StarCrossed and Liar's Moon by Elizabeth C. Bunce

 

A special edition of StarCrossed by Elizabeth C. Bunce has been put up in the Kindle store with a bargain priced $2.99 preorder with a same day release as the sequel, Liar's Moon, on November 1st. So if you haven't read it yet, you can now wait and get it around the time of the sequel's release and read both since just about everyone who has read it has become a fan. But I encourage preordering since the price may fluctuate.

That said, the book is great enough to not wait for the bargain edition. It's really great and the early reviews for Liar's Moon are glowing, too. Just today this appeared on Kirkus: Hooked on the Thief Errant series
by Leila Roy:

Fans of Megan Whalen Turner, Robin McKinley, Kristin Cashore, Tamora Pierce, Sherwood Smith’s Crown Duel books and/or Ellen Kushner’s Privilege of the Sword: Take note. Everyone else—especially those predisposed toward fantasy novels featuring political intrigue, strong world-building and rough-and-tumble female protagonists—take note as well.

Elizabeth C. Bunce’s Thief Errant series—which debuted last year with StarCrossed and which will continue this November with Liar’s Moon—is one that you should seek out. At first glance, the series is nothing like her first novel, the William C. Morris Award-winning A Curse as Dark as Gold, but upon further reflection (and a reread or two), similarities emerge.

The books aren’t at all similar in terms of plot or character, and Bunce certainly doesn’t write according to a recognizable formula*. Even within the Thief Errant series, there’s not a formula: StarCrossed and Liar’s Moon are different in plot, setting and pacing. In StarCrossed, we meet our intrepid heroine as she escapes from a robbery gone so horribly wrong that she’ll be executed if she’s caught. She spends the entire book as a fish-out-of-water, both in an unfamiliar place and pretending to be someone and something she very much is not. In Liar’s Moon, Digger is back on her own turf and among her own people...until she gets plucked off the street and chucked into a jail cell with the last person she’d have ever expected to see there.

And, for full disclosure, I've had this entry in draft form for a few weeks since I saw the preorder special and debated the post since this is one time I think waiting for the bargain is not worth the wait, but if it encourages you to order both and thus support Bunce's career--she's really lovely and used to hang around SurLaLune during her Curse Dark As Gold Days--that's a wonderful thing.

And really who doesn't love these books? I myself have Sherwood Smith's newest on preorder--Blood Spirits--to be delivered to my Kindle after midnight tonight. I expect my elliptical time to increase as I read it tomorrow.