Thursday Thirteen, Edition 22: 2011's Most Anticipated Paranormals

In the January tradition, here are 13 paranormal/urban fantasy/fantasy releases this year that I am eagerly awaiting.  What's on your list?

1. Lover Unleashed, J. R. Ward
2. Demon Marked, Meljean Brook
3. Magic On The Hunt, Devon Monk
4. Kiss of Snow, Nalini Singh
5. Naamah's Blessing, Jacqueline Carey
6. Pale Demon, Kim Harrison
7. The Tears of the Sun, SM Stirling (unofficial)
8. Disillusionists #3 (title tbd), Carolyn Crane (unofficial)
9. Vampire in Atlantis, Alyssa Day
10. Forgotten Sea, Virginia Kantra
11. Eternal Kiss, Laura Wright
12. River Marked, Patricia Briggs
13. Shady Lady, Ann Aguirre

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2010 New Author Round-up

Every Year, Jackie at Literary Escapism hosts a New Author Challenge, the spirit of which I like very much.  However, I'm not very meticulous about posting links etc. so I often don't sign up for the challenge formally.  But I think it's worth talking about -- it's very easy to stay in that circle of known authors, especially with everyone writing series these days.  Sometimes it helps to have a nudge to try someone new.  So I fell pretty short of the challenge goal of 50, but here's my round-up.  I'm sure there are a few I've missed, as I'm also not especially meticulous about documenting what I've read unless I also happen to review it.  (I read lots and lots of books that I don't review).

In no particular order:

Jill Sorenson
Louise Allen
Diana Rowland*
Jennifer Rardin*
Kate Emerson
Cherie Priest*
Barbara Monajem
Wendy Markham
Carolyn Crane
Keri Arthur*
Elisabeth Naughton
Gayle Williams
Shaba Abe
Vicky Pettersson - no reviews yet but really liking the Zodiac series
Devon Monk* - wait, really? no reviews on this one either?  love, love loving it
Tracy Madison
Laura Wright
Nancy Holzner
Courtney Milan
Meredith Duran
Christie Ridgeway
Charles de Lint
N. K. Jemisin

*The starred authors are ones I was inspired to try by Jackie's various "mini-challenges" that she held throughout 2010.  I find it much easier to commit to a monthly theme than a whole year-long goal!

Forged: A Random Word Association Post

Forge, as per dictionary.com:

–verb (used with object)
1. to form by heating and hammering; beat into shape.
2. to form or make, esp. by concentrated effort: to forge a friendship through mutual trust.

It's just such an evocative word.  It makes me think of fire and heat and sweat and dark smoky places lit with glowing orange; of  mysteries and caves and middle earth; of volcanos and lava and brute force.

"To form by heating and hammering; to beat into shape..."  That works on so many levels, doesn't it?  The raw material is tested by fire, pounded on by great force -- and emerges stronger, less brittle, able to be honed and sharpened; potentially deadly.

Then there's the notion of forging on, forging ahead, forging a path -- strong phrases with strong imagery; the implication of challenging barriers.  You never hear about someone forging a retreat.  One who forges is almost by definition a hero, right?

This post was inspired by the title Hellforged by Nancy Holzner-- which I'm liking; and which reminded me of Demon Forged by Meljean Brook which I totally loved.  It almost makes me want to go hunt for titles that use the word "forged" (except as it turns out you need to really enjoy reading World of Warcraft books if you want to go that route).

Is there a powerfully evocative word that's been catching your attention lately?

Maybe This Time, by Jennifer Crusie - Review

To Borrow A Bandwagon
One of my favorite bloggers is running a blue light special on Crusie reviews, and since Crusie is also one of my favorite authors, I figured I'd hitch a little ride.  Hopefully Jessica won't mind too much.

"Maybe This Time" is a great title for how I was feeling about Crusie when I bought it.  She used to be one of my all-time favorite writers; I just couldn't get enough.  But... well, I haven't loved everything.  The collaborations with Bob Mayer were OK, but they weren't the Crusie stories I loved.  And to be honest the two three-way collaborations with Anne Stuart and others were pretty much stinkers.  So I was pleased to see that this was a new solo act, and I thought, "maybe this time..."

It sat on my shelf for a little while though-- it's a hardback, and I usually don't drag my hardbacks back and forth on the commute, so they wait for the perfect weekend moment.  And what could be more perfect than Christmas Day in the afternoon, with my kids sleepily playing with their new loot, after the chaos settled?  A little gift to myself, as it were.

The Characters
Now, I've been keeping up with Jessica's reviews, and she is pulling so many little tidbits out of Crusie's style, and I'm sitting here going, oh yeah, that, and that, and that's in here too... Andie, the heroine, is a slightly scattered high school teacher who is kind of anti-corporate and yet she'd make a heckuva CEO or drill sargeant:

"Mrs. Crumb, I do not want to have to fire you, but I will if you cause any more problems.  You will keep the kitchen clean and you can supervise the Happy Whosis*, but you will not tell any more stories about ghosts, and you will not make any more veiled threats, and you will either assist me with the cooking or get out of my way, and you will answer any questions I have without muttering.  Is that clear?"

*the housecleaning service Andie hires

Oof. It's certainly clear to me.

The hero is Andie's workaholic lawyer ex, whose job drove them apart. As the story of how they broke up gets filled in, you see pretty clearly that both of them failed each other and neither is a true bad guy.  His impression of Andie after ten years: "She'd looked so good, warm and round..." (that was for Jessica). Crusie is pretty famous for her characters and dialog, and while MTT is chock full of her trademark madcap secondaries, it's really more of a plot-driven story than I expected.  As a result, North, the hero, is adequate but in a sense is kind of just along for the ride.

Interestingly, Andie doesn't get a BFF in this story, which traditionally has been one of the best parts of the Crusie book.  Instead, she's the centerpiece of several secondary relationships, and I'm afraid that the one between her and Alice, the little girl, kind of steals the show from the romance.  Andie also especially sparkles with Lydia, her former mother-in-law:

"If you find out what's wrong with Carter and fix it, if you bring these children to Columbus, you'll have the full force of the Archer family behind you."

"Okay," Andie said, taken aback.

"But if you break my son's heart again, I'll rip out your liver and fry it for breakfast." Lydia stood up, looking down at Andie. "Don't blow it this time, Andromeda," she said, and swept from the room.

The Story

So.  The story is completely crazy, and the setup doesn't make a lick of sense for any time in the last two centuries.  It's an homage to Henry James "The Turn of the Screw" with a nod to Edward Gorey-- it comes with a castle, a string of suspiciously coincidental deaths, and a very strange late-twentieth century spin on the Agatha Christy houseparty, where the entire cast is trapped together in the creepy house. It takes a certain amount of torture applied to the contemporary format to get it adequately hammered into the James' parallel.  But if you can run with that, the dialog and story pacing will haul you through the rest of the story at a trot.

This isn't Crusie's first run at a paranormal story but it's by far the best.  I'm not a big fan of the ghost stories in general but the ones where nobody's falling in love with an incorporeal being seem to work better for me.  Crusie does a great job turning the madcap three-ring circus into a high-stakes thriller with a convincingly creepy edge.  It turned quite a bit darker than I expected and she got me with the twist at the end.  (Hint: just because there are only a few pages left? doesn't mean it's all over...)

An honorable mention goes to the character of Isolde, the medium who helps them with their pesky ghost problem.  She's got some salty sarcastic one-liners when she's introduced, but here she is when the story takes a turn for the serious, in North's point of view:

She was a caricature of a woman dangerously out of touch with fashion, all dark eye makeup, big hair and shoulderpats, but the emotion she was feeling was real, and he couldn't leave her alone in that icy barn of a hall, especially since she really believed the place was haunted. [snip]... Whatever Isolde Hammersmith was, she wasn't a faker or a con artist.

Which is a pretty nice microcosm of how the whole story darkens from kooky to creepy.

The Tropes
All up, a pretty typical rollicking Crusie story in terms of characterization, humor, dialog and pacing, but with more of a mystery/thriller at its heart and less of romance (perhaps her collaborations with Mayer have left a stamp on her plotting chops).  It's been said that the "old-skool" romances were typically a coming-of-age story for the heroine, and I think that's a pretty good description of Maybe This Time. While we get a glimpse inside North's head once or twice, the story is told almost entirely from Andie's point of view; and a major theme for Andie is resolving old baggage... some of which may or may not be attributed to simple immaturity.

Feminism?
I'm not good at this sort of analysis, but Jessica leaves me no choice but to consider it.  I can't say that the professional woman gets a very good rap in MTT.  Actually, pretty much all the women are crazy or bitchy in some way or another except for Andie, who holds the only remnant of normalcy or "real"-ness.  Wacky hippie mom, piranha mother-in-law and reporter; crazy drunk housekeeper.  The next-sanest (or at least, most sympathetic) woman in the story is Isolde, the medium, so... yeah.  Make of that what you will.


The Buzz
Chrisbookarama
Dirty Sexy Books
S. Krishna's Book Reviews
The Stay At Home Feminist Mom
Romance Rookie
Smexy Books


As always, if you have reviewed this book and would like to leave a link, please feel free to put it in comments and I will edit it into the list.

Note, the Edward Gorey illustration is from his book "The Gashlycrumb Tinies." Hard to mistake the homage there.

Destiny Kills, by Keri Arthur - Review

Jaded
You know you've been reading too much paranormal fiction when you crack open a book that starts with a naked, blood-splattered amnesiac heroine waking up next to a dead body and you think, "oh this old thing again??"

Marjorie Liu's Wild Road comes to mind, but I'm sure there have been others.  Hasn't there?  Help me out here.

Keri Arthur's new-ish series, Myth and Magic, is not too bad but not as good as I might have hoped, given how in love I have been with the Riley Jenson series --in fact, I mistakenly bought this book last summer thinking it was part of the Jenson series.

Sharp characters and imaginative world-building save this story from a mediocre plotline of paranormals on the run from evil scientists performing unspeakable experiments.  The hero is a pretty classic Bad Boy, with a touch of the Charmer (honestly, I think there's a lot of overlap in the eight classic archetypes).  Trae as a hero hits all the right notes for me -- he's strong, smart, ingenious, funny, ruthless with the bad guys and tender with the heroine.  He's not a masculine Mary Sue -- he's got his own agenda and he doesn't always play fair, but Destiny doesn't let him get away with it.  Two thumbs up for Trae.

Destiny is harder to peg.  She's more vulnerable than I generally like in a heroine, but that's consistent with the story set up -- she's spent the last third of her life in captivity, washing up on shore with no clothes, no money, and no ID.  She's a paradoxical mix of innocence and cynicism, also consistent. This book came out near the end of the Jenson series and I felt like Destiny's voice wasn't as separate from Riley's as it could have been, but Destiny is younger and a bit softer.  Her most interesting qualities, I think, are her supernatural abilities.  As a sea dragon, she has certain powers over bodies of water -- now, I've seen this trope before-- for example, with Alyssa Day's Warriors of Atlantis-- but Arthur gives it a unique and intriguing spin.

I particularly liked the sense of antiquity around Arthur's dragon mythology -- there's a bit of mysticism and ritual that gives it a nice distinction from the gritty, no-frills Jenson series.   The next book is due out in April and follows Trae's sister, so it's looking more like a paranormal romance series than the one-heroine UF style Arthur brought us with Riley Jenson and, later next year, Risa Jones whom we met as a child in Riley's series.

As I alluded to, I was a little disappointed with the tired plotline -- it's a rehash for PNR in general, and Arthur herself has already done it-- and the two-dimensional badness of the villains.  Ambiguous evil is so much more interesting.  And this is a nitpick, but I wish the author had come up with some menacing corporate sort of name for the research group -- calling them "the scientists" throughout the book was a bit off-putting and anti-intellectual to me, since I prefer to think of scientists in general as good guys.

Bottom line, it looks like a promising series with a solid, if not outta-the-park debut.  I'll be picking up the book in April for sure.

Dragons and Selkies

I Can't Believe It's Not Blogged...
I first discovered Kantra in an anthology during my Antholopalooza event two years ago, and I really liked the novella that she contributed, so I went out and got the first of her Children of the Sea series and I've really enjoyed them. I had every intention of doing some reviews but for some reason I never managed it (this happens to me a lot).

I kind of lost track of where she was with her series, but then I spotted her name recently and I snatched up Immortal Sea when I saw it on the new release shelf. I guess that officially makes Kantra an auto-buy for me.  Really enjoyed it.

I Can't Believe It Took Me So Long

When this series came out, I was buried deep in vampires and I wasn't so interested in the historical/paranormal combo, so I didn't pay much attention to the hype going around.  But holy moly, this is a good series!  I'm through the first three so I have a couple more to look forward to.

I am hugely impressed by the voicing in this series; by the lushness of the writing; by the way the author makes it feel like a fairy tale and a true story at the same time. I absolutely love the way Abé hints that the Drákon shifters are also the source of human tales of the Fae without ever coming out and saying so; at least, that's what I read between the lines in the description of their human (but more beautiful) forms, and the treatment of the parallel worlds.

Two Great Tastes?
OK that's interesting and all, you might be thinking, but why are they sharing a post?

The thing that really struck me about the Drákon characters is how very alien they are.  With a lot of paranormal fiction, the characters are "superhuman," that is, they are human-plus.  Their perspectives and small everyday habits are relateable. OK, so maybe they also like to drink blood or cast spells or turn into a wolf with the full moon-- but at bottom they're human characters with extra features.

I did not feel this way about Abé's characters.  She would lull me into familiarity, with a sort-of typical Regency ton sort of thing going on, and then the whole scene tilts sideways-- in one of the early scenes in the first book, the two characters spend several days in a completely empty house, subsisting on oatmeal. No servants, almost no furniture.  It's a bit eerie.

There are quite a few more examples where it would just hit me in the middle of a scene how surreal things were and how not-human --yet completely believeable-- the characters' point of view and motivations were (A more perfect blogger than I would have an illustrative excerpt to pull for this paragraph.)

As this occurred to me, I realized it was a familiar-- but not common-- feeling and I was racking my brain to remember what other author had inspired that reaction. Luckily, having picked up Immortal Sea around the same time, Kantra's selkies and fin-folk were fresh in my mind.  Of course!

Kantra and Abé both achieve something rather remarkable: they write characters that are aloof and emotionally chilly, and make them fall in love without changing their essential character.  Furthermore, they make the reader care about them and believe in the love store even with that edge of remoteness.

But What Does It All Mean?
 I'm not a particularly philosophical reader, but I do see some repeated themes in paranormal romance-- animal nature vs. social convention/civilization in shifter/were stories; the meaning of being alive for vampires; explorations of good and evil; intellect and instinct; belongingness and "otherness", mythology and religion and power and humanity.

I think part of what makes both of these authors really stand-out, fresh voices is that they are both allowing their characters to be something truly different, truly alien.  Their characters' struggle to find love gets some imaginative new twists, and brow-raising new challenges.  I wish I could think of 4 or 5 more ways to say "fresh."  These are stories that continue to linger in my mind -- they refuse to blend in with the large population of paranormals in my reading history.


Reading Order - Kantra
1. Sea Witch
2. Sea Fever
3. Sea Lord
4. Immortal Sea
5. Forgotten Sea (June 2011)
anthology adjuncts: Sea Crossing (antho- Shifter) and Shifting Sea (antho-Burning Up)

Reading Order - Abé
1. The Smoke Thief
2. The Dream Thief
3. Queen of Dragons
4. The Treasure Keeper
5. The Time Weaver

The Invisible Box

I take a fair bit of pride in going a little beyond the superficial in my reviews here on Alpha Heroes. Or so I like to think, anyway.

The downside to this is that it often takes me quite some time to put a review together; up to 6 hours sometimes of drafting, editing, formatting, reference checking, etc. And when I get a book in hand or a concept in mind that I really want to do justice to, I sometimes delay, procrastinate, etc. until I feel like I have a nice chunk of time and mental energy to devote to it. Because I don’t want to do a half-assed job.

However, lately this has been getting in my way. So I want to kick off a plan for the next two weeks – kind of like NaNoWriMo, I’m going to post something every day. Might not be as well-thought out or as prettily-formatted as I generally like to do. But there’ll be something. (This one counts).

Here’s a thought for today – not about books or reading or blogging per se, but for those of us with a procrastination problem. Have you heard the term “paralyzed perfectionist”? In a nutshell, you’d rather not start something unless you are sure you can do it perfectly. Which, on the surface, is an admirable thing—if a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing properly, and all that. It’s the difference between “properly” and “perfectly” that can become tricky.

I once heard this described very amusingly along these lines: “My house is messy. I was going to take out the trash, but then I notice that the floor around the can had a spill, so I stopped to wipe that up with a rag. While I was down there, I realized that the linoleum was starting to peel up and that we need to get that taken care of right away or water will get underneath and ruin the substrate. So I started working up the budget for that and decided that I’d rather go with hardwood than replacing the lino so I started researching the different woods and finishes. And then I looked up and it was midnight so I went to bed and the trash is still sitting next to the can waiting for me to take it out.” This isn’t really a story about getting distracted but a story about turning a little task into a monstrously complicated/expensive/difficult one.

A couple of good background articles:

A good general view
Regarding perfectionism in kids...

Does this apply to you? Do you have any strategies for breaking loose? As it relates to blogging, this daily-post commitment is my strategy for now (and it has worked before, though I haven’t explicitly discussed it).

So here I go, hitting the post button without finding the perfect image to go with the article or second-guessing the article title...

OK, that's a lie, I did second-guess it and third-guess it, but I haven't come up with anything better, so here goes.