The first review of CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 4

/ Thursday, February 28th, 2013 / 3 Comments »

Over the past two weeks, I’ve begun sending out advance reviewer copies of Clockwork Phoenix 4. As it shakes out, Lois Tilton of Locus Online ends up having the first word on my Kickstarted anthology, turning around a review more or less immediately (click here to go read.)

She notes that this is her first-ever crack at one of the Clockwork Phoenix anthologies and says, in part:

a rare original anthology … takes best of show this time. … The tone ranges from dark to heartwarming and simple. The overall quality is high … Several of the pieces are quite challenging. Readers will do well to pick up a copy.

Kenneth Schneyer’s “Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer” not only receives a “Recommended” rating, but also her “Good Story Award,” the only one she declared in February. She calls it “A piece that rewards re-reading.”

She also gives a “Recommended” to Nicole Kornher-Stace’s “On the Leitmotif of the Trickster Constellation in Northern Hemispheric Star Charts, Post-Apocalypse.” (Yay, long titles!) She calls it “A fascinating puzzle of a fiction.”

She also offers particular lauds to stories by Ian McHugh, Richard Parks, Gemma Files, Tanith Lee, Corinne Duyvis, Benjanun Sriduangkaew and Patricia Russo, and, notably, has very little that’s critical to say about the stories she didn’t actively praise.

Because it’s not clear from the review, I feel the need to clarify: Lois read an uncorrected proof, provided to her just two weeks ago. (That is one spectacular turnaround time.)

However, the anthology will not be publicly available for sale until July. (The others, of course, can all be had now.) Ideally, Kickstarter backers will receive their e-book and/or trade paperback copies in May/June, assuming I can keep the schedule on course. Regardless, by then it will have been proofread.

Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that I still have a few trade paperback ARCs left if there’s a reviewer out there who’s interested.

3 Comments

  1. […] fascinating to me to compare Bonnie’s take to Lois Tilton’s. (Click here to see the antho’s first review.) Both reviewers agreed on a handful of points, varied wildly on most everything else, but had nice […]

  2. […] these links to get a gander at the first and second reviews. Or you can take my word for it that so far, this book is on a […]

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