SFF Author: M.T. Anderson

The Game of Sunken Places by M.T. Anderson

The Game of Sunken Places has at its core several relatively humdrum concepts: a board game that plays for real, a hidden kingdom, two friends (one timid, one outgoing), a race to save the (or a) world. This isn’t so bad since so much fantasy works with the same basic materials. The question is whether the author transcends the familiar and here the answer tends to be no.

The story follows a pair of thirteen-year-old friends, Gregory and Brian,

The Suburb Beyond the Stars by M.T. Anderson

As a reader, I find M.T. Anderson a bit all over the map. I tend to see his strongest work as aimed at the older crowd, while his children’s novels tend to leave me a bit cold. That was the case with The Game of Sunken Places, a children’s fantasy involving two boys playing a Game of high stakes involving trolls, ogres, etc. M.T. Anderson hadn’t done enough with the relatively “humdrum” concepts and his plotting and characters were a bit muddled.

The Empire of Gut and Bone by M.T. Anderson

The Empire of Gut and Bone is the third book of the Norumbegan Quartet by M.T. Anderson, coming after The Game of Sunken Places and its sequel The Suburb Beyond the Stars. Unfortunately, it has many of the same problems as those first two books, which led to my ranking them relatively poorly. Which is a shame, because there are some good ideas at the core of this series,