*NEW RELEASE SPECIAL* Review of The Green Man’s Silence – Book 3 of The Green Man series by Juliet E. McKenna #Brainfluffbookreview #GreenMansSilencebookreview

I’m a fan of McKenna’s work – see my reviews of Dangerous Waters – Book 1 of the Hadrumal Crisis, Darkening Skies – Book 2 of the Hadrumal Crisis, Irons in the Fire – Book 1 of the Lescari Revolution, Blood in the Water – Book 2 of the Lescari Revolution, Banners in the Wind – Book 3 of the Lescari Revolution, The Green Man’s Heir – Book 1 of the Green Man series, The Green Man’s Foe – Book 2 of the Green Man series and the Cover Love feature I did of her canon of work to date. So I was extremely excited to get my hands on The Green Man’s Silence the latest book in this delightfully original series.

BLURB: Daniel Mackmain has always been a loner. As a dryad’s son, he can see the supernatural alongside everyday reality, and that’s not something he can easily share. Perhaps visiting East Anglia to stay with Finele Wicken and her family will be different. They have their own ties to the uncanny. But something is amiss in the depths of the Fens. Creatures Dan has never encountered outside folk tales are growing uneasy, even hostile. He soon learns they have good reason. Can he help them before they retaliate and disaster strikes the unsuspecting locals? Can the Green Man help Dan in a landscape dominated by water for centuries, where the oaks were cut down aeons ago?

A modern fantasy rooted in the ancient myths and folklore of the British Isles.

REVIEW: This further set of adventures takes Dan right out of his comfort zone – not much in the way of forests and trees out on the Fens. And he’s staying over with Fin’s family – people he doesn’t want to let down, particularly as he isn’t completely sure about where his ongoing relationship with her is going. To complicate things further, the Green Man isn’t saying much about the emerging crisis, either.

McKenna has been clever in moving Dan away from his usual haunts, where we already know he has a certain amount of power. Now, both personally and as half-Fae, he is out of his depth. It was enjoyable to learn more about Fin and her background – seeing her within her own family and contrasting her sense of belonging, in comparison to Dan’s sense of isolation, brought home why he is quite so wary. It also nicely raised the stakes when recalling his criminal record, so that when problems get sufficiently out of hand to come to the attention of the police, Dan is at an immediate, major disadvantage. This further compromises him, as he deals with an entitled, arrogant character very sure of his own place in the scheme of things.

Once again, the fae characters ping off the page with their sense of otherness and evident threat – the hobs and their unnerving powers, and those sylphs… Who knew that creatures of the air could be so lethal? McKenna further flexes her skill in writing action with a particularly dramatic fight scene in the middle of a storm that had me holding my breath when Dan and his landrover take a beating. It makes a doozy of a climax.

While The Green Man’s Silence can be read as a standalone, I recommend you get hold of at least one of the other books in the series first, in order to get the best out of this outstanding book. Highly recommended for fantasy fans who are looking for well-written fae adventures with a difference.
10/10

Castellan the Black and his Wise Draconic Musings on Family Life #BrainfluffCastellanthe Black #WiseDragonicMusingsonaFamilyLife #PickyEaters

When interceding in a family quarrel, don’t be afraid to roar louder than anyone else.

Castellan the Black, mighty dragon warrior, features in my short story Picky Eaters, written to provide a humorous escape from all the stuff that isn’t happening on Wyvern Peak… All proceeds for the duration of its publishing life are donated to mental health charities.

Friday Faceoff – If music be the food of love, play on

This meme was started by Books by Proxy, whose fabulous idea was to compare UK and US book covers and decide which is we prefer and is currently hosted by Lynn’s Book Blog. This week the theme is a cover featuring a musical instrument, so I’ve selected a real gem – The Future Falls – Book 3 of The Enchantment Emporium series by Tanya Huff.

 

This cover, produced by Titan Books in November 2014 seems to be the default cover. I like it well enough – it’s classy with the gold on red. But it gives little hint of the naughty, sharp-edged fantasy story that lurks behind those thick red curtains…

 

This edition was produced by Daw in November 2014 and I far prefer it as it gives an idea of the story. Both the dragon and the musician feature heavily in the adventure and I think particularly like the fact we get to see only bits of the dragon – but what we do see lets us know that he is magnificent. There are only the two choices this week – which one is your favourite?

ANNDDD…

La libreria di Beppe is featuring Dying for Space as part of the blog tour

Review of The Masked City – Book 2 of The Invisible Library series by Genevieve Cogman

I recently completed The Invisible Library and loved it – see my review here. So I tracked down this sequel at our local library, full of anticipation as most of my blogging buddies said it was even better than the first book.

Librarian-spy Irene is working undercover in an alternative London when her assistant Kai goes missing. She discovers he’s been kidnapped by the fae faction and the repercussions could be fatal. Not just for Kai, but for whole worlds.

Irene, the cool, rather detached protagonist who is starting to work her way up the Library hierarchy as her work is starting to come to the attention of those who matter – is no longer cool or detached. Her young, impulsive and very powerful assistant, Kai, has been kidnapped and she is tasked with the job of retrieving him. Just to add to the gravity of the situation, Kai is a dragon prince. And the immensely powerful dragons will take it as a declaration of war if they can prove it is the Fae who are at the bottom of the kidnapping.

I love the setup here. The dragon-controlled worlds tend to be very organised and logical, whereas those run by the Fae are infested with chaos, so by their very nature, dragons and Fae loathe and distrust each other. The Library and its staff try to keep neutral between the two factions – that’s the theory, anyway. But they, too, cannot cope with worlds permeated wholly by Fae-inspired chaos, which can twist and poison their purpose.

So Irene sets off in pursuit of Kai as part of Lord Silver’s entourage, a Fae lord, who is opposed to the faction who have kidnapped the young dragon prince. The world she ends up in approximates to a Victorian Venice, complete with St Mark’s Square and a Campanile. This story is brimming with incident and tension throughout – it would make a marvellous film – as Irene has to battle her way through a hostile landscape to try and discover where Kai is being kept. The slight steampunk flourishes that appear in the first book are given a fuller rein here, particularly during a marvellous chase in magical train.

It was almost painful to put this book down as the story pulled me in and held me captivated until the end, which is also very well handled. For fans of well-told alternate world stories with strong magical systems and lots of tension.
10/10

Teaser Tuesday – 10th January, 2017

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by The Purple Booker.
Anyone can play along! Just do the following:
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

This is my choice of the day:
Emperor of the Fireflies – Book 2 of the Tide Dragons series by Sarah Ash
4% Kai swivelled his head around to try to make out what had become of Masao. And as the inexorable pull of the outgoing tide tugged Kai further out to sea, away from the contours of the familiar shoreline, he saw a white-haired man crawl out of the receding tide. Naked, water streaming from his body, the distant figure pushed himself up to hands and knees on the damp sand. As Kai stared, he saw color flood into the man’s long white hair, turning it as dark as if someone had poured a pot of ink over his head.

BLURB: Kai and Masao, once enemies, are now condemned to the sea by the Tide Dragons’ Sacrifice. If Hotaru, the new emperor, is unable to summon the Tide Dragons of Ebb and Flood at the Autumn Moon Festival, he will forfeit the right to rule Cipangu. The two Sacrifices face a desperate race against time to free themselves from this ancient curse before Hotaru binds them with forbidden magic to obey his will – forever.

Sakami, Kai’s lover, has become a kitsune, a fox spirit. She is determined to do all in her power to save him – but is Hotaru, aided by his treacherous shikigami, Kurika, just too formidable an opponent to overcome?

I read and reviewed the first book in this Japanese epic fantasy adventure here, so when Sarah Ash let me know the second book is now available, I rushed over to Amazon and snapped it up. Now I’ve reacquainted myself with the story and the stakes involved, I’m settling in for another slice of this wonderful world.

Review of Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton

I’d had a slight dry spell regarding my reading – two books in a row that I hadn’t cared about enough to write a review. In fact one of them still makes me cross whenever I think about the sloppy, offhand ending… So I was relieved when Himself suggested I give this a go, with the comment, “It’s really good – I’ve never read anything else quite like it…” Given how many books Himself gets through in a year, means it must be something special. And, as ever, he’s right.

A family of dragons gathers on the occasion of the death of their father, the elder Bon Agornin. As is custom, they must eat the body. But even as Bon’s last remains are polished off, his sons and daughters must all jostle for a position in the new hierarchy. While the youngest son seeks greedy remuneration through the courts of law, the eldest son – a dragon of the cloth – agonises over his father’s deathbed confession. While one daughter is caught between loyalty to her family by blood and her family by marriage, another daughter follows her heart – only to discover the great cost of true love… Here is a Victorian story of political intrigue, family ties and political intrigue, set in a world of dragons – a world, quite literally, red in tooth and claw.

If you thoroughly enjoy Fantasy, particularly depictions of dragons along the lines of Anne McCaffrey and Robin Hobbs – but also like Victorian novels, especially those by Anthony Trollope, then Tooth and Claw is sheer delight. It could so easily been a tale of offbeat whimsy, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But Walton has given us a few extra twists. Dragons in her world are obsessed with social position in a strictly hierarchical society. But, in order to ‘get on’, you need to be able to defend your position. With force. So females need protection as they don’t possess claws or breathe fire, like large, powerful males. And it is all about size. Dragons are constantly comparing their size – and will devour sickly children, elderly servants that have outlived their usefulness, and the bodies of their parents. For nothing nourishes and increases a dragon’s size like dragon flesh. So servants – who have bound wings to stop them flying off and escaping – rarely grow beyond seven or eight feet long because they simply don’t have access to dragon flesh.

Another interesting kink in this tale, is that female dragons are carefully protected because if they get too close to a male, they turn a bridal pink. If the proprieties have all been observed, this is fine – but if a male manages to corner a young female against her will and she flushes pink, she is ruined if he doesn’t marry her. So we have an interesting parallel with the Victorian obsession of keeping unmarried girls pure – and how fragile their reputations are if they encounter an unscrupulous male.

There is also a fascinating sub-plot about religion, where a more socially acceptable version has superseded an older and a more troubling account of how dragonkind managed to prevail against a race that sounds uncannily like humans. Pockets of high-born dragons still worship the older sect, but have to do so in secret and risk social disgrace, even though theoretically, there is no religious discrimination… It’s all very well done.

By adopting the viewpoint of the omniscient narrator, and providing details of each character’s social class and standing, Walton manages to give us the same cosy feel-good atmosphere we get from Austen and Trollope’s books. Which reads very enjoyably when set against the inevitable explosions of visceral violence that underpins dragon society…

Of course, Walton is not just discussing dragon priorities – Trollope’s books are all about power and ambition. Who has it, who wants it and how far they are prepared to go to achieve it. And how the romantic heroine will cope in a world where her appearance and wit are all she has to offer, when respectable employment is out of the question. Walton could have so very easily made a real mess of this conceit – but in handling all her characters with such humour and adroitness, she presents us with another mirror to our own natures – one red in tooth and claw.
10/10