Early Fall Book Deluge

Confession: There are at least three other books I am looking forward to that would be featured, except I haven't read the previous book in the series yet. And yes, I either own them or have them checked out from the library. Woops!

Fall books! I haven't actually been THAT excited for very many books this year, but this upcoming season seems ready to change that! Which is very exciting. So what am I itching to read?

First up, we have Cold Fire, the second in a trilogy following Cold Magic, which I didn't entirely love, but by the end, I wanted more. Why didn't I absolutely love Cold Magic? It starts off very slow, but that slowness does end up paying off because by the end, I actually care about the characters and was frustrated with their actions! I am not sure if the Cold books are classified as YA, but they read like it, except perhaps that's why I thought it should be moving quicker?

Because an actual YA would have covered more ground in far less pages. However, I can't wait to see what the characters are up to.

One Salt Sea is presumably not a good place to start in the October Daye series because let's face it, a TON has already happened and there has been so much in the way of world building. I can't say I'm super excited about the pairing teased in the preview chapter at the end of the previous book, but this is billed as a long series, so I am willing to wait! (But not that long! I am impatient). Don't you love how extremely vague I'm being? But as that's the fun of the novels I don't want to accidentally spoil anything.

Next up is Hellbent, the follow-up to Priest's Bloodshot and which has been overshadowed in hype by Ganymede, but while I did end up liking Dreadnought, I confess I never finished Boneshaker. Hellbent apparently starts off in Seattle (I say apparently because one of my least favorite elements of Bloodshot was that it doesn't distinguish the city early on and the first mention of any Seattle landmark is on about page 40, and I lived in Seattle for a bit and it really doesn't capture the city. However, it is nice to see an urban fantasy actually in Seattle--but I want there to be monsters lurking under the bridges of Fremont, you know?), and reprises with the same cast of characters. Which, is why this is fast becoming one of the urban fantasy series I actually seek out and buy--because the characters, bar the lead, are very interesting. However, I don't buy the lead as the age she says she is--potential twist, maybe she's lying? but the other characters have the potential to become even more interesting if they break out of the unrealized and kind of annoying lead character's shadow.

New Neal Stephenson. I will be reading it, regardless of whether or not I

have any interest in online gaming (spoilers: I don't).