Book #63 of 2020: Highfire by Eoin Colfer This is a very weird story about the world’s last dragon — really more like a tall, strong humanoid reptile — living in the swamps of Louisiana. It’s very heavy on dialect and other local color, and with its madcap plot of drug dealers and corrupt cops …
Tag Archives: fantasy
Book Review: A Darker Shade of Magic by V. E. Schwab
Book #62 of 2020: A Darker Shade of Magic by V. E. Schwab (Shades of Magic #1) This fantasy novel improves as it goes along, but it’s literally over a quarter of the way through before there’s anything that could remotely be called a plot. I’m also not happy that the only significant female character …
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Book Review: The Shadows Between Us by Tricia Levenseller
Book #60 of 2020: The Shadows Between Us by Tricia Levenseller This standalone fantasy novel has some definite issues with worldbuilding (like the generic medieval setting that then randomly has a semi-automatic handgun in one scene) and character motivation (like the protagonist who wants to seduce, marry, and kill the king for basically no reason). …
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Book Review: The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang
Book #55 of 2020: The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang (The Poppy War #1) I really like the beginning of this novel, with its Ender’s Shadow plot — i.e. an orphan child acing the entrance exam for a prestigious military academy — set in a fantasy world inspired by modern Chinese history. But it …
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Book Review: Akata Warrior by Nnedi Okorafor
Book #50 of 2020: Akata Warrior by Nnedi Okorafor (Akata Witch #2) This second novel in the Akata Witch duology has a messier and more episodic plot than its predecessor, but it also feels more like a fully-formed fantasy vision rather than just an #ownvoices West African take on Harry Potter. (Although as with that …
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Book Review: Witch Week by Diana Wynne Jones
Book #48 of 2020: Witch Week by Diana Wynne Jones (Chrestomanci #3) This has always been my favorite Chrestomanci book, even though it’s a bit of a spin-off, with the multiverse-hopping enchanter only showing up in the last third or so of the text (and not requiring any prior reader knowledge to understand and appreciate …
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Book Review: Race to the Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse
Book #45 of 2020: Race to the Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse A delightful middle-grade fantasy novel that incorporates elements of traditional Navajo folklore while avoiding the paint-by-numbers plot that such modernizations often entail. (I hesitate to call the work #ownvoices, since author Rebecca Roanhorse is not Navajo herself and she makes clear in an afterword …
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Book Review: The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
Book #43 of 2020: The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern This seems like one of those books that is guaranteed to frustrate a lot of readers, in that it obliquely hints at larger designs instead of ever giving us the full picture. The opening premise, after all, is less a novel than a collection of …
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Book Review: Fool’s Quest by Robin Hobb
Book #39 of 2020: Fool’s Quest by Robin Hobb (The Fitz and The Fool #2) A marked improvement over the start of this trilogy, but still rather slow-paced and occasionally a bit tedious in how it retreads familiar territory from earlier in the Elderlings saga. (Of course Fitz is going to insist on doing something …
Book Review: The Guinevere Deception by Kiersten White
Book #38 of 2020: The Guinevere Deception by Kiersten White (Camelot Rising #1) This Arthurian YA took a little while to grow on me, and there’s a major twist that’s telegraphed so openly throughout this initial volume that I wish author Kiersten White had moved it forward and spent more time dealing with the fallout …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 