Hello friend. Today’s Indie Recommends Indie post features author and fellow reviewer Jennifer deBie. Let’s meet her and learn about the indie books she adores!
Jennifer, welcome to Armed with A Book! Since it’s your first time on the blog, can you please tell me and my readers about yourself?
Oh, always an exciting question. So my standard, 100 word bio goes something like this:
Jennifer deBie is a native Texan living in Cork, Ireland where she earned an MA in Creative Writing in 2017 and a PhD on Mary Shelley in 2021. She has been widely published with creative and critical work appearing in anthologies by Raven Chronicles Press, PactPress, and Bloomsbury, which neither impresses her cat nor pays her rent.
Her first novel was published in 2020, her second novel Heretic, was just released by Wild Wolf Press. When not reading, writing, or teaching her seminar on plague literature, Jennifer enjoys typical millennial pastimes like eating brunch and neglecting her blog at jenniferdebie.com
But if I’ve got a little more space, I’d also mention that I’ve got a fascination with (and surplus of) historical severed head stories, that my birthstone is a pearl, which is definitely not why I love pearl jewellery, but also, you know, I’m always looking out for another pair of pearl earrings, and that my favourite plants are aloe vera because they’re easy to care for and I’ve got a nasty habit of burning myself when I cook.
Sometimes I write stuff.
Do you primarily read indie books or big publishers books as well?
Since I started reviewing for a book blogger back in late 2020, my reading has become about a 33/33/33 split between the indies I read for review, big publisher reads, and research texts. It means that my Goodreads Recommendations are always an adventure.
Jennifer’s Indie Recommendations
Ash Tuesday by Ariadne Blayde
Genre: Magical Realism / horror
Published Year: 2022
Standalone
Giving ghost tours on the decaying streets of the French Quarter isn’t exactly a high-profile career, but the guides at Spirits of Yore Haunted Tours are too strange and troubled to do anything else. They call themselves Quarter Rats, a group of outcasts and dreamers and goths who gather in hole-in-the-wall bars to bicker, spin yarns, and search for belonging in the wee hours of the night after the tourists have staggered home.
Through the ghost stories they tell, their own haunted lives come into focus. Like the city they call home, these tour guides are messy with contradiction: they suffer joyfully, live morbidly, and sin to find salvation.
Weaving together real New Orleans folklore with the lives of eleven unforgettably vibrant characters, Ash Tuesday is a love letter to America’s last true bohemia and the people, both dead and living, who keep its heart beating.
I haven’t read a book this haunting in a very, very long time. Human, from start to finish.
It is the final week of Mardi Gras and the guides of Spirits of Yore ghost tours have a story for you. Walk the crumbling streets, stay on the sidewalks, don’t lean on the buildings, and listen as the history of the French Quarter unfolds through the ghosts who haunt its streets, and the guides who keep their tales alive. Each chapter of Ariadne Blayde’s Ash Tuesday follows a different guide as they struggle with their personal demons, celebrate their small triumphs, and share their favourite ghost stories with the tourists who deign to wander their city for a short spell.
This is a book for lovers of New Orleans, lovers of ghost stories, and lovers of history, but more than that it’s a story for lovers of people. The net of characters, tour guides, acquaintances, sometimes-rivals, frenemies, and lovers that Blayde brings to life are wholly unique, each with their own, rich lives that readers are privileged to see. The good, the bad, the baffling, and the in-between all come to life (or death) between the covers of Ash Tuesday, and the inescapable humanity of it all is as beautiful as it is heart-breaking.
There are dozens of canned phrases to throw around about how spectacular Ash Tuesday is, but at the end of the day the highest praise I can offer is this: I bought a copy of this book for someone I love.
This is a novel worth sharing, and this reviewer can only be grateful that Blayde chose to share it with the world.
Recommended to: Fans of history, ghost stories, and humans
This Is Our Undoing by Lorraine Wilson
Genre: ecohorror / thriller / magical realism
Published Year: 2021
Standalone
Could you condemn one child to save another?
In a near-future Europe fracturing under climate change and far-right politics, biologist Lina Stephenson works in the remote Rila Mountains, safely away from London State.
When an old enemy dies, Lina’s dangerous past resurfaces, putting her family’s lives at risk. Trapped with her vulnerable sister alongside the dead man’s family, Lina is facing pressure from all sides: her enemy’s eldest son is determined to destroy her in his search for vengeance, whilst his youngest carries a sinister secret…
But the forest is hiding its own threats and as a catastrophic storm closes in, Lina realises that to save her family she too must become a monster.
Dreamlike in prose and sharp in story, Wilson wrote a story unlike any I had ever read before and I love it!
This is Our Undoing, opens with a standoff between a conservationist looking for what has killed a protected species, and local villagers who want to harvest the carcass. This standoff between Lina, our protagonist, and the native Bulgarians whose land and animals she studies, in many ways epitomizes the many conflicts in Wilson’s debut novel. A lone scientist with the backing of an international organization but little real power of her own, and a group of people who distrust outsiders with good reason and fight for their independence in the only ways they know.
Across the novel the sweeping geopolitics of Wilson’s world are funnelled into just a few individuals caught in the maelstrom that is the volatile near-future her characters inhabit. This is a world in which many western nations have become some version of a police state, global warming has irrevocably reshaped the landscape and the climate, and violent tribalism has become the order of the day.
Wilson’s novel is, at its core, a story about people and their choices. People good, bad, and otherwise caught up in events far greater than themselves. Choices from the past that come back to haunt the present, choices in the present that can ripple out to create the future. Through each step of the novel, her characters make, re-evaluate, and cope with their own choices and the choices of others, leading inexorably to a climax that is at once cataclysmic, and incredibly intimate.
Brilliant in concept and haunting in execution, This is Our Undoing is a fantastic first outing from an author whose work I, for one, cannot wait to see more of.
Recommended to: Fans who aren’t afraid to let the story wander a little, who enjoy grappling with the “big” questions, and who like their hauntings ambiguous.
An Idle King by Andrew Paterson
Genre: War / Military Thriller
Published Year 2021
Standalone
Imagine fighting a war no one wanted you to win. Imagine never wanting to leave.
Afghanistan has been abandoned by the international community. Left to the ravages of warlords and mercenaries, vying for dominance over the new Silk Road.
For Callum King, a former officer who was discharged from the army, his past remains very much tied to that forsaken place. When he receives an offer from one of his former soldiers to work for a private security company in Kandahar, the contract represents an opportunity to make amends for his failures as a soldier and a leader. But the cost would mean walking away from a family that he’s tried so hard to put back together.
An Idle King is a modern retelling of an ancient story about lost soldiers who can never go home.
Raw, and a beautiful subversion of many of the things you think about when you hear the words “Military Thriller”
An Idle King opens with Callum King struggling to slot back into civilian life following military service in Afghanistan. King is just barely navigating support groups in church basements and negotiating some kind of normalcy with his wife and son when a call from an old Army buddy sends him to the other side of the globe—ostensibly to pull said Army buddy out of a sticky situation and make a tidy sum as a private defense contractor while he’s at it. This sounds like the opening to a raucous, blood and glory war movie, or video game, or (yes) novel, and in the hands of a different author An Idle King might have been just that, but it’s not.
Don’t get me wrong, there is action. It takes a few chapters for Callum to land back in-country, but once he arrives in Kabul the octane only creeps higher with every page turn. There’s also the band of warriors we’ve come to expect from stories like these, soldiers of fortune pulled from all around the globe, each with their own quirks, codes, and closets full of skeletons.
But where this could easily be a romp through an improbably explosive landscape full of hot lead and one-upmanship, instead Paterson gives his readers a meditation on war, trauma, and the people who get caught up in it.
Absurd at times, intense, and heartrendingly human throughout, An Idle King is a knockout in ways I was not anticipating and is all the stronger for it.
Recommended to: Fans of war movies and books who are looking for something a little more literary.
Talon, AD: Epitaph for a Planet by Zan Zastrow
Genre: Science Fiction / Cyberpunk
Published Year 2022
First in the Series
Ripped of her neuroenhancements and left to die, Anne Demming has lost her skills and her memory. The medcenter where she wakes up is succumbing to violence in the city outside, and the planet is in chaos. It is a crisis she may have caused on the most valuable planet in the star system. Q-7 is the only known source of a rare element expected to power a New World of advanced technology. And while the people of Q-7 starve, Trade Council allies are coming to take the prize . . . at any cost. Caught in the crossfire, the renegade Talon and his garrison of mercenaries find themselves fighting for their survival. Talon will finish what others started – any way he can.
A fascinating world, and incredibly intimate look at the mind of the protagonist/point of view character
In the first chapter of Zan Zastrow’s debut Talon, AD readers are introduced to our protagonist in the aftermath of a traumatic brain injury of epically intimate proportions, one that has left them with only the vaguest sense of self and an ability to hear the thoughts of those surrounding her. As the chapters pass, we learn who our protagonist is, what happened to her mind and memory, and who and what she was in the past, all alongside said protagonist, and all within the claustrophobia of her first-person narrative.
Our protagonist is not comfortable in her own mind or body, and living there with her is not always an easy experience, but man is it enthralling. Cities are burning, riots and mobs abound, a mercenary warlord who may or may not be trustworthy (and a figure from the protagonist’s past), and a growing team of friends, allies, and followers are all eating up time and energy and space in our mutilated heroine’s brain and watching her cope, learn, rage, and cope again is one of the most captivating experiences I’ve had with science fiction in recent memory.
Epic in scope, and yet intimate in scale, there is so much that I want to say about Talon, AD, and yet can’t because doing so would invite in spoilers and readers, this is one you do not want spoiled.
Recommended to: People who are looking for new science fiction that breaks the mould in exciting and intriguing ways!
The Covenant of Shihala by Laya V. Smith & Kyro Dean
Genre: YA Fantasy
Published Year 2022
Reads as a standalone, but the first in group of books all set in the same universe
For ten years, street musician Ayelet has been on the run from the faceless slave master who tormented her childhood. Every time she sees a wisp or the jewel-toned face of a djinn lurking in the shadows, she knows her tormentor is close and it is time to move on. Nobody else can see the wisps or the nightkeepers, so Ayelet must trust only in herself and her beloved lyre. Secretly, she longs for a home, but she knows anyone she gets close to will share in her terrible fate when the Faceless Man inevitably finds her.
Jahmil Amir, djinn prince and heir to the throne of Shihala, has lost his army and with it his hope. The fierce drakonte riders are his only chance of retaking his fallen lands and avoiding an arranged marriage to the despicable queen of a neighboring kingdom. The desire for revenge has blackened his heart and stolen his sense of humor. Only when he hears music does Jahmil allow himself to dream of peace and to hope for a new home.
When the prophecy of a traitor sends Jahmil into the human world in search of his lost cavalry, he finds Ayelet playing her lyre in the streets. She quickly plucks her way into his heart, while his diamond eyes tempt her with the dream of a real home. But the eight moons of Qaf harbor a different fate. A dark plan is unfolding that will open a rift between the human and djinn lands and unleash a power unknown in either world. To stop it, Ayelet must realize her tortured existence has forged her into an instrument of cataclysmic destruction. Meanwhile, Jahmil must let go of his thirst for vengeance and face the truth that love may be the only thing strong enough to save both of their worlds.
Breath taking and breakneck, I read it in two days!
The only reason this reviewer did not read The Covenant of Shihala in under 24 hours, was because your dear reviewer has a day job and obligations that sadly tear her away from her Kindle. As it is, she still squeaked under the 48-hour mark, students and deadlines be damned.
Chapter by chapter, the narrative alternates between Ayelet, a penniless travelling musician with few ties and a mysterious backstory, and Jahmil, a djinn prince without a kingdom, who would sell his soul to save his people. As their lives entwine, break apart, and knot back together again, Ayelet and Jahmil must learn to work together, and trust each other, through a series of trials that will not only uncover her past, but create his future.
The first of a series of books that dance between the land of Ard, the world of humans in a vaguely medieval Ottoman Empire, and that of Qaf, or the home of djinn and their Nine Kingdoms, with this novel Dean and Smith have created a lush series of landscapes for their characters to play in. Obviously inspired by the mythology of the modern-day Middle East, but with a swagger and finesse that belongs solely to its authors, The Covenant of Shihala is at once breakneck in pace and breathtaking in prose and an exquisite opener to what promises to be a stunning new fantasy series.
Recommended to: People looking for delicious, and unique YA fantasy from two fresh and fabulous new comers to the genre!
📖 Read an interview with the author and an excerpt from this book here. I have it on my TBR. 🙂 📖
Jennifer’s Book Spotlight
Genre: Dark Fantasy / Horror
Published Year 2022
Series: Hellmage Chronicles
The Hellmages, outcasts who feed on the deaths of friends, enemies, and each other, are shaking the earth, killing powerful mages, causing the kind of destruction the Mages’ Council was created to stop.
Siraj, a Lightkeeper who wields sunlight as a weapon and carries purification in his hands, is the only one who can meet with a Hellmage, find out who is upsetting the balance, and walk away unscathed, but there’s a problem.
The Hellmage he meets doesn’t know the earthshaker and magekiller either, but now she’s curious and if there’s anything worse than a curious Hellmage, it’s one who doesn’t fear being burned to death by a Lightkeeper’s touch.
Readers who enjoyed books This Is Our Undoing and The Covenant of Shihala would like this book.
Connect with Jennifer on Twitter, Instagram and her website.
Did you add any books to your TBR today based on this post or did you see any you have already read? Tell us in the comments!
If you are an indie or small press author who is an avid reader and wants to be featured, sign up using the form on the Indie Recommends Indie home page. This is a fantastic way to bring attention to fellow indie authors as well as your own book. 🙂
Thanks for hanging out with us today!
Banner Photo of library by Alfons Morales on Unsplash
Be First to Comment