Location: United States
Member Since:
July 08, 2011
Alice Shipman
Alice Shipman's favorite authors on Smashwords
Smashwords book reviews by Alice Shipman
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Poison Kiss
on July 28, 2020
If you haven't read Mardoll's work before, you're in for a really good surprise! The summary does a good job hitting the main plot points, but the real selling point for me isn't the story. (Though that's damn good.) It's the way xie brings this group of otherworldly folks together into an intensely believable group of people whom you start to care about from the very start. The story unspools as we see the various characters develop and reveal themselves; neither element is rushed along for the sake of the other, which is a surprisingly rare treat in speculative fiction.
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Survival Rout
on July 28, 2020
A really wonderful sequel to Poison Kiss. You're introduced to a new group of characters, but there are a lot of familiar elements of the first Earthside book. I also appreciated the way that the narrative switches off between the 3 protagonists here - it's a nice change of pace, and it allows for a more rounded view of the world. Even though this book introduced a lot more characters, I feel like I 'know' them each more thoroughly than I do those from Poison Kiss. Some of the pieces here are definitely dark - I appreciate that Mardoll always includes content notes in xer work, and that there's a link in the table of contents. (If you want to know more before buying, xer blog will have some more info - I don't want to post the content notes here, because some folks consider them to be spoilers.)