Help: RSS Feed?
Wednesday reviews roundup for 10th June
Posted by Paul Raven on June 10th, 2009 at 23:46
Well, it’s just about still Wednesday here in the UK, so that still counts, right? :)
Just a couple of reviews this week, the first of which is of Alex Irvine’s Mystery Hill at SFrevu:
Irvine manages to pack a lot into this novella — drugs, conspiracy theories, budding romance, surly teens, a redneck moonshiner, gravitational anomalies, fishing, employee relations — along with a well crafted story that will keep you chuckling and wonder “what if…”
[...] Ken, our protagonist, was well drawn and about as down to earth as you could be. [...] The people who show up at Mystery Hill are just about what you’d expect if you’ve ever stopped into one of these roadside gems. Not only that, but the dialog was crisp, witty, intelligent, plausible, and sharp enough to cut at times — and individualized for each speaker.
I was totally entertained and charmed by the story. I certainly will keep Alex Irvine on my to be looked for list for future reading.
And the other is a review I can’t link to… but given that it appears in Locus, arguably the most prestigious venue for reviews of genre fiction titles, we’re not going to complain about that! The review in question is of John Berlyne’s epic Tim Powers bibliography-with-multitudinous-extras, Secret Histories; here are a few snippets:
It’s such a career-capping volume that one wonders whether the publisher might be tempted to off the writer, just to keep it from becoming out of date.
(No chance of that, I can assure you!)
[Secret Histories is] the life of an author laid bare… a celebration of books and the process by which they come into being.
That’s no understatement, either. I’ve never read a Powers novel in my life, but I’ve been unable to keep my nose of of my copy of Secret Histories since it arrived, and I’m now intrigued enough to be considering hunting down as many of his books as I can find. If you’re a Powers junkie, this book will be the equivalent to a kilo of Pablo Escobar’s personal stash.
So feed your habit… before someone else snorts the lot!