Category: Review

Fantasy Review: ‘The Healers’ Road’ by S E Robertson

This is an unusual book. Yes, yes, I know I specialise in unusual books; not for me the dull old treadmill of mainstream popular works. I read stuff you’ve never heard of. But this book is special: I came across it on a forum where the author lamented that she’d only sold… no, let’s not put a number on it. Let’s just say: not very many. So this is a book that nobody has ever heard of. So what’s it about? Well, let me tell you first what it’s not about. It’s not about saving the world. It’s not about finding the lost heir to the kingdom. There’s no quest, no named sword, no moustache-twirling villain, no prophecy. There are no orcs, dwarves, elves or goblins. No dragons, either, sadly (every fantasy book should have dragons, in my opinion, but there you go). There are no witches, werewolves, vampires. OK, […]

Posted December 25, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

Fantasy Romance Review: ‘Urdaisunia’ by Kyra Halland

Kyra Halland is one of those rare authors capable of creating a deeply realistic fantasy world, with an equally realistic romance embedded within it. Too many fantasy authors tack the romance on as an afterthought, or else the romance is all-important and the fantasy elements are hurled randomly into the mix, as if it doesn’t matter whether the obstacles keeping our pair of lovers apart are meaningful or not. Here everything is carefully thought out. Rashali is a simple village woman, struggling to survive in an Urdaisunia now conquered by neighbouring Sazars. Eruz is a Sazar prince, treading a careful path between his father the king, his vicious, squabbling brothers and his own conscience. When chance throws Rashali into his path, he is forced to face up to the consequences of his father’s rule. And then, delightfully, the gods take an interest in matters and start poking around in the […]

Posted December 9, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

Fantasy Review: ‘Bones of the Fair’ by Andrea K Host

The first book in the Darest sequence, ‘The Champion of the Rose’, is one of my favourite fantasies of all time. Who, after all, could fail to love a book which stars a malign rose bush at its heart? With an intriguing setting, some great characters and a difficult but brilliantly realised romance, it ticked all the boxes for me. This one – not so much. On the positive side, we have another array of awesome characters, albeit with a couple of disappointments. Aristide, a stunningly ambiguous fellow in book 1, is here a little more ordinary. No matter how many times we’re told about his glittering coldness and incisive intellect, he’s too straightforward a character here to raise the goosebumps. Gentian is too much a plot device to shine properly. The real star of the show this time is Aspen, a wonderfully over-the-top character, always focused on the next […]

Posted December 6, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

Fantasy Review: ‘Tooth And Claw’ by Jo Walton

So having read (and loved) the very weird ‘Among Others’, I went straight on to read another of Jo Walton’s books, which is, if that’s possible, even weirder. Imagine a Victorian melodrama, complete with disgraced virgins, wives who die in childbirth, a rigidly structured class system with hints of radical reform, and a focus on proper behaviour and keeping up appearances. And now imagine it populated with dragons, and there you have ‘Tooth and Claw’. This is one of those off-the-wall ideas that must have looked brilliant in outline. Make some general points about civilisation and gender roles and class and race, while covering everything with a fantasy veneer. And to some extent it worked. I galloped through the book to find out how it all turned out, anyway. But somehow it never quite felt right. No matter how many times the author wrote ‘claw’ for hands, and had the […]

Posted December 5, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

Fantasy Review: ‘Among Others’ by Jo Walton

I have no idea what to make of this. Anyone who’s read it will understand when I say that I’ve never read anything like it. It’s so far out to left field that it probably meets itself coming the other way. And yet I loved it. Here’s the premise: Morwenna is a fifteen-year-old girl with eccentric family life, who is, after a dramatic family implosion, under the care of her long-absent father, and starting at a girls’ boarding school. Retreating into a shell of leave-me-alone-ness, she finds consolation in reading – inhaling, almost – every sci-fi and fantasy book she can get her hands on. That’s a fairly bald summary of a story that involves a witchy mother, fairies and magic (possibly), a family for whom the word weird just doesn’t come close, as well as the banal details of school life and an array of glorious asides on the […]

Posted November 30, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

Paranormal DNF: ‘Morning Star’ by Desiree Finkbeiner

This is one of those books that I picked up yonks ago in the enthusiasm of a brand new Kindle, which has lurked forgotten ever since. And somehow my tastes have changed in the interim. What seemed like an interesting idea now doesn’t grab me at all. Here’s the premise: Brianna (or Bree) is a normal teenage girl, albeit with an unusual interest in mushrooms, when she encounters a giant dragonfly and falls down the stairs. As anyone would. She recovers remarkably quickly, but then the dragonflies are everywhere, and Bree sees an attractive stranger, Kalen, who fascinates her. He speaks and dresses oddly, and is unfamiliar with common customs. From then onwards, things escalate, involving a specific mushroom Bree found some years earlier, and another stranger with dragonflies and evil intent. And somehow none of it captivated me, and Bree’s insta-lust attraction towards Kalen got tedious very quickly. There’s […]

Posted November 29, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 1 Comment

Fantasy Romance Review: ‘Beneath The Canyons’ by Kyra Halland

What could possibly improve a good old-fashioned western? Why, a little magic, that’s what. Yes, folks, what we have here is a western/fantasy mash-up, complete with horses tied up outside the saloon, gambling and whoring inside, and gunfights in the street, but some of the people wearing the big hats are mages, and the mining going on in the hills is digging up something a lot more powerful than gold. And is it fun? You betcha. Silas is a mage visiting the Wildings from neighbouring Granadaia, a bounty hunter looking to round up a renegade mage for profit. Lainie is a rancher’s daughter with her own untrained magical powers. Silas ought to hand her over for training, or else remove her powers altogether, leaving her a shell of her former self, but somehow he can’t quite bring himself to do either. Meanwhile, the town is being torn apart by the […]

Posted November 28, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 2 Comments

Urban Fantasy Review: ‘Killing Rites’ by M L N Hanover

The fourth in the Black Sun’s Daughter series, written under a pseudonym by Daniel Abraham, and at last things are coming to the boil. Jayne has finally stopped shopping and randomly cataloguing dear Uncle Eric’s many houses, and started to think more carefully, both about herself and what she’s doing, but also about the people who surround her. People who give her (mostly) unconditional love and support, but are also individuals with their own hopes and dreams and murky past histories. And Jayne now knows for sure that she has a rider – a demon residing inside her, who helps her in moments of extreme stress, but who is generally regarded as a Very Bad Thing. This book leaves behind former lover Aubrey, now trying to reconcile with his ex-wife, and, for most of the time, philosophy-man Chogyi Jake, leaving Jayne with one-time priest Ex, a man she now knows […]

Posted November 27, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

Fantasy Review: ‘Watcher’s Web’ by Patty Jansen

I’m a sucker for a portal story, where the main character falls through some sort of access point into – well, whatever the author cares to imagine (past, future, parallel world, some other planet altogether). It’s always fun to watch the character work out what’s happened, and trying to deal with the new setting. It can be trite, but there’s always room for a fresh take on the idea. Jessica has always been an outsider. She’s taller than average, for one thing, not very womanly in shape, has some odd birthmarks, and then there’s the whole web of light thing she does with her mind. Useful for dealing with truculent bulls, but it can kill, too, and she’s still not sure how to cope with it. And then one day, something odd happens and the small plane she’s in crashes somewhere weird. As in very weird. Straight away I like […]

Posted November 26, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

Fiction Review: ‘My Memories of a Future Life’ by Roz Morris

I have no idea what to make of this. I don’t even know how to characterise it: literary paranormal fiction, maybe? Or a psychological… hmm, not thriller, exactly, but mystery, perhaps. And although it was interesting, in an oddball sort of way, it never quite flowed for me. It felt just a bit out of kilter like a slightly convex mirror, everything coming across as distorted. Maybe that’s appropriate for the story, I don’t know. Certainly the future parts were much more interesting and vivid to read about. The premise is that a talented London pianist, Carol, finds herself unable to play because of repetitive strain injury. Her flatmate, Jerry, is pursuing his personal demons by way of regressive hypnotherapy; he feels he’s been a victim of Jack the Ripper in a previous life. Carol tries it too, but finds herself in the future, a soothesayer called Andreq, someone who […]

Posted November 24, 2014 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments