Category: Fantasy

Nobody’s Home by Tim Powers

Nobody’s Home is subtitled An Anubis Gates Story, which helped to draw me towards reading this story because I had heard good things about The Anubis Gates, although I have not read it. In an alternate nineteenth-century London, ghosts haunt the living, and some magics work, if not routinely then with a certain amount of …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/03/08/nobodys-home-by-tim-powers/

Mistborn: Secret History by Brandon Sanderson

Immediately upon finishing Bands Of Mourning, I went to Amazon and purchased this novella. Now, everyone will warn you that you can’t read this book without having read the entirety of the first Mistborn trilogy, and I am no different. But I will further recommend that you read this soon after reading those books, because …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/23/mistborn-secret-history-by-brandon-sanderson/

Bands Of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson

Just Goddamnit, Brandon Sanderson, why are you so good?!?! HOW are you so good?! I spent far too much time yelling at the book like it was an Arsenal match, it was that engaging. At one point, I pounded my fists on the table with rage. Really terrific installment. The Mistborn series just gets better …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/22/bands-of-mourning-by-brandon-sanderson/

Brayan’s Gold by Peter V. Brett

Brayan’s Gold is a novella that forms part of the back story for the main character in a set of novels by Peter V. Brett, which I have not read. It began as a reference tossed into the first of those, “reminding people that Arlen had a ton of adventures back when he was young …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/09/brayans-gold-by-peter-v-brett/

Small Gods by Terry Pratchett

After looking at the power of stories in Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett turns to some of the greatest stories ever told: religions, and, somewhat more incidentally, philosophy. Small Gods, the thirteenth Discworld novel, takes place in and around Omnia, an austere land on the edge of a great desert. The church of the Great God …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/08/small-gods-by-terry-pratchett/

Shadows Of Self by Brandon Sanderson

This guy. Seriously, Brandon Sanderson is the kind of author all professional writers should aspire to be. You’d think that the quality of his output would suffer given the discipline he adheres to in producing it, but no: all his books are intelligent, creative, wildly entertaining and filled with his distinctive sense of humanity and …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/01/08/shadows-of-self-by-brandon-sanderson/

Foxglove Summer by Ben Aaronovitch

It took me two days to finish the last 5%, mostly because damn you, Ingress double ap, but also because I was neither ready for nor okay with the idea of a cliffhanger, which was where I thought the book was going. Instead, it goes one better and, while I still really, really want to …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/11/20/foxglove-summer-by-ben-aaronovitch/

Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch

This was prolly the first book in the series where the case itself felt a little too convoluted (I mean, Isengard, really?) tho I really loved how the overarching series continues to develop with the Faceless Man and argh argh argh the ending! I didn’t expect that to happen and I should have: props to …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/11/17/broken-homes-by-ben-aaronovitch/

Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett

Teresa Nielsen Hayden has observed that while plot is a literary convention, story is a force of nature. In Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett explores some of the things that can happen when these forces of nature latch on to people in his most unnatural of settings. People think that stories are shaped by people. In …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/27/witches-abroad-by-terry-pratchett/

New Amsterdam by Elizabeth Bear

There isn’t a zeppelin on the cover to let readers know this is an alternate history, but by way of making up for it, Elizabeth Bear sets the book’s first story on board hydrogen-filled German airship. The Hans Glücker is on its way from Calais to the jewel of British North America, the eponymous New …

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