Hey, all y'all steampunk folks, you may want to check out Kate Elliott's Cold Magic, which is a YA-ish icepunk novel with a smart athletic female lead, something of a woobie in the male lead, and a brilliantly endearing secondary male character, all set in an alternative 19th-C England where the glaciers never retreated, Christianity never developed, refugees from West Africa came to Europe and mixed with Celtic tribes to form a multi-cultural society, and the Cold Mages are using their elemental magic to fight off the egalitarian forces of the oncoming industrial revolution.
I really enjoyed it, and I suspect y'all might, too.
So Oprah chose FREEDOM for her final book club.
I just watched the episode and it is NOT her final selection. She is going to do book club selections all season and plans on continuing the book club on her new network after the show ends, fwiw.
I went over to check out
Cold Magic
at Amazon and one of the recommendations under it was
Rosemary and Rue
about a half-fairy PI. I thought it looked interesting -- has anyone here read it?
I just bought Cold Magic on the iPhone to read in the ER. Thanks for the rec.
and one of the recommendations under it was Rosemary and Rue about a half-fairy PI.
Isn't that the book by P-Cow's friend, Seanan?
Yep, David. I read it; I liked it, but I wasn't blown away by it.
Rosemary & Rue is an urban fantasy set in SF with an adult woman (with an interesting history) as the lead. It's not one of the half-naked kickass female lead stories, a la Laurell K. Hamilton. I liked it well enough, but not enough to get the next one--urban fantasy just isn't my beautiful cake anymore.
But McGuire won the Campbell Award for best new writer, on the strength of that and Feed, a post-zombie apocalypse political thriller about Web 3.0. (She published that one as Mira Grant, if you want to look for it.) I liked that one better than R&R, myself, and definitely intend to read the sequel.
Urban fantasy that is not like the Urban fantasy that is not your beautiful cake. "Iron Dragon's Daughter" by Michael Swanwick.
No guarantees, but really good and if not your beautiful cake, might still be your cup of tea, or hot beverage of choice.
The Wikipedia article [link] calls it "anti-fantasy" though I think of it more a social realist fairy tale. It is a gritty urban fairyland rather than elves in our world. And believable. High school kids compete to be the wicker king and queen because they they a year of unlimited sex, drugs, scholastic and athletic achievment and top social status. So being burned to death at the end of the year is not too big a price to pay for that. I would swear half the kids I went to high school with would have taken that deal.
Typo, I actually own a copy of that. I just... haven't read it. And right now it's buried in the many boxes of books in my garage. Some day I'll get around to it.
I didn't like Rosemary and Rue as much as I did the second one. The character grows on you.
