fantasy

A Hero at the End of the World by Erin Claiborne

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If you’re me, there’s no way to read this book without thinking about Harry Potter.  And I think that’s the easiest sell!  What if Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, didn’t actually go through with killing Voldemort?  What if the prophecy was wrong, and Ron was the one to kill the Dark Lord?  A Hero at the End of the World is the absurd and hilarious followup to that situation.

Claiborne clearly delights in fantasy, and her parody of a wizarding Britain was the perfect blend of skewered detail.  Her world makes sense, even though the bad guy is named Duff Slan, and the dark magic is called Zaubernegativum.  It’s all ridiculous, and I loved it.

If you’ve read enough middle grade or YA fantasy to know the familiar tropes and plots, you will probably enjoy A Hero at the End of the World.  It is a great palate cleanser before diving back into the familiar world of heroes, magic, and the end of the world.  Continue reading →

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

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Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant feels a little slow, but instead of being uninteresting, this deliberate pace feels more like a spell, drawing readers deeper into the plot with every new revelation.  Axl and Beatrice are an elderly couple on a journey, and I loved having protagonists at the end of their love instead of the beginning.  Theirs is a historical England, after King Arthur but before all his knights died, but the realistic setting is peppered with fantastical dragons, pixies, and a mist of forgetfulness.

This book is powerful, because I didn’t think I cared much about it until I finished the last page, at which point I hugged it to my chest and repeated a word over and over again.  I won’t say what word for fear that it will give something of the ending away.  Suffice it to say, at that point I realized the story had sunk into my body, and I am changed by it.

Themes of forgiveness and revenge, peace and memory, love and endurance weave throughout the story and our five main characters.  Different chapters have different perspectives, and most begin by jumping forward in time before slowly revealing what has happened in the interim.  Yet despite these choices, the plot slowly reveals itself, and by the time we know what is really happening and how everyone aligns with each other, it feels incredibly right.  Ishiguro is a genius.  Continue reading →

Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson

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My roommate let me borrow this book as a birthday present.  As much as I love fantasy, I have a weird “but I’m not that nerdy” attitude toward authors that aren’t J. R. R. Tolkien.  Which is completely dumb, because I am that nerdy.  Anyway, I let it sit untouched for a month, at which point my roommate said, “Um, are you ever going to read that book I gave you?”  Feeling guilty, I started reading….and couldn’t stop!  Mistborn is SO GOOD.  It’s a high fantasy heist novel, two genres I didn’t realize need to be combined all the time!

The world of Mistborn is atmospheric (ash falls from the sky on a regular basis) and extremely intriguing.  Although we don’t learn how Allomancers first received their power, not in this book at least, I am totally in love with the creativity behind these “magical” powers.  Allomancers can swallow and then “burn” metals, which give them various abilities.  Special Mistborn men and women can burn multiple metals at once, giving them the ability to alter peoples emotions, gain strength, or most impressive, push and pull metals around them.  The ways in which characters use these abilities are increasingly creative throughout the story, and I was delighted by their creativity.

I also appreciated the…in-betweenness of the level of violence in Mistborn.  People definitely die, and there are a few scenes of squeamish grossness.  But this is no Game of Thrones, which I’m grateful for.  I want realistic levels of death tolls in a story about war and uprisings, but I don’t want to be constantly grossed out.

I should also mention how awesome Vin is.  She’s a terrified street urchiin turned fake noblewoman, both roles which help her discover her true self–a scared but bold woman who fights for those that she loves and delights in her skillset.  I can’t wait to read more about her in the final two books of Sanderson’s trilogy.  Continue reading →

Fairest by Marissa Meyer

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I LOVE getting backstory for a villain.  So while I desperately wanted Meyer to release the fourth and final volume of her quadrilogy, The Lunar Chronicles, Winter can wait.  It’s Levana’s story first!  Serving as a prequel of sorts, this mini-book (is 220 pages mini? I don’t know) was a fantastic look at the moon’s culture, an incredible insight into Levana’s motivations, and a tantalizing hint of main characters we’ve grown to love from the main series.  That sentence looks like I got lost in an overly expressive thesaurus, and I apologize.  I just forgot how much I love Meyer’s fantasy world!

Levana’s story is excellently handled.  Although we get to empathize with her (sadistic older sister, horribly disfigured) she is still consistently creepy enough that our allegiances never fully shift.  Her “love story” with Evret is terrifying, and a really compelling look into the nuances of the mind of a rapist.  Levana is such a great villain because she doesn’t realize that’s what she is.  She always thinks she is doing the best thing possible–for her country, for those she “loves,” and of course, for herself.  The fact that this leads her to murder on multiple occasions is why she’s the bad guy.

Although Fairest is a self-contained story that ends far before Cinder begins, it totally rejuvenated my love for Meyer’s series, and I cannot wait until Winter comes out in the fall!  Continue reading →

Golden Son by Pierce Brown

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If it were acceptable book review practice to simply post paragraphs of “!!!!!” over and over again, I would.  Pierce Brown seems to delight in leading his readers to believe that one thing will happen…and then making everything fall apart so that you’re left staring at the page, wondering how in the world Darrow will escape this time.  And by “this time” I mean every fifty pages or so.  The big moments come hard and fast, and nothing ever goes as I expect it.  I LOVE IT.

While Rising Red was a small(er) stakes revenge story, Golden Son widens its scope to the whole solar system, and this time Darrow has matured into a desire, not for revenge, but for transformation.  He doesn’t shy away from the battles he needs to fight (and agh!  the battles!  the enormous death counts of actual main characters!), but his overarching goal is to redesign the Society into a place where every color can be and do what they will.  It’s a more complex goal, but nobler as well.  Continue reading →

The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black

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Apparently, I’m really into unapologetically other mythical creatures.  I’m glad we’re trending away from nice vampires and friendly werewolves.  The fun of fantasy comes from the collision of two cultures that are truly dangerous to each other.  Black’s faeries are wild, passionate, and creepy.  Fairfold is a place of changling babies, drowned tourists, and missing persons.  Despite this, the humans are tentatively accepting of their faerie-surrouned world…until the sleeping prince wakes up and everything falls to pieces.

I love Black’s high-stakes world of debts repaid, female knights, and sibling support.  The Darkest Part of the Forest was entirely engrossing from page 1.  Hazel was a super cool protagonist whose eccentricities are fleshed out as the book progresses?  What makes a girl desperate to become a knight while kissing a bunch of boys on the side?  She’s not a Mary Sue character–she’s got reasons for her actions, and I loved seeing them explored.  Her brother Ben is also amazing.  I really enjoyed the gender swap dynamic wherein the older brother feels secondary to his younger, battle-ready sister.  Continue reading →

Close Kin by Clare B. Dunkle

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Okay, I’m sad to say I didn’t like Close Kin nearly as much as I liked The Hollow Kingdom.  Although it was so much fun to return to a world where Victorian humans interact with goblins, elves, and dwarves, there was not nearly enough Kate and Marak to satisfy me. Of course, this was not their love story.  It was…Emily and Seylins’?  Which is weird, because they spend very little of the book together.  Even when they are finally reunited, we hardly get to see them.  Other couples, like Sable and Tinsel, dominate the last fourth of the book.  Which is okay, I guess, because the goblin/elf relationship was oddly sweet.  But it was disorienting to root for one couple the whole time, only to be left with an anticlimactic reunion.

The best part, for me, was getting to see the cultural differences between goblins and elves.  I loved Dunkle’s subversion of the norm, so that her goblins are loyal, respectful, and kind, while her elves are cruel, vain, and dirty.  The ugly creatures are beautiful inside, and the beautiful creatures are ugly inside.  Fun!  Semi-relatedly, I also really love how the goblins see their deformities as based in strength.  There was one especially sweet scene when a goblin heals someone’s scars, but not fully.  He’s happy about this, because the scars are reminders of her courage, and he wants her to be able to keep some part of that.

I still love the world Dunkle has created, but it was definitely the Beauty & the Beast storyline of Kate and Marak that so completely enthralled me in The Hollow Kingdom.  Guess I’ll just have to reread it!

closekinBook Jacket

“Goblins are just a tale to frighten children.”

Emily might have believed this once, but she knows better now.  For years she has been living happily in the underground goblin kingdom.  Now Emily is old enough to marry, but when her childhood friend Seylin proposes, she doesn’t take him seriously.

Devastated, Seylin leaves the kingdom, intent on finding his own people:  the elves.  Too late, Emily realizes what Seylin means to her and sets out in search of him.  But as Emily and Seylin come closer to their goals, they bring two worlds onto a collision course, awakening hatreds and prejudices that have slumbered for hundreds of years.

In this sequel to The Hollow Kingdom, Clare Dunkle draws readers deeper into the magical world that Lloyd Alexander, winner of the Newbery Medal, calls “as persuasive as it is remarkable.”

Release Date:  2004

Want another opinion?  Check out reviews by The Thunder Child and Scribd.

The Hollow Kingdom by Clare B. Dunkle

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OH MY GOSH THIS BOOK.  After I read the last page, I literally held The Hollow Kingdom in the air, shook it, and rasped, “I love you so much!”  It’s been a while since a story was so exactly catered to my interests, and I’m still reeling from its perfection.

I mean, first of all, the goblin kingdom is one of the coolest worlds I’ve read about.  It is lovingly detailed, full of vaguely argumentative doors, polite monsters, and pets with pets.  I loved seeing goblins through Kate’s practical English eyes; at first she can only see the horror.  But when she returns to the human world, she realizes just how attached she has become.  Hers was a slow fade into appreciation and love, which felt very real.  I, however, was more like younger sister Emily, quick to awe and adoration.  Continue reading →

Prophecies, Libels, & Dreams by Ysabeau Wilce

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YES!  More Califa stories!  The California/Aztec world created by Wilce is one of my absolute favorites, so when I stumbled across the existence of this compilation of short stories (cleverly compiled by a “historian” who comments on the likely historicity of each one in chapter Afterwards), I jumped at getting my hands on it.  I’m so glad I did!  Although the last two stories didn’t quite grab my attention–they take place after the events of the Flora series–the first five are wonderful.

We get the background of Springheel Jack in a flashy, hyper-descriptive little story.  But no contest, my favorite stories were the three about Hardhands and Tiny Doom.  Flora’s father was always one of my favorite characters, and it was so fun to read about him as an arrogant, powerful teenager.  Tiny Doom as a toddler was also hilarious fun, and as always, Pig is a scene-stealer.  Continue reading →

Marking Time by April White

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A friend suggested I download Marking Time while it was free on Kindle.  I did, though I was not super won over by her texts about how embarrassed she was to love the series.  It took a while for me to get into the plot–it jumps around quite a bit–but soon I was also hooked.  It’s a clever premise, as White creates a mythology that explains popular YA tropes, from time travel to vampires.  And the writing is occasionally really witty and clever.  

You can sense the “but,” right?  But, the plot ambles or accelerates at an unwieldy pace.  It tries to be too much–a boarding school book, a secret powers book, a supernatural romance book, etc.  I never quite got totally hooked, although full disclosure, I am prejudiced against ebooks.  They don’t seem real (even if they are actually published in print but I’ve just happened to read an e-version) and I don’t give them the same leeway I would a book with pages.
 Continue reading →