Bookish Thoughts

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...