February Top Picks

Frogkisser! by Garth Nix
Release Date:  Late Feb
I’ve enjoyed reading and selling Garth‘s books for years, so I’m always excited about a new one. That would be enough, but happily, there’s more. I’m also a fan of the folklore inspired fantasy that I tend to think of as ‘fractured fairy tales’. Stories that take something familiar in unexpected directions. In this case it’s a girl with a frog in search of a wizard. Of course the girl, Anya is a princess and the frog is a prince. But it’s not her frog/prince exactly, since the froggily interrupted true love was between the prince and Anya’s sister. While love is said to be able to overcome any obstacle, sibling manipulation is very effective too. Which is why Anya is now setting out on a dangerous quest across the kingdom frog-in-hand to seek a wizard to break the curse and thwart the plans of her evil stepfather. The course of true love never did run smooth. Sometimes it hops.

The Sudden Appearance of Hope by Claire North
Release Date:  Early Feb
I’m a big fan of Claire North, and when this book came out last year in the large format I wrote a long review for it which is up on the website. Since the paperback version is out this month I thought another quick mention was in order. Like her earlier books this is a stand-alone work and difficult to categorise. It’s got a mostly contemporary setting, a few vaguely science-fiction elements and a large dose of odd. It’s told in first person by Hope, a young woman who vanishes from people’s memory a few minutes after the stop looking at her. As the reader discovers, this is very useful and extremely limiting. When Hope discovers the dark underbelly of ‘Perfection’, a social/lifestyle app that supposedly helps users achieve the perfect life, she sets out to expose them and in the process starts a chain of events that even to world’s most forgettable girl may not be able to hide from.

King’s Cage by Victoria Aveyard
Release Date:  Early Feb
This is the third of the projected four book Red Queen series. It’s a fairly light YA series, but it has an interesting selection of genre tropes. It’s got a fantasy setting with two races in conflict. The ‘Silvers’ are dominant, pale, bleed silver blood and each has an ‘ability’. These abilities resemble to sorts of things you would expect from the super-hero genre, extra strength, control over particular elements, telepathy and the like. The ‘Red’ are an underclass of normal humans who bleed red and don’t have abilities. Or at least that was what people thought at the beginning of the series. The end of the first book revealed that there is an underground of Reds with powers and sympathetic Silvers and the second with the capture of Mare Barrow by the King of the Silvers. Mare is the ‘Lightning Girl, a powered Red and for many the face of the rebellion. Civil war looms and both factions have a use for Mare with or without her consent. The war that is coming will pit blood against blood and brother against brother and test friendship, family and love.

Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman
Release Date:  Early Feb
Fans of Neil Gaiman‘s books will already be aware of his fondness for myths and legends. They form the inspiration for many of his novels and comics, even if the final result is far removed from the original material. This book is a bit different. In it Gaiman retells a selection of classic stories from Norse Mythology for a contemporary audience, while trying to keep the flavour of the originals. There is a rough chronology, beginning with the Norse creation myths and the origins of the gods and goddesses and then moving through  the tales that define the various god’s personalities and rivalries before ending with the Norse apocalypse, Ragnarok. This is a great book for anyone who is curious about Norse myths but who doesn’t really want to wade too deep into historical folklore analysis and saga translation, though I suspect a few people who read it will. It’s fairly short, coming in at about two-hundred and eighty pages, but it’s a fun read and the structure and pacing are such that it feels the right length.

Barsk: The Elephant’s Graveyard by Lawrence Schoen
Release Date:  Mid Jan
This is one from a new author. Lawrence Schoen has been writing science fiction for a while, but as far as I can tell this is his first book with a major publisher. It’s big universe science fiction with an interesting twist in that there are no people. The signs of the great works of the human race are everywhere, but humanity itself is extinct. Instead it is the creatures born of lost human sciences that have inherited the galaxy. Animals that were changed into walking, talking sentient beings thrive on planets throughout the galaxy. The least of these, according to the others, is the Fant, anthropomorphic descendants of Elephants. Exiled to the ghetto world of Barsk they support themselves through the development and sales of pharmaceuticals. The most remarkable of their drugs is called Koph, which allow some users to communicate with the recently dead. Forces off-world would like to wrest the secret of Koph production from the Fant at any cost and on Barsk a Fant ‘speaker with the dead’ named Jorl uses his gift to investigate the suicide of a friend. These two unconnected will events combine to uncover a truth that some on Barsk will do anything to keep hidden and have consequences that no-one could have imagined.

Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly by Adrian McKinty
Release Date: Late Jan
This is the sixth in a series of crime novels set in Belfast in the 1980s. The changes in technology over the last thirty years mean that this is wholly different sort of crime novel. No mobile phones or internet. No reliable DNA or CCTV. This and old style police procedural set in one of the most volatile places at the time. It’s an era of political and social turmoil and violence and terrorism known to the rest of the world by that wholly inadequate epithet ‘The Troubles’. But in the midst of this there are still crimes that have to be investigated and sometimes even solved. This time, Detective Inspector Sean Duffy has a corpse with an arrow in its back and not much in the way of cluexs. Pursuing this investigation will take Duffy into dark and dangerous places, and find him high on a lonely bog with three masked men and digging his own grave at gunpoint. Here it all comes to a head; Duffy’s run-ins with internal affairs, his troubled relationship and the enemies he can’t identify but knows he has. He’s risking his life, relationship, career and integrity and knows he may not come out with all of them intact. Time to choose.

Lost Gods by Gerald Brom
Release Date:  Early Jan
Gerald Brom or just Brom used to be famous for his work as an artist, often on the covers of other peoples books. Recently he’s began to make name for himself as a talented author as well and his latest book, Lost Gods is only going to add to that perception. The short description is that it’s part Orpheus, part Dante and filtered through Brom‘s dark and vivid imagination. Chet Moran is an ex-con trying to make a new life with his pregnant wife, Trish. But his death at the hands of demonic creature is the beginning of this story, not the end. Chet finds himself in a wholly new reality full of dark and ancient magic. There is no way that Chet can return to the land of the living, but he knows that those who killed him are a danger to Trish as well and maybe in his new state he can protect them. Full of all sorts of imagery from multiple afterlife/underworld mythologies this is a very cool adventure-redemption story. It’s also got some amazing interior artwork that you can guarantee are exactly what the author envisioned, ‘cos he did them.  

Carve the Mark by Veronica Roth
Release Date:  Mid Jan
This is the new book by the author of the blockbuster Divergent trilogy. While this book will appeal to fans of that series, it’s a got a few more science-fiction elements. Carve The Mark is set a galaxy where a space-faring humanity lives on multiple worlds. Connecting them all is The Current, the underlying energy of the Galaxy itself. In people this manifests in the Currentgift that every person manifests. The Currentgifts are varied in nature and in power, and while most people think they should serve as guides for what they are meant to do with their lives, others use their gift to control and enslave. Cyra is the sister of the brutal ruler of the Shotet. Her gift is pain and she uses it at her brother’s command. Akos and his brother are from the Peaceful planet of Thuve. Captured by the Shoket, his gift could keep him from harm, but they have his brother as well and so he finds himself in Cyra’s hands. But neither of these young people are what they seem, and the events that rise from their meeting will change both their destinies and maybe even those of whole worlds.