Bookish Thoughts

This is where waiting so long to review what I've read runs into a wall. I enjoyed reading this story. And I wish Brennan had been able to continue with this series, because there are still a lot of unanswered questions. But at this point I don't remember many of the specifics.

Marie Brennan has quietly become one of my favorite authors. The worlds she creates are vivid and complex. She tends to focus on complicated female characters in complicated situations. And there's something cozy or safe about her work. A bit of what I like so much about Lois McMaster Bujold. I feel like she cares deeply about both her characters and her reader and that she won't let me down. This novella was actually a bit frustrating because it was so short and I wanted so much more. It offers a bare glimpse of an incredible world and religion. The protagonist begins the book with no memory and is just starting to figure out who she is when the story ends. There are hints at a bunch of interesting stories all along the margins of the main one. I wanted more. Good thing there's a sequel. But I think even that won't be quite enough to sate me.

If you read Wheel of Time  and wanted a series that just focused on the inner politics of the Aes Sedai, then Warrior  and Witch  are the books for you. After Miryo and Mirage through thousands of years of tradition into question in the first book, the witches have to deal with the fallout. Predictably, some are on board with the new information while others are desperate to squash it and keep the old ways alive. There's a huge rift among the leaders of the witches, ultimately threatening a civil war that will draw in the rest of the world, as the various factions use their power and influence to lend strength to their various positions. What's really refreshing about these books is the sheer number of female characters. They're brave and scared and strong and cruel and thoughtful and rash and hypocritical and because there are so many of them you get this wonderful varied cast of women behaving in all manner of different ways as they work towards whatever goal they'v...

This was an unexpected delight. Much like with A Star Shall Fall , I went into this expecting a pleasant fantasy novel. But I was blown away but how much I ended up loving the story. Brennan is great at finding a new take on classic tropes, and now I'm more committed to actually tracking down and reading her Memoirs of Lady Trent  series. But back to Warrior . The book follows two women: a Witch named Miryo and a Hunter named Mirage. The former was raised in a sort of Witch academy, and when she goes to take the initiation test she discovers that she has a doppelganger. As long as the doppelganger lives, she won't be able to control her magic. So Miryo sets out to kill her, strong in her belief that this is just a soulless shell, not a person at all. Unfortunately for Miryo, Mirage is very much a person, and might just be the best Hunter in her generation to boot. Trained as an assassin, a spy, a bodyguard, and a tracker, there's no way Mirage is losing in a fair fight....

I really ought to have picked up this book ages ago. I loved Marie Brennan's Onyx Court  series, and this one has dragons. I put it off because it got somewhat mixed reviews. But then the good ones started to outweigh the bad ones and I decided to give it a shot. The good news is that now I don't have to wait too long for the final book to come out. I can read through the whole series pretty quickly. The series is about dragons, but from a scientific perspective and with a Victorian slant. As such, it's a bit slower than a typical dragon story.  The focus is more on learning and discovery than fire and treasure. But that doesn't mean there isn't action. The book has more than one thrilling dragon attack, it's just that the dragons are treated as animals rather than mythical creatures. Like big cats or bears. The book is structured as a memoir. The aging Lady Trent is finally telling the truth about her youthful adventures and how she came to be a leading e...

And so I've managed to come full circle in Marie Brennan's Onyx Court series, returning to the dragon that burned London to the ground. It was a lot of fun to read this series in not quite the right order. Especially as the characters I recognized from later books began to appear. In Ashes Lie is much more sprawling than any of the other books in the series. Where the others took place mostly over the course of a year or two, with a few flash backs to fill in story, this one spanned decades. It begins in 1639, with the rise of the Puritans in London. The political unrest of London and England at large is mirrored by Lune's own struggles to maintain control of her realm without turning into Invidiana, the cruel former queen. Her journey is closely tied to that of the royal family, and both the execution of Charles I and the return of Charles II match with major and similar events in Lune's own rule. The book ultimately culminates in the Great Fire of ...

It's always a little weird to know how a story ends before you even read it. I came into this series halfway through and looped back around to the beginning after I finished everything else that had been written. Thanks to those later books I knew before I began that Lady Lune and Michael Deven would fall in love and that Lune would be the Queen of Onyx Court by the end of the book. But knowing the ending did nothing to spoil the fun of getting there. Midnight Never Come isn't quite as good as the books that came later. But that's mostly because Brennan grew as an author. And that's not to say that this book was in any way bad. It was just lacking a little something that's present in A Star Shall Fall and With Fate Conspire . For one, it limits itself to two point of view characters, while the later books allow glimpses of many more motives. It was also far more straightforward, and I preferred the slightly meandering quality of the other books. Th...

It turns out that when you're stuck in a room without internet for two days, doing regression testing on a machine so slow it takes half an hour to compile your code and 2-3 hours to load data and run through each test, you can get a lot of reading done. Which is how I finished this 500+ page book in two days. I'm glad it was as entertaining and engrossing as it was, or I might have started to pull my hair out. With Fate Conspire is the fourth (and probably final) book in the Onyx Court series by Marie Brennan. I read the third one when Kevin gave it to me for Christmas last year, but I haven't read the first two yet. Though after reading this one, tracking them down has become a priority. This book has a few characters in common with A Star Shall Fall , but they've been shuffled around. The protagonists from that book have either died (the mortals) or moved into supporting roles (the faeries). I don't remember if any of the protagonists from this bo...

Kevin got me this book for Christmas because there was a dragon on the cover and the blurb mentioned fairies. It turns out that this is a pretty good metric for determining whether I'll like a book or not. It helped that it also combined elements of historical fiction, making for a pretty cool book overall. Marie Brennan's A Star Shall Fall is actually the third book in a series about the fairies who live under London. I was a little wary about jumping into the series midway, but I ultimately don't think I missed too much. This book does a pretty good job of recapping the important information from the previous books, and it stands on it's own very well. The previous books apparently dealt with a war between the fairies and a dragon, which resulted in the Great Fire of London in 1666. The fairies managed to disable and trap the dragon. However, they weren't able to build a strong enough cage to hold it forever. So when Halley's Comet came by in...