Bookish Thoughts

 I've been slowly making my way through Kristen Britain's Green Rider series for the past year. And I mean slowly. After a year, I only just finished the fourth book. When I started, I assumed the series was complete at six books, and that seemed doable. But a seventh book was released this year, and it turns out that the author has no set plan for how long the series will be. That's been fine up to now. Each book has been a distinct story. I find I have little trouble remembering what happened previously when I picked up the next book (Britain's ability to seamlessly integrate the "previously on" into her text is pretty amazing). It's also been easy to remember what happened in each book. But then this one ended in a cliffhanger, and now I'm worried that we're diving into some more classic epic fantasy, where the story drags on and on for countless books until the author abandons it for one reason or another. But I'm only a little worried, be...

In December I suddenly found myself craving epic fantasy. I re-watched all three Lord of the Rings movies on Hulu, and I was seriously considering re-reading The Wheel of Time . But then I remembered that I had this other, much shorter and new-to-me series on my shelf, where it had been sitting for nearly two years. So I finally picked it up. Green Rider was everything I wanted it to be and more. It mostly follows Karigan, who has just been suspended from school and is heading home when she gets caught up in a magical adventure. She finds herself in possession of magical powers she doesn't understand, relentlessly pursued by enemies she wasn't expecting, and suddenly wishing she'd paid more attention to history and current events. The story is exciting, and things happened much more quickly than I was expecting. But that propulsive plot didn't detract from the incredible world or rich characters. I loved Karigan's discovery of this world, and Britain did an excelle...