Out of this World: A first shiny fold-out book about space!

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I chose this compilation specifically to read Maggie Shayne's tale from her Immortal Witches series, and although I enjoyed it, IMO it was the least interesting story of the group. I like the author's way of blending hardboiled detective story with science fiction, because it works well. This story has amusing references to H.P. Lovecraft that will delight those who enjoy Lovecraftian stories. Jenna starts off with very low self-esteem, but finds a whole lot of self-confidence as the book progresses and is a great role-model for girls who don’t think they are smart enough. A horrific tragedy permeates the whole story, somehow even the lives of the main characters prior to this event. Harry and his estranged daughter Sophie take turns in telling their version in alternating short chapters. This works fine. Sophie, in particular, suffers from what we gather is second hand ptsd, but is she using this an excuse? Time will tell.

I received Out of This World for review and didn’t actually realize it was a middle-grade novel before starting it. It became fairly obvious as I read through, but it’s definitely one of those books that you have to keep pushing through to the end because it all makes much more sense and reaches a whole new level of awesome! I liked the sections about Harry’s work as a photographer, his meditations on the role of photography in capturing history and events, but also on the limitations of this art: A story about a young lady who visits a medium called Madame LaFarge who has a mechanical eye. She wishes to speak with her beloved Annabel who has died. Because I've always enjoyed reading beautifully written stories, I was instantly captivated by this richly told story. The author writes excellently about the protagonist's search for Vadija and where it leads her.

Table of Contents

While the end strongly makes up for it, the middle chunk of this book is pretty typical for a middle-grade story, making it less compelling for adult readers until the last third. USA Today Bestselling Author Susan Krinard's "Kinsman." Searching the universe for a missing ship, two telepaths lose themselves in each other--mind, body, and soul... Telepathic Kinsman Jonas wants to find out what really caused the death of his wife. A girl approaches him and asks for his help. Her brother's ship the Eurydice never returned from its trade run to the Nine Worlds. This human ship entered shaauri space without a Kinsman on board. There was a war with humans and the shaauri because human beings minsunderstood the aliens. Kinsman communicate and live with the shaauri. Kori is a telepath too and promises to produce and give Jonas a telepath child if he will help her. This story is pure sci fi and I would be interested in reading more by this author. However, the speculative is only part of the title, the fantastic only part of the adjectives given for these tales. These are stories of the queer fantastic. The protagonists found are lesbians, bisexual, gay, or “somehow queer-identified,” as Lundoff explains in her introduction. These are important to her, as a “bi/queer-identified writer,” and to such readers like me. That detective on another planet is transgender. “Beauty”, the vampire retelling of Beauty and the Beast is also a gay love story, a “bit of yaoi with vampires” (v). This vampire gay love story was among my favorites. Shakespeare’s sister has to pass as a man, thus she is a crossdresser. The tale of the witches is a lesbian love story, one marked by jealousy, and slightly less than expert spellcasting. “A Day at the Inn, A Night at the Palace,” another of my favorites, is about political intrigue, dynastic quarrels, body switching at the palace, among other things. As Lundoff asserts in the introduction, “We need to be able to see ourselves as heroes and villains, gods and monsters, knights and wizards, and fair ladies and dragons and all the points between” (v). I read this and cheered! However, I did want to note that a good story, and this is a collection of excellent stories, is a good story, and that the reader does not have to be “somehow queer-identified” to enjoy them. These are human stories, about the human condition and human experience, seen through the lens of fantastic fiction. Here are some answers to the question of what it means to be human, answers that are thoughtful, often funny, sometimes dark, and always, well told, by an award-winning writer with a gifted imagination and keen sense of language and story.

It has been a long time since I have read an Anita Blake book. I used to like her series a lot in the beginning and then I lost interest. This story is from the time frame when I liked Anita Blake. When she only had Richard and Jean Claude to worry about. When things were simpler. This novella sampler comes from Narcissus in Chains. I did like that book.As you may already know, we aren’t like other online book stores. For starters, we don’t believe that books should only be read once, or have a single owner. Literature should endure and be continually recycled, which is why we help millions of used books find new homes every year. Love, Supernatural StyleLove is the universal language. And nowhere is this more apparent than in these extraordinary stories from four of today’s hottest authors. From a futuristic cop caught in a crisis of the heart to a smoldering vision of an unusual love triangle, from the hunger for a human touch on an alien planet to a witch’s desperate search for the love of one man, these tales of paranormal romance will transport you to a time and a place you’ve never been before…. As many speculative fiction readers are aware of, LGBTQ characters are seldom seen in speculative fiction stories, because heterosexual characters can be found everywhere. LGBTQ characters have mostly been featured in novels and stories published by independent presses, because independent presses tend to be more open-minded towards elements concerning sexual orientation and gender issues than bigger presses. Because LGBTQ characters still remain rarities in modern speculative fiction, it's great that Catherine Lundoff writes about them and explores their lives. Magic Like Heat Across My Skin: Probably not fair to evaluate this as I haven't read any Anita Blake books and now...might not. I got the gist of the plot, and was into the concept of the Anita-vampire-werewolf triad, but Anita herself was so "I only just realized how awful I was being" that I just can't.

Catherine Lundoff’s stories have appeared in over 80 publications including Callisto: A Queer Fiction Journal, The Cainite Conspiracies, Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam, So Fey: Queer Faery Stories, The Mammoth Book of Professor Moriarty Adventures, Tales of the Unanticipated, Periphery: Erotic Lesbian Futures, Farrago’s Wainscot and Best Lesbian Erotica. She is the author of Out of This World: Queer Speculative Fiction Stories and Silver Moon: A Wolves of Wolf's Point Novel (new updated edition) and the editor of Scourge of the Seas of Time (and Space) , all from Queen of Swords Press. Zachary & Jenna are having breakfast when suddenly there is a shimmering in the air and their parents disappear. What are two bright middle school kids to do but jump through after them? Well.... Zachery and Jenna are having their usual morning breakfast when out of no where, shimmering appears in the air and their parents are gone. They've disappeared into thin shimmery air. Of course, just being young middle school children, they jump in after their parents.I have to mention that this story was an unexpected pleasure, because it's a wholly successful combination of different elements. Graham Swift's 1988 novel is told by alternating narrators. The father, Harry Beech, is in his sixties and his estranged daughter, Sophie, is in her 30's. As each recalls the past, the reasons for their alienation become clearer. Both have suffered heartache, rejection, death of loved ones, but neither seems able to get beyond their own history of loss; they are unable to recognize the similarities in each other. So far, so good. The characters are simple but believable, the settings are well constructed, the plot flows smoothly and logically... for about 80% of the way through. Robb/Roberts provides her standard excellence in the in Death series. However, it is the kind of book that needs to have multiple reads to get all the nuances. Oddly, I had not read the other short stories in the book. My problem with the story is that it is presented as an adventure to rescue two wereleopards and all of the necessary facts are detailed about the wereleopards at issue. While we seem to move in that direction, the story suddenly takes a tangent regarding some unexplained point from the series the book is a part of. When that small subplot is supposedly resolved, by the character exclaiming that the mystery will never be resolved, the story ends. Robb and, I presume, Shayne are writing stories that are part of a series. However, their stories can be read as stand-alone stories that have a clear, understandable beginning and a fully resolved endpoint. That more action may happen is clearly intimated, but we get to the end of the story that was initially presented. They find themselves transported to another world and almost run over by a pair of transparent (literally) people who seemingly don’t welcome their presence and encourage them to leave through another shimmering portal. Thus, their adventure begins, jumping through portals in search of their parents, and finding themselves in different worlds populated with strange and often dangerous creatures.