Heroines, Highlanders, and Robots! Oh, my!

One of my favorite books is The Pleasure Master by Nina Bangs. No! No! Don’t run away! It’s not what you think.

I know, the title sounds like the book a soccer mom would secretly have on her e-reader. While it is a romance novel, it’s not 50 shades of anything. For a lot of women that would mean it’s a nice, sweet read for grandma but not meaty enough for their tastes. Believe me, this book doesn’t disappoint.

pleasuremasterKathy, our modern-day heroine, is overworked, overstressed, and just got out of a bad marriage. When she cried out to the universe that she needs a sunny vacation she didn’t expect the universe to answer by transporting her to the highlands of Scotland…four-hundred and fifty years in the past. Somehow she has to find her way back home and the only help to be had comes from a sexy highlander (the Pleasure Master) and a talking toy robot.

For those well read in the genre, you’re probably thinking “…and she meets the Pleasure Master, he seduces her, and they live happily ever after.” Well, yes and no. I’m not going to spoil the book but I will say that as a divorced woman I appreciate that Nina made Kathy a strong, intelligent woman that’s more interested in a healthy relationship than a quick roll in the hay with a hot guy.

I think Henry Fonda said it best in the 1968 version of Yours, Mine and Ours: “It isn’t going to a bed with a man that proves you’re in love with him; it’s getting up in the morning and facing the drab, miserable, wonderful everyday world with him that counts.” This book does a wonderful job of illustrating that while simultaneously maintaing the delicious tension between the couple and balancing it with a healthy dose of humor (provided by the toy robot). This book is what all romance novels should be — a fun, entertaining romp through imagination that doesn’t rely on bad decisions or lust to bring two people together. It makes the happy ending much more satisfying.

Beware the Series of Doom!

A guest post by Kylee Unrau.

I grew up in a tiny town that had a tiny library. Every year, they would buy a few new books they thought the students would enjoy, and most of the time I was the only one to read these new books. One book they bought was called Tomorrow, When the War Began, by John Marsden.

I was hooked from the first page, and continued to devour the next four books in the series when the librarians purchased them. The basic premise of the series is that a group of teenagers in Australia decide to go on a camping trip over their summer break (which, since it’s in Australia, is just after Christmas) to a remote area they don’t think anyone has been to in a hundred years. While they’re camping, their country gets taken over by a foreign power that hopes to steal Australia’s overabundance of resources and share it more equally among their people. Since these teenagers aren’t in a civilized area and no one knows exactly where they went, they manage to not get captured, and start planning how to free their families, or escape, or just survive without being caught by soldiers. Aside from being fascinating by the cultural and language differences (they call chickens “chooks” and bathrooms “dunnies”), these books also had humour, adventure, and real emotion as well as a smart and sarcastic leading female and well-rounded characters.

I’ll warn you, if you’re a fan of young adult dystopian fiction, prepare to be frustrated when you go on your desperate search to find this series.

After reading the first four books, I guess the author wasn’t finished writing the rest, so I waited for a few years for my library to order the remaining titles. This didn’t happen before I left high school, and I continued to think of these books well into my university years, right up until this last year when I realized I should just buy this series myself since I couldn’t stop thinking about them and wanted to know how Ellie and her friends fared.

I used to work at a bookstore, and I would recommend this series to people and then promptly apologize because I knew they would be completely addicted to the first book, and then probably never be able to find the rest. Chapters, usually my go-to place for books (I assumed they were the gods of the Canadian book market) only carried the first and second book. Chapters couldn’t even order in my books from the publisher! EBay didn’t have them. Another big local retailer didn’t carry them. No one I’d ever spoken to had even heard of them, even though they seemed to be a big deal Down Under. There’s even a movie based on the first book, and yet they don’t seem to be available in Canada!

Even Amazon, the internet mogul that sells everything, didn’t appear to have them until I did some digging on the American Amazon store and was able to set up an account and find them from some various and slightly sketchy sounding sellers (I bought the seven books in the series from four different sellers). Luckily, my parents often buy things from across the border and have an address there to which they were able to ship the books. Of course, they didn’t all come at the same time, so I waited, watching my tracking numbers diligently, until they finally all showed up as delivered! My mum and I made the hour-and-a-half drive across the border, and eighty dollars plus gas and custom fees later, I had all seven of The Tomorrow Series in my hands.

As curious as I was, I had to start over from the beginning before finding out what happened in the later books. As much as my reading tastes have matured over the years, these books did not disappoint. I still loved all the characters, and the plot was exciting and well-written. There are a few things that are pretty typical teen-lit, and there are a few things that bothered me in the plot (the author never reveals which country has invaded Australia and there are a few unanswered questions about love interests and missing characters; the books are also a bit outdated in regards to technology), but most of these things seem to be woven in to make the reader keep thinking about the series long after they’ve finished the final chapter. What would you do if society broke down around you and you had to either survive, surrender, or try to change things? And who are the real bad guys? I found that even though these books are fast paced and adventurous, with just the right amount of explosions and romance to keep both teenage boys and girls on the edge of their seats, there’s still more than enough insight into humanity and growing up to make it relatable to adults as well.

I highly recommend this series if you can find it, but don’t say I didn’t warn you!

396778_10151095622403319_349165310_n KyleeGuest Writer Bio:
Kylee Unrau is a graduate of the University of Winnipeg with majors in both English and Theatre. She enjoys fantasy and scifi, horseback riding and video games, tea and coffee (most people prefer one or the other. I say, “Bring on the caffeine!”). Kylee hates Winnipeg winters and loves bonfires and camping.

The Darts He Suffers Are His Own

download (1)I write almost exclusively fantasy and science fiction, so the fact that The Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett is both a historical fiction and my very favorite series of books should say something about how highly I regard it. The books have been around since the 1960s, yet the only people I have ever met who’ve read them are my mother (who convinced me to try the first book) and the people I’ve convinced in turn. To me this is nothing short of a travesty.

The six books are set in the middle of the sixteenth century and follow Francis Crawford of Lymond. Francis (known simply as “Lymond” to all but his closest friends) is already a wanted traitor to his homeland of Scotland when he returns there intent on clearing his name as the series opens. Lymond is, in the words of the author herself, “a classical hero: a natural leader whose star-crossed career, disturbing, hilarious, dangerous, I could follow in finest detail for ten years.” He is a leader, scholar, warrior and above all, rogue. No mere Mary Sue or shallow Renaissance James Bond, Lymond is a tragically flawed man of deep feeling and a tortured past, and might be better compared to a Renaissance mix of Jaime Lannister and Rhaegar Targaryen.

The series stretches from Lymond’s home in Scotland to the headquarters of the Knights Templar in Malta to the courts of Suleiman the Magnificent in the Ottoman Empire and Ivan the Terrible in Russia. The breadth and depth of research Dunnett undertook to bring Renaissance Europe to life is nothing short of staggering. Lymond finds himself involved in many of the grand historical events of the time, blending so seamlessly into real history (and surrounded by so many real historical figures) that you’ll swear he must have been there.

Dunnett performs a neat narrative trick which was, for me at the time I first read the series, novel: at (virtually) no point in the series are you ever allowed inside Lymond’s head. Save for one critical scene, the POV always follows other characters. You are permitted to observe Lymond but never to inhabit him. This makes him central to the series but also keeps him at arms length from the reader, a necessary and fascinating technique to maintain Lymond’s air of mystique. It’s a technique I’ve used in my own writing since learning it from Dunnett.

Fair warning: these books are challenging reads, and the first book (The Game of Kings, referencing chess and not A Song of Ice and Fire) has the hardest prose to parse. Dunnett moderates her prose (relatively speaking) in the remaining volumes (Queen’s Play, The Disorderly Knights, Pawn in Frankincense, The Ringed Castle and Checkmate). But throughout the series Dunnett features quotes in other languages. Lymond is a polyglot and is not afraid to flaunt it. His use of multiple languages is not enough to disrupt your understanding of the books if you can’t translate, but it might be frustrating to those who like their prose clear and unaffected. There is an excellent companion book available for this series (and The House of Niccolo, Dunnett’s other series) that will translate the quotes for you and provide historical context, adding to the enjoyment of the diehards like myself.

The bottom lines are these. If you love action and adventure, read these books. If you love fascinating rogue heroes/anti-heroes, read these books. If you love star-crossed romance (in both senses of the word) read these books. If you love political intrigue and deeply-buried secrets, read these books. If you love worldbuilding and attention to detail, read these books. If you love to have your heart torn out of your chest, read these books. If you love soaring triumph, read these books.

If you love great books, these are the books for you.

Dorothy Dunnett sadly passed away shortly after I read this series for the first time back in 2001. But her work stands as a fitting legacy. Earlier I said that Lymond blends into history so seamlessly you’ll swear he was there. Alas, Francis Crawford didn’t exist in real life. But by the end of this series, you’ll wish he had.

Apples and Aliens

A guest post by Guy Anthony De Marco.

downloadI was a nerdy kid before nerds were identified as a cultural subgroup. I was also a very advanced reader, preferring to enjoy college-level books on astronomy instead of the usual dinosaur or Encyclopedia Brown books in fifth grade.

One day, while wandering through the local library, I spotted a section called “Science Fiction”. Since it did have the word ‘science’ in the label, I stopped to check out what was lurking on the shelves.

My favorite librarian was re-stocking the shelves with returned books, and she was surprised to see me in the fiction area.

“Run out of astronomy books already, Guy?” she asked with a kindly smile.

I nodded, still perusing the strange titles and authors names.

She dug through her pile and pulled out a well-worn book. “Here, give this one a try. The reading level is below your range, but everyone in middle school seems to enjoy it.”

The book she handed me was “The Space Ship Under the Apple Tree” by Louis Slobodkin. The cover had a crude drawing of a flying saucer with two people in an apple grove.

I read it in the library. Then I checked it out and took it home, where I read it every evening for almost a month, until I had to return it.

This was the book that inspired me to write stories for a living. It combined my favorite topic with novels and fiction, bridging the gap between the two separate areas (brain hemispheres?) of the library.

The second book I decided to read was written by a doctor named Asimov. The cover of Foundation looked interesting enough, and as I was checking it out, my favorite librarian took the time to tell me it was an advanced book with some topics that might be confusing to a young boy.

It took me almost a week to get through the dense book. I enjoyed every word, every unusual combination of phrases that changed their meaning and context. I was fascinated by the language Asimov used.

When I returned that book, I found out there was something in fiction called a series, with books called sequels that continued the story. I picked up the next book in the Foundation line, devoured it, and continued on. I eventually read most of the library’s Asimov titles (the man was quite prolific), and moved to Burroughs, Clark, all the way to Zelazny.

Eventually I read all of the books in the Science Fiction section, so I progressed to Fantasy. Horror wasn’t a separate section at that time, but I did read Frankenstein and Dracula.

As far as that innocuous-looking book by Slobodkin goes, with internal drawings that were on par with what I was sketching at the time, it actually changed my entire reading habits. No, it’s not the best story ever written. No, it’s not in print anymore, despite people actually pleading for it to get put back in libraries. What it did was tell a story to a young kid at the right age, at the right time, and made that kid want to read—and write—fiction. I started writing stories and comics, selling my first story in sixth grade to a friend for a shoebox full of baseball cards (which was the currency of kids in those days.)

I actually tracked down a copy of the first edition of “The Space Ship Under the Apple Tree”. Amazon has used copies available, but the interesting thing about the book’s Amazon page is buried in the (all five-star) reviews. “This was the first science fiction book I ever read” is a common comment. “I re-read this book many times” is another. Some are asking the publisher to get the book back into print and into the libraries so their kids can begin their own reading journeys. Reader T. Rose said, “Slodbodkin’s Marty and Eddie books were pretty much the only reason that kept me in the town’s small library as a kid.”

It turns out I wasn’t as alone and weird as I thought I was.

Reference: “The Space Ship Under the Apple Tree”; Slobodkin, Louis. Macmillan; First Printing edition (1952). ISBN 0027853403. http://www.amazon.com/Space-Ship-Under-Apple-Tree/dp/0027853403/

Guest Writer Bio:DeMarco_Web-5963

Guy Anthony De Marco is a speculative fiction author; a Graphic Novel Bram Stoker Award®; winner of the HWA Silver Hammer Award; a prolific short story and flash fiction crafter; a novelist; an invisible man with superhero powers; a game writer (Sojourner Tales modules, Interface Zero 2.0 core team, D&D modules); and a coffee addict. One of these is false.
A writer since 1977, Guy is a member of the following organizations: SFWA, WWA, SFPA, IAMTW, ASCAP, RMFW, NCW, HWA. He hopes to collect the rest of the letters of the alphabet one day. Additional information can be found at WikipediaGuyAndTonya.com, and GuyAnthonyDeMarco.com.