Ship of Smoke and Steel by Django Wexler
Ship of Smoke and Steel is an enjoyable fantasy that squeaks into the YA label because the protagonist is a teenager. The violence and sex in the book make it suitable for older teens at best, and boy do I feel like a prude saying that. I found out about this book thanks to John Scalzi’s wonderful segment on his blog “The Big Idea” where an author tells you about a book they have coming out and how they came up with it. I find […]
The Shadow Throne: Book Two of the Shadow Campaign by Django Wexler
At the end of last year I finally got around to reading The Thousand Names: Book One of the Shadow Campaigns and thoroughly enjoyed it. The Thousand Names is primarily about a Vordanai military campaign, in the foreign desert land of Khandar, told through a couple of perspectives. The Shadow Throne completely switches gears and setting. It keeps Winter Inhernglass (Lieutenant and female in disguise) and Marcus d’Ivoire’s (Senior Captain) narratives and adds two new ones; Raesinia Orboan (heir to the throne) and Duke Orlanko (Ministry of Information, spy […]
The Thousand Names has sat on my 2013 TBR shelf for five years now. Each time I would pick it up I would go, “Eh” and set it back down. There wasn’t any real reason for my dislike. My husband had read this and two subsequent books and liked them all. But for some reason each time I picked it up and the knowledge that it was in part about a colonial like military campaign would give me pause and back on the shelf it […]
The Guns of Empire is the fourth book in a series, which I read before I started participating in the Cannonball Reads and so there are no previous reviews. I’m going to try and summarize both this book and the previous books without spoiling anything, but my short recommendation is this; READ THIS SERIES. It’s fabulous. It’s an alt-world Napoleonic France with magic and cross-dressing lesbians in the French Foreign legion. This series is a magical-alt-world mashup of the Frech Revolution, the French Foreign Legion, and […]
The Palace of Glass is book three in Django Wexler’s Forbidden Library series for middle grade readers. And I find myself, once again, with the problem of trying to introduce a series to you with the middle book. I’m going to try and review this book without spoiling the series, but just in case I want to tell you that you should absolutely read it. These are excellent middle grade novels. Django Wexler skyrocketed to my favorite authors list last year, going from totally unknown to […]
