if you’re still looking for something for today’s square, I recommend The Gale Women series by Tanya Huff,.
The first one is The Enchantment Emporium and it’s a lot of fun,.
Hers my review if you fancy trying something light.
https://mikefinnsfiction.wordpress.com/2016/11/03/the-enchantment-emporium-the-gale-women-1-by-tanya-huff-fun-start-to-a-new-urban-fantasy-series-set-in-calgary/
I came across this post on the page and was the first one to share it. Five minutes later and the bookstore PM’d me, asking me for my address. I had the book within several days of that message. I had recently gifted my own copy to a friend and I won this one in the giveaway. How awesome is that! Here’s a look at the booty won:
When I need a book delivered that I can’t find anywhere, these are the guys I go to. They are extremely responsive on Facebook and always deliver. If they don’t have the book, then they will have it imported for you, like the one pictured above. I found about them via Instagram when I saw these lovelies featured on their feed:
As you can see, I was already drooling and promptly ordered both books, impatiently waiting for them to arrive. Oh, they arrived!
As it stands now, I am slowly buying the remaining books from them in this series so as not to break the bank. Give PE a chance; they won’t disappoint!
DWL is always active and always doing something to promote reading and writing in different areas of Pakistan! Since I’d love it if they had more events in my city (Karachi), when I saw the post for Open Mic, I knew I wasn’t going to miss it.
A simple registration process through email later and I had signed up as one of the people who would be sharing their work at the event. I was to pay Rs. 350 at the venue. Besides that, they had only one other rule: the work shared must be original. Mine was.
I read something that I had written for Wringo Ink. You can find it here.
The recital was well received because I was reading in a supportive environment. Whether it was poetry or prose and in English or Urdu, that was being shared, everybody was appreciative.
We were seated comfortably and munched on delicious bun-kebabs provided by Sattar Bakhsh while sipping Pepsi. In short, a good was had by all! DWL has promised to share videos and pictures of the event here, so be on the lookout.
This book reminds me of salted caramel ice cream: the soft smooth sweetness grabs your attention and delights your tongue, but it's that grain of salt, hinting at something earthier and less conventional, that makes it addictive.
In some ways, "The Enchantment Emporium" is a paranormal romance wrapped around the mystery of a disappearing Auntie. There's a feisty, literally charming heroine, with a recently broken heart and an all-consuming family; an attractive, mysterious, potentially lethal.male stranger, a Scooby-gang of leprechauns, fey, witches, and family members with very large...horns, facing off against dragons that, in their human form, have killer cheekbones.
We could almost be in Half Moon Hollow except, beneath the cosy but casual sex and the pop culture references to Star Wars and Firefly, Tanya Huff has created something alien and darkly dangerous: the Gale Women.
At first I thought of the Gales as a particularly large, rambunctious family of witches, with a tendency towards charming but harmless eccentricity. It took me a while to realise that the Gales are not really human, nor are they really individuals in the way I'm used to thinking about it. They reminded me an ancient forest, each tree proud and strong but connected by roots and tendrils that mean that they can best be understood as a collective entity.
The Gale women are enormously powerful. The Gale women outnumber the Gale men. The Gale women manipulate the breeding lines to keep the family strong. The Gale women become more dangerous and more eccentric as they become Aunties.
Once I understood that the lethal, alien, power of the Gale women is the grain of salt in this ice cream, I realised that I wasn't reading a paranormal romance. There is no romance here: sex, ownership, even a little love, but no romance. This is the story of a Gale woman coming into her powers and forcing some new shapes into the pattern woven by the family.
"The Enchanted Emporium" was a fun read from the first page, where I was dropped, with almost no explanation, into the chaos of a large unconventional family and left to enjoy working out what the hell was going on. I'll be visiting the Gale women again very soon.
This book is a little sexually freaky [first cousins on first cousin action with the aunties keeping track of who can get pregnant (hide spoiler)] which had me thinking of this as a milder version of To Sail Beyond the Sunset by Robert A. Heinlein which was chock full of incest. I kept trying to remove myself from the cringy feelings and just enjoy the book but I think (know) that colored my liking this book.
Which leads me to the point where I would have given this book a 4 instead of a 3 star rating but I couldn't get beyond this as it was mentioned throughout the book. The story itself was good, the main romance was good, the writing was good - so it's just my moral sensibilities that have affected my review.
This book reminds me of salted caramel ice cream: the soft smooth sweetness grabs your attention and delights your tongue, but it's that grain of salt, hinting at something earthier and less conventional, that makes it addictive.
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