Amazon Author Recommendations
Jan. 24th, 2020 07:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quizcustodietHello,
Long time no post - apologies! I'm hoping to be able to give a career update in the next month or so, and I should also post some thoughts about parenting two at some point. But the kids had me up at 5 today so I'm out of brainpower, and what you're getting is some authors I've really enjoyed on Kindle.
Most of these I've picked up through the Amazon Daily Deal (as I'm willing to hazard 99p on a lot), but I've subsequently bought basically everything they had on sale so I wanted to flag them for others who might be interested.
Drew Hayes
I came to Drew Hayes' work through the Spells, Swords and Stealth series, which focuses on what happens when 4 non-player characters in a fairly typical tabletop RPG (i.e. it's totally meant to be some edition of Dungeons and Dragons!). That summary could have been written to get me to buy a book, and it worked, but it was carried through with a lot of style and polish. In my opinion the characterisation is ok but not amazing (in particular, Eric and Gromph are a bit elusive - Thistle is clearly the POV character and gets most of the development) but the world-building really shines and the party banter is excellent.
Based on how much I enjoyed those, I also picked up his Super-Powered and Fred the Vampire Accountant series. Of the two, I think the former is better but both are definitely worth reading. It's particularly impressive that he's worked out the details of three worlds that work very differently but hang together well. The Vampire Accountant books score slightly less well for me because character development is very slow - the later books provide enough detail on earlier events to persuade me that the author had thought through the characters at least sub-consciously, but what we see in the first couple of books is quite a lot of people becoming massively loyal friends and allies to Fred without obvious justification.
T. Kingfisher aka Ursula Vernon
I got into this through Swordheart, which slightly reminds me of Sense and Sensibility crossed with The Hobbit - it's refreshing to have a thirty-something woman who's better at running a house than running people through as our heroine, and it was interesting to get the cross-over between the very Regency plot about inheritance and the rest of the novel's fantasy elements.
I enjoyed it so much that I then read The Clockwork Boys, The Wonder Engine and Minor Mage. all of which I enjoyed immensely. While the world-building is very good, I think the strength here is primarily the banter. In the final case, it's mostly with a talking armadillo!
I think in both cases I enjoyed the way that they took a slightly sideways look at fantasy. T. Kingfisher in particular reminds me of Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton.
Long time no post - apologies! I'm hoping to be able to give a career update in the next month or so, and I should also post some thoughts about parenting two at some point. But the kids had me up at 5 today so I'm out of brainpower, and what you're getting is some authors I've really enjoyed on Kindle.
Most of these I've picked up through the Amazon Daily Deal (as I'm willing to hazard 99p on a lot), but I've subsequently bought basically everything they had on sale so I wanted to flag them for others who might be interested.
Drew Hayes
I came to Drew Hayes' work through the Spells, Swords and Stealth series, which focuses on what happens when 4 non-player characters in a fairly typical tabletop RPG (i.e. it's totally meant to be some edition of Dungeons and Dragons!). That summary could have been written to get me to buy a book, and it worked, but it was carried through with a lot of style and polish. In my opinion the characterisation is ok but not amazing (in particular, Eric and Gromph are a bit elusive - Thistle is clearly the POV character and gets most of the development) but the world-building really shines and the party banter is excellent.
Based on how much I enjoyed those, I also picked up his Super-Powered and Fred the Vampire Accountant series. Of the two, I think the former is better but both are definitely worth reading. It's particularly impressive that he's worked out the details of three worlds that work very differently but hang together well. The Vampire Accountant books score slightly less well for me because character development is very slow - the later books provide enough detail on earlier events to persuade me that the author had thought through the characters at least sub-consciously, but what we see in the first couple of books is quite a lot of people becoming massively loyal friends and allies to Fred without obvious justification.
T. Kingfisher aka Ursula Vernon
I got into this through Swordheart, which slightly reminds me of Sense and Sensibility crossed with The Hobbit - it's refreshing to have a thirty-something woman who's better at running a house than running people through as our heroine, and it was interesting to get the cross-over between the very Regency plot about inheritance and the rest of the novel's fantasy elements.
I enjoyed it so much that I then read The Clockwork Boys, The Wonder Engine and Minor Mage. all of which I enjoyed immensely. While the world-building is very good, I think the strength here is primarily the banter. In the final case, it's mostly with a talking armadillo!
I think in both cases I enjoyed the way that they took a slightly sideways look at fantasy. T. Kingfisher in particular reminds me of Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-25 09:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-25 09:17 pm (UTC)I'm glad someone else liked Drew Hayes! I get sucked into that sort of superhero story, and I loved Super Powereds despite feeling the writing got inconsistent sometimes.