Life Was So Wonderful

Tue 19 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Earth Logic cover - In 2004 I was still the science fiction and fantasy reviewer for BookPage and was very happy to see that Laurie J. Marks was about to publish her second Elemental Logic novel Earth Logic. I jumped on the opportunity to review it:

Laurie Marks’s rich and affecting new novel Earth Logic is the second book in her Elemental Logic series which began with Fire Logic (warmly reviewed here in May 2002). . . . Earth Logic is a thought-provoking and sometimes heartbreaking political novel which absorbingly examines the dynamics between two groups of people. Good bread, wine and friendships alone may not save the world, but they make the doing of it much more palatable.

At the end of 2010 Laurie’s agent contacted us with the news that rights to Fire Logic and Earth Logic were available and were we interested in them since we had published the third novel in the series, Water Logic?

Yes!

We started talking with the ever excellent Kathleen Jennings about covers for the whole series and we slowly moved to re-release them, first as ebooks, and now, with the publication of Air Logic in sight(!), in new print editions.

Every time I work on any of these four novels I am drawn once again into the stories within stories. Sometimes readers who don’t read fantasy novels ask why I love to read them and page after page these books provide such a strong answer. Here is a story of power held, relinquished, and shared. A story of families found, lost, made, and remade. A meeting of enemies who must learn to live with one another, or die trying. A story of those at the top, those at the bottom, and those that feed them. These are stories that were relevant when published and even more so now.

So on this cold day here in Western Massachusetts, where the temperature is definitely still below freezing — with all the pre-orders shipped, new review copies all sent out, and the book itself wending its way to your favorite indie bookstore — we raise a cup of tea to the (re)publication of Laurie J. Marks’s second Elemental Logic novel, Earth Logic.