Reviews :: Book Genre :: Fantasy :: Page 53

Having Daniel Abraham withdrawals? Do you find yourself listless and antsy now that Abraham’s Long Price Quartet is over and we have no book from him to look forward to this year? Might I offer a suggestion? Pick up Ken Scholes‘ work. Start with LAMENTATION (Amazon). Go ahead. Do it now. I’ll wait here while you go and read it.

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Wasn’t it great! There’s no need to worry. CANTICLE (Amazon) is just as good as LAMENTATION, possibly even better.
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Adrian Tchaikovsky, we hate you… but in that way that results from loving you too much, and being jealous of your skills. Let’s start by saying how worried we were about Tchaikovsky’s fourth novel in the Shadows of the Apt series, SALUTE THE DARK (Amazon). With three completely excellent novels released, isn’t it about time that Tchaikovsky had a misstep?

No. No it isn’t.
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Progress is good. I always like to see progress when I read a book or follow an author. You get to watch them evolve from their rudiments to greatness not only through their characters and stories, but in their ability to deliver that story to the reader. Unfortunately, not all authors accomplish this. Some just stagnate. Some even regress. A sad but true tale, though completely opposite to the one I’ll paint for you today.
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From the very beginning you know THE WAY OF KINGS (Amazon) is a novel by Brandon Sanderson — you would know it even if his name wasn’t imposed over a Michael Whelan cover. Sanderson has made a name for himself through his imaginative magic systems, and TWoK is no different.

He starts with the pacing set at a sprint. Following a series prelude (yeah, there is a prelude, then a prologue), we are put right into the action of things with a mysterious assassin, Szeth. Right from the onset of the novel we get hints of political intrigue, and of shadowy organizations pulling strings like puppeteers. What it seems to us is that Brandon is trying to start faster than his previous novels. His habit has been the slow burn in pacing followed by an explosion of craziness. Not so much here. Is this a good thing, or a bad thing? Really it will depend on your personal taste.

Ah but we get ahead of ourselves.
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I like avocados. A good one will leave you longing for more without much effort. Soft, green flesh, that great nutty flavor, and all it needs is a bit of salt to provide, quite possibly, one of the finest snacks on the planet. Yum. I’m always on the lookout for some good Green.
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Call me spoiled if you want. After the likes of epic fantasy writers Erikson, Sanderson, and Butcher (and others), I’ve gotten used to the current trend of jumping right into the middle of the story. You could say I’m a girl who likes her some action. Ahem.

Alas, not all epic fantasy writers have gotten the hint. THE LAST STORMLORD by Glenda Larke (Amazon), reminds me of the epic fantasies of 20-odd years ago because the pacing is similar in its devotion to world-building without a visible purpose. There’s the standard young boy being trained whose abilities will change the world. A girl on the verge of womanhood, trapped in a life not of her choosing. I probably wouldn’t have minded STORMLORD if I haven’t already read it, like, one thousand times before in its various incarnations.
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Shadowspawn used to rule the Earth as gods. But you can get kind of lazy when you’re immortal and nearly indestructible. After thousands of years of cross-breeding with humans, today’s Shadowspawn posterity isn’t as pureblooded, making for all kinds of problems. Even worse, humans have over-populated the Earth and kind of taken over things. By the time you get around to dealing with the issue, you have to do something drastic, say, another plague to wipe out all the extra humans so you can reestablish yourself as the one in charge.
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Introduction: Before you read the review Dan Wells has crafted for you, there is something we at Elitist Book Reviews need to make clear: Dan Wells is a jerk-face. We mean this in the nicest way possible. He is an amazing author, a terrific friend, and a cylon (what’s not to like?). And yet, he is a jerk-face. We let him borrow the ARC to SHADES OF MILK AND HONEY (Amazon) with the intention of guest-reviewing it for us. He then promptly read, loved, and reviewed it on his website. The problem? It was supposed to be posted here first. We were given strict instructions that we could not post the review of Mary’s novel until it was released… and then Dan stole our copious amounts of thunder. Like we said: jerk-face.
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We know Lou Anders, and we know his style and what he is capable of. So when we picked up MASKED (Amazon), a superhero story anthology, we already knew we were going to have to reevaluate our appreciation for the genre. Superheroes, to us, have only ever been as interesting as their villains. Villains, in actuality, are the driving force behind the superhero tale. The reasons for this can be boiled down to the fact that the Heroes are almost always reactionary, waiting around for something bad to happen, and the Villains are the ones who have the grand plan or scheme.

It’s because of this that neither of us are big comic book gurus, or even fans. Did the two of us, a couple of hard-sells in the genre, enjoy the anthology? You bet your Bat-Mobile!
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A soldier-poet in a world where connections and subtly are everything, Shen Tai expects to lead an ordinary life. After the death of his father, he spends the required two year mourning period burying the bones of a twenty-year-old conflict in the mountains. His father was the former general of the Kitai army, and had spent many an evening lamenting that fruitless battle. No one else could be bothered to bury the dead because the angry ghosts of a hundred thousand men scared them away, but Tai is doing this to honor his dead father, despite the danger, and works those years easing the spirits of the former soldiers into their eternal rest.
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