July is quite a quiet month in terms of books about which I am excited. There are three new releases which I am anticipating. The first of these is Ian Drescher’s William Shakespeare’s The Clone Army Attacketh. This is the second in Doescher’s reimagining of the Star Wars prequels (the original trilogy has already been adapted.) Regular readers of my blog know how much I love these adaptations – they are witty, very clever and a lot of fun to read/listen to. I am very disappointed, however, that neither The Phantom of Menace or The Clone Army Attacketh are available in audiobook format. Random House Audio’s full cast productions of the original trilogy adaptations were nothing short of brilliant. I have contented myself to preorder The Clone Army Attacketh in Kindle format, which is released on July 7th. This month sees the publication of two novellas in series I am following. Pale Kings and Princes is the next novella in the Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy series by Cassandra Clare and guest authors. This one is co-authored by Robin Wasserman. I adore Clare’s Shadowhunter world and have been loving these novellas to tide me over in the wait for The…
Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige was one of my most anticipated reads of the season. I read and loved the prequel – No Place Like Oz – and indeed my desire to read Dorothy Must Die sent me into a reading slump for a while as nothing else hit the spot. Having read it, I can say that, while there was a lot to enjoy about Dorothy Must Die it didn’t quite live up to my anticipation. What I liked The protagonist. I really liked our protagonist, Amy Gumm, and enjoyed following her journey. She is a strong, kick-ass heroine, yet is dealing with her own internal demons and has her own buttons that can be pressed. Coming from Kansas as she does, she is the reader’s inroad to Dorothy’s Oz. Many parallels are drawn between Amy and Dorothy; both are originally from Kansas, both were feeling trapped in their mundane lives with little escape from their farm/small town before their arrival in Oz. Both are sensitive to the magic that is all around in Oz. The worldbuilding. While it’s fair to say that L. Frank Baum did a lot of the heavy lifting in his creation of the…
This week I suffered every bookworm’s worst nightmare; I have a TBR list of over 100 books (some of which I have been offered free to review) and I could not interest myself in any of them. This is because the book I really, REALLY wanted to read – AKA Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige – has not been released yet. I’m sure you avid readers can empathise with my dilemma. I flicked through several different books and just couldn’t get into any of them. In the end I managed to break out of my reading slump by picking up a book that is completely out of my normal genre – I’m currently reading The Winter Palace by Eva Stachniak, a historical fiction set in Russia in the time of Catherine the Great. So far I’m really enjoying it. A full review will come soon. [book-info title=”Attack the Geek” author=”Michael R. Underwood”] One book I did manage to read this week was Attack the Geek by Michael R Underwood, which I received free to review from Netgalley. This is a novella in the Geekomancy series which had been on my radar for some time. I was intrigued by the…
One of the upcoming books that has been on my radar is Danielle Paige’s debut novel Dorothy Must Die. This is set in the world of L Frank Baum’s Oz in which a modern day Kansas teen is taken to Oz and tasked with bringing down the current despotic tyrant, our old friend Dorothy Gale. The concept sounded intriguing and I have heard some excited buzz around this. So you can imagine I was excited when I discovered that there is a prequel out called No Place Like Oz which tells the story of how plucky Kansas girl Dorothy became a tyrant. At 132 pages it’s a pretty decent length for a novella. The electronic copy also includes a snippet from Dorothy Must Die. I loved No Place Like Oz and it’s really whetted my appetite for Dorothy Must Die. It is based on the L Frank Baum stories rather than the 1939 Judy Garland movie – it mentions the Silver Slippers rather than the movie’s ruby ones (apparently it was felt red made a stronger visual punch than silver) and references characters such as the China Girl and Saw-horse who only appear in the books. Some reviewers have been…