Category — Fantasy

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

I’ve just finished reading Empire of Ivory, the fourth book in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, and it is delightful.  It’s rare that the fourth book in a series is as thrilling as the first, but Empire of Ivory broadens the focus from the protagonists to their world, and the result is epic and majestic.

The series is bit like a cross between Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin books and McAffrey’s Dragonriders, a sort of historical fantasy.  If you have not read any of Novik’s Temeraire books, I strongly recommend them, but you may wish not to read this article as it contains spoilers for the first book, His Majesty’s Dragon.

In Novik’s books, the Napoleonic war is underway, as it was in our more familiar history, with an additional front: the air battle is fought by dragons.  No nation’s military defence is complete without a dragon corps, and although dragons are not easy to either feed, or house, they are a military necessity, and thus England has adapted, to some extent, to co-habiting with these immense carnivores.

Jane Lindskold is an amazing author. I first encountered her work when I read Child of a Rainless Year. I was astonished — here was a coming of age story about an adult, an older woman, and one that …

Hello, my lovelies. I apologize for my enforced hiatus from book blogging – I just moved, and haven’t had reliable internet access for the last few weeks. But don’t worry. My lack of posting does not mean I haven’t been …

Here’s the scene and the context: I’m on the phone with my new (white) boyfriend, and bring up one of the organizations that’s near and dear to my heart… Swirl. In case you haven’t heard of Swirl, it’s …

Note: I thought about explaining all the terms and jokes from the novels that this post contains.  But the thing about a joke is that it’s not funny if you explain it.  If you are intrigued at all, I would suggest picking up one of …

I just read a couple of books by Maria V. Snyder called Poison Study and Magic Study. I don’t know that I have ever read a fantasy novel set in an early industrial revolution time frame with a moderately successful communist military government before. Especially one that neither preached communism nor villified it, but showed the reasons the persons involved created it and the limitations and benefits of it. That was fascinating, no less because the second book compared that government with an early version of democracy and a tribal society.

But even more interesting are the two major female characters. The protagonist, Yelena, is a woman. She is neither usual or unusual as a woman in her culture; the military oligarchy (if you can believe this) has equalized women with men and jobs and positions are based on ability and talent discovered by teachers in the mandatory schooling. Yelena is, however, unusual as an individual who has murdered the son of a general, someone who would seem to be her benefactor, and who has lived to tell about it. Taking the life of another person under the military Code of Behavior is always punishable by death even in cases of self defense, and so Yelena lives under a sentence of death.

In the first book she is offered reprieve as the food taster for Commander Ambrose (the highest official in her country), and her story comes out only in bits and pieces. Given a setting in just barely pre-industrial revolution and post-monarchy, the “food taster” checks for poison in the Commander’s food, an (eventual) death sentence in itself. We soon realize that Yelena committed murder under what any reasonable person would consider desperately justifiable circumstances, but she is not a whiner. She knows the law, and submits calmly to her fate - the torture she received as a teenager has been relieved by the murder of her torturer, and at first she is resigned to the consequences of her relative freedom. As she grows accustomed to her limited freedom, Yelena starts making plans to escape eventual death, making friends, learning to fight, and eventually discovering her own magical powers.

Yelena is an original and kick-ass heroine, and I loved her even more in the second book, Magic Study, but she’s actually not the most interesting female character in the book.

[Spoilers for Poison Study follow]