Paul Raven's Newsround (March 2011)

What with yesterday having been International Women's Day, it feels quite appropriate that both reviews in this week's round-up are for women writers.
First up, Lambda Literary takes a lingering look at Homeschooling by Carol Guess:

Set in a suburb of Seattle next to the Nordic Heritage Museum, Eleanor tells us in the opening paragraph of the book, “the neighborhood was haunted by sea widows and girls whose Santa Lucia candles had set their yellow hair on fire.”
It is in this ethereal setting that we are plunged into the burgeoning relationship between the misanthropic lesbian artist and her conservative Christian neighbor, Laurel, who homeschools her six children. Eleanor finds herself intrigued by Laurel, an odd juxtaposition of good Christian wife and tomboy. Convinced Laurel is unhappy with her life choices, Eleanor becomes obsessed with saving her.
What’s most compelling about the book are those metaphorical hauntings that permeate the women in this novel; love, liberty, an appendage. What we learn about these women from their own words, each in turn having their say, is minimal and must be intuited by their observations about other people or their reflections on their own histories.

And here's I E Lester of NewMyths.com ruminating on Beth Bernobich's enduringly popular Ars Memoriae:

... the thought of a political espionage thriller set in an alternate Earth with lashings of steampunk overtones in a novella length tale worried me. That's an awful lot of plot content to cram into the less than weighty frame of a novella. I'll admit that I couldn't see how Beth Bernobich could pull it off. She did.
With an incredible efficiency she's delivered a whole new world. And this is not just a slightly altered facsimile of our Earth where maybe England drives on the right, or a familiar historical divergence allowing us to fill in the gaps from what we've seen/read before - no Hitler won WW2 cliché type story.
[...]
The steampunk retro-feel serves to heighten the tension of the main plot. Removing the high-tech gadgetry of modern thrillers returns the emphasis to one man's intuition and intellect against another's. It's kind of like comparing an episode of Columbo with CSI, although unlike Columbo we are as much in the dark as to the traitor in the Irish court as Dee.
But good though the plot is - it's the world Bernobich has created here that will interest most science fiction fans. And this is where you'll wish this were longer. What we get of the background is so compelling but there's not enough of it. You'll finish this book wanting so much more.

How's about that, then?
Finally, a quick note for those of you who're not yet signed up to the PS newsletter (an oversight easily and quickly corrected by availing oneself of the little sign-up box in the right-hand column of the site, there): we're now taking pre-orders for the first of a multi-volume luxury reprint project that sees us putting out handsome collected editions of the classic pre-Code Harvey Horrors comics. The first volume is Chamber of Chills, with a special foreword by none other than Joe Hill. Order now to avoid disappointment... :)