I would have loved this book so hard as a twelve-year-old….sadly, I’m no longer twelve, and that means I’m no longer the intended audience for this book. One of the folklore professors at school recommended “The Perilous Gard” to me as one of her favorite, nostalgic, go-to books on Fairies. Maybe I went into it with the wrong expectations. Maybe I should’ve schooled my disappointed “oh, it’s YA” when I found it at the library. Maybe I should have walked away slowly from this book….but […]
Exploring a sprawling, new world
I’ve never read anything quite like Ken Liu’s debut novel The Grace of Kings.I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain it for a week now and the closest I can come to is this: Chinese history meets The Iliad meets Game of Thrones. Sometimes it reads like a history book…and then our heroes wage their wars on the backs of whales or from steampunk-inspired hot air balloons. Sprawling and ambitious, I couldn’t help but cheer for this book, even when I didn’t love […]
Will the real good guy please stand up? Or not.
Righteous Fury is a prequel to a series I have not read (a 4 book series Dwarves). In some ways this is classic fantasy. The cast includes a variety of magical beings, including some elves, dwarves, but mostly the alfar. Humans also come into the story, but are mostly slaves. This race is “cruel and surpassingly beautiful artist-warriors”. Two alfar in particular command the majority of the story: Calphalor and Sinthoras. At the beginning they hate each other and belong to opposing political parties. Calphalor […]
Premise Perfect: London Triple Threat
The premise of A Darker Shade of Magic is pretty perfect. There are parallel worlds with corresponding versions of London in which magic exists or existed to varying degrees, and they are aware of each other’s existence (or at least the rulers are). In this universe, a few people with special powers exist who can travel between dimensions. These people with particular magical ability are called ‘antari’, and Kell is one of the last known. Kell has named the various versions of London “Red” (his […]
Indiana Jones Meets the Babysitters Club
I’m not a huge consumer of graphic novels, but I enjoyed Noelle Stevenson’s Nimona, so I decided to check out her series Lumberjanes (a co-creation with several others). I also couldn’t pass up something in which volume 1 is titled “Beware the Kitten Holy”. I was simultaneously disappointed and relieved that in the end this turns out to be less than literal. In the opening sequence the heroines encounter some wolves; as they are getting their tails kicked, one of the wolves mutters “beware the kitten holy”. By […]
What a delightful little book.
This sneaky little book is a sneaking sneakster. It sneaks right up on you, and you love it before you realize what’s happening. I actually read this book way before I meant to. I realized on my drive to Phoenix a couple of weeks ago that I was quickly going to run out of Pride and Prejudice audiobook, and I didn’t have a replacement on deck. Good old public library and OneClickDigital had this puppy featured, and I wanted to read it anyway, so why […]
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