Empire of Shadows by Alicia Wanstall-Burke
Toxic mother-daughter relationships are uncommon in fantasy. All too often, mothers are already dead on page one, or if Mama lives, she’s warm and nurturing. Even Cersei Lannister dotes on…
Toxic mother-daughter relationships are uncommon in fantasy. All too often, mothers are already dead on page one, or if Mama lives, she’s warm and nurturing. Even Cersei Lannister dotes on…
A little more than a month ago, I reviewed Quenby Olson’s Regency-era fantasy, Miss Percy’s Pocket Guide to the Care and Feeding of British Dragons on this site. In the…
I loved this book. I loved this book. I loved this book! I went back over the reviews I’ve written for Fantasy-Faction and found I’ve used love to describe aspects…
Growing up, we’re taught to always be kind and tell the truth, but as adults, are any of us truly virtuous? We walk past the panhandler with a muttered “sorry,”…
Great books sometimes have unlikeable protagonists. Take Madame Bovary, for example. I have to give props to Gustave Flaubert for crafting such a beautifully brutal examination of shallow, status-chasing jackasses…
There are words you know and use all the time, but you’ve never thought about their actual dictionary definitions. Rhapsody was one of those words for me. I frequently waxed…
A while back on the Fantasy-Faction Facebook group, I posted a question asking people to name books with endings that were so good they raised the overall rating of the…
In the 1990s and 2000s, my reading tastes shifted from fantasy to historical fiction, and consequently I not only didn’t read but hadn’t even heard of authors like Steven Erickson…
First person narratives don’t naturally jive with me. Those in present tense bring to mind loquacious toddlers who narrate their existence to doting parents, and the ones in past tense…
The war is over, but something is rotten in the state of Eidyn. With a ragged peace in place, demons burn farmlands, violent Reivers roam the wilds and plague has…
While preparing for the birth of his first child, Chrys Valerian is tasked with uncovering the group responsible for a series of missing threadweavers—those able to see and manipulate threadlight.…
Scott Kaelen’s debut novel, The Blighted City, was a semifinalist in the Fourth Self-Published Fantasy Blog Off (SPFBO4), and one of my favorite novels to emerge from that annual fantasy…