{"id":741,"date":"2010-07-29T17:20:17","date_gmt":"2010-07-29T21:20:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2010\/07\/29\/adventures-urban-fantasy\/"},"modified":"2010-07-29T17:20:17","modified_gmt":"2010-07-29T21:20:17","slug":"adventures-urban-fantasy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2010\/07\/29\/adventures-urban-fantasy\/","title":{"rendered":"Adventures in Urban Fantasy & Paranormal Romance"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"black-swan-rising-cover.jpg\"My new gig reviewing science fiction and fantasy for Shelf Awareness<\/i> continues this month, with a look at Black Swan Rising<\/i><\/a>, the first volume in a new urban fantasy series by “Lee Carroll” (the husband-and-wife team of Lee Slominsky and Carol Goodman<\/a>). I was fairly impressed<\/a>; despite some quibbles about the way the authors try to ground their universe in “our” world by implying a magical element to certain historical (and recent) events, I liked much of the framework they set up, it played out in an entertaining fashion, and we’ll see where they take things in the sequel.<\/p>\n

(To elaborate, without giving away any key plot elements: Stories which attempt to establish a “magical” cause to real-life historical events, whether they are of a “good” or “evil” nature, sometimes make me feel as if those events are being trivialized or diminished—but it’s not just a fantasy problem, now that I think of it, because I also believe the ending to Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story “Going Ashore” is a weak gimmick, too. So maybe it’s really just about how real-life events are “hijacked” by fiction writers to boost up the drama… which, in the case of Black Swan Rising<\/i>, wasn’t even necessary.)<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, over at Tor.com, I did an interview with my friend Leanna Renee Hieber<\/a>, the author of The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker<\/i><\/a> and The Darkly Luminous Fight for Persephone Parker<\/i><\/a>, touching upon her love of the Victorian era, how it didn’t take much to finesse paranormal elements into her chosen historical setting, and just how you write a sequel to a romance novel…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My new gig reviewing science fiction and fantasy for Shelf Awareness continues this month, with a look at Black Swan Rising, the first volume in a new urban fantasy series by “Lee Carroll” (the husband-and-wife team of Lee Slominsky and Carol Goodman). I was fairly impressed; despite some quibbles about the way the authors try […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}