Everything Everything Box

Sometimes, if you're very lucky, a book that you had no idea you wanted finds its way to you. Way back in 2009, that book was Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim. The advance reader copy showed up on my desk and I picked it up because the cover intrigued me. I was hooked from the very first sentence ("I wake up in a pile of smoldering garbage and leaves in the old Hollywood Forever cemetery behind the Paramount Studio lot on Melrose...")  

I wrote this review for Indie Next:

How a book this dark can be this much fun to read is just one of many things that will amaze you about Sandman Slim.  After surviving eleven years in Hell - literally - Stark is ready for vengeance on the magicians who killed his girlfriend and sent him there.  If he happens to avert the Apocalypse while he's doing it, that will be icing on the cake.  Good Omens meets Raymond Chandler! 

And then I wrote it out on a shelf talker, and we sold 117 copies of the Sandman Slim mass market. Yes, I am bragging. (Okay, a few other people, like William Gibson, Charlaine Harris, Holly Black, and Kim Harrison loved it too.)

The Sandman Slim series continued: Kill the Dead, Aloha From Hell, Devil Said Bang, Kill City Blues, The Getaway God, Killing Pretty. All great. #8, The Perdition Score, is due out June 28 of this year.
 

Just in case that wasn't enough, Kadrey has also written a fantastic stand-alone, The Everything Box, that's the first in a new series, and it comes out tomorrow, April 16, 2016. It's a must for anyone who enjoys action-adventure with a humorous edge. It's been compared to Christopher Moore, Donald Westlake, and Matt Ruff, all of which are apt if you need to contextualize it; but Kadrey's wild imagination and unique voice make The Everything Box completely new and thoroughly entertaining. Here's what I wrote for Indie Next:

The Everything Box

Richard Kadrey

Voyager

Coop is a thief whose immunity to magic lets him specialize in stealing magical objects - until he steals a box that could trigger the Apocalypse. Now fallen angels, supernatural law enforcement officials, rival doomsday cult leaders and just plain criminals all want the box, and expect Coop to get it for them. Can Coop keep himself and his friends alive - and will there still be a world left for them to live in if he does? Kadrey is a master of edgy humor, complex plotting, and nonstop action with a paranormal edge, and The Everything Box is an engagingly dark delight to read!
 
Note: I have now tried approximately 75 times to give this post a consistent font all the way through, and I've given up. 

 

The View From the Cheap Seats

This book doesn't come out until May 31, 2016, but the author just posted on Twitter that he's very nervous about it, so I'm posting my Indie Next review here now. 

Neil Gaiman is an unparalleled storyteller, and his nonfiction writing is every bit as compelling and thought-provoking as his fiction. His curiosity and enthusiasm keep the reader interested, whether he's writing about his cultural influences - books, bookstores, writers, artists, musicians - or his friends, or issues of social justice. His attitude of inclusion and encouragement and his championing of those he admires leave the reader feeling positive. I loved The View From the Cheap Seats!

(Note: I originally typed this title as The View from the Cheap Sheets.  Nothing Freudian about that. )

Jane Steele

If you know me, you've probably heard me raving about The Gods of Gotham, as well as the two other volumes in Lyndsay Faye's Timothy Wilde series, Seven for a Secret and The Fatal Flame. I was sad to see that series come to an end, so I was very excited when I learned she had a new book coming out.
I was even more excited after I got to read it. Damn, this book is good!
Gus, my husband, doesn't read nearly as much as I do (let's face it, hardly anyone reads as much as I do), and he also read and enjoyed it.
Here's what I wrote for Indie Next:

Jane Steele

Lyndsay Faye

G. P. Putnam's Sons

Steel is heavier than air, and Jane Steele is considerably more solid, spunky and self-determined a heroine than Jane Eyre. Lyndsay Faye's orphan-turned-governess narrator outmaneuvers - okay, kills - various predatory men she encounters, in a lively, gripping story full of action and rich with historical detail. Faye's writing, particularly her ear for language, is a delight, and Jane Steele is a freshly forged heroine for the ages.

Out today, 3/22/16.

Save the Bees! The Bee-Friendly Garden

Despite (or maybe because of) the recent snow here in Michigan, I've been thinking about spring, with the help of this gorgeously illustrated, informative volume from Ten Speed Press, The Bee-Friendly Garden. It features loads of interesting facts about bees, great information about which plants are best for them, and plenty of tips on what we can do to create and maintain the best possible habitat for these essential pollinators. I highly recommend this helpful, beautiful and affordable book!
I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.

Two amazing novels!

As a bookseller, one of the great perks of my job is that I often have access to my favorite writers' books before they are released. The down side of that is having to wait to be able to discuss - and more importantly, sell - the books I really love. So I am thrilled that today is the release date for two of the best novels I read in 2015, Lovecraft Country and The Opposite of Everyone.
Reviews written just after I read the books:

Lovecraft Country

Matt Ruff

Harper

Matt Ruff is one of our most imaginative living writers, and Lovecraft Country is simply amazing. It's the story of two African-American families in the Jim Crow era, dealing with terrors both supernatural and man-made. Ruff is a master at creating clever, sympathetic underdog characters who triumph - mostly - over their enemies, and his sharp wit and brilliant world-building make his books delightful to read while leaving you with plenty of food for thought. I highly recommend Lovecraft Country!

The Opposite of Everyone

Joshilyn Jackson

William Morrow

Have you ever loved a book so much that you finished it and immediately went back to the beginning and read it over again? That's exactly what I did with The Opposite of Everyone. Jackson gives us wonderful characters, with fully human qualities and flaws; her ear for language and dialogue is first-rate; her plots manage to be both surprising and satisfying. The Opposite of Everyone centers around Paula, a self-determined, overachieving divorce attorney who appeared in Someone Else's Love Story. The carefully constructed edifice of Paula's life begins to crumble when she learns that her estranged mother is dying, and the events that unfold - surprising, hilarious, terrifying, and delightful - will keep the reader biting their nails until the last page.

Five Days at Memorial

I just finished reading Five Days at Memorial, a stunning, exhaustive work of investigative journalism by Sheri Fink. If you like nonfiction that grips you like a thriller, this book is for you! Fink chronicles the harrowing experiences of staff, patients and visitors at Memorial Hospital in New Orleans during and immediately after Hurricane Katrina, where patients were found to have been given life-ending drug overdoses and medical personnel were accused of murder. Fink does a terrific job of presenting a balanced story and multiple points of view. This is a work that definitely deserves all the accolades it has received. And it's now out in paperback!
More about the author here.
I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.

All the Birds in the Sky

I am the first to admit that as a reader, I am incredibly spoiled. Since I work as a book buyer, I have lots of contact with publisher reps. Since I write a lot of reviews, I get access to lots of books before they are published. One of the only down sides to reading books before the release date is that by the time they are available to the public, they're no longer in the front of my consciousness. This doesn't stop me from recommending them, but I do tend to talk about whatever I've recently finished reading.
In this case, though, I just finished a book that came out on Tuesday, January 26. That's late for indie-review purposes, but pretty much ideal for hand selling. The book is All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders, published by Tor (MacMillan). Our lovely MacMillan sales rep sent me a box of advance reader copies, and I grabbed that one because I'd seen a mention that intrigued me on social media. I then set it aside, since I try to prioritize titles that are far enough from the release date to review. Then last week, a friend of mine asked me about it - thanks, Ted! - so I made it a priority and dove right in - and stayed up until midnight to finish it.

All the Birds in the Sky is a stunning, fantastic - in both senses of the word - novel. Anders draws you into a world where magic and science coexist, on a planet that's close to being destroyed by human shortsightedness. Two misfit kids - Patricia, a magician, and Laurence, a scientist - cross paths, sometimes as friends, more often at odds with each other - as they struggle with technology and forces that may save them, if they aren't destroyed first. Brilliant, compelling and slyly humorous, this is an un-put-downable read! 

Interestingly, while I'm not, in general, a science fiction / fantasy fan, many of my favorite authors (William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Patrick Rothfuss, Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Matt Ruff) write in those genres. It's always fun to find a new, fantastic writer!

2015 Year End Stats

Wow, I really do read a lot.
My year end count for 2015: I read 226 books.
If you discount the 18 that were rereads, I read 208 books.
That's a lot of books.
Here they are, in the order that I finished them:
January 2015
Trigger Warning - Neil Gaiman
Distrust That Particular Flavor - William Gibson
Falling in Love - Donna Leon
The Unquiet Dead - Ausma Zehanat Khan
Juliet, Naked - Nick Hornby (reread)
Bloodline - Mark Billingham
Leave the Grave Green - Deborah Crombie
Dreaming of the Bones - Deborah Crombie
Kissed a Sad Goodbye - Deborah Crombie
A Finer End - Deborah Crombie
And Justice There Is None - Deborah Crombie
In A Dark House - Deborah Crombie
Dragons at Crumbling Castle - Terry Pratchett
Inside the O'Briens - Lisa Genova
Water Like A Stone - Deborah Crombie
Hand Drawn Jokes for Smart Attractive People - Matthew Diffee
Find the Good - Heather Lende
The Sound of Broken Glass - Deborah Crombie (reread)
To Dwell in Darkness - Deborah Crombie (reread)
February 2015
The Spellman Files - Lisa Lutz
Backstrom: He Who Kills the Dragon - Leif GW Persson
A Share in Death - Deborah Crombie
Better Than Before - Gretchen Rubin
Mislaid - Nell Zink
Moab is My Washpot - Stephen Fry
Spook Country - William Gibson (reread)
My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry - Fredrik Backman
Six and a Half Deadly Sins - Colin Cotterill
Fillets of Plaice - Gerald Durrell (reread)
Down Among the Dead Men - Peter Lovesey
Bloodhounds - Peter Lovesey
The Vault - Peter Lovesey
The Fatal Flame - Lyndsay Faye
The Art of Asking - Amanda Palmer
March 2015
Zero History - William Gibson (reread)
Little Black Lies - Sharon Bolton
King and Joker - Peter Dickinson
What Makes This Book So Great - Jo Walton
The Old English Peep Show - Peter Dickinson
Saint Mazie - Jamie Attenberg
Royal Wedding - Meg Cabot
The Missing and the Dead - Stuart MacBride
Flame Out - M. P. Cooley
Superfluous Women - Carola Dunn
Bertie's Guide to Life and Mothers - Alexander McCall Smith
The Clothes They Stood Up In and The Lady in the Van - Alan Bennett
When the Sacred Ginmill Closes - Lawrence Block
Killing the Lawyers - Reginald Hill
Jinn and Juice - Nicole Peeler
In One Person - John Irving
Generation Loss - Elizabeth Hand
Hold Still - Sally Mann
Moon Tiger - Penelope Lively
Archer's Goon - Diana Wynne Jones (reread)
No Mark Upon Her - Deborah Crombie (reread)
Anger Is An Energy - John Lydon
Sewer, Gas and Electric - Matt Ruff
The Now Effect - Elisha Goldstein
April 2015
Fates and Furies - Lauren Groff
One Foot In The Grave - Peter Dickinson
The Seven Daughters of Eve - Brian Sykes
Little Brother - Cory Doctorow
City of the Mind - Penelope Lively
A Combat Medic's Escapes and Escapades - William J. Shier
The Ways of the World - Robert Goddard
The Merlin Conspiracy - Diana Wynne Jones
The Photograph - Penelope Lively
Simon Vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda - Becky Albertalli
A Curious Mind - Brian Grazer & Charles Fishman
After the Storm - Linda Castillo
Killing Pretty - Richard Kadrey
Hold Me Closer - David Levithan
Pray for Silence - Linda Castillo
In the Dark Places - Peter Robinson
Cleopatra's Sister - Penelope Lively
The Kill - Jane Casey
How to Start a Fire - Lisa Lutz
A Good Killing - Allison Leotta
Wonderland - Stacy D'Erasmo
May 2015
A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara
The Forgotten Affairs of Youth - Alexander McCall Smith
The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss
What Comes Next and How To Like It - Abigail Thomas
The Wise Man's Fear - Patrick Rothfuss
Furiously Happy - Jenny Lawson
Emma: A Modern Retelling - Alexander McCall Smith
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl - Jesse Andrews
The Job - Steve Osborne
Bad Kid - David Crabb
One Plus One - Jojo Moyes
House of Thieves - Charles Belfoure
The Swans of Fifth Avenue - Melanie Benjamin
How It All Began - Penelope Lively
Small Mercies - Eddie Joyce
The Nature of the Beast - Louise Penny
Paper Towns - John Green
Home is Burning - Dan Marshall
June 2015
Going Into the City - Robert Christgau
Available Dark - Elizabeth Hand
The First Bad Man - Miranda July
Luckiest Girl Alive - Jessica Knoll
The Ghost Fields - Elly Griffiths
A Banquet of Consequences - Elizabeth George
A Suitable Vengeance - Elizabeth George (reread)
A Great Deliverance - Elizabeth George (reread)
The Slow Regard of Silent Things - Patrick Rothfuss
Daring Greatly - Brene Brown
Well-Schooled in Murder - Elizabeth George (reread)
The Gates of Evangeline - Hester Young
 All Shall Be Well - Deborah Crombie
How To Be Good - Nick Hornby
Humans of New York: Stories - Brandon Stanton
Sweet Caress - William Boyd
Sweet Forgiveness - Lori Nelson Spielman
Rubbernecker - Belinda Bauer
The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra - Vaseem Khan
July 2015
Eric - Terry Pratchett (reread)
Family Album - Penelope Lively
About a Boy - Nick Hornby
Mind Whispering - Tara Bennett-Goleman
Chapter and Verse - Bernard Sumner
Secondhand Souls - Christopher Moore
Corduroy Mansions - Alexander McCall Smith
City on Fire - Garth Risk Hallberg
Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Tooth Tattoo - Peter Lovesey
Bull Mountain - Brian Panowich
Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better - Pema Chodron
Fiddlers - Ed McBain
A Beam of Light - Andrea Camilleri
The Stone Wife - Peter Lovesey
Passing On - Penelope Lively
The Last Detective - Peter Lovesey
Man In Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker - Thomas Kunkel
August 2015
The Lake House - Kate Morton
Our Kind - Kate Walbert
Me Before You - Jojo Moyes
The Soul of an Octopus - Sy Montgomery
Sorcerer to the Crown - Zen Cho
A Very Good Hater - Reginald Hill
Don't Suck, Don't Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt - Kristin Hersh
Find a Way - Diana Nyad
Art in the Blood: A Sherlock Holmes Adventure - Bonnie McBird
The Opposite of Everyone - Joshilyn Jackson
(Note: I only counted this once, but I read it twice, because it was SO FUCKING GOOD.)
The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams - Lawrence Block
Fun Home - Alison Bechdel
Sizzling Sixteen - Janet Evanovich
Splinter the Silence - Val McDermid
The Visitors - Simon Sylvester
Jigsaw Man - Elena Forbes
After You - Jojo Moyes
Wilberforce - H. S. Cross
Foul Matter - Martha Grimes
The Rest of Us Just Live Here - Patrick Ness
September 2015
On the Move - Oliver Sacks
Fat Cat Art - Svetlana Petrova
Girl Waits With Gun - Amy Stewart
Out On The Cutting Edge - Lawrence Block
The Shepherd's Crown - Terry Pratchett
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
In The Midst of Death - Lawrence Block
The Gun Seller - Hugh Laurie
Heat Wave - Penelope Lively
Let Me Explain You - Annie Leontas
Orphan X - Gregg Hurwitz
Kust & Wonder - Augusten Burroughs
The Past - Tessa Hadley
Be Frank With Me - Julia Claiborne Johnson
The Game - Diana Wynne Jones
Guards ! Guards! - Terry Pratchett (reread)
The Perfect Comeback of Caroline Jacobs - Matthew Dicks
Not That Kind of Girl - Mary Wesley (reread)
Some Deaths Before Dying - Peter Dickinson
The False Inspector Dew - Peter Lovesey
The Silkworm - Robert Galbraith (reread)
October 2015
The Code of the Woosters - P. G. Wodehouse
Rub out the Words: The Letters of William S Burroughs 1959-1974 - Bill Morgan, ed.
The One-in-a-Million Boy - Monica Wood
The Girl in the Ice - Lotte and Soren Hammer
The Passenger - Lisa Lutz
A Doubter's Almanac - Ethan Canin
The Imitation Game (graphic novel) - Jim Ottaviani
Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse - Faith Sullivan
*****leaving out one book title because I hate the author*****
Dear Committee Members - Julie Schumacher
Mosquitoland - David Arnold
The Martian - Andy Weir
A Son of the Circus - John Irving
The Girls - Emma Cline
Career of Evil - Robert Galbraith
Binge - Tyler Oakley
Carry On - Rainbow Rowell
Jane Steele - Lyndsay Faye
Detroit Hustle - Amy Haimerl
November 2015
When to Rob a Bank - Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Splitting an Order - Ted Kooser
The Everything Box - Richard Kadrey
Lovecraft Country - Matt Ruff
A Dubious Legacy - Mary Wesley (reread)
Men Explain Things to Me - Rebecca Solnit
The Vacillations of Poppy Carew - Mary Wesley (reread)
Sting Like A Bee - Jose Torres
Lord of the Wings - Donna Andrews
No Shred of Evidence - Charles Todd
Turning the Mind into an Ally - Sakyong Mipham
And Justice There Is None - Deborah Crombie (reread)
Montalbano's First Case - Andrea Camilleri
Noonday - Pat Barker
Remembrance - Meg Cabot
My Father, The Pornographer - Chris Offutt
No Cure For Love - Peter Robinson
Hidden Bodies - Caroline Kepnis
All the Winters After - Sere Prince Halverson
December 2015
M Train - Patti Smith
In Other Words - Jhumpa Lahiri
The Widow - Fiona Barton
The Waters of Eternal Youth - Donna Leon
The Nest - Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney
Gonzo Girl - Cheryl Della Pietra
Year of Yes - Shonda Rhimes
Christodora - Tim Murphy
Easy Streets - Bill James
Rising Strong - Brene Brown
Lucia in London - E. F. Benson
Vexation Lullaby - Justin Tussing
Still Life - Louise Penny (reread)