Review: The Rogue Retrieval by Dan Koboldt

Posted on January 21, 2016April 3, 2017 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | B+ Reviews> book reviews

The Rogue Retrieval by Dan Koboldt
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Series: Gateways to Alissia #1
Pages: 384
Published by Harper Voyager Impulse on January 19th 2016
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo
Goodreads

Sleight of hand…in another land.
Stage magician Quinn Bradley has one dream: to headline his own show on the Vegas Strip. And with talent scouts in the audience wowed by his latest performance, he knows he’s about to make the big-time. What he doesn’t expect is an offer to go on a quest to a place where magic is all too real.
That's how he finds himself in Alissia, a world connected to ours by a secret portal owned by a powerful corporation. He’s after an employee who has gone rogue, and that’s the least of his problems. Alissia has true magicians…and the penalty for impersonating one is death. In a world where even a twelve-year-old could beat Quinn in a swordfight, it's only a matter of time until the tricks up his sleeves run out.
Scientist and blogger Dan Koboldt weaves wonder, humor, and heart into his debut novel, The Rogue Retrieval. Fans of Terry Brooks and Terry Pratchett will find this a thrilling read.

My Review:

The Rogue Retrieval is a terrific example of what is called “portal fantasy”, where a magical portal opens between our world of the mundane and another world where magic is operational.

Admittedly, the magic of the portal itself may be of the Arthur C. Clarke variety, where “any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic” as it may be in this case. Or it can literally be a magic portal, like the famous wardrobe in C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series.

So there is a viewpoint where The Rogue Retrieval can be considered Narnia for adults. Without Aslan.

In the case of The Rogue Retrieval, the portal is a literal portal between our world and the world of Alissia, where not only does magic work but where the human population is not as technologically advanced as in our world. It feels like late Renaissance or very early Industrial Age, maybe the technological equivalent of our late 1700s and early 1800s, but that is totally opinion. It might be our 1600s, but it isn’t any later than the 1800s as the industrial pollution produced in copious amounts in our Industrial era is not present.

And of course the pristine nature of Alissia, along with the seeming lack of sophistication of its inhabitants, is part of its “charm” to two rival corporations; CASE Global and Raptor Tech.

CASE Global controls the portal, and they have a problem. One of their anthropologists has gone missing, along with a backpack full of advanced tech that is not supposed to be taken to Alissia. In other words, they have a rogue agent who has violated the equivalent of the Prime Directive.

And that’s kind of where our hero and point of view character Quinn Bradley comes in. Quinn is a stage magician, and a pretty good one. He’s just about to get his big break when CASE Global intervenes, and threatens him with economic ruin and bodily harm if he doesn’t come to work for them.

These are not nice people. They threaten Quinn’s life and future, and that of pretty much every person he is in contact with; his friends, his business associates, his remaining family, the population of his hometown. The iron hand in the velvet glove is so literal that its adamantium claws stick out of the glove.

Of course Quinn goes along. He has no choice. But he is also looking forward to the adventure, even if the information he is provided with is woefully scanty in its details. He’s not so much in it for the quest as for the experience. For the stage magician, Alissia represents a whole new audience.

With one big catch. On Alissia, magic is real. And magic practitioners are even more jealous of their rights than Quinn’s Vegas competition. Pretending to be a mage is a death sentence on Alissia, and those “nice” folks at CASE Global know that they are potentially throwing Quinn under the bus (or carriage) if he’s caught.

Unless the stage wizard turns out to be a real magician after all.

Escape Rating B+: I really liked this story, but the antecedents were just a bit too obvious to make it an A. It is, however, a wild and very fun ride from beginning to end.

The story in The Rogue Retrieval reminded me of three different books, all of which I loved very much, but which combine here into a whole that so far works well. It will be interesting to see how the issues get resolved in the future stories that I really hope are coming. Quinn Bradley’s story definitely isn’t over.

When I first read the premise for this story, it looked like a mirror image of Dark Magic by James Swain (reviewed here). In that story, the protagonist is a stage magician on our world who uses his identity as a master illusionist to conceal his very real identity as a practicing wizard.

But as I got into the story the one that it reminded me of most strongly is S.M. Stirling’s Conquistador. Also a bit of Charles Stross’ Merchant Princes series, but mostly Conquistador. In Conquistador, a portal is discovered between our world and an alternate version of our world that is several centuries removed in the past. In the world of Conquistador, the contemporary discovers find themselves in America before the colonial empires, and set themselves up literally as conquistadors, conquering the world with advanced technology, enslaving the natives, and exploiting the natural resources.

While that hasn’t happened YET in The Rogue Retrieval, there are all kinds of glaring and blaring signs that it is the direction that the rival corporations are headed, and possibly that the reason their agent went rogue was to get himself in a position to prevent the rape of Alissia, or at least provide it with ways to fight back.

The third part of the story reminded me of L.E. Modesitt’s first Imager book. In that story, a grownup discovers that he is a mage, and has to learn how to master both his powers and the drastic change in his life. At the same time, he is attending classes with children, and having to unlearn the life he knew. But he brings his adult experience and expectations to the table. In both cases, the protagonist is still young and flexible enough to learn, but too mature to indoctrinate. (There’s a reason that the Armed Forces like to recruit 18-year-olds!)

Throw those elements into a classic portal-fantasy quest, and you have The Rogue Retrieval. A relatively young man discovers he is a real mage, long after anyone believes that could be possible. A new and pristine world is ripe for the plucking, and forces are arrayed to begin to pluck, with all of the attendant evils of colonialism lined up to march over the place.

And that rogue agent who started it all is still out there, positioned much, much more strategically than anyone expected.

The next book in this series (oh please let there be a next book!) is set up to be marvelous.

Review: Finding Mr. Right Now by Meg Benjamin

Posted on January 20, 2016January 19, 2016 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | book reviews> C+ Reviews

Finding Mr. Right Now by Meg Benjamin
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Series: Salt Box #1
Pages: 324
Published by Samhain Publishing on June 2nd 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Reality can be hotter than fiction.
"The Salt Box Trilogy, Book 1"
Monica McKellar, associate producer of "Finding Mr. Right," is desperate. One of the show s bachelors has bailed one week before shooting starts. She not only needs a replacement ASAP, he has to get the temperamental bachelorette s stamp of approval.
Fortunately there s a hot guy right under her nose who s a perfect fit. Unfortunately, he pushes all "her" hot buttons. Until the show s over, her hands and every other part of her body are tied.
When Paul Dewitt signed on to write for the reality show, Bachelor #10 wasn t supposed to be in his job description. He fully expects to be cut early on, which will free him to focus on the real object of his attraction. Monica.
Instead, he s a finalist, and they re all packed in an SUV climbing the Continental Divide, headed for Salt Box, Colorado. Where stampeding horses, vindictive tabloid editors, and one capricious bachelorette s waffling over suitors may conspire to end Paul and Monica s romance before it even starts.
Warning: Contains hot sex on the sly, cold nights, creaking wicker couches, and a gypsy wagon that gives a whole new appreciation for the pioneers."

My Review:

I picked this up because I really enjoyed the author’s Ramos Family Trilogy (Medium Well, Medium Rare and Happy Medium) and was hoping that lightning would strike twice.

Nope.

Instead, I have an entire SUV-load full of mixed feelings and reactions. As you’ll read in a minute.

The love story here takes place on the disaster-prone set of a reality TV show. As many things as go wrong, you’d think this was on a Survivor-clone, but it isn’t. Instead, this is an alternate version of The Bachelor, where one of the photogenic losing bachelorettes becomes the star of the first series of The Bachelorette. Although I think this kind of happened.

In any case, in the book, the shows are produced by a fairly downmarket cable production company, and everything is on a shoestring. That might make good comedy, and probably did for some readers.

But the story here isn’t about the starring bachelorette finding true love through the show. Instead, that starring bachelorette loses her original starry-eyed belief in true love. It’s the long-suffering assistant producer who finds the love of her life.

Unfortunately for both of them, she finds that love with one of the erstwhile bachelors. Which is where a good chunk (hunk?) of the sexual tension comes in. Both Monica and Paul are single and unattached, and would normally be free to explore whatever is happening between them.

But they can’t until the show is over, because it will ruin an illusion that no one is really buying into. And they can’t seem to hang on to their pants for the six weeks needed to complete the show.

Escape Rating C+: It’s hard to rate this one. I found the scenario behind the book incredibly contrived. That could be because I’m not a fan of reality TV.

I liked the two protagonists quite a bit. Monica is incredibly put upon as the assistant producer, but she keeps taking the hard knocks and doing her job. She’s self-aware enough to know that jobs in show business are hard to find, and that this is what she expected when she decided to be in the business. But it isn’t until she meets Paul Dewitt that she starts looking for the next phase in her life. Not just that it would be great to have someone to come home to, but that she has learned all she can where she is, and it’s time to move up the ladder. Or on to a less dysfunctional production company. Or both.

I also liked Paul, although the situation he finds himself in seems as contrived as the TV show. He was not a contestant to be one of the bachelors. He’s a writer for the show who found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and got dragooned into the bachelor pool by the self-absorbed bachelorette and the tyrannical producer.

And that’s where things kind of go off the rails for this reader. A big part of this story is all about Monica becoming the “babysitter” for the self-absorbed sweetheart diva of a bachelorette. Little Ronnie probably isn’t half as dumb as she acts, but she comes off as a combination of wide-eyed innocence, total vapidity, and utter self-absorption that made me clench my teeth every time she appeared. She’s also incredibly manipulative, but you’re never quite sure just how deliberate she is in that manipulation.

Except for Monica and Paul, all of the other producers and writers involved with this production company are at best totally overwhelmed and completely oblivious to everything outside their own sphere of crises to solve, and at worst, and this is most of them, they are actively vile. There doesn’t seem to be anyone likable in the company except for Paul and Monica. The photographer on the shoot with them isn’t actively awful, but that’s as high a bar as anyone else in the company manages to reach.

So it feels like the show is toxic, which means that their work environment is toxic. One understands why they both want to escape, but one questions their sanity at being involved at all. It wouldn’t be fun to work in, and it isn’t fun to read about, either.

On that other hand, I liked the town of Salt Box where they get stranded for a couple of days. It’s a quirky place, but it feels more real. Or at least more nuanced in its insanity. While one of the locals is often called “Dick the dick”, when we (and Monica) get to know him a little better, we discover that while he is the curmudgeon that he appears, he isn’t really quite that big of an asshat. He just doesn’t suffer fools, and tests everyone in his orbit to make sure they are not before he lets them in.

At the end of this story, I feel more than a bit of sympathy for Dick. He discovers that Paul and Monica are not fools, and lets them into his circle and out of the circle of Hell they are currently working in. And he makes sure that the rest of the cast and crew of that show all stay OUT.

Review: Give Us the Ballot by Ari Berman

Posted on January 19, 2016January 18, 2016 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A Reviews> book reviews

Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America by Ari Berman
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Pages: 384
on August 4th 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

A New York Times Notable Book of 2015A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2015A Boston Globe Best Book of 2015A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2015An NPR Best Book of 2015Countless books have been written about the civil rights movement, but far less attention has been paid to what happened after the dramatic passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965 and the turbulent forces it unleashed. Give Us the Ballot tells this story for the first time.
In this groundbreaking narrative history, Ari Berman charts both the transformation of American democracy under the VRA and the counterrevolution that has sought to limit voting rights, from 1965 to the present day. The act enfranchised millions of Americans and is widely regarded as the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. And yet, fifty years later, we are still fighting heated battles over race, representation, and political power, with lawmakers devising new strategies to keep minorities out of the voting booth and with the Supreme Court declaring a key part of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional.
Berman brings the struggle over voting rights to life through meticulous archival research, in-depth interviews with major figures in the debate, and incisive on-the-ground reporting. In vivid prose, he takes the reader from the demonstrations of the civil rights era to the halls of Congress to the chambers of the Supreme Court. At this important moment in history, Give Us the Ballot provides new insight into one of the most vital political and civil rights issues of our time.

My Review:

Give this book to anyone who believes that the struggle for voting rights in America is over. Because the all too recent history told in this narrative shows all too clearly that it is far, far from over.

This is a difficult book to review. The history related is searing in its intensity. And it is impossible to be neutral. For those who are of the liberal persuasion, it is an indictment of man’s (and woman’s) continuing inhumanity to those who are not part of the white majority. For those who are conservative, it will read very differently. I’ll admit that my mind just won’t go wherever that it.

I wanted to take a bath when I finished, because the things that were done to suppress the African-American vote (and the Hispanic vote) were disgusting and sometimes deadly. In reading this history, it feels as if the deadly has mostly moved to other arenas, but the disgusting is still very much alive and kicking.

A voting rights case in Forsyth County, Georgia, (one county over from my house) was just settled this past week. Voting rights are still being fought for in the U.S., but the fights have moved from the Edmund Pettus Bridge to the judicial system. The fight is no less bloody for that blood being time and ink instead of red.

This may be progress of a sort, but it is progress that must be constantly and rigorously defended.

And in a nutshell, that is the lesson of Give Us the Ballot. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was landmark legislation, but it also marked a beginning and not an ending. Poll taxes and literacy tests were finally over. The battleground simply moved to Voter ID laws, redistricting and “at large” elections.

The right to vote is one of the bedrock principles of the United States. This history shows that the fight to make sure that every eligible person is allowed to vote, and that their vote counts, and that their vote has effective power, never, ever ends.

Escape Rating A: This is a book where I think it will be impossible for any reader to read dispassionately. As a liberal, I frankly wanted to wash at least my hands after reading it. I found the indictment compelling and also slightly nauseating. Both that blatant attempts to suppress the votes of blacks, hispanics and students continue, but that they are all too often successful and cloaked in coded language. And frankly, I still hear “dog whistles”.

Progress has been made, but it has also been beaten back by those in power who want to retain that power. And the tools used to beat that progress back seem designed to obfuscate either the motives of the perpetrators or the consequences of their actions. Or both.

This history clearly shows, at least to this reader, that Voter ID laws, reduction in the hours of early voting, voter roll purges and other such measures are both racially motivated and completely partisan. They are designed to suppress the votes of groups that generally vote for the Democratic Party. For someone who votes liberal, it reads like an attempt to turn the clock back and prevent the changes to the population that are occurring in fact from having a proportional impact at the ballot box and in the politics of the country.

Someone with a more conservative political inclination will undoubtedly see this history differently. I doubt that anyone can be neutral on this subject. This history will certainly make you think, whatever side of the political spectrum you fall upon. Thinking about the right to vote, and about making sure to exercise that right whenever possible, is always important.

Reviewer’s Note: Give Us the Ballot was nominated for the American Library Association’s Notable Book Awards for this year. As part of the Notable Books Council, I am pleased to say that this book was on our Awards list for this year, along with other outstanding works of nonfiction, fiction and poetry. Give Us the Ballot is an intensive history of an important and timely topic. It was also a perfect book to re-read and review over the Martin Luther King Day weekend.

Review: The Lady’s Command by Stephanie Laurens

Posted on January 18, 2016January 17, 2016 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | B+ Reviews> blog tours> book reviews

The Lady's Command (The Adventurers Quartet, #1) by Stephanie Laurens
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Series: Adventurers Quartet #1
Pages: 384
Published by Mira on December 29th 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

The instant Captain Declan Frobisher laid eyes on Lady Edwina Delbraith, he knew she was the lady he wanted as his wife. The scion of a seafaring dynasty accustomed to success, he discovered that wooing Edwina was surprisingly straightforward—not least because she made it plain that she wanted him as much as he wanted her.
Declan’s vision of marriage was of a gently-reared wife to grace his arm, to manage his household, and to bear his children. He assumed that household, children, and wife would remain safely in England while he continued his life as an explorer sailing the high seas.
Declan got his wish—up to a point. He and Edwina were wed. As for the rest—his vision of marriage…
Aunt of the young Duke of Ridgware and sister of the mysterious man known as Neville Roscoe, London’s gambling king, even before the knot was tied Edwina shattered the illusion that her character is as delicate, ethereal, and fragile as her appearance suggests. Far from adhering to orthodox mores, she and her ducal family are even more unconventional than the Frobishers.
Beneath her fairy-princess exterior, Edwina possesses a spine of steel—one that might bend, but will never break. Born to the purple—born to rule—she’s determined to rule her life. With Declan’s ring on her finger, that means forging a marriage that meets her needs as well as his.
But bare weeks into their honeymoon, Declan is required to sail to West Africa. Edwina decides she must accompany him.
A secret mission with unknown villains flings unexpected dangers into their path as Declan and Edwina discover that meeting the challenge of making an unconventional marriage work requires something they both possess—bold and adventurous hearts.

My Review:

This is a fascinating Regency romance, because it breaks all the conventions. Most romances, historical and otherwise, are all about the chase. The couple meet in the beginning, work their way through one or more roadblocks to their relationship, and the story ends with the clinch or even better, the wedding. And then they live happily ever after.

The Lady’s Command turns that convention on its head by starting with the wedding. At the wedding between Declan Frobisher and Lady Edwina Delbraith, both parties are thinking about how they will turn their whirlwind courtship into a real marriage. The problem is that they have very different visions of exactly what constitutes a “real marriage”.

If the marriage had been arranged, this unconventional plot would not be as surprising, but it is clear from the outset of the story that Declan and Edwina met, courted and married because they fell in both love and lust with each other. They both wanted this marriage.

They just never talked about what would happen after the honeymoon was over.

Declan assumed that Edwina would be just like any high-born wife. That she would wait patiently at home for him while he conducted his business. As his business is as a ship’s captain for his family firm who sometimes undertake secret missions for the Crown, Declan was expecting his wife to wait patiently at home six months out of the year, and to keep his sometimes dangerous and sometimes secret business very, very separate from his private life.

He should have asked Edwina first. Her vision of their marriage is that she will be his partner in all things, even though he has successfully kept the picture of what those “all things” are carefully obscured until now. Both Edwina and Declan are in for rude awakenings.

Both Declan and Edwina come from very unconventional families, so it is not surprising that they finally do figure out that they are better off, not just together, but as partners in a very unconventional marriage.

They just have to survive their first steps together on that journey.

Escape Rating B+: This is a historical romance that I was pleasantly able to sink my teeth into, without those teeth either rotting away from sweetness overload or gritting from the constant institutionalized sexism that sometimes permeates the genre.

In other words, The Lady’s Command is fun. Because this is Edwina’s story, and Edwina seizes the initiative at every opportunity. Declan’s role in this affair is to recognize that his life, his happiness and his business are better off if he accepts Edwina as his partner.

And while he certainly has his fits of protective possessiveness, he does manage to make the journey with her. And not against her.

One of the ways in which this worked for me is that Declan finally recognizes that while Edwina’s skills at manipulating the ton and its impression of her family are incredibly useful, her role as part of the social “powers that be” is a mask she wears and not her true self. He understands that she has many hidden depths and talents that are equal to, if different, from his own.

There’s also an adventure/suspense plot in the middle of the romance. And it’s fascinating because we only get a piece of that story. English men, women and children are disappearing from the British colony of Freeport in West Africa. Agents who investigate those disappearances also disappear. And instead of investigating the disappearances, the British Governor is quashing any rumors, claiming that all those people (almost 20 that are known) just walked into the jungle of their own accord in search of fame and fortune.

Declan’s job is to find out the first clue about what is going on and rush back to London, before he too disappears. In that search for truth, it is Edwina who gets too close and nearly joins the disappeared. And even so, they have only discovered the tip of a very nasty iceberg, an iceberg that it will be the next agent’s job to plumb further.

So we see Declan and Edwina establish the future path for their relationship, and the future path for the investigation into what’s going wrong in Freeport. Further steps in the investigation will be someone else’s to discover in the succeeding volumes of The Adventurers Quartet. Declan’s brother Robert will be posted to Freeport in the next book in the series, A Buccaneer at Heart.

I’m looking forward to further clues to the mystery, and another marvelous and unconventional romance. It should be oodles of fun!

This post is part of a TLC book tour. Click on the logo for more reviews and features.

The Sunday Post AKA What’s on my (Mostly Virtual) Nightstand 1-17-16

Posted on January 17, 2016January 15, 2016 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | Giveaways> The Sunday Post> Virtual Nightstand> Winner announcement

We came back from the ALA Midwinter Conference in chilly, windy Boston late Wednesday night. And we’re still a bit tired and frazzled. I love conferences, but they are exhausting. And I was not looking forward to the cold winter weather in Boston. Next year, the winter conference will be here in Atlanta, so it won’t be such a slog to get there, and the weather obviously won’t be any worse than I would have had to put up with anyway.

Oh, and the communal coat racks ate Galen’s coat at an event Sunday night, just as the weather turned really cold. Murphy definitely was an optimist!

But part of my business at the conference was to be on the ALA Notable Books Council and select what we thought were the 26 best books of 2015. That’s 12 Fiction, 12 Nonfiction and 2 Poetry, just in case you’re wondering where that number comes from. For the curious, the list of this year’s selections is here.

We were gone almost a week. LaZorra has turned herself into “cat glue”, pasting herself to my husband’s side at every conceivable opportunity. It’s adorable. And just ever so slightly intrusive. Wait, I think I just said she’s a cat.

And now back to our regularly scheduled blogging:

Coming Next Week:

The Lady’s Command by Stephanie Laurens (blog tour review)
Give Us the Ballot by Ari Berman (review)
Moonlight Over Paris by Jennifer Robson (blog tour review)
The Rogue Retrieval by Dan Koboldt (review)
Redemption by Kate Douglas (review)

Dreaming of Books Giveaway Hop

Posted on January 16, 2016January 14, 2016 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | Blog Hops> Book Giveaway> Dreaming of Books Giveaway Hop> Giveaways

I’m dreaming of getting to sleep in my own bed…which finally happened last night. (We’ve been gone for a very loooong week)

But I really do dream of books. Sometimes I dream of being in them. Sometimes I dream of being crushed by them. Sometimes I even dream of our house caving in from the weight of all of them. (Our house is on a slab so this is thankfully not possible!)

This month, however, there is a special dream of books. Welcome to the Dreaming of Books Giveaway Hop, hosted by Bookhounds.

The books I tend to dream about are the ones that won’t leave me alone. Sometimes that’s because I just plain loved them, but often it’s because I mostly loved them but there is just the one thing that is driving me absolutely crazy, like the ending of The V’Dan by Jean Johnson. Or because it’s a world I would really, really like to live in, like the version of our world in Jim C. Hines’ Magic Ex Libris series (start with Libriomancer). Or because the story ends in such a moral dilemma that I can’t get it out of my head, like the ending of Inherit the Stars by Laurie A. Green.

What makes books stick in your mind? Or which books are so stuck in your mind that you can’t stop thinking and dreaming about them?

Leave a comment in the rafflecopter for a chance at a $10 Gift Card or a $10 Book from the Book Depository.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

For more bookish prizes, be sure to visit the other stops on the hop:

Review: Unbound by Jim C. Hines

Posted on January 15, 2016January 14, 2016 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A Reviews> book reviews

Unbound (Magic Ex Libris #3) by Jim C. Hines
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook
Series: Magic Ex Libris #3
Pages: 340
Published by DAW Hardcover on January 6th 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

For five hundred years, the Porters have concealed the existence of magic from the world. Now, old enemies have revealed the Porters’ secrets, and an even greater threat lurks in the shadows. The would-be queen Meridiana, banished for a thousand years, has returned in the body of a girl named Jeneta Aboderin. She seeks an artifact created by Pope Sylvester II, a bronze prison that would grant her the power to command an army of the dead.
Michigan librarian Isaac Vainio is powerless to stop her, having been stripped of his power and his place among the Porters by Johannes Gutenberg himself. But Isaac is determined to regain his magic and to rescue his former student Jeneta. With no magic of his own, Isaac’s must delve into the darker side of black-market magic, where he will confront beings better left undisturbed, including the sorcerer Juan Ponce de Leon.
With his loyal fire-spider Smudge, dryad warrior Lena Greenwood, and psychiatrist Nidhi Shah, Isaac races to unravel a mystery more than a thousand years old as competing magical powers battle to shape the future of the world. He will be hunted by enemies and former allies alike, and it will take all his knowledge and resourcefulness to survive as magical war threatens to spread across the globe.
Isaac’s choices will determine the fate of his friends, the Porters, the students of Bi Sheng, and the world. Only one thing is certain: even if he finds a way to restore his magic, he can’t save them all…

My Review:

I love this series. But then, I would. It is an urban fantasy where the hero is a librarian who loves SF and fantasy. Isaac Vainio is someone who I would want to know. Hell, someone I would want to be, as long you throw in a gender swap.

This series is all about the magic in books, and the way to literally draw that magic out and make it act in the real world. Unfortunately, not all magic users, just like not all people in general, are hero material. Some are anti-hero material, and some are unequivocally villain material.

Unbound, which follows directly from Codex Born (reviewed here) is an even darker book than its predecessor. And now that the fourth book in the series, Revisionary, has come out, I’m starting to think that we have two middle books, Codex Born and Unbound. While the immediate evil is vanquished in Unbound, things still feel kind of bleak.

(Confession, I started Revisionary the minute I finished Unbound, and the situation just keeps getting darker. This may be reflecting on my sense that Unbound is darker than Codex Born.)

In Unbound, Isaac is trying to clean up the mess he feels he created at the end of Codex Born. He is also battling extreme depression through the first half of the story. At the end of Codex Born, a young girl that he was mentoring was captured by an evil sorceress and would-be empress of the world. That sorceress, Meridiana, has take control of Jeneta Aboderin’s body and magic, in addition to the Ghost Army she already controlled.

She is using Jeneta for her unique skill – Jeneta is the only libriomancer, so far, who can draw magic out of ebooks. One of the limits on the power of most libriomancers is that they are limited to the books that are available to tham at any given time. Even a long coat with LOTS of pockets has some practical limits on how many paperbacks it can hold. Jeneta can carry the entire Library of Congress in her ereader.

And after the debacle where Isaac lost Jeneta, Gutenberg chose to punish him by throwing him out of the magic-wielding Porters and taking away his magic, but not his memory of it. So Isaac remembers everything that he has lost, and it’s killing him. He goes on a mad, obsessive quest to undo the wrong he has done by finding and saving Jeneta. He doesn’t seem to care whether he survives.

Instead, in battle after battle, whether magical, physical, or merely bibliographic, Isaac gets closer to the secret of Meridiana and her possession of Jeneta than the entire collective efforts of the Porters manage to do.

The price of expiating Isaac’s guilt is going to be very, very high – and it will change the world. Whether for better or for worse is a story that will be told in Revisionary.

Escape Rating A: The pace of this story is utterly relentless — breaks for breath are few and far between, both for the reader and for the characters in the story. At first, that’s because Isaac feels so guilty that he can’t let himself stop, and later it’s because once he gets close to the forces of evil, they don’t let up on their attacks on him.

This is not a place to start this series. That would be the first book, Libriomancer (enthusiastically reviewed here). The action in Unbound, and the way that the backstories of all the characters influence that action, are necessary in order to be fully invested in the events of this story. Also Libriomancer is just plain fun, even though the shadows on Isaac’s horizon are definitely forming by the end of that story.

In Unbound, we get a much deeper view of the way that the Porters both do and especially don’t work. In suppressing the knowledge of magic for five centuries, Johannes Gutenberg has also successfully suppressed humanity’s ability to deal with the existence of magic. And his autocracy within the organization he created has also suppressed the Porters ability to deal with the real world around them, and with each other.

In Unbound, as the title indicates, everything fall apart. The structures and restrictions that the Porters have relied upon for centuries all come unglued. And while in the end that might be a good thing, in the short and medium term, all that results is chaos. It’s ugly. Well written and totally absorbing, but ugly to watch. It’s obvious that the future is not going to be pretty, even if everyone survives to see it.

Isaac, as usual, generally goes in with half a plan, half a prayer, and a whole lot of luck. Sometimes he doesn’t so much succeed as fail upwards. He also has no compunction about sacrificing himself for what he sees as the greater good, even if he might be wrong. One of the interesting things going on is that Isaac makes friends, where Gutenberg seems to have mostly made either enemies or sycophants. The contrast in those two styles is going to have a marked effect on the future.

Isaac has kind of an everyman, or at least every-magic-user quality to him. He’s not particularly handsome, and he doesn’t see himself as particularly brave. He doesn’t even see himself as especially intelligent, at least compared to the rest of the Porters. But he is always extremely determined, and that’s what usually wins the hour, which is enough to move to his next half-a-plan.

So we have an urban fantasy series with an everyman hero and a particularly cool kind of magic saving the world from the chaos that he creates as well as the evil that he is reacting to. And it will keep you on the edge of your seat every minute.

Review: On a Barbarian World by Anna Hackett

Posted on January 14, 2016January 5, 2016 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | B- Reviews> book reviews

On a Barbarian World by Anna Hackett
Formats available: ebook
Series: Phoenix Adventures #8
Pages: 184
Published by Anna Hackett on December 18th 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

When an independent deep-space scout crash-lands on an unknown alien world, the last thing she expects is to find herself claimed by a barbarian warrior.

Aurina Phoenix spends most of her time zooming through uncharted space and gathering intel for her family’s deep-space convoy, but her life takes an unexpected detour when a meteor shower brings down her ship. She finds herself on a barren, low-tech planet inhabited by dangerous beasts…and lands in the arms of a brawny barbarian warlord.

Markarian warrior Kavon Mal Dor is known for his skill in battle. He lives to protect his clan…and to avenge the murder of his father. Every move he makes is part of his grand plan for revenge, including finding a legendary sword and marrying a warlord’s daughter. But when a beautiful skyflyer crashes into his world, she is the one thing he never counted on.

Fighting their incendiary attraction, Aurina and Kavon make a deal: she’ll help him find the sword and in return, he’ll give her the emergency beacon she needs to get home. But as the search for the sword plunges them into a dangerous adventure they find themselves consumed by a powerful passion and questioning everything they’ve ever wanted.

My Review:

This is the eighth, and possibly the last, book in Hackett’s Phoenix Adventures. Even though two of Aurina’s half-brothers are still searching for women who can put up with them, their stories do not appear to be on the horizon at the moment.

While the story in On a Barbarian World stands alone, it has its roots in Beyond Galaxy’s Edge (reviewed here), where Aurina’s half-brother Justyn finally manages to catch the Patrol Captain who has been hunting his smuggling ass up and down the galaxy for years.

It also has some parallels to On a Rogue Planet. Not so much in its story as in its protagonist. In Rogue Planet, the female cousin of the other set of Phoenix brothers finds herself stranded on a planet in the middle of a coup. In On a Barbarian World the only female member of this side of the Phoenix family finds herself stranded on a low-tech world after her scoutship crashes in the middle of a meteor shower.

The men in this series mostly hunt down, or are hunted down by, the women who become the loves of their lives. The women in this series have to get grounded to find theirs, and the metaphor is unfortunately sticking with me.

In many ways, this is kind of a first-contact story. While the relatively primitive Markarians have legends about space travellers, no one seems to have actually met one. So when Aurina’s crashed ship is discovered, she’s quite a novelty.

And of course the barbarian leader immediately claims her. While that initially claiming is stepped back a bit, it certainly has lots of sexual overtones. Kavon Mal Dor may be overtly giving Aurina the stranger the protection of his clan because every Markarian belongs to a clan, but it is clear from the beginning that Kavon really wants to claim Aurina.

There’s a whole lot of lust-at-first-sight going on here. Initially, what attracts Kavon is just how different she is. Aurina is a fiery redhead with a redhead’s coloring (and temper). She is also on the curvy side. Markarians, on the other hand, are tall and muscular, including the women. And they are all bronze-dark, a result of their possible Saurian ancestry.

As their relationship develops, Kavon and Aurina make a lot of assumptions about each other, most of which are demonstrably false. The barbarians are much, much less barbaric than Aurina assumes. Well, at least Kavon’s people are. His enemies are just as nasty as Aurina might imagine.

And of course Kavon thinks that Aurina needs his protection, both because she is a woman and because she is a stranger. Only one of those two things really matters, and a big part of the development of their relationship is Kavon learning to treat Aurina as an equal, in a culture where no one is his equal. Kavon is warlord, and everyone else in the clan is his subordinate. Except Aurina. She is always insubordinate. But utterly captivating to a man who is not used to needing to actually pursue the woman he wants.

Kavon and Aurina make a deal. She will use her scouting skills to help him find the legendary sword Durendal. In return, he will return her e-beacon to her, allowing her to contact her brothers and return to her old life.

In the end, the only life they both want is the one that they can make together. On Markaria. But it will only happen if they both stop making assumptions about who the other is, and what the other wants, before it is too late.

Escape Rating B-: I liked this, but not nearly as much as the other books in The Phoenix Adventures. For a lot of the story, it struck me too much as “barbarian tames skyflier” and with not nearly enough science fiction in my science fiction romance.

The story seemed a bit of a throwback, kind of like Kavon. We have the feisty woman who finally gets the warrior to respect her wishes, while he retains all the power, and in the end she gives up her life to stay with him. This story isn’t quite like that, but it came close enough to the old “noble savage vs. civilized woman” romance to make me uncomfortable.

I really liked the parts where the science fiction aspects came to the forefront. Kavon is searching for the lost legendary sword Durendal, which is a piece of the Song of Roland. So it’s a legend now, in our world, and it is still a legend in the future. That was cool. When Aurina finds Durendal for Kavon, she also finds an Earth treasure-trove similar to the one that Eos finds in At Star’s End (reviewed here).

When Aurina discovers the sword, she also finds information about Markaria’s gods, who turn out not to be gods after all, but stranded star travelers just like herself. Her search upsets their entire culture, and yet everyone manages to adjust reasonable well surprisingly quickly. I loved the search and discovery, but I’m not sure the aftermath would be quite so peaceful. If someone discovered that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob from the Bible were extraterrestrials, and could prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt, the resultant crises in Christianity, Judaism and Islam would probably tear the world apart.

Or that’s my opinion. Your mileage may vary.

On a Barbarian World also suffered from villain failure. Kavon’s rival Drog is a low-down, lying, stealing, cheating scum. He obviously has no honor, which is a very big deal in Markarian culture. But we don’t see enough of him to know why, and he is dispatched much too easily in the climactic battle. I would love to have seen his trial and execution, just to find out what he thought he was doing.

All in all, On a Barbarian World feels like a coda to The Phoenix Adventures series. While it is possible to start with this relatively stand alone story, a better time will be had by starting with At Star’s End or Among Galactic Ruins (reviewed here).

Review: The Rising by Ian Tregillis

Posted on January 13, 2016January 4, 2016 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A Reviews> book reviews

The Rising (The Alchemy Wars, #2) by Ian Tregillis
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Series: Alchemy Wars #2
Pages: 480
Published by Orbit on December 1st 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

The second book in the Alchemy Wars trilogy by Ian Tregillis, an epic tale of liberation and war. Jax, a rogue Clakker, has wreaked havoc upon the Clockmakers' Guild by destroying the Grand Forge. Reborn in the flames, he must begin his life as a free Clakker, but liberation proves its own burden.
Berenice, formerly the legendary spymaster of New France, mastermind behind her nation's attempts to undermine the Dutch Hegemony -- has been banished from her homeland and captured by the Clockmakers Guild's draconian secret police force.Meanwhile, Captain Hugo Longchamp is faced with rallying the beleaguered and untested defenders of Marseilles-in-the-West for the inevitable onslaught from the Brasswork Throne and its army of mechanical soldiers.

My Review:

If you like epic visions of alternate history, get yourself a copy of the first completely awesome story in The Alchemy Wars, The Mechanical (enthusiastically reviewed here) and be prepared to be transported to a world where mechanical men and women are much, much more human than the biological beings that created them. Becoming the proud possessors of a slave-race, or even being the embattled warriors against the power of those possessors, clearly knocks the humanity right out of any of the so-called humans involved.

The Rising is the second book in the author’s Alchemy Wars series, and it is every bit as absorbing, and even more grim, than the first book. But it isn’t just grim for grimness’ sake. This story needs to explore all the dark places of its world, and of the hearts of the people in it, before it will earn its conclusion. And while I hope situations improve, it isn’t necessary that they do for this story to work.

At least so far, this is a story about power corrupting, and absolute power corrupting absolutely. A place where the most desperate of ends are brought about by the vilest of means. There are times when it feels like a breakneck race to the bottom, where the clakkers may inherit the world only to discover that they are just as corrupted as their former masters.

But we’re not there yet, and the journey so far is one hell of an adventure.

There are three sides to this conflict, but the humans are only certain about two. The Dutch are taking over the world, using their clakker army. With a seemingly endless supply of military clakkers, the Dutch are rapidly closing in on the last bastion of human resistance, Marseilles-in-the-West, the beleaguered capital of New France. We see the defense of the city through the eyes of Captain Hugo Longchamp, a former sergeant and long-time military man who found himself an unexpected hero when he defeated a clakker single-handedly. While Hugo does not command the rump of the French Army, it is pretty clear that he is its only real military leader. He is going to defend his capital, his country, his religion and his king to his last breath, and plans to take as many clakkers out with him when he goes as is superhumanly possible. At the same time, he provides an incredibly realistic voice of a veteran soldier who is just so damned tired, but knows in his bones that he has to get up and fight another day, another hour, another minute.

While Hugo is stuck, and eventually besieged, in Marseilles-in-the-West, his former compatriot Berenice is travelling from North America to Europe and back again. Once upon a time, Berenice was New France’s spymaster. Now she is an exile, but she is still trying to find a way to suborn the clakkers into serving New France instead of the Dutch Brasswork Throne. She has absolutely no scruples whatsoever, only a desire to protect her country at any and all costs. She is completely amoral, and incredibly loyal, both at the same time.

While we don’t have a point of view character to represent the Dutch clakker-masters, the clakker Daniel, formerly known as Jax, seems to be the hero of this story. We follow Daniel’s journey as he escapes human control and discovers the fabled Neverland, home of the free clakkers, only to discover that the free clakkers aren’t nearly so free as myths make them.

In the end, Daniel finds himself back among the humans, in an uneasy alliance with Berenice as they each try to betray the other before the other does onto them. Who wins? Only time, and the next book in the series, will tell.

But whatever the answers turn out to be, just like the fable of Neverland, nothing will turn out to be the way it seems. And that’s awesome.

Escape Rating A: The Rising is even darker than The Mechanical, and every bit as compelling.

One of the things that keeps fascinating me is just how backwards the 1926 of the Alchemy Wars is. By 1926, we had airplanes, trains, electricity, steam power, increasing rights to vote in western democracies, fewer monarchies with real power, more democracy in general, more scientific development, and lots more. Telephones and telegraphs, the instantaneous communications revolution of the 1800s. The 1926 of the Alchemy Wars has very few of these things. In the Dutch Hegemony, scientific exploration seems to have stopped with the widespread use of clakkers. In New France, what research and development there is is devoted to stopping the clakkers. The world is going to hell in a handcart, and it seems to be picking up speed on the tracks.

The Tuniers’ Guild of the Dutch is frightening in the extreme. Not content with controlling all the clakkers, they have discovered a means to take away a human’s free will, in effect, turning that person into both a biological clakker and an unstoppable double-agent. Their clakkers, even enslaved, have way more humanity than the people who control them.

It makes sense that the story has no point of view character among the ruling Dutch. Their perspective of maintaining and extending the awful status quo, while creepily fascinating, isn’t nearly as interesting as the perspective of Berenice, who has fought them so long and so hard that she has nearly become them, or Hugo Longchamp, who is fighting the long defeat and knows he’s losing.

But it is Jax, now Daniel, whose journey is the most interesting, and who we follow. Jax begins as slave, and is accidentally freed. But as he moves from Dutch slave to French collaborator to clakker resistance fighter, we see his transformation from mechanical to human. And in its reflection we see all too many humans transform into mechanical monsters.

Review: Bad Kitty by Teresa Noelle Roberts

Posted on January 12, 2016January 4, 2016 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | B+ Reviews> book reviews

Bad Kitty by Teresa Noelle Roberts
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Series: Chronicles of the Malcolm #2
Pages: 202
Published by Samhain Publishing on September 22nd 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

When you make the Devil's bargain, be prepared to take the heat. A lot of heat. Chronicles of the Malcolm, Book 2 Most of Xia's early memories are repressed, thank the Great Cat Mother. But her body remembers how to kill. The longer she and her fellow Malcolm crewmates are holed up on Cibari hiding from assassins, the twitchier she gets-until the planet's insanely sexy Warlord, Rahal Mizyar, borrows her skills to take out slavers. Rahal suspects Xia is his mate, but the human-raised female never learned the finer points of felinoid rituals. The solution: make her fall hard and fast for him, even if it means playing dirty. Hired to determine if Xia is the long-missing granddaughter of the felinoid prime minister, Cal Janssen has finally tracked her down. Getting past Rahal, though, is a problem-until he's mistaken for a notorious arms dealer and playboy. And he finds himself the object of both Rahal's and Xia's seduction. When their first mission brings Xia's memories bulleting back to the surface, she realizes she's fallen for two men who don't exist. Running away, however, could be her deadliest mistake. Warning: Contains an assassin with a swiss cheese memory, a badass warlord who's getting tired of his own con, and a freelance lawman. Secrets, lies, and hot sex with no rules.

My Review:

Bad Kitty is the direct followup to Thrill-Kinky (reviewed yesterday). And while it helps in understanding the world of the space-freighter Malcolm to read both books, I think it would be possible to read Bad Kitty without reading Thrill-Kinky first.

On the other hand, why would you? These are short bursts of Firefly-type fun, and the worldbuilding gets deeper the further in you go.

Where Thrill-Kinky was mechanic Rita’s story, Bad Kitty is felinoid Xia’s journey. While it isn’t completely clear what Xia does on the Malcolm, it is very clear who she is. Mik and Gan rescued her after she killed her rapist, back when she was about 7. Mik and Gan are her dads, no matter who (and what) her birthparents might have been.

But in the big action scene in Thrill-Kinky, the now adult Xia begins to unravel the secrets of her life before Mik and Gan rescued her, and those secrets begin to unravel her. Felinoids, in spite of their generally cute appearance, are apex predators. They are very smart, with long retractable claws and very sharp teeth, and they like to hunt. But Xia is a special case. Somewhere between the death of her birthparents and her adoption by Mik and Gan, someone trained Xia to be an assassin. A very, very good one.

However, Xia had learned to suppress those bad memories, and not see everyone and everything as prey. The meditation techniques that Gan taught her have helped, but not enough. Now that the memory genie is out of the bottle, the darkness inside Xia wants her to feed it with more blood and more death.

Most felinoids learn how to distinguish prey from play when they are young. They are taught by their parents as part of growing up. But at that critical juncture, Xia was taught to kill instead. Her ability to keep her instincts at bay is fraying.

When the Malcolm lands on the lawless planet Cibari, Xia finds someone who can help her deal with all her felinoid impulses. The warlord of Cibari, Rahal, is an adult felinoid who strikes Xia as sex-on-legs. Rahal sees Xia as the mate he never expected to find. So while Rahal was more than willing to help his buddy Drax out of jam, he is highly motivated to protect Xia at all costs.

Little does Rahal or Xia know that the cat-girl is firmly fixed in someone else’s sights, and that her long-buried memories are about to jump out and bite everyone who cares about her. Especially the undercover bounty hunter who has lied his way into both Rahal’s and Xia’s hearts.

Escape Rating B+: Just like Thrill-Kinky, Bad Kitty is also a very-hot-sex-into-love story. Rahal and Xia (and eventually Karn/Cal) are definitely into the screw first and work out relationships later school of thought (or libido). There is plenty of insta-lust all around, but it works in this story.

Xia and Rahal are both members of a species that just likes playing, with anyone and everyone, in infinite combinations. Often with infinite diversity. Cal/Karn is pretending to be an interstellar playboy and arms dealer who is notorious for swinging every way possible. These three are just meant to fall into bed (or a pile of cushions) together.

As their stories combine, the play becomes more serious, and none of them are expecting it. Rahal is pretty sure that Xia is his mate, but Xia has no idea that the mating drive exists among her species. It’s a private thing, and she was raised by non-felinoids. But they all end up feeling it long before the drive is so all-consuming that rational thought disintegrates.

But the underlying story here is the story of Xia’s birth and origins. Cal/Karn comes to Cibari on a mission to bring Xia back to her grandmother. But something about the way that the job is given to him doesn’t mesh with the way felinoids operate. Something is off, and Cal/Karn decides to figure out what that something is before he takes Xia away from the only security she has ever known.

The more Xia remembers about her true past, the more heartbreaking her story is. The climactic moment when she has to decide whether to be the girl that Mik and Gan raised or the assassin that she was trained to be is surprisingly touching.

Her reluctance to reach for true intimacy, and to let go of the nightmares that rightfully haunt her sleep, gives this story its heart. The mission to take down the baddies who are after all of them gives the story its punch. And it’s fun!

Originally published at Sci-Fi Romance Quarterly

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