This week's topic is shining a light on 3 authors who we
think you should be reading, aka Book Recommendations.
Since I’m primarily a science fiction romance author, I’ll
stick to that genre this week and I’m going with some top of my mind authors
who were recent reads, plus a few site recommendations.
My first recommendation would be Pauline Baird Jones and her
Project Enterprise series, of which Maestra
Rising was the latest release. Pauline writes these incredible plots that
unfold with every page like the layers of an onion (no crying, I promise) and
you think you know where the story is going but she changes it up and by the
time you finish the book she’s tied everything together. She’s also very good
at creating memorable and unusual aliens, including one spider villain from two
books ago that still gives me the creeps and I’m not afraid of spiders. On
occasion there’s a bit of time travel involved too.
The Key was the
first book in the series and here’s the blurb: She’s a stranded soldier. He’s
an alien castaway. Can their love save a galaxy torn apart by war?
Sara Donovan knew her top-secret expedition would be
dangerous. But she never imagined she’d end up separated from her crew and
stranded on an alien planet. When the smoke from her crash landing clears,
she’s surprised to find a marooned resistance fighter ready to lend a hand. In
a war-torn galaxy, Sara refuses to give her trust lightly… especially when she
risks exposing the strange abilities she’s kept hidden since childhood.
Kiernan Fyn survives day by day on the hopes of exacting
revenge on the warlord who murdered his wife. Sara is his ticket off the
desolate rock to a new better future…until she’s targeted by hostile forces who
thinks she holds the key to a long-lost civilization. In a fight for their
lives, sparks fly as Sara and Fyn attempt to decipher their hidden connection
with the powerful key before their ruthless enemies distort its power for
galactic domination.
My second recommendation is Leslie Chase and her Crashland
Colony series. One of the things I enjoyed most about the two books (so far)
was the author’s ability to take some standard tropes – alien abduction, being
marooned on an alien planet, indomitable alien warriors etc. - and turn them on
their heads for enjoyable reading. I also
enjoyed the idea of a holographic cat. The blurb for Auric: Crashed on an unexplored planet, with only an alien warrior
and a holographic cat for company… what’s a girl to do?
Tamara expected the trip to Arcadia Colony to be safe and
boring. And it is — until an impossibly hot alien warrior crashes into the
ship, bringing a warning that only Tamara believes. Helping the rugged alien
means mutiny… but the threat he’s warning about is worse.
Auric turned his back on the Silver Band when they abandoned
honor in favor of piracy. Drawn by the riches of the colony ship, the Band are
on their way — and once they arrive, the humans are doomed. Now that he’s met
Tamara, Auric knows he can't let anything happen to her. She's the woman fate
has chosen for him, the woman he would give his life to save.
When the humans and their alien attackers are stranded on a
forbidden planet, Auric and Tamara are flung together on a journey to find
other survivors. Will fate be enough to keep Auric and Tamara together? Or will
the dangers of the planet tear them apart?
Third, Regine Abel, who has many books to her credit but her
Veredian Chronicles is perhaps her best known series. I love her world
building, her feisty heroines and her wide variety of settings. Here’s the
blurb for Escaping Fate, the first
book in the series I’ve mentioned: Born and raised on a slaver’s ship, Amalia
plans to escape before she’s forced to participate in her master’s psi breeding
program. She finds refuge on a foreign planet where she meets the cousins Lhor
and Khel. Together, they fight against those hunting her down, while attempting
to rescue the other victims of her master’s slave ring.
Between her master’s dogged pursuit, deadly rivalries,
assassins, and corrupted nobles, can the cousins keep Amalia safe or will their
respective feelings for her tear them apart?
And since I’m in a rules breaking mood today, let me add
another author, Kate Morris, and her Apokalypsis series. I love dystopian End
of the World As We Know It fiction, starting with the day I first read Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank. I’m not
saying her books are at the Alas, Babylon
level! But, I find what I really enjoy a lot is the set of events leading up to
the apocalypse, the hints and clues around the characters that disaster is
coming, only people refuse to see it. I
wish the TV show ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ had done even more of this before
going full zombie. Kate Morris does this really well.
The first book is a bit
Young Adult skewing for me, although I enjoyed it, but I thoroughly enjoyed
book 2, which featured a Special Forces type soldier and a New Adult age
heroine. Now these books do end on a modified cliffhanger and the author says
we’ll see the characters again in book four…I loathe cliffhangers. But I’m
definitely along for the ride with this series! The blurb for book 1, although
I feel you could safely jump in with the second book: Life was precious. People used to say things
like that all the time, but none of them realized how true that saying would
turn out to be. Life was precious, indeed. Each person in the room had lost
someone or everyone…
Her life was simply about getting through each awful day of
high school without being bullied or picked on. Jane Livingston had a full
life, just not one that included friends, boyfriends, school clubs, sports,
dating, or anything else the typical teenager experienced. She kept her head
down, avoided people, tried to make it out of the war zone (the high school
hallways) without any new battle scars.
His life was status, cute girls, cool cars and being the guy
everyone else wanted to be at his high school. But there was more to Roman
Lockwood than met the eye. He led a miserable existence until he realized the
shy, picked-on poor girl he’d known for four years was a lot more than she
appeared to be at first glance. There was more to Jane Livingston than met the
eye, too. Unfortunately, Roman and Jane’s lives were about to intersect in a
way neither would’ve guessed.
Life was delicate, and they’d realize just how much so as
their worlds changed from one day being typical high school students to the
next when they were merely trying to survive the end of the world together, the
end of normalcy, the end of humanity, the end of life itself, when it became:
Apokalypsis.
I want to leave you with three resources for broadening your
reading list if you so desire, because I’ve found a lot of good recommendations
on both:
Queer SciFi.com – I’ve
found quite a few M/M paranormal and fantasy romances here, although they do
emphasize science fiction…(and I love J Scott Coatsworth's Liminal Sky series...)
WOC In Romance - covers all genres and here I’ve discovered
several new-to-me authors and their backlist.
SFR Station –
which has a fun feature where you can search the listings by ‘pairing types’ or
subgenres (holiday, space western, weird science etc), in addition to the more
standard searches by author name.
Happy reading!
