bookshelves of doom

Awards news: 2014 Aurora nominees and 2014 Vogal winners.

The 2014 Aurora YA nominees are:

The Ehrich Weisz Chronicles: Demon Gate, by Marty Chan

Ink, by Amanda Sun

The Lake and the Library, by S.M. Beiko

Out of Time, by D.G. Ladroute

Resolve, by Neil Godbout

The Rising, by Kelley Armstrong

Click on through for the other categories.

The 2014 Vogal Award for Youth novel went to: Raven Flight, by Juliet Marillier. (LOVE THAT ONE.)

The other finalists were:

Talisman of Vim, by Robert Wainwright

Pratibhashali (The Talented), by Sanjay Joshi

Fountain of Forever, by K. D. Berry

When We Wake, by Karen Healey

Click on through for the other shortlists and winners.

(via SF Signal)

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The 2013 Arthur Ellis Awards have been announced!

The 2013 Oregon Book Award winners...

Kindle Daily Deal: YES, YOU GUESSED IT.

Yet again, some Strange Chemistry titles are on sale: Cassandra R. Clarke's The Assassin's Curse and The Pirate's Wish.

I could have sworn that I already bought The Assassin's Curse, but it doesn't appear to be in my library, so I guess not.

Oh, well: goodbye to $1.99 x 2, then, and HELLO MOAR BOOKS. 

Kindle Daily Deal: Strange Chemistry title.

Strange Chemistry has been all about the sales lately, eh?

Anyway, Eliza Crewe's Cracked is $1.99 today.

I wrote about it at Kirkus last fall:

I ADORED Eliza Crewe’s Cracked. It’s smart, it’s funny, it’s full of action and bare-handed decapitations. Meda’s voice is hilarious and snarky and brash and inhuman and original. She’s an art lover with a wonderfully morbid sense of humor, a monster who takes joy in brutal violence but who secretly hates herself for giving in to her mindless rage, and she’s a girl who’s all alone and just wants to know who she is. She's a quick thinker who considers every angle of a situation, and she doesn't yearn for humanity or, as Buffy’s Spike so wonderfully puts it, exhibit any of “that Anne Rice crap.” She's a mostly unrepentant killer who doesn't shy away from playing the damsel in distress card—even when she's the most dangerous thing in the room.

 

Bad Lip Reading: Eclipse.

 

"And you have the record for frowning." AHAHAHAHAHA.

Also, the Jasper stuff.

Okay. I didn't see Eclipse, so I just Googled "edward cullen tambourine" to make sure that there wasn't actually a tambourine scene. There wasn't, right? Because if there was, clearly I'm going to have to watch it.

Today @KirkusReviews...

...I wrote about Rachel Ward's The Drowning:

...which sets out to be a love story, a ghost story, a story about abuse, and a story about family. Of the four, the ghost story comes the closest to being successful. The idea of a ghost that can travel via and control water is scary in and of itself, and Ward really makes great, cinematic* use of it, sometimes with powerful, gushing torrents, sometimes with insidious, creeping mold. Ghost Rob’s growing strength is rivaled only by his malevolence, and Carl’s deteriorating mental state—despite clear signs of an actual haunting, at times I wondered if it really might all be in Carl’s head—adds to the tension.

As it sadly didn't do a whole lot for me, I went ahead and recommended some OTHER books that I enjoyed much more...

INCLUDING A CERTAIN SERIES STARRING MISS SHIRAZ BAILEY WOOD.

And also one that I haven't read yet, but that LOOKS really super.

Sidenote: Due to the water and the palette, this cover is pretty ambiguous... but if the girl on the cover is supposed to be Neisha Gupta, with her "big brown eyes" and skin with "honey tones", then it looks like the UK cover has been whitewashed.

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Yesterday @KirkusReviews...

Earlier this week @KirkusReviews...

Yesterday @KirkusReviews...

Today @KirkusReviews...

Earlier this week @KirkusReviews...

...I wrote about Lanie Bross' Fates:

Ten years ago, Corinthe made a huge mistake. Since then, she’s been exiled from her sister Fates, living on Earth among the humans. To earn her way back into the good graces of the Unseen Ones and be allowed to return home, she is tasked with helping humans achieve their destinies: whether that means facilitating meet cutes, making someone late for work, preventing an accident, saving a life...or ending one.

(I couldn't post the link earlier due to the Typepad debacle.)

Genre debates: "literary" fiction versus SF/F.

I'm really not into having the whole Which One Is Better debate, because I don't have a strong aversion to any genre: if it's a good book, it's a good book, yay books. YAY BOOKS.

Anyway! Despite the title, ultimately, the essay is more about the differences between the two genres, and more especially about the strengths of SF/F:

You absolutely cannot obscure underlying weakness with waffle. Otherwise the emails will arrive, picking up on discrepancies. Not just for the sake of point-scoring or nitpicking but because fans become so engaged with imaginary worlds and so passionate about their characters.

That passion, so easily mocked by laughing at Trekkies and Whovians, is another thing that distinguishes SF and fantasy from literary fiction. Mocking that passion is missing a key aspect of speculative fiction. By drawing readers in large numbers, contemporary fantasy becomes a platform to debate key, current social and political challenges, while science fiction continues to explore the impact of technological developments, for good and ill, before we have to tackle these things in reality.