Reading Books Recommended by Others

Rather than share more fairy-tale reviews this week, I’m doing something a little different.  All of the books here were recommended over on Rachel Neumeier’s blog.  (If you ever read secular urban fantasy, you should give Neumeier a try.  She’s my favorite in that category.  She also has some really good fantasy.  Even if you usually stick to Christian books, you would probably enjoy her City in the Lake, The Floating Islands, or Keeper of the Mist.)  Her blog is always entertaining and she posts frequently, so I’m often over there at 3 am when I should be sleeping. 

So here are the books that she recommended and I read.  FYI, none of them are Christian books.

Wings of Fire series by Tui T. Sutherland

This is a wonderful middle-grade series about a group of dragonets who have to save the world from an unending war—at least, they have to according to a mysterious prophecy.  I’m about seven books into the series and looking forward to the rest.  Each of the books is told from the POV of a different dragonet. Each dragonet has a distinct voice and agenda. While I definitely have favorites—Moon and Winter are great—each voice is a pleasure to read.  There is action, excitement, politics, and friendship—just enough of each to be rewarding for an adult reader as well as a middle-grader.

Discern: As in a lot of middle-grade fiction, adults—especially parents—tend to be either absent or awful in this series.  Apparently dragons are even more lacking in parenting skills than humans.

 

Island of Ghosts and others by Gillian Bradshaw

GB is apparently a famous historical fiction author.  Somehow I had missed her all these years.  I have a vague memory of maybe trying her Arthurian trilogy as a teenager and not making it through, but after I read Island of Ghosts I couldn’t stop devouring her books.  The ones I’ve read have mostly been set during the Roman Empire (4 BC to 400 AD), although I also read a medieval story with a small but crucial fantasy element (The Wolf Hunt).

Island of Ghosts is the story of an army of horse nomads who were defeated by the Romans and sent to reinforce the Roman garrisons in Britain as part of their peace treaty.  The main character, a war-weary general who learns the Roman way of doing things out of sheer determination to keep his men alive, is absolutely stellar.  When the situation in Britain becomes unstable, he finds himself stuck between the Romans, the Britons, and the Picts.  I strongly recommend it.

The Beacon at Alexandria, The Bearkeeper’s Daughter, Imperial Purple, and Cleopatra’s Heir were also good.

Discern: There is a lot of historically accurate, non-Christian stuff going on in these books.  The main characters always have a certain amount of integrity, but they don’t necessarily make moral choices.  While Christians and Jews are represented in a nuanced, often positive manner in these books, main characters who would claim to be Christians clearly aren’t (they don’t refer to Jesus even in their thoughts or change their behavior because of biblical values).

 

Margaret Rogerson – An Enchantment of Ravens

This is an entrancing fantasy about a practical woman who paints portraits for the Fae.  When a too-accurate portrait gets the Autumn King in trouble with his subjects, he drags her into fairyland to set things right.  I really enjoyed this and am waiting for the next in the series, which is scheduled to come out soon.

If you like Naomi Novik, Katherine Arden, or others authors who write fairy tales with a bit of an edge, you would like this too.  While it’s fun with a strong romance and many funny bits, it also includes many dangerous moments.

 

Heather Dixon – Entwined and Illusionarium

Entwined is a fun retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses.  Princess Azalea and her eleven sisters love to dance, but when their father outlaws all amusement, they have to find a new place to practice… and they find it in a forgotten (and cursed?) cellar of the castle.  I enjoyed it… wouldn’t mind rereading it… don’t remember it all that well.

Illusionarium has a very different tone.  Living in a snow-locked city in a steampunk world, Jonathan is a perfectly ordinary doctor’s apprentice.  After a sudden plague appears, the king arrives to demand that they find the cure.  But the surprises don’t stop there.  A strange drug named fantillium, which causes hallucinations so vivid they can affect reality, may hold the key to curing the plague victims.  But it also opens doors to other worlds.  Jonathan soon finds himself trapped in the world next door, a world with a mad queen and a broken civilization.

I had a hard time getting into this book… Dixon has to set so many different things in motion at the beginning that the story feels very slow at first.  But once I realized what was going on I couldn’t stop reading.  This is a rather dark story, but hope triumphs in the end.