Urban Fantasy May Releases and General Book Chatter

Looks like May is a big month for new urban fantasy releases. Tor.com has compiled a list of twenty-two new titles, many of them young adult – 45% in fact.

I’m definitely going to check out Cassie Alexander’s Nightshifted. That sounds like a hoot and a half. It especially intrigues me because it has a bit of a different premise for a change. Instead of the perfectly trained kick-ass fighter heroine, Edie Spence is a nurse who works in a secret paranormal hospital ward. Ha. Definitely sounds fresh to me.

Talking about new releases, I gulped Kevin Hearne’s new Iron Druid Chronicles release down like tiramisu (= best dessert in the universe). I don’t often actually get adrenaline-jitters about new releases anymore, but Atticus O’Sullivan and his get definitely give me hot flashes of anticipation. And his fourth adventure, Tricked, was just as wild, funny and satisfying a ride as the three before that. Awe. Some.

Another book I discovered for myself two weeks ago that knocked my mind and blew my socks off was Angelfall by Susan Ee. That is one roller-coaster ride of action and angst in a dystopian world ravaged by an angel-apocalypse. It has a five-star rating at Amazon from 366 out of 441 reviews, and it deserves every one of them. Now I’m not usually big on angel stories, but my gut instinct made me download this one on to my kindle, and I’m glad I did. I still catch myself thinking about this story and wondering how it’s going to go on, hoping that the next book isn’t too far down the road anymore. The only crux is, that there’s no release date set for the sequel yet…

On the book-to-movie front, I naturally had to see how The Hunger Games had been adapted to the screen. I read the book shortly after it was released in 2008, so I remembered the basics but wasn’t constantly comparing book and movie, which probably made it more enjoyable than it would have been had I read the book only recently – not that the movie differs greatly. IMO, it’s actually an amazing adaptation, staying very true to the plot, the feel, the characters, the look (as I imagined it). I especially enjoyed the glimpses you get of Gale as he watches (or doesn’t watch) the Games; in the book, because of Katniss’ first-person POV, you don’t see him once she leaves her district. Reading the sequels, you of course realize what he must have been going through, but seeing it on screen was nice nevertheless.

Katniss and Gale