Waiting on Wednesday (9)

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating. So here's a thing I'm looking forward to: The Human Division, by John Scalzi (one-volume edition), coming from Tor on May 14, 2013.

The people of Earth now know that the human Colonial Union has kept them ignorant of the dangerous universe around them. For generations the CU had defended humanity against hostile aliens, deliberately keeping Earth an ignorant backwater and a source of military recruits. Now the CU’s secrets are known to all. Other alien races have come on the scene and formed a new alliance—an alliance against the Colonial Union. And they’ve invited the people of Earth to join them. For a shaken and betrayed Earth, the choice isn't obvious or easy.

Against such possibilities, managing the survival of the Colonial Union won’t be easy, either. It will take diplomatic finesse, political cunning…and a brilliant “B Team,” centered on the resourceful Lieutenant Harry Wilson, that can be deployed to deal with the unpredictable and unexpected things the universe throws at you when you’re struggling to preserve the unity of the human race.

*****

I am specifically looking forward to the collected edition because this has been coming out as a serial since January; I could have been collecting the thirteen segments on my e-reader for a buck or two apiece, but chose to wait for the hardcover. I've had a Nook for over a year now, but I have not been using it nearly as much as I could have, mostly because I'm cheap like that and prefer to get my leisure reading from the library.

Anyway, I quite enjoyed all of the Old Man's War series to date, so Scalzi's return to that universe makes me happy.

Waiting on Wednesday (8)

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating. So here's a thing I'm looking forward to: Inferno, by Dan Brown (from Doubleday, May 14, 2013)

 In the heart of Italy, Harvard professor of symbology, Robert Langdon, is drawn into a harrowing world centered on one of history's most enduring and mysterious literary masterpieces . . . Dante's Inferno.

Against this backdrop, Langdon battles a chilling adversary and grapples with an ingenious riddle that pulls him into a landscape of classic art, secret passageways, and futuristic science. Drawing from Dante's dark epic poem, Langdon races to find answers and decide whom to trust . . . before the world is irrevocably altered.

*****

Say what you will about Dan Brown, the man knows how to write an immensely entertaining potboiler. I quite enjoyed the other books in the Robert Langdon series, though it took me a long time to get around to reading the third one, and if nothing else, I'm looking forward to seeing him back in Italy for this one.

Eighty Days

Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History-Making Race Around the World, by Matthew Goodman.

On the morning of November 14, 1889, New York World reporter Nellie Bly set sail for England, aiming to travel around the world in 75 days, just to prove it really could be done. That evening, The Cosmopolitan magazine literary columnist Elizabeth Bisland caught a train for San Francisco, aiming to travel around the world faster than Nellie Bly. Bly had proposed the trip to her editors almost a year earlier, but had only gotten their approval that week; she had three days to get ready. Bisland's editor only came up with the idea of sending her in the opposite direction when he read the World's announcement of Nellie Bly's departure that morning, so Bisland had all of about ten hours to prepare.

I am not sure where I first heard of Nellie Bly, but I've been a fan of hers for years. I read a biography of her some time ago, so I knew about her round-the-world race, and even recognized the name of her competitor Elizabeth Bisland, but a lot of the details were new to me: like the fact that Bisland was shipped off by her editor with less than a day's notice, and Nellie Bly didn't even hear that she had a competitor until she got to Hong Kong, more than halfway home. Fascinating story! 

Waiting on Wednesday (7)

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating. So here's a thing I'm looking forward to: Sold for Endless Rue, by Madeleine E. Robins (from Forge Books, May 14, 2013).

 After a blighted childhood, young Laura finds peace and purpose in the home of a midwife and healer. Later, she enrolls in Salerno's famed medical school - the first in the world to admit women. Laura and her adoptive mother hope that Laura can build a bridge between women's herbal healing and the new science of medicine developing in thirteenth century Italy.

The hardest lessons are those of love; Laura falls hard for a fellow student who abandons her for a wealthy wife. Worse, her mother rejects her as "impure." Shattered, Laura devotes herself to her work, becoming a respected medico. But her heart is still bitter, and when she sees a chance for revenge, she grabs it - and takes for her own Bieta, the newborn daughter of a woman whose husband regularly raided the physician's garden for bitter herbs to satisfy his pregnant wife's cravings.

Determined to protect her adored daughter from the ravages of the world, Laura isolates the young woman in a tower. Bieta, as determined as her mother, escapes, and finds adventure - and love - on the streets of Salerno.

*****

I'm familiar with the author from her Sarah Tolerance novels, interesting little mysteries set in a sort of alternative Regency period. This one sounds very much like a retelling of a fairy tale that isn't as popular with modern authors as some others, so I'm intrigued.

A Play of Heresy

by Margaret Frazer.

Actor and spy Joliffe is on his way to Coventry to rejoin his company of traveling players for the annual cycle of Corpus Christi plays when Sebastian, an associate in the Bishop of Winchester's service, tells him that while he's there, he should look into the disappearance of one of Sebastian's regular informers. Sebastian suspects Lollards--religious reformers who believed that the Church was hopelessly corrupt, some of whom had gone so far as armed revolt against the Church and the King only seven years before. Joliffe isn't so ready to see heretics under every rock, but at least that possibility gives him a starting point for some questions, when he isn't busy with rehearsals for the play he's in this year.

I had seen this book on a mystery display in the library where I work a few days ago, which both reminded me that I hadn't read it yet and inspired me to check the author's website for any upcoming books. To my dismay, what I learned was that Gail Lynn Frazer, who started the Dame Frevisse series of medieval mysteries in collaboration with Mary Monica Pulver under the name of Margaret Frazer, passed away at the beginning of February. I am now kind of bummed that there will be no more Joliffe novels, to show us how he gets from this point to the kind of professional spy that we know he becomes by the time of his last appearance in a Frevisse novel, and there will be no more Frevisse novels, to show how she copes with being named the Prioress of her convent of St. Frideswide's.

As far as this novel goes, I thought it was a slight improvement on the last one, where the villain was uncovered offstage. I was interested in all the stuff about the Corpus Christi cycle as well. I just wish I could still look forward to more of them.

Waiting on Wednesday (6)

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating. So here's a thing I'm looking forward to: Good Man Friday, by Barbara Hambly (from Severn House, May 1, 2013).

Benjamin January's search for a missing man takes him into a dark world filled with grave robbers and slave stealers. 

New Orleans, 1838.  When Benjamin January suddenly finds that his services playing piano at extravagant balls held by the city's wealthy are no longer required, he ends up agreeing to accompany sugar planter Henri Viellard and his young wife, Chloë, on a mission to Washington to find a missing friend. Plunged into a murky world, it soon becomes clear that while it is very possible the Viellards' friend is dead, his enemies are very much alive - and ready to kill anyone who gets in their way.

*****

I recommend this series all the time at the library where I work. I live in Louisiana, so I figure that local interest ought to be enough to intrigue even readers who don't normally care for mysteries or historical fiction. But the entire series is outstanding historical fiction, and they're excellent mysteries too. Kudos to Severn House for picking up the series after Hambly's previous publisher stopped buying them; I'm very happy to be getting more of them.

The Price of the Stars

by Debra Doyle and James MacDonald. First in the Mageworlds series.

Beka Rosselin-Metadi has grown up seeing what it did to her mother to be the last Domina of lost Entibor and wants no part of the position in galactic politics that she stands to inherit; Beka is a starpilot, has been one since she shipped out at the earliest possible moment after her official coming of age, and that's all she wants to be, except maybe a captain in her own right one day. Then her mother is assassinated on the Senate floor, and Beka's father, the Commanding General of the Republic's Space Force, offers her a deal: he'll sell her his own ship, the legendary Warhammer of his privateering youth, and all she has to pay for it is a couple of names. Specifically, the names of whoever was behind her mother's murder.

I read this after a post at the regularly brilliant Tor.com blog remarked (not the first to do so, either) that it reads like a Star Wars sequel. There are a lot of superficial similarities; the late Perada Rosselin and her husband Jos Metadi do sound a lot like another couple I've heard of where she was surviving royalty from a destroyed planet, a resistance leader, war hero and stateswoman, and he was a rather disreputable "free trader," with a battered but famously fast starship, who became a war hero and general after taking up with her. 

But Beka is her own person and this story is its own thing, and a very fun ride it is. I have some reservations about Beka's body count--she leaves a trail of dead bodies and missing persons across five star systems, starting by faking her own death to get out from under the price on her head--but I'm interested enough in the characters and the intrigue to hunt up the rest of the series.