Reviews :: Book Genre :: Fantasy :: Page 11

One cold winter morning in the early hours, a young boy leaves his home to follow the moon — but then disappears.

Not many hours later a peddler walks into town pulling his cart of wares and finds himself in the midst of a search for the boy and volunteers to help — until the boy’s body is found in the river and he instead finds himself in a grieving town.

The traveling salesman turns out not to be your average peddler: this one sells dreams, made to order, satisfaction guaranteed.Read the rest of this review »

PENRIC’S DEMON is the first story in a 6-novella series (so far? hopefully there will be more?) written by the amazing Lois McMaster Bujold. I just finished listening to all six on Audible and I’m here to tell you that they’re worth your time, and reader Grover Gardner enhances the story the way a reader should.
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This is another one of those books that got buried a little too deep in my TBR pile last year and got lost. I am ashamed. Thankfully, I have awesome friends that remind me about missing out on books like this and then telling me that I’m running out of time before the sequel is released. You just can’t put a price on friends like that. Because seriously, if you start doing things like that, pretty soon all your friends are six feet under and no one new wants to be your friend anymore because they know what happens to those that happen to say the wrong thing…

Okay, maybe that got a little dark, but after all, what good is a book review about an awesome dark fantasy novel without a little morbid humor to kick us all off in the right direction. 🙂
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Here’s another one of those late reviews that totally should have been up last year, but that I just didn’t make it to. On the whole I’ve kind of been a late-comer to the Powder Mage world. What I found in this series was fun, and interesting, and engaging to say the least. Was hoping to find more of the same, when diving into this one. Especially after mentioning that we expected goodness from the short list of missed reviews in 2018 and being so disappointed in the first one of those books that I got to.

Thankfully, I found that this book was just as good as I had expected.
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This is one of the books on our makeup list from last year that I just didn’t have the time to get to. Actually, it kind of took me by surprise. The most recent book in the series, THE LOST PRINCE (EBR Review) came out more than 5 years ago, and I guess the possibility of seeing this sequel had completely fallen off my radar. Still, I was really excited to finally see it. THE LOST PRINCE was an absolutely brilliant book, and I was so looking forward to seeing how it would all come together for the Guardians from Aandor.
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THE ANTIDOTE (Amazon) by Shelley Sackier reads like a fairytale–and not one that the Brothers Grimm recorded; there is no real peril here in Sackier’s stage-set world building. With a lively protagonist and a plenty of twists, THE ANTIDOTE should be a bubbly little read, but a fumble on some story fundamentals makes it more frustrating than fun.
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To borrow a phrase from The Princess Bride, Victoria Lee isn’t writing to the death in THE FEVER KING — she’s writing to the pain. So when I characterize this novel as dark and unsettling, I have to believe that Lee would take that as a complement.
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It certainly seems like it’s been a considerable period of time since I read the first two Books of Babel. Thanks to the words of Mark Lawrence during the 2016-round of his Self-Published Fantasy Blog-off, I was made aware of this brilliant series that had yet to be picked up by a traditional publication house. In point of fact, it’s been a little less than 18 months since I closed the pages of THE ARM OF THE SPHINX (EBR Review) and began my wait for this next book. Would it be the last? Or just the next? Would it be as good? Bah, how could it not be? Tom finally knows where his wife is, and he’s bound to get to her! I had a difficult time believing that anyone that had read the previous two books (that you? hmmmmm?) wouldn’t be just as ecstatic to get into this story as I.
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This book was on my radar for a while, but I didn’t think that I’d be able to get to it. Then, I forgot to cancel my Audible membership after going through that mess with THE SIGNAL, and suddenly I found myself with another book credit and no direction to run with it. After a quick perusal of my options, I found that the audiobook for Chris Wooding’s next book was only 10 days away from publication. Trust me, with our history of loving the books lobbed at us by him (EBR Archive), I quickly made my decision and started into it.
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I think I can safely admit that I wasn’t even planning on reading this book when it first showed up in the mail. I hadn’t been particularly enamored with either the first or second books in the series, I had no idea where this third book might go that could possibly change that opinion, and the cover was so blaringly pink that the thing gave me a headache every time I looked at it. But it was a quick read (which I needed), and the cover was removable (thankfully), and… my experience with its pages was exactly what I expected it to be: a jumbled conglomeration of “What in the world did I just read?” Ever had one of those? For your sake, I hope not. Still, as the saying goes, “In for a penny, in for a pound,” and so I decided to finish this series off with one last monumental push.
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