What is Tina Connolly reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Tina Connolly, author of Copperhead.

Her entry begins:

Well, I just turned in Ironskin #3 to my editor, and I'm about 2 weeks from my due date for our baby #2 [ed: it's a girl!], so I'm indulging in some comfort reading. I'm currently re-reading all the Anne McCaffreys on my shelf. Just started in on Pern, and I went ahead and picked up the ones written by her son Todd McCaffrey as well, since I'd never read those.

It's fun immersing yourself in a long series. I was actually just thinking about how much scope the worldbuilding in the Pern series gives you to play around with. I recently read a blog post by Daniel Abraham (whose work I really enjoy) about building lots of secrets into the first book of a series, so you have plenty of room to pull them out in later volumes.

Similarly, the first book in the Pern series (Dragonflight, 1968) looks rather like a standard fantasy world at first glance, with humans bonding telepathically to dragons and fighting the dangerous organism Thread. But...[read on]

About Copperhead, from the publisher:

Set in an alternate version of early 1900s England, Copperhead is the sequel to Tina Connolly's stunning historical fantasy debut, Ironskin.

Helen Huntingdon is beautiful—so beautiful she has to wear an iron mask.

Six months ago her sister Jane uncovered a fey plot to take over the city. Too late for Helen, who opted for fey beauty in her face—and now has to cover her face with iron so she won’t be taken over, her personality erased by the bodiless fey.

Not that Helen would mind that some days. Stuck in a marriage with the wealthy and controlling Alistair, she lives at the edges of her life, secretly helping Jane remove the dangerous fey beauty from the wealthy society women who paid for it. But when the chancy procedure turns deadly, Jane goes missing—and is implicated in a murder.

Meanwhile, Alistair’s influential clique Copperhead—whose emblem is the poisonous copperhead hydra—is out to restore humans to their “rightful” place, even to the point of destroying the dwarvven who have always been allies.

Helen is determined to find her missing sister, as well as continue the good fight against the fey. But when that pits her against her own husband—and when she meets an enigmatic young revolutionary—she’s pushed to discover how far she’ll bend society’s rules to do what’s right. It may be more than her beauty at stake. It may be her honor...and her heart.

Learn more about the book and author at Tina Connolly's website, blog, and Twitter perch.

My Book, The Movie: Copperhead.

Writers Read: Tina Connolly.

--Marshal Zeringue