A COURT OF MIST AND FURY, Sarah J. Maas

You think Maas is going to go through the whole color spectrum? First ACOTAR in red, then ACOMAF in blue—maybe green next time? Or yellow? Or purple? Ooh, if she’s going with the thesis-antithesis-synthesis model, then I’m predicting purple. Hegelian dialectic, bitches!

What the heck am I talking about? Just how A Court of Mist and Fury basically flips so many things from A Court of Thorns and Roses 180 degrees! Some fans of the first book will like it; others will hate it with all the passion that only shippers can feel. My disclaimer for this review may put off Tamlin/Feyre lovers (do they have an official name? Tumblr, enlighten me!), but I must be honest: I liked Feyre and Tamlin in as much that he made her happy, or at least could be romantic with her to a nauseating degree. He brought light and love into her life—so it’s a shame their relationship takes a bleak turn that only worsens over the course of the book, for various reasons.

RED: THE TRUE STORY OF RED RIDING HOOD, Liesl Shurtliff

I’m starting to realize that I’ve read and reviewed a fair number of fantasy books inspired by the Little Red Riding Hood story, and more are on the way. So either this cape-wearing girl is just really popular, or my repertoire is too narrow, and what little readership I have will soon be sick to death of her. In my defense, two of those stories were about the same Red Riding Hood from Once Upon A Time, just as this Red is the same character featured in Rump: The True Story of Rumpelstiltskin. For both girls, the second book is their true debut as protagonists, so technically I’ve only reviewed two Red Riding Hood stories, right? (Not for long—be on the lookout for Sisters Red.)

In my further defense, I had to give Red a try after enjoying Rump so much, even if part of that enjoyment came from my attachment to the Rumpelstiltskin fairytale—and a certain TV show’s rendition of its titular character. But Shurtliff’s smart and fun writing styles played no small part, so Red deserves as much consideration. 

THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE, Neil Gaiman

Some readers may tend to steer clear of first-person narration, especially with child narrators. In response to that, I say that if you want to see a writer do first-person well, read Neil Gaiman’s work. Specially The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Part of what makes the narration effective—both in first-person and with a kid—is that it captures the atmosphere of childhood in all its mythical, treacherous glory. There’s also some temporal distance at play, even if it’s not always apparent.

The voice itself belongs to a middle-aged man reflecting on a series of memories from childhood he’d lost. No, it’s not a soap opera-worthy case of amnesia. These foggy recollections are triggered when he visits the Hempstock farm after a funeral (never told whose funeral—there’s a lot of names we don’t know, actually). He doesn’t even realize how much he’s forgotten until, while staring into a duck pond that his friend Lettie Hempstock called “the ocean,” he’s mentally brought back to his seven-year-old self.

TRUTHWITCH, Susan Dennard

Water. Earth. Fire. Air. Aether. Void—wait, what?

Sorry, guys, this isn’t exactly a Harry-Potter-meets-Avatar-the-Last-Airbender kind of world. But it’s not that far off. Truthwitch is the first in a series that takes place in a fantasy world called the Witchlands, where people can be born with a witchery (no, not Witcher), or a special power connected to some element of the world or human nature. Sounds like a gripping world, right? Almost like the setting for a tabletop or video game RPG. Much like an RPG resembling D&D or Skyrim, this is a complex world ruled by several kingdoms, with hundreds of years of politics influencing the characters as they pursue their own goals. The only problem: Dennard doesn’t tell us much about it.

THE SPARROW SISTERS, Ellen Herrick

Fair warning: The Sparrow Sisters isn’t really a fantasy story in the expected sense. In fact, you could argue it’s not fantasy at all because we’re never sure if magic is present. Just about all the characters dismiss the notion that there’s magic at work. I wouldn’t even feel comfortable putting this novel in the magical realism category. And yet there’s enough uncertainty and peculiarity to be outside the usual bounds of the “real world” that I decided this book deserved to be discussed on my blog. Plus, it’s my blog and I can break my own rules, so there.

An argument can be made that there are moments of “hyper” reality—that is, there are incidents involving our heroines that don’t quite fit into what most people would consider typical or ordinary. All this ambiguity is steeped in the historical component of the story’s world. The titular Sparrow sisters, three grown single women who live in Granite Point, a tight-knit New England town, are descended from a Puritan-era healer who ended up on trial as a witch. The sisters themselves claim that such an ability derives from both natural (non-magical) talent and a thorough knowledge of herbal remedies. But one sister stands out as especially endowed, and as expected she ends up in the center of the inevitable storm.

MAGNUS CHASE AND THE GODS OF ASGARD: THE SWORD OF SUMMER, Rick Riordan

Is it just me, or does it seem like Norse mythology got really popular all of a sudden? Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is getting a miniseries (which in all fairness has only a couple Norse deities, no spoilers), Marvel is making its third Thor-centric film, and now Rick Riordan is throwing angsty teens at the mercy of Norns, Valkyries, dwarves and giants, not to mention the gods themselves. Now, this isn’t Riordan’s first mythology rodeo, as anyone who loves the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series can tell you. In fact, the Greek and Norse pantheons aren’t the only divine playgrounds he’s visited in his books. But what of the stories themselves? Is each new hero basically Percy Jackson with a different coat of paint? It may seem so with newcomer Magnus Chase, but the clever reimagining of the worlds of Yggdrasil and the characters joining Magnus in this adventure offer much to enjoy.

UPROOTED, Naomi Novik

If you’re looking for a book that brings together the best elements of Sarah J. Maas and Patricia Briggs in style and story, and the intensity of the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy or the Harry Potter heptalogy, you need look no further than Uprooted. Does that sound overblown? Hey, if it gets you to read this book, my work here is done.

Okay, okay, not exactly done, calm down.

Anyone planning to pick up Uprooted should have a fair idea of what to expect. When you read its summary, you might get a Beauty-and-the-Beast vibe, what with the arrangement between a humble village and a powerful figure called The Dragon, who ensures the villagers’ survival in exchange for one local girl every ten years. You wouldn’t be wrong to notice the similarity, but it’s a bit more complicated than that.

THE LEGEND OF DRIZZT: HOMELAND, R.A. Salvatore

Wow, a fantasy book that isn’t Young Adult? It’s a little unsettling, actually, that so many entries in the fantasy genre (and this blog) are geared to a younger audience. Perhaps not that surprising, since literary works are considered more “adult” and “serious”, but even sci-fi gets to explore adult themes more widely. Aside from Game of Thrones and The Lord of the Rings, much of fantasy falls under YA or romance. I’m hoping that novel series like Forgotten Realms will keep cropping up and drawing in older readers in search of stories both insightful and entertaining.

The appeal of these Dungeons and Dragons books, like its tabletop origins, is that people across the age spectrum with a love for fantasy can appreciate and enjoy them. That’s certainly the case with Salvatore’s The Legend of Drizzt series, or at least his first chronological installment, Homeland. There’s good-old action and lore to excite the action junkie and lore nerd, but he also teases out some social commentary about oppressive societies that use fear and propaganda to control its population, and how suffocating it is to live in them, unable to escape. While the world of the drow (dark elves) in Menzoberranzan bears witness to obviously questionable morality, it can make us reflect on those aspects in our own culture an outsider might find objectively horrifying but we accept on a daily basis.

THE SLEEPER AND THE SPINDLE, Neil Gaiman

I almost feel as though this should be considered a Short Review since The Sleeper and the Spindle pretty much qualifies as a short story in length. With its illustrations, it comes out to just under 70 pages. And honestly, it’s a concise, beautifully rendered story that doesn’t need much said, and shouldn’t have too much said to avoid spoilers, so forgive the brevity of this review.

As one should come to expect from Gaiman’s approach to rehashed fairy tales, the stories of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty weave together in both a new and familiar way, and with such seamless ease you’d think other writers would have tried to bring them together sooner. The opening action follows three of the seven dwarves visiting the cusp of Sleeping Beauty’s kingdom to procure fine cloth for Snow White’s upcoming wedding. Right away we glimpse at the devotion the dwarves have for her (if only these three—keeping the number of dwarves low is an understandable alteration for the sake of effective characterization) as well as understand where we are in Snow White’s story. 

TIGER LILY, Jodi Lynn Anderson

When it comes to adapting Barrie’s story of a fantastic land where children never grow up, the aspect that just about everyone stumbles on is the portrayal of his Native American characters, who even in the original story suffer from the influences of colonialism and racism. Jodi Anderson attempts to not only tackle a new vision of Neverland’s native residents but put them in the spotlight as a culture and a collage of diverse characters. That doesn’t spare her from some deserved criticism of the stereotypes and caricatures she employs, as better dissected by Debbie Reese in her review of the book. Forgive my willingness to leave the problematic elements to the scrutiny of critics with a better grasp of the prevailing racial issues in Western literature that Tiger Lily reflects. I’ve honestly struggled to post this review out of fear that I wasn’t giving the Native American portrayals their due analysis, as my own knowledge on the subject is limited. For anyone interested, you can read Reese’s article here, and I recommend you do. I’ll mostly stick to assessing the story elements on the whole.

ONCE UPON A TIME: RED’S UNTOLD TALE, Wendy Toliver

Hey, what’s black, white and Red all over? It’s ABC’s latest attempt to hold on to audience interest in their fairytale franchise—and it’s not too shabby, if I may say so. Certainly a step up from how our beloved Red Riding Hood was utilized in Shadow of the Queen.

Unlike previous addends to the OUAT lore via printed media, Toliver’s novel takes us back to an earlier period in Red’s life, filling in bits of backstory and fleshing out her relationships with Granny, childhood hunk-friend Peter, and other members of her village. It also has a YA flavor, but not to an irritating degree. It follows several tropes of coming-of-age stories without becoming too cliché. You have romantic and sexual awakening, school bullies, weird dreams the hero doesn’t understand but have something to do with finding her true self—yeah, that does sound more overdone when you break it down, but Toliver’s easy, fluid yet intelligent writing style articulates the understandable trials of entering adulthood and makes them feeling organic and visceral to her (well, ABC’s) characters.

CITY OF DARK MAGIC, Magnus Flyte

First of all, let me just say that if you’re going to use a penname, it must carry the epic and mysterious magnitude of Magnus Flyte. Goodness, he sounds like he should be a character in this book! I hope Meg Howrey and Christina Lynch (Flyte’s representatives) go meta at some point and write him into one of their later works. In the words of Shia LaBeouf, just do it.

Also courtesy of Shia LaBeouf, and one of the important lessons of City of Dark Magic: don’t let your dreams be dreams! Unless they involve fire, death and hell portals, in which case, maybe, just let them remain really upsetting dreams. But in case they’re NOT only dreams but actually prophesies, get to stopping them as soon as possible. Kind of a complicated moral, but it makes sense once you get to the end of the book.

Before you start the book, however, you should know that City of Dark Magic isn’t the same kind of fantasy book as most of the other entries I’ve read and reviewed so far. It falls more into paranormal fiction—not even supernatural, per se, because you’re not 100% sure if what causes the strange phenomena are based in magic, science, or simply cosmic forces not understood. So, don’t expect the likes of Harry Potter to show up and zap the problems away, or create them, with magic spells. The “fantasy” in this novel is subtler. Think Da Vinci Code, except with more alchemy, music and sex thrown in.

Short Review: LITTLE MAN, Michael Cunningham

First, a preamble: I swear I didn’t mean for my first “short” review for fantasy short stories to be for a work with a synonym in the title. The concept and the decision to do it at all was very short notice. I put little thought into it, but I figure that some tiny effort should be made on my part to include short fiction in the fantasy genre in my small but growing repertoire.

Sorry, sorry. Forgive the slight digression.

THE SHORT VERSION:

Michael Cunningham is one of those contemporary literary writers I really should be reading (I have at least one of his novels on my shelf), but instead I’m engorging myself on fairytale-inspired fantasy books and TV shows. So Cunningham did the only thing he could to get my attention: write his own fairytale-inspired story.

Of course I speak in jest, but an eerie tingle went down my spine when I saw that “Little Man” was published in the New Yorker last summer. Oh, and he published a collection of reduxed fairy tales in A Wild Swan and Other Tales AND a novel titled The Snow Queen. All right, Michael, you’re on my list.

AMERICAN GODS, Neil Gaiman

More and more I’m becoming a fan of Neil Gaiman’s work, but in all honesty, my first attempt to read American Gods came to a crunching halt in the first chapter. I was in late high school at the time, so my literary palate still needed refining. Or I just needed to develop a deeper appreciation for Norse mythology. Whichever of these won out, I returned to and completed, with relish, this urban fantasy about ancient pantheons, sneaky mythological symbolism, and coin tricks. So many coin tricks.

Having a broader grasp of various mythologies from cultures around the world, especially that of the Norse religion, helped me progress through this book without running into prolonged periods of confusion. Some people, however, may enjoy the sheer mystery that our hero Shadow encounters on his unexpected journey. Actually, the parallels between American Gods and The Hobbit is not a little startling.

THE RUMPELSTILTSKIN PROBLEM, Vivian Vande Velde

Yes, I know I said my review of Out of the Past would follow Shadow of the Queen. Unfortunately the holidays, illness and some writer’s block intervened. So, instead, you’re getting another book that inflicts much less strain on my brain’s logic centers (thanks, Vasquez and Bechko). Funnily enough, the title of this short-story collection could be an alternate to that of Once Upon A Time—The Rumpelstiltskin Problem. 

This imp doth protest!

Anyone watching OUAT understands the Rumplestiltskin problem all too well (one that I continue to consider the best part of the show—is my bias showing yet?). But Vande Velde is addressing something else. In her preface, she highlights some details from the fairytale “Rumpelstiltskin” that are, let's say, fairly questionable. 

RUMP: THE TRUE STORY OF RUMPELSTILTSKIN, Liesl Shurtliff

One of the questions I ask myself about the books I choose for reviews is whether it’s worth the effort to look at ones intended for a younger audience--not just YA, but ages 8 through 12 (so Yearling tells me in miniscule print on the book’s rear; hah, rear). Maybe I ask this to potentially spare myself minor embarrassment at the bookstore or the library, but the truth is children’s literature should face discernment. We should measure it by appropriate standards and reward those works that go beyond our expectations. I admit my heart was already soft toward this book due to my growing love for the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale and a certain character on a certain television show that just returned for its fifth season (if only they’d actually let him be in the show now).

Ahem.

With that said, I dare anyone to read through Rump and reach its final pages without the tiniest smile on his or her face. Not only is it a fun retelling of the old story and sneaks in nods to other classics like Red Riding Hood, Snow White and Rapunzel, but it takes its material seriously, and it takes its readers seriously. It doesn’t rest on pseudo-lingo for a joke or “speak the youth language.” Its narrative is straightforward and honest and shimmers with charming humor.

THE ISLE OF THE LOST, Melissa de la Cruz

It’s not the first time that a creative mind has posed the question, “What if these beloved characters had kids?” Just ask J.K. Rowling and every fanfic writer on the internet. It’s also not the first time Disney was ready to profit on nostalgia and a thriving fanbase at the risk of tormenting those same fans with corny-as-hell songs and butchered characterization.

Well, the Disney Channel film Descendants has at least one of those things down pat. Thankfully the prequel novel The Isle of the Lost doesn’t come with a soundtrack.

Parents and adult Disney fans should be aware that this book and its TV counterpart are targeting a young demographic. The writing meets those expectations with overstating the obvious and inserting casual hip lingo, yo, into the third-person narrative voice. But what about the story and its characters? If they’re interesting enough, can they overshadow the writing style?

Ehhh—kind of.

Welcome, one and all!

Keep Scrolling Reviews is now officially up and running. That is, it will be once I post my first review, Sarah J. Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses. But before we jump into that, let me give you an idea of what you'll find on this blog.

The fantasy genre has long been a double-edged sword for me. So much of its potential intrigues me, yet any given fantasy series, usually no less than three books, requires a level of commitment I've been reluctant to give if I don't know what I'm getting into. Some people thrive on mediocre or even trashy products if it satisfies their craving. I'm a pickier reader. That's not to say I'll always select a golden nugget of a story to enjoy, or that it's quality just because I happen to like it. But as an aspiring writer with time on her hands, and who would like to contribute to fantasy literature someday, it's high time I sat down and looked at what's out there--both new releases and older works that continue to inspire writers and the market. For better or worse.

While I aim to expand my readership horizons across the fantasy spectrum, you can expect that a LOT of what I'll read will take inspiration from fairy tales. Fairy tales and legends are the foundation of much of modern fantasy, after all. Also, while I enjoy it, there will NOT be a sci-fi focus in my selection process. If a novel or series combines both fantasy and sci-fi (Star Wars is the best example I can think of ), I'l definitely consider it. I'm going to be wary of huge subgenres of fantasy like paranormal romance. The market is saturated with these stories, and I'd like to keep my repertoire a little more diverse. Big releases will be prominent, but I'll also look at more fringe works if I see them and they spark my interest, or if I get enough recommendations for them.

Yes, recommendations are welcome! Can't say how much feedback I'll receive, but it's encouraged. Your input will help me gauge what I'm doing well and what I can improve on, and what books I might otherwise pass on that deserve promotion or critique.

Amazon, Goodreads, Kirkus and other book-selling and book review sites are helpful resources; I'm just supplying extra aid in a place where you know what kind of reviews to expect. No three-sentence blurbs of gushing praise or wrathful ranting here. While I'll try to avoid major spoilers, my goal is to give a comprehensive assessment of every book, weighing the good and the bad, the creative and the cliched. If my readers want more in-depth reviews that give away ALL the spoilers, I'll deliver.

That about covers it. If you're intrigued, stick around and check out more of Keep Scrolling! Thanks for stopping by!