I say “soap opera like” in the best possible way. A disinherited heir trying to regain power, siblings facing the potential of having to duel one another to the death, a surprise twin, a scheming patriarch manipulating others to further his agenda, and everyone is trying to gain power and raise themselves in the hierarchy. All this is set amidst a magical tournament to determine which House will lead the Unseen World, the world of magicians kept secret from the mundane. Every twenty years or […]
Not what I was expecting, and not in a good way
I’m a fan of Ender’s Game, so I assumed I was a fan of Orson Scott Card. This may have been a false assumption. I picked up Enchantment because it looked interesting, a retelling of Sleeping Beauty, and it looked different from my last Orson Scott Card disappointment. No awkward religious stuff here, I thought. I thought wrong. Enchantment is billed as a fantasy, as a retelling of Sleeping Beauty. But we open on a Russian boy in 1975 converting to Judaism to escape Russia. […]
I’ve just experienced a tutorial for a game I’ll never play
If there was ever a book written by a gamer, this is it. This is an in-depth tutorial on how to be and grow a dungeon. Complete with helpful glowing orb! (“Hey, listen!) I don’t really mind it, but I can see how the style would annoy some people, either those who know nothing about gaming or who already know waaay too much about gaming. Our helpful will-o-the-wisp is our guide in how to grow a dungeon core into a bigger and badder dungeon. We […]
I was so very often confused, but that’s okay!
There are a lot of threads in this book moving to create a tapestry of a story. This is definitely a fantasy, as their world is much different than ours. There is a great Bog that takes over a good part of the land. The Bog is dangerous, but there is a town in the middle, the Protectorate. The Protectorate is ruled by the Elders. Every year on the Day of Sacrifice, the youngest baby in the town is sacrificed to the witch, to keep […]
Three quarters of the way through I finally “got” why cheese was so prominent in this book
In February 2016 two authors, Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne, were stuck in an airport and decided it was time to kill the proverbial farm boy. Specifically, it was time to make fun of white male power fantasies that typically involve a boy being destined for greater than his humble beginnings because he is somehow special, and all the tropes that often accompany those stories. And so they wrote Kill the Farm Boy. The elements are all familiar; there is a chosen one, a talking […]
Barkonauts are the best!
Greg Van Eekhout is now one of my favorite authors thanks to his Daniel Blackland series, starting with California Bones. In it he created a fascinating magic system called osteomancy, where one gets magical properties through consuming the remains of magical creatures. Magical creatures also being fellow spell casters. Not exactly fit for the tween and under set. However, Greg has just had Voyage of the Dogs come out and it is all ages. If you know a child that loves dogs and thinks outer space […]
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