Books shelved under “Fantasy”

There's more to epic fantasy than sword fighting and magical duels. Patrick Rothfuss seems to know this, and that's really the best way I can think to praise The Name of the Wind.

Since this is a story about a single man, it seems appropriate to start my review by talking about him as a character. A man of many names, Kvothe first appears as an innocuous innkeeper in a small town. He's hiding,…

In one sentence: my review of The Man with the Golden Torc stands double. In fact, I'm beginning to feel almost as repetitive as Simon R. Green, just by reiterating this! However, there are things I missed in my previous, somewhat-hastily-written review, so I shall address those now.

Firstly, Green has too many characters and doesn't know what to do with them. I wonder if he just can't control his urge to explore every cool…

After discovering Simon R. Green through his Nightside series, I was looking forward to this new series. While The Man With the Golden Torc is occasionally entertaining, overall I was underwhelmed.

The culprit in this case is a repetitiveness on the part of the author. He reuses certain phrases often, and it's not clear whether this is done intentionally, for the sake of irony, or if he's just not that inventive. Also, is this book…

I won't lie: I plucked this book from the library shelf because it had a blurb from Jim Butcher on the cover. I was not disappointed.

Simon R. Green's created a wonderful milieu in the Nightside, a shady alterna-London where it's eternal night and its supernatural inhabitants fit the mood. His protagonist, John Taylor, is the perfect mix of capable and scary-dangerous. He's not quite as fun as Harry Dresden, but he's got a good…

Raymond E. Feist is probably among my favourite fantasy writers, simply because he's mastered the ability to create such realistic fantasy settings while still populating them with fantastic feats of magic. However, Rides a Dread Legion did not live up to my expectations for a new book in a new series of Feist's ever-expanding oeuvre.

A caveat: my experience with the Riftwar Cycle is spotty at best; I think I've read at least one book…

What began as a fairly bland, contrived plot soon became an entertaining adventure. Living with the Dead was a pleasant surprise.

I can't say many good things about the book's main character, Robyn Peltier. Kelley Armstrong has her flee the scene of a murder not once, but twice, purely because the plot requires Robyn to be a murder suspect. From that point onward, I expected the book to be fairly clunky. Instead, it rapidly…

Is it just me, or are books about dead characters living in an afterlife increasingly common? There must be something innately fascinating about making one's protagonist already dead. Fortunately, the eponymous afterlife known as "Elsewhere" is a pleasant, non-threatening environment where dead people age backward and then are born again as babies.

If I had a choice, reincarnation would not be my first choice of afterlife. The concept hinges on the idea that everyone has,…

Throughout Scar Night, Alan Campbell occasionally manages to create pockets of drama and suspense, but he fails to sustain this atmosphere for the duration of the book.

The city of Deepgate, suspended above an abyss by chains, is an interesting concept in and of itself. To go along with this temporal construction, Campbell has created an interesting ecclesiastical mythology centred around the abyss and what haunts its depths. The people of Deepgate believe that…

Why, why did Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water precede this book?! Ink and Steel possesses the best qualities of its predecessors and few of their flaws. Elizabeth Bear's skill flourishes in an alternate Elizabethan England where Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare are agents for the Queen and have dealings with Fae.

By far, my reviews of the previous books singled out an overly-complicated mythology as the Promethean Age's major flaw. Ink and Steel…

Significantly better than the first book in this series, Whiskey and Water picks up the loose ends from Blood and Iron and sustains them through half the book, building to a much more satisfying climax consisting of multiple battles and tense magical standoffs. My gripe: why did I have to wait for book 2 for all that heavy worldbuilding to pay off?!

As with its predecessor, Whiskey and Water suffers from a surfeit of mythology…

In The Engine's Child, Holly Phillips has created a rich and interesting world where everyone quite literally lives on an island in a vast ocean. The intrigue among the three main factions--the conservatives who insist on keeping with traditional ways, those who want to find a way back to the land of their ancestors using magic portals, and those who want to master the ocean and find new land--is what fuels most of the…

I will be brief, since I don't read much horror and am generally ignorant of Lovecraft's work, so I won't try to make a general statement based on this one story.

At the Mountains of Madness itself was OK, not great. Lovecraft is far more concerned with describing the extinct society of the Old Ones and their struggles with surviving Earth than injecting genuine dread into the story. It left little impression on me.

I…

In many ways delicious, The Queen's Bastard is a well-written, evocative piece of alternate-Elizabethan-era fantasy. Unfortunately, defects in both its plot and its characters detract from the otherwise beautiful prose of C.E. Murphy.

At first I enjoyed the stalwart strength of the protagonist, Belinda Primrose. An unacknowledged bastard of Lorraine (Elizabeth), Queen of Aulun (England), she has been raised and trained as an assassin by her father, Robert Drake (Francis Drake). Belinda is, in essence,…

Neil Gaiman is one of the world's leading storytellers, and The Graveyard Book great story--several stories, in fact, all bound up into one nice narrative.

I have great respect for Gaiman because he does not patronize children. The Graveyard Book is, in many ways, a children's book (although adults will enjoy it as well). Unlike much of the mass culture drivel produced for children these days, Gaiman does not treat children like they are idiots…

I picked up Kushiel's Dart because I noticed one of the later books in this series at the library, but I wanted to start at the beginning. I'm glad for that. Jacqueline Carey weaves a dense, intricate narrative--I would have been lost had I started in the middle!

Carey's writing was great, although the prose was often indigo-bordering-on purple, and I could have done with a little less exposition. There were times when the world-building…

The Gypsy Morph is the dynamic, action-packed adventure that concludes the Genesis of Shannara trilogy. All the same protagonists return to finish the journey they began in, led by the eponymous gypsy morph, Hawk. The fate of the the races of both men and Elves rests upon his shoulders, for he is a creature of magic who can lead the survivors of a broken world to the promised land.

Overall I enjoyed this book for…

It's always delightful discovering another author in one's favourite genre whose entire oeuvre you want to read after finishing just one book.

Blood and Iron begins in media res, with an agent of Faerie--the Seeker of the Daoine Sidhe--and an agent of humanity--the Promethean Club's Matthew Szczegielniak--chasing the same quarry: a faerie changeling. After introducing us to these two main characters, the book pulls back in scope and reveals the centuries-old conflict between Faerie…

George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books were some of the first fantasy I read, back when I was in grade seven. One of my friends introduced me to fantasy by way of The Belgariad, and after polishing that off, I read the first three A Song of Ice and Fire books (yes, all three were out then, and the fourth one just came out recently!). Martin is one of my…

Although vampires play an important role in this book, vampirism is not the central subject. Rather, Hubbard uses vampirism as the method to explore a girl coming to maturity amid a broken family unit. Hubbard addresses questions of ethics and coming-of-age. Unfortunately, the story is mediocre.

My main problem is a lack of conflict. Each time the story approaches something that resembles a high-stake scenario, it shies away at the last moment. For instance, after…

Might as well just call this book, "And everyone lived happily ever after."

I acknowledge that I may have some sort of sadistic streak in me to want the author to kill off main characters, or at least have something bad happen. Whenever it looked like someone we cared about was going to die, I cheered (thank you for staying dead this time, Ann). The fact that Goodkind broke all the rules he established does…