Tinker

Rating:
Summary: Wen Spencer can write!
Review: European Elves, Japanese Oni, the city of Pittsburgh spending 1 day a month on earth and 30 days on the world of Faerie, and an eighteen year old girl who makes Eienstein look mentally challenged. These are the elements that Ms. Spencer weaves into a highly entertaining tale.
Tinker is an inventive genius, born ten years after her father died, who has spent all of her eighteen year growing up in this strange/familiar city of Pittsburgh. Brilliant, inventive and brave it developes that she is the pivot upon which the fate of worlds turns.
These elements could have been put together into a terrible book. But Wen Spencer's supurb writing turns them into a wonderful romp. The only disappointment was that the story ends far to soon. One can only hope that Ms. Spencer plans to revisit Tinker at some time in the future.
Read this book. Then if you have not read her first three books, get your paws on them and read them.

Rating:
Summary: WOW!
Review: I despise sci-fi that's more science than fiction, more tech than plot but Wen Spencer delivers with a bang. Tinker, a barely eighteen year old genius, is naive enough and brassy enough to grab your attention and keep it. I thought I had gotten a book I could take my time with and found that I finished it in one night. If you like fantasy, romance, sci-fi or just a good romp this book has all the elements to keep you reading. I hope that we can revisit old Pitt again to see Oilcan or even Rikki again. It would be fun to see Tinker wrap her brain around magic instead of quantum physics. The possibilites make me drool....

Rating:
Summary: The jacket blurb and the storyline differ just a bit
Review: Ok, the blurb on the hardback in the library reads " what's really important - her first date. Armed with an intelligence the size of a planet, steel-toed boots, and a junkyard dog attitude(...)"

You don't expect cross species rape from that teaser or similar touches such as erotic dreams, etc. To say the least, the blub and the book have some differences, though the blub is faithful to the general (when not interrupted) feel of the book.

Not that the book doesn't move, but the reviewer who compared it to an old fashioned "bodice ripper" pretty much hit it. Interesting concept, nice execution, all the right stereotype characters in all the right places, perfect timing, lots of romance novel style left-overs as if it needed one more editing pass.

But my fifteen year old daughter who had grabbed the book for the cute side of the blurb, went "eww" and dropped it at the rape scene.

Rating:
Summary: I thought Pittsburgh was an alternate dimension already...
Review: The toughest stuff for me to read in books or watch in movies and television is the blending of Science Fiction with Fantasy. It's a crossing of genres that many have tried and failed miserably at...

...but Wen Spencer gets it right with TINKER, a beautifully crafted, wickedly funny, and action packed adventure featuring one spitfire girl genius, elves armed with swords and sub-machine guns, and a demonic consipracy of global proportions. What makes this book a must read is how Spencer elegantly interweaves the magic and mysticism of Elfhome with the sciences of Earth. Tinker turns the mystery of Elf Magic into the next level of Quantum Theory Physics, and it all makes sense! Sadly, it is this brilliance of our Teenage Einstein of Future Pittsburgh that makes her THE MOST POPULAR GIRL with the Elves, government agencies, and dark forces from an alternate universe.

You think being a teenager is rough...try being a teenager with Stephen Hawking's I.Q. stuck in an inter-dimensional Pittsburgh. THAT'S rough!

One fun ride and worth every page! Thank you, Wen!