borderline fantasy

I recently read two first fantasy novels, Lawrences’s Prince of Thorns and Hoffman’s The Left Hand of God, with the same (rotten) core idea, namely a teenager or even pre-teen exposed to violence, sadism, and mistreatment and becoming a perfect killer. The plausibility of the thing is not what bothers me, as the past years sadly […]

Best Served Cold

“Science is a system of rational thought devised to investigate the world and establish the laws by which it operates.” Joe Abercrombie, Best Served Cold I have just finished Joe Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold I brought back from Texas. It is even darker and more sinister than the First Law trilogy. But, despite some flaws […]

The Way of Shadows

“The mathematical formulae were no help; they were full of infinities and zeroes with no way of knowing on which side of the equation they landed.” This is the first volume of The Night Angel Trilogy, written by Brent Weeks. It falls within the “assassin” branch of heroic fantasy, where the lower levels of a […]

The Godspeaker trilogy

This week, I finished the third volume of the Godspeaker trilogy by Karen Miller. As for the previous series, Kingmaker Kingbreaker, the covers are nice drawings (by Julia Denos) with none of the gaudiness of usual heroic fantasy covers (just think of the original covers of the Wheel of Time series!), even though the editor […]

The Wolfblade trilogy

It has been a long while since I read such a good fantasy trilogy: the series of Wolfblade, Warrior, and Warlord by Jennifer Fallon is altogether a very pleasant and enticing read! It has most of the attributes of standard heroic fantasy, but to a limited extent, in that political maneuvering is generally more important […]