Browsing all articles in Reviews.
Blackwing by Ed McDonald
Ed McDonald’s debut is an impressive tour-de-force of imaginative worldbuilding, gritty characterisation and absorbing writing. Ryhalt Galharrow’s story comes with the intimacy of a first-person point of view. McDonald gives his protagonist a voice as distinctive and world weary as Daniel Polansky’s Warden from The Low Town trilogy. Like the Warden, Galharrow is a soldier […]
Games Wizards Play by Diane Duane
And so we’ve reached the end of the line. Not for my writing for Fantasy-Faction, of course. That, hopefully, will carry on for a long time. No, I mean my reviews of the Young Wizards series, as this month I read the latest installment, Games Wizards Play. It probably doesn’t surprise anyone at this point […]
The Witchwood Crown by Tad Williams
Spoiler Warning: This is the third and, for now, final* installment in Fantasy-Faction’s Osten Ard retrospective. With the release of The Witchwood Crown, Tad Williams has returned to the land from which his greatest tale was born. What follows contains spoilers for the entirety of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn and The Heart of What Was […]
Devil’s Call by J. Danielle Dorn
“On a dark night in the summer of 1859, three men enter the home of Dr Matthew Callahan and shoot him dead in front of his pregnant wife. Unbeknownst to them, the mother of this unborn child hails from a long line of women gifted in ways that scare most folks – the witches of […]
The Death and Life of Schneider Wrack by Nate Crowley
I first encountered the mad genius that is Nate Crowley via an article on Tor.com last year. In it, the author spoke of how the ocean inspired in him a sense of both wonder and dread; his morbid (and nightmare-inducing) fascination with this topic resonated with my own, and naturally I made a beeline for […]
HarperVoyager: ‘Coldmaker’ Announcement
A number of the HarperVoyager team (authors and editors) are over in Helsinki, celebrating WorldCon. They’ve been teasing us with pictures of a great event and selfies with George R.R. Martin… Check out this picture of Fantasy-Faction favourites Peter Newman and Emma Newman interviewing George R.R. Martin on a special WorldCon edition of Tea & […]
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood – Book Review
When I kicked off the Fantastic Literature column, I mentioned that Hulu was producing a series based on Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. And that television show has helped spur a renaissance around the 1985 book, with libraries seeing waitlists for the book run a mile long, and the iconic costumes popping up at state […]
Urskuul’s Reading Circle: The Management Style of the Supreme Beings by Tom Holt
Dear Members of Urskuul’s Reading Circle, This isn’t something I enjoy doing, but I have to remind you all that we do have rules that members are expected to follow. While you may think the rules appear arbitrary or unnecessary, there are good reasons behind all of them. Xerxes Law, our suspiciously, conveniently named resident […]
The Belgariad by David Eddings – Over Thirty?
Hands down, one of the greatest fantasy series of all time. You’re still here? Great. The books, the first five that make The Belgariad, are over thirty years old and still in print. There are many a book, and series, that has gone out of print in that time. Clearly, this series has long term […]
A Wizard of Mars by Diane Duane
Maybe it’s because Mars is named for the Roman god of war, but something about the Red Planet has captured human imagination, or at least the imagination of Western media. Think about it: when there are invaders from within our own solar system, where do they most often come from? It’s a trope that’s over […]
The Hollow Crown by Jeff Wheeler
Spoiler Warning: While what follows is a spoiler-free look at The Hollow Crown, discussion of the 4th book in a series and the start of a new trilogy necessarily “spoils” much of what came before. If you plan on reading Wheeler’s Kingfountain novels but haven’t quite gotten around to it yet, suffice it to say […]
The Court of Broken Knives by Anna Smith-Spark
As I recall, the first rumours I heard of the book that became The Court of Broken Knives was seeing the author’s lament on social media that an agent had found it too brutal, too gory, too grimdark to contemplate representing it. Nonetheless – as has happened to so many authors – one agent’s poison […]
