Archive for the ‘Sci-Fi-Fantasy’ Category
Tuesday, April 16th, 2013
Mr Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore Synopsis
A gleeful and exhilarating tale of global conspiracy, complex code-breaking, high-tech data visualization, young love, rollicking adventure, and the secret to eternal life — mostly set in a hole-in-the-wall San Francisco bookstore.
The Great Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon out of his life as a San Francisco Web-design drone — and serendipity, sheer curiosity, and the ability to climb a ladder like a monkey has landed him a new gig working the night shift at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. But after just a few days on the job, Clay begins to realize that this store is even more curious than the name suggests. There are only a few customers, but they come in repeatedly and never seem to actually buy anything, instead “checking out” impossibly obscure volumes from strange corners of the store, all according to some elaborate, long-standing arrangement with the gnomic Mr. Penumbra.
The store must be a front for something larger, Clay concludes, and soon he’s embarked on a complex analysis of the customers’ behavior and roped his friends into helping to figure out just what’s going on. But once they bring their findings to Mr. Penumbra, it turns out the secrets extend far outside the walls of the bookstore.
With irresistible brio and dazzling intelligence, Robin Sloan has crafted a literary adventure story for the twenty-first century, evoking both the fairy-tale charm of Haruki Murakami and the enthusiastic novel-of-ideas wizardry of Neal Stephenson or a young Umberto Eco, but with a unique and feisty sensibility that’s rare to the world of literary fiction.
Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore is exactly what it sounds like: an establishment you have to enter and will never want to leave, a modern-day cabinet of wonders ready to give a jolt of energy to every curious reader, no matter the time of day. (Amazon)
BOOK REVIEW
Mr Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore reminds me of a cult movie classic combo – Hackers meets The Goonies – with a helping of Gen Y style thrown in.
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Wednesday, April 10th, 2013
Seduction Synopsis
 From the author of The Book of Lost Fragrances comes a haunting novel about a grieving woman who discovers the lost journal of novelist Victor Hugo, awakening a mystery that spans centuries
In 1843, novelist Victor Hugo’s beloved nineteen-year-old daughter drowned. Ten years later, Hugo began participating in hundreds of séances to reestablish contact with her. In the process, he claimed to have communed with the likes of Plato, Galileo, Shakespeare, Dante, Jesus — and even the Devil himself. Hugo’s transcriptions of these conversations have all been published. Or so it was believed.
Recovering from her own losses, mythologist Jac L’Etoile arrives on the Isle of Jersey — where Hugo conducted the séances — hoping to uncover a secret about the island’s Celtic roots. But the man who’s invited her there, a troubled soul named Theo Gaspard, has hopes she’ll help him discover something quite different — Hugo’s lost conversations with someone called the Shadow of the Sepulcher.
What follows is an intricately plotted and atmospheric tale of suspense with a spellbinding ghost story at its heart, by one of America’s most gifted and imaginative novelists. (Atria Books)
BOOK REVIEW
Seduction is the fifth novel in the very successful Reincarnationist Series from prolific author M J Rose. Last year I had the pleasure of reading the fourth book in this series The Book of Lost Fragrances and as well as being highly entertained, I was struck by the quality of Rose’s writing. Her artistic and lyrical prose shone again in Seduction.
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Thursday, April 4th, 2013
The Wild Girl Synopsis
 Dortchen Wild fell in love with Wilhelm Grimm the first time she saw him.
Growing up in the German kingdom of Hessen-Cassel in the early nineteenth century, Dortchen Wild is irresistibly drawn to the boy next door; the young and handsome fairy-tale scholar Wilhelm Grimm.
It is a time of war, tyranny and terror. Napolean Bonaparte wants to conquer all of Europe, and Hessen-Cassel is one of the first kingdoms to fall. Forced to live under oppressive French rule, the Grimm brothers decide to save the old tales that had once been told by the firesides of houses grand and small all over the land.
Dortchen knows many beautiful old stories, such as ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘The Frog King’ and ‘Six Swans’. As she tells them to Wilhelm, their love blossoms. Yet the Grimm family is desperately poor, and Dortchen’s father has other plans for his daughter. Marriage is an impossible dream.
Dortchen can only hope that happy endings are not just the stuff of fairy tales… (From the book cover)
BOOK REVIEW
The Wild Girl is another novel from Kate Forsyth that is terribly difficult to do justice to in a review. Just as in her previous novel Bitter Greens, Forsyth delves much deeper into the origins of the fairytales we grew up with, adding her innate sensitivity and passion for people to produce a very adult tale. She acknowledges the greatest characters are often born from hardship, and does not shy away from the brutality of life, in all its forms.
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Wednesday, February 27th, 2013
Watering Heaven Synopsis
 What would you do if you found out your girlfriend laid an egg every time she had sex? Who would you be if you were invited to a party in Beijing but had to make up a brand-new identity for six weeks?
Peter Tieryas Liu’s Watering Heaven is a travelogue of and requiem for the American dream in all its bizarre manifestations and a surreal, fantastic journey through the streets, alleys, and airports of China. Whether it’s a monk who uses acupuncture needles to help him fly or a city filled with rats about to be exterminated so that the mayor can win his re-election bid, be prepared to laugh, swoon, and shudder at the answers Liu offers in this provocative debut collection. (Amazon)
BOOK REVIEW
Watering Heaven by Peter Tieryas Liu is a collection of 20 stories ranging from 2 to 17 pages in length. This collection is an eclectic mix of profundity with surrealism and the avante garde. (more…)
Monday, February 18th, 2013
As The Lightning Comes Synopsis
 This fast paced adventure is like The Bible Code meets The Chariots of the Gods. It weaves together the fascinating themes of ancient astronauts, angel visitations, hidden Bible codes and end time prophecies, with an international conspiracy thrown in.
The story follows the quest of cynical lawyer John Marshall to locate the Tree of Knowledge and then to pass on the key to it to the one called the Son of Man. Marshall unwittingly becomes the last custodian of the key when he tries to come to the rescue of an elderly Eastern wise man.
He teams up with fellow American, evangelist and one time Middle Eastern linguistic expert, Marc Arnold. Arnold ropes in the assistance of longtime friend, Kirsty Gordon, a Scottish aristocrat and archaeologist. Their quest across three continents is thwarted by dark forces apparently hell bent on grasping the key from them for an as yet unknown nefarious purpose.
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Tuesday, February 12th, 2013
The Best of All Possible Worlds Synopsis
 Karen Lord’s debut novel, the multiple award winning Redemption in Indigo, announced the appearance of a major new talent — a strong, brilliantly innovative voice fusing Caribbean storytelling traditions and speculative fiction with subversive wit and incisive intellect.
Now Lord returns with a second novel that exceeds the promise of her first. The Best of All Possible Worlds is a stunning science fiction epic that is also a beautifully wrought, deeply moving love story.
A proud and reserved alien society finds its homeland destroyed in an unprovoked act of aggression, and the survivors have no choice but to reach out to the indigenous humanoids of their adopted world, to whom they are distantly related. They wish to preserve their cherished way of life but come to discover that in order to preserve their culture, they may have to change it forever.
Now a man and a woman from these two clashing societies must work together to save this vanishing race—and end up uncovering ancient mysteries with far-reaching ramifications. As their mission hangs in the balance, this unlikely team — one cool and cerebral, the other fiery and impulsive—just may find in each other their own destinies . . . and a force that transcends all. (Amazon)
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Tuesday, January 15th, 2013
The Best of All Possible Worlds Synopsis
 The Best of All Possible Worlds is a stunning science fiction epic that is also a beautifully wrought, deeply moving love story.
A proud and reserved alien society finds its homeland destroyed in an unprovoked act of aggression, and the survivors have no choice but to reach out to the indigenous humanoids of their adopted world, to whom they are distantly related. They wish to preserve their cherished way of life but come to discover that in order to preserve their culture, they may have to change it forever.
Now a man and a woman from these two clashing societies must work together to save this vanishing race—and end up uncovering ancient mysteries with far-reaching ramifications. As their mission hangs in the balance, this unlikely team—one cool and cerebral, the other fiery and impulsive—just may find in each other their own destinies . . . and a force that transcends all. (B&N)
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