Recommended Reading by Professionals... with Sharon Shinn

In this series, I ask various publishing professionals (including authors, bloggers, editors, agents etc.) to recommend 2-3 authors or books they feel haven't received the recognition they deserve.

Today's recommendations are by Sharon Shinn. Sharon Shinn has published 24 novels, one collection, and assorted pieces of short fiction since her first book came out in 1995. Among her books are the Twelve Houses series (Mystic and Rider and its sequels), the Samaria series (Archangel and its sequels), the Shifting Circle series, and the Elemental Blessings series. In 2010, the Romantic Times gave her the Career Achievement Award in the Science Fiction/Fantasy category, and in 2012, Publisher’s Weekly magazine named The Shape of Desire one of the best science fiction/fantasy books of the year. Three of her novels have been named to the ALA’s lists of Best Books for Young Adults (now Best Fiction for Young Adults). Her newest Shifting Circle book, The Turning Season, will be published in November.

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These are all books I read between the ages of ten and fifteen, and that I have read many times since, and that have stayed with me my whole life. So of course I think everyone should read them.

1. The Gammage Cup by Carol Kendall
   
   
   In the serene Land Between the Mountains, all the small people known as Minnipins are pressured to conform, particularly as the twelve villages compete with each other to win the prestigious Gammage Cup given out to the most perfect village. But five quirky individuals in Slipper-on-the-Water refuse to dress in boring colors or stop speaking in silly rhymes, so they’re banished while the competition is under way. It’s while they’re out in the wild, trying to survive on their own, that they spot the evil Mushrooms trying to breach the mountains and invade the valley. Relying on their courage and their friendship, they defeat the Mushrooms and save the Land Between the Mountains—and win the trophy for their village.
   
   
   This was my first exposure to the trope of a band of misfits who take on great evil and save the world, and I never got over it.
   
   
   
2. The Diamond in the Window by Jane Langton
   
   
   Edward and Eleanor live with their eccentric aunt and uncle in a wonderful old house in Massachusetts. They discover a hidden room high in a turret, and they learn that, long ago, two children disappeared one night while sleeping in this very room. There’s a poem etched into the window glass, and when they start spending the night in the tower, the events of their dreams match the verses of the poem. They soon realize they aren’t dreaming after all, but chasing after those missing children and having real adventures—which put them in real danger. If they don’t solve all the clues in the poem, they too could disappear.
   
   
   In one chapter, Eleanor and Edward are trapped inside a giant nautilus shell on a beach as the tide starts coming in. They make their way from the smallest chamber to the next biggest one and the next biggest one, but each time the door between chambers only opens when they do something worthy. Tell a riddle, solve a math puzzle. Their accomplishments must get bigger each time a chamber gets bigger. They’re finally in the very largest chamber—but they can’t think of anything momentous enough to free themselves. And then a wave comes in and lifts the shell and almost carries it out to sea…
   
   
   I will never forget my fear and excitement the first time I read that scene. To me, this book is about the potential for magic all around us, all the time. I’ve never stopped looking for my own poem full of clues and mysteries.
   
   
   
3. Enchantress From the Stars by Sylvia Louise Engdahl
   
   
   A spaceship full of operatives from an advanced civilization makes a stealthy approach to the primitive world of Andrecia—which has just been invaded by a third civilization not quite as advanced as the first one. Elana is on the first spaceship with two other team members, and their goal is to save Andrecia from the invaders, without letting the inhabitants know that extraterrestrials actually exist. Elana lands on Andrecia and takes the role of an enchantress who devises nearly impossible quests for the bravest of men, and when they succeed, she gives them magical devices to help them slay the “dragon” that has started to destroy their world. Of course, the devices are really high-tech tools and the “dragon” is really giant machinery brought by the invading forces.
   
   
   The book alternates between the self-aware science fiction narrative of Elana’s voice, and the fairy-tale style of Georyn, a brave Andrecian who wins magic from the enchantress’s hands. "At the edge of the Enchanted Forest there lived a poor woodcutter who had four sons…"
   
   
   I read this book before I ever watched an episode of “Star Trek,” so this is where I learned the basic tenets of the Prime Directive. It made me think differently about fairy tales, history, and space exploration, and introduced me to the idea that two different people will have vastly different takes on the same events. And it’s a love story. It has so many elements that have stuck with me forever.

Stay tuned for the next post where we get more reading recommendations!

Recommended Reading by Professionals... with Kristen from Fantasy Cafe

In this series, I ask various publishing professionals (including authors, bloggers, editors, agents etc.) to recommend 2-3 authors or books they feel haven't received the recognition they deserve.

Today's recommendations are by Kristen, who blogs at Fantasy Cafe. I've been a huge fan of her site since before her amazing Women in SF & F Month in April of 2012.  The reception for the series was so good she repeated it in 2013 and has just announced that she'll be doing it again this year.   If you’re interested in seeing all the wonderful posts she gathered for her series, here are the link lists for 2012: week 1, week 2, week 3, week 4, week 5 and final thoughts; 2013: week 1, week 2, week 3, week 4, week 5 and final thoughts. She also did a round-up of book lists featuring female authors. Her ‘Leaning Pile of Books’ feature is a great place to learn about new titles and she’s constantly posting new book reviews. She also does author interviews and hosts guest posts.

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It was difficult to choose only three books that do not receive the amount of recognition I believe they deserve—there are so many to choose from! In the end, I went with three of my favorites that are not exactly unknown but are not read and discussed as much as I think they deserve. I also liked that this worked out to include one fantasy, one science fiction, and one young adult speculative fiction book.

1. Transformation by Carol Berg is one of those rare books that captivated me from the very first sentence and kept me riveted until the very end. The magical aspects are unique, and I found the way they were expanded upon over the course of the trilogy well developed and surprising—but the first book remains my favorite because the slowly developing friendship between arrogant Prince Aleksander and his slave Seyonne was so gripping. This was my first experience reading one of Carol Berg’s books, and all of her books I’ve read have wonderfully developed characters, but Aleksander and Seyonne are the two I remember most fondly.
2. Warchild by Karin Lowachee is another one of those extraordinary books that made me care from the very beginning and left me truly sad when I reached the end and had no more pages left to read. The powerful second person account of the pirate attack on eight-year-old Jos’s spaceship is personal and terrifying and is one of the best openings I have ever read, both action-packed and intensely emotional. Jos came to life as a character, and I actually missed him once I finished reading the book. This book is a fairly recent discovery for me—I haven’t even read the next two yet!—but it is one of my favorite books in the world.
3. I was thrilled to see Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone well-received, but I still do not see her previous books mentioned that often. That’s a shame because they are also wonderful, and I particularly love Lips Touch: Three Times, a book containing three exquisitely written stories. Laini Taylor writes like nobody else, and her prose particularly sparkles in this collection. “Spicy Little Curses Such As These” is a beautifully written feat of storytelling, but my favorite story is “Hatchling.” It drew me in with its creepy opening, in which Esme awakens to discover that she has both an eye and memories that are not her own. It’s delightfully dark, and if I hadn’t already been convinced that Laini Taylor was a master storyteller and wordsmith by that point, this story would have done just that.

Stay tuned for the next post where we get more reading recommendations!

Recommended Reading by Professionals... with Jack Campbell

In this series, I ask various publishing professionals (including authors, bloggers, editors, agents etc.) to recommend 2-3 authors or books they feel haven't received the recognition they deserve.

Today's recommendations are by Jack Campbell. Jack Campbell (aka John G. Hemry) is a retired U.S. Navy officer and the New York Times bestselling author of the Lost Fleet and Lost Stars series.  His most recent books are The Lost Stars - Perilous Shield and the stand-alone alternate history novella "The Last Full Measure".  Coming in May will be the next Lost Fleet book, Beyond The Frontier - Steadfast. He’s also written several SF novels as John G. Hemry (one series featuring Sergeant Ethan Stark and another, Paul Sinclair), and a lot of short stories.

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1. Madeleine Robins' Sarah Tolerance stories are noir detective stories with an alternate history twist (among other twists). Imagine The Maltese Falcon or The Thin Man set in Regency England, with an Agent of Inquiry (private investigator) named Sarah Tolerance whose mind is as sharp as the sword she wields with expert skill.  Miss Tolerance moves from the lowest whore houses of London to the heights of society as she pursues mysteries, solves murders and avoids threats to her life. Point of Honour, Petty Treason, and The Sleeping Partner are sometimes mistaken for Regency Romances, but anyone who likes a good detective novel where the hardboiled protagonist has to stir the dregs of society to find the answers to mysteries should enjoy these brilliantly realized stories. They'll also learn some sword play, since Madeleine Robins makes her fights as realistic as everything else about the period.
2. We're coming up on the one hundredth anniversary of Fifty-One Tales by Lord Dunsany, which was originally published in 1915. He was one of the first writers of modern fantasy, and this collection of what are now called short short stories gives a good look at how brilliant he could be. The short pieces are sometimes moody, sometimes humorous, sometimes just plain beautifully written, but they are never boring. They don't feel dated, either, in their comments on modern trends that seem just as pointed and relevant now as they were when written (such as the vision of an angel angrily adding on to hell to make room for the marketers who sold unsafe food for children). You don't have to buy this book (it's available online in a variety of forms), and it's well worth the time to see a real artist of words at work. Just one of the shortest pieces in here, "After the Fire", sets out in three short paragraphs what others have used entire novels to try to say.
3. The books in Kristine Smith's Jani Killian series (Code of Conduct, Rules of Conflict, Law of Survival, Contact Imminent, and Endgame) never got the attention they deserved, but they are still out there for anyone who wants an excellent read steeped in espionage and double-dealing that captures the reality of it all better than most thrillers set in the modern day. (They are real enough to make me wonder if "Smith" knows more about that sort of thing than she lets on.) The books accurately evoke the life of an undercover operative in a tale in which Jani never really knows who to trust and sometimes can't even tell who she herself really is.  Aliens, interstellar travel and genetic engineering further complicate things. Jani is a great character in a great story. Kristine Smith is working at getting the earlier books re-released in ebook format and possibly POD, so keep an eye out for them.

Stay tuned for the next post where we get more reading recommendations!

Recommended Reading by Professionals... with Maurice Broaddus

In this series, I ask various publishing professionals (including authors, bloggers, editors, agents etc.) to recommend 2-3 authors or books they feel haven't received the recognition they deserve.

Today's recommendations are by Maurice Broaddus. Maurice Broaddus has written hundreds of short stories, essays, novellas, and articles. His dark fiction has been published in numerous magazines, anthologies, and web sites, including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Cemetery Dance, Apex Magazine, and Weird Tales Magazine. He is the co-editor of the Dark Faith anthology series (Apex Books) and the author of the urban fantasy trilogy, Knights of Breton Court (Angry Robot Books). Visit his site at www.MauriceBroaddus.com.

I tend to hope around in genre, from science fiction to fantasy to horror, both in what I write and what I read.  So it was tough trying to narrow down a list of 2-3 impactful but overlooked works until I made my criteria books have I come back to read again and again.

1. My favorite genre to read is crime fiction, so I was already a huge Walter Mosley fan.  When I found out that he’d written a collection of short stories, I snatched it up immediately.  Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World (2001) had a huge impact on me and is one of those collections that I rarely hear anyone talk about.  A series of nine interconnected tales about a dystopian future where rich technocrats rule and poverty is basically considered a crime.  The world-building is dizzying and he piles idea on idea on idea while speaking to issues of race and class.  This book is second only to Octavia Butler in terms of writers that have inspired me to find my unique voice.
2. I was torn for my fantasy pick.  There are two books that immediately leapt to mind as being under-rated.  The first is Patrick O’Leary’s The Gift.  Beautiful, complex, and layered, the book speaks to the power of story by nesting story within story within story to great effect.  On the other side of the fantasy scale is Charles Saunders Imaro, a tale some would say is simply a “black Conan” tale, except for Saunders wonderful story telling style, world-building, and exploration of character and cultures.
3. When it comes to horror, I think of Brandon Massey.  I’ve been a fan of his since Thunderland, back when people were running around calling him “the black Stephen King” which was honestly what caught my attention.  With his brisk plotting style and keen characterization, I quit thinking of him as a “black Stephen King” and he became “Brandon Massey.”  It was his Dark Dreams anthology series that introduced the world to many up and coming African American horror writers, including Lamar “L.R.” Giles, whose debut novel, Fake ID has just been released.

Stay tuned for the next post where we get more reading recommendations!

Recommended Reading by Professionals with Jessica Strider (x2)

In this series, I ask various publishing professionals (including authors, bloggers, editors, agents etc.) to recommend 2-3 authors or books they feel haven't received the recognition they deserve.

I don’t intend to do this often, but with working extra for Christmas and everyone being busy, I wasn’t able to get all the recommended reading posts that I’d hoped. So here I am, filling in a gap.

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1. I noticed K. M. Ruiz’s Mind Storm when it first came out in 2011. It’s the first book of a duology completed in Terminal Point and recently reprinted as an omnibus edition under the title Strykers. The novel’s set in a post-apocalyptic future where only ‘clean’ genes, untainted by the radiation that’s mutated humanity and given some people psychic powers, are valued. The majority of psychics are either controlled by the government or are part of the Stryker Syndicate, led by a politician the world believes is a clean gene’d human. It’s a tightly written novel with a lot of action and some great political intrigue.
2. M. J. Locke (aka Laura Mixon)’s book Up Against It blew me away. It’s set on an asteroid cluster which depends on methane ice shipments for water, air, and energy. When it’s most recent shipment is destroyed in an explosion, the colony’s resource manager scrambles to figure out what happened and find a new source of ice before their mayor sells them out to the Martian mob. There’s an AI, a transgendered character, lots of intrigue and decent amounts of action. I can’t understand how this book slipped under the radar.
3. One series I really enjoyed is Chris Evans’s Iron Elves trilogy, starting with A Darkness Forged in Fire. It’s set in a fantasy world where one nation has discovered gun powder and invaded and enslaved several others. A falling Red Star marks the return of dark magic, fostering rebellion. So the Empire sends the reinstated Iron Elves (named after a disbanded regiment that now suffers from a lack of actual Elves) led by disgraced Elf Konowa Swift Dragon, to find the pieces of the star before other interested parties do.

Stay tuned for the next post where we get more reading recommendations.

Recommended Reading by Professionals... with Jaime Lee Moyer

In this series, I ask various publishing professionals (including authors, bloggers, editors, agents etc.) to recommend 2-3 authors or books they feel haven't received the recognition they deserve.

Today's recommendations are by Jaime Lee Moyer. Jaime Lee Moyer lives in San Antonio with writer Marshall Payne, two cats, three guitars and a growing collection of books and music. She writes poetry and short stories. Her first novel, Delia's Shadow, came out in September.

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Most readers lament that there are always too many good books, and not enough time to read them. Good books, and excellent writers, can slip through the cracks for that very reason. Here are two recommendations from me for two writers you might have missed.

1. Amanda Downum: The Drowning City, The Bone Palace, and The Kingdoms of Dust (The Necromancer Chronicles).  A great series set in a non-European setting.  Isyllt Iskaldur is a necromancer and a spy, and these books are full of intrigue, magic, innovative worldbuilding, and excellent writing. Highly recommended. There is so much to love in these books, but I only get a paragraph.
2. Ian Tregillis: Bitter Seeds, The Coldest War, and Necessary Evil  (The Milkweed Triptych).  Where to start with these books? These are alternate history at it's absolute best and most inventive. The Nazi's have succeeded in building a race of supermen, the British use magic--and demons--to keep from being swept away during WWII. These books deserve a lot more attention than they've gotten.

Stay tuned for the next post for more reading recommendations.

Recommended Reading by Professionals... with Andrew Post

In this series, I ask various publishing professionals (including authors, bloggers, editors, agents etc.) to recommend 2-3 authors or books they feel haven't received the recognition they deserve.

Today's recommendations are by Andrew Post. Andrew Post has been writing science fiction and horror stories for years and has been published in several literary magazines. His first novel, Knuckleduster, came out last year. His second book, Fabrick, was released earlier this month.

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1. With Simon West-Bulford’s The Soul Consortium, readers are taken on an extraordinary journey beyond death with Salem Ben. While scouring through multiple lives, he discovers a terrifying recurring element—a malevolent entity who never seems to age who’s managed to sprinkle himself throughout time. Combining hard sci-fi with a dollop of horror, The Soul Consortium’s wondrous, lyrical prose and excellent pacing (a hard combination to achieve, any writer will tell you) make this an absolutely fantastic debut.
2. Sam Thorton, hard-bitten protag of Chris F. Holm’s The Collector series (Dead Harvest, The Wrong Goodbye, and The Big Reap), is one of the most engaging and interesting main characters I’ve come across in a long time. Mixing noir and horror may not be a completely fresh idea, but Holm, makes it feel like it’s never been done before—and with astoundingly page-turning results.
3. In a city that’s been built up rather than out, pain mage Rojan Dizon accepts an assignment that’ll take him to a variety of depths. Fade to Black by Francis Knight is a rollicking steampunk-but-not-quite thriller that glows with fabulous characters, a speedy pace, and Knight’s unmatched world-building. Continuing with Before the Fall and Last to Rise (set to release later this month), readers will have plenty more adventures after Fade to Black with the likeable pain mage.

Stay tuned for the next post for more reading recommendations!

Recommended Reading by Professionals... with Violette Malan

In this series, I ask various publishing professionals (including authors, bloggers, editors, agents etc.) to recommend 2-3 authors or books they feel haven't received the recognition they deserve.

Today's recommendations are by Violette Malan. Violette Malan lives in southeastern Ontario with her husband. People tend to ask her about the choreography of stripping – and she'll answer – but most of the time she's the author of the Dhulyn and Parno novels, and the Mirror Lands novels, fantasies available from DAW. You'll find her on Facebook, on Twitter, and check her website.

1. Howard Andrew Jones - I really enjoyed Jones' Desert of Souls and The Bones of the Old Ones, two novels chronicling the adventures of the scholar Dabir, and the guard captain Asim. First, they're sword and sorcery, my own preferred genre. Second, I felt there was actually a flavour of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin – the intellectual and the man of action, coming together to form the perfect campaigning duo. Third, they're set in the world of the Arabian Nights, one of my favourite story cycles.
2. Kari Sperring - Think of a cross between Gene Wolfe and Alexandre Dumas, and you've got a fair idea of Sperring's work. Her two novels, Living with Ghosts and The Grass King's Concubine, are compelling, multi-layered and dark. Her worlds are completely imaginary, and yet they're imbued with a subtle familiarity that adds to their complexity. It's not often we can get truly alien perspectives in fantasy, but we can find them here. Not for the faint of heart, but irresistible.
3. Dave Gross - Gross' Radovan and Count Jeggare novels are set in the Pathfinder universe, though you don't have to be familiar with that setting to thoroughly enjoy them. The series starts with Prince of Wolves, and the latest is King of Chaos, but each is a stand-alone adventure, so you don't have to read them in any particular order. An unusual touch is Gross' use of two first person narrators.  As the pov alternates between the two main characters, we not only get broader story lines, but occasionally different – and amusing – perspectives on the same events.

Stay tuned for the next post where we learn whom David Lomax thinks we should be reading more of!

Recommended Reading by Professionals... with Joshua Bilmes

In this series, I ask various publishing professionals (including authors, bloggers, editors, agents etc.) to recommend 2-3 authors or books they feel haven't received the recognition they deserve.

Today's recommendations are by Joshua Bilmes. Joshua is the president of JABberwocky Literary Agency, which he founded in 1994. He has been a literary agent for over 27 years, having made his professional debut at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency in 1986. His client list includes a large number of SFF authors including Charlaine Harris, Brandon Sanderson, Elizabeth Moon, and Jim C. Hines.  He also blogs about the business, movies, tennis and more.

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Here are three authors off of the JABberwocky list with a book or books that I would consider to be under-appreciated at the moment.

1. Since I'm doing this for a Canadian-based blog, I want to start off by talking about Tanya Huff's The Silvered.  Tanya's written a lot of novels, but this is one of her very, very best, and even more than that, it's something that's fresh and distinct in a genre that often can't be called either.  It's got werewolves, but not like what we're used to.  This isn't a horror novel with a few werewolves threatening human society.  It's not even a werewolf novel set amidst a group of werewolves within the world as we know it.  Those would be too easy!  And when I say it's set in an entire werewolf culture created by Tanya herself, that doesn't mean what you'd think it means from all the other werewolf novels you've read.  It's a world where men are from werewolf warrior genes and women are from magery, the men and the women both powerful in their own right and yet mutually dependent on one another.  Within that world, the plot itself has lots of things that will be familiar and welcoming to fantasy readers.  The ruler of the neighboring kingdom is trying to fulfill a prophecy.  The perilous journey that Mirian and Tomas embark on in the novel hearkens back to other work, including the male/female interplay of Sing the Four Quarters (another of Tanya's very best books) or of the classic quest journey of The Fire's Stone.  At no point can the familiar ingredients be entirely separated from the overall freshness and imaginative conceptualization of the world itself.  This is a story that could only be taking place in this book at this time.  If you like fantasy, you ought to be reading this novel.  If you're reading this novel, you'll be recommending it.  It almost suffers from "just" being one of the very best novels from an author who's written so many really good ones.
   
2. Switching gears a bit, the next book I'll recommend is a nuts-and-bolts piece of science fiction called Infoquake and the other novels in the Jump 225 trilogy by David Louis Edelman. Back before Apple came up with the idea of an app store for the iPhone, David Louis Edelman came up with the idea of an app store for the human mind.  Buy enhancements for your eyesight or other intriguing things and plug 'em in!  A lot of the things that came along with the Apple app store were also anticipated by Edelman.  The eye focuses on the best-selling apps, so it's very important to become a best-seller or to be first out with a particular something.  Against that backdrop, somebody's playing around with a very powerful new app, both for what it can do and for the computing power it requires.  It's called Multi-Real, and it's an app that can run through versions of the future like a chess computer looking at the different outcomes of different moves, and find its way to the future.  A lot of people want to own the app, in both senses of the word -- as buying it for themselves or being the one it has to be purchased from.  People in both business and government.  There isn't a full appreciation of the impact of having this much processing power going to run through so many versions of the future for so many people at the same time.  Hence, whomever owns the app has the power to do a lot of danger.  These novels are full of action, ideas, political intrigue, and much much more.  When Infoquake came out, it got a lot of attention and made a lot of Best-of-Year lists and award ballots.  But in the half dozen years since all of that, the series has kind of fallen off the radar, and it shouldn't.  These are books as eerily predictive of technological advancement as William Gibson's Neuromancer.  You should be reading these books now, and people ought to still be reading the Jump 225 trilogy another dozen years from now.
   
3. Finally, if it's possible to consider an international best-selling author to be under-appreciated, I'd make that case for Peter V. Brett. And it all has to do with his covers.  In fact, if you're ever wondering if covers make a difference, if covers sell books, Peter V. Brett and his Demon Cycle series answer that question.  His last book was #3 on the British bestseller lists, #5 on the German lists, and "only" #19 on the US lists, and it's because of the cover.
   
   
   
   Peter wrote this great first novel called The Warded Man (Painted Man in the UK). As a rule, people who pick up the book like it a lot, and they eagerly wait for the author's next book, and they tell all their friends, and it's the kind of thing from which bestsellers are made as they've been here.  But the biggest job a publisher might have is to get people to pick up the book in the first place.  In the UK and Germany, the publishers did a really good job of that.  If you look at the original hardcover cover for the Del Rey edition in the US, not so much.  It was a cover by committee, with a realization that it wasn't a great fantasy cover, so fantasy ingredients kept being added in, but it never quite worked.  Ultimately, the publisher realized this and switched to the better UK covers and/or UK cover artist for the next books in the series, and sales in the US started to pick up a lot when they did so.  Strange, isn't it?  The same book, but with a different cover it all of a sudden starts selling like it's got different words inside! So I don't have a time machine to go back and put a great cover on the first US edition of The Warded Man.  I can't do that, but I figured I'd use my soap box here to try and make up for it!

But I don't want to just be talking about a great first novel from commercial terms.  And creatively, what makes Peter's Demon Cycle work?  To go full circle some, it's not dissimilar to what makes Tanya Huff's The Silvered work so well.  He's got a lot of ingredients from other great fantasy series.  Good magic system and kick-ass good fight scenes and epic scope and rich world-building.  But a lot of fantasy writers who usually have that are doing it within the very familiar same-old same-old fantasy worlds that we've been in.  The demon magic in Peter's universe isn't that same-old.  More important, the magic has real implications for how people act in the world itself, so when you're spending time in the world you know you're spending time in Peter's world, and not in Tolkien's.  Pretty much all of these things could be said of Tanya Huff's The Silvered as well.  Tanya and Peter are very different authors.  Tanya's a little more the romanticist as you think of it in a romance novel, while Peter is maybe a little more the capital "R" Romanticist.  What both share is the ability to deliver the things readers want in unexpected, fresh and inspiring ways.  The Silvered should be talked about as much as Peter V. Brett.

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Stay tuned for the next post where we learn whom Violette Malan thinks we should be reading more of!

Reading Recommendations by Professionals: Introduction

This is the first post of my new series for SF Signal: Reading Recommendations by Professionals!  So if this looks familiar, that's where you saw it.

In this series, I ask various publishing professionals (including authors, bloggers, editors, agents etc.) to recommend 2-3 authors or books they feel haven't received the recognition they deserve.

I'm hoping this series will highlight some under-appreciated authors on a biweekly schedule, dependent of course on the responses I get.  I do have several posts lined up already, but I'm looking for more.  If you're a professional and you'd like to participate, please contact me at jessica (dot) strider (at) gmail.com with "Recommendations" as the subject.

To get us started, here are some of my recommendations:

1. Carol Berg - I normally like one or two series by an author and can't get interested in other things they write.  Not so with Carol Berg.  She's got several series, all different lengths (from a stand alone to a 4 book series) set in different worlds with different magic systems, types of characters, etc.  And despite coming up with new worlds and everything, she still manages to publish a book a year!  I have loved every book by her that I've read (and I've read all but her most recent 3, and that's just because I haven't had time to pick them up and read them all together - because hers are the kinds of books where you NEED to read the next  one immediately).  My only complaint with her work is that by the end of a series she's punished her protagonists so much I'm not sure how they're still alive and optimistic enough to keep going.  My favourite book is Transformation, as it's got just enough humour to make the abuse the protagonist goes through not seem so grim.  But all of her books are fantastic.
2. James Knapp wrote the brilliant Revivors trilogy.  His new novel, under the pseudonym James Decker, Burn Zone, features an asian female protagonist and truly alien aliens.  His writing is tight and fast-paced and you've got to pay attention because things mentioned offhandedly in the novel come back as important clues later on.  If you want to give him a try, I'd start with State of Decay.
3. Violette Malan has written 6 books, two involving contemporary Toronto and the realm of faery (starting with The Mirror Prince), and four secondary world fantasy novels (starting with The Sleeping God).  If you like books with strong paired male and female protagonists, I can't recommend her work enough.

Stay tuned for the next post where we learn who Brandon Sanderson thinks we should be reading more of!