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Book Review: The Theft of Sunlight

3/25/2021

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I got an early look at Intisar Khanani's new fantasy release with HarperTeen! It officially launched this week, so if you're itching for more of her refreshingly unique take on high fantasy, you can jump right in!

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Book Review:
 
Dauntless Path #1: The Theft of Sunlight
 
Intisar Khanani
 
HarperTeen, March 23rd, 2021
 
Grade: A
 
(I received an advance copy via Edelweiss)
 
The Basics:
 
Amraeya has lived her whole life under the unspoken terror of the Snatchers, knowing that the people she loves could disappear at any moment, and that if they do, no one will even dare look for them. Born with a clubfoot, Rae herself has enjoyed the dubious privilege of being considered an unappealing target, but even that won’t protect her if she starts asking too many questions.
 
When a child is taken from her village on the same day that she receives an invitation to attend the royal wedding, she decides to take a chance and petition for help from the highest power in the kingdom of Menaiya.
 
The Downside:
 
Without spilling any spoilers, The Theft of Sunlight ends on a pretty extreme cliffhanger. It still feels like the end of a complete installment in a bigger saga, not just an arbitrary stop in the middle of a story that hasn’t really gone anywhere yet, so it doesn’t bother me. Still, I know that’s something that a lot of readers prefer to be warned of in advance, so there it is.
 
The Upside:
 
Khanani leads us through Menaiya with her usual sharp confidence and vivid descriptions, using high fantasy convention to deepen the atmosphere but never being confined by it. Rae has to navigate courtly drama, street-level criminal syndicates, religious corruption, and culture clashes far more subtle and complicated than those so often explored among the standard Tolkienian fantasy beings, all in the course of a (sadly) timeless and grounded human trafficking investigation. Every detail is purposeful, never recycled unexamined from the genre’s stock motifs.
 
While the mystery adventure has its thrills, the real heart of the story is the friendship that develops between Rae and Princess Alyrra (the same princess from Thorn, which is advisable but not required pre-reading). At first, through Rae’s eyes, Alyrra is an impossibly distant and powerful figure whose support would solve all her problems, but as those who’ve read Thorn already know, Alyrra is an unwanted princess of a small outlying kingdom, now happily engaged to Menaiya’s prince but still as much of an outsider to its court as Rae herself. The two bond over their uncompromising passion for justice, learn to prop each other up, and challenge each other’s assumptions about their own power or lack thereof.
 
Recommended for anyone looking for interesting new high fantasy universes to explore.

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When the World Stopped: A Collection of Infectious Stories

10/15/2020

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I'm in a new anthology!

When the World Stopped: A Collection of Infectious Stories is just what it sounds like. It's a multi-author anthology of short stories about viruses, real and fictional, compiled and edited by Emma Nelson and Hannah Smith of Owl Hollow Press, the same publisher that brought you Matt's Bennytown.

It's freshly released, and my personal copy is still on its way, so I haven't gotten to look at the stories other than my own yet. However, I hear tell that this was one of Owl Hollow's most popular short story submission calls ever, and that it took a lot of tough choices to keep it down to a manageable size, so I have no doubt that the quality and range of different takes on the theme will be stellar.

So, if, like me, you cope through fiction and have spent this year watching zombie movies along with Alien and Contagion and The Thing more times than you can count, consider joining me for some new, timely-on-purpose plague fiction.

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From the back cover:

Viruses are not new to life or literature, but the ways we experience them are always evolving. And stories are some of the best ways to heal, connect with others, process our own emotions, and remember the nuances of unique times and places, so join us as we explore love and loss, passion and betrayal, fear and panic, togetherness and separation, community and isolation within viruses of all varieties—real and imagined.

Look for my story, "The Regrecode."

In the year 3020, an idealistic young doctor and her randomly assigned quarantine partner, a jaded operations manager, race to save humanity from a bio-digital virus that can short out the human brain, circumventing all reason and compassion and leaving only childlike pettiness with a compulsion to spread.

Click here to order 

(Paperback and Kindle editions available)

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Escape Velocity Is Available Everywhere

9/21/2020

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So, remember how Escape Velocity was Amazon-exclusive?

Well, it's finally not!

​You can now enjoy these first two feminist folktales from beyond the stars on whatever platform you prefer (except Google Play, it's being finicky about stocking The Kryssitid Gaze, but I'm working on it).

Also, since I couldn't legally give early access to these on Patreon, what with the Amazon-exclusive thing, I'm making them available for one month, starting now, for patrons of all levels to download.

And yes, for those asking, I am in the early stages of writing a third installment!​

Check out the new, all-over-the-book-world links below.

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Once upon a time, on a glamorous space station called Eris, there was a young woman who could spin base metals into gold…
 
At least, that’s what she tells people to separate them from their money.
 
Naia Mills is a con artist, a Human orphan scraping to get by in a galaxy that doesn’t want her, more than a century after her ancestors rendered the Earth uninhabitable. She travels the stars selling fake gold jewelry and elixirs, until the day she unknowingly swindles the son of a space station commander. Now confined to the station and threatened with a slow death in a radioactive penal colony, Naia has three days to buy her way to freedom with an impossible act of alchemy.
 
Eager to get out from under his father’s thumb, and fascinated with Naia’s profession, the commander’s son is an easy dupe and willing accomplice, but to get their hands on the gold they both need to escape, they’ll have to make a deal with the local mob, and a queenpin so powerful and private that even her closest associates don’t know her name.
 
Welcome to Escape Velocity: Feminist Folktales from Beyond the Stars. This reimagining of “Rumpelstiltskin,” along with other Escape Velocity novellas about complicated fairytale women in space, can be enjoyed independently or in any order.

Purchase links:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

iBooks

Kobo

Google Play

Smashwords

Indigo

Books-a-Million

​Indiebound
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​Once upon a time, on the second planet from Apocrytus, there was a monster whose face men trembled to behold…
 
Or they would, if they knew who she was. Perhaps she should leave more survivors.
 
Meligora lives for revenge, but it’s not as dreary as she thought it would be. Her old life ended when the Brotherhood took control of her planet and started rounding up women for mandatory “conversion,” removing their stingers, wings, and most of their eyes, looting their bodies for their valuable reproductive organs, and leaving them docile shells of their former selves. But after her own botched procedure turned her into a lethal weapon instead of a slave, she learned to make the best of things, bending Brotherhood enforcers to her will and slaughtering them in droves each night.
 
She knows it’s only a matter of time before someone tries to stop her, but when a young Human bounty hunter finally follows her trail of corpses, he offers her a choice: stay a wanted killer of dime-a-dozen thugs, or join him in tracking down the man who mutilated her.
 
Welcome to Escape Velocity: Feminist Folktales from Beyond the Stars. This reimagining of the legend of Medusa, along with other patriarchy-smashing Escape Velocity novellas, can be enjoyed independently or in any order.

Purchase links:

Amazon
​
Barnes & Noble

iBooks

Kobo

Smashwords

Indigo

Books-a-Million

Indiebound
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Day 1 of The Future Mrs. Brightside Blog Tour

8/10/2020

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It's the first day of my month-long blog tour celebrating The Future Mrs. Brightside, and at the end of it all, there's a $10 Amazon giftcard up for grabs. Along the way, there'll be excerpts from inside The Future Mrs. Brightside, along with guest posts and interviews about how it was written, my fantasy movie casting, and my thoughts on the Contemporary Women's Fiction genre I've splashed my toes into so suddenly and without warning.

If you want to follow along, you can find the full schedule of links on the website of my gracious host, Silver Dagger Book Tours.

You can also read the very first excerpt there today.

And of course, whether you head over there or hang around here, you can peruse the lovely art and teaser text, and enter the giveaway at the bottom of the page!


The Future Mrs. Brightside 
by Fiona J.R. Titchenell 
Genre: Women's Fiction 


After a year of making beautiful music together, Chloe Hatherly thinks she’s more than ready to make the age-old promise to her bandmate, Jon. In sickness and in health, for better or worse. When the sudden death of Jon’s father forces the couple to postpone their wedding in favor of a funeral, however, their relationship veers rapidly off course from the ever after they’d both envisioned. Now living in her intended father-in-law’s memory-steeped house and acting as round-the-clock caregiver for her fiancé’s worsening depression, Chloe finds herself afflicted with a songwriter’s block for which she’s only ever known one cure: leaving and writing a killer breakup song. Unlike the subjects of her past lyrical rants, Chloe can’t picture her life without Jon in it, and she begins to wonder if there’s a way to save the music she loves while keeping the vows she never had the chance to make — or if she and Jon have already been irrevocably parted by death, albeit not their own.

The Future Mrs. Brightside is an uncomfortably honest, sometimes hilarious, fiercely romantic prose ballad to the hideous beauty of love in good times and bad. 

Goodreads * Amazon





FIONA J.R. TITCHENELL is an author of young adult, sci-fi, and horror fiction, including Pinnacle City: A Superhero Noir, The Prospero Chronicles, and the Summer 2018 Feminist Book of the Month, Out of the Pocket. The Future Mrs. Brightside is her first foray into contemporary women’s fiction. She graduated with a B.A. in English from Cal State University Los Angeles in 2009 at the age of twenty. She currently lives in San Gabriel, California, with her husband and fellow author, Matt Carter, and has also published under the initials F.J.R. Titchenell. Find out more about her and her books at http://www.fjrtitchenell.weebly.com. 

Website * Facebook * Twitter * Pinterest * Bookbub * Goodreads




$10 Amazon gift card 

Follow the tour HERE for special content and a giveaway! 


a Rafflecopter giveaway


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Bennytown Interview with Matt Carter

7/20/2020

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In honor of Matt's new horror release, Bennytown, I'm asking him a few questions. And with no false modesty, I think my insider knowledge of both this terrifying book and the psyche of its creator allowed me to coax forth some pretty interesting answers.

See for yourself:

​ 
FJRT: Tell us about Benny the Bunny himself, the icon and mascot of Bennytown. Within the world of the novel, he’s a fictional character whose likeness is all over the park. How was he created, and what is he like in his own doubly fictional world where he’s real?
 
MC: Benny the Bunny… wow, he and I go back. He was the subject of a lot of my horror-based writing throughout a lot of my early attempts in the genre, an evil, malevolent Barney like figure back when Barney was a character who particularly annoyed me (can you tell I’m a 90s kid?), though for the record I hold no ill will towards now. Over time, Benny evolved more into an amalgam of famous cartoon characters and ubiquitous cultural icons as a satire of ever-present media creations, and has become a lot more fun to play with because of it.
 
In the world of Bennytown… Benny the Bunny is the world’s most popular and recognizable cartoon character, the icon of the Dorian Studios media empire. He’s a green bunny rabbit who wears overalls and white gloves. Personality-wise he’s distinctly mellow and friendly, always with a kind word or a wise story, always welcoming you to sit on his front porch in Happy Hollow so he can play you a song about friendship on his banjo. Benny the Bunny wants to be everybody’s best friend, especially to those who have no friends. Benny believes in you.
 
FJRT: You’ve written young adult horror in the past, and Noel, the protagonist of Bennytown, is a teenager, but you chose to write his story for a more general adult horror audience. What factors went into that decision, and how is the book different from what it might have been if you’d taken a more teen-focused approach?
 
MC: From the start, I knew that I wanted Bennytown to be an adult oriented horror novel, because that is the type of horror that I’ve read for about as long as I can remember. Stephen King was very much a part of my coming into being as a horror fan, and I’ve wanted to walk in his footsteps for a very long time you could say.
 
But why would I make Noel sixteen? Well, a lot of the decision-making on that front simply came from life experience. I wanted to write this story from the naïve perspective of a new hire at Bennytown, and having actually been a new hire at a theme park once upon a time back in the dark ages when I was sixteen, it was the kind of story-telling fit I knew that I could do some justice to. It gives Noel less life experience, less a frame of reference for him to be able to tell what is and isn’t normal in a job like this, and more for the sinister forces behind the park to play with in his psyche.
 
If I was going to write this for a more teen based approach… I think I wouldn’t go quite as far as I went in some of the darker portions of this book, because I get pretty twisted at points. I know YA has grown a lot since I last read it, but I also know that I went to some dark and uncomfortable places in this book that I only stepped into here hesitantly. I also know that it would have affected how I wrote the ending, but without going into any spoilers I think I’m just going to leave that one where it is.
 
FJRT: You’ve talked elsewhere about how especially long the process of developing Bennytown was. How much did the final version end up differing from your initial plans for the story?
 
MC: Like almost everything I write, the first draft of Bennytown was rather long and meandering, and through various editing phases I wound up cutting close to 30-40,000 words to make it a tighter, more coherent story. A lot of things wound up getting cut in the process, a couple supporting characters (including Noel’s childhood best friend, who was quite important to the plot at first), some scene blocking that had to be adjusted, even a whole subplot about the horrible goings-on at Lost & Found. Once it got into my editors’ hands, it began to change even more, until it reached its current state, which I’m quite happy with. Things change from draft to draft, and sometimes that’s for the best.
 
FJRT: Bennytown alternates between Noel’s narrative and vignettes from the park’s sixty-year history. Why did you decide to show us parts of Bennytown’s backstory directly, rather than through Noel’s eyes?
 
MC: Part of this was simply because I wanted to weave a tapestry that was larger than just one character’s perspective would allow for. To get in a lot of the information I wanted about the park while strictly using Noel’s perspective would have required a lot of random information dumps, which would have felt inorganic in the limited, even naïve perspective I wanted to create with Noel. He can’t see everything, but the things he can’t see often have a way of affecting him.
 
As well, by looking into these little vignettes from over the park’s 60-year history, I wanted to help breathe life into Bennytown itself. The park itself is almost the second main character of the book next to Noel, and by showing it throughout the years, we get a chance to see that it has existed even without Noel and didn’t just spring to life the moment he popped onto the scene as a character.
 
And, from a simpler, geekier level, I am a huge fan of both history and worldbuilding, and getting to visit the park throughout the decades was a fun way of getting to put my worldbuilding designs for this story to use.
 
FJRT: It’s me you’re talking to, so I have to ask, can you tell us a bit about the ladies of Bennytown and what it was like writing them?
 
MC: While I can’t go into tremendous detail about my characters without giving away some spoilers, on the whole I’m quite proud of the women of Bennytown. Characters like fellow employee Garcia, restaurant manager Kathleen, park heiress Elle Dorian and Noel’s girlfriend Olivia are more than just supporting characters for Noel’s journey. These are people who have their own stakes in what happens in Bennytown, their own histories and issues with the park and their own goals. This being a horror story, I’m not going to go out and promise them all happy endings, but I like to think I managed to make them all fleshed out characters who are doing everything they can to make it through this torment.
 
What it was like writing them… well, honestly it was like writing any other character in the story. I try not to differentiate too much between how I write my male and female characters, since everyone is a character first. I’m not saying that there are no differences, because different people with different backgrounds will have different life experiences that inform who they are as characters as well, I won’t deny that, but I want to try to give everyone the same level of developed backgrounds and agency within the story.
 
FJRT: Would it be fair to say that you’re a feminist, but that your lead characters can’t always say the same? How would you characterize Noel’s morality, and how is it different from your own? How does it feel to write those differences?
 
MC: I completely and utterly identify as a feminist, but that doesn’t mean the characters I write always are. A lot of stories I write are characters exploring their worlds and themselves, either confronting their personal demons or succumbing to them, and sometimes that doesn’t take characters to the greatest places in their minds or biases. I like to see characters succeed and get over their own issues, but it all depends on what works best for the story.
 
Noel’s morality is limited by his experiences. He’s a sixteen-year-old kid raised in white bread suburbia, which has given him a very limited worldview. He’s childish in many ways, knowing that he has to grow up and somewhat looking forward to that change, but also wanting to hold onto his childish side. In a lot of ways, it was like looking back into my own teenage years when I was a much less happy person, and much more sheltered from the wider world. It was unsettling digging into my past for these elements of a character that I’ve done my best to grow out of, but in this story it felt right to revisit those demons to better have an understanding of a character dealing with similar demons. Noel and I are very different people, and he has a lot of rougher edges than I ever did, and he is manipulated into making some bad decisions I know I never would have, but I still have a lot of sympathy for a lot of what he is put through.
 
FJRT: Would you say Bennytown itself has a “moral,” and how do you feel about morals in horror in general?
 
MC: While I wouldn’t use the word “moral” per se when discussing Bennytown, one of its major themes is growing up. Noel is confronted by a world and a particularly bizarre set of circumstances that have him battling between the realities of growing up and what he thinks it means to “be a man” in the limited societal context that he has for that phrase, while still wanting to hold onto his childhood as a life preserver. It’s a battle we all must go through in life in one form or another, and some of us handle it better than others, and that is definitely a conflict that Noel himself has to deal with over the course of the story.
 
As for morals in horror… I can go either way on the subject. The classic definitions of morality and morals popping up in horror as guides to tell people what to do and what not to do often come across as puritanical and misguided. It’s the subtle messages that we come to think of as clichés and tropes, the kinds of things you yell at characters for screwing up, those I find to often be the best morals to take out of horror.
 
Stick together with friends in the face of evil.
 
Don’t make fun of the unpopular kid. Or anyone, for that matter.
 
Always be prepared.
 
Turn on the damn lights.
 
Don’t be an asshole. Of any kind.
 
These are good morals to take out of horror, I’d say.
 
FJRT: In literature and film, hauntings are often tied to characters being unable to escape or let go of the past. Are these important themes in Bennytown?
 
MC: Oh, very much so. Bennytown is very much a patchwork of events that have happened and people who have passed through (and passed away in) the park. Bennytown’s past is inextricably tied to its present, a battle that is played out nightly in the park.
 
As for Noel, his past with Bennytown might leave him particularly susceptible to the evil forces at play. After a childhood tragedy, he credits frequent visits to the park with restoring his mental health, and he has a skewed view of Bennytown because of it. He forces himself into a position of being willfully ignorant of anything bad happening there and… well, I might have said too much already.
 
FJRT: In folklore, hauntings tend to revolve more around simple but striking images that only hint at a vague or changeable bigger story, like the Headless Horseman or Bloody Mary. Would any of Bennytown’s apparitions make good campfire legends in their own right? Which ones were the most fun to design visually?
 
MC: Oh yes, very, very much so. There are quite a few distinct spirits wandering the grounds of Bennytown, and though most of them are benign, occasionally chaotic entities, the leftovers of people who’d died in the park but were never allowed to move on, there are some bad ones who have really left an ugly mark on the park and wander around as nightmarish revenants.
 
Easily the one who gave me the most willies when writing the book is that of one of the park’s wandering costumed characters, Wilbur Walrus. Though seemingly a benign cartoon character, with soft purple skin and a loud Hawaiian shirt, the person behind the costume for Wilbur is an utter monster, a prolific child abductor and murderer who hid within Bennytown with the help of the park’s dark magics before his gruesome demise. Now he wanders the park as a grotesque, half-rotted beast, tormenting the story’s main characters and the ghosts of his victims that he keeps on a very short leash. He’s disgusting, unsettling, and was both fun and utterly repulsive to write for.
 
FJRT: Finally, if you had the chance to visit Bennytown as a guest (in non-pandemic times), would you do it? Why or why not?
 
MC: Dear god, no, lol. I mean, in the context that I created it for the story, Bennytown the theme park may well be “The Most Dangerous Place on Earth”, and I wouldn’t want to risk my health and soul just for a theme park experience, no matter how wonderful their attractions were. Now, even if it weren’t for the dark forces that run things behind the scenes, I still designed a lot of Bennytown to be a fairly obnoxious theme park, so I don’t imagine I’d be jumping into it anytime soon. Yeah, there are a few attractions I’d enjoy checking out… but at the end of the day I think the best way to visit Bennytown would be in the pages of this book, and not in person.
 
Besides, this way I don’t have to wear sunscreen or wait in line, a combination which will always get my vote.
 
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For nearly sixty years, Bennytown has been America’s most exciting family theme park destination. Under the watchful eye of cultural icon Benny the Bunny, the park has entertained generations of children with its friendly atmosphere and technologically innovative rides. Park founder Fletcher Dorian’s dream lives to this day, with Bennytown acting as a beacon of joy and wonder, where magic is real and dreams come true.
Bennytown once saved sixteen-year-old Noel Hallstrom’s life, and to repay it, Noel has applied for a summer job. Though the work is messy and the hours are bad, Noel is happy to be a part of the Bennytown family, until he sees the darkness beneath the surface. Strange, mechanized mascots walk the park perimeter. Elegantly dressed cultists in wooden Benny masks lurk in the darkness. Spirits of the many who’ve died in the park roam freely, and every night the park transforms into a dark dimension where madness reigns and monsters prowl.
​
Noel is about to find out more about Bennytown than he ever wanted to know, and that its darkness might have designs on him…

​
Plan your visit today:

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Find out more about my amazing husband/partner Matt Carter and his work:

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The Future Mrs. Brightside Is Now Available

7/14/2020

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​Happy book birthday to me and The Future Mrs. Brightside!

Both paperback and Kindle editions of this tale of grieving and love are now live, and it's free on KU as part of this year's Kindle Storyteller contest.

Much as I'm looking forward to getting back to the stars, the future, and the dark corners of the imagination, this was a story that simply demanded to be told. I hope you all find it as powerful a journey as I did.

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After a year of making beautiful music together, Chloe Hatherly thinks she’s more than ready to make the age-old promise to her bandmate, Jon. In sickness and in health, for better or worse. When the sudden death of Jon’s father forces the couple to postpone their wedding in favor of a funeral, however, their relationship veers rapidly off course from the ever after they’d both envisioned. Now living in her intended father-in-law’s memory-steeped house and acting as round-the-clock caregiver for her fiancé’s worsening depression, Chloe finds herself afflicted with a songwriter’s block for which she’s only ever known one cure: leaving and writing a killer breakup song. Unlike the subjects of her past lyrical rants, Chloe can’t picture her life without Jon in it, and she begins to wonder if there’s a way to save the music she loves while keeping the vows she never had the chance to make — or if she and Jon have already been irrevocably parted by death, albeit not their own.
 
The Future Mrs. Brightside is an uncomfortably honest, sometimes hilarious, fiercely romantic prose ballad to the hideous beauty of love in good times and bad.
​

Kindle (free on Kindle Unlimited)

Paperback

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Cover Reveal and Giveaway: The Theft of Sunlight

6/25/2020

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Congratulations to Intisar Khanani, author of Thorn and The Sunbolt Chronicles, on her upcoming book, The Theft of Sunlight!

Today we get to see the newly revealed cover and have a look inside. There's also a giveaway at the bottom of this page for $25 to spend at The Book Depository. I'm a little late posting this, so hurry and get your entries in! But first:

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About The Theft of Sunlight:


I did not choose this fate. But I will not walk away if I can make a difference.

Children have been disappearing from Menaiya for longer than Amraeya ni Ansarim can remember. When her best friend’s sister disappears, Rae knows she can’t stay silent any longer. She finds the chance to make a difference in an invitation to the palace.

But Rae struggles to fit in with the lords and ladies of the court. Instead, she finds unexpected help in a rough-around-the-edges thief named Bren who always seems to have her best interests at heart. Soon even Bren can’t help her, and Rae must risk her life and well-being to face an evil that lurks in the shadows of the darkest hearts.


Retail links are not yet available, but right now you can add the book on Goodreads, so you don't lose track of it.

A Peek Beneath the Cover:


I wait, listening for the sound of someone entering the house. Anything to indicate I need to hide what Niya’s doing. I can hear a woman calling to her children somewhere in the distance, and the general sounds of the town: a wagon creaking its way down the road, chickens clucking in someone’s backyard, and, faintly, people calling Seri’s name.

I swallow and glance back at Niya.

She looks up. “It’s not working. I don’t know if it’s me or . . .”

“Here,” I say, catching the end of one of my braids. “Try my hair. See if that works.”

Niya takes the bit of hair I snap off and bends over her bowl again. I grip my skirt with my fists and hope, hope that it’s Niya’s magic that isn’t working, and not . . . not that Seri is truly beyond our reach.

“It’s working,” Niya says, her voice flat. I look down to see the leaf has turned, the silver needle glinting brighter than it should as it points straight toward me.

I raise my eyes to Niya’s. Seri isn’t just missing. She’s somewhere even magic can’t find her.
​
She’s been snatched.

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About Intisar Khanani:

​
Intisar Khanani grew up a nomad and world traveler. Born in Wisconsin, she has lived in five different states as well as in Jeddah on the coast of the Red Sea. She first remembers seeing snow on a wintry street in Zurich, Switzerland, and vaguely recollects having breakfast with the orangutans at the Singapore Zoo when she was five. She currently resides in Cincinnati, Ohio, with her husband and two young daughters.
 
Intisar used to write grants and develop projects to address community health with the Cincinnati Health Department, which was as close as she could get to saving the world. Now she focuses her time on her two passions: raising her family and writing fantasy. She is the author of The Sunbolt Chronicles and Thorn. 

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​

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Cover Reveal: The Future Mrs. Brightside

6/15/2020

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Announcement time! I've got a new book coming down the pipeline this summer, called The Future Mrs. Brightside.

It's my first foray into non-speculative contemporary fiction. No aliens, no zombies, no ghosts, just a complicated love story on regular planet earth.

​Want to see?

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After a year of making beautiful music together, Chloe Hatherly thinks she’s more than ready to make the age-old promise to her bandmate, Jon. In sickness and in health, for better or worse. When the sudden death of Jon’s father forces the couple to postpone their wedding in favor of a funeral, however, their relationship veers rapidly off course from the ever after they’d both envisioned. Now living in her intended father-in-law’s memory-steeped house and acting as round-the-clock caregiver for her fiancé’s worsening depression, Chloe finds herself afflicted with a songwriter’s block for which she’s only ever known one cure: leaving and writing a killer breakup song. Unlike the subjects of her past lyrical rants, Chloe can’t picture her life without Jon in it, and she begins to wonder if there’s a way to save the music she loves while keeping the vows she never had the chance to make — or if she and Jon have already been irrevocably parted by death, albeit not their own.
 
The Future Mrs. Brightside is an uncomfortably honest, sometimes hilarious, fiercely romantic prose ballad to the hideous beauty of love in good times and bad.

Coming July 14th, 2020.


This is a pretty personal one, as my friends and family can probably guess, and it's been in the works for a few years now, but it's finally ready!

So, where can you get it?

Well, the ebook's going to be Kindle-exclusive to start out, so if you have a Kindle or Kindle App, you can preorder it right now:

The Future Mrs. Brightside (Kindle)

It's also going to be on Kindle Unlimited for a while, so once it's out you can read it for free there if you're enrolled. I'm entered in this year's Kindle Storyteller contest, so your page reads really do make a difference for me.

If you're non-Kindle, or if you just prefer the physical touch, there'll be a paperback edition out at the same time, link coming soon.

In the meantime, you can keep it on your radar by adding it to your Goodreads shelf.

Love & Books,

-Fiona.


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Book Review: The Deep

6/7/2020

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I realize I’ve fallen far behind in my reviews lately. In honor of Pride Month, and for other quite obvious reasons, I’m finally getting around to posting my review of Rivers Solomon’s amazing mermaid story, The Deep.
​
Picture
 
Book Review:
 
The Deep
 
Rivers Solomon, with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, Jonathan Snipes
 
November 2019, Gallery/Saga Press
 
A+
 
The Basics:
 
When pregnant African women were thrown overboard from slave ships to conserve dwindling supplies for their captors, the restorative magic of the deep allowed their babies to survive and transform into the first merpeople, the Wajinru.
 
Today, the Wajinru survive and live with the horror of their origins by placing all the memories of every Wajinru who ever lived in the mind of a single Historian. The Historian periodically shares the memories with the rest in a Remembering ceremony, guiding them through the story and satisfying their craving for identity and belonging, before allowing them to return to blissful ignorance.
 
Yetu is this generation’s Historian, and seeing through the eyes of every dead Wajinru, bearing the weight of tragedies that those around her are willfully unable to understand, has gradually erased her individually identity and ultimately her will to exist. In a desperate attempt to save her own life, she runs away in the middle of a Remembrance, leaving the other Wajinru floundering under knowledge they don’t remember how to bear, and strikes out to discover who she is beyond the suffocating role she’s been assigned.
 
The Downside:
 
At only 166 pages, The Deep is a quick read, but both the characters and the world have plenty of room for deeper exploration. Maybe a sequel will show us more. The story also arguably treads water (pun intended) toward the middle, but that’s certainly preferable to rushing Yetu’s overdue retreat of self-reflection, or the development of her first romance.
 
The Upside:
 
The entire premise of The Deep forces a bitter conflict between the duty to self and duty to community. That’s an important, universal theme that Yetu’s predicament captures well, but it’s not a rare one for fiction to tackle. What sets The Deep apart is the simultaneous, connected, equally bitter conflict between the need for truth, and the need to avoid drowning in the ugliness of that truth. To save herself, and the people and planet she loves, Yetu must confront head on a set of catch-22s that many people will spend a lifetime trying to reconcile or ignore.
 
Meanwhile, Yetu’s also discovering the joy and terror of first love with a human woman, who’s wrestling with identity and belonging issues of her own. Wajinru are hermaphroditic and choose their own gender identities if they wish, but refreshingly, this is not among the things that Yetu finds confusing about her world or herself. There’s a beautifully frank scene in which Yetu and her prospective love interest ask each other honest questions about how sexuality works for them, and give honest answers as best they can. It’s an unfortunately special moment to see fictional love interests communicate so openly and functionally about anything, let alone something so personal and sensitive.
 
The Deep is insightful, beautiful, and intensely human on multiple levels, and I’d recommend it to anyone looking for an extremely different take on a classic fantasy character type.
​
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Book Review: The Wolf Queen

4/2/2020

2 Comments

 
Picture

Book Review:
 
The Wolf Queen (The Hope of Aferi #1)
 
Cerece Rennie Murphy
 
LionSky Publishing, 2018
 
A-
 
The Basics:
 
A powerful group of sorcerer women called the Amasiti once lived in the Land of Yet, helping the people around them with their healing, life-giving magic. That was long ago, but just as the Land of Yet is on the brink of civil war between a power-mad Hir and the people he has long abused and neglected, a reclusive young woman named Ameenah discovers that the legacy her mother left her may be older and more important than she ever imagined.
 
The Downside:
 
The plot of The Wolf Queen is slow to start, which is okay, given the richness of the opening worldbuilding, but it’s also fairly slight when it arrives. Even when Ameenah is given what seems to be an impossible task, she completes it almost immediately with luck rather than any steps of problem-solving. There are also the standard fantasy themes of the past being an ideal to return to, and of a person’s blood and gender and foretold destiny determining their potential, rather than their choices and efforts.
 
The Upside:
 
In spite of how little actually happens in it, The Wolf Queen is an engaging read from start to finish. Ameenah is coolly steadfast in her innate knowledge of her possession of herself, in the face of an entire country’s gaslighting insistence that she owes herself to the Hir, to the resistance, or to the false fairytale that both have spun around her. The setting stands out from the usual medieval-Europe fantasy backdrop, featuring magical creatures based on gazelles and secondary characters who’ve escaped from the nightmare of diamond mines. While traditional in some places, the themes also touch on the range of different kinds of power, and how those that are less violent, more constructive, and easier for the unscrupulous to co-opt and take advantage of aren’t necessarily weaker or less admirable.
 
Altogether a unique escape into a magical world that comes alive almost from the first page.



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