The Kate Daniels series by husband and wife writing team Ilona Andrews is one of my favorite urban fantasy series. I love reading fantasy, urban fantasy, science fiction and romance. A big part of my love for these genres is their escapist nature. Another reason I love them is the way we can vicariously thrash through difficult social issues. I tend to read several books at a time, and will often re-read beloved books while reading something newer and/or more challenging. Yesterday I picked up […]
A sort-of Scientific Mind Meets 103,000 Magic Books
This is the story of Touma Kamijou who believes that he the worst luck possible. He lives in a world in which a sizable chunk of Tokyo is taken up by “Academy City” a place where people gifted with special psychic abilities come to train their powers. Touma himself is ranked a a Level Zero, meaning the official tests reveal that he has no special ability whatsoever. Except that he actually does posses an ability called “Imagine Breaker” which cancels out any other special ability […]
An epic fantasy anthology, cherry-picked from other sources.
This was a pretty great anthology. I was probably destined to like it because it’s pretty hard for me to dislike most kinds of fantasy. This is also different than some anthologies because the editor didn’t commission pieces for this book, but collected them from other already published sources. I sampled a lot of authors I’ve been meaning to try for some time, although I’m annoyed that some of the stories occur halfway through a series or something like that. If you like Epic fantasy […]
“We broke the world to make it whole…”
In a possibly controversial opinion, the final novel of the Earthsea cycle just might be my favorite. To get here, we’ve had two great adventures, an exploration of a foreign ritualistic spirituality, and a pointed take on the value of women in a world of male-dominated power, both political and magical. In this last book, all of those elements come together, and the story looks back to the origins of magic, just as it looks forward and asks where the people of Earthsea truly stand in the […]