Book #141 of 2024: The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman As a genre, Arthuriana tends to be at its finest — with Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King remaining the absolute gold standard for me — when pitched as a tragedy, inviting us to invest in the glimmering dream of Camelot so that its …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman”
Book #223 of 2020: The Silver Arrow by Lev Grossman There’s a fun Diana Wynne Jones-meets-Norton Juster vibe to the start of this children’s fantasy novel, in which a bored eleven-year-old girl and her nine-year-old brother are gifted a life-sized magical steam train by their eccentric uncle. The ensuing adventure doesn’t quite live up to …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Silver Arrow by Lev Grossman”
Book #28 of 2018: Warp by Lev Grossman It turns out this short first novel by The Magicians author Lev Grossman went out of print for a reason, and the success of that later work doesn’t really justify this new edition. You can almost see the origins of Magicians hero Quentin Coldwater in its aimless …
Book #255 of 2017: Dangerous Women edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois Far more misses than hits in this genre-spanning short story collection that purports to be about ‘dangerous women’ but mostly delivers stale femme fatales from a largely male gaze. (Why did it not occur to George R.R. Martin and Gardner …
Continue reading “Book Review: Dangerous Women edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois”
Book #25 of 2017: The Magician’s Land by Lev Grossman (The Magicians #3) An improvement over the first two novels, and a satisfying end to this loose adult fantasy trilogy. Both protagonist Quentin Coldwater and writer Lev Grossman feel like they’ve grown up a lot for this novel, and both approach their tasks here as …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Magician’s Land by Lev Grossman”
Book #134 of 2016: The Magician King by Lev Grossman (The Magicians #2) Like the previous novel in this series, The Magician King is about wizards with depression, and it’s a good illustration of how that condition can strip away all sense of joy or satisfaction and leave a person completely listless in every situation. …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Magician King by Lev Grossman”
Book #125 of 2016: The Magicians by Lev Grossman (The Magicians #1) Thematically, The Magicians is a story about wizards with depression, and about how getting your heart’s desire isn’t always enough to make you happy. That’s a perspective that’s pretty rare in the fantasy genre, and I appreciated author Lev Grossman giving his characters …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Magicians by Lev Grossman”
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more