Discovery: Tor Books

 It started with an advertisement on Facebook for Tor Books “Free eBook of the Month Club” and who could resist a free eBook every month? The first book of the month was V. E. Schwab’s A Darker Shade of Magic. I had heard about this book from friends and my Goodreads feed, but I hadn’t really heard much about it plot wise just that it was a good book. But then I started reading it and I was hooked. Not to mention look at this great cover:

The cover alone is like a summary of the book. And with this as my introduction to the imprint how could I not be excited to discover more books curated by them? So, I followed their Instagram.

I hadn’t really finished a book by them, or by anyone really, because I was in sort of a reading funk. But between Stephen King’s It which consumed most of last year, and Tamora Pierce’s Tempests and Slaughter I finally felt like my reading slump had ended. But what to read next? I didn’t want to pick up A Darker Shade of Magic again just yet. Not because it’s not a good book, just because it wasn’t the type of book I was craving. It was too real world still, I needed a complete escape. Enter Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson, another book with an AMAZING cover:

This cover is just so gorgeous and interesting to look at that I couldn’t help but be drawn to it when I first saw it. But that’s not why I had picked up this book. I had first heard of Brandon Sanderson’s books from Critical Role and Tor Books sponsorship of them but I had never known where to start with them. Mistborn was exactly what I was looking for in a book because it was short enough to read in a couple of months (as opposed to taking me an entire year) and it was enough out of this world for me to escape into its setting. And that’s what I needed at the time.

A Darker Shade of Magic was just too grounded in reality still to accomplish that task. But that’s part of what makes Tor Books so perfect to me. They have books that cover every level of real-world grounded settings. Mistborn is one that has minor similarities to the real world where you can see the influences that historical background has had. But that’s about it as far as real-world similarities. A Darker Shade of Magic has London as its real-world tether with side worlds that are less connected but still based on the standard society.

But Tor also has books that just twist the real world slightly. I just received an ARC from a give away I entered called The Tesla Legacy by K.K. Perez and I am so excited to read it. It seems to treat Tesla like Sanctuary does, but with a twist and it is most definitely grounded in modern day America/World (I haven’t gotten far enough to determine a definite setting. Once I do, I will definitely do a review). The cover on this one is just as gorgeous as the rest:

And I just have the ARC. So I can’t wait to see what the finished product is like.

This book comes out March 16^th, 2019 and it’s ARC give away and the free ebook are the only ways in which I was “compensated” for this review and they had no idea I was going to write this to begin with. As I’ve said in the past, nothing I write about on this blog ahs anything to do with sponsorship. They are all things I genuinely like and enjoy and Tor Books imprint is no different. They have books I love, they have great editors from what I’ve seen (you’d think this wasn’t important as long as the story is good but I’ve found that to be very untrue), and their cover designers are awesome!

So, in conclusion, I 10/10 would recommend Tor Books as an imprint to check out, as well as each of these books I have mentioned in this post.