Wren Handman's Blog, page 4
June 28, 2019
Meatspace Book Trailer Release
One of the best things about signing on with Parliament House is getting to be on the same stage as some truly incredible authors. I’m always excited to see what’s coming out next, and today I have something really cool for you – a book trailer for the upcoming Meatspace.
Uploading to a virtual world is a theme I really enjoy. You’ll see it explored in different ways in a lot of media, and this is one take you don’t want to miss.
Meat Space, by Asa Tait. Forthcoming from The Parliament House – look for it this fall!
Eternal life Inside is a digital paradise if you can make rent. Jim Chord can’t.
He already sold off the last of his childhood memories. The love of his life has ghosted him. He has nowhere left to run. When a trillionaire goes missing, Jim has one last shot to track him down and earn a reward that will keep him Inside forever. But the magnate seems to be dead, and that simply doesn’t happen. Not here. Not to someone with money.
The solution to this impossible mystery can only be found on the Outside – the grimy, blood-soaked physical world that Jim had happily forgotten. Now he must face the people and sensations he’d abandoned in a world where nothing is free and death is very real.
June 14, 2019
This Savage Song – Review
image borrowed with love
https://writtenwordworlds.com/2017/06/23/this-savage-song-book-review/
I loved EVERYTHING about this book. Absolutely every last thing. Schwab clearly has a fascination with the nature of evil and good and the conflicts therein, and she does a lovely job of writing beautiful, haunted characters who think they’re worse than they are, or want to be worse than they are.
This is a genuinely unique take on vampires, which is REALLY hard to do. They don’t call them vampires, of course, but they clearly are, and they’re really NEAT. Each monster is created when someone commits an evil act, and they’re tied in some way to the nature of that sin. It’s really beautiful and interesting and fun.
It’s definitely YA, so keep that in mind, but if you’re a fan of the genre then I say dive in! I cannot wait to read the sequel, it’s definitely next up.
June 3, 2019
The Summer Tree – Review
I read this series in high school and adored it, so I decided it was time to dive back into the world. I’ve read other Kay since, and I’ve liked every one.
Unfortunately, Summer Tree does suffer from “written in the 1980s” syndrome. Fantasy has just gotten SO MUCH better since then, as has Kay’s writing (his recent stuff is phenomenal). It’s VERY Lord of the Rings, with some Norse mythology thrown in for kicks. Humans, elves, dwarves, evil power vanquished and rising again, the whole nine yards. I really enjoyed Dave’s character, but everyone else felt sort of interchangeable, and there’s a whole lot of ancient lore that bogs the story down.
Still, I found myself being drawn in by the plot and the high tensions, and I genuinely liked the section with Dave and the Riders. The horrible rapey stuff at the end was really unnecessary (oh 1980s, I’m glad you’re over), and I could have done without the friends letting their suicidal friend kill himself since it was for a good cause… ahem. Yeah. But overall, it had enough going for it that nostalgia won through.
I wouldn’t recommend it to a new reader of Kay, because he has far better books, but at some point I will likely read the next one.
May 26, 2019
River of Teeth – Review
This is a fun little novella set in an alternate version of the United States where hippos were brought in to the Mississippi and domesticated.
The characters are a bit weirdly queer for a book set in the 1890s – one of the characters is genderqueer and uses ‘they’, which felt really unreaslistic, but I suppose if it’s an AU and there are hippos, we can assume also it’s a totally different society where racism and sexism aren’t a thing any more, either.
The pacing of this felt very, very weird. It was like it was an entire novel but they just skipped all the boring bits and only told you the highlights. So it was fast, never boring, but there was no time to sit on everything. It just kept MOVING and then it was over. I think it would make a great movie. As a book it was fun, and an easy read, but didn’t give any time or depth to characters, plot, action… anything, really.
Also, I had to read the ending three times to figure out what happened. But maybe that was just me.
Lift – Review
The poems run the gamut from lovely and simple to blistering and full of repressed pain. Definitely recommend the read.
May 23, 2019
Before the Devil Takes You – Review
Some books are just so atmospheric, so all-encompassing, that you feel you can’t quite shake them when you put them down. They follow swiftly in your shadow, murmuring soft echoes that cling to your hair and pool at the small of your back. Before the Devil Breaks You is such a book.
I didn’t really think books could be scary until I read Bray. Granted, horror isn’t usually a genre that appeals to me, so I probably hadn’t read very much of it. But scary situations aren’t really scary to me unless people I love are facing them, and that’s what The Devil does so well. Each character is uniquely lovely, and though some get significantly more screen-time than others (Henry and Ling in particular felt a bit shafted this book), Bray does an overall good job of balancing the many stories she’s juggling at this point.
Halfway through the book I remarked to my partner that I couldn’t figure out how there would be a fourth book when everything seemed to be racing so swiftly towards a conclusion, but the book ended without feeling like the plot had been stretched out at all. There were some tear-jerker moments, a whole lot of surprises and reveals, and now I am just utterly desperate for the next one.
Bray, I wish you wrote faster. Otherwise, you are perfect.
May 20, 2019
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May 15, 2019
The Glass town game – review
There were parts of this book that I really enjoyed, and parts where I felt the plot really slowed down and suffered from the utter imagination of the setting. Let me explain…
A lot of people love Alice in Wonderland, but I found it hard to get into because the world was so fantastical that there weren’t any stakes. That was the problem I had with the Glass Town Game. The first part of the novel gets to know the Bronte siblings and their life in England, and I utterly adored it. The characters are charming, their grief is realistic and honest, and their minds are delightful. It was lovely.
But then they entered this magical world, very Narnia-esque, and it all fell apart a bit for me. It was SO magical and SO fantastical that it felt like it existed mostly to be lovely and strange, and nothing was actually happening or moving forward. That went on for far more pages than a children’s book should have (it also felt more like a children’s book than I expected), but eventually the children got a goal and things picked back up, and the second half of the book was a marked improvement. By the conclusion I was very glad I didn’t give up, as I almost did near the end of that slump period.
Overall the writing was lovely, the characters were excellent, but the plot was a little too child-focused and wandering for my taste.
October 4, 2018
Acquisition Announcement!
So thrilled to share the news: In Restless Dreams has been acquired by Parliament House!
If you’re familiar with this incredible press, you should be. They have gorgeous covers, they do exclusively fantasy and science fiction, and have I mentioned their Instagram? The aesthetic is to die for (seriously, go check it out!).
It looks like In Restless Dreams is slated for an early 2020 release, so details will follow in the next several months. So excited to embark on this next chapter (I need to apologize for that pun right now!) with them.
Acquisition Announcement
If you're familiar with this incredible press, you should be. They have gorgeous covers, they do exclusively fantasy and science fiction, and have I mentioned their Instagram? The aesthetic is to die for (seriously, go check it out!).
It looks like In Restless Dreams is slated for an early 2020 release, so details will follow in the next several months. So excited to embark on this next chapter (I need to apologize for that pun right now!) with them.
http://www.parliamenthousepress.com/s...
