Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 12

Every week... blah blah blah... listing of books here. Yadda yadda yadda I haven't read them. Inka dinka doo hope you like them.

This time out I have one book to write about, which is absolutely wonderful -- it's better than none (the state of the last week or two), and one entirely free book is still an awesome thing, and I don't ever want to lose sight of that.

And that book is Ilana C. Myer's Last Song Before Night, the first fantasy novel (first any kind of novel, actually) from a New York-based journalist who I suspect is originally Canadian. (Her bio lists the Globe and Mail as the first periodical she writes for, which is what poker players call a "tell.") [1] This is an epic fantasy -- Red Death returning, plucky young heroine leading a small band to save the world, a mystical Otherworld from which enchantment flows -- and I suspect that also means it won't be the last. That heroine is named Kimbralin Amaristoth (we all hope you won't hold that against her) and she's run away from a horrible family (which I'm sure will turn out to be noble, probably royal) to live on the run as a musician, which of course is forbidden to women. (One can sense Myer stacking up her plot complications carefully, like bricks in a wall.) Last Song is coming in hardcover from Tor on September 29th, and it already has laudatory quotes from Fran Wilde, A.M. Dellamonica, Jessica Day George, and L.E. Modesitt, Jr.


[1] This is actually wrong; see first comment. And now you see why I am not a champion poker-player. Or finder of Canadian spies, for that matter.