Toni Artuso

 As someone who once did 19 th century historical re-enacting, including both Civil War re-enacting and vintage social dance of that period, I’ve heard of steampunk a lot, but I’ve never really understood it. That was my initial motivation for reading Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear:  it’s billed as a steampunk novel, and I thought reading it would give me insight into that genre. Having finished the book, I can’t say I feel a lot more enlightened about steampunk per se. Featuring a U.S. Marshal from the Indian Territory in hot pursuit a serial killer, the novel feels much more like a cross between Criminal Minds and an episode of The Wild Wild West , the TV show from 1960’s starring Robert Conrad (not the 1999 Will Smith feature film) than anything more au currant in the way of steampunk. Like a kind of alternative history, the universe of Karen Memory is populated with familiar names from the late 19 th century, including U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes and French ...

Spoiler Alert : If you have not read either Seraphina or its sequel, Shadow Scale , and you intend to and want to avoid spoilers, read no further. Otherwise, proceed at your peril. You have been warned. :) I just finished reading Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman, the sequel to her fantasy novel, Seraphina . You may wonder why an adult in her sixties would invest so much time in reading a pair of young adult (YA) novels. I accidentally read Seraphina . I like to listen to audio books on loan from my local library as I take walks, and, desperate for something to listen to, I picked out Seraphina , not realizing it was a YA book. But having made that mistake, I couldn’t resist listening to it. The title character is a musician and a teenager, naturally, but she carries the burden of a very adult secret: she is a half-dragon. In Hartman’s fantasy world, akin to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, dragons and humans uneasily coexist. After centuries of warfare between humans and dragons, a 4...

The stories in Mistress Darcy’s The FemDom Diaries remind me of the tales of the trickster god Loki in Norse mythology or Coyote in Native American mythology. The fun of Darcy’s stories isn’t in who will win (Loki, Coyote, and Darcy always win, of course) but, rather, in how Darcy achieves her ultimate victory. Darcy comes across in this collection of stories as a FemDom Wonder Woman before whom all males kneel – literally, that is. Forget the Golden Lasso of Truth (though there are Golden Showers aplenty) or the bullet-deflecting bracelets. All Darcy needs is her overwhelming good looks and charm to overcome all obstacles. Any pathetic, useless male foolish enough to try to oppose her or escape from her ends up crushed, and, while he may not be smiling, he will end up throbbing with desire for her. Like Loki and Coyote, Darcy shows up in various guises: a scheming professional dominatrix in New York, a newlywed, the wealthy owner of an English manor house, even a French woman who...