Featured in F&SF – review by Charles de Lint!

An Unexpected Review

As followers of my blog will know, I’ve given up on soliciting reviews.

When I took that decision, I guessed at some future stage, I might timorously approach some erudite maven of the Urban Fantasy realm, and see if my luck had changed. I dreaded the moment. Little good and much angst has come from this!

Unsolicited reviews, however, are my joy. Thank you, all of you, for all of the positive or constructive things you’ve said to me.

The reviewing area I haven’t looked at is ‘professional’ reviews. Reviews that are done by people who get paid to do reviews. These people (I’ve always thought) are generally clogged up with publisher’s books and wouldn’t look at an indie.

Hmm. Maybe I was wrong.

Do you know Charles de Lint? If you don’t, you should. There are maybe a half dozen people who you can point to and say ‘that person is one of the godparents of Urban Fantasy’. Charles de Lint is one. His fiction in the 80s and 90s brought the paranormal into contact with modern, everyday life and spawned this genre which we enjoy so much. His style, especially in his short stories, can be described as lyrical magic realism. He’s one of my writing heroes.

Charles de Lint continues to write, but his other occupation is a professional reviewer for the Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine. F&SF is one of the major magazines in the sector, established in 1949 and re-inventing itself to track emerging media and help shape the culture and awareness of the genres it covers.

So…it was with considerable trepidation I saw the email from the magazine saying that Charles had reviewed Bite Back; both print book versions of Sleight of Hand and Hidden Trump. OMG.

I didn’t approach the magazine for a review, and hadn’t provided the books to them.

The full text of the review appears in the July issue. You can read it on the website:

http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2013/cdl1307.htm

Scroll down a couple of screens.

Please visit the site and read the full review, but I just have to share the closing comments…

“If you don’t like these books, you probably shouldn’t be reading urban fantasy, because they represent some of the best the field has to offer. I still can’t quite put my finger on how Henwick has made the tropes feel so fresh. I’m just glad he has.”

#HeadSwelling