Howl’s Moving Castle is one of my favorite books ever, and I was over the moon when I found out Diana Wynne Jones had written a lesser-known sequel (or at least companion book.) As much as I enjoyed the way things came together at the end of the first book, I wanted more of Sophie’s fierceness and ability to cut through society’s nonsense, and I wanted more of Howl’s vanity and snark and never quite succeeding at being a truly terrible person. Unfortunately, Castle in […]
Lois Pulled a Bait-and-Switch on Me
So, I am more than familiar with LMB’s two main series – The Vorkosigan Saga (Which is mostly a space opera), and her books set in the world of the Five Gods. (Which are a sort of semi-medieval fantasy.) What I’ve been slow to pick up though is her Sharing Knife series. Mostly because they are almost impossible to find in print! I’ve never stumbled on these books in a bookshop and had to go searching really hard across libraries to find a hard […]
Hope is the thing with feathers
This Newberry Medal winning YA novel is a fantasy/fairy tale about hope’s triumph over sorrow. Kelly Barnhill writes about a world populated by witches, dragons, monsters, and humans. She writes of bogs, forests, and towns separated by fear and magic. In this world, one town in particular, the Protectorate, engages in a terrible human sacrifice every year, wherein the youngest child in town is left in the forest as a tribute to an evil witch. It is an age old practice, perpetuated by the town […]
Who is more human and who is the monster?
After giving glowing reviews to several other books by Victoria (V.E.) Schwab, multiple people have recommended her “Monsters of Verity” series. I recently picked up This Savage Song as a treat to celebrate the 25th birthday of my favorite independent bookstore. Considering how much I’ve enjoyed every other book by Schwab, I should have known better and gotten the second book in the duology, Our Dark Duet right away instead of foolishly only getting book one. I had the great pleasure of seeing Victoria Schwab’s panel at Wonder […]
A Witch with a Badge
Black Magick is a really well written and beautifully drawn series by Greg Rucka and Nicola Scott featuring a police detective named Rowan Black who, unbeknownst to her colleagues, is also a witch. In Volume I of what I can only hope will be a long running series, Rucka and Scott introduce the reader to Rowan, some of her fellow Portsmouth police officers, and another witch named Alex, who is also Rowan’s friend/lover. The story opens with a Wiccan ritual in the woods interrupted by […]
I enjoyed it but have a hard time not complaining about problems
The epistemological vagueries of this novel was what annoyed me the most, followed closely by the lack of information concerning the relationships and actual descriptions of/between the three species participating in this narrative. Or in plainer English, there’s a few troublesome holes in the world-building that seem pretty important to the story. This is mostly a novel about characters and action; I appreciate this. However, when much of said action is directly related to the systems of faith, values, knowledge, and inter-species relationships in the […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- …
- 158
- Next Page »