Reviews :: Book Genre :: Fantasy

There are relatively few authors for whom I’ll buy physical copies of novellas. By and large, they end up being too short for the money they cost. Falls into the same category as Audible books that are only 3 or 4 hours long but still cost me a full credit. Not that length, necessarily, lines up with goodness, but it absolutely lines up with potential *amount* of goodness, yeah? When it came to this one, I found myself smack dab on the top of fence. After all, it was being released at essentially the same time as the next novel in the main series, and it had been forever since the last (first) book in the main series came out. What if the novella ended up being super important to the story? What if it was a connector? Gah! I just couldn’t do it. So, I bought the thing, and here we are.
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Yumi and the nightmare painter is book 3 in Brandon Sanderson’s “Year of Sanderson” and like TRESS OF THE EMERALD SEA (EBR Review) it sometimes has a fairytale quality to it, with a mind-bending setting, magic that helps the people survive a harsh world, and characters you can’t help but love despite their flaws.
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Shiori’s continuing story from SIX CRIMSON CRANES, begins in book 2, THE DRAGON’S PROMISE, as she travels with Seryu, her dragon friend, to the bottom of the sea, to meet the king of the dragons.

If you haven’t read SIX CRIMSON CRANES, then this book will not make much sense to you; it doesn’t make very a good standalone because you get a lot of important backstory, setting explanation, and magic development that will only make sense if you’ve read book 1. Otherwise what follows will be horrible spoilers. (You’ve been warned.)
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A friend recommended SIX CRIMSON CRANES, explaining that it’s a sweet story for young adults with romance and a creative re-telling of the traditional six swans fairytale.

And fortunately, that’s what it turned out to be.
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The great thing about Martha Wells is that even if you don’t read anything about the book beforehand, you can be guaranteed it is something different and unusual. And in a good way. WITCH KING is one such book.
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It’s not often I come across a modern book that’s been written from the 3rd-person omniscient viewpoint. Especially recently. For those of you not in the know, this means the story is told from an external perspective (like a god) that knows the thoughts and feelings of all characters, knows information that a given character doesn’t know but that you the reader should, and almost always employs the use of “head-jumping”.

There are very few instances where a book written in such a way will not turn me off very quickly. For me, an experiential reader, consuming a story from the viewpoint of one character, and then suddenly finding myself experiencing the story from the viewpoint of a different character, without some kind of obvious change in the narrative (a chapter end; a break in the text to denote a change of scene) is very disorienting and immediately off-putting.

Every once in a while though, a book written in this way will come along that doesn’t completely ruin the experience of the story for me. Almost invariably, this is because the story “sticks” to a single POV for the large majority of the time. I.e., minimal head-jumping. DUNE is one that immediately comes to mind, but that was written in another era completely.

I can’t think of any others. Though, I might be guilty of having some selective cognition here.

The point is that this book is a second that succeeded for me where others have failed.
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I feel like I owe Gareth Hanrahan an apology. I mean, that review I put up for his most recent book– Yeah. Not exactly the brightest shining star in the firmament. Not that I’m going to apologize for my opinion on it. Nope. Just that I ended up leaving it at the top of our site for the past two weeks. Totally meant to get this review up more quickly than I did to hopefully overshadow some of the negativity I’d left hanging around. Because, I think this guy has a stellar imagination and knows his stuff, and up until that most recent book I’ve thought that everything I’d read from him was pretty impressive. So, even though my review for this book will absolutely be spot-on as to what I thought about it in particular (no apologies, remember?), hopefully it’ll also help to wash away any lingering bad taste left in our reader’s mouths with regard to his stuff in general.

Because, MAN, this one was abso-freaking-awesome-tastic and you really need to read it (and the rest of the series, if you haven’t) right now.
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It’s been a long time since I’ve been really disappointed by a read. Guess I was about due for one.
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I mentioned in a previous review (HERE) that after thoroughly enjoying a short story by Patricia Briggs in that anthology, I was going to load myself up with her books and just read, read, read. Found a bundle of the first six in this series. Go me. Helps that we don’t have reviews up for the first four. Also chatted with V a little bit about it before writing up this review. Apparently she’d reviewed it a while ago (in her early years of doing so on another, now dead, site), and she was kind enough to send me a copy of it. So, this review will be somewhat of an amalgam of both our thoughts on the matter. But regardless, you should know that we both absolutely loved this thing.
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Occasionally, I’ll come across a book that just resonates with my inner core. At who I am, way down deep. This was one of those. The first time I saw the announcement–the author, the title, the cover–there just wasn’t any question. I was going to buy this book and it would be fabulous. I mean, look at that cover! How can that visual *not* just call to you? Maybe I’m biased by the fact that I’m a father and husband, by how hard I know life can be sometimes. So for me, pre-ordering this one was near instant, unknown publisher or not. Didn’t matter. I wanted to get this book into my greedy hands and devour it as soon as humanly possible.
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