It’s been a shorter gap between round-ups than average so there aren’t as many reviews to report as usual. Nevertheless, readers have linked us reviews covering all three of my usual sub-genres, so that’s nice.
Horror
The unambiguous horror review from the past month came from Narrelle M Harris, who reviewed Caution: Contains Small Parts, a collection of stories by Kirstyn McDermott. I suggest you go read the entire review, which is not very long and which I would have liked to be able to quote in full. But a snippet:
As a writer, Horn creeped me out the most as a cautionary tale of unintended consequences. The resolution of What Amanda Wants was horrific, and I feel like maybe I’m a terrible person for finding it so satisfying as well.
Fantasy
The reviewing cake was very much taken by Keri Arthur this month, with Teddyree (who must have been on a review-linking roll) posting four reviews of her books. The reviewed books are Dancing with the Devil, Hearts in Darkness, Chasing the Shadows and Kiss the Night Goodbye and they form the Nikki & Michael series (in the order I’ve listed them, I think). To give you an idea about the series, Teddyree sums-up the first book:
Nikki is a private investigator with strong psychic abilities – telekinesis telemetry, telepathy (love it, I gobble up that stuff) she’s also stubborn as a mule and sometimes just as stupid. 300 year old tortured vamp Michael is a bit of a hotty but having been around a while he’s carrying baggage.
So go give Keri Arthur and this series a shot if that sounds like your sort of thing.
The other fantasy book reviewed this month is the Aurealis-winning Ember and Ash by Pamela Freeman and falls more into the BFF (big fat fantasy) category rather than urban fantasy. Faith, who had not read Freeman’s earlier books in the same series, writes that she things “reading the earlier books would make it easier to connect to some of the characters”, even though Ember and Ash follows a different generation of characters. As someone who has read the earlier books, however, I found them a more engaging and memorable read all-round. The earlier series starts with Blood Ties.
Science Fiction
And we have one science fiction review rounding-out our categories. Brenda read and reviewed Reckless Rebellion by Rinelle Grey, which is the second book in the Barren Planet SF romance series. (The first book is Reckless Rescue.) Brenda enjoyed it and writes:
The new characters which were introduced are well crafted and easy to know. Getting to know Tyris’ family was great, especially his younger brother Kerit, and it’s exciting to learn the third in the series will be Kerit’s story. I have no hesitation in recommending Aussie author Rinelle Grey and her Barren Planet series to all readers of fantasy and science fiction.
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About Me
I’m Tsana Dolichva and I’ve been reading and enjoying Australian speculative fiction since I first started reading “grown up” books (back before YA was its own genre). More recently, I’ve been blogging my reviews over at the creatively titled Tsana’s Reads. I irregularly blog about science in science fiction over at the Science Fiction Writers’ Guide to Space. When not reading or writing, I’m probably working towards my PhD in astrophysics.
