Tag: fantasy

#REVIEW: The Bone Raiders, by Jackson Ford

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Man, this was a lot of fun.

It may be that there’s no cliché less true than “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” You not only absolutely can judge a book by its cover, you are supposed to. That’s what the cover is for! It’s to attract peoples’ attention, particularly those kind of people who are likely to enjoy the book.

And let me tell you something: I absolutely encourage you to judge Jackson Ford’s The Bone Raiders by its cover. Five badass-looking women of color holding weapons and a fire-breathing technically-not-a-dragon in the background? Sold. Gimme. We’re done. I don’t quite get why they decided to put the Billy Joel quote on the cover, but that’s not just my biggest gripe about the cover, it’s my biggest gripe about the book. Because this book is everything that you think it is upon looking at that cover, except maybe a little smarter than you’re expecting. I’m super psyched that it’s a trilogy, because I want more of these characters and more of this world, which can be fairly boiled down to “Mongols during the time of Genghis Khan, but dragons and feminism,” and that’s really all I need.

(Every POV character is a woman except for the first and last chapters; the first chapter is an okey-doke and the last chapter is a tease for the next book. There are hardly any men with dialogue. I can’t believe a guy wrote this, to be honest.)

But yeah. This is one of those reviews where I don’t need to belabor the point at all. Violence and humor and violence and world building and violence and lesbians and violence and rebellions and violence and family drama and violence and … animal husbandry. If you’re remotely interested in a book with that cover, go grab it right now. You will be well rewarded. I want the sequel, and I want it tomorrow.

Go get it.

Two quick book reviews

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews5 Comments

I am in a horrendous mood, as the world is continuing to go to shit and nothing seems to be able to stop it or even slow it down, but there are still books out there, so I may as well talk about them. I don’t have the energy to make a full post about either of these so let’s just do a couple quick paragraphs each and call it a day.

Samantha Downing’s Too Old For This is a book about a serial killer forced out of retirement when a documentarian comes calling who wants to make a series about her. She was never actually brought to trial for her crimes, but changed her name and moved across the country anyway, and she’s less than interested in someone dragging all of that back into the light again.

She’s in her seventies, by the way.

This book ended up being lightweight and quick and more fun than it probably had any right to be, as Lottie Jones’ life keeps getting upended more and more as she attempts to cover for her crimes– both the old ones before she moved away and the new ones she has to keep committing as she keeps making mistakes that wouldn’t have mattered when she was killing people decades ago but are a bit of a problem in an era of near-constant surveillance by our own possessions. I can imagine a reader who is bothered by the fact that the protagonist is an unrepentant serial killer who we’re more or less expected to like, or at least enjoy reading about, but I’m not that reader and I had fun with this. I may look into more of Samantha Downing’s work if I ever allow myself to buy books again.

So, yeah, okay, I finished it, and it’s a thousand pages long and I have a full-time job and I still finished it in less than a week, and because of that I can’t really call it bad, but … if you weren’t going to buy this anyway, don’t let anyone talk you into it. SenLinYu is a perfectly cromulent author and no one would ever read this book and figure out on their own that it was originally brought into the world as Harry Potter fanfiction, but it’s way overhyped, at least from my perspective. I keep seeing videos about people who were in tears for the last two hundred pages or whatever, and I feel like these people need pets or significant others or something, because in the end it’s just a book and it’s being treated like a life-altering event online. I said in my first post that I was buying this out of FOMO, and I’ve got to stop doing that. I’m never going to be missing out if I don’t read a book TikTok likes.

(I deleted the app again today; we’ll see how long it lasts this time.)

Again, it’s not awful, but it’s definitely romantasy despite all the people insisting that no, it’s dark fantasy— I’m pretty sure “dark fantasy” is just romantasy with at least one rape scene to these people– and I’m tired of romantasy as a genre. It’ll look good on my shelf, and I didn’t hate it like I figured I would, but those are the best things I have to say about it.

Status update

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I’ll be halfway done with this beast of a book before I go to bed, and … it’s not terrible, but it’s kinda boring? And I was expecting any number of possible reactions to it, and “boring” was not one of them.

One indisputable good thing: there has not been, after about 430 pages, even a single trace of the source material to be found. I have no idea how SenLinYu managed to adapt this from a fanfic of any kind. I’m not going to go looking for the original to compare them or anything, but I think it’s reasonable to lay that worry to bed.

Anyway, off to — no, not reading, you silly goose, Ghost of Yotei is out. My PS5 is calling.

On FOMO and BookTok

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading5 Comments

I think we all knew this already, but it’s official: I can be manipulated. Rather easily, in fact.

I don’t know if you live a lifestyle that allows you to not have heard of the above book. If you do, I envy you, because it has been everywhere on my everything for two solid weeks. I first became aware of it several months ago, and actually had it preordered for a while, a preorder I cancelled when the word Dramione first entered my vocabulary.

So why do I own it now, snagging it from my local Barnes and Noble for a surprisingly reasonable $21 and change?

Because the reviews this damn book has been getting have been ludicrously good, and while I don’t really think it’s going to be all that good, and I’ve been burned by BookTok fads approximately fourteen thousand times before, if this book is half as good as people have been claiming it’s going to be something I need to read. And the reviews don’t seem quite as dominated by young women as one might expect; TikTok is the world’s epicenter for the “book girly,” a category that I think is supposed to exclude grizzled and ancient penis-havers such as myself, but I’ve seen guys talking about it too, if perhaps not quite as glowingly.

It’s a thousand fucking pages long. I have far too many thousand-page books on my TBR, and seriously, y’all are never going to stop laughing when you see the state of my shelf tomorrow. I will get to it when I get to it, God damn it, and if I don’t love it I’m never trusting another TikTok book of the moment again.(*)

That was a lie, sadly. I knew it was a lie when I was typing it, and it’s a lie now.

The fucking book doesn’t even have pretty edges. I’m trying to save for a down payment on a car, damn it, what the hell am I doing?

(*) What am I reading right now? Book five of Dungeon Crawler Fucking Carl. Which is so much better than it has any right to be that there should be some kind of law that it’s breaking.

#REVIEW, sorta: The Enchanted Greenhouse, by Sarah Beth Durst

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews1 Comment

I’ve done not much but sleep this weekend, and at least one person in the house has Covid and at least two are sick, and I didn’t have a lot of grading to do today but what I had to do was immensely annoying.

So, please, forgive me, when I write a very short review, less than it deserves: that The Enchanted Greenhouse is delightful, and it’s a sort-of sequel (same world, different characters) to The Spellshop, which I didn’t review when it came out last year but was also delightful, and it was absolutely the antidote to having read a bunch of books lately that I didn’t like all that much. It is short (I finished it in less than three hours, easy), low stakes (sure, “cottage core” or “cozy,” either works) and has a romance angle without ever descending into smut, and there are talking plants and a cat with wings.

I loved it, but I’m too tired to say much more, so just go read it, and enjoy peeling the pages apart, because something about the way they stained the edges kinda locks them together a little bit, and I’m not gonna sit here and pretend that the physical feeling of splitting the pages as I was reading didn’t add to my enjoyment of the book, because it totally did.

Back to bed.

#REVIEW: The Art of Legend, by Wesley Chu

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews1 Comment

I take no pleasure in this.

I write negative reviews infrequently enough that almost every time I do I start with a disclaimer like this. Under any circumstances other than “The publisher sent me the entire trilogy because I asked for it,” I would simply not review this book. It feels ungrateful to make other people go to trouble to send me books for free and then say bad things about them. But while I really liked the first book in Wesley Chu’s War Arts Trilogy, I was mixed on the second and unfortunately I have to report that the series’ ending really ends up unsatisfying.

The problem is writing this without massive spoilers. I mean, in one sense I don’t really have to worry about that, I can just say “Hey, spoiler alert,” and then go about my day, but I don’t want to do that either. So we’re going to go the “mild spoilers” route; a lot of what you will see in the next few paragraphs could have been reasonably guessed going into the book, but I’m not going to completely reveal the story.

The Art of Prophecy begins with Jian, the Prophesied Hero of the Tiandi and the Champion of the Five Under Heaven. Jian has been prophesied since birth to be the one who kills the Eternal Khan, ending his dominion over the Tiandi people. And then the Khan goes and gets killed on his own, leaving Jian with no more destiny and setting the events of the whole trilogy in motion. In the second book, elements of the Tiandi decide that Jian is actually their betrayer, and he spends the entire series either running from capture or escaping it one way or another.

So, we all know that in Book Three the Khan is coming back, right? Of course we do. And he does. And then he confirms something that I had been wondering about since the first book: he was going to come back anyway. It’s even straight-up stated that even if Jian kills him he’s going to return in a decade or so. Now, one of the POV characters spends the whole first book trying to find out where the Khan has been resurrected and the second book trying to get a chunk of his soul peeled out of her body, so it’s clear that he’s “Eternal” because he keeps getting resurrected. But I had the idea that Jian killing him would be permanent, and … not so much? He’d have come back anyway? Really? What the hell was the point of making such a big deal about Jian, then?

Jian is a problem, honestly, and he’s at the middle of what I didn’t like about the book. The series can’t really decide if if he’s powerful or not– even during the inevitable final battle with the Khan the text itself bounces back and forth between “he’s ready, and this is a real fight” and “the Khan is obviously toying with him and the four other people he brought to the fight” and while Taishi talks about how much he has grown over the years she has known him, I kind of feel like the book doesn’t realize how annoying he is?

A brief diversion: did you watch Smallville or Buffy the Vampire Slayer? You know how Lana was actually really fucking annoying and Xander was kind of a creep, or to use another example, Barney Stinson was a predator and Ted Mosby was a huge loser in How I Met Your Mother, but the TV shows didn’t seem to realize that? That’s Jian. He started off as a pampered, callow youth, and for me, at least, he never improved– he actually faints when he is told the Khan is back. And this is as close as I’m going to come to a huge spoiler, but for a whole series about a prophecy about a dude, that dude has much less to do with the ending of the series than you might expect.

Some of my other gripes are artifacts of having read the trilogy more or less back-to-back-to-back; the bit where Qisami talks like an overenthusiastic memelord and her speech doesn’t remotely match anyone else in the book, or the fact that every insult in the series is inexplicably egg-based, wouldn’t have annoyed me as much had I not devoured 1600 pages of it over a few weeks. Seeing “Let them cook” in dialogue would still have been distracting as hell, though, or the way people keep “eating” punches and kicks.

I dunno, guys. I still stand by enjoying Prophecy, but given where it ends up I can’t really recommend the whole trilogy. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it bad— I three-starred it on Goodreads and Storygraph, and I feel like that’s about right– but it’s not something I’d have talked about had I not been sent the books, and I’d likely have DNFed the final book. I feel bad about it, but there you have it.

#REVIEW: The Art of Destiny, by Wesley Chu

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Middle books in a trilogy can be so weird.

A quick recap: I got asked if I was interested in reviewing Book Three of Wesley Chu’s War Arts Saga, and replied that I’d love to, but I hadn’t read the first two books yet, and somehow that led to me getting sent review copies of the entire trilogy. My review of the first book, The Art of Prophecy, is here, and while I’m not going to go directly into Book Three like I thought, there’s only going to be one book in between, so I’ll probably have a review of that next week sometime.

But yeah. I enjoyed the book, but it definitely has a case of Middle Book Syndrome, where it sort of feels like they’re moving pieces around in preparation for finishing it off in Book Three. Destiny sticks with its same crew of players as the first book; Jian and Taishi are in training, Qisami spends most of the book on a job, and Sali spends the book trying to get the fragment of the Khan’s soul out of her body. Qisami feels like the main character of this one, which is a little odd, as I felt like she was the least important of the leads in the first book, to the point where I don’t think I mentioned her in the review. She has some interesting character development that is almost entirely tied up in spoilers, and Sali has a major status quo change and a clear direction going into the last book. The characters don’t interact as much in this one, either; they all end up in the same place for the last third of the book, but even then nobody really runs into each other; they’re all just doing their thing in the same city.

Jian and Taishi … feel kinda wheel-spinny. Taishi was easily my favorite character of the first book and she’s not got nearly as much time on-page in this book, and Jian gets captured again and it just sort of feels like a retread of a lot of what happened in the first book. There are some interesting developments in the religion around Jian; I was thinking as I was reading Prophecy that it’s super rare in the real world for a prophecy to be proven wrong and its supporters to just shrug and give up, and … well, turns out they didn’t, but I won’t say much more about it than that. But Jian still kind of feels like an immature kid for the majority of the book. There are some signs of maturation toward the very end of the book, so hopefully I won’t feel this way about him in the conclusion to the trilogy.

Don’t misunderstand me; even if I had bought these, this certainly wouldn’t put me off the third book, as a lot of my gripes are just part and parcel of the way middle books in trilogies tend to be messy. It’s not like there was much of a risk of anyone trying to read this as a standalone.

I’ve got another book I was sent for review to read next, as it’s out on the 16th, and then I’ll be diving into the conclusion. Stay tuned!

Monthly Reads: August 2025

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Depressing, I know, but remember I stared an 800-page history of London on July 31 and school started this month, so it’s not quite as depressing as it looks.

Book of the Month is Shroud, which I guess I should have reviewed.