To end April on an exciting note, I am thrilled to be part of the Random Things Blog Tour for The Heron Kings by Eric Lewis, published by Flame Tree Press today! An epic grimdark fantasy set in a country at war, focusing on a healer rather than a warrior, reminding me of nothing more than a Dungeons and Dragons campaign where the players have taken over.

Many thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Blog Tours and Flame Tree Press for having me and providing me with an advance copy of the book!

RELEASE DATE: 23/04/20

STAR RATING: 3/5 ✶

SUMMARY: After a warlord slaughters her patients, Sister Alessia quits the cloister and strikes out on her own to heal the victims of a brutal dynastic conflict. Her roaming forest camp unwittingly becomes the center of a vengeful peasant insurgency, raiding the forces of both sides to survive. Alessia struggles to temper their fury as well as tend wounds, consenting to ever greater violence to keep her new charges safe. When they uncover proof of a foreign conspiracy prolonging the bloodshed, Alessia risks the very lives she’s saved to expose the truth and bring the war to an end. (From Flame Tree Press)

OPINIONS: If you are looking for a fun romp through gritty fantasyland, The Heron Kings might just be what you need. Featuring a ragtag team bumbling through a land at war, trying to survive between enemy factions while healing, plundering and tricking their way to survival and accidentally landing themselves in deeper waters than they expected, this really does remind me of the dynamic of a D&D campaign where the DM has lost control and the players have taken over. While entertaining, it does make it a bit hard to follow at times – but then, I read an advance copy and the signposting could easily have been fixed in final edits.

I thoroughly enjoyed Alessia’s character holding up the story – it is not often that a healer is put front and centre, and especially one that starts out with lofty morals but soon grows a pair and becomes adept at weathering the challenges of uncertain times. She is a refeshing main character for the genre, and I hope to read more women like her in the future! Her companion, Ulnoth, is less pleasant – I hated the bastard, even though I thought he was intended to be more of a hero-type. To me, he often acted incongruously, and I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. The secondary characters often only pop up once or twice, or stay otherwise non-descript. I feel fleshing them out more could have given the book more substance and elevated it.

In general, there were some stellar scenes – I remember one featuring a whore very fondly – while the book as a whole seemed to never quite find the true heart of its story. There was a lot of violence, much of it not strictly necessary for the plot or character development (think random bodies found with mutilated genitalia and it being made clear that mutilations had happened as a means of execution), which made me personally roll my eyes, as I feel that the genre has moved past that in recent years. I do think a lot of what I didn’t like as much about The Heron Kings is down to its nature as a debut novel and a bunch of smaller issues that are due to reading a digital ARC that I am confident will have been fixed in the final version.

All in all, I do recommend The Heron Kings as a fun way to spend an afternoon or evening in lockdown, and read a tropey, epic, grimdark fantasy that will take you away from everything that is shitty in our world! Get yourself a copy from Hive (hardback/paperback), or your indie of choice!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: By day Eric Lewis is a PhD research chemist weathering the latest rounds of mergers and layoffs and still trying to remember how to be a person again long after surviving grad school. In addition to subjecting his writing to one rejection after another, he can be found gathering to himself as many different sharp and pointies as possible and searching for the perfect hiking trail, archery range of single malt Scotch. Don’t ask where, because he’s never lived anywhere for longer than five years.

His short fiction has been published in Nature, Electric Spec, Allegory, Bards and Sages Quarterly, the anthologies Into Darkness Peering, Best Indie Speculative Fiction Vol. 1 and Crash Code, as well as other venues detailed at ericlewis.ink. THE HERON KINGS is his first novel.

Thank you, Booktamins and Heather Blair, for having me as part of the blog tour for this sweet gay time-travel romance! I’ve been in an odd reading mood recently, so reading something with barely any fantastical elements has proven a welcome distraction from my usual diet, and it was fun to read a new adult romance for once!

RELEASE DATE: 21/04/20

STAR RATING: 3/5 ✶

SUMMARY: When Diego Delgado closed his eyes it was 2020. When he awoke, he was one-hundred years in the past. Thrust into the dawn of the Jazz Age with no money and nowhere to go, Diego encounters a veritable bouquet of acquaintances including a kind-hearted factory owner, a free-spirited flapper, a worldly-wise mystic, and a strong-willed heir named Thomas Greely. Diego, desperate to return to the future and reunite with his young daughter, must blend in with the roaring twenties lifestyle while searching for answers. But distractions are all around him, especially Thomas who is both beautiful and charismatic, and Diego must grapple with the reality that even if he succeeds in returning home, half of his heart will stay behind.

OPINIONS: Now, I want to begin by saying that I really enjoyed reading For the Lost Time. It is a cute story about two men finding themselves and figuring out who they are and who they want to be, and as a romance, there is of course a HEA. While the main characters were not as deep as they could have been, they were written in ways that made the readers feel with them, and hints for the ending were strewn nicely throughout the book without giving too much away before it was time. And I mean, yeah, Diego and Thomas were the stars of the show, but Dora stole my heart. I love me a feisty woman who can hold her own in a man’s world.

However, as it is a self-published work, it shows that it has not been thoroughly edited by someone other than the author. This might partially be me picking up on this more as someone trying to get into the industry and editing myself, but the prose is inconsistent, and heavily overwritten at times. The author often tells rather than shows, and there are a few logical inconsistencies. I am confident that a professional edit could help improve the book immensely, as the bones of the story and characters are strong.

If you are intrigued, add For the Lost Time on Goodreads here, or order it from Amazon US as a paperback or ebook here!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Heather Blair is the author of new adult romance novels including Lucid Dreaming and Wide Awake. She was born and raised in Vermont and has spent much of her adult life in New York and Los Angeles. She currently resides in Connecticut with her two cats. You can find her here:

• Website – https://heatherblairauthor.blog/
• Goodreads – https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18185508.Heather_Blair
• Twitter – https://twitter.com/IamHeatherBlair
• Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/iamheatherblair/
• Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/heatherblair.author/

To finish off the big Titan Books blog tour for Eden by Tim Lebbon, I’m honoured to add my review to the lineup! A fascinating, unique read that got me scared, which is no easy feat.

Thank you to Lydia Gittins and Titan Books for the review copy and the inclusion on the blog tour! I’m feeling ill today, so I hope no silly mistakes have made their way into the post!

RELEASE DATE: 15/06/20 (UK)

STAR RATING: 4/5 ✶

SUMMARY: Earth’s rising oceans contain enormous islands of refuse, the Amazon rainforest is all-but destroyed, and countless species edge towards extinction. Humanity’s last hope to save the planet lies with The Virgin Zones, thirteen vast areas of land off-limits to people and given back to nature.

Dylan leads a clandestine team of adventure racers, including his daughter Jenn, into Eden, the oldest of the Zones. Jenn carries a secret––Kat, Dylan’s wife who abandoned them both years ago, has entered Eden ahead of them. Jenn is determined to find her mother, but neither she nor the rest of their tight-knit team are prepared for what confronts them. Nature has returned to Eden in an elemental, primeval way.  And here, nature is no longer humanity’s friend. (from Titan Books)

OPINIONS: Eden might well be the creepiest, scariest book I have ever read. This pacey read keeps you on your toes from beginning to end, trying to figure out its mystery. Rather than fighting a clear evil, this book’s villain is unclear throughout most of the story, and it is that uncertainty that drives the plot and atmosphere. Hopelessness, loss, sacrifice and love are all themes strongly present in Eden, and while it is a horror thriller, it is just as much a family drama at its heart.

Dylan and his daughter Jenn lead a ragtag group of adventurers into one of the remaining virigin zones, Eden. Ostensibly there to push boundaries and come out on top of the community, the team soon finds out that Kat, Dylan’s estranged wife and Jenn’s mother has gone missing inside Eden weeks earlier and that there might be more to their expedition than glory and adventure. And once they are inside the zone, they start finding impossible bodies before the first members of their own team start disappearing. That’s when things become creepy and terrifying. I think quarantine has made me a bit soft, but I actually had to take breaks while reading, which I don’t remember ever doing before.

Massive strengths of the book are worldbuilding and pacing, which both Eden, and the genre in general depends on. Sadly, one victim of this is character development – while a couple of characters are a bit more fleshed out, they are generally relatively one-dimensional. Think stand-ins for plot and world to happen to them, rather than agents of story as a driving force. I do think this is to a large part due to genre, but I would have wished for a bit more depth.

If you are looking for an escape from lockdown life, I definitely recommend you pick up this eco-horror mystery thriller! Add it on Goodreads here, and order it from Forbidden Planet or your indie of choice.

Today I’m here to talk to you about one of my favourite books of last year, Sanctuary by V.V. James. While it came out in a beautiful hardback last summer, it is being re-released in a shiny new paperback and Orion are celebrating with a full fledged blog tour (and obviously, saving the best for last!). I am very excited to share my first ever author interview with you all, and I’m very happy that it gets to be with one of the loveliest authors I know.

A genre-defying gem of a story, Sanctuary is the story of a murder in a small town, with all the drama and social implications that brings with it. However, in the world of Sanctuary, witches are a part of society, and this murder seems to have been committed through magic… Outsider Maggie Knight is brought in to investigate, and the young cop has her work cut out for her: the blame gets assigned quickly and factions built, murder becoming more of a social game rather than an objective investigation.

The story is intricately crafted, and reveals are written in the magical way where the balance between ‘I did not see this coming’ and seeing all the little hints dropped on the way build to the logical conclusion once you have gone past the point of the reveal. When I finished Sanctuary, I immediately wanted to reread it – apart from its unique approach to magic, it is the first book I’ve ever read that included tweets from the president. It is a great book, and we need more of them! Order yourself a copy of the shiny new paperback via Hive or Waterstones.

What was your inspiration behind the concept of having witches as a known, but strictly regulated part of society?

I’ve always loved writing worlds that are recognizably our own, but off-tilt by five or ten degrees. My first trilogy is recognizably modern Britain, with the tweak that the elite 1% who have all the wealth and power also have magic. SANCTUARY sprang from a world rocked by the Women’s Marches, and Me Too, and is about many things, but certainly women’s anger and disenfranchisement, yet also their strength. It seemed possible to embody those qualities within witchcraft.

Our whole notion of what it is to ‘be a woman’ has been created within a patriarchal culture that polices the boundaries and acceptable forms of women’s existence. So a policed and regulated witchcraft is my expression of that in the world of SANCTUARY’s alt-America.

Which character did you enjoy writing the most, and why?

Maggie. I love her humour and pragmatism, and the way she listens to both her heart and her brain. The way she respects but challenges her boss, and teaches and supports her assistant. The way she constantly strives to determine the right thing, on a case where nothing is simple or easy. The fact that she loves doughnuts. (I can’t tell you how many gratuitous doughnut moments were struck out by the editor’s red pen! I was definitely projecting…) Maggie is a good, decent human navigating a complicated world – like Luke in my first trilogy. I love inhabiting characters like that.

What was the biggest challenge writing SANCTUARY after your initial fantasy trilogy?

My trilogy used multiple narrators – my brain is really drawn to 360-degree storytelling – and is also very ‘plotty’, but one huge change was switching from writing in the close-third person to first person. Also, in SANCTUARY, our three key narrators are adult women, whereas in the trilogy we heard from both adults and teens, male and female. I knew it was vital that cop Maggie, bereaved mother Abigail, and witch Sarah were clearly distinguished, so I worked hard on their language and interior thought patterns, as well as their very divergent outward behavior. I was absolutely thrilled when the audiobook was cast with three different narrators, rather than one narrator varying her delivery. Go have a listen!

One of the central elements of SANCTUARY is fear and mass hysteria – do you see any parallels between the threat of Sanctuary’s witches and how we are dealing with the current pandemic?

It’s ironic, when I was writing SANCTUARY the one plot element I worried might strain the reader’s willing belief was the quarantine at the end, when Sanctuary is locked down by local authorities. And here we are in the time of Covid-19. I’m writing these answers in my London flat which I only leave for an hour a day to go for a run, and by the time you read this I maybe won’t even be able to do that. You’re absolutely right, the book is about what fear does to a community – and sadly we’ve seen plenty of examples recently, most shamefully in the panic buying of the first weeks of lockdown. And it is about how a frightened population can turn against individuals and the group they represent – just look at the boycotting of Chinese restaurants at the first whispers of Covid-19, the awful hostility endured by people of East Asian appearance, and the persisting narrative of the ‘Chinese virus’ that’s still coming down from the highest levels. Hatred is never the correct expression of fear. Community is the only answer.

As an aspiring editor, I am always curious about the author/editor relationship. What can you tell us about working with the fabulous Rachel Winterbottom?

Rachel is the person responsible for SANCTUARY existing in the first place! We were having coffee when she talked about how much she’d love to see a ‘Big Little Lies with witches’ book – and I just knew the right person to write it was me! We talked then about how I’d been in the US making documentaries during the time of the Women’s Marches after the Trump election, the national mood, Lana del Rey’s apparent call for witches to hex the new president … and the sinkhole that subsequently opened up in the White House lawn! SANCTUARY is really tightly plotted, and again, Rachel was pivotal – we kicked an outline back and forth, finessing twists. And then I went away and wrote it, and it all just flowed. The first thing you learn when your debut gets bought by a publisher is how close and collaborative the writer-editor relationship is. Usually that input comes after you’ve finished the first draft. In this case, it was front-loaded – Rachel literally waved a wand and magicked SANCTUARY into being, championing it within Hachette at acquisition. We were a coven of two!

What are some books you are excited to read in the upcoming weeks or that you have loved recently?

I just binged Jay Kristoff’s NEVERNIGHT – wow wow wow. Possibly the best fantasy trilogy of the past ten years? GIDEON THE NINTH by Taz Muir was a wild ride and I am desperate for the sequel. And I am loving that we’re seeing more of the feminist fantastical, from Samantha Shannon’s magisterial PRIORY OF THE ORANGE TREE to Mel Salisbury’s slender-but-devastating HOLD BACK THE TIDE, to the otherworldly SISTERSONG coming next year from Lucy Holland, which I was lucky enough to read in draft.

Thank you, Vic, for your wonderful answers!