Daily Deals: YA adventurer, second chance at love, and a female assassin
A kind person gave me an international heads up>
Angels’ Blood, Archangel’s Kiss, and Archangel’s Consort are currently $3.99 each – but only in Australia and New Zealand. All retailers. And Slave to Sensation is £1.99 right now – for the UK.
The Second Seduction of a Lady by Miranda Neville. $ 1.99
From the Jacket Copy:
Enter the thrilling, sexy world of GeorgianEngland in this splendid Miranda Neville novella—and catch a glimpse of Caro, the heroine ofThe Importance of Being Wicked,on sale December 2012.
Eleanor Hardwick and Max Quinton shared onenight of incredible passion . . . that was shatteredthe next day, when Eleanor learned of a bet placedby Max’s friends. Now, five years later, Max stillcan’t get Eleanor out of his head or his heart. He hasa single chance to make a second impression—onethat will last forever.
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Midnight Rescue by Elle Kennedy. $ 2.99
From the Jacket Copy:
Dangerous. Ruthless. Savage. And she’s the good guy.
Abby Sinclair had a desperate childhood until she was rescued and adopted by a retired army ranger who molded her into a master of self-defense. Now, she’s a cunning and fearless assassin thrust into assignment after dangerous assignment, using everything she has-nerve, resilience, strength, sex-to come out on top. Her only rule: trust no one.
Abby’s latest assignment is in Columbia: go undercover and snuff out a dangerous arms dealer active in the underground sex trade. But when Abby purposely blows her cover in a last-ditch attempt to free the helpless victims, deadly mercenary Kane Woodland is recruited as back-up. His mission: get Abby out of that hell hole.
The last thing Kane expects is to feel a primal attraction for Abby. But when she convinces him to join her on her perilous mission, their newfound passion could put the lives of their whole team at risk.
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Virals by Kathy Reichs. $ 2.99 AMZN | Google
From the Jacket Copy:
Adventure is in Tory Brennan’s blood. After all, she’s the grandniece of world-famous forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. Always up for a challenge, Tory and her science-geek friends spend their time exploring the marshlands of Loggerhead Island, home to the very off-limits Loggerhead Island Research Institute, where something strange is going on. After rescuing a stray wolfdog pup from a top-secret lab, Tory and her friends are exposed to a rare strain of canine parvovirus, changing them–and their DNA–forever. Now they are more than friends. They are a pack. They are Virals. And they’re dangerous to the core. But are they unstoppable enough to catch a cold-blooded murderer?
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The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. $ 1.99 AMZN | Google.
From the Jacket Copy:
Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna resolves to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook.
Doris Lessing’s best-known and most influential novel, The Golden Notebook retains its extraordinary power and relevance decades after its initial publication.
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Re. The Second Seduction of a Lady
Actually I did review it here and it’s my least favorite of all the Nevilles I’ve read (and I’ve read all but her first book). I gave it a C. It’s also a novella and usually priced at $1.99, so this isn’t really a deal.
The Ruin a Rogue, currently priced at $1.99 and featured in yesterday’s daily deals, is much better as well as a full length book. But if you’d rather start at the beginning of one of her series, then I recommend The Wild Marquis (Burgundy Club series) or The Importance of Being Wicked (Wild Quartet series).
I haven’t kept up w/ Kathy Reichs’ Tempe Brennan books, but thought I might give Virals a try, but it’s now showing at $5.48 on Amazon for me. Eh, I have enough books anyway. But it does have a cool cover.
I read The Golden Notebook for a women’s lit class in the late 80s. It’s a book that stayed with me, although I’m honestly not sure how well it would hold up to a re-read – I have a feeling it’s one of those books that was way ahead of it’s time but is behind ours. I do remember it as being one of the only books I read for school where a main female character had sex outside of marriage without suffering dire consequences. For romance readers, there are several romances but no heas or hfns.
I just read an ARC of Elle Kennedy’s latest one in the series (name escapes me at the moment) yesterday and really liked it! I had read one of her past Harlequin series and enjoyed it, and then I saw Jane recommending this new series so I wanted to give it a try. I love the female assassins trope.
The Golden Notebook was a life changer for me. I read it as a young adult transplanted from the US to the Netherlands, immersed in a different culture and rendered inarticulate as I groped to learn the language. TGN was one of those reading experiences in which I felt as if the author was speaking directly to me. A must read for sure.
I never got around to reading Lessing’s scifi series. Are they to be recommended as well?
@Mzcue: I read them all soon after they came out and thought the first three or four were amazing. In fact, I pulled out the old paperbacks a couple of months ago to do a reread, but I haven’t had a chance to get to them. They’re a bit uneven but really interesting, and I’m surprised they aren’t discussed more often when people talk about SFF written by women (and engaged with gender issues), especially the second book.
@Sunita: Thanks, Sunita. I’ll take a look. I have often thought of them in the kind of discussions you mention, but somehow never got around to seeking them out. I just saw that Lessing preferred to call them “space fiction” rather than sci fi. How intriguing!
I enjoyed The Second Seduction of a Lady, though not as much as Neville’s full-length novels. It’s a prequel of sorts to The Importance of Being Wicked, and a secondary plot involves Caro’s ill-advised romance with Robert Townsend.
@Mzcue:
Authors of literary fiction frequently prefer to call their science fiction something other than “science fiction,” whether “space fiction” or “speculative fiction” or what have you. Kurt Vonnegut did the same thing, and I think Margaret Atwood may have as well. It’s not really intriguing; it’s that they don’t want the prejudices against genre fiction to be applied to their books. IMO by not owning up, they help perpetuate these prejudices.
@Janine: I have to disagree with you here. Lessing didn’t try to shy away from the genre label; from everything I’ve read, she honestly didn’t care. Here’s an excerpt from the Paris Review interview, where she talks about Shikasta:
I believe Atwood was sniffy about Oryx & Crake being called genre (although I could be wrong and am happy to be corrected), but there are many literary authors who do not take that attitude.
@Sunita: I didn’t say all literary writers take that attitude (I know Lev Grossman doesn’t and I believe Jonathan Lethem doesn’t either) but at the same time I don’t think it’s that uncommon.
Re. Lessing, I can’t say with absolute confidence that that was her reason but I read the passage you quoted with a greater degree of cynicism than you do. To say “Of course, I don’t really write science fiction” after you’ve been invited to be a guest of honor at the World Science Fiction Convention seems to me to be a deliberate attempt to distance yourself, and perhaps even an attempt to portray the genre as poorer than it is, its umbrella confined to hard (techonological) science fiction, while ignoring the existence of soft (sociological) science fiction.
@Janine: I would really prefer not to debate this issue in the Deals thread; I was primarily interested in providing an alternative explanation. I’m sure that Mzcue can draw her own conclusions after reading the books, and there are plenty of interviews with Lessing available online to provide additional background.
That’s fine, I don’t really want to debate it either. I hung out with writers of both communities (literary and SFF) in the late 1990s and saw this attitude not infrequently, as well as meeting other writers who had encountered it, so if I’m judging Lessing too quickly, that’s why.