Only two days left to treat your feet! The BOGO socks sale ends Monday. You know what to do: buy one, get one 50% off.
Categories
So we’re ten days into 2017 – how’s everyone holding up? There are certainly a ton of amazing books coming out today, and further down the road, so at least we can look forward to another great year of reading. I have a few great books to tell you about today, and you can hear about more wonderful books on this week’s episode of the All the Books! Rebecca and I talked about a few awesome books we loved, such as Fever Dream, Always Happy Hour, and The Dry.
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Frostblood by Elly Blake.
They say that frost and flame were once friends. That world is long gone.
Vivid and compelling, Frostblood is the first in an exhilarating new series about a world where flame and ice are mortal enemies…but together create a power that could change everything.
Little Heaven by Nick Cutter
This is a book about mercenaries hired by a woman to find her nephew, who is being held by a cult. Except not quite as straight-forward as that. The mercenaries have weird abilities and an insane backstory, and the cult may actually be situated in Hell. It’s bananapants. Fans of The Troop know the crazy, gory stories Cutter is capable of spinning, and this one spins out of control and right off the edge. In the best way, of course. (And if you enjoyed this, keep your eyes out for Black Mad Wheel by Josh Malerman, out May 23.)
Backlist bump: Those Across the River by Christopher Buehlman
Lucky Boy by Shanthi Sekaran
Two women are bound together by their love for a baby boy in this moving novel of motherhood, immigration, and privilege. Solimar crossed the Mexican border into California to find a better life, but now she is pregnant and alone. Kavya has always dreamed of being a mother, and when Solimar is placed in immigrant detention, her baby is placed in Kavya’s care. But when Soli fights to get her baby back, the two women will experience the anguish and heartbreak of broken dreams and second chances.
Backlist bump: The Light Between Oceans by M. L. Stedman
The Second Mrs. Hockaday by Susan Rivers
When Major Hockaday asks for Placidia’s hand in marriage, she has known him for two days. But a life away from her family home intrigues her, so she accepts. Two days later, the major is off to fight in the Civil War, where he is taken prisoner, leaving Placidia alone for three years. Upon his return, he learns his wife has given birth. Where is the child, and who is its father? Told through letters and reports, we learn the intense circumstances of Placidia’s plight. It’s a suspenseful tale of love, marriage, and racial division in the antebellum era.
Backlist bump: A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick
Glaxo by Hernan Ronsino (Author), Samuel Rutter (Translator)
A fantastic whodunit revolving around the lives of four men, best friends who grew up in Argentina and became embroiled in romances and politics they would have been wise to avoid. Now one is dying, one is in jail for a crime he didn’t commit, and one is a police officer fuming over his wife’s infidelity. And someone is dead. Who can you trust when everyone could be guilty? This is a suspenseful mystery-slash-western, now in English for the first time.
Backlist bump: The Black Minutes by Martin Solares (Author), Aura Estrada (Translator), John Pluecker (Translator)
The Sleepwalker by Chris Bohjalian
Annalee Ahlberg has been a sleepwalker for years. Sometimes her nightly walks are harmless, and other times they’re scary, like when she climbed onto a bridge. But she’s never disappeared – until now. All clues point to Annalee being dead, but one detective continues to show up at the house asking questions. How does he know so much about Annalee’s sleepwalking habits? Is she really dead? All will be revealed in this chilling mystery. You can always count on Bohjalian to tell a great story, and it’s always very different from his others.
Backlist bump: The Guest Room by Chris Bohjalian
YAY, BOOKS! That’s it for me today – time to get back to reading! I am REALLY into reading about historical murder these days (but don’t be scared). Especially books set around the mid-19th century to early 20th century, so if you have any book recommendations, fiction or nonfiction, please send them my way! You can find me on Twitter at MissLiberty, on Instagram at FranzenComesAlive, or Litsy under ‘Liberty’!
Stay rad,
Liberty
Greetings, fellow Earthlings!
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by St. Martin’s Griffin.
Mara is used to the extraordinary. Roaming from place to place with Gideon Davorin’s Traveling Carnival, she longs for an ordinary life where no one has the ability to levitate or predict the future. She gets her chance when the struggling sideshow sets up camp in a small town, where she meets a gorgeous guy named Gabe. But then Mara realizes there’s a dark presence in the town that’s threatening her friends. She has seven days to take control of a power she didn’t know she had in order to save everyone she cares about—and change the future forever.
Let’s have some good news, shall we?
In perhaps the most welcome and exciting press release I’ve had the pleasure to receive, Orbit Books has announced a new three-book deal with NK Jemisin (tired of hearing me talk about her? TOO BAD.). The first in the series is also Jemisin’s first novel set in our world and will deal with “themes of race and power in New York City,” due out in April of 2019. No one who’s read Jemisin’s work will be surprised by this description; she frequently deals with themes of race and power. But ever since I read her short story “Non-Zero Probabilities” I have been yearning for an urban fantasy from her, and now we’re getting one. I look forward to looking forward to that for the next two years.
LitHub recently published a selection of letters from Alice B. Sheldon as James Tiptree Jr. to Joanna Russ, and I am fascinated. Not least because I love the work of both authors, but because it gives us a look at the charade Sheldon maintained and her reasons for it. My first encounter with Tiptree’s work was “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” likely via The James Tiptree Award Anthology 3 — well worth a read if you haven’t already. As near as I can tell, the letters quoted are from this collection (which does not appear to be digitized, alas).
Did you watch the first episode of Emerald City last Friday? I did! And I definitely plan to keep watching. I knew it would be visually lush since Tarsem Singh is involved, and I was excited about having a Latina lead; beyond that, I had no idea what to expect. I wasn’t disappointed: it’s gorgeous to watch, Adria Arjona is beautiful and really good at looking creeped out, Vincent D’Onofrio is perfectly obnoxious as The Wizard, and while it is not without problems there was plenty of plot to intrigue me. (Tor.com agrees.) It also made me want to read the Oz books, as I have heard from friends that Tip’s character is a particularly exciting inclusion (I know, how have I not read them?). Our very own Annika has contemplated the magical systems of both the show and the books (spoilers if you haven’t read the books). This is just one of a plethora of sci-fi/fantasy shows hitting the channels this year; io9 has a guide for you, if you’re interested in adding some screen-time to your 2017.
If you’re looking to add some representation to your TBR, Nicole Brinkley put together a list of Seven Fantasies with Asexual Leads for Book Riot and I want to read all of them. (Except for maybe Jughead; I am just not an Archie fan, y’all.)
Will everyone please report to the bridge? An exact replica of the original Star Trek bridge exists in Ticonderoga, NY, and you can visit it. It’s currently closed, but you can buy gift tickets now; might be a good Valentine’s Day gift for the Trekkie you love, I am just saying. Special tours with the original Chekov, Walter Koenig, (RIP Anton Yelchin) will go on sale in February.
And now: books!
Galactic Empires, edited by Neil Clarke
Empires, so hot right now! You’ll forgive me for not having read all of this 600+ page anthology yet, as I’ve been cherry-picking. Personal favorites Ann Leckie, Aliette de Bodard, Yoon Ha Lee, and Naomi Novik all have pieces here-in, and all are worth your time. If you’ve missed the Raadchai, Leckie’s brief tale of interspace espionage will scratch that itch (and if you’re unfamiliar with her Ancillary series, welcome aboard). De Bodard expands on the world of the Dai Viet (On a Red Station Drifting should be required reading for all space-opera fans, in my opinion) and offers a truly unsettling look at sentience and culture clash. Yoon Ha Lee gives us origami-inspired warships and moral ambiguity. I am here for all of it! You can see the full Table of Contents here to check if your favorites are included (I bet at least a few are).
Nine of Stars, Laura Bickle
I am a die-hard fan of the Dresden Files, the Kate Daniels series by Ilona Andrews, and of Walt Longmire, so the publicity for Nine of Stars had me curious. “Weird West” is a tricky thing to pull off (and I’m not qualified to comment on the inclusion of Native American elements aside from to say that at least Bickle has honored the original Navajo definition of a skinwalker, unlike a bunch of other writers I could mention), but I enjoyed this installment a great deal. This is the third book in the Dark Alchemy series and I haven’t read the first two, but I didn’t have any trouble following the action or feeling attached to the main protagonists, reluctant alchemist Petra Dee and her love-interest the supernaturally-inclined Gabriel. While Dee and Gabriel are far less grumpy than Harry Dresden or Kate Daniels, it’s still a good comp for those series; Nine of Stars has some nicely escalating villainy, an intriguing supporting cast, and a well-imagined rural West setting. I’ll be going back to read the first two, and recommend them to anyone looking for a good distraction and/or escapist contemporary fantasy.
Live long and prosper (at the very least, until the next newsletter).
Categories
Book Radar
In his more formative years, my dad was a radar man in the Navy. It’s interesting to consider that with today’s modern technology, I would suspect that just about everything he did back then has since been completely overhauled, deprecated, and otherwise rendered obsolete. Radar, as we know it, is no longer a viable way of detecting precise movements that a military unit requests.
It’s interesting then to take a step back and ponder what other technical formats have since been made obsolete during our own times. Surely, we would feel very out of place in this day and age if we suddenly found ourselves in a position where we have to use a payphone. Remember card catalogs? It’s hard to believe these were still the standard 25 years ago as I was going through grade school.
Categories
In The Club System Check
Do you know what’s going to be hot in the club in 2017? You and your Nintendo Switch. I mean, think about it: you’re going to have the hottest new handheld, with your copy of new Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I mean, at that point, why bother even going to the club, right? Might as well be at home, beaming Link through your tv for maximum enjoyment.
Well, at least that’s what I thinking when I wrote this! Your mileage may vary.
The Most Popular Books at US Public Libraries
Happy day for Paula Hawkins: The Girl on the Train is the most frequently checked out book from eight of the 14 US public libraries surveyed by Quartz. Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton also tops the list (unsurprisingly), and books from mega-best-sellers James Patterson and Janet Evanovich. Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up continues to fascinate American audiences, apparently.
Amazon Bookstore Coming to Manhattan
Amazon is opening a 4,000 square foot bookstore in Manhattan’s Time Warner Center, joining its existing brick-and-mortar stores in Seattle, Portland, and San Diego. Their foray into physical bookstore spaces is interesting–it seems to me that the things people value about local bookstores (keeping money in the hands of small business owners, author events, concerns about literary culture) will be absent in Amazon locations and therefore the people who shop at physical bookstores won’t care to visit the Amazon ones. We’ll see!
Simon & Schuster UK Declines to Publish Milo Yiannopoulos
The book world was sent into a tailspin when news that Simon and Schuster was paying Breitbart editor and vocal sexist and racist Milo Yiannopoulos $250,000 for a book about, well, sexism and racism, one assumes (does it really matter?). The company’s UK division has announced that it would not be following suit. Milo probably isn’t as well known in the UK and wouldn’t sell as well, but a publishing insider also said it would be a “toxic book to try and sell here.”
Categories
Weekend Giveaway: The X-Files Origins
We have 10 copies each of The X-Files Origins: Agent of Chaos by Kami Garcia and The X-Files Origins: Devil’s Advocate by Jonathan Maberry to give away to 10 Riot readers.
How did Fox Mulder become a believer? What made Dana Scully a skeptic? The X-Files Origins has the answers. Read these dark thrillers to find out why millions of people became obsessed with The X-Files.
Click here to enter the giveaway, or just click on the cover images below:
Today’s Riot Rundown is sponsored by The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett by Chelsea Sedoti.
Hawthorn Creely doesn’t fit in, and that was before she inserted herself into a missing persons investigation. She doesn’t mean to interfere, but Lizzie Lovett’s disappearance is the most fascinating mystery their town has ever had—which means the time for speculation is now.
So Hawthorn comes up with a theory way too absurd to take seriously…at first. The more Hawthorn talks, the more she believes. And what better way to collect evidence than to immerse herself in Lizzie’s life? It might just be the push Hawthorn needs to find her own place in the world.
We have 10 copies of The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett by Chelsea Sedoti to give away to 10 Riot readers.
Here’s what it’s about:
Hawthorn Creely doesn’t fit in, and that was before she inserted herself into a missing persons investigation. She doesn’t mean to interfere, but Lizzie Lovett’s disappearance is the most fascinating mystery their town has ever had—which means the time for speculation is now.
So Hawthorn comes up with a theory way too absurd to take seriously…at first. The more Hawthorn talks, the more she believes. And what better way to collect evidence than to immerse herself in Lizzie’s life? It might just be the push Hawthorn needs to find her own place in the world.
Go here to enter the giveaway, or just click on the book’s cover below:
It’s a new year and a whole new chance to make some reading resolutions (and maybe even keep them)! Join us as we discuss our holiday reading, prioritize our TBRs for the year ahead, decide which reading challenges we’re going to do, and generally geek out about books.
New York City, NY – 1/14
Boston, MA – 1/14
Philadelphia, PA – 1/15
Vancouver, BC – 1/19
Chicago, IL – 1/19
Los Angeles, CA – 1/21
Glasgow, GB – 1/21
Washington, DC – 1/22
Houston, TX – 1/22
Toronto, ON – 1/22
