A long holiday

This website / blog is taking a long break and new material won’t be posted for the foreseeable future.

In the meantime please visit the Peter Coleborn and The Alchemy Press websites.

 

 

Book review: Superfluous Women: Daisy Dalrymple

We occasionally receive non-fantasy, horror or SF books to review. Here’s one such example:

Jan Edwards

Superfluous Women: A Daisy Dalrymple Mystery –Carola Dunn
Published by Constable, £16.99 h/b.
Release date 9^th July

After an illness the Honourable Daisy Dalrymple-Fletcher uses her convalescent trip as an opportunity to visit her old school friend, Wilhelmina ‘Willie’ Chandler (one of those superfluous women of the title) in her new home. When the Great War took the lives of 700,000 British men, a generation of women were left without prospect of marriage or a family of their own. These women were often referred to as superfluous women; the forgotten victims of war adrift in a society that denigrated them for their spinsterhood yet in the same breath rebuked these women’s attempts to earn their keep in an era that had yet to acknowledge women’s freshly emergent emancipation.

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The Country of Ice Scream Star by Sandra Newman

“‘My name be Ice Cream Fifteen Star and this be the tale of how I bring the cure to all the Nighted States, save every poory children, short for life. Is how a city die for selfish love, and rise from this same smallness. Be how the new America begin, in wars against all hope – a country with no power in a world that hate its life. So been the faith I sworn, and it ain’t evils in no world nor cruelties in no red hell can change the vally heart of Ice Cream Star.’

In the ruins of a future America, fifteen-year-old Ice Cream Star and her people survive by scavenging in the detritus of an abandoned civilization. Theirs is a world of children – by the time they reach twenty, each of them will die from a disease they call posies.

When her brother sickens, Ice Cream sets out on the trail of a cure, led by a stranger whose intentions remain unclear. It’s a quest that will lead her to love and heartbreak, to captivity and to a nation’s throne, and ultimately into a war that threatens to doom everyone she loves.”

Out now from Chatto & Windus, £14.99.

 

Kill Baxter by Charlie Human

“The world has been massively unappreciative of sixteen-year-old Baxter Zevcenko. His bloodline may be a combination of ancient Boer mystic and giant shape-shifting crow, and he may have won an inter-dimensional battle and saved the world, but does anyone care? No

Instead he’s packed off to Hexpoort, a magical training school that’s part reformatory, part military school, and just like Hogwarts (except with sex, drugs, and better internet access). The problem is that Baxter sucks at magic. He’s also desperately attempting to control his new ability to dreamwalk, all the while being singled out by the school’s resident bully, who just so happens to be the Chosen One.

But when the school comes under attack, Baxter needs to forget all that and step into action. The only way is joining forces with his favourite recovering alcoholic of a supernatural bounty hunter, Ronin, to try and save the world from the apocalypse. Again.”

Kill Baxter is out later this month (century £13.99).