Tag: romantic fantasy

Girl of Shadow and Glass is almost here!

I’m happy and relieved to say I just turned in my manuscript for the Kindle edition of Girl of Shadow and Glass! Woo! The ebook is available for 99c for a limited time.

In the coming days, Girl of Shadow and Glass will be available on other retailers, but you can check out this handy universal book link and see where to get it now.

For those of you who don’t know, Girl of Shadow and Glass has its humble beginnings in my first foray into epublishing, the novella A Shadow in Sundown. This release is a completely redone coming of age tale, and will be my first novel.

Also to come, I’ll be making the first several chapters available for those who sign up for my mailing list. Till then, take care.

Go Bills!

-CKB

Indie Book Spotlight: The Thief and the Throne (Rookwood)

The Thief and the Throne (Carnival of Fae Book Two), by Helena Rookwood (New Adult Fantasy, Romantic Fantasy; 2020)

For my review of the first book in this series, click here.

{Note: I received an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.)

Lira Potion-maker is back…minus her talent with potions. In fact, the ex-circus girl can’t even read a decent fortune these days.

The second book of Helena Rookwood’s imaginative Carnival of Fae series finds Lira fleeing with the perennially handsome and irritating Kit, whose true motivations are unknown. The reception they’ll receive at their timely winter destination? Also unknown. The reason Lira can use fae artifacts she’s never seen before? You guessed it: unknown. The only thing Lira does know is that the eyes of the Fae gods are upon her, and that ain’t good.

Lira is easily one of the best female main characters in fantasy. She’s strong without being a fighter, a fantasy character who does not lose herself to fantasy; if her heart beats a little faster at the sight—or touch—of a handsome young man, she is back to being an ever practical and self-serving survivor a moment later. She lies, cheats, and ignores advice in favor of what she (very impatiently) would rather happen. She also has no interest in the lives of the wealthy and powerful—just the sort of people she finds herself surrounded with these days.

Fae artifacts cause serious trouble in The Thief and the Throne, especially for Lira, who can use them without training–and like everyone else, she has no idea why.

All of this is a bold choice by author Rookwood (really, when was that last time you read a heroine who lies that frequently and isn’t a spy or something?). But Lira is never unlikable, even if her actions make the reader cringe from time to time. That’s because no matter what happens (and a whole lot does, in this book), Lira is always true to herself. Her well-developed character allows her to make mistakes and still be a MC worth following. In fact, it often makes her story more exciting.

The Thief and the Throne has a smaller scope than the dazzlingly magical The Prince and the Poisoner. Lira’s choices, once a focal point of the series, have dwindled, leaving the story with a higher ratio of action to intrigue. The Thief and the Throne derives a lot of its tension from character development, too. You can never really be sure who will end up helping Lira, or who will do worse than the opposite.

One development is the labeled slow-burn romance. It comes in the form of a very pleasant Mr. Darcy-esque twist, one we’ll have to wait for the sequel to see more of. I won’t say who the potential love interest is, but in the world of Carnival of Fae, nothing is for sure.

There are some genuinely cool moments in The Thief and the Throne, interesting twists and a persistently wonderful (if more sinister) magical world. This is an enjoyable and exciting read, and the perfect follow-up to The Prince and the Poisoner. You’ll never think of the smell of caramel (burnt or otherwise) the same way again.

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Indie Book Spotlight: Throne of Sand (Rookwood, Vince)

In today’s Indie Book Spotlight, we revisit Helena Rookwood, author of the excellent new adult fantasy/romantic fantasy The Prince and the Poisoner (see my review from March 2020 here), and are introduced to her friend and writing partner Elm Vince in:

Throne of Sand (Desert Nights Novels Book 1), by Helena Rookwood and Elm Vince (April 16, 2020; Teen/YA Historical Fantasy, Historical Romance, Asian Historical Fiction)

(Note: I received a free digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.)

Familiar, then unexpected.  Throne of Sand is a book that caught me by surprise—in a very good way.

Its basic premise is not so unusual, with a tenacious, un-ladylike for the times female lead.  It’s written in familiar, contemporary language (not my favorite for a story in an older era, but it ended up suiting the action well).  As a retelling of Aladdin, it’s a story we’re well acquainted with (comfortingly so), complete with cheeky little nods to the movie adaptation and callbacks to the original folktale (this djinni is in a ring). But this time, the hero is a heroine: Zadie, the princess who reads, writes, rides bareback and knows her way around a trade agreement.  In other words, she is not the princess her fiancé expects.

Especially because Sultan Kassim was engaged to her sister.

Zadie hides a very large secret, having helped her sister elope with a commoner she loved.  But the replacement princess is not all virtue and romantic ideals: Zadie wants her sister to be happy, but she also wants a chance to rule, something she’s prepared for and never had a chance at until now.  She’s not above a little manipulation, and her servants are not above caking her with makeup to make her the legendary beauty Kassim was promised.

This Aladdin retelling is fast, full of action and fun–and even the djinni gets a backstory.

After a very tense meeting with the sultan, Zadie travels to her future kingdom, where she spends her time ditching her servants and trying to prove she can be a sultanah who rules, rather than one who just looks pretty on her powerless throne.  She has to balance her kingdom’s need for the marriage to go through with getting what she wants.  The tightrope act soon gets irritating, both for Zadie and for this particular reader.

Fortunately, Zadie’s adventurous nature gets the better of her and the best parts of the story come on fast, full of action and fun. Even rude, tradition-obsessed Kassim, whose sole virtues were his title and muscles, starts to soften after a bit.  The wooden sultan becomes a real boy, and it turns out he isn’t half bad.

I wasn’t familiar with Elm Vince before this, but I knew from The Prince and the Poisoner that Helena Rookwood can write amazing and unique female characters (resilient ones, to be sure).  Like the royalty in The Prince and the Poisoner, nobody’s a hero or flat-out scoundrel in the courts of Throne of Sand.  The characters in this tale are also more dynamic.  We see them grow, show their true colors and correct their mistakes throughout the story, and Zadie turns out to be a great deal of fun as a main character.

She certainly knows how to find trouble, too.  Like Rookwood’s Lira, she never crumples in the face of it (unless, you know, it’s physically impossible not to.  Again, there’s a lot of great action in Throne of Sand).  Zadie has intelligence, diligence and toughness to commend her, and whenever she has a sheltered princess moment or two, she manages to redeem herself with her cleverness sometime after.

This is one of those books that I really looked forward to picking up again, only to remember I’d just finished it, which left me really disappointed that I couldn’t go back for more.  (Thank goodness the sequels are now out.)  Our princess may start out helpless and a little on the scheming side (and a lot on the naïve side), but beneath all that is true, three-dimensional character, and just the right traits for someone who hopes to rule.  For all my grumbling when I started reading, it becomes impossible not to root for her—and important that I must read what happens next.

Indie Book Spotlight: The Prince and Poisoner (Rookwood)

Today’s indie book spotlight is on…

The Prince and the Poisoner (Carnival of Fae Book 1), by Helena Rookwood (May 14, 2020; New Adult Fantasy/Romantic Fantasy)

(Note: I received an advanced digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.)

Four words: The Carnival of Stars.  The ultimate setting of Helena Rookwood’s The Prince and the Poisoner is unique, wonderful, and begs to be explored almost as much as Hogwarts or Lothlorien.  The morning after I finished this first installment of the Carnival of the Fae series, I woke up thinking I couldn’t wait to get back to the Carnival of Stars and see what happens next.  I was genuinely disappointed when I remembered I’d finished The Prince and the Poisoner the night before.

In addition to those four words, this book has four great strengths: it’s heroine (Lira), it’s near-constant plot developments (action and twists!), it’s realistic writing (the characters’ motives and dialogue), and its imagination (gorgeous, magical settings).  Those last two sound like contradictions, but Rookwood proves you really can have both.

When one character protests something, or offers troubling new information to another, the listener is quicker to believe it’s a lie than almost instantly believing what they don’t want to hear or accepting information from someone they don’t trust.  And the royals in the story are neither shining heroes nor ruthless tyrants (with one possible exception, though we see very little of that particular king).

The story begins with Lira in a small traveling circus.  Everyone in the circus has a specialty, and Lira’s is that she makes potions according to the specific ways her father taught her.  When she gets a headache at the back of her head, she knows that her potions will work.  And work they do, better than anyone else’s.  As Lira steals and scrapes to save money to flee the circus’s abusive masters, her talent draws the attention of a mysterious man on horseback, who whisks her away on a journey to the Carnival of Stars one night.

But her escape comes with a surprising catch: Lira must poison a princess and thereby frame a kingdom.  She then must balance the enormity of that task with her need to get away from her old circus, which the mysterious man threatens to return her to if she doesn’t fulfill her end of the bargain.  But this is Lira, which means there is plenty of unexpected adventure, a little romance, a helping of magic and very little navel-gazing involved.

Lira is by far this story’s greatest asset (that’s what you’d want out of a MC, right?).  She is both different and well-rounded, a secretive, bold, brassy, bratty, proud, secure, confident, flirtatious, headstrong, resilient, “preening,” braggadocios, and all-out marvelous female lead.  If the necessary quality of a main character is that they would want to tell their own story, Lira does it with a lot of flare and no self-pity.  She also has realistic motivations.

Lira rarely has a woe-is-me moment throughout the story, and when she does it’s almost always short-lived.  She tends to make brave and sometimes surprising choices, and it’s not because of generic heroism: her motives are self-preservation and unwavering belief in her own talents, and a lot of that comes from her difficult (but never overly dramatized) backstory.  It doesn’t mean she’s always likable, but she is never boring, either.  It was frankly refreshing to find a heroine who never doubts her abilities and actively promotes them.

All in all, The Prince and the Poisoner makes for one heck of a circus.

Next in the Series: The Thief and the Throne (Review)
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