Once upon a time there was a little girl, a princess, born on the moon. No, not that princess. The other one. The one who grows up to be the evil, baby-killing psychopath who brings a literal plague to Earth and is now using it to control diplomatic relations so she can, you know, take over and stuff. Fairest is a novella-length attempt at a much-needed fleshing out of Levana’s backstory and motivations, Levana being the villain from Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles series. If you haven’t […]
Fire spider: IGNITE!!!
Sometimes you go into a book with expectations, and the book blows those expectations all to hell. The first two books in the Magic Ex Libris series were fun, pulpy romps through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (and through the annals of great fantasy and sci-fi literature). We followed librarian cum libriomancer, Isaac Vainio, a man who can use magic to pull things out of books, as he fought off all mess of troubles. As a member of the Porters, a secret society of magic […]
These books might actually be a bit too young for my expectations, but they are still great.
Daja’s Book is the third in Tamora Pierce’s children’s fantasy book series, Circle of Magic. I was previously classifying this as young adult, but this book has firmly set my mind on the subject. At the end of these books, I keep wanting more from them. More development. More sophistication. More actual content (they’re very short). More time spent (they take place over very short periods of time). And I finally decided, basically just about five minutes ago, that the expectations I was placing on this […]
Lots of threads, no tapestry…yet
In books I read spookily close together, two authors I love (Mike Carey and China Mieville) both happened to mention being influenced by Mervyn Peake (one in a post-book interview, one actually dedicated the book to Peake). I had never heard of this interestingly-named person, but I figured the universe was giving me a sign. I inter-library-loaned an intimidatingly large book that turned out to be three novels in one: The Gormenghast trilogy. It’s easy to see why Mike and China like the writing, which is […]