I hope no one is so jaded on Arthurian fantasy that they can’t enjoy this glorious retelling and meticulous tear-down of every facet of the over-familiar stories. Every character comes to scurrilous life in By Force Alone, as that title phrase echoes over and over throughout this dynamic, hilarious and strangely moving book. I say […]
Ashes of the Sun by Django Wexler #WyrdandWonder
Ashes of the Sun by Django Wexler is the first book of the Burningblade & Silverye series, and it’s a roaring good adventure. Just don’t expect anything deeper from the story. It focuses on Gyre and Maya, brother and sister, who are violently separated in childhood when a fearsome warrior known as a centarch removes […]
The Singing Hills Cycle by Nghi Vo #WyrdandWonder
Look, I can’t pretend to keep up with the outpouring of fine SFF writing we are now witnessing, so I’m dipping into the recent past to discuss a pair of stories that are so perfect in their way that it’s hard to write about them. Nghi Vo is a storyteller of dazzling gifts, and her […]
The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri #WyrdandWonder
What an exciting and involving novel this is! Tasha Suri’s The Jasmine Throne takes a while to set its crowded stage but soon launches into a powerful story of two extraordinary women, each trying to gain power of very different types. When thrown together, despite their vastly different backgrounds, one (Priya) apparently a lowly servant, […]
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison #WyrdAndWonder
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison is a brilliant but perplexing book, straddling the line between fantasy and literary fiction. It’s sort of proto-fantasy in which two principal characters, Shaw and Victoria, play out their lives, as if stuck to a purpose that no longer fits them, hardly able to […]
Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard
Aliette de Bodard’s prose swept me through Fireheart Tiger like a single brushstroke of many beautiful strands toward a strong conclusion that came just a little too easily and a little too soon. She is a master at plunging the reader at once into a richly imagined fantasy world yet without distracting the mind with […]
