First, one of the squires of the Green Order, a devout young woman who, to that point, seems only interested in becoming a knight, for no apparent reason, forsakes her vows and throws herself at Heden. Near the midpoint, there is a collision of head scratchers that nearly made me put the book down. Then the book hit its first major snag for me. The character of Heden, though, and the mystery of the Green Order, kept me interested and turning pages. I’m a former gamer, but I really don’t like my books to feel like the storyline of a campaign. I kind of cringed every time Colville used the word “campaigner” because it gave me more of the D&D feel. In the early going, though, you can almost hear the dice tumbling in the background. “Priest” moves along at a very fast pace. Heden must try to unravel what happened and get the order back on track to have any chance to save the people. The knights should be protecting a nearby city that is threatened by an army of urqs (read orcs), but they’re frozen and guilt-ridden by the death of their captain. Heden is sent by the bishop of his church to investigate a murder among a reclusive order of knights. In “Priest,” Matthew Colville introduces us to Heden, a sort of warrior priest. The second book in my journey through the Self Published Fantasy Blog Off finalists was enjoyable, but not quite as compelling as my first read.
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Not since Jane Eyre has a heroine faced such difficulty with the Other Woman. And the memory of his dead wife Rebecca is forever kept alive by the forbidding Mrs Danvers. Whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to his brooding estate, Manderley, on the Cornish Coast, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man. Life begins to look very bleak until, on a trip to the South of France, she meets Maxim de Winter, a handsome widower whose sudden proposal of marriage takes her by surprise. Working as a lady’s companion, the orphaned heroine of Rebecca learns her place. NOW A MAJOR NETFLIX MOVIE STARRING LILY JAMES, ARMIE HAMMER AND KRISTEN SCOTT THOMAS * ‘It’s the book every writer wishes they’d written’ CLARE MACKINTOSH * ‘One of the most influential novels of the twentieth century’ SARAH WATERS * ‘The greatest psychological thriller of all time’ ERIN KELLY With the recent passing of her Chinese immigrant parents, she’s had her fill of uncertainty. Maybe it’s the end of the world, but not for Candace Chen, a millennial, first-generation American and office drone meandering her way into adulthood in Ling Ma’s offbeat, wryly funny, apocalyptic satire, Severance.Ĭandace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. A stunning, audacious book with a fresh take on both office politics and what the apocalypse might bring." ― Michael Schaub, NPR.org "A fierce debut from a writer with seemingly boundless imagination. Club * Jezebel * Vulture * Literary Hub * Flavorwire NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: NPR * The New Yorker ("Books We Loved") * Elle * M arie Claire * Amazon Editors * The Paris Review (Staff Favorites) * Refinery29 * Bustle * Buzzfeed * BookPage * Bookish * Mental Floss * Chicago Review of Books * HuffPost * Electric Literature * A.V. Winner of the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award * Winner of the Kirkus Prize for Fiction * Winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award * Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel * A New York Times Notable Book of 2018 * An Indie Next Selection In her book Bi: The Hidden Culture, History and Science of Bisexuality, Shaw explores all that we know about the world’s largest sexual minority. It is a personal journey that starts with her own openly bisexual identity and celebrates the resilience and beautiful diversity of the bi community. After years of feeling the crushing dearth of information on bisexuality, psychological scientist and bestselling author Dr Julia Shaw dug deep and found a colourful and fascinating world that she is bringing out of the shadows. Significant strides have been made in recent years in the movement for LGBTQ+ rights, visibility and empowerment, but the conversation is far from over. Her goal is to empower the aromantic and asexual people, bring those identities into the mainstream, fight for their social and legal inclusion, and dispel misconceptions about them in an intersectional, cross-sectional way. In late 2017, she publicly came out as aromantic-asexual and quickly became an unlikely face and voice for those communities. At 18, she began modelling with the goal of diversifying the fashion industry and became one of the UK’s most prominent Black alternative models. Yasmin Benoit is a British model, award-winning asexual activist, writer, speaker and project consultant. Join us for a conversation on other ways of other ways to live and love with asexual activist Yasmin Benoit and Dr Julia Shaw, author of Bi: The Hidden Culture, History and Science of Bisexuality. Life is never truly binary, love maybe even more so. |