Reviewing the Mail: Week of 2/27

Hello, and welcome back.

Sometimes I get books in the mail from publishers, and, when I do, I thank them by making a post about those books on Monday morning, listing the books and writing a bit about them in a way that I intend to be enticing. (If your tastes are massively different from mine, you may find my comments work entirely in the opposite direction, but there's little I can do about that.)

This week, there's one such book, and here it is: The Lyre Thief by Jennifer Fallon.

It's a Tor hardcover hitting stores in North America [1] on March 8th, and starts a new trilogy called "War of the Gods" -- not the first time that's been used for an epic fantasy trilogy, certainly, but very regularly applicable -- set in her popular world of Hythrun. [2]

This one sounds interesting, with some fun opportunities for drama -- a princess discovers she's not really a princess, and runs off with her half-sister-cum-maid, who coincidentally is a dead ringer for her. And there are several gods mixed up in the action as well, plus the fallout from events in the previous two trilogies.


[1] It may already be available in the author's native New Zealand [3], or other places -- I make no promises there.

[2] I keep wanting to type "Hyrule," because my fingers and brain are conspiring against me.

[3] There was a time, when the world was young and life was gay and I worked in the halcyon halls of the SF Book Club, where I fell into being the Antipodean Expert [4], and acquired a bunch of Fallon books. I think I bought her first trilogy, and maybe even part of the second one, and liked them -- it was large-scale epic fantasy with good characters and some real depth, without heading over to the grimdark side of things.

[4] I acquired Fallon, the Seans (both McMullen and Williams), Sara Douglass, Isobelle Carmody, a couple of Greg Egan projects, several George Turner books, and worked on a couple of projects with Jonathan Strahan. And then I did a big multi-omnibus set of A. Bertram Chandler's John Grimes series, which I don't think I managed to complete before I got the axe. (I don't have copies of any of the books, post-flood, and obviously I don't have any of my notes and plans from the late job.) None of that was planned; it just sort of happened that I acquired most of the SFF from the other end of the world -- perhaps I was just upside-down in my thinking, and thus connected better with those books.