I took my Kindle with me on the trip, and actually got some reading done from my backlog.  Considering how much of my writing income is made up from ebooks, I really ought to find a way to integrate this thing into my regular reading life, but at least I leave town every now and again.

Katherine Lampe’s Dragons of the Mind: Seven Fairy Tales is interesting.  It’s a side project from her Caitlin Ross urban fantasy series– a series I haven’t read yet but the first book is on my Kindle waiting for me.  The first story in Dragons is a modern retelling of Puss in Boots, and is the closest to the urban fantasy genre the rest of her books fit into.  The remainder are more traditional fairy tales, and unless my Grimm calibrator is off the rest of the stories aren’t necessarily retellings of older tales.  Interestingly, Cat, Sack, Boots was my least favorite of the stories in the book; I found Lampe’s writing to be much stronger in the quasi-formal, repetitive tone of the more traditional stories that followed, and the second story, entitled The Harper on the Hill, was strong enough that I read it twice through before moving on to the third.  Another strong effort was the sixth story, Whiskers and Fur, which is about cats.  Lots of cats.  It has a fascinating hallucinatory quality to it that I liked a lot and was one of the highlights of the collection.

Dragons of the Mind can be had at the scant price of $2.99 from the Amazon, and is also available in print.  You can also follow Katherine on Twitter if you like; she is reliably interesting and entertaining, so you should.

I four-starred both of these books on Goodreads, but you should understand that the first is a full four-star and the second is more three and a half.  I had downloaded Critical Failures long enough ago that I had honestly forgotten about it, and opened it on the flight from Atlanta to Raleigh just to see what it was.  I ended up finishing it before I landed, and that isn’t a terribly long flight.  (Note that this is a compliment.) You’ll get a good idea of what the book is about from the (rather striking, if I’m being honest) cover; it involves some D&D players (yeah, he calls it “Caverns and Creatures,” but it’s D&D, and nothing else is altered but the name of the game) being forcibly transported into the game and having to live their lives as their characters–which works out well for them when their characters are atheistic clerics and less so when their characters are half-orc barbarians with Charisma scores of 4.

It’s entertaining, but calling it “juvenile” doesn’t quite do it justice.  See how he uses the word “shit” right there on the cover?  I have a rule about profanity in my books: I use it, but on my second pass through the manuscript I try to eliminate half of it.

Robert Bevan does not have that rule.

There are so, so many swear words in this book.  So many “your mom” jokes, although some of them are genuinely hilarious.  And dear lord you could put together any five or six other books from my shelves and not have half the number of instances of vomiting and pants-befouling as happen in this book.  But the story itself is fun, and the ending clever enough that it pulled the book up to three and a half stars from the somewhat less than that it was before, and got me to order the second book.

You can order Critical Failures from Amazon for $4.99.