Cover Reveal for Charlie Holmberg's MAGIC BITTER, MAGIC SWEET

I adored Charlie's Paper Magician series--particularly her charming characters and inventive magic system. I'm thrilled to participate in her cover reveal for her newest fantasy: MAGIC BITTER, MAGIC SWEET.

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The peculiar tale of an enchanted baker who creates fairy tales’ darkest and most magical confections.

Maire is a baker with an extraordinary gift: she can infuse her treats with emotions and abilities, which are then passed on to those who eat them. She doesn’t know why she can do this and remembers nothing of who she is or where she came from.

When marauders raid her town, Maire is captured and sold to the eccentric Allemas, who enslaves her and demands that she produce sinister confections, including a witch’s gingerbread cottage, a living cookie boy, and size-altering cakes.

During her captivity, Maire is visited by Fyel, a ghostly being who is reluctant to reveal his connection to her. The more often they meet, the more her memories return, and she begins to piece together who and what she really is—as well as past mistakes that yield cosmic consequences.

From the author of the Paper Magician series comes a haunting and otherworldly tale of folly and consequence, forgiveness and redemption.

Magic Bitter, Magic Sweet is available for preorder on Amazon and B&N. Ebook, audiobook, and paperback release from 47North June 28^th!

You can also preview the novel on Goodreads.

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About the Author

Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Amazon | Goodreads

Born in Salt Lake City, Charlie N. Holmberg was raised a Trekkie alongside three sisters who also have boy names. She graduated from BYU, plays the ukulele, owns too many pairs of glasses, and hopes to one day own a dog.

The Goblin Emperor

Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor recently made the short list for this year's Nebula award, and with good reason. The story is fascinating, the world complex, and the hero utterly likeable. (It's also a little dense, but that's a separate issue).

Maia is fourth in line for the throne of the Elven emperor, a largely overlooked son of the emperor by his goblin wife. After his mother's death, he's relegated to the outer reaches of the empire with a singularly unappealing guarding, and taught little outside of rigid court courtesies. Then word comes that the emperor and his three closest heirs have all died in an airship explosion, and his world changes radically.

It becomes clear early on that Maia is wildly out of his depth: he races to the capitol to outmaneuver those who are scheming to take his position, but once there, he finds himself hemmed in by rigid protocol, and unsure who of the many people who seem to hate him he can actually trust. The real marvel of this story is that it keeps readers (at least, it did me), glued to the page despite the sometimes deliberate pacing. This isn't a war story, like so many epic fantasies seem to be, and I loved seeing Maia gradually find his place in the intricate political world Addison sets up.

While the worldbuilding was fascinating (the world has some magic, but runs mostly on steam power), I was drawn primarily to Maia himself, who strives to differentiate himself from his father by establishing a reign notable for kindness and bridge-building, in more ways than one. As the story unfolded, I found myself grieving for the unexpected betrayals Maia faces, and cheering when he discovered new allies (the loneliness he faces in the book is terrifyingly believable: early on, his chamber men tell him, "We cannot be your friends.") And parts of the ending made me actually tear up--an unusual reaction for me!

My only complaint about the book is that I struggled with the complex nomenclature Addison set up, and there are lots of characters, so it took me a  while to figure out who was who. I read this as a kindle book; I think it might be easier to have a hard copy where it's easier to flip to the back of the book to consult the extensive list of names.

Newt's Emerald

 For fans of Regency romance--especially Regency with some magic thrown in, ala Caroline Stevermer and Patricia Wrede's Sorcery and Cecilia--this is a fun little romp of a book. However, Newt's Emerald is very different from Garth Nix's other books, so I think it's important to know that going in!

Truthful Newington is looking forward to her upcoming season in London, when the heirloom Newtington Emerald is stolen from her home. Desperate to get it back, Truthful finds herself in London earlier as expected, and forced to disguise herself as a boy (with some magical help from her great-aunt), since many of the places she needs to go in search of the emerald are closed to her as a boy.

There wasn't a whole lot of substance to the story, or to Truthful's growing romance (with, of course, the gentleman who disapproves of her female self but is helping her, disguised as a boy, to recover the emerald). But it was a lot of fun, and it's clear to see Nix's fondness for Georgette Heyer's books in this story. A quick, enjoyable read for fans of Heyer and other magical regencies.

Dreams of Gods and Monsters (also a bit of Pitch Wars)

So, yeah, I get that I haven't posted in almost two weeks.

Part of that is because I was savoring Laini Taylor's Dreams of Gods and Monsters, which took me longer to get through than most of the books I read.

Also, I've been buried up to my eye-balls in Pitch Wars revisions. The revision has been a pretty big overhaul--my MS has gone from 90,000 words back up to 96,000 and down to 87,000--but in between all that I've cut almost 28,000 words and written 25,000--in three weeks. But I'm pretty excited about the way things are shaping up. I think I've fixed some of the major pacing problems in the story.

Ahem.

On to the review.

I've been a fan of Laini Taylor since her Fairies of Dreamdark series. But I didn't love Daughter of Smoke and Bone as much as I've loved her two most recent books. That's rare in a trilogy, for the later books to wow me more than the original one.

In this conclusion, Karou (a chimera) and Akiva (seraphim) struggle to reconcile their warring people, prevent Jael from acquiring nuclear weapons on earth, and put an end to his cruel rule (how's that for an awkwardly half-rhymed sentence?). As if that weren't enough, Taylor also introduces a new set of characters, PhD student Eliza who has (she thinks) put her family's crazy cultish history behind her, and a race of seraphim whose duty it is to protect Eretz from some unnamed threat.

As always, the stakes are high. And Taylor's prose is breath-taking. Heart-breaking.

I thought she did a terrific job of working together several very complex plotlines and keeping the pace moving forward. I was confused for a little while in the middle, but I was invested in the characters and kept reading anyway.

And if the end seemed a little drawn out and indulgent, well, Akiva and Karou earned it.

The Paper Magician

 I thought Charlie Holmberg's debut novel, The Paper Magician, was quite charming. I'm a sucker for historical fantasy (I adore Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer's Sorcery and Cecilia), and I was hoping this would be in the same vein. To my delight, it was.

When the story begins, Ceony Twill is less than thrilled to apprentice to a Paper Magician. In her world, once magicians have bonded to a material, they are bonded to it forever. She'd studied hard in school and hoped for something more impressive, like metal magic. But there aren't enough paper magicians, so paper it is.

But Magister Thane is nothing like what she expected--and Ceony discovers unexpected wonder in Paper Magic, where complicated folds of paper bring things to life. I thought Holmberg was particularly successful in setting up the magic here--I wanted to try paper magic myself!

When a dark secret from Thane's past shows up in the form of an Excisioner, whose dark magic uses the material of the human body, and rips Thane's heart from him, Ceony has to use her limited skills with paper magic to try and save him.

The magic system here was fun, and Ceony herself was delightful. I liked that she was smart, independent, and knew what she wanted out of life. I wasn't sure about the speed at which the romance here developed, but I could see why Ceony found Thane appealing and intriguing. And I loved that Ceony had such limited resources for saving Thane--it made the stakes that much higher. So often in fantasy the heroine has this incredible power, but Ceony didn't have any of that. She was just an ordinary magician who barely  had the training she needed to animate paper. It was refreshing.

I'll be interested to see where Holmberg takes the story in the sequel, The Glass Magician.

The Magicians

 I determined to read Lev's Grossman's The Magicians because it's been deemed such an important fantasy book and because a friend who I trust wrote a thoughtful and provocative review of the series (warning: there are a spoilers in the review).

Intellectually, I liked the idea of exploring the fantasy portal as an emerging adult, rather than as a wonder-struck child. Lev Grossman basically crosses the portal (Narnia) and the enchantment of a magical school (Harry Potter) but throws in philosophical characters like Quentin (the main character) who seem innately immune to happiness. Over the course of the book, Quentin gets everything he wants: an aspiring stage magician, he finds himself admitted to a super-secret and exclusive school for magicians at Brakebills. But as he learns about the magic, even though he finds the magic fascinating, he never seems to find it quite as magical as the reader does. His friends (save Alice) are an unpleasant, narcissistic bunch. They're fascinating in small doses (much like a train wreck), but I found it difficult to press through an entire novel in their company.

For me, the intellectual angle of the book was it's main redeeming quality: I didn't enjoy the story itself and felt as if I had to force myself through much of the time. But I'm glad I read it. Some of the questions it raises about our expectations and what we think will make us happy are important questions. And I do, still, love the idea that maybe Narnia and those other fantastic worlds have a dark side that we don't always see--even the idea that maybe what most robs those worlds of enchantment is our own trespass there.

Gilded

Christina Farley, Gilded

I picked up this book a couple of months ago (part of the Amazon First program) and, now that I'm done frantically trying to finish the Whitney Award books, I finally had time to read it.

Jae Hwa is a sixteen-year-old Korean American girl living in Seoul, Korea, for the first time as her father has transferred to a new position and both he and Jae are still recovering from the death of her mother. But not long into their stay, strange things begin happening. Jae sees creatures out of Korean folklore, and her grandfather hints at a centuries-old curse plaguing her family: namely, as revenge for his rejection by Princess Juwha, the demon Haemosu has been stealing away the oldest young woman in each generation.

This just happens to be Jae. And despite her martial arts skills, this is one battle that Jae can't win alone.

I have really mixed feelings about this book. I love mythologically-based fantasy (both historical and contemporary), and Farley includes some lovely, rich details of Korean mythology. The setting, too, was wonderful: nice details and evocative images. But I struggled to warm to Jae, who often does stupid and impetuous things just because she can (and I know that lots of teenagers are impetuous, but Jae seems dangerously so sometimes). And, as other reviewers have pointed out, it seems a little problematic that in a story centered around Korean mythology and culture, Jae's love interest is an American guy, and his American parents are often the key to her solving the mysteries that face her.

That said, I'm not sorry I read it--I learned a lot of cool stuff about Korean mythology and the plot moved quickly enough that I was never bored (although annoyed, sometimes, yes).

The Enchanter's Heir

I love Cinda Chima's books. I've loved her Seven Realms series, and I loved her Heir Chronicles, though I thought she'd concluded that series with the Dragon Heir. Imagine my surprise and delight, then, when I found a new one at the library! Only, silly me, I somehow thought this was a companion novel to the other books--that is, a storyline that would largely wrap up in this book. My biggest complaint now is that since this book came out only recently (in October), I now have to wait to see how the cliff-hanger ending resolved.

I'm still processing the book, though, which adds an intriguing new dimension to the world of the Heir Chronicles. In fact, the story starts out largely outside of the traditional world of the magic guilds, with a commune in Brazil (Thorn Hill) where magic wielders have chosen to leave the guilds behind. Only then disaster happens (and one of the big mysteries of the book is what, exactly, did happen--was it an accident? Deliberate sabotage?) and all the adults at the commune are wiped out, poisoned, and many of the children die as well. Those who survive are deeply scarred, their magical gifts changed and sometimes distorted beyond all reason. Jonah Kinlock survives, but with a gift that is also a curse: he can kill with a touch.

Fast forward ten years or so: Jonah is busy fighting shades, undead creatures who are on a continual quest to find fresh host bodies to sustain them (and with painful links to the Thorn Hill massacre). Meanwhile, Emma Greenwood is happy playing the blues in Memphis and living with her luthier grandfather--until she finds him dead under strange circumstances. With only a few clues left by her grandfather, Emma goes to live with her father in Cincinnati (not coincidentally near Anchorage, where the survivors of Thorn Hill have taken refuge, and Trinity, the center of the new guild leadership from the other Heir novels).

While Jonah seeks to untangle the mysteries of Thorn Hill (which are linked to the increasingly powerful and organized shades), Emma tries to figure out her own past, and her own odd connection to Thorn Hill.

I liked both of the main characters--and of course, that key to good romantic suspense, their inability to get past their own obstacles in the relationship (the fact that Jonah could kill Emma if they ever kissed is naturally part of their chemistry). But I loved the way music threads through the story and I'm really curious to see where Chima goes with the driving mystery of Thorn Hill. I could have done without the cliff-hanger ending (dang it!), and there was a surprising amount of death in the novel (though it was fun to see certain villains from previous stories finally get what they deserved).