Yikes, a Starred review from Publishers Weekly for Bright of the Sky. I knew the review was coming… somehow they get word to your publisher, but sneakily say nothing about whether the story is a groaner, so-so, or that it’s going to get serious love.
In such situations you sigh, remind yourself of how little, in the cosmic sense, reviews mean, how much fun you had writing the piece of shit (unless it is a work of art), and how you are certainly too seasoned to get worked up over One Person’s Opinion. Thus armed, you allocate to the situation a few 3:00 a.m. wakings (“How could they say something so cruel?”) and then go on with the current writing.
But they loved it! Here it is:
February 19, 2007 STARRED REVIEW!
Bright of the Sky: Book One of the Entire and the Rose Kay Kenyon. Pyr, $25 (480p) ISBN 978-1-59102-541-2
At the start of this riveting launch of a new far-future SF series from Kenyon (Tropic of Creation), a disastrous mishap during interstellar space travel catapults pilot Titus Quinn with his wife, Johanna Arlis, and nine-year-old daughter, Sydney, into a parallel universe called the Entire. Titus makes it back to this dimension, his hair turned white, his memory gone, his family presumed dead and his reputation ruined with the corporation that employed him. The corporation (in search of radical space travel methods) sends Titus (in search of Johanna and Sydney) back through the space-time warp. There, he gradually, painfully regains knowledge of its rulers, the cruel, alien Tarig; its subordinate, Chinese-inspired humanoid population, the Chalin; and his daughter’s enslavement. Titus’s transformative odyssey to reclaim Sydney reveals a Tarig plan whose ramifications will be felt far beyond his immediate family. Kenyon’s deft prose, high-stakes suspense and skilled, thorough world building will have readers anxious for the next installment.