Promo Awaits

I'm busy getting ready for Grand Rapids Comic Con, including catching up on some bookwork. So I wanted to get this week's promo post out before the day slips away from me. Enjoy, and hope to see a least some of you at the con.



The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin by L. Jagi Lamplighter

Roanoke Academy for the Sorcerous Arts – A magic school like no other!

To Rachel Griffin, Roanoke Academy is a place of magic and wonder. Nestled amidst the beauty of New York’s Hudson Highlands and hidden from the eyes of the Unwary, it offers everything a young sorceress could desire—enchantments, flying brooms, and the promise of new friends.

On her first day of school, Rachel discovers her perfect memory has an unexpected side effect. She can see through the spell sorcerers use to hide their secrets.

When someone tries to kill a fellow student, Rachel investigates. She soon discovers another far-vaster secret world that hides from the Wise the way the Wise hide from mundane folk. Rushing forward where others fear to tread, Rachel bravely faces wraiths, embarrassing magical pranks, mysterious older boys, a Raven that brings the doom of worlds, and at least one fire-breathing teacher.

Described by fans as: "Fringe meets Narnia at Hogwarts", The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin is a tale of wonder and danger, romance and heartbreak, and, most of all, of magic and of a girl who refuses to be daunted.

Curiosity may kill a cat, but nothing stops Rachel Griffin!

"Lamplighter introduces many imaginative elements in her world that will delight..." VOYA

(The first of a series that currently stands at three volumes, with more to come).



A Diabolical Bargain by Mary Catelli

Growing up between the Wizards' Wood and its marvels, and the finest university of wizardry in the world, Nick Briarwood always thought that he wanted to learn wizardry.

When his father attempts to offer him to a demon in a deal, the deal rebounded on him, and Nick survives -- but all the evidence points to his having made the deal.

Now he really wants to learn wizardry. Even though the university, the best place to master it, is also the place where he is most likely to be discovered.



Wren Journeymage by Sherwood Smith

The first summer of peace brings Wren on her weekly visit to the young Queen Teressa, where she encounters the derisive, upsetting Hawk Rhiscarlan riding in! Wren races to warn Teressa, to discover he's expected, which causes the girls' first argument. Tyron gives Wren a chance to leave Meldreth by sending her on a new journeymage project--to find Connor, who had wandered off to the Summer Isles. When Wren vanishes, her scry stone abandoned, Teressa veers between regret over the argument, worry about Wren, and the beguilement of attraction as Hawk skillfully upsets her court. Wren has just made friends with some young sailors when they are captured and forced on board a shady smuggler, where Wren learns all about the sea. When pirates attack, Wren does magic, which leads her straight to another confrontation with the villain she hates most, aided by the boy she . . . what do you call these feelings? Once again the four--Wren, Teressa, Connor, and Tyron--find themselves deep in adventure, as they try to navigate the treacherous waters of growing up.

(The first three Wren books were originally published by Jane Yolen's YA imprint with Harcourt. When Harcourt discontinued the imprint, it left the series orphaned with the fourth book unwritten. Sherwood Smith has reissued the series through Book View Cafe, a writers' co-op. It begins with Wren to the Rescue and continues through Wren's Quest and Wren's War.)



The Sun Never Sets by Joseph T. Major

A passionate defense of an exiled prince leads to changes that shake the course of European and world history, and lay the stage for a wider and wider yet monarchy.
In our world, the Electress Sophia of Hanover, sister of the gallant Prince Rupert of the Rhine, was made heir to the British throne, only to die just too soon, leaving the succession to her son. Once, though, she got a little too exercised about the poor exiled Pretender . . . and if she had been just a little more exercised, William of Orange might have changed his mind.
Such a change could put a strange and striking monarch in reach of the British throne. But the heirs of the Stuarts were not yet gone, and they could strike back. The result of this bold decision would mean wars across the world, involving people from lands spreading from Poland to Virginia, from Scotland to Naples. It would mean battles in the Cockpit of Europe, in the wilds of Saxony, and indeed on the green fields of England itself.
Not all is war. Literary figures such as Swift,Johnson, and Voltaire have strange and different meetings. The universal genius Benjamin Franklin, Printer, has an entirely new field of endeavor.
The opposed royal houses, and the other princes of Europe, face off in new and strange alliances in this novel.



Historical Lovecraft by Silvia Monero-Garcia, editor

Historical Lovecraft, a unique anthology blending historical fiction with horror, features 26 tales spanning centuries and continents. This eclectic volume takes the readers through places as varied as Laos, Greenland, Peru, and the Congo, and from antiquity until the 20th century, pushing the envelope of Lovecraftian lore. William Meikle’s inquisitor tries to unravel the truth during a very hostile questioning. Jesse Bullington narrates the saga of a young Viking woman facing danger and destruction. E. Catherine Tobler stops in Ancient Egypt, where Pharaoh Hatshepsut receives an exquisite and deadly gift. Albert Tucher discovers that the dead do not remain silent in 10th century Rome.

These are tales that reimagine history and look into the past through a darker glass. Tales that show evil has many faces and reaches through the centuries. Tales that will chill your heart.

Join us in our journey through horror and time, if you dare.

Stories by: Regina Allen, Jesse Bullington, Nathalie Boisard-Beudin, Mason Ian Bundschuh, Andrew G. Dombalagian, Mae Empson, Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas, Orrin Grey, Sarah Hans, Travis Heermann, Martha Hubbard, Nathaniel Katz, Leigh Kimmel, Meddy Ligner, William Meikle, Daniel Mills, Aaron Polson, Y. Wahyu Purnomosidhi, Alter S. Reiss, Josh Reynolds, Julio Toro San Martin, Bradley H. Sinor, Molly Tanzer, Albert Tucher, E. Catherine Tobler, Bryan Thao Worra

(Contains my short story "Red Star, Yellow Sign," which is tied to my indie short stories The Other Side of Midnight and The Shadow over Leningrad



All the Little Hedgehogs" by Leigh Kimmel

The Lower Volga Special Bio-Research Laboratory is one of the Soviet Union's most closely guarded secrets. Yona Feldberg didn't even know it existed until the day Academician Voronsky arrived at the Suvorov School and took him away from the austere life of a military cadet.

Here Yona learned why he, the son of a KGB labor camp commandant, should have been placed in a school to train the Soviet Army's future officers: he is a clone of one of the Red Army officers murdered in the Great Terror. However, his extraordinary talent for genetics makes him more valuable as the Academician's personal student, learning the technology of gene splicing alongside the Academician's adopted son.

But privileges can be revoked, as Yona discovers when he runs afoul of the local guardians of propriety. Now he will get a different kind of education, in teh darker secrets of the Soviet cloning program.

(Another story set in the Soviet Union, in the Gus on the Moon timeline).

Over at Sarah Hoyt's blog, the Free Range Oyster has even more cool books. In the comments you can also find a story beginning of mine, for another story in the Gus on the Moon timeline.

I also have some new in-depth book reviews up at The Billion Light-Year Bookshelf.

As always, if you'd like to have your works included in future versions of this promo post, please let me know at leighkimmel@yahoo.com. Because I'll be setting next week's promo post up while I'm at Grand Rapids Comic Con, they'll stand a better chance of being included in it if sent earlier.

Crossposted at The Starship Cat Blog and Through the Worldgate.

Harry Potter -- One Year Later

How the time has flown -- already it's been a year since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows hit the shelves. It was a time of particular excitement because it was going to be the very last one, the final time for Harry Potter fans the world round to gather in eager anticipation of a brand new volume in the adventures of the boy wizard. The last time for big themed parties at libraries and bookstores, and generally the last time that we would reach this fevered pitch of anticipation, because after this there would be no more.

Now, a year later, a certain amount of the excitement has worn off and we can begin to look back at the Harry Potter phenomenon with a degree of perspective and ask just what was its significance. Some things are obvious, such as the record-breaking sales statistics that catapaulted a relatively obscure single mother into the ranks of the world's richest women. Others are more debatable, particularly when one begins to move into questions of quality and literary merit.

There can be no question about the Harry Potter books being engaging, for they were books that children read willingly, even begged to be able to read. Children who had previously regarded reading as an onerous chore had come to look upon the Harry Potter books with eager anticipation, and upon acquiring them would even read them multiple times to capture every nuance of the often intricate plotting. The Harry Potter books also crossed generations in a way seldom seen for children's literature, with adults reading with the same eagerness as their younger counterparts. Although some grown-ups were chary of being seen to read a children's book and would take off the dust jacket of the hardcover or wrap paper around the paperback to hide it, a surprising number of adults proudly showed off their choice of reading matter.

The Harry Potter books also broke new ground in terms of the substance of children's books. It had previously been regarded as a given that children would not read large books, and many authors had to deal with longer books being broken into multiple parts to keep them within what were regarded as hard limits on length. But when Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire weighed in at nearly twice the usual length for a children's book and young people still devoured it by the crateload, publishers began to re-evaluate their assumptions.

The Harry Potter books also broke new ground by allowing the storylines to grow with the characters. Many children's fantasy series feature relatively static characters who face the same sorts of challenges in book after book. Even if the characters' achievements and losses from earlier books carry through into later ones, the types of problems they face generally remain at the same age level. By contrast, Harry Potter and his friends face ever escalating problems in each book, delving into steadily deeper issues of good and evil. In the first few books, the dichotomy is simple enough to almost seem simplistic -- Voldemort is evil because he's evil, and that's that. Harry being downtrodden and suddenly discovering that he's a star is treated as pretty much a plot device, and left at that.

But by the fourth book, we begin to move into more complicated territory, in which Rowling begins to plumb the nature of love and loyalty, themes that will run throughout the remainder of the series and prove to be the foundations of the most powerful magic of all. Even the character of Voldemort becomes more complex and nuanced, and we begin to see more human motivations for his fall into depravity, moving him beyond the menace that is a menace because it's a menace.

However, we may question whether we are seeing a lasting phenomenon. Will we continue to see new children take up the Harry Potter books with the same eagerness now that there are no further volumes to whet our appetite and encourage us to re-read the earlier ones in order to be ready to catch all the subtleties of the latest installment?

Skeptical critics have pointed out that the Harry Potter books really don't break that much new ground in terms of storytelling, and that much of their storytelling is merely the artful rearranging of standard tropes. Yet the tropes are often so common for the simple fact that they speak to deep and basic things within us, with the resonance of the familiar. And truth be told, many of the greats of literature have made their place in the canon by works that are in fact derivative of various precursors now remembered only by specialists. For instance, every educated person in the Western world knows Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, yet only a few dedicated scholars recall such authors as Arthur Brooke, William Painter or Matteo Bandello, all of whom wrote earlier versions of the doomed couple's romance. Shakespeare's genius lay in changing the theme and impact of his story, taking what had previously been a condemnation of youthful refusal to listen to the advice of elders and turned it into a story of the redemptive power of young love.

In the final reckoning we will only know whether the Harry Potter books have lasting literary merit when they have lasted. Which means we need to wait a few decades and see if new generations of children take up the series with the same delight, or if they come to regard it as a stodgy old thing only their parents and grandparents would want to read.