The Basques is by an author who has impressed me in the past, and was also a chance to look at The Peoples of Europe series. The book (and presumably others in the series) is a little under 300 pages[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Archive for Books
The final volume of Kate Elliot’s Crown of Stars series has a lot of work to do. The cast has grown enormous, multiple threats are coming at the main characters from completely different sources, and the political situation is a[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
It often seems to me like Sicily doesn’t get a lot of attention, now or in the ancient world, even though it’s a very prominent land-mass that dominates the middle of the Mediterranean. This is more an accident of our[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
In origin, this is half a book. Each volume of the Crown of Stars series was longer than the last, and here at the end it finally got too long to put under one cover. It’s also hard to figure[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
As the Crown of Stars series nears its end, this book loses its individual identity. There’s no real ‘spine’ overtly holding this book together as a unit. No new characters to speak of. As a result, The Gathering Storm does[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The cover of H. Paul Honsinger’s first book promises grand old-fashioned military SF. And he delivers on this. The general setup is familiar: officer with his first command of a warship gets a ship with a troubled, low-morale, crew and[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This isn’t quite an Arthurian book in the usual sense. Set in post-Roman Britain, The Winter Prince adapts from the Welsh versions of Arthurian legend, taking the general situation to tell its own story. The entire story is told by[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
If you study the history of the Middle Ages, it doesn’t take long to realize the Normans were involved in a lot more than England and northern France. However, while I’d become aware of the Norman state in southern Italy,[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The very beginning of The Disfavored Hero directly states that this is an alternate Japan (Naipon) where myth is real. This is something that should never be said in a novel. Let your creation stand on its own feet, and[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Book four of Crown of Stars follows the usual practice of giving time to four major plot threads. The new major character this time is Adica, the Hollowed One of a tribe that is part of an effort to cast[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…