First, Garth Nix is actually the author of Sir Hereward and Mr. Fitz Go to War Again, not Daniel Abraham.
Oh, shoot, you're absolutely right! I think I have a few short circuits in my associative memory. You said "Balfour and Meriwether" and somehow I associated it with "Sir Hereward and Mr. Fitz". Probably because of the similar structure of the titles with "name and name" which tend to get me odd associations that don't make a lot of sense. And those two stories are ones that I liked, and ones which have similar tones in my mind. For other examples of my short-circuited memory, for the longest time I confused "Vylar Kaftan" and "Lavie Tidhar" despite their names being quite dissimilar, and I just realized yesterday that I've been confusing "John Updike" with "Upton Sinclair". Anyway, if I swapped in the proper title in the previous post, my opinion there would still stand, since I also very much enjoyed Balfour and Meriwether.
Second, my question above was about whether or not The Dragon's Path satisfied readers as a standalone novel, as well as an introduction to a new series. Not that I'm unhappy for people to share their opinion on ways to improve these Spotlights, but just that I want to make clear the context
Ach, another screwup on my part, I guess. You HAD asked people's opinion about the spotlight, but I quoted the wrong post. A more appropriate quote would be:
This being our first ever Spotlight, this sucker's different. We really would love to hear from everyone what you liked, what you didn't like, etc.
Just to be clear: Anna and I get paid absolutely nothing to do these. Not from the publishers, and not from Escape Artists. So these are not advertisements, paid or otherwise.
The way we do the Spotlights is this: if an author we like has a book coming out we think a) we'd like to read, and b) the PodCastle audience might like to read, we ask if we can read the book, and feature it as a Spotlight. Our thought was, there are books out there by authors the PC audience likes, but the PC audience might not be aware of those books. (I think Abraham's a perfect example of this.) But yeah, that's why we call it a spotlight. It's most definitely not a review.
I figured from what you said in the review that you hadn't gotten paid for it, which is good. Good choice not reviewing books that suck, there are plenty of that kind of thing out on the blogosphere (is that still a word??). But I still stand by what I said, which is that if there is only glowing things to say about it, it sounds a bit like an advertisement. I'm not saying that a review with eviscerations and vivisections would be better, only that it would be more meaningful to me if there were some kind of counterpoint to glowing praise. If it's not an advertisement and it's not a review, I find it a little hard for me to tell how to interpret it.
I agree that excerpts would be cool, but among other things, that equals more time for us (and both of us are kinda maxed out time-wise), and in most cases, the excerpts are out there in other forms. (Here's the first chapter of the Dragon's Path to read. I should've put that in the top post...) Additionally, we get into the quasi-murky waters of audio rights that are not non-exclusive and have generally already been sold elsewhere, or have some built-in exclusivity (this has happened).
Fair enough. It was just a suggestion.