Upcoming Release: The Gospel of Loki, by Joanne Harris.

It's no secret that I love Joanne Harris' work. When I found out that she's about to be releasing a new novel, The Gospel of Loki, well, I got rather excited.

Not just because, to me, Loki looks like this:

 

Ms Harris does some incredibly insightful and evocative work, from the ongoing small time #Storytime hashtag on Twitter to the recent MBE insignia for services to literature she received from the freaking Queen of England!

Of course, like any author of relative popularity, she doesn't always receive high acclaim for all her works. I recently read a review of her Four Quarters of the Orange which, among other things, stated that the reader is an adult and wants to read about adult things. Funnily enough, that review and what I already knew about Joanne Harris just made me get around to reading this book faster. And what a read! Filled with such amazing and evocative writing as usual:

"The secret is to leave the stones in. Layer cherries and sugar one on the other in a wide-mouthed glass jar, covering each layer gradually with clear spirit up to half the jar's capacity. Top up with spirit and wait. Every month, turn the jar carefully to release any accumulated sugar. In three years' time the spirit has bled the cherries white, staining itself deep red, penetrating even to the stone and the tiny almond inside it, becoming pungent, evocative, a scent of autumn past. Serve in tiny liqueur glasses, with a spoon to scoop out the cheery, and leave it in the mouth until the macerated fruit dissolves under the tongue. Pierce the stone with the point of a tooth to release the liqueur trapped inside and leave it for a long time in the mouth, playing it with the tip of the tongue, rolling it under, over, like a single prayer bead. Try to remember the time of its ripening, that summer, that hot autumn, the time that well ran dry, the time we had the wasps' nests, time past, lost, found again in the hard place at the heart of the fruit."

Delicious!

Her latest novel The Gospel of Loki tells the story of the trickster god (no surprise there) finally taking the stage after being thoroughly misrepresented in histories and the tales we know of him. He's going to set the record straight on May 24th later this year.

Rachel Bach's upcoming: 'Fortune's Pawn'.

I've been thinking, after my post on Orson Scott Card, that I need to get into some new science fiction. Different science fiction. Science fiction written by people I very much enjoy talking to.

For a little while now, I've been aware of yet another upcoming book that I'm not able to read yet. This one comes out in November and, with this review, the book has jumped up several spaces on my 'Priority Reads for 2013 TM'.

I am sure the author had in mind a crazy-action-fulled love story.  Yes, I said it. This is in part (at least 33.33%) a love story.  It at first took me by surprise. 

Here was a main character I loved.  Devi is smart, feisty, forthright and skilled.  She is basically a female child of Boba Fett and Han Solo.  At least.  She is great to read and choice to write in first-person made this all the better. (read more)

Sci-fi with interesting characters, you say? With a romantic plot line? With a focus on something other than cool weird science gadgets that I am not quite geek enough to be able to imagine? What is this amazing venture?

It is none other than Rachel Aaron's (writing as Rachel Bach) new novel Fortune's Pawn.

From what I understand, the upcoming Fortune's Pawn tells the story of Devi, a mercenary, who gets a job on a particularly troublesome trade ship. Things go wrong. The ship itself seems to be the cause, or the reason, or... But Devi has a Plan (yes, with a capital 'P'), and this particular ship seems to be our heroine's way of getting onto Step 2 of this Plan.

Okay, okay, I'm really no good with summarising or describing science fiction novels. Did I not already mention that I'm not particularly well read in this genre?

No matter; Fortune's Pawn has grabbed my interest as potentially being something other than the standard sci-fi novel and, for that alone, I am looking forward to my chance at picking this one up.

Holly Black's upcoming release: 'The Coldest Girl in Coldtown'.

I had just finished airing excitement for the release of Love in a Time of Global Warming by favourite author Francesca Lia Block, as well as the upcoming new season of Sherlock. There as well is the ever-continuing promise of S.H.I.E.L.D. coming out in September. I had almost thought that all my potential for squee had been all used up for the time being.

Nope. I was wrong.

At the beginning of the month, I promised I'd be writing more on this upcoming title soon, and here it is:

Holly Black! That is a name people have no doubt seen on my blog more than a couple of times. (If you haven't, I have personally devised a clever tagging system at the bottom of each post so that clicking on 'Holly Black' will pull all such posts up. :D)

Holly Black's short story anthology The Poison Eaters got a fair amount of publicity in 2010 when it was released, but by far and away the most noise made of any short story in that anthology had to do with "The Coldest Girl in Coldtown".

Now, more than three years later, it's going to be released as a full length story in its own right. Now, first there was the cover reveal, then there was Entertainment Weekly releasing their exclusive trailer for the book slated to come out on September 3rd, here.

I'm not ashamed to say that I am excited. In fact, I'm already re-reading The Poison Eaters just to tide me through! And, as of today, the First 8 Chapters of The Coldest Girl in Coldtown are available for FREE, you saw correctly, FREE on Amazon now: http://www.amazon.com/Coldest-Girl-Coldtown-Chapters-ebook/dp/B00DB7R7E6/ref=sr_1_1_bnp_1_kin?ie=UTF8&qid=1375816503&sr=8-1&keywords=coldtown

Only until the date of the release. (September 3rd. Eeeeeee!!) So get in quick!

Francesca Lia Block: a loving (incomplete) bibliography.

In 2003, I was 19 years old. I was in England, staying halfway across the world with a couple of girls I had only ever talked to online. I was going through their bookshelves, and realising how similar our tastes in books were, except for this one author I'd never heard of before: Francesca Lia Block.

It was only the first time that I would come across this wondrous woman's writing. There were two books on that bookshelf; one was about a teenager who met and fell in love with a boy with angel wings, the other was the story of a girl fighting anorexia and telling her story through a series of tarot cards. I was hooked.

At 19, I was one of many young women who was struggling with an eating disorder. I was also a young woman who still believed in magic in all places. These books, speaking of realities like cancer and abuse while intermingling it with a sense of the divine or the magical spoke to me in a way that I couldn't quite describe.

My writing style changed around this time, trying to emulate the simple beauty I found in these books. 

It was 2005, I was 21, and New Zealand was the flavour of the year. A friend had a copy of Violet and Clare, a novel that I mistakenly took from its title for a lesbian love story, but I wasn't disappointed. 

2006, still in New Zealand, and leafing through a copy of I was a Teenage Fairy, the story of a young model trying to live up to the pressures of her mother, who sees fairies in the backyard and is close to one fairy, the fairy Mab, in particular. 

When I revisited this novel again in 2008, I started wondering whether these stories of real life with magical realism spoke of a deeper metaphor, whether suffering mental health was the scope through which these teenagers escaped to and regularly found outlets of the mystical and the divine. Or whether the fairies and angels were part of their delusions. 

In 2011, I did an Honours paper that included one of the short stories from Francesca's The Rose and the Beast. There, while my focus was on the short story 'Beast', I finally found my lesbian love story in the retelling of Snow White and Rose Red. 

This month, I read The Elementals, a book with lyrical writing, strong plot and many of the familiar themes I have come to associate with Francesca's various works. This novel was, in many ways, one of those "New Adult" novels we've been hearing so much about: The main character moves out from her family home, goes to college, discovers sex. But it's so much more than that. Mystery and drugs and abductions and cancer with just a hint of magical realism serve to make this a very well weaved, heart-wrenching novel by a very talented author.

For ten years , Francesca Lia Block has managed to elevate, excite, liberate, titillate and make my heart soar with her stories of sadness and beauty, magic and suffering. I love these stories. They are a part of me, and now, this year, she will be releasing her latest novel. 

Love in the Time of Global Warming is a post-apocalyptic novel with a young woman going on a journey to find her lost family. Early reviews of the book agree that this will be another one of her gritty realisms in a slightly fantastical setting which, of course, post-apocalyptic settings tend to be.

This will be the first time that I am getting on board with one of Francesca's novels as they come out. I was close, I think, when I picked up her novel Ruby (co-written with Carmen Staton). Of course, the release date for this novel is saying late August, so my only question really is how am I going to wait that long?