The Daughter of the Wildings series is possibly my favourite reading at the moment. This is book 3, and the author’s getting into her stride now. The characters are charming and heroic, the villains are exceedingly villainous (or just plain stupid), the setting is wonderfully detailed with a bit more revealed with every book, and the stories are just out and out good, rollicking fun. The two main characters, Silas and Lainie, are (unusually for fantasy, but not for this author) a married couple. Theirs isn’t a straightforward relationship, which allows for a bit of angsting along the way, but they still get along fine. I’m usually critical of books where the characters fall headlong into stereotypical gender roles, but here it works really well. Silas has a gentlemanly desire to protect Lainie from… well, everything, basically. She still blushes at any mention of sex. Yet they still have total […]

This is the second book in the ‘Daughter of the Wildings’ series, and I loved the first, ‘Beneath The Canyons’, when I read it last year. What do you know, this one is even better. Part of the fun is the genre mash-up – if you’ve ever wondered what a western would look like if you threw wizards and magic into the mix, wonder no longer. This has all the traditional elements of a western – desert badlands, saloons with swinging doors, gun-slinging bad guys, dust storms, horses and big hats. But it also has two or three different kinds of magic, some strange blue-skinned creatures who are probably not human and a whole heap of conflict between the different magic users. The world-building is a strength of the series, and although each story seems to be no more than a simple adventure, each book pulls back the curtain a […]