Smudge Marks & Engel Werks Flash of Steel Playing at the World Dyson’s Dodecahedron Quest for Fun! Bruce Heard and New Stories CRRPG Addict Fantasy Cafe Lynn’s Book Blog Sitrep Hex and Violence Banzai!! Dungeon Fantastic Gaming Ballistic Ravens N’ Pennies Let’s GURPS The Collaborative Gamer Don’t Forget Your BootsThe Golem and the Jinni was a very good historical fantasy with a very character-driven focus. It also had a very intricate plot with a lot of moving parts that don’t come into alignment until the end. That is still[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Despite having its origin in the same writing project as the first part, this is a fairly separate section and the break helps emphasize that. In-fiction, the bulk of the stories here all intertwine even more than the first part.[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
So, book 2 of a YA fantasy horse series. Warning: there is a cliffhanger ahead. The fact that this leads directly into book 3 explains a few things, because on its own the plot is a mess. Even as the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The final Tomoe Gozen novel is much more cohesive as a novel than the first two. But it is broken into three parts, and they are somewhat independent. A sad repeat from the second book is that there’s an ad[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The tenth FR-series book kept with the general geographical format of the series, but the book is 96 pages instead of the usual 64. The detached cover is only two panels, and gives a cutaway view of a pyramid and[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is a bit complicated. First, at a hundred pages (plus an appendix that really is part of the novel) this is pretty much in novella territory. Really though, it’s a jumble of short stories with the same inciting event.[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Doing a story that hops back and forth between two distinct storylines is difficult. It’s done quite well here. There’s a lot of very deliberate parallels (in fact, this is brought up inside the novel), which help strengthen the structure.[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The fifth Queen’s Thief book shifts main character again, this time to Kamet, who was last seen rescuing his master and fleeing back the Mede Empire near the end of Queen of Attolia. And he gets teamed up with Costis,[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
For the recent Tolkien Reader Day, I picked up the first of Christopher Tolkien’s ‘History of Middle Earth’ series. It takes a bit of unpacking. This is largely the earliest versions of some of the earliest stories. However, while the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The initial book of the Hidden Sea Tales comes to a very satisfying conclusion, but there’s a number of dangling threads. Sofie gets to go back to Stormwrack, and pick up the investigation of this world which isn’t—and is—Earth. She’s[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…