Reviews and Reprints: FOULSHAM and IMAGINARIUM 4

Some bits and bobs as I try to catch up on all the things.

First, my review of Edward Carey’s Foulsham — the second book in his Iremonger Trilogy, following the brilliant Heap House — went up at NPR Books last week, and I had this to say about it:

The pace of Foulsham is much faster than that of Heap House, so a number of important things come up amidst flurries of action; this is very exciting, but sometimes makes revelations and plot shenanigans seem arbitrary, where Heap House had a slower, more organic build. But just like Heap House, the character voices, new and old, are varied and wonderful, the situations terrifying and exhilarating, and the concept and execution so desk-thumpingly good that I resented having to spend time away from reading it. I love this series’ structure, beginning from a single house and expanding outward into a borough and then a city, widening the scope of its action even as it widens the circle of its concept’s implications.

As I say in the review, Heap House was one of my top two books last year (the other being The Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine), so I can’t recommend the reading of it enough, and then I suspect reading Foulsham will just happen as a matter of course.

Next, I’m delighted to announce that “The Lonely Sea in the Sky” — my story from Lightspeed‘s WOMEN DESTROY SCIENCE FICTION issue last year — will be reprinted in Imaginarium 4: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing, in among a smorgasbord of luminaries. Introduction by Margaret Atwood! What! Amaze. So I’m really looking forward to that, too.

In other news, I’ve spent a very hot day looking at flowers and thinking about weddings and have just about enough brain power left to sip a Dark & Stormy and hope it works some sympathetic magic on the weather.

#SFWApro