Rating: 10/10

All Petre Mercy wanted was a good old-fashioned dramatic exit from his life as a prince. But it’s been five years since he fled home on a cyborg horse. Now the King – his Dad – is dead – and Petre has to decide which heir to pledge his thyroid-powered sword to.

As the youngest in a set of quadruplets, he’s all too aware that the line of succession is murky. His siblings are on the precipice of power grabs, and each of them want him to pick their side.

If Petre has any hope of preventing civil war, he’ll have to avoid one sibling who wants to take him hostage, win back another’s trust after years of rivalry and resentment, and get an audience with a sister he’s been avoiding for five years.

Before he knows it, he’s plunged himself into a web of intrigue and a world of strange, unnatural inventions just to get to her doorstep.

Family reunions can be a special form of torture.

How Do I Know I’ll Like This Book?

The Fall Is All There Is was designed with people who have already read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy in mind. It blends both genres as well elements from post-apocalyptic, steampunk, and more–into a world and story many readers have not seen before.

Shut Up And Give Me My Free Copy!!

I’m sharing FIVE codes. All are available to people who use audible.com.

I will be sharing another batch of codes through my newsletter TOMORROW, which you can sign up for HERE if you want another chance to grab a free copy!

OR you can redeem one of the codes below by copy/pasting one of them into the box you see when you follow THIS LINK!

AUDIBLE.COM CODES:

JS2LAREAUPQ66

KZM2E7CGEGHG9

LSHFK29MS72QG

SU6A6CWD74C56

TBSWKMSN9LCMK

That’s all the codes!! Thank you to everyone who’s grabbed a copy!! I appreciate your interest and I hope you enjoy the book!!!

Rating: 10/10

All Petre Mercy wanted was a good old-fashioned dramatic exit from his life as a prince. But it’s been five years since he fled home on a cyborg horse. Now the King – his Dad – is dead – and Petre has to decide which heir to pledge his thyroid-powered sword to.

As the youngest in a set of quadruplets, he’s all too aware that the line of succession is murky. His siblings are on the precipice of power grabs, and each of them want him to pick their side.

If Petre has any hope of preventing civil war, he’ll have to avoid one sibling who wants to take him hostage, win back another’s trust after years of rivalry and resentment, and get an audience with a sister he’s been avoiding for five years.

Before he knows it, he’s plunged himself into a web of intrigue and a world of strange, unnatural inventions just to get to her doorstep.

Family reunions can be a special form of torture.

How Do I Know I’ll Like This Book?

The Fall Is All There Is was designed with people who read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy in mind. It blends both genres as well elements from post-apocalyptic, steampunk, and more–into a world and story many readers have not seen before.

No Caption

No Caption

Shut Up And Give Me My Free Copy!!

I’m sharing TWENTY-TWO codes. Eleven are for people who use audible.com to get their audiobooks, and the other eleven are links to its UK equivalent.

I will be sharing another batch of codes through my newsletter in NEXT WEEK, which you can sign up for HERE if you want another chance to grab a free copy!

OR you can redeem one of the codes below by copy/pasting one of them into the box you see when you follow THIS LINK!

AUDIBLE.COM CODES:

E5XAF4KMLPXHJ

ENYYQ4KKNWJ5N

G78RDCALT65GR

GYQMQWNT9T3R5

HTNNY5N9KKNLD

JS2LAREAUPQ66

KZM2E7CGEGHG9

LSHFK29MS72QG

MJWKM9QW6X9TF

MN5J5QK2URK6U

QZJTH3P4AKDJA

AUDIBLE.UK CODES

423E3BPPE3UFP

4A8XLNLDL6L4E

4EKMWK8WU5MH7

6MSM6APPUZAKF

7TK3SR3KGEFQ4

87CTRAXUU4ZZK

9YJSET829Z8TF

AFRF7CD5HTUGF

AMG2G54XEUGUX

ARXC8MX28JMK2

D6XSNLDM7H9BS

That’s all the codes!! Thank you to everyone who’s grabbed a copy!! I appreciate your interest and I hope you enjoy the book!!!

Synopsis

You never want to ruin a really good dramatic exit.When you flee home on a cyborg horse the exact second you turn 18, you don’t really expect to go back to the place you fled from, you know? But sometimes your old life hits you from behind.

Sometimes you spend years away from home, killing dangerous people who had the bad luck to get infected by a lungful of ghostfog, only to find out that your dad, the king, is dead, and now your siblings are ordering you back home for a high stakes family reunion.

But when the heirs are quadruplets, the line of succession tends to get a wee bit murky. So in order to regain your independence, you’ve got to navigate a deadly web of intrigue, where every sibling wants your allegiance, and any decision might tear your country—and your family—apart.

Forgive the rating I started this out with. I’m a bit biased.

I’m just making this post to let everyone know that the audiobook for The Fall Is All There Is came out earlier today! Working with my narrator Scott Fleming and seeing it come together has been a truly incredible experience, and I really hope you’ll check it out!!

If you’re on the fence, I’ve got a few sample excerpts attached below!

If this catches your attention you can find the audibook here!! I’m really excited to have this thing out, and I hope everyone who checks it out has a great time reading it!!

Synopsis:

Set in Boston at the end of the First World War, New York Times best-selling author Dennis Lehane’s long-awaited eighth novel unflinchingly captures the political and social unrest of a nation caught at the crossroads between past and future.

The Given Day tells the story of two families—one black, one white—swept up in a maelstrom of revolutionaries and anarchists, immigrants and ward bosses, Brahmins and ordinary citizens, all engaged in a battle for survival and power. 

Beat cop Danny Coughlin, the son of one of the city’s most beloved and powerful police captains, joins a burgeoning union movement and the hunt for violent radicals. 

Luther Laurence, on the run after a deadly confrontation with a crime boss in Tulsa, works for the Coughlin family and tries desperately to find his way home to his pregnant wife.

Here, too, are some of the most influential figures of the era—Babe Ruth; Eugene O’Neill; leftist activist Jack Reed; NAACP founder W. E. B. DuBois; Mitchell Palmer, Woodrow Wilson’s ruthless Red-chasing attorney general; cunning Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge; and an ambitious young Department of Justice lawyer named John Hoover.

Coursing through some of the pivotal events of the time—including the Spanish Influenza pandemic—and culminating in the Boston Police Strike of 1919, The Given Day explores the crippling violence and irrepressible exuberance of a country at war with, and in the thrall of, itself. As Danny, Luther, and those around them struggle to define themselves in increasingly turbulent times, they gradually find family in one another and, together, ride a rising storm of hardship, deprivation, and hope that will change all their lives.

Review

Krystle Matar: I first read The Given Day years ago (back when I wasn’t reading fantasy for a while, because David Gemmell had died and I was sulking) and there was something about this book that seized me by the brain stem and went “Look. Fucking look. This is what you can do with a story, if you figure out how.” If Gemmell showed me that I wanted to be a ‘real writer’ (whatever that meant) it was Lehane who showed how to be ambitious. It also tends to show me how divisive the subject of storytelling can be, but we’ll circle back to that. I’ve read The Given Day easily a dozen times now. The last time was in 2019, and then as I was working on Brick & Bone, I decided it was time to pull this chonk of a histfic out again to study it. To understand it. To know it in the core of my storytelling bones. And lucky me, I convinced Connor to read it, too. 

C.M. Caplan: Krystle had been gushing about Dennis Lehane for as long as I’ve known her, and in all honesty it was picking up Legacy of the Brightwash that convinced me to give him a shot. Any time someone writes the kind of book that rewires my understanding of what storytelling can do, I get a little obsessive with whatever behind-the-scenes details that influenced how the book came to be, so part of the reason I joined in on this was from the standpoint of like, “Damn, if this guy has influenced someone this talented so thoroughly, it really sounds like passing up on this read would be shooting myself in the foot. I really have to do myself a favor and check this thing out.”

K: Reader, I bullied him into this. He’s saying nice things about me, but the truth is I cajoled him endlessly. 

C: YOU BOUGHT ME THE AUDIOBOOK AS A BELATED BIRTHDAY PRESENT. LEGALLY I WAS OBLIGATED TO.

K:  SELFISHLY. SO YOU WOULD READ IT. 

C: You’re my favorite bully. Thank you for cajoling me, this was fantastic. 

K: And so now we’re here! We’re both kinda slow readers so we were well matched for this buddy read. And, listen, for histfic, The Given Day is some epic fantasy sized chonk. It clocks in at 227k (just about 700 pages depending on which version you buy) and it’s ambitious. Another writer might have broken it off into a few books, but Lehane is a one-story-one-book kinda guy, and so all his books do stand alone. Start anywhere, and you’ll be fine. So my question for you, Connor, is how was it as your first Lehane experience? 

C: Honestly, I was on board around the time I got to “The air was woolen with smoke and the stench of butchered cattle.” Which was much faster than I expected to get hooked by this thing. The first few paragraphs I remember wondering what the fuck we were doing hanging out with  Babe Ruth in this book about Boston Police Riots, but something about that line—it reminded me of my brief stint as a fiction editor, where I had to learn early on in a manuscript, whether or not I was in the hands of someone who knew what they were doing. And I remember getting to that line and going, “Oh, I’m in the hands of someone who’s being really careful about his attention to detail.” And it never lost me from there.

K:  Therein lies the magic of The Given Day, in my humble opinion. Reading it now with all the training that self-editing has pulled into me, I’m in awe of how many storylines this book juggles, and how expertly he pays off things that might seem superfluous. You could have technically cut out all the Babe Ruth interludes (for the word count of course!) but they added something mellow and magical. And the payoff of that brick at the end, and the line “You should… be a baseball player or something.” MY GOD. You don’t know how good that line hits until you’re at the end of the book SOBBING because—well, spoilers. 

C: And I think the reason that brick, and the last line works so well is because we’ve spent the last however many hundreds of pages hyperfocused on the small details of these people’s lives. Like—there’s a rule I see a lot in storytelling, where you’re supposed to start as close to the end as possible. And it’s a rule Lehane just gives the middle finger in this book, because so much of its appeal is in how all these tiny moments stack together. There’s a number of moments where Lehane will divert from the plot of a chapter for several paragraphs to go into the backstory of the POV character in a way that’s tangentially related to what they’re doing in a while that, while not strictly necessary to keep the plot moving, it works wonders in adding layers to whatever’s happening, and convincing you there’s more to these people beyond what’s on the page right now.

K: Seaking of stacking, The Given Day seems to juggle genres. He started out in thrillers, and then slipped into histfic with this series. Part family saga, part historical fiction about a very harrowing year for Boston, it’s touched by romance, by politics, by sports. We mostly follow Danny Couglin and how he epicly fucks up his life, and Luther Lawrence, whose life is epicly fucked up by someone else’s choices. They wander through their own stories for a while, separate, but you can sense them coming together, drawn into each other by storytelling fate. 

C: OH SO THAT’S WHERE YOU GET IT FROM. 

K:  Someone come get this jerk under control, he keeps making me blush.

C: I LOVE YOU. (No but seriously did Lehane influence the way you straddle genres, do you think?)

K: Good question—I think it’s more that Lehane AND Gemmell both left their marks on my love for storytelling. Tashué was my ode to Lehane and what he did in the thriller world, and the Dominion was my attempt to break back into fantasy after so long away. And then when I didn’t want to spend my career choosing one or the other, I smashed them both together. BUT ABOUT LEHANE—

C: I think he straddles genres for similar reasons you do, cause both of your books are ostensibly about what’s been happening in the world lately, it’s just getting interrogated via an act of displacement, almost? With you it’s a world, but Lehane is going back in time so he can talk about more contemporary issues, I think. 

K: That tracks, which leads us to a big content warning for The Given Day. It’s an uncomfortable read at times. Danny Coughlin starts off as a beat cop in Boston, circa 1919. Him and his buddy Steve are enlisted to escort some sailors off a transport vessel. And they’re sick. And it’s bad. Enter, the utter devastation of the Spanish Flu. Steve gets sick, and Danny is left dealing with all of it. The illness, the deaths. And that’s only the START of this book. 

C: Oh God, and Luther’s chapter during the epidemic is like ten times more harrowing than that. It was horrifying, and I think ironically one of my favorite parts of the book. The damn thing could’ve worked as its own little historical horror novella. 

K: Omg you’re absolutely right, Luther down in Tulsa is in huge trouble with a crime boss and what he has to do to TRY to get out of trouble… Man. And again, that’s just the start of his story. After surviving the flu, Danny gets pulled into politics. He’s being sent undercover by the powers-that-be (one of whom is his father, Thomas) to find the usual threats: Bolsheviks, communists, general trouble makers. He makes his rounds at various union meetings looking for any proof that “something big” is gonna happen, but winds up getting himself in trouble by sleeping with ::ahem:: an inappropriate choice of bed partner. Which, if I’m saying it, must be a BAD choice!

C: That whole romance element had such a noir vibe to me, even down to the way she tries to swing things in the climax, and the fact that it fits so seamlessly into everything else that’s going on I think really illustrates how many genre’s Lehane is playing in, and it’s fantastic.

K: Yes, that’s what I loved so much. Just when you start to wonder if he’s dropped a thread, if he’s led you down a dead alley that leads to nothing, suddenly that thread comes back to bite Danny (almost always Danny but sometimes also Luther) in the ass in the worst ways. 

C: I think I honestly preferred Luther’s storyline, of the two, in this? I mean don’t get me wrong they’re both tremendously done. He’s just such an underdog, and he finds himself almost constantly in danger. Any scene where he has to interact with a white person is like a masterclass in building tension, it’s terrifying, and seeing everything he had to do just to get to Boston I think really, really deepens the payoff when he and Danny start interacting, even from the point of view that these two have kind of had parallel themes in their storylines that work as foils for each other, in a way.

K: Something about Luther is more sympathetic, yeah, there’s this feeling that all this shit that landed on his shoulders is because of someone else’s mistakes. Whereas Danny is in hot fucking water because Danny is a stubborn asshole. (We love him though.)

C: I think the interplay between storylines is part of what makes this book as good as it is, going back to what you said about dropping threads—like there’s just so many ways you wonder when or how it will fit together and when you does it’s almost dazzling. Like Lehane’s performing some kind of sleight of hand trick.

K: Which I think circles back really well to the tease I dropped at the beginning—about how divisive this book is when it sparks conversation about storytelling. Lehane himself will tell you that people are of one of two opinions about The Given Day. Either people say it’s some of his best work, or they hate it. HATE IT. Hate it passionately. Reading reviews online, people call it meandering, bloated, boring. Or brilliant. There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground with this novel, and it seems to contain an important lesson for us as readers, and writers. 

C:  IT TOOK ME A FEW MONTHS OF THINKING ABOUT IT BUT I THINK I FINALLY FIGURED OUT WHY THAT DISPARITY EXISTS. I think the people who hate this book go into it expecting the book to be about the police strike, and for that to drive the bulk of the story and inform most of what happens. And when they read it they get this story where the strike is less the plot and more of a thru-line happening in the background while you wait to see how much of a disaster one man can make of his own life, and the ways in which petty family drama can influence the kinds of things that end up in history books. But if you’re not prepared for a book about Danny, it kinda makes sense you’ll be disappointed, cause you went in wanting striking, goddammit! But that’s not what Lehane wants to focus on, and I think that’s fantastic, honestly.

K: Yes, I totally agree. Ultimately, Lehane wanted to talk about the human cost of that much civil unrest. He wanted to take you by the hand and drag you into the weight of it all, instead of flashing imagery at you. He wanted you to understand with perfect clarity why Danny made the choices he did. Some of them were even decent choices, but because everything was just so awful, the whole city fell apart. The Flu, the strikes, the molasses tank explosion, union busting, more strikes. The economy, so unstable because of the lasting effects of the First World War. All of it simmered in the pressure cooker of Boston, but it wasn’t about that, as you said. It was about the people suffering through it. Surviving it. Barely. Which feels incredibly poignant these days. 

C: I think there’s also something to be said about the theme of agency in this book, as well, just to underpin what you’re saying. In a lot of books you’re kind of used to “This character is making a bad decision and that’s going to blow up on them” and then later on they’ll make the right decisions and things will start to work out, but this book is really concerned with a lack of agency, so sometimes they’ll do everything right, and the city still gets completely trashed. It reminds me of a review someone made of a video game where the genre conventions of video games gets turned on their head halfway through and gives you a purposely negative experience as a player, where the review is like “You weren’t playing a game about surviving a pandemic with no food and no money, you were playing a game about starving.” And I think it’s a small distinction some people might not be prepared for, but I think especially now a lot of people are feeling that lack of agency, which adds to the poignancy. 

K: So true, what does agency mean when your whole city is rioting? 

C: EXACTLY. They’re caught up in forces that are so much bigger than them. It’s most apparent I think with Luther, but you see echoes of it in everyone, even Babe Ruth!! Where he could be traded at any time and have to pack up and completely change his whole life. Ruth’s sections actually sort of embody all of the themes that pervade the book. You start off with him cheating to get a win in on the black baseball players, which mines out a lot of the racial tension at the heart of Luther’s story. And then from there you have him interacting with the Bolsheviks, and skirting the periphery of Danny’s story, and in every interlude he’s in he doesn’t technically change much about the book in terms of the plot that happens the page, but thematically his arc serves as a sort of lynchpin tying together everything Lehane is talking about in this book. 

K: A funny anecdote about Lehane: I was watching one of his press releases for a different book and someone in the audience asked about Babe Ruth in The Given Day and Lehane admitted he wrote those sections making everything up. Just bullshitting his way through every word. He just wanted the first draft DONE and he promised himself he’d fix it in editing. So he hands the book off to the first edit, and goes off to actually research Babe Ruth to fix everything… but he got most of it right. He hardly had to change those sections at all. His quote, I think, was something along the lines of “I guess as a storyteller I just kind of knew him already.” 

C: OH THAT’S SO CLEVER. It’s really cool when a revision turns out to be less work than you thought there would be. Like you already had parts of it in you, deeper than even you had ever known. On that note—I did wanna circle back to what you said in the beginning, and ask you what you learned deep in your storytelling bones in this read-through.

K: Actually you summed it up really well; some stories are about THINGS happening, and some stories are about the PEOPLE they happen to. And which angle you choose as a storyteller will massively inform how much you include. There are so many moments in The Given Day that could have been trimmed out in order to make it a shorter book, but ultimately it would have lessened the impact of Danny’s mistakes… and his victories. These moments squeezed your heart in ways that wouldn’t have had so much power if you didn’t know how deeply conflicted each character was. How much Luther had to lose, everything that Danny knew he was failing to live up to. These little human details made the book into a study of human suffering, and human joy. It’s a book about love in the face of terrible circumstance, and that is my favourite sort of story. 

That brings us rather naturally to the end (even though I could talk about this book for hours more. We didn’t even touch how his prose balances beauty and the bleakest shit you’ve ever seen with the lightest touch possible!) 

C: OMG IT’S LIKE HE’S LEANING OVER CONSPIRATORIALLY TO LET YOU IN ON A SECRET HE ONLY TRUSTS YOU WITH, IT’S SUCH A PERSONAL VOICE AND IT’S WEIRDLY RELAXING WHILE ALSO BEING AT TIMES UNYIELDINGLY DARK. 

K: Weirdly relaxing and then someone gets his face sliced wide open XD

C: RIGHT!! 

K: If you’ve made it all the way to the end of this rambling, dear reader, I thank you. I implore you to give Lehane a chance. He has a sprawling epic feel, and the world he builds is enchanting. And I leave you with this quote, from Babe Ruth’s section. 

“What a day. What a city. What a time to be alive.”

Hey, guys! It’s time to reveal the cover for the A.C. Cross’s new novella, Zoo!! Before the reveal, though, we’ve got a bit of a Q&A!!

Author Q&A

So what is the pitch for Zoo?
Imagine if you could take a tour through someone’s mind and view the things that make them unique. Now imagine you were on the tour with a peppy tour guide and that all the exhibits are mental illness, regrets, and other things that weigh a person down. ‘Zoo’ is simply me writing what a tour through me would look like. 

What is your favorite thing about this story?
I think I love how open this book is more than anything else. When you read it, you’re going to see me. Warts and all. Things you may not want to know, in fact. But it’s honest and that matters to me.

What were your biggest influences on this book?
Well, my cover designer Luke has a similar sort of thoughtful memoir-ish thing out and it struck a chord in me while reading it. But anyone that is open and willing to share parts of themselves online and publicly have impacted it even a little bit.

How did you get the idea?
It’ll sound strange, but it just…came to me. At the time of writing, and even now, I was (am) wrestling with some significant events and aspects to my life that just thinking about won’t fix. Having it written down was, in a way, kind of purging things. Not like in a gross way, but in a cleansing way. It came out because it needed to. 
Do you have a favorite line or any dialogue you’d like to share?“If the zoo reaches the milestone of being a Movie Reference in about four years or so, we may be receiving a giant specimen of Shame, but negotiations are on-going.” – This only works in context and is meant to be both funny and sad. Hopefully that comes across. 

What was your favorite part about writing this? And do you have a favorite scene?
Normally, writing is one of my favorite things to do. This wasn’t something that was ‘enjoyable’ so much as it was ‘necessary’. That’s not to say I’m not proud of it – I definitely am – but this wasn’t a laugh riot to write. It was kind of like sweating blood at moments. Favorite scenes though? Definitely the last two chapters. Those hit the hardest and were the toughest to write, but the most cathartic.

Were there any challenges to putting something like this together?
The main challenge was figuring out exactly what to do with it! Should I post it on my blog? Should I keep it to myself to avoid potential embarrassment? Ultimately, going forward and publishing it was the best move, I felt. It gave me a reason to keep going with it. 

How did writing this compare to Where Blood Runs Gold? Was there any overlapand/or differences in your approach or process?
This was almost entirely different! For Where Blood Runs Gold, I took my time, tinkered with it, sent it through extensive edits, and worked to create a cohesive world for the characters. It was laborious but enjoyable and exciting for me to see what came next. Zoo was…I couldn’t do anything else while writing it. I mean that literally. It was like all the other pieces I’m working on ceased to exist and the only thing that could be written was this. It took me about a week and when it was done, it was like a leash had been taken off the other books and I could write again. I’ve never had a book take my full attention before and it’s a strange feeling. Not necessarily bad, but it’s something that sticks with you, even when it’s over. 

Were there any unexpected rewards or difficulties to writing something this vulnerable?

Offline, I don’t regularly discuss the things within the book. Sure, if someone asks me about them, I’ll tell them, but I don’t typically volunteer information about myself. Certainly not some of the more sensitive topics that Zoo touches on. There are things that I’m not proud of in the book. Things that I’ve done and haven’t done that aren’t ideal and aren’t things about myself that I particularly like. But the story deserved nothing less than total openness, so I had to set my ego aside and let the story be what it was going to be. Even now, I have some apprehension about putting it all out there, but what the hell, right? 

How do you think writing this has shaped your approach to your work, and do you thinkit will influence anything you put out going forward? Is there anything we can look forward to coming down the line?
There are things in the book, especially near the end, that are absolutely going to affect my work moving forward. There are some things that I touch on that are never going away and have profoundly affected my world. So, yeah, there will definitely be some themes and ideas in future books that will cut deeper to the bone than I expect I’m intending! In a way, I’m excited to see how it all works moving forward. I’d like to think that my writing becomes more mature, although there will never NOT be dick and alcohol jokes because there has to be some humor in everything.

As far as future work, I actually have a noir thriller that’s in the middle of edits right now! I’m also hard at work on the Where Blood Runs Gold sequel, another story set in San Dios that is a reinterpretation of the Labors of Hercules, and a cyber-punk-ish story that has a neat family element to it that I didn’t expect. If you like what I write, you definitely will have options coming at you over the next few years (hopefully decades). 

Synopsis and Cover Reveal

Welcome to the Zoo!
Inside, you won’t find tigers or lions but Anxieties galore.
You’ll crawl through the Depression Caves and gallivant through the Regret Gardens.
You’ll see wondrous creatures that will tug at the very heart of you.
And at the very end, amidst it all, we offer you one more surprise.
Join us for a tour today!

Book Information

Zoo by A.C. Cross

Genre: Dark Memoir

Expected Publication: November 23rd, 2022

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63338880-zoo

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BMQGJLCP

Cover Artist: Nightcafe Studio 

Cover Designer: Luke Tarzian

Author Information 

A.C. Cross is a doctor, but not the kind that you want treating you for kidney stones or pneumonia or anything. That’d likely make your situation much worse.

He (currently) lives in the Great White North of the United States as a bearded, single man.

He’s a lover of words, many of which you have just read in this very book.

He’s an admitted scotch whisky and beer snob and his liver would not argue with him.

He has written four books now, including this one, but the other three (in the Roboverse) are funny and not nearly as sweary or violent.

You can find more about him as well as some neat little free stories at www.aaronccross.com.

Find him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/daneatscatfood

Synopsis

Miss Mildred Percy inherits a dragon.

Ah, but we’ve already got ahead of ourselves…

Miss Mildred Percy is a spinster. She does not dance, she has long stopped dreaming, and she certainly does not have adventures. That is, until her great uncle has the audacity to leave her an inheritance, one that includes a dragon’s egg.

The egg – as eggs are wont to do – decides to hatch, and Miss Mildred Percy is suddenly thrust out of the role of “spinster and general wallflower” and into the unprecedented position of “spinster and keeper of dragons.”

But England has not seen a dragon since… well, ever. And now Mildred must contend with raising a dragon (that should not exist), kindling a romance (with a humble vicar), and embarking on an adventure she never thought could be hers for the taking.

Review

Miss Percy’s Pocket Guide (to the Care and Feeding of British Dragons) is a book that’s so delightful you could spend an entire review trying to come up with analogies and comp titles to fully capture how impossibly brilliant it is. The novel’s only downside is that the book is so good that nothing I can say will fully capture how phenomenal it actually is. I will make two attempts to do so, though the first: “The Princess Bride x Bridgerton with tea and cake and dragons”, fails to fully do it justice.

Make no mistake. There is tea. There is cake. And boy, there sure is a dragon in it. His name is Fitz and I love him with my whole heart. 

But the biggest sticking point in this comparison is the fact that Miss Percy is not exactly a romance. The focus here rests on finding self acceptance, not true love. And though there is a love interest, this novel centers on the learned powerlessness of one Miss Mildred Percy, and the overcoming of it. 

It is a book where the central character’s diminished self worth, and everything that has been done to strip her of that, has become so routine that when the novel begins it is something to be expected. To be anticipated. There is a degree of intertextuality between this novel and Cinderella. The abuse Miss Percy deals with is so commonplace, so everyday that it is at first seen as a kind of force of nature that couldn’t possibly be chafed against. 

Ultimately, it takes quite another force of nature to disrupt it: a dragon. Fitz.

Mildred, and the people in Mildred’s family, only perceive her as valuable so long as she has use. She is tolerated if the things she does can outweigh the economic cost her presence incurs.

This transactional way of thinking suffuses itself through the actions of the book’s antagonists, in ways that permit them to be threatening while also at times comic. Though importantly, neither element takes away from the other. 

Which is quite a feat. I’ve never seen these themes handled in this way before, and never this well. There have been remarkable novels I’ve read in which a character has felt useless. Ones where their perceived uselessness is a theme or motif. but none that so completely capture the transactional ways that uselessness can be learned, in such an intimately familial context. 

And to do it all subtly, in a way that never sacrifices the comedic tone? It’s astounding. Mildred must learn to love herself, and believe she is worthy of love. 

It’s remarkable. 

And it also means “The Princess Bride x Brigerton fails to fit a fair summation of this book.

So how else could you describe it? I believe the first way I ever thought to was “Neil Gaiman meets Douglas Adams,” which I find apt. But there are still problems with that comparison as well.

Sure, the novel reads as suitably Gaimanesque. An everyday character living an ordinary life finds a supernatural element, hijinks ensue. There is comedy (and we will come back to that), and though Miss Percy skips the more horrific overtones of Gaiman’s work, the prose in Miss Percy could go toe-to-toe with Gaiman’s best, if not surpass him. 

And that’s not even counting the parentheticals. 

The asides in this novel are not unlike something out of Hitchhiker’s Guide. The comedic elements to the prose are often interwoven throughout the events. Sometimes it is not so much what’s happening that makes you laugh so much as how Quenby Olson tells it. Which seems sufficiently like Adams. 

Except for the unfortunate fact that none of Douglas Adams’s books ever got as many chuckles out of me as this book did. And I’m sure we’re all aware that Adams was a very funny man. But he is ultimately, believe it or not, on a line-by -line basis, outclassed by Quenby Olson in this book. 

So how to do it justice? How do you get someone to read a book when you can’t even find the words to explain how wonderful it is? And how wildly disparate elements are contained within? The number of elements Quenby Olson juggles in this book, and the fact that all of them together result in a compounding meaning that enhances the text, rather than taking away from it, is nothing short of masterful. 

Perhaps that is ultimately the best way to describe this. Masterful. Have you ever seen those videos of glassblowers working their craft? Or one of someone making chocolate sculptures? A sped-up video of a portrait being painted? You know the awe it inspires to watch somebody who’s at the top of their game, the best in their class, throwing their weight around and making something unparalleled? There’s a certain satisfaction in watching someone who’s the best in the world do what they do. In sitting back as they create something gorgeous, in watching all those layers come together.

That is the appeal of Miss Percy.

And that’s why no words can do it justice.

Hey, folks! It’s finally time to reveal the cover for the Quenby Olson’s phenomenal novel, Miss Percy’s Pocket Guide (to the Care and Feeding of British Dragons), the first in the A Miss Percy Guide series. I’ve had to privilege to read an ARC copy, and it is one of my favorite books of the year (for the second year in a row, if you count the version you can find on Quen’s Patreon.)

Before the reveal, though, we’ve got a bit of a Q&A!!

Author Q&A

How does it feel to be so awesome?

This question boggles my poor mind. As someone who was definitely Not Cool at any point in my early life, just the thought that people would associate the word ‘awesome’ with my existence or what I do with it is…

Nope, still boggled. 

Is there going to be a real “guide” as an item in the book? Or is the book itself intended to be the guide? 

There are excerpts from the “real guide” in the book, at the start of every chapter. So this is a book based on the story surrounding the origins of the “real guide” of which the reader is treated to pieces of and… um. Yes. (Also, the “real guide” does not exist outside of those excerpts. In this world, I mean. In Miss Percy’s world, she’s a fairly prolific writer.)

How big are these British dragons? Because somehow the pocket guide makes them seem small and cute, but is that really the case? 

The Guide is pocket sized, the better for being able to carry it on oneself while adventuring after the dragons, which come in all shapes, sizes, colors! (This is probably a bit of a spoiler. Whoops.)

If you had a pet dragon, what kind would it be and why?

It would be Fitz, Miss Percy’s dragon. Absolutely and 100%. Because I based Fitz on my first cat, who was named Dog (though my dad called her Nermal), and I suspect this might have been my way of eking out a bit more time with her, giving her a place in this story so I could come back to it whenever I wanted.  

What’s a question you wish people asked about you/your book more often? 

Well, how I came to be so awesome, of course. 

What is your favorite part about this book? 

Mildred’s journey. When the book begins, she’s in her early forties, she’s unmarried, no children, no fortune, living off her younger sister’s charity. And she’s fully accepted that as her fate, no matter how much she dreamed of adventure when she was young. It was exploring that hidden desire in her, watching her face the prospect of being the heroine of an adventure story – when she thought such things weren’t for people like her – that was (and is!) my absolute favorite part of the whole series. 

What part scared you the most?

Pulling that off without failing completely. 

What grabbed you about this book that made you start writing it, and what influences shaped that process?

It was the beginning of the pandemic (so… March of 2020) and the week before things went into lockdown, but the threat of it was already looming, the idea started pushing to the forefront of my brain pretty quickly. It was an absolute comfort story (cake, cozy English village, baby dragon) and I think it was almost a defense mechanism to write it, fighting off the anxiety of … *gestures at the world*… everything with this quirky little story about a middle-aged lady who really likes the previously mentioned cake and is suddenly thrust into a fantasy adventure.  

With all the cakes/biscuits/tea in this book, I’m now curious if you have a favorite kind of any/each?

Hmm. I bake a lot, so this is a bit like choosing my favorite child. But I’m going to say ginger cake, shortbread biscuits with raspberry jam filling, and orange spice tea. 

Oh my gosh, I’m so hungry now. 

What can we expect from future installments in this series?

More. I’m trying to think of what I can say without spoiling anything, but definitely more. The second book takes place in Wales, so there is some traveling that’s going to occur. And some mischief and mayhem (both human and dragon) will play a significant part. But the world really expands for Miss Percy after the events of the first book, showing just how much myth and magic has been simmering beneath the surface of the world everyone believed to be thoroughly devoid of those things.

 Synopsis and Cover Reveal

Miss Mildred Percy inherits a dragon.

Ah, but we’ve already got ahead of ourselves…

Miss Mildred Percy is a spinster. She does not dance, she has long stopped dreaming, and she certainly does not have adventures. That is, until her great uncle has the audacity to leave her an inheritance, one that includes a dragon’s egg.

The egg – as eggs are wont to do – decides to hatch, and Miss Mildred Percy is suddenly thrust out of the role of “spinster and general wallflower” and into the unprecedented position of “spinster and keeper of dragons.”

But England has not seen a dragon since… well, ever. And now Mildred must contend with raising a dragon (that should not exist), kindling a romance (with a humble vicar), and embarking on an adventure she never thought could be hers for the taking.

Book Information

Miss Percy’s Pocket Guide (to the Care and Feeding of British Dragons)  by Quenby Olson

Series: A Miss Percy Guide (#1)

Expected Publication: October 26, 2021

Genre: Comedic Fantasy

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55040182-miss-percy-s-pocket-guide

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Percys-Pocket-Feeding-British-Dragons-ebook/dp/B097GF4Z1H

Cover by: Mon Macairap (https://www.artstation.com/monmacairap)

Cover Design: Kay Villoso (http://www.ksvilloso.com/)

Author Information

Quenby Olson lives in Central Pennsylvania where she spends most of her time writing, glaring at baskets of unfolded laundry, and telling her kids to stop climbing things. She lives with her husband and five children, who do nothing to dampen her love of classical ballet, geeky crochet, and staying up late to watch old episodes of Doctor Who.

Author Links

Website: https://quenbyolson.wordpress.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/quenolson1121/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/QEisenacher

Rating: 10/10

Synopsis

Queen Talyien is finally home, but dangers she never imagined await her in the shadowed halls of her father’s castle.

War is on the horizon. Her son has been stolen from her, her warlords despise her, and across the sea, a cursed prince threatens her nation with invasion in order to win her hand.

Worse yet, her father’s ancient secrets are dangerous enough to bring Jin-Sayeng to ruin. Dark magic tears rifts in the sky, preparing to rain down madness, chaos, and the possibility of setting her nation aflame.

Bearing the brunt of the past and uncertain about her future, Talyien will need to decide between fleeing her shadows or embracing them before the whole world becomes an inferno.

Review

This review is mostly about The Dragon of Jin-Sayeng, with some general thoughts on the Bitch Queen trilogy as a whole. And while I’ve tried not to be too specific about anything, some of the things I discuss here may be potential spoilers for those who haven’t read it.

So.

With that in mind.

How to begin?

How do you write a book about individuals trapped within the strict confines of a system? How do you communicate the confines of such a system before the viewpoint character is even aware that they exist—before she grasps the utter, horrid totality of the world she’s mired in?

How do you write about the enormity of injustice inherent to absolute power if your only viewpoint character does not at first understand the greater context in her perpetuation of it?

How do you convey, in a first person point of view, that the most powerful people in this world radiate violence out from the fact of their existence? How do these people in the world cope with the fact that any one of them, for all that they are, for all that they can do, cannot hope to match the ruthless machinations of Empire?

Well.

It helps if you’re K.S. Villoso, the greatest character-writer alive today.

Like this book’s predecessors (and you should really read the other two books first), The Dragon of Jin-Sayeng builds a world enormous enough that every environment explored can serve as an externalization of its main character. Everything in this book is doing everything it can to demonstrate what Talyien is going through. Every instant conspires to let you in on her inner state.

It is this structure, the utter centrality of her lead character, that has allowed Villoso to spend her trilogy throwing obstacles at Talyien that embody both the blind spots in Talyien’s thinking, as well as the failures of imagination in the world around her. In this way, gulfs between characters become emotional, physical, and systemic all at once. The others around Talyien are inspiring stories and cautionary tales (and often both), and the legacy of those long left behind continue to haunt her.

It is difficult to summarize her emotional journey, in the best way. Like her physical one, it’s been all around the map. This has been a three-book buildup to perspective, the payoff to which trickles in slowly. A hint of awareness from Talyien, be it a comment, an excuse, a monologue—are perhaps the most rewarding part of the experience of this book (There is a monologue that comes in around the 2/3^rd mark that I’d love nothing more than to commit to memory). It is an interrogation of the fantasy genre’s obsession with royalty, and the way the power dynamics inherent to such a setting are often sidelined without much question from the reader.

All this to say: we do not think about it because we do not want to.  Just like Talyien.

This book marks the point where looking away becomes utterly impossible. It is the culmination of Talyien’s journey, which expertly implicates its readers.

The bulk of the book is focused on the way Talyien navigates her inextricable ties to the machinations of her Father, who still pulls the strings from beyond the veil of death. This man, this abuser, this externalization of the way she has been taught to hurt herself, becomes an apotheosis of a system he created to become a prison for his daughter. The inescapability of her own future, of her Father’s plans, drives much of the plot. It is primarily concerned with the navigation of Talyien’s feelings about the things that have been done to her. For her. In her name. It explores her feelings about life decisions made without her knowledge or consent. Decisions that remain tragically necessary, regardless of how she might feel about it.

And yet even so—even so! Necessary is not quite the right word for it. Talyien’s been doctored in to paper over the cracks made by the generations before her. What they are doing to her is only necessary because they made it so.

If this concept feels frustrating (in the best way) imagine that point being driven all the way out, and all the way down. From what the rulers of this land see as the lowest scribe, to what, in their judgment, is one of the most powerful people in their world.

He is a monster.

He is another monster.

And he wants nothing more than Talyien’s hand. Not her. But the power she possesses in her titles.

He wants nothing more than to cannibalize Talyien’s land, culture, and everything around her. And all the while he’s utterly indifferent. It is less about desires and more that this is all he knows how to do. He is how an empire shows its love.

He is a barely-held-together corpse that embodies every ideal Empires advocate, right down to the very fact that he is decomposing. He is falling apart at the seams. He is a shambling reminder that monstrosity is not an inherent state, but a product of creation. One that requires human life to sustain—innocent or otherwise, all lives are taken unjustly. Every scene involving him evokes discomfort. There were times I even had to put the book down and breathe deep.

The Dragon of Jin-Sayeng is a novel leery of the things we justify. It pulls no punches, it makes no excuses for an immoral action. It is a reminder that the act of feeling powerless is not the same as being powerless. It is about access to power and how people use it.

By the end of the book, everybody in this novel is made a monster, to some degree, and it is utterly, heartbreakingly human.

After all—we ourselves are made monsters in the same way. Whose hands built the device you read this on? How many injustices do we flinch from every day? How much power do we have that goes ignored?

We do not want to look at it. Just like Talyien.

This book expertly implicates its readers.

But. Perhaps the strongest element of this book is the way our heroes often react to its antagonist. The moments when his plans go sour. The instants of empathy he has no capability to anticipate or understand.

These are the things that make the struggle worth it. The brief glimpses of escape from everything. The moments in which Talyien is unburdened from expectation, from the crushing weight of a system all on her shoulders. A battle it is impossible to win.

This book is not afraid of murk, of darkness, but it is not quite grimdark. It does not delight in suffering. It is dark because the suffering is for something.

Talyien is the queen of a nation, and she fight so hard, sacrifices so much—all to have just one thing that’s worth losing.

And her journey is one of the best stories I’ve ever read.

Rating: 10/10

Synopsis

Follow the law and you’ll stay safe. But what if the law is wrong?

Tashué’s faith in the law is beginning to crack.

Three years ago, he stood by when the Authority condemned Jason to the brutality of the Rift for non-compliance. When Tashué’s son refused to register as tainted, the laws had to be upheld. He’d never doubted his job as a Regulation Officer before, but three years of watching your son wither away can break down even the strongest convictions.

Then a dead girl washed up on the bank of the Brightwash, tattooed and mutilated. Where had she come from? Who would tattoo a child? Was it the same person who killed her?

Why was he the only one who cared?

Will Tashué be able to stand against everything he thought he believed in to get the answers he’s looking for? 

Review

In Pink Floyd’s The Wall, there is a scene during the song Another Brick in the Wall that features legions of children marching in unison, herded along a conveyor belt, falling unflinching into a meat grinder that churns up, until they’re nothing but a packaged product to be consumed. The imagery evokes slaughterhouse massacres in an apt, if on-the-nose metaphor for the British education system at the time and the larger failings of a system that trains people to limit their imagination, to work against their own self-interest, and to willingly surrender their bodies and safety to feed the perpetuation of the very systems they are being shepherded through by malignant actors who willingly perpetuate the ongoing injustice of what is being done to them.

Legacy of the Brightwash is book about what happens in that meat-grinder.

This secondary world fantasy novel is part slow-burn romance, part pseudo-Victorian Era murder mystery, with doses of political intrigue and character study. It is a creative cocktail that slides its hooks into you with blades so fine and sharp that you don’t even feel them sinking in until it’s too late.

The pacing of Brightwash evokes what I can only describe as intentional meandering that I usually come to associate with the likes of Robin Hobb. Each scene takes its time squeezing every ounce of meaning from its premises, and each character is made to bleed for all they’re worth.

This is an open wound of a novel, and the pain between its pages demands to be felt. More than that, it demands interrogation of said feelings. Why these characters feel what they feel is often a signal from Matar that she is aware of the power dynamics inherent to each scene. Few books can crush you by giving you what you want. But this is how Matar manages it.

Everything happening on these pages is demonstrating that these people are the product of forces far larger than themselves. The book plants you so firmly in the mindset of its characters that by the very nature of its structure it is difficult to feel like you yourself are not being ushered into the meat grinder by the very progression of its pages. What begins as a murder mystery soon spirals into a larger story, and the forces arrayed against the protagonists, the structures confining them to their social roles, creates a stark contrast. That of walls closing in even as the world gets broader and the conflict gets bigger, but the system strains against the demands these characters make of it. It strains and chafes against them and their dignity with blades and guns and violence.

Everyone in these pages has been broken, left for dead, or left behind. Most of them don’t know how to manage their emotions. And all of them are giving up their bodies to the system in one way or another. It’s eight hundred pages of people on the precipice of the meat grinder, searching desperately for a reason not to jump in.

This means each character in the novel is fighting to assert what shreds of agency they have left. This is perhaps Brightwash’s greatest strength. These characters are unflinchingly messy. While villains exist, they largely fade into the background, serving as the embodiment of the larger structural forces these characters contend with. Matar allows her characters to be cruel. To be petty. To hurt each other for no reason, save self-harm. Their thoughts often turn in cannibalistic spirals as they pick at the scabs of the people they love—aggravating old wounds out of ill-conceived unbelief at the idea that they themselves are worth loving.

These are characters straining against the limitations of their imagination, fighting to find a reason to believe they deserve anything more than what meager dregs of dignity are doled out in condescending piecemeal fashion now and then. But the breaking of their mental bonds do not come cleanly, and Matar displays a commendable degree of honesty in the portrayal of that process.

It is this messiness, this ability to allow characters to process their many traumas in unhealthy and at time unlikable ways, that allows for such a depth of feeling by the end. They are each rendered vulnerable to an at-times startling degree.

It is this vulnerability that makes the core relationship work so well. The power dynamics inherent to it forces the love interests to navigate their own self-hate and unhealthy habits to make it work. They earn the love of the other by aspiring to be worthy of it. To find a better way to build relationships. To escape the world they know and the systems they are guilty of perpetuating. Love gives these characters something worth earning.

And that’s how you escape the meat grinder.

Rating: 10/10

Synopsis

A secret affair. A disfiguring punishment. A burning need for revenge.
Kyrra d’Aliente has a bad reputation and an arm made of metal.
Cast out of the safe and luxurious world of silk to which she was born, played as a pawn in a game of feuding Houses, Kyrra navigates a dangerous world of mercenaries, spies, and smugglers while disguising herself as a man.

War destroyed her family and the man she loved.
Vengeance is within her grasp.
But is she willing to pay its price?

Review

Fortune’s Fool took all my expectations, ripped them out of my arms, and shoved them in a blender until they were ground down to a smooth sludge. And that’s just the first half.

The second half set them on fire, then fed me the ashes. It ripped my heart out and it’s brilliant. I can’t recommend it enough.

The book’s structure is perhaps one of its greatest strengths. Split between past and present, the latter version of Kyrra sets up her situation, and every time we glimpse her past life, we get a chance to peel back the curtains to glimpse the events that led her there. It is an exercise in twining plot and structure with character-building and tension in a way I can’t say I’ve ever seen done quite so effectively before.

The setups in the present also play on the fantasy reader’s expectations. It draws you in with assurances that you know how this type of story is supposed to go. But then we glimpse Kyrra’s past, to see how we wound up in this type of story. And it’s—well. I can’t give it away. Suffice to say that the trick that is pulled off so deftly, and it so succinctly encapsulates the story’s themes in microcosm, that I had to lie down when I realized just how thoroughly I’d miscalculated the kind of book I was reading.

I did not trust my expectations for the rest of the book, to my delight.

It’s worth mentioning just how well Boord uses the nuances and minutiae of Medieval life to inform every obscure detail, and it’s difficult to overstate how well the worldbuilding works to complement the plot and character work. It reads as an intensely-personal epic and it brings an oft-neglected vibrancy to fantasy drawn from Medieval history.  

It’s also commendable that this interrogation with the politics of the era, and the immorality inherent to it, permeates every aspect of the book as well as it does.

The evils of this era are embodied in what has been done to each of the protagonists by systems larger than themselves. The way they have internalized and made themselves responsible for what has been done to them bleeds through everything from the sentence structure to the relationship building, to the character work, and to the heart of the conflict itself.

This is a book where the gods, in many way, embody systems. Or perhaps a better metaphor might be that they reflect them. And the problem with systems is that they cannot care how you feel about them. It is about people who have been hurt by a world that has no capacity to care for them, despite their desperate desire for it to do so. These characters are complex, messy, and at times it seems as if they’re willing to do anything if it’ll make the institutions all around them just listen.

In this way, Fortune’s Fool becomes an interrogation of exhaustion. It is a book utterly fascinated by how people can keep going when they think they have nothing. And the answer to that is often: find something. Pick a reason. Any reason.

Hell, when the book starts, Kyrra only has a tenuous toehold on her own damn uncertainty as to the fortunes (or lack thereof) of a love interest. But she clings to it, because it’s one of the things that keep her going. It’s fantastic.

That’s honestly what I find so compelling about the romance at the center of this book. Love is positioned as the counterweight to despair. Like a sort of second cousin to the redemptive power of love.

These characters look despair in the face and often embody each other’s reason to reject it. The book manages to avoid sinking to the grimdark-gloom through the way it utilizes romance. Love gives every character a reason to either hold on or go on, as the need arises. It’s used as the fuel to keep characters hoping. Even when it’s a fool’s hope.

Fortune’s Fool is a book about messy, broken characters. It’s about exhausted people who keep walking because it’s all that they can do until they reach a new place and find a real reason to keep walking.

It’s an utterly brilliant book, and I absolutely recommend it.