Early thoughts on two upcoming releases

This past week, I received two ARCs. The first was from Random House and it was Lord Tophet by Gregory Frost, which concludes the story began in Shadowbridge. The second ARC I received from Tobias Buckell himself and it is the third serial installment in his stories about Pepper and other Ragamuffins, Sly Mongoose. While I will not be writing formal reviews until closer to each book's release date (late July for the Frost and I believe sometime in August for Buckell's), I thought I'd give just a few teaser reactions to each, for those who are curious about each author.


Lord Tophet is a slender book, shorter even than the 270 pages or so Shadowbridge. However, much more is revealed in these pages and Leodora/Jax's stories play a much more prominent role, as there is a dark, destructive force striding the spans. Frost has a nice twist on our own legenda, some of which is referred to directly in places, and the climatic scene was done quite nicely. Lord Tophet almost certainly will get a positive review from me when I sit down to write the full review in 5-6 weeks.



I am about 2/3 into Sly Mongoose right now and am enjoying it quite a bit. Buckell continues to develop his characters and if I'm not mistaken, Sly Mongoose might be his most "political" novel to date, although I use that term in the loosest of senses; it is not didactic or "preachy." As in his earlier novels, Crystal Rain and Ragamuffin, there is an adolescent voice (Timas in this case) who serves as a focal point for the cultural conflicts that often are undercurrents in his novels. I have enjoyed those scenes in which Timas is the focal character and I have high hopes that the novel will conclude nicely, as right now the characterizations are better than in the previous novels and the pacing is smoother. It'll probably be two months before I sit down and write out all of my thoughts.

Hope these teasers will be enough for those who are curious about these two summer releases!

Lord Tophet cover art

I just found out that the cover art for Gregory Frost's upcoming sequel to Shadow Bridge, Lord Tophet, is now up at Amazon, so I copy/pasted that image here for others to see. The book is listed as going on sale on July 29, 2008 (which happens to be my sister's birthday, coincidentally), so if you wanted to know how Shadow Bridge's story arc concludes, you only have a shade over six months to wait!

Gregory Frost, Shadowbridge

Before I begin the review proper of Shadowbridge, the opening half to a duology that shall conclude this summer with the publication of Lord Tophet, I must apologize for those readers who find certain "academic" terms and their discussion to be tedious and prosaic. But to understand more fully the reaction that I had to reading this excellent one, I feel compelled to take note of something that I believe makes the entire construction and execution of this story to be so marvelous.

Underlying every permutation of a story, especially stories that are expressed via oral and/or visual representation, is a performance. By "performance," I mean that complex set of paralanguage communication tools, from a grunt to a pause to a waver in the voice or a slight shake of the head to the tapping of an impatient foot to all the other myriad ways that we communicate our wants, desires, needs, fears, and hates to each other. But "performance" also can be artifice, the replacing of the "real" with the ersatz, with the created, with the "performed." In Gregory Frost's excellent novel, Shadowbridge, I saw not just a well-told story, but also a performance.

The story is set in a sort of a metaverse, where all people live along a massive, worlds-spanning bridge, with an abyss-like sea below it. Most people, just like the vast majority of people before the Industrial Revolution, rarely travelled more than a span or so of that massive bridge. But there were some who did traverse the spans, and many of those people were storytellers and shadow puppeteers. Leodora, or perhaps her stage name of Jax would do for some, is one such traveller, part of a troupe that travels among the spans spinning magical tales of hope, despair, and of love lost or gained (in other words, tales of ourselves) for others to take in. She is accompanied by a lush named Soter, who once accompanied Leodora's father, the legendary puppeteer Bardsham, and by Diverus, whose musical accompaniments are rivaled only by his mysterious past. It is their stories, when juxtaposed by the tales told within by this trio, that makes Shadowbridge feel like such a multi-layered performance.

For countless centuries, humans have told tales for a variety of reasons, including catharsis. As the book progresses and we begin to see the actors behind the various story performances shown in the book, we can start to see hints and traces of a much larger story that lies behind the tales. While some who have read stories-within-story books such as The Arabian Nights or Catherynne M. Valente's recent two-volume The Orphan's Tale might view Shadowbridge as being more of the same, I would argue that taking such a position might be counterproductive for approaching the tale from the vantage point that Frost might have conceived it. It seems to me from reading the passages in which Leodora's past is revealed that Frost is more concerned with the notion of Story as Performance, or with the idea that the act of transmitting ideas in a story for whatever reason is much more important and interesting than the stories themselves. This is not to say that the stories that Leodora tells/performs in this book are dull or shallow; they are far from that. Rather, the stories serve as a backdrop for an exploration as to why telling stories (or reading fiction, for that matter) has such importance to us today. In this slender 255 page novel, Frost goes a long way towards establishing what I suspect will be one of the more moving and masterfully performed stories of 2008. I cannot wait until I can get a review copy of Lord Tophet.

Publication Date: January 15, 2008 (US), Tradeback.

Publisher: Del Rey