Looks like Fictionwise finally has Faerie Blood for sale!
I’m still not showing up on their Stanza store yet, or on Amazon, but now at least I’m on Fictionwise. So if somebody reading this hasn’t bought the book yet, you have another option through which to do so!
ETA 2:13pm: No whoops, wait, I’m on the Stanza store, too! So those of y’all using Stanza to read ebooks on your iPhones, there you go!
Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.
It took me a bit to get into A Fountain Filled With Blood, which is the second book in Julia Spencer-Fleming’s series about a young female Episcopalian priest who becomes involved with the police chief of her small town. For one thing, I made the mistake of trying to read this book before I read Book 1. For another, several of the initial scenes involve violence against gay people in the town, and I was genuinely unsure if I could handle reading about that. Nor was I terribly happy about the relationship brewing between Clare, the priest, and police chief Russ–because Russ is married to another woman, and that seemed to me to be asking for all sorts of annoying angst I wouldn’t enjoy reading about.
But then I did go back and read Book 1, In the Bleak Midwinter, and wound up enjoying that more than I expected. So I opted to give this one another chance.
As with Book 1, the writing here is quietly engaging, with just enough descriptive detail to be vivid, and not so much that it gets in the way of the story. The spate of violence–which soon enough includes murder–that must be investigated is suitably complex, and once I got past the uneasiness of seeing gays targeted, it was refreshing to see Clare speaking out against such acts being perpetrated. Clare in general seems to be a highly atypical priest, which for me at least makes her an interesting character even if sometimes I have a hard time buying her plausibility.
The heart of the book is of course her burgeoning relationship with Russ. If the idea of a protagonist being attracted to a married man bothers you, especially if that protagonist is a priest, you might skip this series. But I will give it credit for handling the chemistry between the two leads in a very ethical way so far. My only complaint is that I’d like to see the police chief’s wife on camera, and given the same complex treatment of character that Clare and Russ have gotten so far. I may have to read farther in the series just to see if that occurs. For this installment in the meantime, four stars.
Mirrored from annathepiper.org.
One of the many reasons I’m delighted to have me an iPhone is that I can finally get caught up on reading my backlog of ebooks. This includes several I’ve purchased from my very own publisher, Drollerie Press, and I’ve been working recently on reading those along with several other ebooks.
However, in the interests of impartiality, I’m not going to do formal review posts for the Drollerie books. I will however give y’all picoreviews and touch on at least one thing about each that I like! So here right quick are the first three:
Pixie Warrior, by Rachael de Vienne: In a genre that’s been heavily overpopulated by urban fantasy the last several years, it’s a nice change of pace to get a period fantasy novel set in a decidedly non-urban locale. It’s also kind of neat to get a story in which the protagonist, the pixie daughter of a human lumberjack and his pixie wife, gets romantically involved with NO ONE. The love story with her parents is certainly an important subplot, but really, this story’s all about Sha’el. Three stars.
Unseelie, by Meredith Holmes: It should surprise none of you that with Faerie Blood under my belt, I’m a bit of a sucker for any book that involves the Unseelie Court. Meredith’s book gives ‘em a bit more of a traditionalist touch than I do. Come for the subverting of which Court is the good guys and which one the bad (a trick 
jimbutcher
Scars on the Face of God: The Devil’s Bible, by C.G. Bauer: If you like your horror old-school, with a hint of Rosemary’s Baby and a side helping of Omen, you’ll probably groove for this. I quite liked the dual-layer story involving our protagonist both as a boy and as an old man who must root out the nasty cause of why settlers in Three Bridges, Pennsylvania used to murder their babies–and why his parish’s own bishop seems to be batting for the other team. Four stars.
Mirrored from annathepiper.org.
Y’all will notice that I’m hitting four books at once in this post. That’ll be because I was in a mood for some Elizabeth Lowell, and since she hasn’t come out with any new suspense novels for a bit, I went back and slurped up a bunch of her older romance ebooks for iPhone reading goodness. First up was her “Only” quartet of historical Old West romances, and I’m doing these as a set since they’re all inter-related, covering the adventures of Willow Moran, her brothers, and associated badasses of both genders (men with guns and feisty women, and sometimes the other way around).
( Read the rest of this entry » )Mirrored from annathepiper.org.
It is entirely the fault of the fine ladies at Smart Bitches Trashy Books that I picked up an ebook copy of Patricia Gaffney’s Wild at Heart, which showed up on Smart Bitch Candy’s list of books with Schlocky Premises But Good Executions. And let’s face it, folks, “boy raised by wolves” is a pretty schlocky premise to start with. But yeah, Smart Bitch Candy is right. Gaffney pulled off a surprisingly charming little novel here.
It’s 1893, and Sydney Darrow, after the death of her young husband, has come back to her family home in Michigan to find that her absent-minded anthropologist father is involved with an astonishing discovery: the so-called “Ontario Man”, a young man who’s been found in the Canadian wilderness, apparently raised by wolves. Her father and his assistant Charles are caught up in researching whether a man in a feral state can exhibit true altruism, but Sydney is appalled that they’ve given him a churl of a guard to keep watch on him and that they’ve given him only the rudiments of interaction with his own kind. With her little brother’s help, Sydney soon discovers that “Ontario Man” can actually talk–he just needs to be reminded of it–and she coaxes him into revealing that his name is Michael MacNeil.
Once Michael starts talking, the story gets its feet under it. We learn he was lost as a boy, late enough in his childhood that he’d not only learned how to talk and read, he’d even clung to a treasured book on gentleman’s etiquette that his father had given him. All of which is Oh So Convenient for explaining why he’s not really feral, but it does actually work, and it also sets Michael up for having some very unsophisticated, innocent sensibilities–which is a bit of a switch for romance novels. There’s quite a bit of sweet mileage with Sydney’s younger brother, who is himself a boy, introducing Michael to the city and teaching him things more easily than the adults, since Michael’s forgotten many things that only a child would think to have to explain. His chemistry with Sydney is equally straightforward and refreshingly innocent, and that went a long way to my enjoyment of the plot. (I was particularly amused by one scene where he laments, “Why do you have so many clothes on? Can’t you take some off?”)
Things come to a head when the family makes the mistake of trying to introduce Michael to a zoo, and he flips right out, deciding to singlehandedly release every animal he can get to in one night and thereby causing an uproar in the city. Sydney has to juggle resolving that uproar with tracking down Michael’s long-lost family, and there’s quite a bit of nice tension around that. There is of course a happy ending; this is after all a romance novel. But all in all the trip getting there was quite satisfying. Four stars.
Mirrored from annathepiper.org.
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