Stolen Away

Alyxandra Harvey

Bloomsbury (2012)

ISBN: 978-1-4088-1132-0

Reviewed by Lorraine Cormack

Stolen Away is a standalone novel by the author of the Drake Chronicles (to date, My Love Lies Bleeding, Blood Feud, Out for Blood and Bleeding Hearts) and Haunting Violet.

Stolen Away has much the same strengths and weaknesses as Harvey’s other novels. It seems that she’s not changing much as an author; she’s found her rhythm and is sticking to it with little improvement (or degeneration). But the result is a set of entertaining, pleasant enough novels; and if she’s happy and her audience is happy, does she really need to push herself?

Eloise Hart is a pretty ordinary teenage girl. She doesn’t fit with the cool kids, but she does have her good friends – notably, Jo and Devin. She has her share of insecurities, but she’s also pretty comfortable with who she is. Her family is a bit unusual – her single mother dresses like a rockabilly and tends bar, and her aunt appears every year for around six months and then disappears completely for another six. She’s not even contactable during those six months.

Timeless

Gail Carriger

Parasol Protectorate, book 5

Orbit (2012)

ISBN: 9780316127189

Reviewed by Alexandra Pierce

The last Parasol Protectorate book, Heartless, bugged me because of its snobbish attitudes towards the middle class. I was very pleased to see that this was not quite such an issue here, mostly because there is little real interaction with the middle classes. So that was one problem cleared up.

This review contains spoilers for the first four books, but NOT this one.

Bleeding Hearts

Alyxandra Harvey

The Drake Chronicles

Bloomsbury (2011)

ISBN: 978-1-4088-1497-0

Reviewed by Lorraine Cormack

Bleeding Hearts is the fourth book in the Drake chronicles, following on from My Love Lies Bleeding, Blood Feud, and Out for Blood. Like its predecessors, Bleeding Heart is an enjoyable and well written young adult novel.

The Drake Chronicles follow a clear pattern. In each novel one of the seven Drake brothers falls in love. The Drake family are vampires; they are unusual in that they are not “turned” by another vampire – instead, when they turn sixteen they also turn into vampires. This significantly reduces the yuk factor when it comes to their becoming vampires; it also provides a credible explanation for the existence of an entire family of vampires. (There are some flaws if you think too hard, such as the question of why their father doesn’t look sixteen; but generally this is a well constructed world.) Importantly, it also means that we are reading stories of vampires who are either the same age as or only a few years older than the teenage girls they fall in love with. For me, this is less creepy than all those vampires who are one or two hundred years old and still fall for sixteen year olds.

Psy-changling

Mine to Possess (Psy-Changling #4)

ISBN: 9780 575 10000 8

Hostage to Pleasure (Psy-Changling #5)

ISBN: 9780 575 10003 9

Kiss of Snow (Psy-Changling #10)

ISBN: 9780 575 10568 3

Nalini Singh

Gollancz

Reviewed by Helen Merrick

Nalini Singh’s best-selling Psy-Changling series is now up to its tenth book, with no sign of ending soon. Obviously Singh has legions of fans who eat up her successful formula of paramornal romance, spiced up by a bit of crime, suspense and a hefty dose of fairly explicit sex. The Psy-Changling books now have an established pattern, with each novel centred on the coming together of an unlikely couple who, despite challenges and obstacles end up in each others arms (and much more) by the finish. Along the way, each book further develops the broader plotline which occurs in an alternate world where alongside humans live two powerful races – the Psy and the Changlings. The Psy are, not surprisingly, a race with psy powers such as telepathy and telekensis, who dominate the world’s economic and political systems. They are also supposedly without emotion, a condition known as ‘Silence’ which was self-induced a century ago to prevent the increasing damage done by mentally unstable Psy. The Changlings are a very different race, part human and part animal who morph into their animal form at will and carry the heightened strength and senses of their animals while in human form. The key changling groups in the series are the Dark River Leopard pack, who effectively run San Fransisco, and the Snowdancer wolf pack, with whom they form an alliance as the threat from the Psy grows stronger.

Tempest Rising

Tracy Deebs

Walker Books (2011)

ISBN: 9780802722317

Reviewed by Helen Merrick

I’m a great fan of YA speculative fiction, but to date have read little in what I suppose is now a whole genre of teen romance. In many ways, Deeb’s Tempest Rising could be seen as the little sister of the enormously popular paranormal romance genre. There are fantastical creatures, magic, prophecies and a fair amount of heavy-breathing fuelled longing for an inappropriate love object. There is, however a lot more to this book than either simple romance, or teen angst.

Tempest McGuire is just about to turn 17 and is dreading her birthday. For her it signals not just another step towards adulthood, but will force upon her an impossible choice: to become a mermaid, or stay human. Until now, her life has apparently been that of an average American teenager focused around school, friends, and boyfriends, complicated by the fact that her mermaid mother walked out on her family when Tempest was 10. Tempest is also not quite your stereotypical girl: her passion is for surfing, and much of her social life centres around catching waves with a group of surfer boys, including her boyfriend Mark.

Still smarting from her mother’s abandonment, Tempest is furious at the choice she faces between her world and her mother’s world of which she knows nothing beyond the note her mother left behind. As the story opens, Tempest is terrified by the changes beginning to become apparent – a flash of a mermaid tail appearing, growing gills, and the sense that some dark force under the ocean intends to claim her. To further complicate her life, a mysterious, beautiful stranger called Konea appears to challenge her feelings for Mark and her steadfast desire to remain human.

Dead Reckoning

Charlaine Harris

Sookie Stackhouse #11

Piatkus (2011)

ISBN: 9780575096530

Reviewed by Stephanie Gunn

Dead Reckoning is the eleventh book in the Sookie Stackhouse/Southern Vampire Mysteries series by Charlaine Harris, now filmed as the television series True Blood.

Sookie Stackhouse, telepathic waitress and part fairy, is now involved with the vampire Eric and sharing her house with two of her fairy relatives – her cousin Claude and great-uncle Dermot. After much tumult, her life has achieved something like stability. But this is Sookie, and that stability is never going to last for long.

The Vampire Shrink

Lynda Hilburn

Jo Fletcher Fiction (2011)

978-0-85738-720-2

Reviewed by Lorraine Cormack

The Vampire Shrink is part of that fast-growing sub-genre, vampire chick lit romances. None of those elements are necessarily bad, but it’s a field that’s getting so crowded that originality is starting to become a rare thing. Despite that, Hilburn does manage to inject some freshness into her setting and some of the scenarios, although many elements of the plot seemed a bit routine to me.

Kismet Knight is a psychologist looking for an idea. She needs to write her next book, and keep her profile up. She wants something interesting, and original, and maybe a little sensational too. But nothing has really caught her imagination. Then she meets her new client, Midnight. A teenage girl, Midnight has been referred by her family. They’re worried about her fixation on an older man, and more precisely about her desire to become a vampire like him. While Kismet is genuinely concerned about Midnight, she also becomes entranced by the idea of people who genuinely believe that they – or other people – are vampires. She wants to protect Midnight from the presumed predator who appears to be grooming her, but becomes distracted by the idea of becoming the Vampire Psychologist. Kismet will counsel “vampires” and wannabe vampires, and at the same time gather material for a truly original book.

The Sookie Stackhouse Companion

Edited by Charlaine Harris

Orion (2011)

ISBN: 978-0-575-09753-7

Reviewed by Lorraine Cormack

I tend to eye “guides” and “companions” with some suspicion; too often they seem designed for people who have crossed that fine line between dedicated fan and obsessed geek. However, this particular volume offers enough new material to avoid that trap. As the name suggests, it’s a companion to the Sookie Stackhouse books (such as Dead in the Family, reviewed here.)

The companion is edited by Charlaine Harris, the author of the novels, and she’s at pains in the introduction to be clear: it’s a companion to the Sookie Stackhouse novels, not the TV series True Blood which is based on the books. If you’ve tried both then you’ll know that they are very different. Harris does include a few nods to the TV series, most notably an interview with series creator Alan Ball. Appropriately, many of the questions focus on differences between the books and the TV series.

Nightshade

Andrea Cremer

Atom

ISBN: 978-1-907410-27-7

Reviewed by Lorraine Cormack

Night Shade is a young adult novel which focuses on Calla Tor, a young werewolf. When the novel opens, she is a few months away from turning seventeen, and on her seventeenth birthday she will marry Renier Laroche, another werewolf. Their union has been decreed by the Keepers, their masters. Calla has known since she was five that she was destined to be mated with Ren and that together they would create a new pack. And Calla has accepted that, just as she’s accepted that it’s fine for Ren to sleep with every girl in school but she must remain pure until their union. She’s also accepted that the Keepers dictate their lives, and that the Packs (known as Guardians) must serve the Keepers in their fight against the Searchers.

But Calla isn’t entirely happy about all this. She resents the way others run her life and tell her what to think and what to do. She’s drawn to Ren, but isn’t sure she loves him. And there’s much about the way the Keepers treat the Guardians that makes her uncomfortable. Everyone around her seems to accept it, and so Calla falls in line – but she couldn’t really say that she’s happy.

Then one day Calla meets Shay, a human boy, and breaks more than a few rules to save his life. And then Shay begins to attend her school, and turns Calla’s world upside down. Perhaps she doesn’t have to do what the Keepers say. Perhaps she doesn’t have to do her duty, mate with Ren, and form and lead a new pack. As Calla deals with the turmoil Shay has brought into her life, she also starts to realise that perhaps she’s been lied to all her life – and that perhaps all the Guardians have been lied to. The relationship between the Keepers and the wicked Searchers may not be as the Guardians have been taught.

Heartless

Gail Carriger

The Parasol Protectorate, book 4

Orbit (2011)

ISBN: 9780316127196

Reviewed by Alexandra Pierce

This is the fourth book in the Alexia Tarabotti/Maccon series, The Parasol Protectorate. As such there are spoilers for the first three (Soulless, Changeless, Blameless), but there are NO major spoilers for Heartless.

When a ghost turns up in front of Alexia and mentions that there is a plot against the queen’s life, Alexia naturally flings herself into uncovering and halting it. Even if she weren’t muhjah and therefore responsible for such a thing, she could hardly help herself from meddling and being all Miss Marple-y. In the course of her investigations, Alexia must of course deal with the supernatural set – werewolves and vampires mostly – of London, have hair-raising adventures, and drink a great deal of tea. All of this while she is eight months’ pregnant. Oh, and her life is being threatened on a regular basis, too.