Category — Fantasy

Man, I was really excited to see HarperCollins Reading Warriors program, an online resource offering a bunch of downloadable tools for kiddies looking to read over the summer and teachers looking to guide that reading. It’s available here: http://www.readingwarriors.com/rwshell.html.
HOWEVER, a quick skim through the titles recommended for further reading suggests that HC didn’t do the [...]

The Thirteenth House is the sequel to Mystic and Rider by Sharon Shinn.  Both books, along with the third, Dark Moon Defender, are fantasy-romances set in the mythical kingdom of Gillengaria, and are, unfortunately, fraught with the saccharine tendencies of romance novels of every other genre.  Sharon Shinn, although a fascinating world-builder, is prone to [...]

This was a great read til the last five minutes. Basically, what’s going on is that our narrator, Ariella, is realizing that her dad’s a vampire. Also, she’s realizing that SHE might be a vampire as well. Little things like her (human) mother’s disappearance, the fact that her dad won’t let her leave the house, [...]

Barnes’ alternate history explores the evolution of slavery and racial formations in a world where the West never rose to prominence. The New World is in the process of being conquered by various African empires, and both women and enslaved whites are starting to buck up for independence. This is a very cool context — [...]

This week’s flashback book is Daughter of the Bright Moon, featuring Rifkind, a warrior-healer whose character inspired Xena, the warrior princess herself!
This was such a fun book. Rifkind’s one of the few lady sword-slingers coming out of this sword and sorcery genre who doesn’t have sexual assault as a part of her origin story. She’s [...]

Barnes’ promising first effort introduces the reader to a wild reimagining of turn of the century London. It’s very “The world has moved on” a la Stephen King — technology is on the rise, magic/mystery in the form of our main guy Edward Moon, and the disappearance of the titular character, who exits stage left at the [...]

Ultimately, Lisey’s Story is an unmemorable foray into King’s trademark prose. While it’s certainly compelling, it doesn’t really stand up to some of his classic works like The Stand or to some of his more recent works like The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. I mostly read it because I’m a pretty rabid King fan, [...]

At some point, when I was fourteen or fifteen years of age, someone said to me, “If you like Piers Anthony, you really should try Terry Pratchett!” This recommendation resulted in my avoiding Pratchett for ten years.
I did eventually discover that this comparison was misleading, and gleefully tore my way through Pratchett’s immense corpus, [...]

Sometimes? LKH makes me really really angry. Why? Because she takes these pretty standard tropes re: the angsty mulatta, tosses in some vampires/angry faeries, and voila! People love it.
 I’m gonna do a close read of The Laughing Corpse, one of the first books in the Anita Blake series. After this, I’ll probably do a follow [...]

Hmm. It’s a toss-up. On the one hand, Roberson’s writing at full force here. All the delightful sensory details that made the dry deserty world of Tiger and Del a reality are present. You can feel the dust coating your face in Roberson’s lushly realized world. And she neatly establishes that it’s a world in [...]