You searched for book_author:"Julia Blake"
This really hit the spot. I’ve been craving some good, old-fashioned fantasy—the kind of stuff I mainlined as a kid, you know, the high fantasy stuff with dragons and wizards. But I find that when I go back and try to revisit the fantasy from my youth, when I read it with the more critical eyes of a modern feminist adult, there’s just too much problematic stuff in there for me to enjoy it as…
Full disclosure: the author was my landlady when I lived in the UK! Despite our age difference, we got along quite well because of our penchant for watching science fiction and humorous British TV shows, or documentaries with luminaries such as Lucy Worsley. Julia first gave me a copy of Lifesong to take with me on my final flight back home, telling me not to read it until I was on the plane. More recently,…
I’ve spent a great deal of time these past two years helping a friend revise her PhD. dissertation, which was about the history of sustainability in the Ontario forestry industry. Riveting, right? Anyway, one of the ideas she explores early in her thesis is that European settlers brought with them to the New World various prejudices regarding forests. The forest, in many European folkloric traditions, is a dark and scary place. We see this echoed…
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to read Erinsmore, a secondary-world fantasy novel coincidentally written by my former landlady from when I lived in England. Erinsmore works quite well as a standalone novel. However, in Mage Quest, Julia Blake provides us with an excellent sequel story, one that revisits beloved characters from the first book, introduces new ones, and builds further on the lore of this world.
On Earth, six years…