In for a penny, in for a pound. I reread an October Daye book and posted old reviews for the first seven books, and I’ve ended up rereading the series and figured I would fill out the rest. Obviously once you get to book 8 of a series, the only people reading are the hard core fans, so assume that you should go back and read the earlier books before getting to these ones, and that later reviews might contain spoilers for earlier books. Thanks to The Unkindest Tide being overdue, this completes the current run of novels, and just leaves the short fiction to review…
Tag: Fantasy
Play Review – PUFFS: The Play by Matt Cox
PUFFS is clearly made by someone who loves Harry Potter, but is not blind to its faults. Ever since it appeared on the scene, fans have been obsessed with which house they would fit in (Brave, Smart, Snake), but it was fairly clear that not all houses were created equal. Puffs answers the question, what is it like to be in the other, other, other house at Hogwarts, in the most humorous way possible…
Hugo Awards Extravaganza 2019 -Graphic Story
This is a pretty self explanatory category typically composed of graphic novels and trade paperbacks. The big story of 2019 is how stagnant the selection is; half of the Graphic Story slate has been locked in since 2017, in the form of Saga (six time nominee), Monstress (two time winner), and Paper Girls. Fortunately two of the repeats (Monstress and Saga) were my top picks of last year, so it is hard to begrudge them their perennial status.
Hugo Awards Extravaganza 2019 – Novella
Works in the Hugo Novella category are almost always short novels (17500-40000 words).I feel like this category has undergone a bit of a renaissance with digital publishing…
Review – Trail of Lightning
I put Trail of Lightning into the urban fantasy box from a look at the cover, and, to be fair, it feels like an urban fantasy book…
Review – The Invisible Library Series by Genevieve Cogman
If the idea of an infinitely sprawling library, filled with unique books salvaged from across the multiverse, where time doesn’t pass for you while you are within its walls doesn’t appeal to you, I don’t know why you would read fantasy books at all.
Review – Shades of Magic Series by V.E. Schwab
The world might be different but there will always be London, or at least there are four of them, spanning from Georgian England to a lifeless world scoured by magic. A few special mages ferry messages between the worlds, but not all messages are created equal…
Review – Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone
A young woman in private practice after being cast out of the academy in disgrace, is hired by a partner in a major firm to assist in a post bankruptcy restructuring of a global entity, but a range of opponents both old and new are arrayed against her. Oh and the practice is wizardry, the academy was above the clouds, and the entity being restructured is a god.
Essay – Harry Potter, my father, and me?
Harry Potter day falls in the same weekend as father’s day this year, and so this seems like an appropriate time to meditate on how I missed the Harry Potter boat. My father and the book are so inextricably linked in my mind that I vividly remember where I was when I read Harry Potter […]
Review – Temeraire Series by Naomi Novik
The first book is in this series is pretty close to the platonic ideal of Napoleonic ships and Dragons. As the series continues however, Novik sets her sights on bigger things, and does something laudable that many fantasy authors never do – thinks through the consequences of her premise. Over the course of the next five novels, she examines the extension of the franchise, slavery, colonialism, mercantilism, and the conflict between honor and duty, through the prism of a world where power is shifted by the existence of Dragon’s weighing 10’s of tons.