Mystery and thriller often go hand-in-hand, but some stories are excellent mysteries but not solid thrillers and vice-versa. And then there’s Ruth Ware’s One By One: a mystery, a thriller, and a great book. Snoop, a company built on a music app, decides to hold its business retreat in the […]
Continuing the world started in Reformed, H. L. Burke offers this sequel in her superhero series. In the BCU (Burke’s Connected Universe), superheroes (called sables) are organized as law enforcers with all of the advantages and disadvantages bureaucracy brings with it. Some of these sables have a rehabilitation goal. What […]
The second books in trilogies must serve the function of advancing the story without the benefit of starting or finishing it. The Raventree Society Season Two bears this burden. Season 1 introduced the winning idea of a five-story novel of faux ghost hunters looking for a lost member of their […]
One of the most unique titles for a book in a superhero series has to be Toga. By its name alone, a reader may assume this work is historical non-fiction, historical fiction, or possibly a fantasy about Roman gods ala Rick Riordan. The last guess is partially correct as it’s […]
When Your Beauty IS the Beast is an anthology by Ye Olde Dragon Books and the first in their fairytale series. Instead of “give us retellings of Beauty and the Beast,” the editors have cleverly asked for stories where the beauty is the beast. How to interpret that directive—looks, personality, […]
Every horror reader knows the basics: “Don’t go into the basement (or attic)”, “Don’t stare at your reflection in the lake for too long”, “Don’t play some creepy old game you found in a trunk (unless it’s Jumanji),” etc. Pansy Finster lives her life by these rules, and they have […]
C. J. Redwine’s The Wish Granter is the second novel in her Ravenspire series in which a popular fairy tale is reimagined into a more realistic (yet still fantasy) setting with serious consequences for the main characters. In this novel, she highlights the town of Sundraille where the royal family […]
Starla Huchton’s Shadows on Snow is a retelling of Snow White but with males taking traditional female roles and vice-versa. Yes, this means that Snow White is a man in this story. He is Prince Leopold, the evil step-mother becomes an evil step-father, and the seven “dwarfs” become seven sisters. […]
Forget everything you know about fairytale retellings when you read Ashen by H. L. Burke. Most retellings either are a straight-up novel length version of a story you’ve read before, or they include some type of gimmick to make the narrative fresh. Reading these types of retellings are like playing […]
I was writing a blog about the traditional fairy tales and my novel Kingdom Come. At the end I recommended some fairy tale retellings of that particular story. I suddenly had an idea. What if I read them to compare their treatment of the Snow White character? Not rate the […]