Life comes at you fast, and these past few years have come with a whole lot of extra life stuff to deal with. So it’s been a bit of a while since I’ve actually read much of anything, much less read anything to completion, and much less even than that read anything that’s left me with strong enough feelings to write another one of these.
But then I saw this book on a little shelf in a thrift shop a couple months ago offering “high fantasy and low stakes,” and it looked like the kind of chill, cozy, light read that might lull me back into reading more regularly.
The jury’s still out on that point, because busy life things are still happening and I only just finished this book; but regardless, Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree definitely delivers on the “slow down, take a breath, have a nice time” vibes it was giving. It is, in a word, charming.
The story follows Viv, a freshly retired orc barbarian who’s decided to swap her greatsword for a bean grinder and get away from the bloody, hectic life of a professional adventurer. To this end, she rolls up in the city of Thune with a nest egg and a plan: introduce the townsfolk to this wonderful gnomish concoction she fell in love with on her travels, a liquid hug in a mug called “coffee.”
Making hot bean water sound appealing is the least of her concerns, though. And although there are tense conflicts that pop up to raise the stakes (local mob bosses, slighted and suspicious ex-allies, magical mumbo-jumbo that may or may not be steering things), most of Viv’s story is focused on the more mundane and day-to-day struggles of starting up a new cafe: shop maintenance, building renovation, finding the right employees and business partners, figuring out a menu, experimenting with snack recipes, etc.
Put like that, the story doesn’t sound too exciting, and for the most part, it’s not. But that’s a feature, not a bug. It’s just a nice, wholesome time watching Viv struggle with social awkwardness around her new succubus barista, or try to convince the terse hobgoblin who helped her renovate the place to accept free drinks for his trouble, or wrangle the dire housecat that’s decided it lives in the cafe now and has a propensity to startle the customers and steal unguarded baked goods.
The few more dramatic plot points notwithstanding, this book is more concerned with casual lo-fi story beats. It’s a domestic fantasy to relax and study to, if you will. And that makes it every bit the warm, refreshing treat as the titular lattes.
If you’re looking to just feel comfy and nice, but in a nerdy fantasy kind of way, give this one a sip.
Well, we made it to the last 50 out of the original 300 titles before our book was cut. While The Black Lily didn’t make it into the top 10 finalists, our reviewer Kitty G enjoyed our book and left us a wonderful review on her Youtube channel. Check it out!
Our dark fantasy novel The Black Lily is a contestant for SPFBO 6. SPFBO is short for Self-Published Fantasy Blog Off. It is a competition for self-published fantasy books that is currently in its sixth year.
This year, 300 books were entered in the competition. We’re currently in the first round, where the 10 judges read (and often review) the 30 books, weeding out the ones that won’t go on to the semi-finals.
After that, each blogger chooses their favorite book to go on to the semi-finals (10 total). Then, they each read the semi-finalist and choose their favorite book from those. The one with the most votes is the winner.
The judge assigned to our book is Kitty G, a booktuber. Her channel can be found here.
We adore our book, but the competition is fierce. While we have no expectations of winning, we would be happy if we just got a review from Kitty G, as she has a large audience (15.1K subscribers)!
I absolutely loved this book. I love faerie lore (both traditional and reimagined in a second world setting), and Shadowfell is full of faerie creatures. While there are your more well-known creatures like will-o-wisps, pixies, brownies, and redcaps, there were a few new ones to me, such as the stanie mon, brollochan, and urisk. Probably my favorite was the Guardian of the South, a trickster figure of fire that can shift between an old man, a young boy, and a fierce warrior. He definitely reminded me of Loki, and I’m anticipating reading more about him as the series goes on.
This is kind of a hard review to write, just because I’ve already written it once already, so now I have to try not to repeat myself. Part of me just wants to drop a link here to my review of the first book in the series, The Grey Bastards, and leave it at that. And while I won’t actually be that lazy, I will go ahead and link that first review — check it out here, if you’ve a mind.
Honestly, I’m not sure at first what to say here besides: Did you read The Grey Bastards? Did you like it? Because this is more The Grey Bastards: more sprawling storylines weaving together in unexpected ways; more tough-as-nails, foul-mouthed, badass characters with flexible moral compasses; more unapologetic grit and grime and gut-strewing; more peeks into the nooks and crannies of a unique and beautifully built but cruelly unforgiving world; more sex; more violence; and more robust bacon flavor.
Also, to lift another similarity from the first review, more quick notes worth disclosing. First off, spoilers for the first Bastards book, obviously, so go read that if you haven’t yet before you read this. Second, for the sake of transparency, Jonathan French is still a friend of ours — someone we thanked as a mentor figure in our own debut self-published novel, and someone whose work we’ve been promoting at conventions and on social media and such as Bastards ambassadors (aka “ambastards”). We got advanced reader copies of The True Bastards about a month before the book goes/went on sale to the public, depending on when you’re reading this.
Take all of that into consideration if you want — but also know that, like The Grey Bastards before it, we don’t need no incentives to tell people that this book is damn good. This shit is my jam, and I was gonna read it and love it whether or not the author knows what my face looks like. The fact that I got to do it a month ahead of most other people was just a nice bonus and an incidental early birthday present.
Judge this book by its cover. I did, and I wasn’t disappointed.
Dragon Apocalypse: The Complete Collection by James Maxey is a thick-as-a-brick compilation of four hack-n-slash action fantasy novels (plus the original short story that inspired them): Greatshadow, Hush, Witchbreaker, and Cinder (plus “Greatshadow: Origins”).
Just to be thorough, I did a quick image search of each individual novel’s cover art, and my initial thesis still holds up. Badass lady jumping down a dragon’s throat, small woman with big hammer versus ice dragon in a frozen wasteland, dragon attacking ship on a storm-wracked sea, they all check out. And they’re all pretty good indicators of what kinds of stories to expect on the following pages.
I know it’s gauche to start an essay with a definition, but bear with me for a second, I promise it’s relevant.
Pulp fiction is technically defined by how it’s published, in magazines made with inexpensive wood pulp paper, priced cheaply to be sold and read in bulk. Sometimes this “quantity over quality” approach applied to the stories themselves, but sometimes it didn’t; pulp fiction, like all fiction, is only as good or as shoddy as the author writes it.
But beyond the technicalities of publishing, pulp fiction also developed a sort of overarching genre definition based on some recurring themes that tended to crop up in the stories again and again, regardless of categories like fantasy, noir, horror, etc. — namely, big, bombastic heroes squaring off against sinister, mysterious villains in dangerous, exotic locales, featuring beautiful women of both the damsel and the deadly variety.
All of this is to underscore that pulp fills a certain niche in fiction, and that The Bone Queen by Andrea Judy (disclaimer: another indie author friend of ours for several years now) falls squarely into this niche, so the answer to the question “But is it good, though?” will vary depending on where a reader stands in relation to said niche.
Do I like it? Yeah, I think it’s pretty good. The narrative isn’t deep or particularly nuanced; it doesn’t ask any tough questions or make many thoughtful moral arguments; and the fact that it’s an origin story for a character named “the Bone Queen” means you kind of know where the book is going to end up, more or less, from the word “go.” But it’s an entertaining trip getting there, straightforward and simple and fun, and full of rotten, visceral imagery, dark magic, and bone-crunching (in the most literal sense possible) action.
Out of the Shadows by Dana Fraedrich really scratched the steampunk itch I’ve been having lately. I especially enjoyed that the book was set in a unique steampunk world, rather than Victorian England. In fact, the unique world that it is set in means that one could also classify it as magicpunk.
The book takes place in Springhaven, a London-esque city in the small country of Invarnis. While Springhaven appears idyllic and tranquil on the surface, in reality, it is a dystopian society run by Enforcers who take a zero-tolerance policy to what they deem criminal activity. Criminal activity includes your usual—theft, rape, murder—but also means any sort of resistance against the established order. This includes befriending or assisting anyone deemed a criminal.
The main character, Lenore Crowley, has been an orphan for around a year at the start of the book because her parents were taken away for defying those in charge. She believes them to be dead, but learns later on that their fate was much worse—they are in a prison where they are tortured daily for information and the sheer sadistic pleasure of the Enforcers.
What I found especially interesting about the world building in Out of the Shadows is that Lenore’s society is built upon the remains of the Old World. Nobody is entirely certain what the Old World was or what happened to it, but they do know that in the Old World, magic, supernatural creatures, and fantastical events occurred which no longer exist (or so everyone believes). As readers, we are not even entirely sure how long ago the Old World ended. Thousands of years, hundreds, or just decades? It is my guess that the end of the Old World may have been brought about by the same iron hand that now rules Lenore’s society.
Big, tough, ripped, brutal badasses, for years they’ve been the go-to choice in fantasy for evil power players in need of intimidating mooks. More recently, modern fantasy has granted them a PR boost, both in reimaginings and in original stories. Black-and-white morality is out of fashion, shades of gray are in, and this gives orcs the opportunity to take the powerful, intimidating, dangerous image they’ve cultivated through decades of villain status and turn it toward nobler (or at least more sympathetic) pursuits.
No character is more interesting than the reformed villain. Put simply, orcs are the bad boys of the fantasy world.
And the warhog-riding half-orc bikers of The Grey Bastards are the bad boys (and girl) of the orc world.
Mix Sons of Anarchy with Shadow of Mordor and you’ll get a world similar to the Lot Lands of Jonathan French’s The Grey Bastards, where gangs of orc-human hybrids ride monstrous swine called barbarians as they patrol their anarchic wasteland, keeping the humans of Hispartha safe on one side by fending off the raiding parties of full-blooded orcs that routinely probe their lands from the other.
Although, confession, I don’t know how accurate this analogy still is when it comes to quality, because I’ve never actually seen Sons of Anarchy or played Shadow of Mordor. I’ve heard pretty good things about both, though, which makes me think the comparison still holds up. Because I have read The Grey Bastards, and yeah, it’s good. It’s really, really good.
I love fantasy novels, but I have a hard time sticking with a series that has more than four books, especially if they follow a single main character. What can I say; I’m a trilogy kind of girl. However, Maria V. Snyder did an excellent job of keeping me hooked all the way through the end of her nine-book series, The Chronicles of Ixia (AKA Poison Study, AKA Soulfinder—publishers really need to learn to just find one series name and stick with it). It helps that the nine books are divided into three sub-trilogies.
The first trilogy, comprised of Poison Study, Fire Study, and Magic Study, follows Yelena Zaltana. The second series, also called the Glass series, follows her friend Opal Cowan in Storm Glass, Sea Glass, and Spy Glass. The final trilogy, Shadow Study, Night Study, and Dawn Study, is where things get a bit odd. Maria V. Snyder had thrown in a few short stories/novellas throughout from different characters’ points of view. Perhaps she got bored of just sticking to one POV, or maybe fans wanted more from the other characters, so the third trilogy is from Yelena’s POV in first person and the POV’s of multiple characters (mainly Valek, Leif, and Janco, with a few others popping in from time to time) in third person.
I’m not sure which editor thought it would be a good idea to have POV switch from first person to third person in the same novel, but—yikes—is it jarring. I don’t know if the editor thought readers would be too confused because the first two trilogies were first person, but I think the entire last trilogy should have been third person. Now, I will admit my bias here—I personally always prefer third person, and I especially love third-person limited that switches between multiple characters. I think the first two trilogies in the series would have been much stronger if they had been written as such.
But enough of my rant. Because even with the wonky POV stuff in the third trilogy, these books are amazing and absolutely worth your time to read. Snyder’s world-building is compelling, detailed, and original. The books take place mostly between two pre-industrial countries: Ixia and Sitia. Ixia is a post-revolution country ruled by Commander Ambrose. His personal body guard and assassin is Valek. In the first novel Yelena is in prison for murder and is offered the choice to be the Commander’s food taster in exchange for her life. She agrees, and throughout the first book she and Valek begin to fall in love.
Starting a piece of writing can sometimes be one of the hardest parts of writing it, even for a book review, and especially for this one. I’ve been reading Jacqueline Carey’s adventures in Terre d’Ange for years now, starting with Kushiel’s Dart and just recently wrapping up Naamah’s Blessing. And I can honestly say that the nine books that comprise these three trilogies are among the best fantasy available today as well as nine of my all-time favorite books I’ve ever read. Ask me a question about some aspect of them and I can start rambling for an hour, but how do you pick a spot to begin at with this much to talk about?
The first two-thirds of the awesome.
I’ve been meaning to review the Kushiel and Naamah books since I started this blog, but covering just one book on its own is no good – by now, they’ve all melted into one massive and epic storyline in my head spanning multiple generations of characters. Also, it’s been a while since I finished Kushiel’s Dart, and like most series, you have to start at the beginning to fully appreciate what comes afterward.
So instead of talking about a single book in the series or each one individually, I’ve decided instead to write one big ass review to cover my thoughts on the series as a whole. Call it a bittersweet celebration for my finally having finished the last book, a going away party as I finally leave Terre d’Ange behind. Also, seeing as how Ms. Carey herself recently sounded off on the feasibility of the whole shebang being adapted for screen, it’s almost timely.
Very few fantasy fans can get away with admitting that they aren’t all that big into sweeping, high epic fantasy à la Lord of the Rings or the Pern stories or everything that Terry Brooks writes. Many non-fantasy fans, however, can point to these tales as examples of why they aren’t into fantasy. Like it or not, it’s hard not to see the latter group’s point, as a lot of high fantasy is riddled with confusing terminology, rehashed stories, and genre clichés. This is not to say that these stories are bad, per sé, just that they can easily turn off readers who aren’t in the right kind of crowd.
Banewreaker, the first book in Jacqueline Carey’s two-part volume The Sundering, will probably not change any opinions in this respect, then, as it’s sweeping high fantasy to the core. This, as it turns out, is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness.
Fantasy and satire are two of my favorite genres in any medium, but especially so in books. Satirical fantasy, then, holds a special place on my shelves. I grew up on Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, and desire to imitate him and his style is what led me in middle school to begin writing in earnest, for fun, and for myself rather than just for my teachers and their assignments.
So when I picked up Sir Apropos of Nothing, I did so based on the title pun and the back-of-the-book synopsis that promised “a berserk phoenix, murderous unicorns, mutated harpies, homicidal warrior kings, and – most problematic of all – a princess who may or may not be a psychotic arsonist.” I expected another lighthearted riff on the familiar archetypes. Murderous unicorns? Unicorns are not typically described as such! Oh teehee, how unexpectedly humorous!
(Since I want to keep this blog with some sort of momentum but have been lacking the time to do anything about it for the past few weeks, enjoy this book review from an earlier, temporary blog that I had going for a class, in which I pretended I was a dragon with a computer, edited to remove any reference to me being a dragon with a computer, as I am in actuality not one of those.)
Flightless Falcon is a light DAW fantasy by Mickey Zucker Reichert that first came out in paperback in July of 2001. Set in your typical fantasy land – lightly coated in magic but sans any fantastical creatures such as dragons, elves, dwarves, and the like – it follows the sad, luckless exploits of an ex-miner named Tamison made useless after a cave in kills his father and brother and leaves him trapped deep in the mine for a few days.
Dragon Apocalypse: The Complete Collection by James Maxey is a thick-as-a-brick compilation of four hack-n-slash action fantasy novels (plus the original short story that inspired them): Greatshadow, Hush, Witchbreaker, and Cinder (plus “Greatshadow: Origins”).
But beyond the technicalities of publishing, pulp fiction also developed a sort of overarching genre definition based on some recurring themes that tended to crop up in the stories again and again, regardless of categories like fantasy, noir, horror, etc. — namely, big, bombastic heroes squaring off against sinister, mysterious villains in dangerous, exotic locales, featuring beautiful women of both the damsel and the deadly variety.
And the warhog-riding half-orc bikers of The Grey Bastards are the bad boys (and girl) of the orc world.
So when I picked up Sir Apropos of Nothing, I did so based on the title pun and the back-of-the-book synopsis that promised “a berserk phoenix, murderous unicorns, mutated harpies, homicidal warrior kings, and – most problematic of all – a princess who may or may not be a psychotic arsonist.” I expected another lighthearted riff on the familiar archetypes. Murderous unicorns? Unicorns are not typically described as such! Oh teehee, how unexpectedly humorous!
Flightless Falcon is a light 
