Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/12

I have my limits. I do try to be as honest as possible about the books that come in my mail -- to present them as positively as I can, even when some of them are very much not my kind of book (since you are not me, and may well like different things), and find the right covers and a link or two for more details.

But when even a book's publisher has the wrong cover on their webpage for the book...well, some things I can't fix by myself.

This week I have one book to tell you about: Melanie Rawn's Playing to the Gods. That image over there to the left is not the real cover for it. Oh, the art is correct, and the title and author's name have the right words and are spelled correctly. But the type and design is quite different on the final book -- which I am right now holding in my hand -- and the blurb is both different and at the opposite end of the cover.

Well, the words inside are the same, right? And we all claim not to care about covers, since we're smart rational people who are never affected by marketing -- marketing somehow became a gigantic industry despite the fact that it never once got anyone to do anything. Sure.

Playing to the Gods is the fifth and last in Rawn's "Glass Thorns" series, about a theatrical troupe in an epic-fantasy world. I may be confused, but I believe our heroes do not save the world in this volume, nor have they saved the world in any of the previous books. They've saved themselves, I'm sure, and probably others. This time it looks like they may need to save the kingdom. But I continue to hold out hope that there can be secondary-world fantasies without Dark Lords, and my firm belief is that this series is among that august company. If you also appreciate worlds that do not need to be saved every second Thursday, the first book in this series is Touchstone -- start there.

This is a hardcover from Tor, hitting stores August 29. Go look for it, and you can see the real cover.