Genre: fantasy

Review: Bookshops and Bonedust by Travis Baldree

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: Bookshops and Bonedust by Travis BaldreeBookshops & Bonedust (Legends & Lattes, #0) by Travis Baldree
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy fantasy, fantasy
Series: Legends & Lattes #0
Pages: 352
Published by Tor Books on November 7, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

When an injury throws a young, battle-hungry orc off her chosen path, she may find that what we need isn't always what we seek.
In Bookshops & Bonedust, a prequel to Legends & Lattes, New York Times bestselling author Travis Baldree takes us on a journey of high fantasy, first loves, and second-hand books.
Viv's career with the notorious mercenary company Rackam's Ravens isn't going as planned.
Wounded during the hunt for a powerful necromancer, she's packed off against her will to recuperate in the sleepy beach town of Murk—so far from the action that she worries she'll never be able to return to it.
What's a thwarted soldier of fortune to do?
Spending her hours at a beleaguered bookshop in the company of its foul-mouthed proprietor is the last thing Viv would have predicted, but it may be both exactly what she needs and the seed of changes she couldn't possibly imagine.
Still, adventure isn't all that far away. A suspicious traveler in gray, a gnome with a chip on her shoulder, a summer fling, and an improbable number of skeletons prove Murk to be more eventful than Viv could have ever expected.

My Review:

Legends & Lattes was all about Viv fulfilling a dream that she’s had for a very long time, to retire from the mercenary life and open a coffee shop, a place where she can hang up her sword (literally) and dispense peace and life-giving liquid in equal measure – instead of dealing death to people who generally deserved it.

The story in Bookshops & Bonedust is the story of way back when Viv was considerably younger and a whole lot dumber (as we often are) and first caught the inkling of that dream. Not in bustling Thune but in tiny, tacky, tawdry Murk, a seaside town that has certainly seen better days.

But it’s the most convenient place for Rackham’s Raiders, the mercenary company that young Viv is signed up with, to deposit her after she gets herself ahead of her team in a fight and gets skewered in the leg for her trouble. Or her hubris. Or just her belief that as a young orc in her first big skirmish she’s both immortal and indestructible.

Of course she’s neither, and has the bleeding holes in her leg to prove it. So she’ll be rusticating and recovering in Murk while Rackham’s Raiders are off to bring down Varine the Necromancer and her horde of skeletal warriors.

Viv is scared that Rackham won’t come back for her. She’s worried she won’t heal properly. But more than anything else, she’s frightened half to death that she’ll go out of her mind with boredom while she’s stuck, literally on her ass, in Murk.

Which is what leads her, albeit very indirectly and with a whole lot of excruciating steps, to Maylee’s bakery and Fern’s bookshop. The bakery because damn it smells good and the dwarf baker looks every bit as yummy as her freshly baked wares. The bookshop because there’s nothing to while away a whole lot of quiet time quite like a good book. Or a whole series of them.

And that bookshop, Thistleburr Booksellers, looks like it has lots and bunches of books, all sort of moldering away in a place that reeks of mold and moist and uncleaned rug and unwashed gryphlet. It smells ‘yellow’ to Viv, and any pet owner knows EXACTLY what that means.

But that doesn’t stop Viv from stepping in to while away a few minutes as she certainly has plenty to spare. The bookshop owner, desperate for both companionship and custom, induces Viv to take a book that she is certain will suck the orc right into its pages for a few hours.

And she’s right – of course she’s right – and it’s the beginning of the kind of friendship that will save them both, the store, and eventually and surprisingly the entire town of Murk.

Because Rackham’s Raiders are chasing that necromancer. A necromancer who is already on her deadly and deathly way to Murk – where Viv and Fern are waiting to beat her. Not with swords – but with just the type of cleverness that eventually will make Viv and her coffee shop such a success in Thune.

All it will take is a bit of ingenuity and a whole lot of help from Viv’s newly found friends.

Escape Rating A+: Anyone who sunk straight into the cozy fantasy vibe of Legends & Lattes is going to sink into Bookshops & Bonedust and not emerge for much of anything until they fall out the other side with a huge smile, a taste for Maylee’s lassy (molasses) buns and a hankering for more stories just like this one – especially for more set in this marvelous world.

What makes this world, and this cozy fantasy style, just so much of a comfort read is that, although bad things do happen to good people, that is most emphatically NOT what the story is about. It’s not about big wars and bigger politics and gigantic battles between good and evil resulting in stupendously high butcher’s bills.

Not that there isn’t danger, and not that there isn’t a confrontation. Because there is most certainly both along with plenty of tension, both dramatic and romantic, to push the whole thing along.

But the way that things get solved and resolved is through less bloodthirsty means – and just as occurred in Legends & Lattes, quite often problems, from small to world-shattering, get solved with a whole lot of ingenuity and more than a bit of help from the friends – and even the frenemies – that Viv has made along the way.

So it’s all cozy in the best way, where the reader slips under a warm blanket of story and gets told a marvelous tale that displays more of the best in people than it does the worst.

Even better, Bookshops & Bonedust, while it has all the charm of Legends & Lattes, is a prequel and not a sequel. Meaning that if you somehow missed the sensation that is Legends & Lattes, you can start here. The story, after all, does start here. If this is where you start, you’ll be thrilled and charmed and ready to start Legends the minute you finish.

But if you started with Legends, reading Bookshops & Bonedust will almost certainly inspire you to pick up Legends again the moment you finish, so you can discover how all the little clues about Viv’s later adventures fit into her first one. I know it certainly inspired me! Which is a good thing because, both fortunately and unfortunately at the same time, the author has three more cozy fantasies lined up, but the first won’t be published until 2025. Plenty of time to reread – or maybe listen this time around – to both Legends and Bookshops (and maybe my other cozy favorite, Can’t Spell Treason without Tea) before my next visit with Viv!

Review: A Stroke of the Pen by Terry Pratchett

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
Review: A Stroke of the Pen by Terry PratchettA Stroke of the Pen: The Lost Stories by Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, short stories
Pages: 240
Published by Doubleday on October 10, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Far away and long ago, when dragons still existed and the only arcade game was ping-pong in black and white, a wizard cautiously entered a smoky tavern in the evil, ancient, foggy city of Morpork...
A truly unmissable, beautifully illustrated collection of unearthed stories from the pen of Sir Terry Pratchett: award-winning and bestselling author, and creator of the phenomenally successful Discworld series.
Twenty early short stories by one of the world's best loved authors, each accompanied by exquisite original woodcut illustrations.
These are rediscovered tales that Pratchett wrote under a pseudonym for newspapers during the 1970s and 1980s. Whilst none are set in the Discworld, they hint towards the world he would go on to create, containing all of his trademark wit, satirical wisdom and fantastic imagination.
Meet Og the inventor, the first caveman to cultivate fire, as he discovers the highs and lows of progress; haunt the Ministry of Nuisances with the defiant evicted ghosts of Pilgarlic Towers; visit Blackbury, a small market town with weird weather and an otherworldly visitor; and go on a dangerous quest through time and space with hero Kron, which begins in the ancient city of Morpork...

My Review:

I first became acquainted with the Discworld and its creator – or perhaps perpetrator would be the better word – in the early to mid 1990s when I had a long commute, audiobooks were still on actual tape, and the collection of same at the library where I worked wasn’t all that big because there wasn’t all that much available.

Two of those available titles were The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, the first two books in the Discworld . It wasn’t exactly love at first listen because those first two books were a bit weirder than I expected, and looking back from the perspective of even Mort, only two books later, it was pretty clear that the author figured out he had a series going on somewhen approximately between The Light Fantastic and book 3, Equal Rites.

I don’t think he was all the way there until book 8, Guards! Guards!, which is a much better entry point for the series. (I digress – but hopefully not too far or I’ll fall off the edge.)

The point I’m working my way around is that masterpieces like the Discworld do not spring fully formed from the head of Zeus – or even two Zeuses in the case of Good Omens, co-authored with Neil Gaiman.

The stories in this collection, these ‘strokes of the pen’ by Sir Terry Pratchett, are a bit of a portrait of the beloved author as a young scrivener who was still in the process of figuring out what in the hell he was doing and quite possibly where was he going in that handcart.

The story of these stories is a bit of a story all by itself. They were published – these are not early efforts that were never intended to see the light of day. It’s just that they were published in a tabloid newspaper, the Western Daily Press, published in Bristol in the U.K. from 1967 to 1984, mostly under the pseudonym Patrick Kearns.

But the Western Daily Press was – and still is – a very small newspaper. The stories were published, read and mostly forgotten, with the exception of “The Quest for the Keys” which had been cut out and preserved by one enterprising fan – howsomever without any of the borders of the pages which would have revealed where and when it was published. A painstaking search through the British Library’s Newspaper Archive resulted in the discoveries that have been published in this collection.

The stories themselves are a LOT of fun. Every single one gives the reader a chuckle or at least a smile, and there are hints of what evolved into Pratchett’s style of both telling the story and making snide asides about the circumstances even in the earliest instances.

But they are very, very short, and with the exception of “The Quest for the Keys”, which was published in four parts, it’s obvious that the newspaper had limited space for fiction – and probably everything else. So these are touches, tastes, teasers and don’t get into a lot of detail.

Still, by grouping them in little series, the reader does get a pretty clear picture of places like Blackbury [sic] which seems like it could be just around the corner from Unseen University – no matter how much the stories refer to far-distant London. Which could, with a bit of a squint, be Ankh-Morpork.

Although, speaking of Ankh-Morpork, the final story in the collection, “The Quest for the Keys”, is set in the city of Morpork. Perhaps the annexation of Ankh is just around its corner. And again, a bit of a squint turns the lazy and underhanded wizard Grubble into the more inept but much nicer about it Rincewind of The Colour of Magic, while the hired sword Grubble has hired and duped, Kron, seems more than a bit like a younger and savvier Cohen the Barbarian, perhaps with just a touch of the inestimable Sam Vimes.

Escape Rating B: A Stroke of the Pen isn’t exactly the Discworld , but it is Discworld -adjacent. Which is as close as it’s possible to get now that its author, creator and perpetrator is no longer among us. It’s at that intersection of not being sure whether to cry because it’s over, or smile because it happened. The stories themselves are generally fun but not terribly deep, because there wasn’t time in the format to get that way.

So, think of this collection as a last twinkle of the author’s eye, and enjoy!

Review: Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Review: Shadow Speaker by Nnedi OkoraforShadow Speaker (The Desert Magician's Duology, #1) by Nnedi Okorafor
Narrator: Délé Ogundiran
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: African Futurism, climate fiction, fantasy, science fiction
Series: Desert Magician's Duology #1
Pages: 336
Length: 10 hrs 28 mins
Published by DAW, Tantor Audio on September 26, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Niger, West Africa, 2074
It is an era of tainted technology and mysterious mysticism. A great change has happened all over the planet, and the laws of physics aren’t what they used to be.
Within all this, I introduce you to Ejii Ugabe, a child of the worst type of politician. Back when she was nine years old, she was there as her father met his end. Don’t waste your tears on him: this girl’s father would throw anyone under a bus to gain power. He was a cruel, cruel man, but even so, Ejii did not rejoice at his departure from the world. Children are still learning that some people don’t deserve their love.
Now 15 years old and manifesting the abilities given to her by the strange Earth, Ejii decides to go after the killer of her father. Is it for revenge or something else? You will have to find out by reading this book.
I am the Desert Magician, and this is a novel I have conjured for you, so I’m certainly not going to just tell you here.

My Review:

Peace bombs. A phrase that only makes sense in the context of the future history of the world that leads to this story, as told by the chaotic trickster the Desert Magician about the coming of age of the titular Shadow Speaker, Ejii Ugabe, and her friend, the rainmaker Dikéogu Obidimkpa. It’s their story, but the Desert Magician is the one bringing it to us. Also messing with them and it at the same time.

The Desert Magician is not exactly a reliable narrator – but then trickster avatars seldom are. After all, the story is more fun for them if they get to mess with the protagonists a bit. More than a bit. As much as they want.

As Ejii describes the world in which she grew up, the Earth as it exists after the ‘Great Change’ brought about by those Peace Bombs, it’s not hard to think that the event was as much of a eucatastrophe as it was the regular kind. A whole lot of things seem to be better. More chaotic, but better. Certainly the climate has improved, even if entire forests sometimes spring up overnight, while the technology imported from other, more advanced worlds has made living with the remaining extremes considerably easier.

None of which means that humans are any better at all. Whatsoever. Because humans are gonna human. But it does mean that there are more possibilities, both in the sense of seemingly magical powers and animals, and in the sense of more opportunities for more people to rise above their circumstances – even if some people are still determined to fall into the traps laid by theirs.

Which leads the Desert Magician to Ejii’s story, and leads Ejii to Jaa, the great general who swept into Ejii’s village of Kwàmfà and struck off her father’s head with her sword, setting Jaa and Ejii on a collision course that will either save the world – or end it.

Shadow speaking, the ability to hear the voices of the spirits, is one of the many gifts that have arisen after the Great Change. Ejii is the shadow speaker of the title, and at fifteen is just coming into her power. A power that is telling her to follow Jaa to a great meeting of the leaders of the worlds that have merged into one interconnected system as a result of the change.

Jaa is going to the meeting to start a war in the hopes of preventing worse to come. Ejii has been tasked with finding a way to make peace. Neither task is going to be easy – and only one of them is right. The question is, which one?

Escape Rating A-: This version of Shadow Speaker is an expanded edition of one of the author’s out-of-print early novels. The original version of which, also titled Shadow Speaker, was a winner or finalist for several genre awards in the year it was published, as a young adult novel. Which it still both is and isn’t.

It is, on the one hand, aimed at a young adult audience because its protagonists are themselves in that age range, being merely fifteen when the story begins. As a consequence of their age, both Ejii and Dikéogu clearly still have a lot of growing up ahead of them in spite of the life-changing and even world-altering experiences that have led them to undertake this journey.

At the same time, Ejii at least is very much on the cusp of adulthood, and this is a journey that forces her to make adult decisions about, with no sense of hyperbole whatsoever, the state of the world. Howsomever, a good chunk of what she brings to those decisions has the flavor of the naivete of youth, particularly in the sense that the world SHOULD be fair, people SHOULD do the right thing, and that if only people would communicate honestly a peaceful solution SHOULD be within reach.

It’s not that she doesn’t know the world and the people in it are often stupid, self-centered, greedy and downright mean, it’s that she hasn’t yet been jaded enough by her experiences to truly believe that there can’t be a better way. Even though her personal experiences thus far in her life have seldom shown it to her.

Dikéogu is not nearly as mature as Ejii is. He whines a LOT. Not that his complaints aren’t justified, but it’s so very clear that he still has a lot of growing up to do and that expresses itself in a kind of ‘pity poor me’ whining that gets hard to take – particularly in audio as he’s voiced in a higher pitch to distinguish his speech from Ejii’s. Which works very well indeed as characterization while driving me personally nuts as I find high-pitched voices jarring. (I recognize this is a ‘me’ thing and may not be a ‘you’ thing, but if it is also a ‘you’ thing, you have been warned.)

While the Desert Magician is presenting this story, he’s not an omnipresent presenter. We see the story through Ejii’s perspective except at the very beginning and end. She is the person we follow, although the story is not told from inside her head. Rather, the story unfolds around her and her actions, and we only see what she sees and know what she knows and get as confused as she does at what she doesn’t.

Which means that while the narrator, Délé Ogundiran, does an excellent job of standing in as Ejii’s voice, that may not be true for the second book in the duology, which will be Dikéogu’s story. Hopefully by the point in Dikéogu’s life when that story takes place, his voice will have dropped.

As much as Ejii comes of age and into her power through her riveting adventures in Shadow Speaker, her world and all the worlds that have become interconnected as a result of the ‘Great Merge’ that was part and parcel of Earth’s ‘Great Change’ also have a great deal of maturing to do – or at least negotiations towards that goal – as this first story ends. Whether the merged worlds will survive that change or destroy each other is part of the subsequent story in this duology that I’m really looking forward to seeing. Or hopefully hearing.

Dikéogu’s story may have started here but his true coming-of-age-and-into-power story, Like Thunder, is coming just after Thanksgiving. And I’ll be very grateful to read it – or hopefully have it read to me like Shadow Speaker – over the holidays.

Review: The Hunter’s Apprentice by Lindsay Schopfer

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Hunter’s Apprentice by Lindsay SchopferThe Hunter's Apprentice: A Keltin Moore Adventure (The Adventures of Keltin Moore #4) by Lindsay Schopfer
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: adventure, fantasy, steampunk
Series: Keltin Moore #4
Pages: 275
Published by Lindsay Schopfer on May 25, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo
Goodreads

Can the beast hunter's apprentice prove his worth?

Professional monster hunter Keltin Moore has worked hard to teach his trade to Jaylocke, his good friend and apprentice. But the time for teaching is over when Jaylocke receives word that the woman of his dreams may marry someone else if he cannot prove to his people that he has mastered his trade.

Together, master and apprentice must assemble their friends and travel the fabled Salt Road to the annual Gathering of the Weycliff wayfarers. But there's more than a simple test of skill awaiting them among the mysterious, nomadic people. Bitter rivalries and titanic beasts will put Keltin's talents as hunter, teacher, and friend to the test as Jaylocke struggles to prepare for the most important trial of his life.

This is the fourth installment of the award-winning Adventures of Keltin Moore, a series of steampunk-flavored fantasy novels. If you love compelling characters, fantastic creatures, and intense action then you will love these stories!

My Review:

Keltin Moore’s fourth adventure represents a turning point for the famous Beast Hunter AND his family of choice in this fantasy-tinged, steampunk-powered series. When his story began in The Beast Hunter, Moore was very much a lone wolf – in the best Western tradition – relying on himself and his trusty weaponry to make a living out in the wilds, only returning to his rented room in his tiny hometown to rest, refuel, resupply, and of course pick up new jobs so that he can pay for all of the above.

Over the course of Keltin’s subsequent adventures, Into the North and Dangerous Territory, we’ve seen the boundaries of Keltin’s world AND his circle of trusted friends and found family expand to include his business partners and friends, Bor’ve’tai and Jaylocke, his office manager and the love of his life Elaine Desnov (the heroine of The Beast Hunter) and a new business in a bigger town that he hopes will support them all – so that he can finally propose to Elaine.

But Jaylocke isn’t just his friend and his business partner, Jaylocke is also Keltin’s apprentice as a Beast Hunter, and that’s where this story comes in and gives the reader a much deeper dive into the places and peoples that make up Keltin’s not-quite-Weird-West world.

Not all the inhabitants of that world are ‘Original Recipe’ humans. (Which makes a whole lot of assumptions, but I have to start somewhere). Keltin’s partner Bor’ve’tai is a loopi, who look a bit like Sasquatch but are sentient, sapient and have magic. Jaylocke, on the other hand, is a Weycliff wayfarer. His people appear to be a combination of Native American and Romani, but again, I’m using analogies that may not be 100% on any front but helped to get me into the story.

Jaylocke’s people also have magic, but it’s a kind of generational magic that allows adults to tap directly into the knowledge, memories and experiences of their direct ancestors. It’s magic that only comes fully into use when each individual is declared an adult by proving that they have brought a new branch of expertise into their family line. It’s time for Jaylocke to prove that he has become a Beast Hunter in his own right so that he can be declared an adult and marry the girl of his dreams.

The question is whether or not Jaylocke is ready, both to declare himself an adult and a master of his craft – AND to prove it. So, the story of this fourth book in the series, The Hunter’s Apprentice, is all about that apprentice’s quest to stop being one. And it’s about the trials and tribulations he faces as he looks into his own heart to decide whether or not he’s worthy of it after all.

Escape Rating A: I read the second book in this series, Into the North, first. Between the remoteness of the setting, the whole ‘frozen northlands’ vibe of the thing, and the gold rush in the background of the story, in that book it seemed like the author was channeling Jack London’s Alaskan adventure stories into a place that was not Alaska as it was, or even as London portrayed it was, but somewhere very like it in a world not our own.

As I’ve continued through the series – which I just devour every time around – it’s not so much that Keltin’s world resembles ours as it was but that it reads like an even further out there Weird West. His world isn’t ours, it isn’t a fantastic version of ours in the way that Weird West stories generally are, but it still has that feel to it.

So if you liked Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker or Laura Anne Gilman’s Huntsmen series (starting with Uncanny Times and continuing with Uncanny Vows later this year), or if the upcoming collection The Good, the Bad, and the Uncanny sounds like it might be your jam, you’ll love Keltin Moore and his fantasy-ish, steampunk-like, world.

This particular story, set in that world, does a bunch of things really, really well for a story that isn’t all that long but does manage to pack a LOT of story into its pages.

First, it’s a road story. Keltin and company take a trip WAY outside Keltin’s comfort zone, giving the reader the opportunity to see more of his world, both geographically and culturally as we get to see Jaylocke’s people at their most removed from so-called civilization and at the peak of their ceremonial celebrations.

It’s an outsider’s inside view and the reader learns as much as Keltin does.

It’s also a view of a world that lets nature and the creatures within it be who and what they are in a kind of live and let live symbiosis that is as appealing as it is dangerous – which is how we get caught up in Jaylocke’s quest. As very much does Keltin.

At the same time, it’s a particular part of the hero’s journey, intentionally for Jaylocke but also for Keltin. It’s Jaylocke’s chance to prove he has become an adult, but it’s also Keltin’s chance to learn to let go. Their journey, separately and together is harrowing – as it should be.

The story ends with the hope of a brighter – but different future. One that I hope we get to explore in future books in the series. May they come soon!

Review: Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Review: Into the Riverlands by Nghi VoInto the Riverlands (The Singing Hills Cycle, #3) by Nghi Vo
Narrator: Cindy Kay
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: purchased from Audible, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy
Series: Singing Hills Cycle #3
Pages: 112
Length: 2 hrs 21 mins
Published by Tantor Audio, Tordotcom on October 25, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Wandering cleric Chih of the Singing Hills travels to the riverlands to record tales of the notorious near-immortal martial artists who haunt the region. On the road to Betony Docks, they fall in with a pair of young women far from home, and an older couple who are more than they seem. As Chih runs headlong into an ancient feud, they find themselves far more entangled in the history of the riverlands than they ever expected to be.
Accompanied by Almost Brilliant, a talking bird with an indelible memory, Chih confronts old legends and new dangers alike as they learn that every story-beautiful, ugly, kind, or cruel-bears more than one face.

My Review:

The entire Singing Hills Cycle is a story about stories; the collection of them, the interpretation of them, and especially the way in which that interpretation changes over time as those stories fade in and out of conscience and memory.

Cleric Chih has come to the Riverlands to learn what the Riverlanders themselves have to say about the many, many martial arts legends that once walked the Riverlands, only to find themselves in the middle of one.

Or perhaps two. Or even an infinite number of interpretations of the very same one.

Chih, with their friend, mascot and memory recorder, the neixin bird Almost Brilliant, are on the road to Betony Docks, intending to wind their way home to Singing Hills to deliver their report of the stories and legends they have found along their most recent journey.

It’s who they are. It’s what they do. It’s what Singing Hills is all about.

Chih sees the opportunity to travel with the young martial arts master Wei Jintai, her sworn sister Mac Sang, and the middle-aged couple Lao Bingyi and Mac Khanh as a way of traveling the rather dangerous road through the Riverlands in somewhat greater safety while taking the opportunity to hopefully learn some new stories to take home.

However, the stories come to life – and death – as they travel into the lands of the Hollow Hand sect of bandits, thugs and marauders. The Hollow Hand is supposed to have been wiped out long ago, and the martial heroes who did the wiping, Wild Pig Yi and Gravewraith Chen, are assumed to be long dead.

But legends never die. Sometimes they don’t even fade away. They just become different legends. Over and over and over again. Even as they hide in plain sight and boss everyone around.

Escape Rating A+: At first, Into the Riverlands seems as if it’s a play on the Canterbury Tales, with Cleric Chih taking the place of Geoffrey Chaucer himself (who, come to think of it, by certain definitions was himself a ‘cleric’). Into the Riverlands is a journey, and every person in the party has at least one story to tell. It’s Chih’s duty to record those stories – not to become a part of one themselves.

Which most definitely doesn’t stop that from happening anyway.

It’s pretty clear from the beginning of their trip that Lao Bingyi and Khanh are more than they seem – a devoted middle-aged married couple where the wife knows everyone and everything and can’t stop from bossing people around and telling them all about themselves, while her husband is a man of few words who indulges her every whim.

And that portrait is manifestly true – while still only being one face that they wear. It’s who people expect them to be at this point in their lives. But it’s not who they have been, or even who they ARE. Those are faces they reveal only in part, and only when they must.

It’s only when the crisis comes upon them – or they come upon it – that Chih gets a glimpse of those true faces, and even those are masks that conceal one or more truths that they are not ready to reveal – if they ever will be.

It’s as though Li Mu Bai and Yu Shu Lien, the protagonists of the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, had managed to survive their tragic story and outlive their legends into middle age. If they had, or if their tragic ending was either smoke and mirrors on their parts or literary license on the part of some chronicler, they might have become Mac Khanh and Lao Bingyi. And perhaps they did.

Certainly Lao Bingyi lies at the heart of a whole host of tales that Chih gets the barest glimpse of and is informed in no uncertain terms that it’s all they are entitled to get. That the story is hers and not theirs and NOT the Singing Hills Abbey’s.

And that’s the right ending of this tale, which was lovely in the telling even if a bit nerve-wracking for the participants in the doing.

But, as I said in last week’s review of Mammoths at the Gates, throughout the Singing Hills Cycle Chih has been moving steadily from the periphery of the story to the center of the narrative. Their own story is in Mammoths at the Gates, and it was marvelous to finally see their perspective on their own world rather than merely being a witness and recorder to others.

I read Into the Riverlands before it came out in 2022 for a Library Journal review and loved it at the time but didn’t take the opportunity to write it up for Reading Reality while it was still fresh in my memory. After re-reading Mammoths at the Gates last week in the same circumstance, I wasn’t ready to leave Chih’s world and decided to take a trip back through audio. It seemed appropriate as the stories that Chih records are stories that they are being told and I wanted to experience them the same way.

I’m very glad I went back, as Into the Riverlands made an excellent audiobook, thanks to the expert narration of Cindy Kay. And the story had added depth and meaning after reading Mammoths at the Gates and exploring the neixen birds in general, and Almost Brilliant in particular, in a story that better showcased her talents and personality. On the whole I enjoyed this book even more the second time around, to the point where it’s making me think I might want to pick up the audiobooks for the first two books in the series, The Empress of Salt and Fortune, and When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, and go all the way back to the very beginning!

One final note in reference to the ‘neixin’ and the audiobook. The thing about reading without hearing the words is that you learn how to spell words like ‘neixin’ without knowing how they sound. Listening to an audiobook is the reverse, in that you hear the word without knowing how it’s spelled (which can be frustrating when writing a review!) ‘Neixin’ does not sound at all like I thought it did, and I’m glad to sit corrected.

So reading/re-reading the Singing Hills Cycle has been lovely, and I’m already looking forward to the next book in the series, The Brides of High Hill. But listening to the story, as I think it’s meant to be told, has been a delight.

Review: Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi VoMammoths at the Gates (The Singing Hills Cycle, #4) by Nghi Vo
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy
Series: Singing Hills Cycle #4
Pages: 123
Published by Tordotcom on September 12, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

The Hugo and Crawford Award-Winning Series!
The wandering Cleric Chih returns home to the Singing Hills Abbey for the first time in almost three years, to be met with both joy and sorrow. Their mentor, Cleric Thien, has died, and rests among the archivists and storytellers of the storied abbey. But not everyone is prepared to leave them to their rest.
Because Cleric Thien was once the patriarch of Coh clan of Northern Bell Pass--and now their granddaughters have arrived on the backs of royal mammoths, demanding their grandfather’s body for burial. Chih must somehow balance honoring their mentor’s chosen life while keeping the sisters from the north from storming the gates and destroying the history the clerics have worked so hard to preserve.
But as Chih and their neixin Almost Brilliant navigate the looming crisis, Myriad Virtues, Cleric Thien’s own beloved hoopoe companion, grieves her loss as only a being with perfect memory can, and her sorrow may be more powerful than anyone could anticipate. . .
The novellas of The Singing Hills Cycle are linked by the cleric Chih, but may be read in any order, with each story serving as an entrypoint.

My Review:

When the Cleric Chih returns home to the Singing Hills Abbey after three years on the road collecting stories, they are astonished to discover that there really are mammoths at the gates of the abbey. It’s not exactly like saying there are barbarians at the gates – but as Chih learns it’s not exactly unlike, either.

Because in the stories that the clerics of the Singing Hills Abbey collect, mammoths ALWAYS come at the end. After they’ve trampled everyone and everything that stood in their way.

So Cleric Chih already knows that something terrible has happened even before they walk through the gates of the Abbey. And it doesn’t take them long to learn at least the tip of the iceberg of the rest.

Discovering that under the trumpeting of mammoths, it’s grief and stories all the way down.

The abbey is virtually empty, as most of the chroniclers and archeologists rushed to the site of a temporarily uncovered village, located in a valley that has been flooded for years, has been temporarily and briefly unflooded, and will be flooded again in just a few short months. Stories are what the Singing Hills Abbey is, and what it does, and there have been stories sunken in that village for decades that won’t survive the re-flooding.

So away they went.

In their absence, Chih’s best friend Ru has been made temporary Abbot, making the divide between the two lifelong friends even deeper than it has been, as Chih’s duty is to leave the Abbey to gather stories, while Ru, disabled in childhood by disease, is left behind to learn how to administer the place.

Which he is, and has, but…nearly the first thing that happened after most of the abbey’s population was out of reach was the death of the most senior cleric, Cleric Thien. Thien was both Chih’s and Ru’s mentor and father-figure. But before he became a Cleric, Thien was a high-ranking advocate (read lawyer) in the Empire.

Thien was disowned by his family and stripped of his imperial status when he became a Cleric. But the mammoths at the gate demonstrate that someone official, at least, has not forgotten Thien’s imperial service. And now they want him back. Dead or alive.

Escape Rating A+: I love the Singing Hills Cycle, and have from its very beginning in The Empress of Salt and Fortune. At first, it seemed like this series was a bit of an exercise in mythmaking, fantasy not because there’s any particular magical system, but because it feels like fantasy and doesn’t fit, neatly or otherwise, into any other box.

Also the writing is utterly lovely every step of the way, and it’s easy to get caught up in Cleric Chih’s world and the stories in it, even if we’re never quite sure whether or not it has any relationship to our own. There’s magic in these stories, they’re magically compelling, and that’s all that’s necessary to make for a captivating read.

Howsomever, while each story is complete in and of itself, the series as a whole is Chih’s literal journey around their world to learn and record the stories they find in that world, and that overarching frame provides a vehicle for telling fantastic adventures.

One of the fascinating points about that overarching story is the way that Chih began very much on the periphery of it. In The Empress of Salt and Fortune, Chih seemed merely to be the vessel into which the handmaiden Rabbit poured her tale of the Empress that she served, loved and hated, all at the same time, while Chih was there to make a record of it and explicitly not become a part of it.

But the following stories, When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain and Into the Riverlands, nudged Chih towards the center, as they spend the night When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain telling the tiger of the tale the tale of the tiger as it is remembered among humans, in the hope that said tiger won’t eat them and their companions before morning. While in Into the Riverlands it almost seems as if the tale is happening around them even as the villagers tell that tale to Chih.

The tale in Mammoths at the Gates is Chih’s own story, it’s happening TO them as we read it. It’s a story about love and loss, a story about friendship and compromise, and a story about growing up and letting go.

It’s also a heartbreakingly beautiful tale of a truth that sets no one free, and a love that both transcends and transforms death.

This was my second read of Mammoths at the Gates, and it was even better this second time around, as I had more time to savor it. I didn’t want to leave Chih and their world when I turned that final page, and I’m happy to say that I won’t be. I picked up the audio of Into the Riverlands, which I read when it came out but didn’t review here, because I wanted a chance to experience the Singing Hills Cycle as it feels like it’s meant to be, as a story being told and recorded.

AND, and I’m oh-so-happy about this, a fifth book in the Singing Hills Cycle, The Brides of High Hill, just popped up on Edelweiss last night as coming out in May, 2024. I’m thrilled and already looking forward to it!

Review: Big Little Spells by Hazel Beck

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> blog tours> book reviews
Review: Big Little Spells by Hazel BeckBig Little Spells (Witchlore, #2) by Hazel Beck
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, paranormal romance, urban fantasy
Series: Witchlore #2
Pages: 384
Published by Graydon House on August 29, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Is her magic a threat to witchkind…or is she simply powerful enough to save the world?
Rebekah Wilde was eighteen when she left St. Cyprian, officially stripped of her magic and banished from her home. Ten years later, she’s forced to return to face the Joywood Coven, who preside over not just her hometown but the whole magical world. Rebekah is happy to reunite with her sister, and with her friends, but the implications of her return are darker and more dangerous than they could have imagined.
The Joywood are determined to prove Rebekah and her friends are a danger to witchkind, and her group faces an impending death sentence if they can’t prove otherwise. Rebekah must seek help from the only one who knows how to stop the Joywood—the ruthless immortal Nicholas Frost. Years ago, he was her secret tutor in magic, and her secret impossible crush. But the icy immortal is as remote and arrogant as ever, and if he feels anything for Rebekah—or witchkind—it’s impossible to tell.

My Review:

In Small Town, Big Magic, the first book in the Witchlore series, there was something rotten at the heart of small, witchy, St. Cyprian Missouri. But by the end of the story it seemed more than obvious that what was going wrong was a big and nasty disturbance at the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri and the hidden Illinois river that gives the town all of its witchy power.

It seemed obvious because defeating the nasty in the confluence was the big, climactic battle that nearly ends the book – at least until after it’s been subdued. Which is when that first book ended, on the mic drop that the powers that be had shown up to bring the hammer down because they didn’t do it the ‘right’ way with ‘approved’ witches – even as they proceeded to gaslight the newly formed coven about whether the evil that was about to literally flood the town ever existed in the first place.

And that’s where this second book picks up the action, as the ruling coven of witchkind, the oh-so-inappropriately named ‘Joywood’, brings that hammer down in a way that is so petty and such an over-the-top attempt at belittling AND gaslighting that the new coven knows that whatever this is all about, it isn’t about what they did so much as who they are – even if they don’t know why. At least not yet.

They don’t have much time to find out, either. Ten years ago, back when Emerson and Rebekah Wilde were both eighteen, the sisters failed their coming of age ceremony and were supposed to be stripped of not merely their magic but their memories of it. Emerson emerged as kind of a shadow of her true self – at least until the events of the first book when she not only broke the block on her memory but reclaimed her powers as well.

Rebekah never forgot a thing, because she ran into exile instead. She couldn’t practice her magic, she couldn’t come home, and she couldn’t bear to keep in contact with the friends she left behind because her sister wasn’t really her sister anymore.

Now she’s back, doing her level best, which sometimes fails, to not fall back into the destructive behaviors of her adolescence. Because that’s just what Joywood wants and she’s able to focus her rebellious streak on denying them that above all things.

The one thing from those years that she can’t seem to let go of is her ‘crush’ on the cold, powerful, gorgeous and immortal asshole, Nicholas Frost. Back then, he secretly trained her power but abandoned her when she needed him most. This time around he’s playing the biggest game of ‘come here no stay away’ that has ever been played.

But Rebekah isn’t a teenager any more, and she’s tired of being played – by Nicholas, by Joywood and especially by a fate that has kicked her around for the last time – no matter what it takes to bring it and her powers to her command and no one and nothing else’s.

Escape Rating B+: In that opening bit of petty bullshit, I began wondering if the reason that nasty showed up in the river was either because Joywood summoned it themselves – or if they were just so corrupt that like called to like. I’m still debating that particular question – but hunting for the answer certainly kept me turning pages.

In fact, I liked this second book a bit better than the first, because I felt for Rebekah and her snarky rebellion in a way that Emerson’s partially-manufactured goody-two-shoes perfection did not touch. What I liked best about Rebekah was that she never fell for Joywood’s act. It’s all a setup and she knows it’s a setup and she never pretends otherwise to herself or her friends.

Even better, it doesn’t take much to convince her friends that she’s right. It is not paranoia if someone really is out to get you, and Joywood really does have it in for the Wilde sisters. Even if the why of it all is still a bit TBD (to be determined).

A question that has yet to be completely resolved by the end of Big Little Spells. The question that DOES manage to get itself resolved is the romantic question, the one about what’s really going on in that hot immortal asshole’s cold, cold heart when it comes to Rebekah. For that, at least, we get the whys and the wherefores, AND we get a resolution that deals at least partially with what would otherwise be a vast power imbalance.

And it was great to see some truly epic UST get resolved, along with the processing of a whole bunch of suppressed grief as well as a bit of a stand up and cheer moment from at least half the town.

So stuff happened. In fact, this book in particular was more about the stuff happening, the things being done – or attempting to be done – TO Rebekah and company than anything else. It was, in a peculiar way, more than a bit political. And I was all there for it. Some readers did not like this as much as Small Town, Big Magic because it was more about witchy small-town politics and the mean no-longer-girls in charge of them and less about the romance. Personally, I liked this one better for the shift.

But the things that did not get resolved, that are still hanging over the series like the proverbial Sword of Damocles – or more like Chekhov’s Gun on the mantel waiting to be fired – are the questions about the true motivations and the depths of the corruption that Joywood has sunk to in their quest for power.

The answers to those questions seem to be being dribbled out slowly so as to be able to give each of the romances their chances to shine – and to put together the steps necessary to defeat the evil that Joywood represents. I liked this particular droplet of that part of the story more than the first. There are intended to be two more books in the series to finish things – and hopefully the Joywood – off.

So far, at least, I’m in for another round, because this was better than the first. We’ll just have to see how that goes as the series continues.

Review: Contrarian by L.E. Modesitt Jr.

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: Contrarian by L.E. Modesitt Jr.Contrarian (The Grand Illusion #3) by L.E. Modesitt Jr.
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, gaslamp, steampunk
Series: Grand Illusion #3
Pages: 624
Published by Tor Books on August 15, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

L. E. Modesitt, Jr., bestselling author of Saga of Recluce and the Imager Portfolio, continues his gaslamp political fantasy series which began with Isolate and Councilor . Welcome to the Grand Illusion

In Contrarian , protests against unemployment and poor harvests have become armed riots as the people sink deeper into poverty. They look to a government struggling to emerge from corruption and conspiracy.

Recently elected to the Council of Sixty-Six, Steffan Dekkard is the first Councilor who is an Isolate, a man invulnerable to the emotional manipulations and emotional surveillance of empaths―but not the recent bombing of the Council Office Building by insurrectionists.

His patron, the Premier of the Council, has been assassinated, leaving Dekkard with little first-hand political experience and few political allies.

Not only must Dekkard handle political infighting, and continued assassination attempts, but it appears that someone high up in the government and corporations has supplied arms and explosives to insurrectionists.

Insurrectionists who have succeeded in taking over a naval cruiser that no one can seem to find.

My Review:

If diplomacy is war conducted through other means, then it can be argued that politics must be civil war conducted by other means. There’s certainly a civil war going on between the three political parties in Guldor, complete with campaigns, strategies and entirely too many casualties.

The first book in this series, Isolate, ended in triumph. The second, Councilor, ended in tragedy. This third book, Contrarian, ends in – well, you’ll see – or at least you’ll see enough to make you want to pick it up. I hope.

The overall theme of The Grand Illusion series (Isolate, Councilor and now Contrarian) is wrapped around the grand and all-too-often grandiose illusion that government can somehow take care of all of the people all of the time even as it caters to the elites at the top of the dogpile.

While spinning pretty much everything they can – or can invent – to convince people that the folks who are sincerely trying to fix things are actually the people causing it because they are the ones bringing attention to the injustices.

We all know it works because we’ve seen it in action, much too often and much too recently, in real life.

However, by setting this intense political discourse in a gaslamp fantasy world and embodying it in the literal body of one political neophyte who is doing his damndest to make real life better for average people, we get to see the arguments from the outside and can pretend, if necessary for our psyches, that the story doesn’t have relevance to the real world.

The first book ended in triumph, as the middle-class, working-class Craft Party was swept into power in the constitutional monarchy of Guldor because they had a charismatic leader at the head of the party, his security aides were exceptionally good at keeping the man alive in spite of the number of assassination attempts he faced, AND the competing parties, Landor (nobility) and Commerce (megacorporations) had screwed the pooch so thoroughly and so often that their abuses of power became too obvious to cover up.

The second begins in the triumph of starting to stab at the myriad problems afflicting the country, only for that triumph to be cut tragically short when that charismatic and effective Craft leader was assassinated along with many of his most able councilors.

All except one, who was one of those exceptionally good security aides turned councilor in his own right. In Contrarian, Steffan Dekkard is caught on the horns of multiple dilemmas and in the midst of overwhelming changes both personal and professional.

Dekkard is the ‘contrarian’ of the title. He is one of THE most junior councilors in the Council of Sixty-Six, both in age and political experience. He is also the clear ‘spiritual’ heir to the assassinated Axel Obreduur, but can’t take up the reins of power – at least not yet. This is the story of him finding a way to operate, not so much from the shadows but from the back benches, managing up the levels of his party while continuing to dodge the political machinations of his enemies – along with the increasing number of assassins they aim at his head.

The opposition Commerce party is like a hydra, sprouting two heads for every one of their plots he manages to thwart. It is part of the cut and thrust of politics even at the best of times, but he knows he can and will lose some of the battles in pursuit of the greater war.

An assassin only has to succeed once. If Dekkard, with the assistance of his friends, working under the eagle eye and mind of his security aide and new bride Avraal, has to practice ‘Constant Vigilance’ while still serving his office, taking care of his constituents, and somehow managing to have a life – for as long he can.

Escape Rating A+: This series is my catnip. I could read about Steffan’s work day, his colleagues, his attempts to maneuver around a great many of them, and the crises in his country that he tries to prevent, pretty much all day long. As I did for the two days it took me to finish the book a few months ago for Library Journal, AND the day it took me to skim-read just now for this review. .

The book – and the previous books in the series – combine a kind of ‘slice of life’ story with an ongoing exploration of how the sausage of politics is made and why most people really don’t want to know about exactly what goes into it.

What makes it work, or at least work fantastically for this reader, is the way that all of the political maneuvering, whether for good or for evil, is embodied in the characters. Which means that this isn’t traditional epic fantasy, even though it is certainly epic in scope.

But we are meant to like Steffan Dekkard and his wife Avraal Ysella-Dekkard, and we do. We believe they’re working for, not an abstract good, not a ‘greater good’ but to make the lives of as many people as they can better by getting their government to work for all its citizens and not merely a privileged few who grease the wheels.

They are fighting the good fight, and it’s fun to watch them do their work – surprisingly so as watching them work often involves just watching them go through their day. It shouldn’t be riveting but it is and I was every step of the way.

The progress of the series so far reminds me a lot of the author’s Imager Portfolio, although not so much the first three books as the rest of the series that started (honestly re-started) with Scholar. Which means I’m expecting the Grand Illusion series to encompass Steffan Dekkard’s political career and end with a book titled Premier – or at least with Steffan holding that title in the book.

Whether or not my surmise about the far-off ending of the series is correct, Contrarian ends in a way that absolutely begs a return to this world and this series. It is clear from the book’s conclusion that neither the series nor Steffan’s career is remotely near done. And that he’ll have plenty of political battles to get through before it is. So, even though the author has returned to one of his other series this year, I have high hopes that we’ll get to see more of Guldor through Steffan and Avraal’s eyes in the years and books to come.

Review: Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz by Garth Nix

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz by Garth NixSir Hereward and Mister Fitz: Stories of the Witch Knight and the Puppet Sorcerer by Garth Nix
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, sword and sorcery
Pages: 304
Published by Harper Voyager on August 22, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

New York Times bestselling author Garth Nix's exciting adult debut: a new collection including all eight stories--plus a never-before-published story--featuring Sir Hereward and his sorcerous puppet companion Mister Fitz, gathered in one magical volume for the first time ever!
Sir Hereward: the only male child of an ancient society of witches. Knight, artillerist, swordsman. Mercenary for hire. Ill-starred lover.
Mister Fitz: puppet, sorcerer, loremaster. Practitioner of arcane arts and wielder of sorcerous needles.
Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz: godslayers. Agents of the Council of the Treaty for the Safety of the World, charged with the location and removal of listed extra-dimensional entities, more commonly known as gods.
Together, they are relentless travelers in a treacherous world of magic, gunpowder, and adventure.
Compiled for the first time ever, these eight magical stories--plus an all-new tale, "The Field of Fallen Foes"--featuring fabulous, quintessential Garth Nix protagonists Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz comprise a must-have adult fantasy collection for fans and those about to discover the witch knight and his puppet sorcerer for the first time.

My Review:

A long time ago in a galaxy not far away at all SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) Grand Master Fritz Leiber loosed a pair of anti-heroish-type heroes into the world of fantasy, and the genre was never the same. I’m referring to the immortal swordsman Fafhrd and his rogue companion the Gray Mouser, who together embodied the subgenre of sword and sorcery.

Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz follow in those bootprints, right down to the boots being rather large in the cases of both Fafhrd and Sir Hereward, and considerably smaller for the Gray Mouser and Mister Fitz.

Just as the earlier pair roamed the world of Nehwon, traveled through places strange, wondrous and frequently unpronounceable, tackling enemies both mundane and sorcerous, putting down old gods and monsters when needed, so do Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz, their literary if not actual descendants, wander their own world of unpronounceable places filled with even more tongue-twisting gods, carrying out one mission after another for the Council of the Treaty for the Safety of the World, tasked with casting rogue gods back to whatever corner of the multiverse they sprang from.

The stories here are just that, stories. This is a collection of nine stories that feature the titular pair, as they carry out their missions – sometimes deliberately and occasionally by accident – as they travel their world and keep very, very far from home.

In their very first adventure, “Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz Go To War Again”, originally published in 2007, we meet the witch knight Hereward and the puppet sorcerer Mister Fitz as they start out pursuing a bit of mercenary work to tide them over financially, only to wind up doing their real job when they discover a rapacious godlet who is draining all the lands around itself in a bid for more power. There’s a bittersweet tone to this story as Hereward knows he must deal with the godlet’s adherents whether they serve out of true belief or a sense of duty and wishes that it didn’t always end quite like this.

All of the stories in this collection, save the final story, “The Field of Fallen Foe”, have been published over the intervening years between that first story and this last – but hopefully not final – one.

Each story is an adventure in its own right, each stands very much alone as they were published with that intent, but together they build up a portrait of an all-too-often-literal ‘ride or die’ friendship as the knight and the puppet save each other even as they bicker together over and over.

It’s also a bit of a cast-against-type kind of partnership, as Mister Fitz is an autonomous puppet who has lived for so many centuries that he has passed into legend, while Sir Hereward is barely an adult – sometimes – at a mere twenty five. That Mister Fitz was originally Mistress Fitz and their relationship began when Mistress Fitz was Hereward’s nanny just adds layers to their partnership and their endless bickering.

And it’s considerably more common in their adventures that Fitz is the one who gets the job done and saves both the day and his partner, while Hereward plays the bait and has the credit thrust upon him in the end. Because Fitz is smart enough to hide the literal lights of his eyes and his sorcerous needles under his very tall and broad hat.

Any reader who remembers Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and the genre they embodied will love Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz, while anyone looking for a compelling series of adventures that can be read in tasty bites – or who just likes a good buddy story no matter where the buddies are hanging out – will have a terrific time with Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz.

Escape Rating B+: I’ve always meant to read the author’s Old Kingdom series, but it fell victim to the ‘so many books, so little time’ conundrum, as so many do. So it’s buried somewhere in the virtually towering TBR pile but has never managed to rise to the top. Reading Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz bumped it up quite a bit higher, but it’s a VERY tall pile.

I enjoyed my journey with Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz rather a lot, but then I did love Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser when I read them back in the 1970s, and they were already classics at that point. I love sword and sorcery, and it’s something that you don’t see much of right now. Like many subgenres, I expect it will come back around again, just as urban fantasy was everywhere in the 1980s, died down in the early 2000s but seems to be coming back around again.

As I write this, I have the sense that I’m not doing the collection justice. And I think that’s because, while the collection as a whole definitely made an impression that lingers, I found that the individual stories in this collection were not memorable in and of themselves. I’m not dealing well with handling that dichotomy.

The not-individually-memorable part may be due to the way that these were originally published. Each needed to stand on its own, so there’s a fair bit of repetition in the setup of each story that slows things down a bit. But, over the course of the whole, we do get plenty of clues about the two characters, their personalities, their histories and most definitely their relationship. In the end, if you like the way the two of them work together, the whole thing is a treat but if they don’t resonate with you then the collection won’t work for you either.

Personally I would love a remix of this collection as a full-length novel or one that sinks its teeth into the earlier days of their association because they are fascinating characters and the hints of their origin story – especially Mister Fitz’ – and the world they inhabit would be (literally and figuratively) fantastic.

It’s not required to have read Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories to get into Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz, but if you have you’ll find much that seems familiar. However, if this book teases you to pick up the classic, the first collection is Swords and Deviltry – and I remember it very fondly.

Two final notes about Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz. There’s a story in the forthcoming collection The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: Volume Four titled “The Voice of a Thousand Years” by Fawaz Al Matrouk that influenced my reading of Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz and gave me an overall sense of bittersweetness that isn’t exactly there in the text but now that I’ve read them close together I can’t get it out of my head.

And, on a much greater note of whimsy, for anyone who has ever played Final Fantasy IX, there’s a strong possibility that Vivi Ornitier is a portrait of the sorcerous puppet as a very young mage.

Review: Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Review: Thornhedge by T. KingfisherThornhedge by T. Kingfisher
Narrator: Jennifer Blom
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, fairy tales, fantasy, retellings
Pages: 128
Length: 3 hours and 43 minutes
Published by Tor Books on August 15, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

From USA Today bestselling author T. Kingfisher, Thornhedge is an original, subversive fairytale about a kind-hearted, toad-shaped heroine, a gentle knight, and a mission gone completely sideways.
There’s a princess trapped in a tower. This isn't her story.
Meet Toadling. On the day of her birth, she was stolen from her family by the fairies, but she grew up safe and loved in the warm waters of faerieland. Once an adult though, the fae ask a favor of Toadling: return to the human world and offer a blessing of protection to a newborn child. Simple, right?
If only.
Centuries later, a knight approaches a towering wall of brambles, where the thorns are as thick as your arm and as sharp as swords. He’s heard there’s a curse here that needs breaking, but it’s a curse Toadling will do anything to uphold…

My Review:

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess who was cursed by an evil fairy godmother to prick her finger on a spinning wheel’s spindle and sleep for a century – along with everyone else who inhabits that castle. This isn’t that story. That’s the story that was made from this one, when the truth needed to be spindled in order to make the story fit a more conventional mold.

Because in all the stories, evil is supposed to be ugly and anyone beautiful must be good. Which is what makes it a story, because in truth, evil often wears a very pretty face – all the better to hide the rot within. But that’s not the way the story is supposed to go – so it didn’t.

The truth, or at least this version of the truth – is considerably different – as the truth generally is.

Toadling has watched seasons change and years pass beyond counting, guarding the thornhedge that surrounds the darkling woods that encase the decaying castle where the beautiful princess sleeps a troubled, enchanted sleep. Once upon a time, Toadling was human. Once upon a time, she might have been that princess.

Once upon a time, she made a terrible mistake that put her exactly where she is, standing guard, doing her sometimes human, sometimes toad-like best to perform her self-imposed duty of keeping the princess safe – and keeping everyone else safe from the princess.

Just as Toadling is almost, almost sure that all knowledge of the lost princess and the crumbling tower has slipping out of time and mind of the rest of the world, her sanctuary is invaded in the kindliest and most annoyingly frustrating – at least for Toadling – way possible. The knight Halim has a burning need to solve the mystery. If there’s a princess imprisoned in the crumbling castle, he’ll certainly rescue her – after all, he is a knight – if not either a very good or very successful one. But his primary motivation isn’t the princess, it’s solving the puzzle.

Which, in the end, he does. Just not the way that Toadling feared. Or even worse, hoped.

Escape Rating A: Thornhedge is a fractured fairy tale. In fact, Thornhedge and A Spindle Splintered are fractured versions of the same fairy tale, that of Sleeping Beauty. But they have been fractured along very different fault lines.

It’s because they start with different questions. A Spindle Splintered asked whether there were ways for Sleeping Beauty to escape her destiny, and what would happen if she tried, and then proceeded to play out those variations across the multiverse.

Thornhedge goes back to the beginning of the story and asks a fundamental question about why it was necessary for the princess to be ensconced in that castle so thoroughly in the first place. The answer to that question sets the fairy tale entirely on its head but also makes the story considerably more interesting.

Instead of a ‘fridged’ heroine who gets top billing but does nothing to earn it, we get a lovely story about friendship and duty and guilt and spending a lifetime making up for someone else’s mistakes and cleaning up after someone else’s messes and finally, finally participating in your own rescue.

Because this isn’t really the Sleeping Beauty story at all, but in a totally different way than Sleeping Beauty wasn’t actually Sleeping Beauty’s own story.

Instead it’s a story about friendship and guilt and learning to be – not who you are supposed to be, but who you really are. That the lesson turns out to be just as much for Halim the Knight as it is for Toadling the fairy is just the teeniest, tiny part of what makes Thornhedge such a lovely read.

Or in my case, reread. I read this for a Library Journal review a few months back, and loved it as I do all of T. Kingfisher’s work, but not quite as much as I did Nettle & Bone. Listening to it now brought all the best parts back – particularly the perspective of the princess turned Toadling in her frustration, her longing, and her utterly justified anger at everything that brought her to this pass. Including herself.

The way in which she rescues herself, and Halim, and finally gets the future she wants now and the home she wants later, was beautiful. As is Toadling, even if neither the reader nor Halim notice it at first. Because this is Toadling’s story, and she’s the heroine, and heroines are supposed to be beautiful. So she is, and so is her story.