Month: November 2015

Authors Answer 2: is there an author often criticised that you love to read?

Not really. I’ve never read Fifty Shades of Grey, for instance. I’ve never read Barbara Cartland. I actually have more of the opposite problem: widely lauded books that I absolutely hate. I don’t know why this should be. I’m just contrary, I suppose. Or I look for something odd or quirky in my reading. But it’s happened to me many times over the years: a book receives rave reviews, but when I come to read it, I really don’t enjoy it at all. Examples? The Black Prism by Brent Weeks. So many people rave about it, and there were elements I loved – the magic system was awesome, for instance, and there were a few moments that just took my breath away. But then there was Karris, the main female character, who was super-strong and the first woman to do something or other, but… what drove her to that was […]

Posted November 30, 2015 by PaulineMRoss in AuthorsAnswer / 2 Comments

Fiction review: ‘The Beginner’s Goodbye’ by Anne Tyler

Aaron is a man with a withered arm and leg after a childhood illness. His family and friends fuss around him, but he won’t be cosseted, and has become a curmudgeonly adult, grumpy at everyone and unable to interact sociably with the world. He works in the family’s small publishing business, a vanity press which also publishes a series of how-to books, The Beginner’s (whatever). Aaron marries a woman just as socially inept as he is, and when she dies suddenly, he begins to encounter her ghost. The plot, such as it is, involves Aaron coming to terms with Dorothy’s death, and beginning to move on with his life (hence the title). I found this book a very easy read. There’s quite a bit of humour, and, as something of a curmudgeon myself, I very much enjoyed Aaron’s snappishness and passive resistance. With his house damaged by a fallen tree […]

Posted November 29, 2015 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

Authors Answer 1: If you could design your dream writing studio/office, what would it be like?

A little over a year ago, blogger Jay Dee Archer, of the I Read Encyclopedias For Fun blog, had an idea: why not gather together an eclectic bunch of authors and ask them to answer an interesting question every week? And so Authors Answer was born. I discovered it rather late in the day, but when Erica Dakin, of the Theft And Sorcery blog, and author of the raunchy fantasy trilogy of the same name, decided to revive the questions to answer on her own blog, I thought – why not do the same? So here goes: the first Authors Answer question is: Question 1: If you could design your dream writing studio/office, what would it be like? The study I have is pretty close, actually. It already has space for a nice big desk and plenty of bookcases. It has a big picture window looking out to the Moray […]

Posted November 21, 2015 by PaulineMRoss in AuthorsAnswer, Writing musings / 0 Comments

Mystery review: ‘The Riddle at Gipsy’s Mile’ by Clara Benson

This is the fourth book in the Angela Marchmont series of Christie-esque murder mysteries, and after the seaside romps of the last outing, this one is back to the classic structure: a country house, a body and an array of possible suspects. Angela Marchmont herself is a pretty low-key amateur detective, who sometimes seems to uncover information or deduce things more by chance than skill. She’s not a flamboyant Poirot type, but she also doesn’t seem as astute as Miss Marple. What she does have, however, is a great deal of curiosity, and a willingness to go out to start rooting round for evidence herself, although she thinks of it as helping the police. If she herself is a little bland, she is surrounded by an array of much more colourful characters. I like her American chauffeur, William, and also Freddy, the aristocratic newspaper man. I hope we’ll see more […]

Posted November 16, 2015 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

Fiction review: ‘Little Face’ by Sophie Hannah

This is one of those books that starts well, and then descends into some tortuous farce which requires a drastic level of improbability. Lacking a single likeable character, a realistic plot or convincing writing, I’m really struggling to find anything positive to say about it. I kept reading it to find out how it ended, so there’s that, I suppose. The premise is intriguing. A mother leaves her two-week-old baby for the first time, taking a modest trip to a health club she’s joining, and having a drink. When she returns home, she insists that the baby isn’t hers, that somehow her own baby has been stolen and a different baby substituted. Her husband, who has been looking after the baby, disagrees. This immediately sets up the central conceit of the book: is Alice (the new mother) right? Is she mistaken, suffering from some delusion? Or is she lying? Whatever […]

Posted November 13, 2015 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

‘The Magic Mines of Asharim’: launch report

It’s now seven weeks since the launch of The Magic Mines of Asharim, the fourth Brightmoon story. Time for a report on how things went. The two previous launches were very successful, so I followed much the same pattern: put the book on pre-order first, to allow me to book ads, run several days of promotion to boost the book in the rankings, then run some promotion on the other books. I chose to run a discount on The Fire Mages plus a free day for The Plains of Kallanash, towards the end of the 30-day high-visibility cycle for the new book, to try to keep things going. So how did it work? Like the curate’s egg, it was good in parts. The good points: The new book had 236 pre-orders (compared with 12, 19 and 34 on the previous books). This was the first long (3 month) pre-order period, […]

Posted November 13, 2015 by PaulineMRoss in Publishing/marketing, The Magic Mines of Asharim / 0 Comments

Fantasy review: ‘The Death of Dulgath’ by Michael J Sullivan

Yippee! A new Royce and Hadrian story! I was lucky enough to get this before the official release by contributing to the Kickstarter campaign. For fans of the boys, this is the third story in the Riyria Chronicles series, which was written after the Riyria Revelations trilogy, but precedes it in the story’s timeline. It’s possible to read either first, but personally I think it makes more sense to read the trilogy first, and then move on to the prequels. The plot is straightforward: the new Countess of Dulgath has been the subject of several assassination attempts. Royce and Hadrian are called in as consultants to advise her courtiers on likely methods of future attempts and suggest ways to circumvent them. And you don’t have to be as cynical as Royce to smell a rat, and suspect that they haven’t been summoned to the far end of the continent just […]

Posted November 8, 2015 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

Fantasy review: ‘Dragon’s Bride’ by H L Burke

It’s always a sad moment, reaching the end of a series and waving farewell to favourite characters. Will the author produce a final triumphant flourish, or will it fall a bit flat? Will obstacles be swept aside too easily, or will everything make perfect sense? Fortunately, the author got pretty much everything right in this. Ewan and Shannon’s story was tied up in a very satisfactory way, bad guys got their comeuppance, good guys got their reward and even the time travel worked out very neatly. Let’s start with Ewan and Shannon. I was always very pleased that Ewan embraced his dragon-ness, and Shannon was cool with it, too, even as they both had good reasons for wanting him to be human again. It seemed likely to me that the end of the story would have to be bittersweet, with one or both of them having to make a sacrifice. […]

Posted November 7, 2015 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

Fantasy review: ‘City of Mages’ by Kyra Halland

This is the fifth, and penultimate, part of the Daughter of the Wildings series of western fantasies, and this is the moment I’ve been looking forward to from the start. Finally, we get to leave the Wildings behind temporarily and visit Granadaia, the home of rogue mage Silas, and the place where mages are the wealthy aristocrats, and those without magic (Plains) are not much more than slaves. At the end of the fourth book, To The Gap, Silas had been shot and captured by mage hunters, to be taken back to Granadaia. It’s all down to his wife Lainie, Wildings-born and a mage with both Granadaian and Wildings abilities, to ride to the rescue. Although I missed Silas, it was wonderful to watch Lainie rise to the occasion and work out ways to find her man and then rescue him, almost single-handed. The opening of the book feels a […]

Posted November 6, 2015 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

One day only! 60 science fiction and fantasy books FREE!

UPDATE: The promotion is officially over, but many of these books are still free, so it’s worth checking out. Just be sure that the book you want is still free before downloading. Yes, folks, for today only (Tuesday 3rd November) you can download up to 60 scifi and fantasy novels completely FREE, all either the first in a series or standalone. One of my favourite authors, Australian Glenda Larke, has made The Aware free for the occasion, book 1 of the Isles of Glory. I loved her Stormlords Trilogy and the standalone Havenstar, so I’m looking forward to reading this one, which was shortlisted for the Aurealis Awards. Here’s the blurb: “A halfbreed’s search for a mysterious slave woman leads her to a lawless land of dark dunmagic and an evil that poses a threat to all the Isles of Glory.” There are lots of other great reads available, from […]

Posted November 3, 2015 by PaulineMRoss in General, Publishing/marketing, The Plains of Kallanash / 0 Comments