Release Week: 11 January 2022
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Release Week: 11 January 2022
Posted on 2022-01-11 at 12:00 by Samuel Montgomery-Blinn
PICKS:
To Paradise: A Novel By: Hanya Yanagihara, read by Edoardo Ballerini, Catherine Ho, BD Wong, Feodor Chin, and Kurt Kanazawa for Random House -- "From the author of the classic A Little Life, a bold, brilliant novel spanning three centuries (1893, 1993, and 2093) and three different versions of the American experiment, about lovers, family, loss, and the elusive promise of utopia."
Daughter of the Moon Goddess: A Novel By: Sue Lynn Tan, read by Natalie Naudus for Harper -- "A captivating debut fantasy inspired by the legend of the Chinese moon goddess, Chang’e, in which a young woman’s quest to free her mother pits her against the most powerful immortal in the realm and sets her on a dangerous path - where choices come with deadly consequences, and she risks losing more than her heart."
Battle of the Linguist Mages By: Scotto Moore, read by Justis Bolding for Recorded Books -- "In modern-day Los Angeles, a shadowy faction led by the governor of California develops the arcane art of combat linguistics, planting the seeds of a future totalitarian empire. Isobel is the queen of the medieval rave-themed VR game Sparkle Dungeon. Her prowess in the game makes her an ideal candidate to learn the secrets of "power morphemes" - unnaturally dense units of meaning that warp perception when skillfully pronounced. But Isobel’s reputation makes her the target of a strange resistance movement led by spellcasting anarchists, who may be the only thing stopping the cabal from toppling California over the edge of a terrible transformation, with 40 million lives at stake."
Deep Dive By: Ron Walters, read by Stefan Menaul for Angry Robot -- "Still reeling from the failure of his last project, video game developer Peter Banuk is working hard to ensure his next game doesn’t meet the same fate. He desperately needs a win, not only to save his struggling company, but to justify the time he’s spent away from his wife and daughters. So when Peter’s tech-genius partner offers him the chance to beta-test a new state-of-the-art virtual reality headset, he jumps at it. But something goes wrong during the trial, and Peter wakes to find himself trapped in an eerily familiar world where his children no longer exist."
How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them By: Barbara F. Walter, read by Beth Hicks for Random House -- "A leading political scientist examines the dramatic rise in violent extremism around the globe and sounds the alarm on the increasing likelihood of a second civil war in the United States."
INDIE WATCH:
- The Seven: The Labyrinth, Book 1 By: Brian Keene, read by Joshua Saxon for Crossroad Press -- "The Labyrinth - an interconnected mythos that binds all of Brian Keene’s works together."
YOUNG READERS:
- Northwind By: Gary Paulsen, read by JD Jackson for Macmillan -- "This stunning audiobook from the survival story master, set along a rugged coastline centuries ago, does for the ocean what Hatchet does for the woods, as it relates the story of a young person’s battle to stay alive against the odds, where the high seas meet a coastal wilderness."
MOST MISSING:
The Amber Crown by Jacey Bedford (DAW) -- "In this new epic fantasy, three societal outcasts must work together to fulfill the orders of a dead king’s ghost or risk their nation falling to a tyrant."
Sorrow of the Cranes by J.M. McDermott -- "Every night begins with a story in the ferryman’s mountain home. His two daughters, Joy and Sorrow, live wild with their pet pig, Roy, since their mother’s death, and their grandmother wants them to come down the mountain and attend a refined girls’ school. But nothing is as it seems. The younger daughter, Sorrow, is coming of age as a crane wife. Her song awakens old gods and old magic. The secretive queen of clocks in the city below the mountain would take her song, and the city, and the whole world. Sorrow’s elder sister, Joy, is the only one who can see between worlds, save her sister, and the dreams of everyone and everything, from the clocks."