Claire O’Dell

Signal-Boosting Some Friends

To start things off, happy book day to Juliette Wade! Today is the release day for her second Broken Trust book, Transgressions of Power. I reviewed both of these back in September.

I was supposed to provide a one-sentence blurb for the books, and I utterly dropped the ball on that. You wouldn’t think it should be hard for a professional writer to come up with one little sentence, but yep, I blew it. So as I’m pulling this blog together, let me just say:

These books are complex, thoughtful science fiction, full of heroism in large moments and small alike.

Sorry it took me so long, Juliette!

#

Today also marks the release of Deborah Blake‘s Furbidden Fatality, “the first in her new RUNDOWN RESCUE series about a recent lottery winner who decides to spend her unexpected windfall on a defunct shelter, only to quickly find herself the main suspect in the murder of the town’s nasty dog warden.”

I haven’t had the chance to read this yet, but I’ve read and enjoyed several of her other books, and this one sounds like a lot of fun.

#

Next up, Claire O’Dell/Beth Bernobich has re-released her River of Souls trilogy.

I read and discussed the first of these books with Sherwood Smith back in 2010, but it looks like our post is no longer up. Hmph.

In the author’s words, this is a trilogy “about politics and intrigue, about magic and multiple lives. It’s about confronting hard choices, life after life. It’s about one young woman’s journey toward independence.”

Here’s the summary for book one:

Therez Zhalina is the daughter of one of Melnek’s most prominent merchants. Hers is a life of wealth and privilege, and she knows her duty—to marry well and to the family’s advantage. But when Therez meets the much older man her father chose, she realizes he is far crueler than her father could ever be.

She decides to run. This choice will change her life forever.

Therez changes her name to Ilse and buys passage with a caravan bound for distant cities. Her flight leads her to Lord Raul Kosenmark, once a councilor of the old king and now master of a famous pleasure house. But feasts and courtesans are only the outermost illusion in this house of secrets, and Ilse soon discovers a world of magic and political intrigue beyond anything she had imagined.

#

I know I’ve missed a lot of new stuff from good authors, so please feel free to chat things up in the comments. What are your thoughts about the ones I mentioned, and what other new books would you recommend?

 

A Study in Honor, by Claire O’Dell

Cover Art: A Study in HonorA Study in Honor, [Amazon | B&N | IndieBound] by Claire O’Dell, is a near-future twist on Sherlock Holmes.

And according to O’Dell’s Big Idea post over on John Scalzi’s blog? It’s my fault. As she explains,

“Back in 2014, Jim wrote a blog post about his experience writing fanfic. I’d never felt the tug of fanfic before, but after reading about how satisfying and involving it was for him, I decided to take a stab at writing some myself. After all, fiction is a conversation with itself, and what else is fanfic but a very intimate conversation?”

Now, the book sounds really interesting. Watson and Holmes as two black queer women in a future Washington D.C. still reeling from the New Civil War? Here’s an excerpt, if you’d like to start reading the first few chapters now.

I haven’t read the book yet, so I’m not in a position to talk much about it. But I’m still reeling a bit over that first line in O’Dell’s blog post.

“A Study in Honor is all Jim Hines’s fault.”

Now, I’d argue this point. O’Dell did all the work of actually writing the book, after all. But the fact that it started with a random blog post I did four years ago, talking about my silly Frosty the Snowman vs. Rudolph fanfiction? That’s … that’s a metaphorical boot to my head right there.

I struggle sometimes, as I imagine many of us do, with the question of whether any of this stuff makes a difference. The blog posts, the social media, and so on. Is it really worth the time and energy it takes to keep posting? How many people actually read and remember any of it?

I don’t want to overinflate my own importance here. O’Dell/Bernobich is a good writer with a solid publication history behind her. Her new book is getting some good buzz, and that’s all her.

But in some small way, I was a part of that. A thing I wrote sparked something new for someone else.

What more could a writer hope for?