Stefan Raets | Fantasy Literature: Fantasy and Science Fiction Book and Audiobook Reviews

The Sentinel Mage: Great storytelling, unoriginal plot

The Sentinel Mage by Emily Gee

As The Sentinel Mage by Emily Gee begins, a curse is sweeping across the Seven Kingdoms, starting in the east and slowly trickling westwards across the land. Anyone who drinks curse-tainted water becomes a mindless, bloodthirsty monster, attacking friends and family alike. There’s only one way to stop the curse: a royal who is also descended from witches must touch and spill some blood on three stones spread throughout the land. Unfortunately, witches are considered monsters by most of the Seven Kingdoms: victims of an unfounded prejudice that thinks them guilty of a list of unlikely crimes,

January 24th, 2011. Stefan Raets´s rating: 2 | Emily Gee | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |

God’s War: Dark, edgy, highly imaginative

God’s War by Kameron Hurley

Some reviews are harder to write than others. Take God’s War, the first novel by Kameron Hurley, an author whose blog I’ve been reading with interest. The book had a long journey getting published (which you can read about on said blog) and has now, finally, reached the shelves thanks to the awesome folks at Night Shade Books. I was excited to get my hands on this book, because it’s in a sub-genre (or maybe more accurately,

January 21st, 2011. Stefan Raets´s rating: 3.5 | Kameron Hurley | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |

The Fallen Blade: A wild, improbable adventure in Renaissance Europe

The Fallen Blade by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

CLASSIFICATION: Combining alternate history with the supernatural, The Fallen Blade is kind of like Jasper Kent’s Twelve and Thirteen Years Later crossed with Anne Rice’s vampires and Underworld’s lycans, written in the style of Glen Cook.

FORMAT/INFO: The Fallen Blade is 464 pages long divided over two Parts, sixty-three numbered chapters,

The Hammer: Entertaining but deceptively deep

The Hammer by K.J. Parker

Gignomai met’Oc is the youngest son of a once-noble family that, decades ago, fell out of favor and was exiled from the Empire’s capital to a remote and comparably primitive colony established 70 years before the start of the novel. The met’Oc family is really twice isolated, as it lives on a plateau separate from the rest of the colony, with which it lives in an uneasy kind of not-quite-peace. While Gig’s older brothers Luso and Stheno have their own responsibilities around the house, Gig has enough free time to get into trouble,

Pirate Freedom: Unique, thought-provoking, elegant

Pirate Freedom by Gene Wolfe

It’s hard not to approach a Gene Wolfe novel with high expectations. After all, the man is responsible for some of the most brilliantly mind-bending science fiction and fantasy written in the last few decades. Such high expectations can make it hard to write an objective review (if such a thing is even possible) when the new book in question is quite good but just doesn’t blow you away like, say, his Book of the New Sun or The Wizard Knight.

Pump Six and Other Stories: A stunningly good collection

Pump Six and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi

In Pump Six and Other Stories, which won the Locus Award for Best Collection, Paolo Bacigalupi treats us to these ten excellently written biopunk stories:

“Pocketful of Dharma” (1999) — a young street urchin finds a digital storage device which contains some startling data. This is Bacigalupi’s first short story — and it’s impressive. I love the premise of this story and its ambiguous ending. It would be fun to see Bacigalupi extend this one into a novel.

The Lost Gate: Intriguing new fantasy universe

The Lost Gate by Orson Scott Card

In the fictional universe of Orson Scott Card’s latest novel The Lost Gate, what we think of as gods were actually people from another planet (called Westil), who arrived here through magical “Gates.” Passing back and forth through these Gates gave people with minor or latent magical powers huge boosts to their skills, resulting in god-like abilities — and as a result, they were often thought of as actual gods and entered Earth’s mythology. Some time in the 7th century,

The Spirit Eater: Best book of the bunch so far

The Spirit Eater by Rachel Aaron

The Spirit Eater (2010) is the third installment in Rachel Aaron’s THE LEGEND OF ELI MONPRESS series. Just like the first two books, The Spirit Thief and The Spirit Rebellion, it’s an entertaining, fast-moving fantasy story, although this newest novel does have a considerably darker edge to it.

The darkness starts right away with the novel’s prologue, in which we learn more about Nico,

December 21st, 2010. Stefan Raets and Kat Hooper´s rating: 3.5 | Rachel Aaron | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |

Book of Secrets: Roberson is a great storyteller

Book of Secrets by Chris Roberson

Spencer Finch is an investigative journalist who is researching billionaire J. Nathan Pierce for one of his stories. In the course of his research, he discovers that a mysterious book was recently stolen from Pierce, and it’s this book that will lead Finch on a fascinating and unlikely journey with far-reaching implications. Early on in the story, Finch also receives his recently deceased grandfather’s inheritance: a box full of stories and other texts. These gradually add a whole new dimension to both his grandfather’s legacy and the secret,

Pathfinder: A great way to steer YAs toward SFF

Pathfinder by Orson Scott Card

Rigg is a 13-year-old boy who lives in seclusion with his father, surviving as a trapper and only occasionally going to the nearest town to sell animals’ pelts. He is successful as a trapper in part because he has a unique ability: he can see the “paths” people and animals have taken, in the form of a colored trail that stretches behind them, showing where they’ve been. This way, he can track almost anything — “almost” because the only person who doesn’t have a trail is his father…

Author: Stefan Raets

The Sentinel Mage: Great storytelling, unoriginal plot

God’s War: Dark, edgy, highly imaginative

The Fallen Blade: A wild, improbable adventure in Renaissance Europe

The Hammer: Entertaining but deceptively deep

Pirate Freedom: Unique, thought-provoking, elegant

Pump Six and Other Stories: A stunningly good collection

The Lost Gate: Intriguing new fantasy universe

The Spirit Eater: Best book of the bunch so far

Book of Secrets: Roberson is a great storyteller

Pathfinder: A great way to steer YAs toward SFF

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