After finishing The Chronicles of Narnia, the first three Harry Potter books and starting “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children”, only to discover we couldn’t renew at the library due to the waiting list, my 8 year old daughter wanted new fantasy to read. I handed her “The Book of Three”, first volume in the Prydain Chronicles, by Lloyd Alexander and off she went to be completely absorbed in the story and declare she would use it for her oral book presentation. The Prydain Chronicles […]
A Worthy Tribute
I’m a huge fan of Ray Bradbury, but I actually found this in the process of hunting down a copy of Joe Hill’s By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain, which is included in this collection. Pretty much every story here is a winner, though, and definitely worth reading for Bradbury fans. Here’s a full list of everything included. I particularly enjoyed Lee Martin’s Cat on a Bad Couch, Jacqueline Mitchard’s Two Of A Kind, Charles Yu’s Earth: (A Gift Shop) and Julia Keller’s Hayleigh’s Dad. Overall, though, there aren’t any duds. And I really liked […]
A Constellation of Tales
Though the title makes it sound like it’s a collection of new stories, The Starlit Woods is a collection of re-told fairy tales. I had a different perception going into the book, though being a fan of retold fairy tales I didn’t mind that the stories were retellings and not completely original stories. This is a really good collection of stories and while there were a couple I wasn’t fond of, most were very compelling. I decided to check this book out because the list […]
A non-European Based Fantasy
Saladin Ahmed’s name regularly kept coming up on lists of fantasy authors to check out. Last Christmas I put “Throne of the Crescent Moon”, book one of The Crescent Moon Kingdoms series, on my wish list, in June it came with me on a family vacation. The vast majority of the fantasy I’ve read over the years has been in some way based on/inspired by feudal Europe. TotCM is written from a different perspective with roots in Middle Eastern culture and that made it […]