Books shelved under “Fantasy”

When I was younger, I was ridiculously fond of watching Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. (I still am. I just don’t have the time to watch it as much any more, nor am I spry enough to stay up until 1 am when it’s usually on these days.) The show is typical of the 1990s sitcom-with-a-twist: typically, each episode consists of Sabrina trying to solve a typical adolescent dilemma with magic, only to make the…

And we arrive now at the final instalment of my reviews of the Godspeaker trilogy. Picking up soon after the end of The Riven Kingdom, Hammer of God is the epic battle between Mijak and Ethrea, between Hekat and Dmitrak (for Mijak) and Zandakar and Rhian (for Ethrea). Portents, prophecies, faith, and family are all important parts of this book, as Karen Miller propels her plot towards its final, brutal confrontation.

Miller spent the…

For a while now I’ve been ruminating on the role of the medieval setting in fantasy, and more specifically the kingdom. Monarchies are (largely) obsolete these days, though Charles Stross has some interesting ideas about how the divine right of kings could intersect with extreme libertarianism. It’s interesting, then, this obsession we have with a form of government that is inherently unstable, unfair, and usually just crap. I mean, yes, it makes for good conflict,…

With a book called The Assassin’s Curse, you might expect this to be about the curse of an assassin on their victim. But no, this is about a curse on an assassin when his target saves his life. And with this twist, Cassandra Clare sends us rocketing off on a bizarre adventure through a vibrant fantasy world of pirates, deserts, and high-stakes pursuit by supernatural beings.

Ananna doesn’t want to get married, or at…

Some people are just, to quote Daffy Duck, “dith-spicable!”

Empress is about a girl who grows up with no name, in a dirt-poor village on the edge of a desert, unwanted and unloved. She gets sold to a passing trader, who anticipates being able to train her as a concubine. This event triggers something in the girl, some hidden ambition or untended guile. She gives herself a name—Hekat—and begins plotting, eagerly soaking up everything Abajai…

This is a book I wouldn’t ordinarily give a second glance on a library shelf. It’s an ambitious attempt to combine a western with the "hunter" subgenre of urban fantasy. I’m just not a fan of the western tropes or, in fact, the time period or setting. I don’t sympathize with the dangerous, romanticized nostalgia for a “simpler” time on the “frontier” when men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures…

Well, here we are, at the end of a very long journey. I can see now why The Dark is Rising sequence is packaged, well, as a sequence. The individual novels are quite short--some of them closer to novellas than anything else. The five-book stories are in fact a single story, but packaged together, they take up nearly 800 pages of very small print. It's an adult-sized story aimed at young adults and children, and…

I’ve gradually been making my way through China Miéville’s back catalogue. He’s one of those authors who is prolific, but not in a terrifyingly fecund sort of way. I feel like I can play catch-up without being overwhelmed. Well, without being overwhelmed by the number of titles to read. Miéville’s characteristic, crafty style means that I might be overwhelmed in other ways.

I made the mistake of taking my form tutor group to the library.…

I’ve been making a slow tour through Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence for a few months now. It’s undeniably an important series in the fantasy canon, but my personal reaction to it has been more ambivalent. I have been rather disappointed with the novels as stories. They’re brilliant examples of methodical mythological remixing. Yet in adjusting the tone of the books to aim them to her younger audience, Cooper also seems to feel…

Thaiburley. The City of a Hundred Rows. Nestled in a vast but somewhat unexplored world, Thaiburley is the centre of this story, almost a character itself. From the Pits and Kat to the Heights and the Prime Master, characters of different backgrounds have gradually come together to face the greatest threat this city has seen in ages. They’ve grown and changed in ways they didn’t think was possible. Though I haven’t always been the most…

I have fond memories of this trilogy from my youth. Or, more likely, of parts of this trilogy, both because in my rebellious heyday I read things out of sequence like it was nobody's business (because it wasn't) and because my library is very fond of buying books 2 and 3 but not book 1. So I can't recall if I ever read Newton”s Cannon, but it seemed like a good place to restart…

Greenwitch is the third in Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series. It unites the protagonists of the previous two books. Will Stanton meets Barney, Simon, and Jane. Together, they foil the latest plot of the Dark, which involves stealing a secret artifact from the Greenwitch. This entity is a construct of twigs and leaves built by the women of Trewissick in an elaborate, night-long ceremony. They assemble the Greenwitch, then the men of the…

This might be one of my favourite Charles Stross books. I think it’s the effortless blend of bureaucratic humour and horror, and the slight homages to spy fiction, that makes The Atrocity Archives so appealing. It’s not just any one thing, and it isn’t too much of any of these things. There are plenty of ways to play the "secret government agency that fights the supernatural" angle, and plenty of them are valid. Stross has…

Now that’s how you end a series.

Naamah’s Blessing is the swan song of Moirin, half–Maghuin Dhonn, half-D’Angeline. Moirin has ventured as far eastwards as Ch’in, where she saves a princess and a dragon. In this novel she goes westwards. After a brief stop in Terre d’Ange, it’s off to Terra Nova, where she hopes to find Prince Thierry alive and bring him back to Terre d’Ange to deal with an opportunistic regent. Raphael de…

I probably shouldn’t have read this, considering how little time I had left to get through these library books. I probably should have skipped in favour of a book I was more confident I could enjoy. But I think I needed this—I needed something that’s just so bad I could sit back and bask in its badness for a bit. The Thirteen Hallows certainly satisfied me in that regard.

All the warning signs are clearly…

There is both reward and danger in reading the books of a series in close succession. Obviously, it’s easier to see the common threads that tie the books together; it’s easier to appreciate the arc of the characters and how events in one book might later affect events in another. I often deepened my appreciation for many series through an extensive re-read (and the same could be said for “marathoning” television shows). Nonetheless, there always…

I hadn’t heard anything about this book before I snagged it from my library’s new books shelf, which surprises me. I would have thought that one of the book blogs I read would have featured it at some point. Bronze Gods sounds like, and indeed is, a very original and refreshing voice in fantasy. Its authors (Ann and Andres Aguirre, who together form a writing name that is sure to be as close to the…

With a little over a week left before I return to England, I went to the library and borrowed a few more books. As I was browsing the stacks, I noticed all three of these books next to each other on the shelf. Longtime library conossieurs will share with me the feeling of surprise and elation that one has when discovering the complete set of a series on one’s to-read list is there, ready to…

It’s really neat that the Of Darkness, Light, and Fire omnibus contains both urban fantasy and classical fantasy. Not a lot of combined editions will do that. It showcases Tanya Huff’s wider abilities, and it also provides a nice change of tone if one is reading the two novels back to back. It can also make the task of comparing the two books somewhat more difficult. Even after a few days of thinking on it,…

Tanya Huff is another one of those Canadian authors I’ve shamefully never read until this year, but now I’m making up for that! Gate of Darkness, Circle of Light, which I read in the Of Darkness, Light, and Fire omnibus (yay, Oxford comma!), is Huff’s first published novel and the third one she wrote. In many respects this is evident from the novel’s plot and characterization. Nevertheless, it’s evidence that, even back then, Huff…