Browsing all articles in Reviews.
Sword of Kaigen by M. L. Wang
The Poppy War’s darkness meets The Last Airbender’s elemental magic. Being a second world conflict between China and Japan, M. L. Wang’s Sword of Kaigen brought to my mind R. F. Kuang’s meteoric debut, The Poppy War. With all the hype surrounding it, The Poppy War was my most anticipated release of 2018, but one […]
Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng
“So desperate are you to speak to us that you see us everywhere. You look across your borders, your walls, and instead of your neighbours, you see us. As your ships sail further and countries and continents discover each other, you see not each other. You see us. You want to see us.” Jeannette Ng’s […]
The Forgetting Moon by Brian Lee Durfee
Spoilers Warning: This review contains minor spoilers for The Forgetting Moon. Please read with caution if you have yet to finish the book. “Bloodwood assassins have hunted us your entire life, boy!” Brian Lee Durfee is an epic new force in the dark fantasy genre and one I feel that can stand alongside the likes […]
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
A world divided. A queendom without an heir. An ancient enemy awakens. The House of Berethnet has ruled Inys for a thousand years. Still unwed, Queen Sabran the Ninth must conceive a daughter to protect her realm from destruction–but assassins are getting closer to her door. Ead Duryan is an outsider at court. Though she […]
The Blighted City by Scott Kaelen
The Blighted City begins with a quest and ends with a beautiful contemplation of filial love, loyalty, duty, and grief in a story that blazes a trail out of standard epic fantasy into a really fresh, original science fantasy narrative. The novel starts with an engaging first chapter in which Maros, a retired mercenary and […]
The Coilhunter Chronicles by Dean F. Wilson – Spoiler Free Series Review
Steampunk Batman meets A Fistful of Dollars (and later, the Borg). Despite Fantasy-Faction originally being a British website, I am pretty sure that everyone knows Americans romanticize the Wild West: the freewheeling setting, the gunslinger vigilante who stands up to the bad guys when the government can’t. It might as well be the bedrock of […]
Is Voltron: Legendary Defender Worth Watching?
The final season of Dreamworks’ Voltron: Legendary Defender dropped on 14th December 2018. Originally launching on Netflix in 2016, this re-boot of the 80s sci-fi adventure cartoon captured the hearts of both new and old fans alike. With a fluid animation style similar to Avatar: The Last Airbender and with a phenomenal voice actor cast, […]
Seven Deadly Swords by Peter Sutton
For every sin, a sword For every sword, a curse For every curse, a death Reymond joined the Crusades to free the Holy Land from the Saracens and win glory for himself. Instead, with six others, he found himself bound under a sorcerer’s curse: the Seven Sins personified. Doomed to eternal life and with the […]
This Dreaming Isle edited by Dan Coxon – An Anthology by Unsung Stories
This Dreaming Isle by Unsung Stories is a collection of supernatural short stories by different authors inspired by British folklore, British history and the British landscape. Not quite one thing or another, it wanders back and forth across the shadowy borderland between urban fantasy, gothic horror and grown-up fairy-tales. Dreaming is the operative word here, […]
Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi
If GRRM wrote a mix of The Incredibles and Avatar, with a necromancer heroine. Last year, Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone came in second to RF Kuang’s The Poppy War on my personal list of Most Anticipated Debuts. After seeing Ms. Adeyemi’s interview with Jimmy Fallon (he lauded her success at an early […]
Firefly: A Traveler’s Companion to the ‘Verse
I am a huge Firefly nerd. Like, seriously huge. I’ve watched the show and the movie many times. I took a movie criticism class in college and compared Star Wars and Serenity, just because I could. When I left my first full-time job, my coworker gave me Firefly comics as a parting gift. When I […]
Small Press, Big Stories: 2018 in Review
Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape. So, said the great Sir Terry Pratchett, and in the last year we needed fantasy more than ever to keep ourselves from falling backwards. Fortunately, there was a hell of a lot of good fantasy about and, […]
