Brides' second starred review!

Starred review at Kirkus Reviews:

Earthy, vigorous characters and prose ground the narrative in the world we know, yet its themes are deep as the sea. Daniel, son of a human father and his seal wife, wonders why “whosoever’s pain I thought of, it could not be resolved without paining someone else.” Intentions and actions, cause and effect are untidy and complicated, raising questions that will require generations to answer. Bracing, powerful, resonant.

This follows on from an earlier starred review from Booklist:

Though this is a more reflective affair than some of Lanagan’s feistier works, her writing is as sumptuous as ever: a fine mist of lyrical elegance and sharp anguish that offers vast spaces to get lost in. The passage in which a boy joins his mother in seal form is pure poetry, expressing the inexpressible: “the best I can do is overlay a skin of man-words on the grunt and urge and song and flight and slump of seal-being.” A haunting, masterfully crafted novel that, as one should by now expect from Lanagan, isn’t a bit like anything else.

:)

Continuum 8

This is what I'll be doing program-wise at Continuum next weekend:

• Gender and Sexuality in YA Speculative Fiction, Friday 4pm in Lincoln/Argyle, with Alison Goodman and Kate Eltham. Sex, teens, witches and spaceships—what's going on and what we should do about it
• The Big Bad—Fairytale Villains, Saturday 11am in Pelham, with Angela Slatter, Nalini Haynes and Peter Ball—we will so slay those villains
• Readings, Saturday 2pm in Faraday, with Alison Goodman, Cheryse Durrant and Jason Nahrung—could be selkie related, could be a chunk of Cracklescape. Maybe there'll be time for a taste of both.
• Other Entities, Saturday 3pm in Pelham again, with Jane Routley, Paul Pouton and Amanda Pillar—all about un-cliched monsters
• Book Trailers, Sunday 10am in the Argyle, with George Ivanoff, Travis McKenzie and Cheryse Durrant—what makes a good book trailer? We hope to show you. Also, how to avoid the worst pitfalls.

If there's a book trailer that you particularly adore, or particularly loathe, please let me know in the comments, so that I can consider it during my panel preparation. Villains and monsters I can probably dream up on my own...