Stacking the Shelves is a weekly event hosted on Tynga's Reviews where we can share what new books we've picked up this past week be they bought, borrowed or downloaded. There
are also lots of other 'book haul' memes out there for you to choose
from!
I've been away from home all week but still managed to end up with all these! It's been a really good week, went to a great event on Thursday night (photos in my end of the month post!) and got one of my most anticipated books of 2014 to review but late yesterday afternoon I heard the sad news about Strange Chemistry and Exhibit A. Anyone who reads this blog on at least a semi-regular basis knows of my affection for all things Strange Chemistry, they've introduced me to some outstanding authors and published some amazing books so I'm saddened by the news that Angry Robot have stopped publication immediately of all their forthcoming SC books. I can only hope that the authors who have worked so hard are able to find new homes for their books, I know I'll be checking frequently! There's so much more I could say about the situation, including my initial reaction from yesterday but I'm not going to say anything else except thank you to all the great people who worked for or wrote for Strange Chemistry and I wish you all the best.
I've noticed this year I'm not giving as many books my top rating, at the time of writing this post I've given 5 stars to just three books which is unheard of. On the other hand there are quite a few picture books with five stars because I'm not the one rating them! Here's my list of the best books I've read so far this year, there are 11 rather than 10 but as I started with 17 I think 11 is a good compromise :)
Stacking the Shelves is a weekly event hosted on Tynga's Reviews where we can share what new books we've picked up this past week be they bought, borrowed or downloaded. There
are also lots of other 'book haul' memes out there for you to choose
from!
What a great week! I was really good this week and only bought one book, there are two in the picture though as I forgot to add House of the Rising Sun last week! I also put in a cheeky request for two books on Netgalley/Edelweiss and got approved, cue much happy squealing! I'm away this weekend as it's my sister's birthday (she's 40 on Monday!!! But you didn't hear that from me...) so probably not a lot of time for reading but I will get to spend time with my favorite four year olds!
'Meda Melange has
officially hung up her monstrous mantle and planted her feet firmly on
the holy and righteous path of a Crusader-in-training. Or, at least,
she’s willing to give it a shot. It helps that the Crusaders are the
only thing standing between her and the demon hordes who want her dead.
The
problem is, the only people less convinced than Meda of her new-found
role as Good Girl are the very Crusaders she’s trying to join. So when a
devilishly handsome half-demon boy offers escape, how’s a girl supposed
to say “no?”
After all, everyone knows a good girl’s greatest weakness is a bad boy.' - Goodreads I absolutely loved book one, Cracked, by Eliza Crewe so can't wait to get my grubby little hands on Crushed. If the devilishly handsome half-demon boy is who I think he is Meda is most definitely in trouble!
Stacking the Shelves is a weekly event hosted on Tynga's Reviews where we can share what new books we've picked up this past week be they bought, borrowed or downloaded. There
are also lots of other 'book haul' memes out there for you to choose
from!
And another restrained week on the buying front! Could it be my book ban has decided to start enforcing itself ? Just one book bought and one Kindle book, unbelievable! I finally got my copy of Unwrapped Sky, with the UK cover but I'm still wondering whether I should have bought the US edition. Review books on the other hand... I was really, really lucky this week so huge thanks to Titan, Tor and Angry Robot/Strange Chemistry for so many amazing titles! I can't wait to read all of them but super excited about The Blasted Lands, Hot Lead, Cold Iron and The Dark Blood of Poppies :)
Welcome to the blog tour for the fabulous Wizard's Promise by Cassandra Rose Clarke! The Wizard's Promise is the first book in a new duology set in the same amazing world as Assassin's Curse and Pirate's Wish but featuring different characters due and due out at the beginning of May, look out for my review towards the end of this month. Without further ado I'll hand you over to Cassandra and her childhood reading habits!
I have a graduate degree in creative writing, which means I’ve
attended a lot of workshops in my time. Every single one of them starts
the same: you go around the room and introduce yourself by listing your
favorite books and authors.
This might seem like a no-brainer, but in reality it was a delicate
balance. You couldn’t pick any of the “obvious” books (i.e., things
assigned in high school English classes), nor could you go too far down
the genre well, although choosing authors with a slight genre bent was
acceptable. I was never clear if you got bonus points for listing
authors your classmates hadn’t heard of, though.
I found the whole process rather tedious and exhausting, but it did
mean I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my favorite authors, and,
by extension, authors who’ve influenced my writing—the more interesting
question, I think, and one which sometimes yields a slightly different
answer from the “favorite book” category.
I’ve written about my favorite books AND my authorial influences on my website, but since we’re here today
celebrating The Wizard’s Promise, a YA novel, I think I’d like to shift
the focus to stories and authors that inspired me when I was younger.
These are the books that left an indelible imprint on me as a kid, when I
first dreamed about becoming an author, but they are also favorites I
never got to name in my creative writing workshops in grad school.
First up is a picture book that delights me to this day: The
Mysteries of Harris Burdick, by Chris Van Allsburg. It’s not so much a
story as it is a collection of strange, surreal illustrations, each
accompanied by a single tag line. The idea is that you can tell your own
stories about the illustrations. This book blew my mind when I first
encountered it in the library. It was a book that you wrote
yourself. It also helped me to understand the connection
between storytelling, something I did to myself all the time, and the
books lining the shelves of my library. I’d say if I had to pick any one
book that influenced me on my path to becoming a writer, it was this
one.
But what sorts of things influenced me to become the kind of writer that I am? When people ask me what
sort of stories I write, I usually say speculative fiction—a catch all
term for science fiction, fantasy, and the weirdo in-between stuff. The
Wizard’s Promise is itself an adventure fantasy, and I have an adult
science fiction novel out too. But as a kid, I didn’t read fantasy or
even all that much science fiction. I was all about horror.
It helped that horror was rather popular at the time (this was the
early ‘90s), and the Goosebumps books were everywhere amongst kids my
age. I started with them, of course, and I tore through their pages,
frightening and delighting myself in equal measure. I think I read Mary
Downing Hahn’s Wait Till Helen Comes about five hundred times.
Eventually, I moved on to RL Stine’s YA series, Fear Street, and I was a
huge fan of Lois Duncan’s books (she wrote I Know What You Did Last
Summer, among other things). By junior high, I’d graduated on to the
master of all things horror, Stephen King.
I’m not sure what it was about horror that captured my fancy as a
kid. I don’t care for it much anymore; rarely do I watch horror movies
or read scary books. But one thing about all those horror stories I read
stuck with me, and that is the focus on the strange and the uncanny.
Speculative fiction is a huge, catch-all term, but there is one
commonality: stuff is fantastical. It couldn’t happen in the real world.
And while I did learn later on that some of things I was reading about
in those scary books did, in fact, really happen, much of it
didn’t - ghosts and monsters and vampires and all the rest. So even though
I don’t consider myself a horror writer, it was horror that shaped me
as a writer.
There were other books and authors I adored when I was younger - I read
voraciously, gobbling up books across all genres. I read every single
Little House on the Prairie book, from Little House in the Big Woods (my
favorite) to The First Four Years. I read every Newbury nominee the
year I was in third grade, and I read my copy of Harriet the Spy so much
it fell apart. But it was the horror stories, and the eerie, surreal
strangeness of Harris Burdick (really, the closest you can come to a
picture book horror story, now that I think about it) that influenced me
the most.
Cassandra Rose Clarke grew up in south Texas and currently lives in a
suburb of Houston, where she writes and teaches composition at a local
college. She graduated in 2006 from The University of St. Thomas with a
B.A. in English, and two years later she completed her master’s degree
in creative writing at The University of Texas at Austin. In 2010 she
attended the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop in Seattle, where she was a
recipient of the Susan C. Petrey Clarion Scholarship Fund. Cassandra’s first adult novel, The Mad Scientist’s Daughter, was a finalist for the 2013 Philip K. Dick Award, and her YA novel, The Assassin’s Curse, was nominated for YALSA’s 2014 Best Fiction for Young Adults. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons and Daily Science Fiction.
Stolen Songbird - Danielle L Jensen
ISBN - 9781908844958
Publisher - Strange Chemistry
Release date - April 2014
Find - Goodreads/Book Depository For those who have loved Seraphina and Graceling comes another truly fabulous fantasy...
'For
five centuries, a witch’s curse has bound the trolls to their city
beneath the ruins of Forsaken Mountain. Time enough for their dark and
nefarious magic to fade from human memory and into myth. But a prophesy
has been spoken of a union with the power to set the trolls free, and
when Cécile de Troyes is kidnapped and taken beneath the mountain, she
learns there is far more to the myth of the trolls than she could have
imagined.
Cécile has only one thing on her mind after she is
brought to Trollus: escape. Only the trolls are clever, fast, and
inhumanly strong. She will have to bide her time, wait for the perfect
opportunity.
But something unexpected happens while she’s waiting
– she begins to fall for the enigmatic troll prince to whom she has
been bonded and married. She begins to make friends. And she begins to
see that she may be the only hope for the half-bloods – part troll, part
human creatures who are slaves to the full-blooded trolls. There is a
rebellion brewing. And her prince, Tristan, the future king, is its
secret leader.
As Cécile becomes involved in the intricate
political games of Trollus, she becomes more than a farmer’s daughter.
She becomes a princess, the hope of a people, and a witch with magic
powerful enough to change Trollus forever.' - Goodreads
It's not often you come across a book that is a little bit different to all the other fantasy books out there but Stolen Songbird is definitely one of them. I can't remember reading a book featuring trolls not only as main characters but as the love interest and as soon as I started reading I was hooked.
Cécile is kidnapped by someone she considered a friend and taken deep under the mountain to Trollus where she learns she is to marry the troll prince, Tristan. Bonded together and married, proven by strange filigree markings on both their hands/wrists, Cécile doesn't stop trying to escape even when it becomes obvious that she is falling for Tristan and being seen as a beacon of hope by the half-blood trolls that make up most of the population of Trollus who treated with nearly as much contempt as the few humans that are in the troll city. When we first meet Cécile you think she's going to be another pretty but empty-headed main character, this turned out to be the exact opposite. Throughout the book Cécile meets every challenge thrown at her with strength, courage and bravado and by putting on a mask - especially when it comes to Tristan who it turns out is doing the very same thing. I love how the relationship between them develops over time, no case of insta-love here, their feelings seem real and deep. Tristan doesn't want to fall in love with Cécile as he is terrified that his father, the troll king, will use this against him whilst his aunt - the Duchesse, seems to be encouraging both of them. They are both fantastic characters, as are most of the supporting characters in Songbird. I particularly liked Vincent & Victoria, twin trolls and firm supporters of Cécile, they bring a some light relief to the story and are amongst Cécile's first friends while she is in Trollus. Another favorite is Marc, from his description he appears to be more like the trolls that we are used to, a very dark character due to the pain of losing his bonded wife (trolls are not meant to survive this),
The
two sides of his face, so flawless on their own, were like halves of a
fractured sculpture put back together askew.The lack of symmetry was
more than unsettling – it was shocking, gruesome even. One eye higher
than the other. One ear lower than the other. A mouth marred by a
permanently sardonic twist.
The world-building in Stolen Songbird is wonderful, not what you would expect from a debut novel but when the city of Trollus was being described I could see it, every dark corner and every rose in the Glass Gardens, the ferocious underground river & waterfall and the small opening miles above the city where the moonlight comes in during their bonding ceremony. All the usual myths we've heard about trolls are turned on their head too. They aren't ugly, far from it in some cases such as Tristan with his beautiful silver eyes. They aren't stupid, some are sly & calculating, some are out to outsmart anyone who gets in their way but there is a troll who is completely insane, violent and delusional (staying spoiler-free I can't tell you who it is!) And the one myth we probably know best? trolls turn to stone when exposed to sunlight? Definitely not true as Cécile finds out to her humiliation when she thinks she is saving Tristan! She also makes some important discoveries about herself, thanks to a troll librarian called Martin and this brings into play a whole new set of possibilities.
Stolen Songbird has it all really. Love, intrigue, action, secret plots and magic... I couldn't put it down once I started reading it and at over four hundred pages I was left looking a little bleary-eyed after finishing it at 4am in the morning but I would do it all over again. The only thing I didn't like? The ending... I was speechless and actually flicking back pages to make sure I hadn't missed something. I hadn't, it really ends the way it does. I can't believe that we now have what may be quite a wait to find out what happens next to our songbird & troll prince but you can be sure I will be snatching up a copy of the second book as soon as humanly possible. If you like your fantasy with a fresh new twist and wonderful writing then you need to read Stolen Songbird now.
Many thanks to Strange Chemistry for providing me with an ARC of Stolen Songbird! As Stolen Songbird could well turn out to be one of my favorite books of the year I'm offering you the chance to win a copy for yourself. You're eligible to enter if you live in a country that the Book Depository
ship to - find the list of countries here. All you have to do is leave a comment and I'll pick a winner on April 7th!
Stacking the Shelves is a weekly event hosted on Tynga's Reviews where we can share what new books we've picked up this past week be they bought, borrowed or downloaded. There
are also lots of other 'book haul' memes out there for you to choose
from!
This week has been a great week! Lots of new books but I only bought three! I'm so proud of myself :) It was library week and blog tour week and review copy week all rolled into one so still a few books in but I only bought three... I'll keep repeating that as I can't believe it! Before I get to the books I'd just like to say thanks to the lovely folks at Hodder who, after seeing my WoW post on Wednesday for Smiler's Fair, offered to send me a copy and I have it in my covetous little hands now.
Welcome to my stop on the blog tour for the lovely Danielle Jensen, the author of Strange Chemistry's new fantasy title, Stolen Songbird!
For those who have loved Seraphina and Graceling comes another truly fabulous fantasy...
For
five centuries, a witch’s curse has bound the trolls to their city
beneath the ruins of Forsaken Mountain. Time enough for their dark and
nefarious magic to fade from human memory and into myth. But a prophesy
has been spoken of a union with the power to set the trolls free, and
when Cécile de Troyes is kidnapped and taken beneath the mountain, she
learns there is far more to the myth of the trolls than she could have
imagined.
Cécile has only one thing on her mind after she is
brought to Trollus: escape. Only the trolls are clever, fast, and
inhumanly strong. She will have to bide her time, wait for the perfect
opportunity.
But something unexpected happens while she’s waiting
– she begins to fall for the enigmatic troll prince to whom she has
been bonded and married. She begins to make friends. And she begins to
see that she may be the only hope for the half-bloods – part troll, part
human creatures who are slaves to the full-blooded trolls. There is a
rebellion brewing. And her prince, Tristan, the future king, is its
secret leader.
As Cécile becomes involved in the intricate
political games of Trollus, she becomes more than a farmer’s daughter.
She becomes a princess, the hope of a people, and a witch with magic
powerful enough to change Trollus forever.
Hi Danielle, welcome to the Bookish Outsider and thanks for talking about your debut novel, Stolen Songbird!
2. What inspired you to write Stolen Songbird? And why trolls?
I was
inspired to write Stolen Songbird by
a dream I had about a city buried by rubble. The trolls came into being when I
started thinking about who would populate my city and why, and they sort of
created themselves as I wrote the story.
3. What comes first when you're writing, the story
idea or the character?
Usually,
story idea. In the case of this novel, I was inspired by the setting.
4. How do you pick your character's names?
I’ve
always liked the name Cécile, and I was taking a Arthurian Romance class at
university when I started writing it, so that’s how Tristan got his name.Otherwise, I have some websites with lists of
French names that I use.
5. How did you celebrate when you heard Songbird
was going to be published by Strange Chemistry?
I was in
shock for a few days, but eventually I pulled myself together and went for
dinner with my family. A lot of champagne was consumed.
6. What's the best thing about being a writer?
Wearing
pajamas to work.
7. Stolen Songbird is the first book in the
Malediction trilogy, do you already know how it's all going to end?
Yes, yes
I do *evil laugh*
8. Which character was the easiest to write, and
which character was the hardest?
Marc and
Tristan were the easiest to write. Cécile was the hardest.
9. Any other books in the pipeline? No pun intended
regarding the gas & oil industry!
I love
puns! Especially troll puns!
I’m
pretty busy working on The Malediction
Trilogy, but I do have another fantasy project that is about half finished.
I’m not sure when I’m going to get back to working on it.
10. Do you listen to music whilst writing? Does
Stolen Songbird have a soundtrack?
I listen
to classical music when I write, and I particularly like soundtracks to movies.
Stolen Songbird’s theme song is Lux
Aeterna from the Requiem for a Dream soundtrack.
11. What's your favorite place for writing?
My office
in my house, but I can write anywhere as long as I am alone.
12. What books are currently on your reading pile?
I’m just
about finished A Mad, Wicked Folly,
and after that I’m going to read Defy.
13. What's the last book you read?
The 57 Lives of Alex Wayfare, by MG Buehrlen. Everyone should
read it.
14. What authors inspired you to write?
I’d say
my love of fantasy novels stems from reading David Eddings when I was a kid.
That was where it all started.
15. What's the worst thing you could do in front of
a troll?
Get
caught lying.
Well, should I ever meet a troll I shall remember not to lie to him... Thank you so much for answering my questions Danielle, and for reminding me of a beautiful piece of music from one of my favorite films! Ah, Jared Leto... If you should want to watch Requiem for a Dream please remember it is an R rated movie (18 certificate in the UK) because of the intense depiction of drug addiction, graphic sexuality, strong language and some violence. Only watch if you're old enough :) Look out for my review at the end of the week and I'll be giving away one copy of Stolen Songbird, open internationally as it will come via the Book Depository!
