By: Adrienne,
on 3/13/2015
When Detective Gabriella Versado finds the strange deer-boy body, she's on the case, and her daughter Layla is on her own adventure! An immensely enjoyable, fast-paced, super-scarey read. Unforgettable characters are vividly portrayed in a Detroit city setting. The amazing Lauren Beukes skillfully weaves this captivating tale to its fantastical conclusion! Books mentioned in this [...]
By: William Gibson,
on 12/5/2014
At Powell's, we feel the holidays are the perfect time to share our love of books with those close to us. For this special blog series, we reached out to authors featured in our Holiday Gift Guide to learn about their own experiences with book giving during this bountiful time of year. Today's featured giver [...]
By: Cate Gardner,
on 10/21/2014
By: Jennie,
on 9/18/2014
This is a bit of a jump-back in time from where the main series is. With the “present day” happening in 2002, so the action is pretty firmly at the beginning of the series, with lots of flashback to Rapunzel’s back story.
So, like most fairy tales, Rapunzel has a dark edge that we tend not to retell. In the original, the witch discovers the prince because Rapunzel is pregnant. She casts Rapunzel into the desert where she gives birth to twins. The prince gets tangled in brambles trying to climb the tower, is blinded by the thorns and is also cast into the desert. They all wander around for like 20 years before they find each other, Rapunzel’s tears of joy cure his eyesight and only then do they all live happily-ever-after.
In the Fables world, Frau Tottenkinder is the witch that imprisoned Rapunzel. She casts her out, Rapunzel gives birth, and she’s told her children die during childbirth. She’s always known that they survived and has spent centuries searching for them. At one point, she tries to drown herself but washes up on the shores of a Japanese fable kingdom (named the Hidden Kingdom).
In the present day, she gets a message via attacking crane origami that there is news of her children. She meets up with friends and enemies from her old adopted homeland, and Tokyo’s version of Fabletown where the present is tied with the fall of the Hidden Kingdom to the adversary's forces.
I loved this one. I loved the look at Japanese mythology and fables, how they played in their homeland and how they survive in the modern Mundy world. I liked the old school “present day” with Jack running his schemes, Snow and Bigby in the business office and Frau Tottenkinder doing her thing on the 13th floor of the original building. It was a nice return to the beginning. But more than that, I loved Rapunzel’s story and her strength. We don’t see a lot of her, as she’s not allowed to leave Fabletown because of her hair and she’s been kinda shoved to the side in this series.
There’s also a tantalizing clue about the truth about her daughters, that I don’t believe we’ve seen the answer to yet. (I’m trying to rack my brain, as this happens so far in the past to see if we’ve seen them and not known it, or if they have yet to come up.)
This is my favorite volume in the Fairest spin-off series.
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By: Abigail Nusbaum,
on 5/21/2013
The last recent reading roundup chronicled several months of slow reading. This one covers several weeks of fast reading (a period that also included the Clarke shortlist, reviewed elsewhere). There are several books here that I would have liked to write full-length reviews of, but I read them in such quick succession with several others that any chance of disentangling my thoughts enough for
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By: Jason Boog,
on 10/17/2012
Can the pay-what-you-want model work for the publishing industry? With six days left to purchase, the Humble eBook Bundle has already raised $855,755.
The Humble Bundle team has offered a collection of digital books from writers like Cory Doctorow, Paolo Bacigalupi, Lauren Beukes, Kelly Link and more, letting readers pay as much or as little as they want. As of this writing, they have already sold 63,441 copies of the bundle, with the average buyer paying $13.49 for the bundle.
Here’s more from the site: “Separately, this collection of fantastic novels and comics would cost around $157. But we’re letting you set the price! These eBooks are available in multiple formats including PDF, MOBI, and ePub so they work great on your computer, eBook readers, and a wide array of mobile devices … Choose how your purchase is divided: to the authors, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Child’s Play Charity, and/or the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.”
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
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By: Richard Kadrey,
on 9/20/2012
I just tore my office apart. I bought a new filing cabinet and three new sets of bookshelves. In the past I've been a book hoarder, keeping every single research book I ever used, as well as novels I hadn't read in 10 years and probably wouldn't reread for another 10. So I'm trying an [...]
HarperCollins UK and Australia have won out in a five-way auction for hotly tipped Frankfurt Book Fair title The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes.
HarperFiction crime and thriller publisher Julia Wisdom, together with Shona Martyn of HarperCollins Australia, bought the title in a two-book deal for UK and Commonwealth rights from Oliver Munson at Blake Friedmann, for what is understood to be a high six-figure sum.
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A high-concept thriller is currently the subject of a five-way UK publisher auction, with North American rights already sold to Mulholland Books by Oliver Munson of Blake Friedmann.
Editor John Schoenfelder acquired The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes, author of Zoo City (Angry Robot) and winner of this year's Arthur C Clarke award, and one other novel in the deal. The Shining Girls will be published in spring 2013, with Munson describing it as "a high concept thriller about a time travelling serial killer".
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