The third installment of John Flanagan’s The Ranger’s Apprentice series, The Icebound Land continues the story of Evelyn and Will’s journey to Skandia. Along the way, they are forced to hunker down on an island outpost with their Skandian captors. While they are treated fairly well, they know that they face life as a slave unless someone comes to rescue them. Of course, this being a coming-of-age story, there is someone who is coming to rescue them. Halt and Horace are fighting their way through […]
It’s OK to be Genre Fiction, I Promise
This review is for the audiobook version of The Quick, by Lauren Owen. This book wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. I don’t think that it’s what it thinks it is either. This is genre fiction that thinks it’s literary, with quirks that seem to scream “I’m different and unique,” when in fact it’s just another vampire story. The blurb described the book as being about a woman, Charlotte, who goes to London after her brother disappears and discovers a few […]
I Hate Writing Titles
This review is for the audiobook version of The Drafter, by Kim Harrison. It’s the first in a new sci-fi series. Peri Reed is a drafter for the government, a person with the ability to turn back time to fix mistakes. For every second she goes back, part of her past is erased. To offset this all drafters are paired with anchors, people who can experience multiple timelines and sort between them, able to fill in the gaps after a draft. But what happens when […]
If you loved the movie, you need to read this.
If you’ve read any reviews of this book, what I’m about to say is probably something you’ve heard before: This is one of the best film novelizations I’ve ever read, if not the best. Oy, that sounds really hyperbolic, and to be fair, it’s really not a high bar to clear. People aren’t going around screaming for the next great novelization. They just aren’t. Also, the novelization for The Force Awakens was quite terrible, so psychologically speaking, pretty much if this one had been halfway decent I […]
Magic & Manners
The Cecelia and Kate books, set in an alternate-history Regency England where magic is commonplace, chronicle the lives of two cousins as they find love and foil a dastardly plot (Sorcery and Cecelia), travel the Continent while foiling an even more dastardly plot (The Grand Tour), and wrangle a number of children and dogs while foiling a slightly less dastardly plot (The Mislaid Magician). I adore the first book in this series. It’s an epistolary delight. Wrede and Stevermer wrote the story via “The Letter […]
Everything comes entirely too Easy
The Paper Magician is a Gaslamp Fantasy that was so boringly mediocre that I want to weep at the wasted potential. The ideas behind the story, and the world building, are all deserving of a far better novel then this one ended up being. You see people can do magic with any kind of man made material, but you have to pick one particular kind of material (paper, or smelted metal, or in a twist-human flesh (because humans are man-made-get it?)) and once you choose […]