, a plucky farm boy will find more than he’s bargained for on his quest to awaken the sleeping princess in her cursed tower. First there’s the Dark Lord, who wishes for the boy’s untimely death . . . and also very fine cheese. Then there’s a bard without a song in her heart but with a very adorable and fuzzy tail, an assassin who fears not the night but is terrified of chickens, and a mighty fighter more frightened of her sword than of her chain-mail bikini. This journey will lead to sinister umlauts, a trash-talking goat, the Dread Necromancer Steve, and a strange and wondrous journey to the most peculiar “happily ever after” that ever once-upon-a-timed.