Fantasy Book Reviews
Before we get started, given that this book is number 18 in the series, the review inevitably has spoilers for what's happened previously. This is unavoidable, but if you haven't read Battle Ground or indeed the 16...
I do not think of myself as a person of culture, but when I stop to think about it, I have likely been to more theatre productions, museums and Stately Homes than most people. I can thank my mother for this as being forced to go as a youth has made me appreciate them and want to go as an adult....
There's a shape of epic fantasy that a lot of us have grown up on. A sleepy village in the back of beyond, a clutch of young people on the edge of adulthood, a once-a-year ritual that lifts one or two of them out into...
Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
I am not sure if readers have noticed, but we have quietly entered a new Golden Era of Fantasy writing. There is a handful or more of established fantasy authors who have the experience and skill to be writing at the top of their game. Fantasy novels that are not just simple retellings of old...
A brief admission to start. I've just finished Twelve Months and realised, slightly to my embarrassment, that I never actually got round to writing a review for Battle Ground. So here, six years late, is that review. I will keep this one largely spoiler-free; the events of Battle Ground are by...
A short warning before the review: Peace Talks is the first half of a single story that concludes in Battle Ground, and certain late-book events spill across both volumes. I have kept the major plot resolutions and the...
A small note before the review: Skin Game is the kind of book that hides a lot of its best work in its second half, and to talk about it usefully I will need to touch on a few of the setup beats from the opening...
Twas in a café they first met, Romeo and Juliet. And twas the first day they fell into debt, because Rome-owed and Juli-eat. It feels to me that the entire system is rigged so that you never have quite enough money to escape, you work to live, and if you do not work, you do not eat. It is...
Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me, but in Shay Kauwe’s The Killing Spell, words will very much hurt you. In fact, words can be fashioned into spells to kill. Not the best in an everyday family situation where words can fly thick and fast, nor in a society...
I like when a genre becomes so embedded that as a whole, we can play with it. This has happened for years in comic books, even the films are so prevalent now that you get plenty of leftfield superhero movies. One genre that has been around longer and has even deeper roots is Fantasy, but has it...
A large part of fantasy novels is not really the destination, but the journey. The camaraderie that builds among a troop of characters as they travel to their destination, but what happens once they have arrived? In T Kingfisher’s Clockwork Boys four mismatched social pariahs set out to...
Naming your book The Last Phi Hunter comes with some idea that this will be the last of their kind, but Salinee Goldenberg proves this is not the case with a sequel, Way of the Walker. But is this Walker an actual Phi Hunter? If your job is to find and kill the undead (Phi), befriending them and...
A lot can happen during a siege, enough so that you do not have to have a book full of battles, you could have just one about the siege itself. This is the setting of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s latest in the The Tyrant Philosophers series, Pretenders to the Throne of God. We will meet new...
As a born cynic, I am always on the lookout for the angle in life and in fiction, but sometimes something is what it seems on the surface; wholesome. Not all books need to challenge the reader and leave them exhausted. Novels can be an escape, an entertainment, full of love and magic. Books and...
Find the latest Fantasy book reviews here. Fantasy as a genre can be very difficult to define but is usually said to encompass stories set in an alternative reality based on imagined fantastical elements like magic or the supernatural. This is the defining difference between science fiction and fantasy, science fiction deals with elements that are theoretically possible while fantasy deals with the improbable or impossible.
Fantasy can be most commonly associated with sword and sorcery stories however the genre can include contemporary (Harry Potter) and humorous (Tom Holt) tales. Fantasy, science fiction and horror can occasionally overlap and generally the term used to describe these novels is speculative fiction.
Fantasy fiction can trace it's roots all the way back to ancient mythology, especially Homer's Odyssey which was written in the 9th century BC. Homer's Odyssey chronicles the fictional adventures of a hero returning to Ithaca after the capture of Troy. The earliest surviving English text of fantasy origins is the poem Beowulf which dates back to 700 AD.
The most recognisable to modern audiences is perhaps the Legends of King Arthur and the knights of the round table. These stories have been told many times from Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur (around 1485 AD) to T. H. White's The Once and Future King (1958), Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon (1982) and Stephen Lawhead's Pendragon Cycle (1987).
The series that could be said to bring fantasy into the mainstream has to be Terry Brooks Sword of Shannara series, written in 1977 it was one of the first modern fantasy books to become a new york times best seller. Since then this has been repeated by David Eddings, Robert Jordan, Terry Good Kind and Terry Pratchett.
Here you can find fantasy book reviews from the big name authors to the self published and independant, it's the story that's always the star here.
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