The Date

I actually had a fabulous Mother’s Day this past weekend, which all started out on Saturday night when the hubby and I went out on a date for the first time in 2 years.  It was awesome.  My father came up and babysat the monster while we went out and had some fun.

So, why am I writing about it here…simple, we spent 1.5 hours at Barnes & Noble.  That was part of the date.  He took me out to dinner and then we hung out at the bookstore, just browsing the aisles, until our movie started at 9:45 (we saw Star Trek, I’ll do a short review soon).  We actually went to the later show just so we could spend time in BN.  I haven’t had a chance to just ramble through the Science Fiction/Fantasy section in months – it was wonderful.  While I was doing so, I did come across a couple of novels that struck my interest.  Check these out:

End of the Century by Chris Robinson

From Publishers Weekly: This ambitious fantasy combines three very British stories: an Arthurian fable, a Victorian murder mystery and a modern-day YA adventure tale. A strange visitation sends young father Galaad to Caer Llundain in the year 498. American teenager Alice Fell, who gets holy visions during epileptic seizures, makes a similar pilgrimage to London in 2000. In 1897, as Queen Victoria celebrates her jubilee, consulting detective Sandford Blank and his sidekick, Roxanne Bonaventure, investigate a series of brutal murders. The hinted interconnections between the three tales are complex and fascinating, but as the stories come together, the novel disintegrates into a confusing mélange of ancient computers from the future, overlapping characters and objects moving through time and space. Though it jumps the tracks at the end, Roberson (Paragaea) still makes this a rollicking ride.

The reason this novel caught my eye was because of the cover.  It’s another fabulous one done by the amazing Dan dos Santos and I just found the title of the book.  The cover has been up at Dan’s site for awhile now, but I couldn’t figure out the title.  Now that I have, I’m still intrigued by the synopsis and it has been added to my TBR list.

The Stepsister Scheme by Jim C. Hines

What would happen if an author went back to the darker themes of the original fairy tales for his plots, and then crossed the Disney princesses with Charlie’s Angels? What’s delivered is The Stepsister Scheme-a whole new take on what happened to Cinderella and her prince after the wedding. And with Jim C. Hines penning the tale readers can bet it won’t be “and they lived happily ever after.”

Is it me or does this cover not totally remind you of Final Fantasy X-2’s cover? Seriously, there is a huge similarity between the two. Because of this, my eyes kept going back to it whenever I was in this section. So I was curious about the story. It’s another twisted fairy tale. This time we’re dealing with more princesses – Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, etc etc – and they are all apart of the same world/plot.  I’m into the whole twisted fairy tale thing right now, so this one is definitely added to the TBR list.

Last Angel & Dante’s Girl by Natasha Rhodes

Last Angel (Kayla Steele #2): An angel is found murdered on the streets of Sunset Boulevard. To the media gossip mongers, it’s the biggest story ever. To the Hunters, an underground monster-fighting hit-squad, it’s just another case of ‘whodunnit’. To Kayla Steele, their youngest and newest member, it means a last, desperate chance to bring her murdered fiancé back from the dead, and to others with a far darker purpose it is the means to destroy the human race. If the Hunters are to stop the onset of Armageddon they must join forces with their most hated enemies, the warewolves…

Dante’s Girl (Kayla Steele #1): When Kayla Steel’s fiancé, Karrel Dante, is found mauled to death, she thinks it is the end of her world. But when Karrel shockingly returns from the dead, Kayla is stunned to find out that everything she knew about the man she loved was a lie. Part of an underground network of supernatural hit-men, Karrel had secretly dedicated his life to exterminating the dangerous supernatural entities that stalked the streets of California. Now Kayla is on a mission to learn the Dark Arts so she can avenge Karrel’s death and bring peace to the supernatural community by continuing his work. Not easy for a girl trying to hold down a job at the perfume counter to pay her mounting bills.

There are a lot of vampires and shapeshifter stories out there right now, so I’ve been keeping my eyes open for new novels involving other supernatural creatures. The latest one I’ve found was Last Angel by Natasha Rhodes.  The title and the cover kind of caught my eye (remember, I’m a cover junkie), so I started checking it out.  The premise sounds interesting, but it really didn’t give me the idea that it centers around angels, but that’s okay.  However, it did tell me that it was the second novel in a series, so of course I had to check out the first novel – Dante’s Girl.  Both novels caught my attention enough, so they’ve also been added to my TBR list.

So those are the books I’ve found while I was at Barnes & Noble. All of them have been added to my TBR list and that started me thinking about a new feature for Literary Escapism.  My TBR list is well over 700 novels long; which is to be expected since I really didn’t get involved in paranormal fiction until I started Literary Escapism.  I was reading it, but I was only finding the heavy hitters – LKH, JR Ward, Kim Harrison and Kelley Armstrong.  So my list probably doesn’t have all that much on it for someone who has been reading the genre a lot longer than I have.  BUT, that also means that anything new I add to the list could get lost among everything that is there.  So now, whenever I add a new novel to it, I’ll feature it here first.  What do you guyst think?  Is this a good idea or a waste of time?