Grishaverse Trilogy
Eastern Europe inspired YA fantasy series. It’s competent enough even if it is predictably about a conflicted chosen one. Though she does seem more conflicted love life than her fate as the chosen one.
Category: Fantasy
spiders?
Calculated Risks
Very enjoyable installment of the Incryptid sequence as cousin Sarah tries to find a way back home from another dimension for her, Antimony and friends. Of course Antimony et. al. don’t remember or trust Sarah at all after the math/magic that took them to this alien place.
exandria?
The World of Critical Role
A competent recounting of the Critical Role phenomenon, lavishly illustrated
cart?
The Lives of Christopher Chant
A story telling the childhood adventures of the boy who would grow up to be Chrestomanci in Charmed Life. Very entertaining kids book with much more of a fantasy adventure focus.
Next in order is Conrad’s Fate which I disliked on first reading and have stalled with for now.
matchbox?
Charmed Life
I started to read the Chrestomanci books in DWJs preferred order.
Eric and Gwendolyn are orphans who are taken to live with their parent’s cousin who happens to be Chrestomanci.
This is an excellent kids fantasy book with the trademark wit and compassion of the author on full display.
amnesiac?
The Eternals
Gaiman gives a new spin on Jack Kirby’s creations in this entertaining superhero yarn. This is meant to be highly influential on the upcoming film so I gave it a spin from the library
subway?
A City Dreaming
M is a magician or as he would put in it “in with the management”.
This book is a series of rolling vignettes as we see what M gets up to after washing back up in New York after drifting all over the planet.
The main character is a charming rogue and the writing enjoyable.
The problem for me was that the story never coheres. Some vignettes are utterly trivial tales of life as a debauched New York who just happens to have magical abilities and others have a genuine sense of danger and high stakes.
The stories just feel random – there’s no sense of tension and release. It’s never building to something and certainly the war between magical queens promised in the blurb never materializes.
I don’t regret reading it – there was much to enjoy – but I just felt it could have been great if was a more conventional fantasy story.
pete?
The Unkindest Tide
This is the very latest book in the October Daye series and another where the price of the audiobook just wasn’t justifiable (at least for now).
This the book where the long teased story of the Luidaeg calling in the debts of the Selkies is told.
It’s a cracking read but another one where things happen in the plot more to extend the length of the book than serve the story.
The accompanying novella is interesting but slight and only tangentially related the the main book.
kale?
Night And Silence
As my re-read of the October Daye series progressed I finally came to the first one I hadn’t read before. So I read this one while I had it’s audiobook on the go.
October is recovering from the trauma of events in The Brightest Fell when she’s called in to investigate a missing college student – her own daughter Gillian.
This was another very enjoyable installment in the series and contained quite a few cracking twists that impact on the long arc of the series.
The only issue really was that it felt less like a novel and more like a couple of novellas mashed together.
The accompanying novella is intimately tied in with the events of the book and are very illuminating in ways that I found tantalising about the direction of the series.
Lots of fun but not any kind of entry point.
portland?
A Red-Rose Chain
The latest instalment of the Toby Daye story finds her in Portland on a diplomatic mission to avert war between Faerie kingdoms. Obviously this being Toby nothing quite goes to plan.
I read this because I have been going through the series as audiobooks and this was the first I couldn’t find at a reasonable price. So old-fashioned physical reading was my only option.
Last time I read this I gave it a higher rating because I genuinely really enjoy the October Daye series but on a re-read in the context of the series it felt like a lesser work. Still good but not as good as the best books in the series