For the 2012 blogging from A to Z challenge, I'm writing to the theme of book series that I love. Mostly science fiction and fantasy, with a few others thrown in.
Allie's War a series by JC Andrijeski. These books (there's four out in the series right now with more to come) are billed as urban fantasy but felt much more like science fiction to me -- the world is like ours except humans are living alongside another species, Seers, and their presence has changed the technology and politics of the world. The altered tech and heavy focus on warfare and strategy make it feel more sci-fi thriller with an underlying romantic thread based on a prophesy from religious scriptures -- but hey, that could describe The Fifth Element and that's still a sci-fi movie, right?I first came across Rook when I was asked to review it for New Myths magazine (full review). I had a lot of issues with the first hundred pages, but the last few hundred hooked me into the world and made me care about the characters. I went and got a digital copy of Shield and Sword and read both of them before my review deadline even came to pass. And at the time I didn't own an eReader. So I read two entire novels on the tiny, glowing, harsh-to-read-for-hours-on-end iPod screen. It's a measure of how enthralled I was.
I was also completely devastated at the end of Sword because I'd somehow gotten it in my head that the series was a trilogy and Sword ends with a twist that would be so not a cool place to end an entire series. I felt mad, I felt cheated, I felt like I had to scour the internet in search of news if there was a fourth book in the series!
Turns out the internet didn't have much to offer me but I came across JC Andrijeski's facebook page where she was interacting with readers and plunked down the question there. The response was a relief: book four was in the works ... and so was book five. Shadow came out in January and book five, whose title I don't yet know, is due out in June.
