Angela Korra'ti

It’s a bit of an odd experience reading a graphic novel on an iPhone screen, but thanks to a freebie PDF from Tor.com, that’s exactly what I was able to do with Three Shadows by Cyril Pedrosa, a work that otherwise I would never have encountered. So props to Tor.com for giving its members a chance to check it out.

The story is inspired, according to the author/artist’s notes, by the death of the child of close friends. What we get for a story, then, is a sort of haunting litle folktale about how parents Louis and Lise and their son Joachim are living a peaceful life until three shadowy figures arrive on their farm, watching and waiting. Soon enough it becomes clear that the three have come for Joachim–and Louis promptly flees with his son, willing to go to any lengths to keep the boy from death, even if it means losing his own humanity. Art-wise, each page is filled with character and fluid detail, even on a tiny iPhone screen; full size, I fully expect it would be stunning.

The flow of the story was sometimes difficult for me to follow, but I don’t know if this was the author’s own story style and sensibilities, or whether it’s an artifact of the work having been translated from the French. Eventually I simply let the story flow as it would, which helped–it gave it leeway to be as haunting and sometimes surreal as it liked.

I wouldn’t recommend this to parents with young children or to folks who might in general shy away from the eventual fate of Joachim (although I will note that that was tastefully and lovingly done). Still, though, the work is well worth a look. Four stars.

The Chocolatier’s Wife is a delightful little novel, nicely blending fantasy, romance, and a touch of murder mystery all together into a single confection. Tamsin Bey is a herb-mage from Tarnia, a northern country that was once at war with the southern land of Berengeny, and the two lands are still prickly towards each other after five hundred years. But their peoples have one thing in common: the spells of the wise-women that reveal to every living soul who their fated spouse will be. For Tamsin, hers is William of Berengeny.

As the two grow up they come to know one another via extensive letters, while William goes to sea and Tamsin grows proficient at her herb-craft. William, though, does not want to remain a sea captain forever, and he shocks his family by wanting to come home and establish himself as, of all things, the proprietor of a chocolate shop. Before he can establish himself, however, he is framed for a murder–and it is his arrest that prompts Tamsin to come down out of the north at last, for although she has yet to meet her intended face to face, she is absolutely convinced there is no way he could have committed the crime.

The story glides back and forth between Tamsin’s efforts to ingratiate herself to William’s standoffish relations, to uncover the truth of the murder, and her and William’s own quietly blossoming feelings for each other. Tamsin and William had positively Austenesque chemistry, and the letters they exchange, shown at the beginnings of the chapters, are little works of beauty and character development all by themselves. The setting through which they moved very much added to that feel, invoking the impression of an England-like land where magic goes hand in hand with well-mannered society. Speer’s prose is lovely, and oftentimes lushly detailed; I came out of the book thoroughly satisfied, as if after the best of chocolate truffles. Five stars.

Note to folks: The Chocolatier’s Wife is a Drollerie Press novel, currently available only in electronic form, but I do highly recommend checking it out if you are willing to read an ebook! And if y’all buy enough copies, you can help Drollerie get it into print, too.

Michael Boatman’s The Revenant Road is another Drollerie Press novel, one which by rights I should stay impartial about, but that’s tough to do when the novel is just that good. This one straddles the line between horror and dark fantasy, as it has a lot of elements in it that live under the aegis of urban fantasy these days. For my money, though, it’s more properly horror.

Obadiah Grudge is a best-selling horror author, but for some time now he’s been discontent with the lack of life and depth in his work. But when his long-estranged father is killed, he discovers a huge reason for the flatness of his writing, one he’s been in denial about for most of his life: there are real monsters in the world, and it’s been his father’s job to hunt them.

Now that his father is dead, that job is to be his.

As you might expect, Obadiah fights this fate tooth and claw for a while. As you might also expect, he possesses certain powerful and highly rare abilities that mark him to be hunted by the monsters once tracked by his father. Eventually, though, he joins forces with his father’s partner to stop a string of supernatural killings in Seattle, where he must not only face his destiny, but also the thing that killed his dad.

This is all around a solid read, and I got a particular snicker out of the monsters gunning for Obadiah taking on the forms of critics who’d previously savaged his work. If you’d like to check out the book for yourself, it’s one of Drollerie’s print titles, so you can ask your local bookstore to order it today! Four stars.

In the last of my Elizabeth Lowell Summer 2009 Marathon, I’m jumping out of the historicals and into a contemporary, Remember Summer. I was hoping that I’d get closer in general flavor to the sorts of suspense novels Lowell’s been writing for much of her recent career, and at least in some ways, that’s what I got; it was easy to see the progression from her historicals to this novel and on up to her later work. Still, this one’s got its feet planted way more on the romance side of the fence than on the suspense one.

I’ll give it props for the setting, though: it’s the Summer Olympics, and our heroine Raine Chandler-Smith is on the US equestrian team, aiming for the gold. But OHNOEZ, her father is a government official of Unspecified but Incredibly High Rank, and there’s an assassin on the loose! Our hero, the obligatory Operative of Unspecified Rank but Suitably Dangerous and Broody Competence, and who for purposes of this assignment is going by the name of Cord Elliott (side note: seriously? CORD? What kind of a name is CORD? A romance novel name, apparently), is on the case to keep Raine from getting shot right off her horse by way of being the appetizer for her father.

Definitely the sort of thing Lowell sank her teeth into with later work, but here, there’s way less suspense than I like and way more angsting about how OHNOEZ, Cord’s job is dangerous! And he’s all tired of it and burned out and Raine is all beautiful and stuff! Which was acceptable character fodder as it went, but after pages and pages of it, I was all “ENOUGH ALREADY now get to the shootings and suspense and stuff”.

Which the book did, eventually. With suitable suspenseful shootiness, and even a bit of a bittersweet ending that was appropriate given the Unspecified nature of Cord’s secret-agenty job. All in all, though, for Lowell suspense? You’ll really want to go to her later work. Two stars.