As a short story companion to the author’s His Dark Materials trilogy, this attractive volume offers a diverting look at Lyra two years after the events in The Amber Spyglass. The majority of the book is devoted to the telling of Lyra and the Birds, which outlines a dangerous situation in which Lyra must decide who she can trust. Her decisions are always vital, not only to her own safety but to that of others. Readers of the trilogy will recognize the responsibility Lyra carries on her adolescent shoulders as a standard of her young life, forced upon her and held with good intent but not always with the best judgment, as one might expect from a teenager. When a witch threatens a scholar in whom Lyra has developed an interest, she rushes to help, but her impetuousness blinds her to alternative possibilities and consequences.
This red cloth bound package is graced with detailed engravings by John Lawrence but marred by extraneous material that is annoying rather than enhancing. A preface with instruction on connections between these materials falls into this category as well. The “things” to which it refers, including a map of Oxford, glued to a page about a third of the way through the story; a picture postcard from Oxford, with a note written by Mary (presumably Dr. Malone of HDM) to a former companion at the convent; a page on the history of Oxford; and a brochure for a cruise on the Imperial Orient Shipping Line in London, with the arrival in Smyrna on Monday, May 11 circled and marked “Café Antalya, Suleiman Square, 11 a.m.” clutter and interrupt the story.
This is one for HDM readers of all ages, but would not appeal to those unfamiliar with the preceding titles. Lyra’s past plays a critical role in her choices and reactions in Lyra and the Birds. There are many references made to incidents, characters, and relationships necessary to Lyra’s experience in this short story that would alienate readers who do not have this frame of reference.
The audio book, which runs short and sweet at 45 minutes, is primarily narrated by Jo Wyatt. Wyatt, who plays the excited teenage girl very convincingly in adaptations of Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty and Meg Cabot’s Avalon High, follows her portrayal of Lyra in HDM with an appropriate range of expression, from eagerness to self-doubt, for the spontaneous and open girl readers have followed since 1995. The CD comes with a slightly smaller copy of the map that is included with the book, but it is tucked neatly out of the way and as such, not an issue.

Tracy Hickman Presents: The Anvil of Time is a new DragonLance trilogy. Book one is The Sellsword, by Cam Banks.

The prologue of the story introduces us to the mysterious Journeyman. He is tasked with using the Anvil of Time to watch history but not to interfere. Our tale then begins 71 years earlier. The War of the Lance has ended but all is not roses in the land of Nordmaar. Highmaster Rivven Cairn, disciple of Emperor Ariakas himself, and her Red Wing of the dragonarmies still rule these lands.

Our central character is Vanderjack. We know he’s the central character because he is mentioned in the first sentence of every chapter of the novel except two. I don’t say that as a criticism. It was obviously done intentionally. Vanderjack is a sellsword. He’s The Sellsword. At the beginning of the story he’s low on coin and seemingly cursed with a haunted sword, the magical Lifecleaver given to him by his mother.

But circumstances find Vanderjack. He’s a man of action and he’s always in the middle of things. Thus, it became something of a matter of intrigue to see what he was going to be in the middle of at the start of a chapter. It wasn’t uncommon for Vanderjack to be surrounded. When he DIDN’T lead off the chapter, that break in the pattern was significant as well.

The Sellsword finds himself in the employ of a noble who wants him to recover something of great value to him. Vanderjack’s plans begin to go awry when he has to take the Baron’s assistant with him. Things become more complicated when they are joined by the gnome warrior and inventor (like all gnomes are) Theodenes, a former adventuring companion of Vanderjack’s. Things went sour the last time they saw each other though, and Theodenes had a score to settle.

After Vanderjack, Gredchen the Baron’s assistant, and Theodenes set off, things got more and more complicated as the group came under attack in their travels, and made enemies. When one makes an enemy of a dragon Highlord, things become more complicated indeed. Vanderjack also learned that the job he was doing wasn’t exactly what he’d thought. However, the need to settle some scores, some old and some new, continued to drive The Sellsword, as his assignment become more than just doing the work and collecting the money.

Through it all, Vanderjack was a sarcastic, trash talking “action hero”, who had a one-liner for every occasion. The dialogue was not classic fantasy. It featured back and forth banter between adventuring companions, between heroes and villains, and between villains. That term is rapid-fire dialogue and I enjoyed it here. Personally it reminded me of the way our characters interacted in my years of playing D&D, rather than the more formal and stylish manner of speaking from The Lord of the Rings.

I could easily imagine Vanderjack saying “Yipee-Ki-Ay Mu…” ahem…you know the rest, Bruce Willis style as he cleaves into a draconian with Lifecleaver. I ate it up, I admit. I loved Vanderjack. He is a very different type character than what I’m used to reading in DragonLance. He’s a man of questionable morality, as much interested in profit as anything else. However, in the spirit of DragonLance, some people are destined for greater things. Sometimes they just need a nudge in the right direction. While this was a bit of a grittier DragonLance, it didn’t turn the principles of the franchise on their ear.

At first I wondered how interesting a gnome character could be. But I liked Theo. His character worked very well with Vanderjack. I did wonder at times exactly why the gnome would travel with his old sellsword companion given how badly their last encounter ended. Don’t think Cam Banks left a plot hole in there. He left some mystery and intrigue in the story, and held some cards up his sleeve until the very end.

Our interesting heroes also had interesting villains to play off of, the determined Highlord and the devious Dark Robed Mage. No, not THAT Dark Robed Mage, but another one.

It appears that book two of the series is not going to focus on Vanderjack. That’s unfortunate, but never say never I suppose. There is a thread that links the books though. That would be the Journeyman. We got a little bit of a flavor of him in book one. Enough to be intriguing. I expect that we’ll learn even more as other authors pick up the series

I will admit that I had some doubts coming into this book. Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman ARE DragonLance. Every one of their books that I’ve read have been gold. Once other authors began writing books in the series, they definitely became hit or miss.

Cam Banks definitely hit with The Sellsword however. I learned that Banks has been a managing editor with Margaret Weis Productions. So in a manner of speaking The Sellsword was kept “in the family”. That’s a good thing.

The plot was fast paced and action packed. However it wasn’t a one-dimensional creampuff either. Maybe not as deep and layered (yet?) as the original DragonLance Chronicles, but it was no slouch. I enjoyed how every chapter began with a “Vanderjack moment”. That made me laugh. I got a good chuckle out of the fact that one of the major cities is named “Wulfgar”. I appreciate a good tip of the cap to R.A. Salvatore, being a fan of his work as well.

If I have a complaint it’s that the book was too short. It came in at 307 pages. Give us a bit more of Vanderjack cracking jokes and putting on a cocky façade in the face of danger. We got sword battles, aerial battles, gladiatorial arenas, magic and more, all packed into 307 pages of an “action movie story” Give us 400 pages, and give us even more I say.. Or maybe the plan was to leave them wanting more.

I’m going to give The Sellsword by Cam Banks a very solid 7.5 stars. I hope we haven’t seen the last of The Sellsword. I also want to see how these events play into the events in the other two books. I certainly hope the other two books are published, given the state of affairs, or lack thereof, with the DragonLance license and Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.

Irish author John Connolly is perhaps best known for his crime stories that hover on the edges between traditional detective stories and supernatural horror, but with The Book of Lost Things, Connolly travels deeper into fantasy-land, reinventing age-old fairy tales in a beautiful and poignant story of childhood and loss.

Set in England during the beginning of World War II, The Book of Lost Things is the story of the 12 year-old David and his struggle to come to terms with the death of his mother, his father’s quick re-marriage and the birth of a baby sister. David is especially close to his mother, sharing her love of literature. Her illness and death is an earth-shattering experience for him, and it is this loss that the whole narrative revolves around, which is already hinted at in the very beautiful opening paragraph:

David’s mother has shared her love of fairy tales with him, and she has taught him that these old stories are important. The fairy tales have a special power. They are stories that come “alive” in the telling and they have the power to take root in and transform the reader, and the power to create their own reality. After his mother’s death, these ancient stories begin to intrude upon David’s reality. Books start to whisper to him and he receives episodic visitations from the Crooked Man, a strange and frightening figure.

About six months after his mother’s death, David’s father introduces him to Rose. She works at the hospice where David’s mother ended her life, and it quickly becomes apparent that she is in a relationship with his father, a relationship that most likely began while his mother still lived. David’s father and Rose marry not long after this introduction, she gives birth to a son, Georgie, and the new family moves into an old country house that belongs to Rose’s family. This house contains its own tragic story, a story that becomes intertwined with David’s. In his new room, David finds a book with dark and horrifying fairy tales, a book that once belonged to Rose’s uncle Jonathan, who, as a child, disappeared with his foster-sister Anna many years ago, never to be found again.

David is both attracted and repulsed by the tales in Jonathan’s book, and the narrative subtly builds an atmosphere of quite menace as David continues to hear the books and see the Crooked Man while he at the same time clashed repeatedly with his step-mother. He hates his new life; he hates his step-mother, his half-brother. He misses his mother, and his father who is emotionally absent. And the reality of war is ever present as the backdrop of this more intimate battleground of familial conflict. This atmosphere of conflict and menace comes to a head when the war in the family and the war in the world briefly collide. David’s resentment of Rose’s intrusion into his family finally explodes in a heated argument, and the very same night, a bomber airplane crashed in the garden. At precisely this point, the membranes of David’s reality violently ruptures, tearing him away from his known world and catapulting him into a strange and frightening place, where he hears his mothers voice, calling for him to save her, to bring her back.

David finds himself in a strange forest where the trees bleed and the flowers have the faces of dead children, and where blood-thirsty wolves walk and speak like men. Aided by a woodsman, David sets out to find the king of the land, who owns The Book of Lost Things, which might help him find his way home again. David has to negotiate many horrifying dangers during his quest, sometimes aided by different helpers, sometimes alone – all the time haunted by his mother’s voice, and shadowed by the mysterious Crooked Man, who wants something from him. When he finally reaches the king’s castle and finds the Book of Lost Things, David learns that things are not what they seem, and that he has to make a choice that might have severe consequences for himself and his family.

In The Book of Lost Things John Connolly engages with several different, yet interrelated literary traditions. His novel is structured as a portal-quest fantasy in the tradition of C.S. Lewis, where the protagonist enters parallel world, but the world David enter into draws extensively upon the tradition of fairy tales with an emphasis on their darker aspects, which touches upon the horror genre. Connolly handles these different aspects extremely well, weaving them into a coherent whole with an emotional underpinning that is both poignant and psychologically truthful.

The main part of the narrative takes place in the parallel world that David enters, but Connolly manages to keep up a continuous doubt about its reality. It is a world that is both real and tangible, in the sense that David interacts with it, yet also dream-like and hallucinatory, its elements made up well-known fairy tales re-told and re-invented, mixed up with elements from other books that David has been in contact with. Thus David’s encounter with a group of dwarves living with a petty house-tyrant in a dysfunctional domestic situation offers a rather funny and whimsical interpretation of the fairy tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves filtered through a text book on Communism! Thus, the kingdom that David journeys through is in many ways his own creation, it is the amalgam of all the stories he knows, mixed and reordered into a new configuration.

In a sense, John Connolly highlights the workings of the traditional quest fantasy by making explicit the fact that the external quest often stands as a metaphor for the internal journey of the protagonist. David’s quest through his dark and twisted fantasy-land is driven by his need to work through his grief, to accept the loss of his mother and the presence of his new brother – a need that is not met in his own reality due to the emotional absence of his father. But at the same time, Connolly leaves the reader in doubt about the actual presence of this fairy tale parallel world. It both is and is not real, for The Book of Lost Things is also a story about the power of stories.

The Book of Lost Things is brilliant take on a modern fairy tale – dark and scary but also beautiful and moving in its depiction of a child’s loss, grief and ambivalent jealousy as is it filtered through the fantastic. The emotional underpinning of Connolly’s story is its most powerful element, but his re-workings of popular fairy tales also work very well. Their emphasis on the horrific touches upon all that is scary, while at the same time addressing the fact that most of the fairy tales we know today were heavily edited in the 19th century. The paperback edition of Connolly’s novel comes with an appendix, where the author explains the origins of each of the tales he re-invents in the novel, accompanied by a reprint of the “original” tales (from textual sources such as the Brothers Grimm). The appendix is also the only gripe I have with this otherwise wonderful novel as Connolly unfortunately not only explains the origins of each tale but also proceeds to explain their use in his narrative, thus essentially interpreting his own work for the reader. This is a rather heavy-handed move, but since it is located in an appendix, it can be skipped.

Take the political intrigue of various factions of church, state, subjugated peoples of an empire, and religious heretics in a Renaissance setting and combine with magic and a well-realized fantasy setting and the result is A Magic of Twilight by S.L. Farrell, the first, yet stand-alone, volume of the Nessantico Cycle.

Nessantico, the city and empire has endured a period of relative peace under the leadership of its long-time ruler – Kraljica Marguerite ca’Ludovici. This period of peace has allowed for elements within the ruling nobility, the lands of The Holdings, and factions of the religious order known as the Concènzia Faith to separately plot their own ambitions. The Kraljica and Archigos Dhosti ca’Millac of the Concènzia face a rough road as they are awakened to the growing dangers encircling them.

The main narrative follows the path of a of a minor noble, Ana cu’Seranta as she gains the favor of the Archigos Dhosti within the Concènzia. Ana is gifted in the magical force at the heart of the faith and is soon overwhelmed by the ambitions of the higher nobility, the demands of the faith, and a personal brush with a heretical sect at odds with all she’s ever believed in as she is taken into the Archigos’ council. In these struggles lie the future of The Holdings and Nessantico.

A Magic of Twilight represents another example of a fairly standard epic fantasy framework – an adolescent rises above her roots to attain power and save the day with inborn magical skill. A couple of the variances to the common clichés are the Renaissance setting and use of a female lead character, though the tropes of epic fantasy are embraced rather than subverted. The key is that A Magic of Twilight is skillfully realized and balances well the needs of world-building, characterization and plot. Trope and cliché have their roots in universal truths of the human condition and in competent hands can both entertain and enlighten. While A Magic of Twilight may not rise to a level of enlightenment, it does provide an entertaining and addictive read.

The strength of A Magic of Twilight resides in politics. There are no less than six factions of competing interests at play – complete with assassination, massive armies, and powerful magic. The interplay of these factions and their shifting alliances keeps the reader alert and interested while providing just enough surprises along the way. The portrayal of these Machiavellian politics rivals writers like Robert Jordan at their best, even approaching the skill of George R.R. Martin, if not actually attaining it.

The characterization generally holds up well across the spectrum of point of view and supporting characters. While all the common roles are present, Farrell manages to go beyond caricature characterization to provide an interesting depth. My only real complaint with the characterization is with some of his choices surrounding the main character, Ana. To round her out with a depth of hurt and despair, Farrell chooses to follow the well trodden path of sexual abuse. This approach both benefits and detracts from the character that Ana could be and would drive any follower of feminist theory into a fury.

The primary aspect of A Magic of Twilight detracting form its readability is the choice of naming and the hierarchical titles. The liberal use of apostrophes and made up titles brings the pace to a crawl – especially in the beginning. While this is somewhat effective at creating an otherworld sense of atmosphere, it often proves to be a confusing stumbling block that will likely sour many a reader. The inclusion of an informative Appendix may help and please some, but does little to improve the pace of the narrative.

A Magic of Twilight presents a familiar fantasy epic in a new wrapping that should appeal to fans of the genre while providing an entertaining and addicting read. The story is complete and stands well on its own, though this is the first volume of the larger story of the Nessantico Cycle.

Bitterwood by James Maxey is on its surface a fantasy tale of dragons versus humans. Our titular character is Bitterwood. Notice his name is not Mellowwood. He is not a laid back easygoing man. Dragons have ruined his like and he’s….bitter. Bitterwood has vowed not to rest until he has hunted and killed every dragon in the world. Despite their power and their position of rulership over humans in the world, the name Bitterwood still inspires fear, as he is a man with nothing to lose with the expertise and will to kill dragons. That is his only ambition in life, and his motivation is born from personal vengeance not the cause of humanity as a whole.

Humans being oppressed by dragons, and an anti-hero obsessed with delivering vengeance despite overwhelming odds are pretty standard s for a fantasy story. The biggest question would be whether Bitterwood could bring a twist to the story to rise above the average

Bitterwood did not take long to toss out the first morsel when a Southern Style fire and brimstone preacher comes to a village preaching the salvation of God. Blessed with inhuman strength and endurance he seems to be the very messenger of God. That’s certainly unexpected in a dragon ruled world of fantasy, and it’s a spark that kickstarts the story from the get-go.

As we progress through the story, in the presence and in flashback, I feared for awhile that the story would turn into a complicated story of political intrigue and powerplay within the court of the dragon king Albekizan. Instead individual characters moved back to the forefront to give me someone to latch onto as I read the story. Personally if I’m going to read a story high on the political intrigue, it had better be written by Robert Jordan or George R.R. Martin. Even Jordan’s plots became so complex and intertwined that I began to get lost in the intricacies as The Wheel of Time got deep into the series. So I was beginning to get nervous as we saw the interplay between the King’s sons, his royal mage, his royal biologens, and his insane, murderous brother.

King Albekizan was determined to exterminate the human race in revenge for the death of his favorite son. Many in his inner circle disagreed with this plan, and even desired to overthrow him and bring forth a new age for the race of dragons. Most of the motivations here had nothing to do with altruism, but rather personal agendas.

The book then moved some characters to the forefront and provided some sympathetic characters through which to tell the story. That allayed any concerns that I had and got the story flowing again after it had been in danger of stagnating a bit.

We learn that there is much more to this world and to the story than what had previously been apparent. As more twists are parceled out, Bitterwood becomes more of a fantasy/science fiction story.

I liked that part of the story evolution a lot, and became more and more engrossed in the story as it went along. While these more science fiction elements were intriguing to me and added to the story in the way that they were incorporated they didn’t affect the overall world, nor have any bearing on the war that was brewing between dragons and humans. If those elements are to be used to their full potential we would need to see them expanded in the additional books of the Dragon Age series.

It was these elements that added the unpredictable into a story that was predicable on the larger scale. The story gave us unexpected alliances, secret plans, betrayal, daring escapes, and heroic victory against overwhelming odds. There’s our basic scoop of chocolate ice cream. It’s good. The science fiction that James Maxey sprinkles into his recipe are the fudge chunks. They make it better.

When I say science fiction don’t expect spaceships streaking through the sky unloading arsenals of laser weapons. Things are handled more subtly and expertly than that, and I thought that it provided the gem of the story. The backstory of Bitterwood, and his character development that was intertwined into the story was more interesting than the character in the present day portions of the story. He’s definitely a flawed hero, if he can even be called a hero. Perhaps he will blossom in future books but he wasn’t the most interesting character in the story, or even the second most interesting. Bitterwood is not a hero. He’s just a man with a grudge, a lot of arrows, and a knack for using them to kill dragons. Many of our science fiction pieces swirl around Bitterwood though, so his story is still of interest within the novel. He does also begin to show signs of wanting some purpose in his life other than to kill dragons. I suppose that’s a classic portion of the journey of a hero, so I don’t believe that Bitterwood will end up taking a backseat in the novel or series named after him, even if that happened to an extent in this book.

I’ll be interested to see who the central character ends up being. Jandra, the 16 year old human apprentice to a dragon mage would be my candidate and was my favorite character in the story.

I give Bitterwood a 7.5. The fantasy portion of the story, taken alone, was above average, on the strength of the elaborate focus on dragon society and culture. It was the other twists that made this an even more interesting tale and raised my rating a bit. For this series, if in fact this is the beginning of one, to truly remain above average the pieces of the larger world as a whole and some of its history and truths needs to play a larger role in the story. Hopefully they will be more than just interesting addendum to the story. Bitterwood promises much. We’ll have to see if it delivers in its sequels.

Embrace the Night, Karen Chance’s third volume in the Cassandra Palmer series is a fitting sequel to the first two. Fast paced and filled with faeries, kids, vampires, mages, ghosts, incubi, gargoyles, magic spells, evil plots, backstabbing and surprises – this one follows the lead of the first two and adds in a bit more of each to ‘kick it up a notch’ so to speak. In this novel, Cassie is now Pythia, the most powerful living clairvoyant with the charge of keeping the current timeline from being corrupted through unscrupulous use of time travel. Cassie’s familiarity with vampires and ghosts is an aid to her for this post but she has just a few tiny little obstacles to surmount. The first issue she has to deal with is a geis placed upon her by the very old and very powerful vampire Mircea. Just for complications sake, during one of her trips to the past, she accidentally caused the geis to be intensified. Another problem she must manage is her deal with the king of the faeries. She has agreed to retrieve an ancient book of magic for him. Not just any book but one written personally by Merlin and sought after by everyone who is anyone in the magical community. It hasn’t even been seen in hundreds of years, yet she has to find it and recover it. Working against her are the mage’s Silver Circle and various factions of this or that group that either want to kill her or control her because of her power.

Cassie, however, has friends. She has the permanently cranky Pritkin, war mage extraordinaire who is not only an expert on demons, but the son of one himself. Can she trust him? She also has Casanova, an incubus in the employ of her former tormentor, crime boss and vampire Tony. Can she trust him to not betray her to Tony? Then there are the gargoyles who illegally work the kitchen of the casino where she’s hiding out, Francoise a powerful witch transported from the past, and of course, Billy, her gambler ghost friend.

The action begins immediately and carries through to the final page. This one goes quickly and drags you along for the ride. Full of quirky humor, a bit of steamy romance, and lots of inventive magic and mayhem it is an enjoyable ride to follow along as Cassie attempts to control her gift, save her life and those of her friends as well as to get the magic, faerie and vampire communities off her back. Being new to the post of Pythia, she has to learn as she goes. Her jumps through time seem to be both too easy in a technical manner, as she decides she must go to a certain place and time and does so – even though in the last book it was explained that her magic was tied to a disarray of the timeline and that would be the only way she would travel back in time and would also dictate when she arrived; and too inconsistent – as her multiple leaps bring her physical discomfort some times but not others.

All in all a very engaging book that had me leaping through the pages, and since it is nearly double the size of the previous two, it kept me engaged for a decent amount of time. Now that Cassie is getting settled into the Pythia role, I expect that the series can branch out from personal-to-her stories to more stories of her working at the role of Pythia and keeping the timeline intact. I will definitely be interested in finding out what happens next.

My first experience with Tad Williams was when I picked up his novel, "City of Golden Shadow." I found the book's opening, in which one of the main characters experiences scenes from World War I, to be marvelously descriptive and quite riveting. Though I found the culmination of that book series to be rather disappointing, I moved on to more of Williams' books. I read his "Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn" saga, which I found more enjoyable, but was once again disappointed by the ending. I then tackled "Shadowmarch," which was so bogged down I could hardly finish it. After all of these lengthy works, I wanted to try something that would give me more of what I liked about Tad Williams without the sheer weight of pages. That led me to try, "The War of the Flowers."

In this standalone novel, I was soon rewarded with exactly what I had hoped for. Williams' gift for wonderful descriptive scenes was again present as I began reading. The scenes and events involving Theo and his mother stand out as some of the most poignant I've ever read.

The premise of the book is interesting, if not completely new to fantasy readers. Theo, the main character, finds himself transported to the land of Faerie and encounters danger and adventure as he is caught up in the affairs of the ruling houses, named for flowers. I found the title misleading, as actual war in the sense of pitched battles and combat heroics is not a major element of the plot.

The book is not so much about fantastic elements, though these are certainly present, as it is about interaction between its well-developed characters. Many are dark, with sinister aspects hinted at and revealed slowly by the author. Theo begins as a sympathetic loser, but grows as the story progresses. Love interests abound throughout and feature prominently in his fate. There are some aspects of "Romeo and Juliet" here, in fact, though with a less tragic outcome.

There is some social commentary as well, though I perceived it to be understated, perhaps even underdeveloped. The inhabitants of Faerie, in an interesting twist for a fantasy novel, are discovering all the problems of industrialized society, class inequality, exploitation, and greed.

Unfortunately, the excellence of the early parts of the book begins to wane by the middle to late chapters. This is a common problem with many of Williams' books, in my opinion. The mysterious elements in the plot begin to be explained -- but the details seem overly contrived. I was disappointed with some of the plot twists, and others I found predictable. In a few cases, I felt as though I was left hanging with no explanation at all.

These complaints would have been forgivable but for the end of the story. It almost seemed as though the author had lost interest in the book chapters ago, and just needed to get it wrapped up so it would be finished.

In fairness, I enjoyed reading this book, flaws and all. Tad Williams once again succeeds in creating another world for the reader to explore, though at times the writing is frustrating. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a short -- if 700 pages may be called short – introduction to the style of Tad Williams. His best and worst are both present in this novel.

Magic Burns is the second in a new series from Ilona Andrews. In the first book, Magic Bites, we are introduced to Kate Daniels a magical mercenary whose heritage and experience has given her the ability to handle herself in difficult situations. Living in Atlanta after a magical cataclysm that renders technology unreliable on a regular basis, the magical pulses that are echoes of this magical upheaval occur in an unfixed pattern except for the large ‘flare’ that happens every seven years. That Flare is coming soon and apparently some magical beings are out to utilize that Flare to escape their prison and make Atlanta their new base of operations. Since these destructive demons intend to use the human race as fodder, Kate must work to stop their plan. Kate discovered all of this while searching for the mother of an orphaned waif who seems to have a great deal of innate magic herself.

This was a very fitting sequel to the first book, taking up nearly at the same time that the first closed. As a character, Kate seems a bit more fragile mentally than your average magic wielding heroine. Her past, including a dangerously powerful father and a murdered partner keep her from exuding the usual invulnerability. Her relationship with the Beast Lord is both convincing and compelling while being a touch out of the ordinary. Kate still kicks demon butt though when needed and typically gets herself in trouble with her smart mouth. While parts of the timeline for the magical catastrophe and certain areas of logic that Andrews used to constrain and explain her world seemed a bit sketchy to me; her characters, plot, magic and adventure carry the story along nicely so that this will not be a deterrent to any but the most pedantic.

I found this to be a satisfying, if short, urban fantasy adventure in the line of Patricia Briggs and Jim Butcher. Like their characters, Andrews’ heroine is a bit of an outsider who does not fit comfortably in one category and thus is able to cross differing cultures without undue difficulties. In my opinion, this book was definitely enjoyable enough for me to keep an eye out for the next in the series. I’ll give it a 7.

Tick, an introverted and intelligent young man suddenly receives a mysterious letter. By opening it, Tick launches himself on an adventure of a lifetime. Each subsequent letter holds a quirky and sometimes humorous clue, promising Tick danger if he continues and harm to others if he quits. Intrigued and compelled, he pursues each clue vigorously in spite of the risk involved. The mysterious clues drag him across the country and introduce him to a spitfire Italian girl and an all-American jock from California. Banding together, the trio commits to seeing the mystery through.

At the root of it all are concepts of time and reality, the forces that bind and drive creation. In The Thirteenth Reality, Tick discovers more than one reality exists. Life as he knows it continues in Reality Prime while as many as thirteen other Earths continue on different planes of existence. If this seems overwhelming, don’t worry. Dashner lays out his concept of parallel realities in a manner young readers can understand. Even the basis of quantum physics, aka kyoopy, becomes approachable!

I enjoy how Dashner portrays Tick’s relationship with his family. Too many times, parents are viewed as either the idiot contingency or the evil overseers. Not here. Tick’s sisters drive him nuts but he still obviously loves them. Tick’s dad is a wonderful character that supports and trusts him even though this means letting go of his little boy. In a world where Tick is often a target, at home he is safe and loved. Maybe that isn’t realistic, but who said fantasy had to be reality? Perhaps a little wishful thinking would do us all some good.

I liked this story. There are a few classic aspects that walk on stage, but these are presented in a fresh and believable manner. The evil witch (dressed in lemon), a giant with a quasi-Cockney accent, a dwarf as round as he is tall, mechanistic magic that blurs the line between technology and fantasy; all delivered in wrapping paper designed by Dashner himself. He writes in bold colors, splashing strong characters across the pages who demand your attention (and sometimes your fear).

This isn’t a sweet little fairy tale, bad things happen and our hero is faced with tough decisions. Dashner quietly leads his readers from an odd mystery into a hair-raising quest complete with flesh-eating monsters. As odd as some of the scenes are, though, the entire thing holds together. This is definitely a book young readers should sample.

Poltergeist by Kat Richardson is an interesting read full of Seattle history and places, tidbits on creating magical illusion and a winding plot that leads you down misting alleys, much as you find in the real Seattle. These things are the strength of the book, but for me a sometimes weakness; some of the facts go on a bit too long and resemble dreaded info dumps. Most are quite necessary, but there are occasions when they are a tad dry.

Harper Blaine is a greywalker, a woman able to see into a shadowy realm of ghosts and monsters—a kind of nether world that exists between the living and the dead. She is a private investigator called in to prove that someone is adding a bit of mundane trickery to a paranormal experiment. Of course, the trickery proves to be a real paranormal phenomena, but Harper’s client doesn’t believe in the paranormal even though his experiment was supposed to prove or disprove it one way or the other. The ole, “scientist had his mind made up before the experiment” alongside “accomplish a few things not in the notes” type of non-scientific approach to lab work. The situation creates an interesting set of circumstances and characters.

Richardson is very skilled at creating characters, although I found most of the side characters to have more personality than Harper. I couldn’t fall in love with Harper—too many of her actions were mechanical; she’s very scientific and precise in moving forward through the investigation. Though there are little things, such as a pet hamster, I just couldn’t warm to her. Luckily the plot is quite strong and drives the book. What is causing the paranormal activity? When one of the assistants working on the experiment is found dead, there are many fascinating questions to explore. Was a human responsible or did the paranormal entity get out of hand? Who or what is calling the entity and what is it? Can it be stopped? And if so, how?

These questions propel the reader forward. The grey world is explored and doled out to the reader at a nice pace; it is never boring, because there is always something new in the in-between.

I enjoyed the novel. It’s another in the line of urban fantasy that is all the rage at the moment. This book fits in well in its spot and it does its job—the plot wraps up and all loose ends are accounted for.

Tad Williams has a knack for creating an atmosphere. His fantasy worlds are fully populated and full of fanciful imagination and realistic character interactions. When you read one of his fantasies you can imagine a whole wide world full of his imaginary people. Shadowplay is no different. The second of his Shadowmarch series, Shadowplay directly follows the events from the first book.

He starts off with the narrow escape of Princess Briony from her home as it is taken over by a treasonous branch of the royal family. The reader first follows Briony and her companion, Shaso, the former Southmarch master of arms and the man she had formerly believed to be a part of the murder of her brother, Prince Kendrick and who had thus been imprisoned for months. Theirs is an uneasy voyage; the princess has never had to fend for herself, has never been hungry and at first has difficulty with the idea of running and hiding.

The next thread for the reader to take up is the story of Prince Barrick, Briony’s twin, who has been given a secret mission for the Twilight People behind the shadowline following the Southmarch army’s defeat at the hands of those same People. Traveling through their lands, into unknown territory with unknown dangers and difficulties; Barrick is accompanied by Ferras Vansen, the former captain of the royal guard who is not only in love with Briony but has been charged by her with the safety of her brother.

While those are the two main threads of the storyline, Williams weaves into the story a handful of other players. Among these are the imprisoned King Olin, held for ransom by Ludis Drakava, Lord Protector of Hierosol, Qinnitan an acolyte of the Hive in Xis who has escaped and is on the run, Merolanna, the royal twins’ great aunt who is still inside the Southmarch castle, Chert Blue Quartz one of the Funderlings who not only has a very strange adopted child but is helping Chaven, the former royal physician work against the treasonous Tollys, Matthias Tinwright at poet at Southmarch, and Daikonas Vo a Perikalese mercenary sent by the autarch of Xis to return Qinnitan. As you can see from the long laundry list of players above, this is not a simple one act play. The reader is allowed into each of these characters minds and is able to see the world from their point of view as well as the view of the main characters. Some may find this distracting, the moving back and forth among so many characters, but I generally don’t as long as the number of characters that I enjoy reading about outweighs the number of characters whose stories I must wade through. Unfortunately, in my opinion, there are very few characters whose fate I truly wish to follow in this book. Thus I found the story to be very uneven with the characters I was interested in being thrown in like candy amongst a morass of plot and characters that I just did not care about.

While I found the plot itself, at its most basic, to be something I would normally enjoy; Williams’ need to throw in everything but the kitchen sink and to drag out certain storylines till they were dull as ditchwater made me sigh with frustration several times during my reading. With some hefty word count cuts and some judicious flashback and tale-telling use, I feel this could be a stellar book. The characterization is deftly handled, the political plotting and inter-character relations were all finely tuned and the realization of the world itself incredibly imagined. At heart, this is a good story and worth reading, though it certainly would not be harmed by a judicious cut back of about 100 pages.

I am a huge sword and sorcery fan. I grew up reading the mythical stories of Howard’s Conan , Moorcock’s Elric , Leiber’s Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser , and Moore’s Jirel of Joiry . The staging of drama, romance and high adventure set in a fantastic land have always held a special part in my heart—journeys started quietly that end up shaping the future of man. And above all others, I hold David Gemmell in the highest regard.

Like all quests, this one begins with a search. While all quests have different beginnings, they all inevitably have the same outcome; the quest becomes more of a journey to within—to the soul. The journey in Quest For Lost Souls begins with a young boy named Kiall and his journey to rescue a hopeless love and how through the power of his simple kindness, a whole world is changed and destinies fulfilled. Along the way, he encounters the heroes of Bel-azar, the city which was at the center of the last battle fought against the Nadir armies led by Tenaka Khan, the hero of The King Beyond The Gate . Years have passed since that epic battle of Bel-azar and the surviving heroes begin to question why Tenaka Khan allowed them to live, and why he named them the ghosts-yet-to-be. They will travel protecting Kiall to the heart of the Nadir territory and confront Tenaka Khan’s son Jungir who is now khan after his father’s death.

What I have always loved about Gemmell’s books is his overly didactic writing style like the beating of war drums. His action sequences move from point to point, his characters always driving the plot. Some may see this as his having a limited vocabulary, which leads to many of his stories seemingly ripped from one another. Still, what some may see as a weakness, I see as a strength.

Many of Gemmell’s books deal with the theme of love, mainly the folly of love; how love can destroy and bring down the strongest of men to children. Despite this, Gemmell also liked to look at the redemptive power of love; how love can change otherwise ordinary men to heroes—farmers to legends, carpenters to saviors. And with that, Quest For Lost Heroes is really all about love—familial, lustful, innocent and heart breaking.

Gemmell is a master storyteller. However, my fascination with Gemmell’s work is not just because of his thrilling stories and epic struggles. No, my fascination with Gemmell lies with the humanity he brings to his work. Gemmell has that rare ability that not many of his peers have—the ability to show the humanity of life through pain and horror. How the deepest of pains can be strength and how even in the darkest times heroes can exist.

I remember first reading Gemmell’s seminal work Legend when I was a kid. I was young, naïve and lost like most people become at some point in their lives. What I found within those pages was hope. As time passes and I grow older, I find myself remembering the moments spent reading Gemmell’s works, works littered with heroes far past their prime—too old, too lost, too jaded—yet no matter how difficult their lives are and no matter how hard they fight it, they are heroes. And when people need help, they are there. Not because they want to, not because it’ll change the world, but because they must, because it’s what’s right.

One of the many things I have taken away from Gemmell is that one man can change the world—how one man can “matter.” To be a better person, not because you want glory, but because it’s what’s right.

A life-lesson told through a tale of sword and sorcery? What more can anyone ask for?

A disclosure : I readily see the faults of many Gemmell books, but the sub-genre sword and sorcery is my first love and like any first love, we forget the faults and only see the beauty. However, without that love I can see how these stories may seem hackneyed, misogynistic and repetitive and I fully understand if anyone has those views.

Quest For Lost Heroes is a fine addition to the growing Drenai saga mythos and I happily recommend it.

If you liked this also check out: All of Gemmell’s works, Jirel of Joiry , Conan , Usagi Yojimbo , and Dostoevsky.

The Age of Fire has been a wonderful set of books so far, with E.E. Knight doing a wonderful job at spinning the tale of a clutch of dragons each with their own story during the same time frame. Book three gives up the nameless Copper dragon that was crippled after birth in the male dragon battle for dominance. This wild born dragon, who is perceived to be a selfish villain, is given his own story. All that we learned from the other dragons’s perspectives is flipped and we learn the real story of this copper, who will become known as Rugaard.

We start the story with Rugaard, a character that we have come to hate from the other two books. Ah, such a victim of circumstances that we did not really have full insight to at the time. This is why this story is so enjoyable, it feels like a puzzle where the pieces are being put together and you get to see the full story. Let us be clear though, not the 1 million pieces of the same color flower type of puzzle that can be frustrating, but the 500 piece puzzle that makes you feel accomplished but not stupid.

In the cave where we find Rugaard on the way to what we know already is the slaughter of his parents by the dwarves, we get a grander tour after the main event. E.E. gives us a nice view at all the different societies in the cave, like the bats, dragons, dwarves, and snakes. Rugaard has to take on t