Tag: Fantasy (nonspecific)

Book Review: Bewitched & Betrayed

Erin Penn

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Bewitched & Betrayed by Lisa Shearin

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From the national bestselling author of The Trouble with Demons comes another fantasy adventure with a beloved, bold heroine.

Raine Benares is a seeker. She finds lost things and missing people—usually alive. But now she’s been bonded with the Saghred, a soul-stealing stone of unlimited power, and must hunt down its escapees. Especially since one of them is also hunting her…

 

MY REVIEW

Another installment of Lisa Shearin’s Raine Benares novels. Reads like Urban Fantasy in a Fantasy setting – kickass woman in leather with swords and magical powers off the charts (check), plucky friends (check), bad guy (check), politics stew (check), two love interests – one good but kind-of bad and one bad but kind-of good that are both total dish (check).

Love the main character’s family with their questionable morals, but extreme loyalty. The behind the scenes political stuff does not usually affect the character directly, but does impact who she can go to when – just enough stuff happening in the background for you to feel the character is part of a much larger world and it doesn’t just revolve around her. The other characters have real lives offscreen, and some of them may be even more interesting than hers.

One down-side – the author constantly adds mini-recaps, like you expect to put her book down and come back to it in a couple days. Not something I do, but if you actually have a life and can only read a book in 2 or 3 chapter intervals, may be a helpful.

If you like the Urban Fantasy formula, give this series / book a try.

Book Review: Because You Love to Hate Me

Erin Penn

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This edgy anthology teams up acclaimed YA authors and popular YouTubers to create 13 fairy tales and 13 inspired works–all from a “villain’s” perspective, in the vein of Maleficent or Wicked.

Leave it to the heroes to save the world–villains just want to rule the world.

In this unique YA anthology, thirteen acclaimed, bestselling authors team up with thirteen influential BookTubers to reimagine fairy tales from the oft-misunderstood villains’ points of view.

These fractured, unconventional spins on classics like “Medusa,” Sherlock Holmes, and “Jack and the Beanstalk” provide a behind-the-curtain look at villains’ acts of vengeance, defiance, and rage–and the pain, heartbreak, and sorrow that spurned them on. No fairy tale will ever seem quite the same again!

MY REVIEW

This is very much a YA of the present (2019) generation. The villains are too sweet; all have justifications and are likable in the extreme. Some you might even rub elbows with. Each of them is someone a reader can understand and identify with.

I guess it is a good introduction to when villains are heroes in their own stories – but this feels more like what an 11 and 12 year old are fed rather than raising the moral questions a 13 and 14, let alone a 16 or 17, should be asking and investigating. The gimmick of the bloggers commenting actually improves the book in this regard. Some of the best writing is from them.

The Blood of Imuriv – Selfish boy with anger control issues. No where near as creepy as it should be. Blog commentary is A+.

Jack – A retelling of Jack in the Beanstalk. A lot of these are retelling of old myths and stories, and they suffer in comparison with the creepy, evil of the originals. This one doesn’t; it’s on par with Jack and the Beanstalk.

Gwen and Art and Lance – Another retelling, this one of Camelot. Very teen-angst. You can see where the evil is going to grow, but it isn’t true evil yet.

Shirley & Jim – Sherlock retelling. One of the few without the evil being the POV character. Love the villain and the relationship with the future hero. This one establishes everything which will follow and you can see it unspool in your mind after you are done reading. Great read.

The Blessing of Little Wants – I’m the wrong generation to enjoy this one. M. Night Shyanmalan’s movie is still too fresh in my head, and I saw the twist a mile away which deflated all the magic of this short story.

The Sea Witch – The little mermaid from a different point of view. The blogger questionnaire is interesting to answer.

Beautiful Venom – Medusa in a different mythos. Extra plus for diversity.

Death Knell – An original work, mostly. (I’m too widely read for delaying Death to be truly original.) Southern Gothic feel.

Marigold – Nice. This is how I like my elves in the woods to be. A historic piece that keeps several historic values of age and culture-stratus in place.

(Note that the three furthest from contemporary US culture (and that includes the sci-fi at the start) are grouped together – Beautiful Venom, Death Kneel, and Marigold.)

You, You It’s all about You – Don’t often see second person stories. This one pulls it off fairly well.

Julian Breaks Every Rule – This is one where the blogger gets it 100% right. The story needs to continue. (and yet it doesn’t – ends at a perfect time for a short story.) Captures both YA and villainy perfectly. This is what the whole anthology should have been like.

Indigo and Shade – Beauty and Beast retelling. Way too heavy-handed in trying to get parallels. It felt stiff; like a story constrained by the structure of the story it is emulating rather than a celebration like the previous short story of Jack.

Sera – Birth of a Death God. Has too many POVs to get emotionally invested in the story. This doesn’t disturb the way it should. The characters in the story has no agency – everything was destined from the beginning and no one had any choices. Either fighting or celebrating fate would have been more interesting.

Julian Breaks Every Rule and Marigold are what I hoped for the whole anthology to be like, with Jack, Shirley & Jim, You You It’s All About You, and Sera being close. The “villain” POV stories are a popular anthology sub-genre. This villain anthology concentrated on making the bad guys identify as good guys and neutered them too much in order to keep the YA feel. Villains don’t have to be likable; their willingness to do what needs doing is how a reader identifies with and envies them. Power has its own draw.

Read for book club; borrowed book from another member.

Author Spotlight: Barb Hendee

Erin Penn

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I first discovered Barb Hendee through the Dhampir/Nobel Dead series she co-wrote with her husband J.C. Hendee. The book sold in 2001 and by 2006 success as a writer team had allowed them to quit the day jobs and move to Oregon and just write. Then in 2011, even though they did all the right things – keep writing, keep in touch with their fans, were easy to work with – the market imploded when Borders gave up its fight. They, like many writers, suddenly found their royalty checks shrinking.

In her post “Don’t Quit Your Day Job” (9/20/2023 note – looks like she moved her website and has discontinued the blog aspects as part of concentrating on her day job), she discusses what it is like to be a successful writer … and then not be successful anymore.

She is still writing. The fourteenth (and last?) chapter of Nobel Dead came out in 2016. In addition, she is solo writing the Dark Glass Novels, where noble women faced with choices like stopping an assassination or choosing which of the king’s sons to marry look into a mirror and see those choices play out. Rarely are any of the futures fully happy, the question is which will the woman pick and how will it change her.

Barb Hendee may have returned to her day job, but she isn’t walking away from her night job. She loves writing too much.

Author: Edmund R. Schubert

Erin Penn

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Edmund R. Schubert has been instrumental with Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show until recently, when he retired to concentrate on his own writing. All I can say is, About Time!

Don’t get me wrong, the man is an amazing editor. Listening to him at conventions, reading his blog posts on Magical Words, and all the other ways he passes on his mystic skills of editing to the apprentices gathering at his feet, one never doubts he is a master of his craft.

Thing is he is also a master at writing. Editing for OSCIMS took up a lot of his time, so he was limited to short stories. He is one of those when I am bopping through an anthology and a story stops me dead, and I go back to the title page for the short story, I go “oh, of course it’s him”. There are very few who do this to me … even fewer who do it every.single.time.

The man is really, really good.

Grab his collection, This Giant Leap, and see if you agree.

Flash: Rafella de Sable (Part 4)

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So with her family history and her personal history established, I needed to give the DM pieces to play with – story for him to weave into what was happening but far enough in advance he can take it in a completely different direction if he wanted. As it turned out the game fell apart after two sessions – the first to make the characters and the second was the first adventure.

Even though I never really got a chance to fully explore Rafella, I really like her and her family. They have gone through a lot. I wonder what happened next in her life.

*** Rafella de Sable (Part 4) – The Groomspeaker arrives soon

The wedding contract is to be finalized on her twenty-fifth birthday, which will double as the engagement party should the groomspeaker be pleased with the final product. Nearly immediately after the wedding is to take place. Which is good, since the family is nearly out of money again. Paying for the dowries of her two sisters, arranging for her brothers marriage, and maintaining the house for three families (grandfather, brother and sister), as well as her own training, consumed the initial payment. The final payment is scheduled for delivery after the wedding night. Then that Rafaela will leave with her husband and never have to see her family again. A prospect she eagerly awaits. She respects the old man as much as she hates him. Her sister is a prig and her husband an overweight wannabe. And her brother is a sniveling, self-centered jerk and his wife is a worthless ditz. Her other two sisters are long gone and never understood her. She will be able to finish her obligations to the family that raised her and start paying her obligation to the person that paid for her to learn magic.

Rafaela is curious about the next few weeks. She has never been certain if the groomspeaker arranged for the contract for himself, his son or his benefactor. The man is at least twenty years her senior, which means he is over forty-five; if he is meant to be her husband, she just might break him on the wedding night. In under nine days she will walk into her engagement ball and officially meet her fiancée the first time. Her grandfather has arranged everything; she hasn’t even talked directly to the groomspeaker since her sister’s wedding sixteen years ago. Sometimes she would be called into the office and paraded in front of him with them asking questions around her but never to her, but that is it. One month after that the wedding is scheduled, enough time to do the final planning, while not making the families make two trips. She has started saying goodbye to her true friends, the thieves’ guild. A handful of the higher-ups even know who she is in real life and have been invited to the party (some of them are high enough in the social structure that it was automatic, but others should raise a few eyebrows).

Her life is going to totally change when she walks down the main staircase from the Gallery of Elders and places her gloved hand in the hand of the man standing at the bottom of the steps. She plans to look long and hard at the person she will be vowing to spend the rest of her life with. Because of obligations owed, she won’t try to run if she doesn’t like what she sees, but she is hoping to have the change of luck that comes to her family when they change their name.

NOTES TO DM:

  • The curse to the line may actual or just perceived.
  • The story the old woman told her may be actual or a malicious lie.
  • The old thief may still be alive somewhere and they meet him outside.
  • The sister’s wedding could have been in the local kingdom or out-of-kingdom so her paramour could come from a different set of traditions (including slavery).
  • Don’t know anything about her husband, where he is from, what he is like, etc other than he knows people that have access to money and want him to marry a mage.
  • Don’t know where they will be going after the wedding.
  • The engagement party is to take place in SEVEN TO NINE DAYS game time.

(Words 600, first written for game 9/23/2005; first published 3/8/2020)