Recommended Reading

I am so behind on my recs! My kids went away for a week, and I went hog-wild. Well, my guess is others might not interpret "reading every minute for a week" as hog-wild, but to each her own.

Highly Recommended:
Hammered by Elizabeth Bear

Jenny Casey is a perfect American Everyman, except she is Canadian and she isn't a man. This brilliant book is based in a future where the superpowers are the communist Pan-China alliance and the mostly democratic Canada, propped up by the private Unitek corporation. Master Warrant Officer Casey has retired, and is now living in Hartford, Connecticut where she is largely annonymous in the lawless US. As the "wetware" that runs half her body starts to fail, she is confronted by a series of coincidences that force her back into the life she thought she was done with: super soldier for the Canadian special forces.

I love this book, it does my heart good to see it all come together: Action, spaceships, corrupt governments, unlikely heros, environmental issues, scientists who save the world, AI brilliance and just enough silliness to stick it all together. Elizabeth Bear gets enough emotion in that it doesn't read like the description of car chase, but keeps the story lively and engaging.

I'm already reading book two, Scardown, and I can say that I expected it to flail like a second novel in a three part series, but I was WRONG! It began a bit slow, but then flared up and was even better than Hammered. So brilliant! On to book three (WorldWired) for this gal.

Recomended:
The Stars Down Under by Sandra McDonald

I loved loved loved McDonald's first book, The Outback Stars, and she continues to write an innovative and compelling story in her second in the series. The main characters, Terry Myell and Lieutenant Commander Jodenny Scott, again travel through a multi-world system where Team Space both employs them and misleads them in adventures.

This book deals more with the relationship between Scott and Myell, now married and dealing with the repercussions of their prohibited romance - officer and enlisted relationships being frowned upon. I would have cut quite a bit of this out, as it is a bit heavy handed. However, by the end of the book, you realized how key the issues of trust between loved ones is to the plot, and there is more than enough action to cover the sluggish begining.