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Posts Tagged ‘reviews’

Possibly the Best Monday Morning EVAR

If I have to be jolted awake by my alarm on a Monday morning when I don’t really want to be up yet . . .

. . . then this is the sort of thing I want waiting for me when I sit down at the computer:

Stunningly conceived and exquisitely achieved, this rich historical fantasy portrays the Elizabethan court 30 years into the reign of the Virgin Queen, often called Gloriana. Far below ground, her dark counterpart, heartless Invidiana, rules England’s fae. Brennan (Warrior and Witch) pairs handsome young courtier Michael Deven, an aspiring agent under spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham, with bewitching fae Lune, who attempts to avoid Invidiana’s wrath by infiltrating Walsingham’s network in mortal guise. History and fantasy blend seamlessly as Deven and Lune tread their precarious tightropes between loyalty and betrayal. Brennan’s myriad fantastical creations ring as true as her ear for Elizabethan and faerie dialogue. With intriguing flashbacks to historical events and a cast of deftly drawn characters both real and imagined, Brennan fleshes out the primal conflict of love and honor pitted against raging ambition and lust for power in a glittering age when mortals could well be such fools as to sell their souls forever.

That, folks, is (I believe) my first-ever Publisher’s Weekly review.

It’s starred. And the at the top of the SF/F/H section, too. (Page down if you’re looking for it in context; there’s no way to link directly to that graf.)

(It also happens to be the thing I had to redact from my earlier post; I didn’t realize I wasn’t supposed to mention it until the review itself came out. But I only knew the review would be good; I didn’t know what it said until this morning.)

So, yeah. A very nice thing to wake up to. Paired, as it happens, with an e-mail from a super-sekrit individual planning a different kind of interview for Midnight Never Come, who also loved the book. Did somebody declare today Ego-Stroking Monday and not tell me?

picture time!

Your tidbit for today: photographs from my research trip to London last year. You can start here, or browse the entire set.

It’s an oddly-balanced set of pictures, for several reasons. First and foremost, I can’t take pictures of 99% of the stuff in the novel because it isn’t there anymore. The best I could do was to photograph some stuff like what was there. But that got hampered by the restrictions against photography inside Hampton Court Palace and Hardwick Hall; those were some of the most informative places I went, but I have very little to show from them. Finally, I also took a great many pictures I didn’t upload, but they’re reference shots from inside museum exhibits, and between the lighting conditions and the necessity of photographing through glass, most of them came out very poor-quality. So my apologies for the odd skew of the set. But those of you who have never been to London will at least have a few mental images now.

*** *** *** *** ***

My publicist wrote to tell me the other day that [redacted: I think I was not supposed to report this yet. But it had to do with a review.] It turns out that isn’t the first review of the book, though. I got myself listed on LibraryThing as an author, and in exploring the links I discovered that two people have already reviewed it. One mixed-to-positive (according to that individual’s allocation of stars), one overwhelmingly positive. And then d_aulnoy‘s ICFA con report includes her reaction; she grabbed the book in ARC while she was there.

Seventy days to street date. It’s finally starting to feel like the book is on its way.

Mail Call

Today’s mail held not only my contributor’s copies and check for Fictitious Force #2 (with my story “Sing for Me”), but my contributor’s copy for Dark Wisdom #9 (with my story “The Wood, the Bridge, the House”). I don’t even recall proofing that latter, but whether I did or not, here it is. Neat!

Also in the mail a couple of days ago was a copy of the Romantic Times Book Club review of Doppelganger. It seems they cover a lot more than just romance — which, given that they apparently review something like two hundred and fifty books in every issue, ceases to be surprising. Anyway, much of the review is a plot synopsis, but at the end it says:

Kudos to Brennan for writing such a remarkable first novel and creating a distinctive fantasy world that poses a unique magical and ethical question. The twin heroines follow an electrifying knife-edged journey that takes readers to uncharted territory. An exceptional debut for what looks to be an intriguing series!

You can’t read the RTBC reviews online, but you can see what they rated things, and when Rachel alerted me that they’d reviewed Doppelganger, I went and took a look. They gave my book four and a half stars; I presume that’s out of five, but I can’t be positive, since nothing else in that issue got more than four and a half stars.

^_^

And, just to keep my ego in check, some rejection letters in the mail, too. But I’m used to those at this point.

The Book, One Month Later

My friend Kleenestar observed recently that “once you get to a certain critical mass of not-posting, the return to semi-regular posting is shockingly hard.” This is very, very true. And it goes double at the end of a semester.

So, my apologies for the silence. I’ll return to the world of the e-living by giving an update on Doppelganger.

More reviews in various places, mostly on blogs, a few on Amazon. Another negative review, too. This one, I will link to; it’s on the Green Man Review. (For the record, I didn’t link to the last one because it was someone’s journal, and I didn’t want to give the impression that I was asking anybody to go defend me in the comments thread. This one, on the other hand, is in a publication that habitually publishes reviews.)

It’s very odd, seeing the utterly contradictory nature of the positive and negative responses I’ve gotten. The GMR review doesn’t like the world or the characters all that much. Other people have spoken glowingly of that selfsame world, those selfsame characters. At least one person has found my prose terrible; others have raved in favor of it (though in the vein of “it’s nice and tight” rather than “wow, it’s really artistic”). Some of that is personal taste. Some of it, I imagine, is a matter of focus; you might pay attention to the aspects of the world that are original, while someone else is more attentive to those that aren’t. Some of it is probably perspective, since originality is partly a matter of what you’re accustomed to. Hell, thanks to my late introduction to The Lord of the Rings, I cruised happily through fantasy for many years without spotting who was ripping off Tolkien.

I’ve been getting fan-mail. Is that weird or what? <g> Over two dozen complete strangers have written to me since the book came out, telling me how much they liked it. For those of them who might be reading this journal: I am grateful to each and every one of you. No, really. As much as it boggles me to be getting such messages, this is, in a sense, why I wanted to write: not to get letters from readers, per se (especially since I feel like an idiot, trying to figure out how to respond with anything better than “um, wow, thanks!”), but to tell stories that other people care about. The letters are simply a way for me to know I’ve succeeded at that.

Sales-wise, I have no numbers yet. I won’t get anything official until the first royalty statement, I imagine, which will happen some time after June; they come to me twice a year. (I do get royalty statements, even if I’m not getting royalties yet. They let me know how far away I am from getting royalties yet.) I may get some less official numbers in the nearer future; in fact, I hope so. At the moment, I’m basically going off anecdotal evidence and sporadic checking of my Amazon sales rank against a handy webpage that translates the otherwise meaningless numbers into something like a sales rate. But that doesn’t tell me much, since my rank’s been fluctuating by as much as twenty thousand places. (I kind of wish Amazon would just abolish the bloody thing; it’s little more than a way to feed the fluctuations of my self-confidence.)

Now that the semester’s winding down, I’ll have a little time to do promotion. No concrete plans for that as yet, but watch this space for announcements.

That’s it for the nonce, I believe. Posting should resume as normal, since I’m out of classes now, and virtually done with grading. Ah, summer. How I’ve been looking forward to thee.

win some, lose some

Found my first negative review of Doppelganger today. (I knew there would be some. No book ever pleases everybody.) As I’d hoped, though, I find that I can take negative commentary in stride if what the person objects to is something I chose to do deliberately.

In this case, the reader put the book down after about twenty pages because, although they liked the swift opening, they soon found themselves confused about who the people were, and felt I was doing a bad job of introducing my characters (and the world in general). It isn’t quite true to say that’s an approach I took on purpose, since when I first wrote those scenes I wasn’t yet experienced enough to make choices like that on purpose, but through the various passes of revision, I chose to refine it in that direction. Why? Because the characters in those first twenty pages all know each other very well. Ergo, I chose to show through their behavior that they are familiar and either friendly or hostile by long habit, and to convey why and how they know each other through an accretion of brief comments, rather than an outright explanation.

For a lot of you reading this, that probably evokes a “well, of course” reaction. Not for everybody, though, and maybe not even for everybody reading this journal. Some readers prefer clearer explanations. It was a point of negotiation with my editor when I was revising Doppelganger — not the character introductions, per se, but the introduction of other information; I don’t always explain things when they first appear. Sometimes I drop them in and hope you’ll stick with me until the explanation arrives (which it usually does not long after). This is a technique that doesn’t work with every reader, and I know it. It’s my personal preference, since I find it more graceful. But it also means some people may get confused, and of those who get confused, some (like the reviewer) will not choose to stick with me.

You win some, you lose some. One of the commentators on that post went on to write a very positive review of the novel on her own blog, so hey.

(The negative reviewer also didn’t like my writing style. That aspect of fiction, more than anything, makes me roll my eyes and chalk it up to taste; you can try to make arguments for objective standards of plot or character or whatever, perhaps, but not writing style. I’ve gotten people telling me they love my writing style and I should never change it. There is absolutely no style I can use that will make everybody happy. Which is probably good, since it means I can stop worrying about it and just write in the style that the story feels right in.)

So, first negative review successfully survived. The choices I made didn’t work for that reviewer, and I’m more or less fine with that (“more or less” because, let’s be honest, I want everybody to love my book — what author doesn’t?). We’ll see what future reviews bring.

This Writing Life

The updates keep piling up, and I keep being too busy to post any of them. There was supposed to be a brief window to relax in right about now, but just as I reached it, the copy-edited manuscript for Warrior and Witch arrived on my doorstep. <sigh>

Anyway. Further reports of Doppelganger, all over the place; unless you’re in Hawaii (where my parents are right now), it ought to be in stock.

Or unless they’ve sold out. Which has happened in a few places.

<bounce>

I’ve gotten some extremely nice e-mails from readers, one of which told me to take the Amazon reviews with a grain of salt, since I’d probably end up with people declaring me the coolest thing since sliced Tolkien and others howling that I can’t write worth a rat’s ass. This prodded me to go check Amazon again (which I hadn’t done in a couple of days), where I found four reviews had been posted: the Harriet Klausner one from a while ago, Mike’s very flattering words, and two others that were entirely new to me. No Tolkien comparisons yet, but I’m entirely fine without those, and more to the point, no rat’s ass comparisons yet, either.

Having nothing whatsoever to measure this experience against, I can’t really evaluate it based on anything more than gut feeling, but so far, my gut is quite happy. Doppelganger is on the “New in Paperback” stand-alone racks in a number of Barnes & Noble stores, and an endcap display in at least one Borders, which is always good to hear; visibility can help sales along. I don’t know when I’ll first see sales numbers — whether those are quarterly, yearly, or what. I also don’t know when I’m likely to start seeing trade-publication reviews; we’ll see how those go.

Now, in writing news that has nothing whatsoever to do with Doppelganger, I just got pointed at a review of Summoned to Destiny, the anthology my first story “White Shadow” appeared in. It very nearly had me fainting out of my chair. A sample:

Brennan’s story achieves the elegance of a Bruce Holland Rogers fable, and is told in a voice as assured as Le Guin in her early Earthsea writings. The same sparse directness of scene; the same simple sentence structure, yielding prose passages of surpassing clarity and power.

I think I’m going to go hug that review and giggle until it’s time to head to class.

book updates

My mother reported discovering (and purchasing) copies of Doppelganger in Dallas today, though in her tour of the local bookstores (yes, she visited more than one; she’s my mother; what did you expect?) not all of them had it shelved. There will be a picture to post soon, she promises me. Also, it’s in Elk Grove, California, according to a woman named Heather who found it there, read it, and liked it.

Two more reviews here and here. I debated whether or not to link to them, since both of the reviewers in question are personal friends, but on the other hand, both of them have solid things to say about the book — more than just “the writer is a friend of mine squeeeee.” So I don’t feel too weird about linking to them. (Go go nepotism machine! Or something.)

Remember, let me know when and where you find the novel on the shelves!

the reviews begin

With Doppelganger starting to make its way out into the world, I took some time today to do what any sane first-time novelist does: I googled myself again. Which let me cross paths with this delightful review by Sue Burke on the website Fresh Fiction (review header — “Brilliant debut fantasy novel with a shocking ending”):

A fully realized new world, Ms. Brennan’s first novel is a brilliant read. The conclusion is a humdinger I never saw coming and literally stopped reading and said “Wow!” when it hit me. With likable characters, good world building and a story arc that keeps you wanting more, everything fits together nicely and comes to a satisfying conclusion for characters and readers alike.

That’s the tail end of the review, following a few paragraphs about the early plot of the novel. In a similar vein, I don’t think I ever actually linked to this other, equally delightful review I found a while back, from a woman named Jenica who read an ARC of the book. Relevant pull-quote:

In sum, the characters are engaging, the concepts of magic, goddesses, souls, and religious history are familiar but never derivative, and the society they live in is an interesting take on high fantasy. A wonderful read with a really satisfying resolution. And, just maybe, there’s more?

So far, so good. Haven’t gotten any trade-publication reviews yet; if those turn out half so well, I’ll be pleased.

I must be a REALLY real author!

Just got a heads-up for the Tangent Online review of Talebones #31, which contains my short story “The Twa Corbies”. Once again, some plot spoilers (some day I shall learn to stop being surprised by their presence), but I can’t complain too much when the reviewer is saying nice things:

I enjoyed Brennan’s characterization of a narrator who regrets the choices he made that enabled him to understand birds. The author’s experience as a folklorist allows her to give this story extra verisimilitude. While I haven’t heard the ballad this story is based on, I have heard many similar pieces in the Celtic tradition, and “The Twa Corbies” does a good job of capturing the feel of those.

So all in all, some nice ego-boosting today (to balance out two rejections, one of which had me scratching my head, the other of which had me politely saying “okay, but I disagree” with regards to what the editor would have preferred the story to be).

I must be a real author!

Harriet Klausner has reviewed Doppelganger.

DOPPELGANGER is a spellbinding, fantastic and unique fantasy due to the cast. Both Mirage and Miryo are two sides of the same coin except that one is a witch and the other a warrior. Although this is Marie Brennan’s first book, she proves she is a talented storyteller and a creative worldbuilder. Although there is a lot of action in this novel, the characters are fully developed and readers understand them because they have similar feelings and concerns as the readers do.

So, who is Harriet Klausner? She’s a woman who’s managed, in a fairly short span of time, to gain a substantial amount of clout in the reviewing world, by dint of the fact that she reads an enormous number of books. You know that challenge, where you’re supposed to read fifty-two books in a year? This woman probably reads fifty-two books a week. Maybe more. And she reviews them all. She’s achieved enough status that publishing companies deliberately send her review copies. Devi told me some time ago that yes, they were sending Doppelganger to her, so it was neat to see this go up.

If you want to read more of her reviews, she has a website, but a word of caution: one gripe I’ve heard against her style is that she tends to give plot spoilers in her reviews. I can vouch for the truth of that with her Doppelganger piece; she doesn’t describe the whole plot of the book, but she does mention something that I would consider to be a spoiler. So if you go browsing her archive, do so with care.

On a related note, the cover for Warrior and Witch is FRICKIN’ AWESOME. Devi and Rachel and I are drooling over it. You’d better believe I’ll post it the instant I get the go-ahead.