Books Received June 2012

I was pretty ruthless about not accepting new review requests this month (as I've a pile of books I'd love to get to this summer). So I've only a few to showcase here. Plot synopses are from the Indigo website with the exception of Fat Girl in a Strange World, which is from the Crossed Genres Publications site..

Seven Wonders by Adam Christopher

Tony Prosdocimi lives in the bustling Metropolis of San Ventura - a city gripped in fear, a city under siege by the hooded supervillain, The Cowl.

When Tony develops super-powers and acts to take down The Cowl, however, he finds that the local superhero team Seven Wonders aren''t as grateful as he assumed they''d be...

The Hammer and the Blade by Paul S. Kemp

Egil and Nix, adventurers and swords for hire, are pulled into the dark schemes of a decadent family with a diabolical secret. A fast paced adventure redolent with the best of classic sword and sorcery tales.

vN by Madeline Ashby

Amy Peterson is a self-replicating humanoid robot known as a VonNeumann.

For the past five years, she has been grown slowly as part of a mixed organic/synthetic family. She knows very little about her android mother''s past, so when her grandmother arrives and attacks her mother, Amy wastes no time: she eats her alive.

Now she carries her malfunctioning granny as a partition on her memory drive, and she''s learning impossible things about her clade''s history - like the fact that she alone can kill humans without failsafing...

Fat Girl in a Strange Land edited by Kay T. Holt and Bart R. Leib

For every supermodel, there are thousands of women who have heard “Why don’t you just eat less?” far too often. Except as comic relief or the unattractive single BFF, those women’s stories are never told.

Crossed Genres Publications presents Fat Girl in a Strange Land, an anthology of fourteen stories of fat women protagonists traveling distant and undiscovered realms.

From Guatemala, where a woman dreams of becoming La Gorda, the first female luchador, before discovering a greater calling in “La Gorda and the City of Silver”; to the big city in the US, where superhero Flux refuses to don spandex in order to join her new team in “Nemesis”; to the remote planet Sidquiel in “Survivor”, where student Wen survives a crash landing, only to face death from the rising sun. Fat Girl in a Strange Land takes its characters – and its readers – places they’ve never been.