Tag: fantasy

Categories
Review

“Still the Sun”

Charlie N. Holmberg

Oh, this was a delight of a read. Sort of a slow burn overall, but it made it very effective at building up over time. By the halfway point I didn’t want to put it down, and at 4/5 of the way through I couldn’t. In a way, it’s a lot of filler, but it’s beautiful filler, and without the filler it’d be too quick. It’s the fun of digging through the filler to find the little pieces of the puzzle.

My favorite moment, and this will be a spoiler, is reading the very careful, analytical description of an artifact of the Ancients, and saying to myself “it’s a sundial. Obviously it’s a sundial. How have you not figured this out?” And then we get to see this lovely analytic mind of the viewpoint protagonist answer that question: why would you know what a sundial is on a planet that isn’t rotating? Would you look at that, the title makes sense.

As I said, an absolute delight to read. The protagonist is building something, and I get that seem feeling of building towards something as I try to piece together the mysteries. Give it a read.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Little Nothing”

Dee Holloway

I didn’t quite click with this one. The closest I got was with the “little nothings,” the small pieces of magic, and even there, I wanted it to be a bit more. I want magic that actually feels like magic, not magic that feels like someone believing in themselves by telling a story in their head that it’s magic. The biggest ‘little nothing,’ as it’s referred to, that appears in this book is someone getting themselves untied… and the way they do that spell is to spend an hour slowly fidgeting with the rope until the motion and them bleeding on the rope from the sores on their wrists loosen it enough that they can pull the knot the rest of the way undone. The spellwork is simultaneously treated as “enough of a threat that they have to be tied down so they can’t move their hands” and also “basically a form of self-affirmation” and it just bugged me.

Complaints about magic aside, it was an interesting read—I’ve never been much for Civil War-era stuff, so the perspective of people loyal to the Union, living in Florida, in the lead-up to the actual declaration of the Confederacy, was a new perspective to me. Worth it for that, I suppose, though the concept of “what if Florida had carnivorous swimming horses in addition to the alligators” was a bit more fun of a twist. Check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Off-Time Jive”

A.Z. Louise

An interesting little story. Not long enough for me to really figure out the magic system in any detail, which was a bit of a bummer—I quite liked the idea of there being an Old School of magic and a New School of magic, and tying it together with race relations in the Jim Crow era sure did add an interesting twist. A surprisingly good ending, everything came together better than I was expecting. Worth the read, I think.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Salt & Broom”

Sharon Lynn Fisher

This book probably would’ve felt a bit more familiar and interesting I’ve actually read Jane Eyre, but as I haven’t, it took me a while to get used to the style of it. I nearly gave up about halfway through, in fact; I get the feeling that ‘regency romance’ as a genre isn’t for me. Still, this book managed to add in a fun supernatural mystery element, which I did enjoy; it twisted enough that I kept coming up with theories and then being proved wrong, though in a way I didn’t much mind. A fairly quick read, surprisingly light and fun, occasionally spooky, but overall enjoyable. Give it a go.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Champion of the Scarlet Wolf, Book 2”

Ginn Hale

As promised, I went right into reading the second book.1 And I quite enjoyed it, though admittedly not as much as I did the first. I think part of my issue was that this seems to be an advance reader copy or something — not the final edition, is all. There’s a few clear errors that a final editing pass should’ve caught.2

That said, I did enjoy the read. I was worried that it was going to do the Syfy thing, and try to continue escalating, but it didn’t — the scope stayed “well, we’re all gonna die, but the world will go on.” Nice to have a sort of series-scale denouement like that, after the first book featured “well, we’re all gonna die, and then also this thing might end the world after that.”

The other thing this reminded me of was Diana Wynne Jones. It had that same kind of “slow build right up until everything comes together at once” feeling; in the same way that I spend the first half of the book going “I dunno, I don’t think this is really capturing me as much as I’d like it to…” and then suddenly I’m forgetting to eat because I can’t put the book down that long. It wound up being fun, and tying up some of the remaining threads from the first book pretty well, so I appreciated that. A good read! Start with Book 1, but then give it a go.3

  1. At some point in the book I thought “is there going to be a third?” and found out that this is, in fact, the fourth book in the series — evidently a great deal of the Mysterious Backstory I’d been piecing together as I read was just the events of the first two books. Whoops, guess I was reading on challenge mode. That said, I think it held up quite well as its own little duology! ↩
  2. And I mean obvious stuff like a word that was meant to be replaced still being there. The subtler things, like a character’s name being spelled differently, are harder to notice if you haven’t just read the first one. And, presumably, particularly if you didn’t spend every appearance by that character in the first book thinking about “her name isn’t ‘Fleur’ like from Harry Potter, it’s ‘Fluer’” so that it suddenly becoming ‘Fleur’ really stands out. ↩
  3. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
Categories
Review

“Champion of the Scarlet Wolf, Book 1”

Ginn Hale

I had so much more fun reading this than I expected to. A great deal of giving me exactly what I wanted in the most fun way possible. So much mysterious backstory to piece together! Two missing princes! Quests within quests. A character whose two intertwined emotional arcs are “working through internalized homophobia” and “dealing with PTSD that they’ve spent a lifetime ignoring.” And a truly wonderful “the audience knows but the character doesn’t” scene featuring a shapeshifter who’d been stuck in animal form, and a man in the midst of a severe fever waking up to a twink in his bed wearing nothing but the collar he’d hand-made for the dog he rescued a couple weeks ago. Exactly as hilarious a reveal as I wanted that to be. Absolutely perfect.

The magic system here feels cobbled together out of various other things—there’s hints of Tolkein-style “the magic is going out of the world,” but it feels more like a “… because we’ve deliberately forgotten how to do the really big stuff” in a way that makes the world feel like it has lots and lots of history to dig into. The magic users all at least a little bit know about the other types of magic, some kind of passing familiarity, but there are, indeed, at least three distinct styles that we see. And it feels like they all fit together, like they’re all expressions of the same fundamental thing—reminiscent of the Thirteenth Child series, in that way.1

An absolute delight of a read; I’m about to dive into the second book, because things aren’t neatly tied up at all here at the end, and I’m excited to find out where it goes. Check it out!2

  1. Having just gone to look for a link, it would seem that I’ve never written up a review of those books… so I suppose I now have an excuse to do a reread. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“The Witch’s Lens”

Luanne G. Smith

This held up reasonably well as a story, and had some fun little twists to it. The hidden backstory got revealed at just the right pace, and really changed the tone of the latter half of the book, which I quite enjoyed. There was a bit more ‘monster movie’ to it prior to that, which doesn’t tend to be my favorite, but the action-adventure of it outweighed that long enough to carry me to the end.

The magic system was interesting; there were places where it felt like a hard magic system, but overall, I think it’s really a soft magic system, which contains the occasional regional hard magic system. The presence of a djinn with a wildly different set of powers, including “oh, I actually don’t care about the macguffin, that’s just, like, a normal thing for my people” felt a bit hilarious, honestly. The whole dramatic fight, a large part of World War I coming down to the negotiation about this rarity… and the representative from the middle east is like “oh, I thought you had something interesting to discuss after all this. Peace.” and just up and leaves. Excellent.

The only issue I had with the book was that it was trying to do the “normal people don’t know about magic” thing, but couldn’t actually decide on what level that was a thing. Like, everyone acknowledges superstition and the existence of hedgewitches… but the fact that the government is employing magic users for purposes of war is a deep secret that must be kept from the normals? It’s inconsistent with itself.

That said, since the book is almost entirely the magic users amongst other magic users, it’s not too much in your face, so it’s okay to read past it. Overall, a fun read; check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“The Time of the Dark”

Barbara Hambly

This was a fun little swords-and-sorcery isekai kind of thing, which mostly did a good job of taking those tropes and twisting them a little bit. The wizard feels like a less-self-serious Gandalf, and the fact that it takes them a few tries to actually wind up isekai’d, after the wizard himself pops over to our world for a bit, adds some fun variation.

It does, however, still feel like a book written in the 80s; the feminist qualities to it feel very Second Wave Feminism in a way that I don’t dislike, but does date it. The biggest failing, to my mind, was that despite being in a different world with a very different history, there’s still a recognizably Christian church running around. It was mostly okay, being a sort of vaguely monotheistic part of the pastiche of western European medieval tropes… right up until there were mentions of people crossing themselves. That’s what kicked me into “okay, wait, how did the same gesture wind up as the holy thing?”

That aside, it was a fun book. And the big bad being ancient lovecraftian horrors was a nice twist, too; made it bad bedtime reading, but an interesting bit of variety. Check it out.1

  1. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
Categories
Review

“Spellbreaker”

Charlie N. Holmberg

This book caught my attention so much more thoroughly than I expected it to. The magic system is fascinating: we start off with the titular character, a spellbreaker—one of a small group of people born with the natural ability to break spells cast by others. And, as it turns out, to sense their presence in a way that the actual spellcasters (or, as they’re called, aspectors) cannot. It goes into more detail: there’s four types of spells, and the way the casting system works feels… honestly a great deal like it was originally designed to be the setting for a videogame. Learn a spell by consuming Magic Points, and then after that you can cast it at will until you’re tired out and need to rest? That’s a writer, explaining a game mechanic.

So, we have a fascinating setting. And then we have two fascinating characters: Bacchus Kelsey, a wealthy scion, up for his mastery examinations in magic… and running face-first into a wall of “it is the 1800s and Britain is very racist”. And then there’s Elsie Camden, the (illegally) unregistered spellbreaker, who lives a double life. Mild-mannered—or rather, well-raised and -behaved—administrative assistant by day, vigilante spellbreaker by night, going on secretive missions to help the downtrodden masses. Magic, after all, may be magic, but it’s also a form of power… and power corrupts.

I was locked in to the book fairly early on, but by the end I couldn’t put it down. An absolutely delightful read, I highly encourage you to check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“The Bruising of Qilwa”

Naseem Jamnia

A quick read, but a very enjoyable one. It’s a bit of a medical mystery, but mostly what it’s about is the experience of being… well, going into the author’s note at the end, of being Persian. Of being an oppressed minority… whilst also being aware that your people were once the oppressors.

The linguistics and magic were both very interesting, and I found all the characters to be well-developed. Definitely worth the read.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“The Dragon Eater”

J. Scott Coatsworth

The ‘jumping the shark’ moment for this book was in the appearance of one of the Pern books in-universe. A bit on the nose to have your “fantasy setting, but it’s actually another planet that got colonized by humans before the big civilization collapsed” book feature, as one of the Ancient Artifacts… a book about the exact same concept. In this case, the threat is still unknown, but we do get to see it, and it’s a bit more… active than thread.

That said, I did really enjoy the setting; I’m a firm believer in the whole “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” thing, and dropping the general level of technology available to people lowers the threshold on “sufficiently advanced” enough to make it more recognizable.

It also helps that the love arc here was just… hilarious. I quite liked all the characters, and seeing them interact, but the fact that there’s at least one love triangle, one member of whom keeps thinking about jumping ship to a different love triangle, makes it fun.

Overall, I quite enjoyed the book; my main complaint is that it’s an entire book’s worth of setup, and the payoff is going to happen in, presumably, the third book of the trilogy. I’d rather one long book to three medium-short ones. Still, a fun little fantasy/science fiction thing, worth a try.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Wings of Fury”

Emily R. King

I’ve kinda got to enjoy a book that makes me think about what the pluralization of “apotheosis” is.1

This feels like it was inspired by Song of Achilles—or, at least, it’s within that same “let’s tell one of the ancient Greek myths in a way it hasn’t been told before” genre. It’s the story about the end of Cronus’ reign, about Zeus coming to power… but it’s from the point of view of a woman living under the Cronus regime, and boy, does he ever not believe in women’s rights. The latest in women’s fashion is self-mutilation in hopes that it’ll avoid catching his eye; “property rights for women” is a discussion of how many women a man can own. Not… a great place to live.

In that depressing setting, I did find the story rather fun. The romance arc was… confused, at best? There’s a clear romance arc, and then there’s the actual mythology, and they didn’t align super well. But then, what’s a retold myth without artistic license?

All in all, this was a fairly fun read; give it a go.2

  1. “Apotheoses,” for those wondering. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Song of the Forever Rains”

E. J. Mellow

I bounced off this book at first—it opens with a very violent scene, and that put me off for quite a while. Fortunately for this book, though, that happened right as I was going into one of my “I need to reread the Circle of Magic books” phases, so instead of completely putting it away, I wound up setting it aside for long enough to forget why I hadn’t finished it, and gave it another go. And as it turns out, it got a lot more interesting from there!

Broadly, what’s sticking with me here at the end of the book is the dreamlike quality of the world. There’s a poetry to it; the titular Forever Rains are a decade-long rainstorm brought about by grief bolstered with magic. Everything about the magic system, really, has that feeling to it—that whatever rules there may be, they only exist to service the story. Unlike most soft magic systems like that, though, it isn’t “the author can change the rules for the sake of the story,” it really feels more like “within this world, magic changes the rules of magic for the sake of whatever story it’s trying to tell.”

It made for a fun read; Lark, the protagonist, is a delight, and reading her interactions with her sisters brought a smile to my face. So, if you don’t mind the occasional bit of violence, I can recommend the book. Check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Uncommon Charm”

Emily Bergslien, Kat Weaver

I might have to go back and reread the first chapter now that I’ve finished this, just so I can understand what all was going on. The point-of-view protagonist spends that whole time talking a mile a minute, and there’s so much background that you don’t know yet that it’s rather overwhelming. Though, given that it’s a scene of someone being dropped off for a new apprenticeship, feeling overwhelmed is probably about right.

There’s a definite mystery vibe to this one, though it’s a cold case, as well as something of a coming-of-age. Really, quite a lot to shove into this short a book. It was an interesting read, though, and at least one reveal had me going back like “oh, that’s what that was about! oh! oh.” Check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Any Way the Wind Blows”

Rainbow Rowell

Oh dear, it has been four years since I read the first two books in this trilogy, no wonder it took me so long to remember who any of the characters were or what had been going on.

That said, after an adjustment period of the first part of the book to remember what was going on and who any of these people were, I quite enjoyed it. There’s solid closure for some of the lingering threads that I remember cropping up in the first book, which was quite nice to see, as well as some additional characters being brought in to add some more to it.

Switching from POV to POV was a bit rough at times, but Rowell used it well—so many opportunities for cliffhangers!

I enjoyed the whole concept of this series, really. It came from another of Rowell’s books, where what these books are was a fanfiction being written by the protagonist of that book. Very clearly meant to be an homage to the whole Harry Potter fandom, without incurring the wrath of She Who Must Not Be Named. But instead of writing the children’s book series, we have the final book and then the epilogue.1 Because, hey, a child soldier? They’re not exactly gonna be in a great place, mentally at the end of their war. Can’t really hand-wave past a decade of trauma. These characters deserve time to work through that.

Anyhow, I really enjoyed this book. What’s not to like? There’s a whole scene that I’d describe as “divorce court in Hell,” which I’d call a B-plot, roughly, but with the POV swapping you can kinda choose whichever plotline you’d like as the A-plot. So many choices! Give it a go.2

  1. The Harry Potter epilogue (and later sequel) being so bad that there’s a whole “Epilogue? What Epilogue?” tag. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩