"Dragon Thief" by Blake & Raven Penn

To be clear, the titular Dragon Thief is a thief who steals dragons, not a thief who is also a dragon.

This may be the only book in which I've ever seen someone use the "reckless and flirtatious protagonist" trope and actually pull it off. I think it helps that Asher (the dragon thief in question) is funny, and he does have some character depth to work with. His various crushes do get a bit annoying at times, but it's not constantly, and he's not an annoying person overall. Plus he does prove himself able to crush on only one person at a time.

It also helps that Asher never does anything outright stupid. And whenever he does things that would seem to be outright stupid, he usually can almost make them work through sheer Asherness.

Oh, and Asher isn't an orphan! One (1) of his parents is still alive! It's his dad. And his dad isn't even the annoying kind of parent who doesn't want the kid/teen protagonist to do the plot. He's just as invested in the plot as Asher is, albeit also a bit more cautious.

Dragon Thief's setting is basically a fantasy world trying to be a Western. Sort of. It uses a lot of the Wild West tropes; no trains :<, but there's random tumbleweeds and things, and there's one character (Boone) who would absolutely be a cowboy except he's in a fantasy world.

But the setting is also full of dragons, to the point that most of the animals are replaced with dragon versions of those animals. So jackalopes exist but they're drakalopes instead, their buffalo are replaced by dragon buffalo, raccoons are replaced by draccoons, et cetera. Also people ride kirin instead of horses. And there are, y'know, actual dragons.

The magic system in this is very well thought out. And you don't need to flip back to the setting guide every time they mention something (coughHandofSteelcough), which means they did the worldbuilding naturally. And there isn't a single "as you know, Bob" to be seen!

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for fantasy violence.

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    "Ha!" The newer Mage Hunter pointed at me. "Caught you. Who ever said the Keeper's treasure was dragon eggs?"

    There was a moment of silence as I blinked back at him.

    "Um... you did," I said.

    "That's true, you did," Dad added.

    "Did I?" the Mage Hunter looked at his older companion.

    "Yes, you did. Come on Lothar," she grumbled.

    Page 77. Lothar is Dragon Thief's resident Comic Relief Villain.

(Endnote: There's a character in this whose name is Solrac. "Solrac" is "Carlos" spelled backwards. I have no idea whether or not this is intentional, but it's funny either way.)

"The Beast Player" by Nahoko Uehashi (translated by Cathy Hirano)

Really my only major quibble with this book is that it could have used a bit more denouement. But then it also has like five story arcs one after another, so 80% of them ended properly, even if the last one left off somewhat abruptly.

*looks at Goodreads*

So it turns out there's a sequel. Never mind, the lack of denouement can stand.

This was originally written in Japanese, and had to be translated into English. I suspect that, in Japanese, the prose is beautiful. The translation is, well, a translation, so it can be a bit choppy at times, but one does get used to it fairly quickly. I did, at least.

The titular beasts are these giant flying things called Royal Beasts. I imagined them as birds, but they're not really birdlike; they have fur and teeth, and they don't lay eggs.

As it was originally published (in Japan), this was two separate books. That goes some way toward explaining the abundance of story arcs.

In the first of the several of those, the main character acquires a wise mentor slash surrogate father figure. He keeps bees, and he's really nice. It's entirely possible he's my favorite character in the entire book.

This author likes to put her protagonist through moral dilemmas, which is not something I see often in books. Usually the only moral choices a protagonist will face are A) the ones that are a choice between doing the right but difficult thing or the wrong but easy thing, or B) the ones where the right choice is obvious to the reader, if not the characters. This book opts for C), the ones where there's a choice between two options and both of them are, in some form, the bad option.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: ...a soft T15+ for mostly veiled sexual references. One of the main plot points revolves around the reason why the giant flying bird things don't reproduce in captivity, and it involves them, y'know, reproducing. It's not described in any detail, but it does happen.

4 stars.

(Endnote: This has nothing to do with the Beast Crest from Hollow Knight: Silksong.)

"How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse" by K. Eason

"Fantasy space opera political intrigue" is not a genre I knew existed. And yet, here we are.

The "fantasy" comes in from the fact that all their advanced technology is actually made of magic (or "arithmancy"). Which means you can hack it with your brain. I don't know why everyone doesn't know arithmancy if it lets you hack into things with your brain; maybe it's harder than it seems. There are also fairies, who the people in-universe didn't think existed until they invited the fairies to Rory's christening and the fairies actually showed up.

Speaking of whom! Rory Thorne, who left the structural integrity of the multiverse entirely unchanged, is a princess (of a space kingdom) who was cursed at birth by a fairy. No, this is not a Sleeping Beauty retelling; she was cursed at birth to... see through politeness. And also lies. This is one of those curses that are also sort of a blessing in disguise.

I think the book started being truly good about a third of the way through, when it decided to drop the snarky feminism and just focus on the fantasy space opera political intrigue. And I have nothing against feminism, but it's like bay leaves: it can make the thing you're making better, but if it insists on being an integral part of the finished product, it's going to mess stuff up.

And once it dropped the snarky feminism (which grated on me, just like a bay leaf), I did enjoy it. Even the fantasy space politics.

This is written in sort of the style of an in-universe history book, which gives it a unique narration voice. The framing also means that it usually just leaves you to figure out the worldbuilding from context, which it mostly does a good job of subtly explaining, aside from a couple of instances of "as you know, Bob" (which, as you know, is not generally a good way to explain lore or backstory).

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: ...a soft T15+ for bad language and some (mostly veiled) sexual references. I had a difficult time deciding whether to give this T or T15+, and eventually decided to err on the side of "there's nothing stopping a 13-year-old from reading this, but I wouldn't give it to them, so I guess T15+." That said, it's a soft T15+.

4 stars.

(Endnote: I have a theory: Rory Thorne is actually a distant descendant of none other than Carswell Thorne, of The Lunar Chronicles fame.)

"The Hobbit" by J. R. R. Tolkien

One does not simply review The Hobbit.

I'm serious. You read it, you nod and you're like "oh, yup, that was a really good book," and then you go on your way. Nowhere in there does "reviewing" factor into it, because honestly, what would you even say?

Apparently, this.

I liked it reasonably well, although sometimes the narration style (with occasional asides of "of course, if he had known this, he would have...") got on my nerves. But as we later learn in Lord of the Rings that this is originally told by Bilbo as a story to small children, it does kind of fit.

Smaug is the best dragon. (He agrees with me on that point.) He's arrogant and powerful and terrifying and dramatic, and most importantly, he's villainous. All fictional dragons should aspire to be Smaug.

As it turns out, one also does not simply review The Hobbit because one does not have much to say about it.

My mom reviewed this, twice (first review, second review). This review is also part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence and giant spiders.

4 stars.

(Endnote: Most of this book is actually based on a much older text by someone named Bilbo Baggins.)

"A Cast of Stones" by Patrick W. Carr

This book's cover does it no favors.

Seriously, it looks dark and creepy. And also, weirdly, kind of low-effort. I actually put off reading it for a while because the cover pushed me away so much. (Yeah, I know, don't judge a book by its cover and all that, but on some level you're kind of supposed to. That's the point of the cover. If the cover played no part in people's assessment of a book, then there's no real reason aside from "it looks pretty" for books to have cover art at all.)

Okay, mini-rant over. Despite what the cover would seem to indicate, this book is actually pretty good.

Plot summary: In a world where casting lots to decide things actually works, the king is dying without an heir. So we have to pick a new one, or else the magic barrier protecting the kingdom from the demons will fall apart and the kingdom will get overrun by demons. And because casting lots to decide things actually works, that's how we're going to do it. Also there's Fantasy Christianity involved.

Except |the demons don't want us to choose a new king, because they want the magic barrier to fall apart so they can overrun the kingdom|. At least, I'm pretty sure that's who's behind all the problems we keep having.

I've noticed (from my incredibly large sample size of exactly two) that whenever you have Fantasy Christianity, things tend to be named in some sort of butchered approximation of Latin. Granted, I've only encountered Fantasy Christianity twice, in this and in Deathless Beast, so I may be missing the vast array of Fantasy Christianity that's named in a butchered approximation of Swedish or Swahili or something. But the Latin is probably thanks to the Roman Catholics and their historical insistence on Latin for everything.

(Granted, most of my knowledge of Roman Catholicism dates to roughly the sixteenth century, so they may have changed significantly since them.)

I really liked that the main character |isn't the Chosen One|. That honor goes to the side character who could have been really annoying if he were actually annoying at all, and who's still slightly residually annoying because the main character is envious of him.

And speaking of our main character, he has issues. Mainly alcoholism. I'm not an alcoholic myself, and I don't know any, so I can't speak to how accurate the portrayal is. He's also not instantly good at everything (he is, in fact, bad at most of things), but he gets better at some of them after a good training montage or two.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for alcohol abuse and fantasy violence. Also some veiled sexual references, but those are veiled, as they should be.

4 stars. 

(Endnote: This is the book that inspired my previous post.)

"The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England" by Brandon Sanderson

This book was a Christmas gift from a relative for whom I have no suitable pseudonym.

It's about a guy from |what's eventually revealed to be a sci-fi universe|, who lands in a field in medieval England (hence the title) (well, it's |actually an alternate dimension's version of medieval England|) with no memory. And, thus, no idea why he's here, what he's supposed to be doing, or who he even is.

He actually reminds me a lot of Guy from Minecraft: The Island. They're both amnesiac guys who get portal-fantasied into another world, for one. And for another, they're confident in themselves, mostly, despite not really having the competence to back up that confidence.

(They also both annoy me to varying degrees throughout the earlier parts of their respective books.)

Amnesia is a good way to avoid having to lore dump about your original world, while also being able to integrate the lore about your fantasy world in a fairly natural way. It's really a very useful plot device, especially for portal fantasy.

Our main character is not actually a wizard, though |he does have nanobot augments. And there is magic, of a sort, just not used by him|.

The "frugal" part of the title is an artifact of an earlier book concept of Sanderson's, entitled The Frugal Wizard's Guide to London, which he rejected for being "too Harry Potter". In this, "Frugal Wizard" is a brand name. Frugality really has nothing to do with the plot.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T, probably, for fantasy |and sci-fi| violence. I don't recall anything objectionable. It could be a pretty decent videogame.

4 stars.

(Endnote: Personally, if I got portal-fantasied, I'd rather have a copy of the Adventurer's Guide. That in-universe book is more useful and less of a marketing brochure.)

"Deathless Beast" by Andrew D. Meredith

This book is long as nouns.

(Now, I should qualify that statement. I read this piecemeal whenever I had time. I'm not sure if that was because it's too long to read in a few long sittings, or if it felt long because I read it in small bits.)

But yes. It's really long. It also takes forever to actually get started with the plot; I recall looking up from it once and declaring to my family, "It's page 373 and the main villain has finally put in an appearance."

For all that, though, it's not bad. The author decided to forgo the usual fantasy races (elves, dwarves, etc.) in favor of making up all new ones such as hrelgren and qavyl. They're mostly rather weird. He's also äddicted tö ümlauts when naming pläces (one of them even includes the capital Œ [or OE], which I'm not sure I've ever seen before).

The book contains something I really like, as well: your Fantasy Organized Religion that isn't evil, or even antagonistic. Sure, there are bad guys within the church, but they're bad guys because they're a sort of evil cult trying to bring it down and/or take it over, not because they're in the church. It stands against oppression, its paladins and clerics are the Good Guys (for the most part, although as in any organization there are some jerkfaces), and its patron deity genuinely wants the best for humanity. Every fantasy church should be like these guys, and I say that with absolute certainty.

There are a bunch of glossaries at the back if you want to know how all these ümlaut-läden nämes are actually pronounced. I didn't know those were there. I just took potshots at the pronunciation, and I probably got 50%-70% of it wrong.

This is a low-magic high fantasy. It's set in an extremely original world, but there's barely any magic involved. Most of what magic there is is thanks to the world's pantheon, though there's also this weird seed pod thing one of the main characters has that doesn't seem to have ties to any of them. Yet. That may change.

(Oh, did I mention there are four main characters? One of them is a paladin, one of them is the girl version of a cleric, and we also have a brother-and-sister duo of mercenaries from Morally Greyish Mercenaries Incorporated -- also known as the Black Sentinels.)

Probably my favorite part of this book is |the battle between the nonagenarian paladin leader and the giant evil werewolf king. The werewolf king gets wrecked. It's the first actual magic we see in the book, and it's glorious|.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A hard T for fantasy violence and some sexual references.

4 stars.

(Endnote: Technically, I am also deathless. I have experienced zero deaths.)

"Ember's End" by S. D. Smith

I probably should have reread Ember Rising before reading this, because it's been almost a year and a half and I forgot like half the plot.

Much of the book is consumed with the final battle against The Evil Bird Dude and his Evil Bird Dudes (and also The Evil Bird Army, The Other Six Evil Bird Armies, The Evil Wolf Army, The Evil Wolf Army II: Wolf Army Boogaloo, and The Rabbit Traitors Who Were Only Traitors Once). My thoughts on that will follow.

I found it a tad unrealistic how we were like "oh, this is too much, we're out of reserves and weapons and couldn't survive another attack" after the attack of about every other army, then always managed to come up with more reserves and weapons for the next one. It strains my credulity.

(Note: "The Rabbit Traitors Who Were Only Traitors Once" is because earlier in the series, a bunch of rabbits had betrayed the other rabbits and gone to work for the Evil Bird Dude (whose name is Morbin Blackhawk, but I'm just going to keep calling him the Evil Bird Dude). Then, in this book, the good rabbits manage to convince some of the traitor rabbits to be traitors a second time, betray the bad guys, and go back to being good guys. But not all of them did; some stayed behind, hence the Rabbit Traitors Who Were Only Traitors Once.)

Oh, and the gunpowder use is still all out of whack. They have exploding arrowheads now, but still no, y'know, firearms. Or (as has been my perennial refrain for the reviews of pretty much the entire series) landmines. Seriously, the amount of explosives you can pack into a rabbit-scale arrowhead is puny; if you don't have modern high explosives you'll make a loud bang and possibly a flash, and that's it.

(If you did have modern high explosives, I'm not entirely sure you could have any more success at making an effective weapon. An arrowhead--even a human-scale one--is just too small a space to pack a detonator and any reasonable amount of explosive into without making it too heavy to use. I guess maybe if you made an arrowhead out of pure sodium and shot it into water or something? Humans do make explosive harpoons for whaling, though I'm not sure why, but a human-scale harpoon is at least an order of magnitude bigger than a rabbit-scale arrow.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence. I'm not entirely sure what genre of videogame this would fall into.

4 stars.

(Endnote: They're rabbits. With swords. And increasingly unrealistic and idiosyncratic other weapons. And also hang gliders.)

"Hollow Knight: Silksong" by Team Cherry

Me: "I'm going to buy Hollow Knight: Silksong!"

*sixty hours of playtime later*

Me: "That was fun!"

Seriously, this game is huge. I've played about seventy hours of the original Hollow Knight, and I've gone through that one three times.

It was about seven years in the making, most of which was "Team Cherry works on the game and doesn't share any news about it because they're having too much fun working on the game, while the fandom slowly goes stark raving mad." (And yes, that's the actual explanation; there was an interview where they were basically asked "why didn't you say anything for 7 years" and they basically answered "we were having too much fun working on the game.")

But as befits a game that took seven years, and as I've said, it's huge. It's also, as with Hollow Knight, not for the faint of heart, because it, too, is difficult as nouns.

(The final boss of Silksong took me slightly fewer tries than the final boss of Hollow Knight, but I attribute that to my being more skilled now.)

Anyway. Silksong's art is at least as beautiful as Hollow Knight's, and everything in the game is similarly some combination of elegant, adorable, and horrifying. It has the same hand-drawn aesthetic, and it's also full of unique areas with distinct looks.

Some of my favorites:

-Moss Grotto (similar to Greenpath from Hollow Knight, it's a verdant forest of moss. And I love moss.)

-Mount Fay (a really annoying parkour challenge, but I have to give it kudos for all the snow)

-High Halls (also kind of annoying, but also really pretty)

And dishonorable mentions to Bilewater, Putrified Ducts, and Sinner's Road (all of which are annoying and swampy/sewery), as well as the Sands of Karak (a coral desert place with a boss whose runback is entirely too long).

And now it's time to explain the story!

(Caveat lector: This game is best experienced as unspoiled as possible. If you ever intend to play it and don't already know the plot, I suggest not reading inside any of the spoiler tags.)

Basically, in the past, the |malevolent goddess at the top of the kingdom| decided to make |spider people|. Said |spider people rebelled against her and put her to sleep, then noped out of the kingdom when she woke up| and started possessing people and making them go insane.

Flash forward an indeterminate amount of time. The |Citadel at the top of the kingdom| has taken over everything, and is subtly tugging everyone to |make pilgrimages to it|. Most of them |die along the way|, because Pharloom (Silksong's game world) is even more dangerous than Hallownest from the original. |The Citadel's bugs| also sent out envoys to capture any descendents of |the malevolent goddess's spider people|, including the player character, Hornet. Hornet is brought to Pharloom and promptly decides that the bugs capturing her can get yeeted, yeets them, and makes her way up to the top of Pharloom to figure out what's making people go insane. And, hopefully, talk it out of it or slap it until it decides not to.

There are multiple ways of doing that. In the normal ending, "Weaver Queen," Hornet |kills Grand Mother Silk (the malevolent goddess, henceforth "GMS"), sort of eats her power, and apotheoses|. Unlike with Hollow Knight's "The Hollow Knight" ending, wherein it's implied |the player character will eventually fail in its containing-the-Infection task just like its predecessor did|, I'm not entirely sure that "Weaver Queen" |isn't the good ending. Hornet apotheoses (replacing the evil overlord with a good overlord), most of the characters are still alive, and aside from the Citadel getting covered in silk, everything is fine|. This is in contrast to the second and third endings, |"Snared Silk"| and |"Sister of the Void"|. In |"Snared Silk"|, Hornet |teams up with an NPC named the Caretaker to trap GMS and kill her without Hornet apotheosing. I'm not sure why she doesn't want to; maybe she doesn't want the responsibility of having to run a kingdom now|. Except |it goes wrong, because Lace (Hornet's foil character) screws everything up, meaning that instead of getting eaten by the void, GMS is now violently resisting to try to protect her daughter|.

So |the kingdom starts falling apart and void is taking over everything|. That's where "Sister of the Void" comes in, as Hornet has to |fix everything by going down into the void and taking Lace back out of it so GMS will stop trying to pull herself out of the void and unintentionally wrecking things|. Hornet doesn't |apotheose, but a bunch of people get killed, and Pharloom is in tatters. Aside from Hornet not having to run a kingdom, I can't see how this is really a better ending than "Weaver Queen"|.

This has been the story of Hollow Knight: Silksong. (I find it interesting that Pharloom is currently going through what Hallownest went through in the past; Pharloom is |actively dying|, while Hallownest |has already died and is now just sort of decaying|.

Unlike the Knight from Hollow Knight, Hornet has a foil: Lace. Like Hornet, Lace is the daughter of |one of the Hollow Knight universe's gods (Hornet's dad is the Pale King, Lace's mom is Grand Mother Silk|. Like Hornet, Lace has wandered around the game world stabbing people before the player character showed up, and like Hornet, Lace is a boss you fight twice who survives both battles. They even have similar fighting styles. Also, in Hollow Knight, Hornet |jumps in and stabs the first final boss at the climax of the bossfight, giving you access to the true final boss|; Lace does the same thing in the |"Snared Silk" bossfight with GMS|.

Except that what Hornet did in |the fight against the Hollow Knight| was entirely helpful, and didn't cause the huge amounts of problems that Lace's actions did. And there's other differences, too; Hornet was stabbing people to protect the kingdom, Lace seems to just be stabbing people for the sake of stabbing people. Lace is also, despite being ageless-ish like Hornet, still rather immature, spoiled, and bitter. The difference between them is exemplified by the differences between Lace's opening monologue in Silksong and Hornet's opening monologue in Hollow Knight; Hornet's is like "look, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have stop you here," and Lace is like "I'mma stab you because I caaaaaan" before Hornet tells her to shut up and get on with it.

This game also contains probably the third-saddest bossfight I've ever encountered: the Cogwork Dancers. (First- and second-saddest bossfights are here.)

Honestly, I could write an individual review of every boss and area in the game. But instead I'll just mention a few more NPCs before I go:

-Shakra, the mapmaker, who's much more capable of handling herself than Cornifer from Hollow Knight is (Shakra can fight and, in fact, |helps you out in one of the arena battles|; Cornifer really can't).

-Sherma, a smol adorable guy wearing a cymbal as a hat who shows up in random places throughout the game.

-Caretaker, an exceedingly curmudgeonly shrine-tender-person who's |actually one of the Snail Shamans (first seen in the original Hollow Knight)|. For a while, I had a theory that he was the reincarnation of |the Pale King, who's dead in Hollow Knight but who is known to reincarnate when he dies|; that theory did not turn out to be true.

And a dishonorable mention to the boss Disgraced Chef Lugoli, who was kicked out of being a chef for thinking the Pickled Muckmaggot was a good idea.

I intentionally avoided wikis while I was playing this, in order to avoid spoilers. That was really annoying to do.

This is a videogame, and it's rated E10+, presumably for fantasy violence. (For whatever reason, I can't find the official rating documentation anywhere.)

5 stars. My only real quibble is that I don't like the various wave defense sections scattered throughout the game, but that's really just me.

(Endnote: This game is magnificent.)

"Mistborn" by Brandon Sanderson

This book kept reminding me of Hollow Knight: Silksong while I was reading it, and I eventually figured out why: the settings are basically the same if you ignore the fact that one of them is made of bugs.

I mean, think about it. A dying kingdom ruled by an evil god who the female protagonist doesn't like? Without asking a clarifying question like "is everyone bugs," there's really no way to know whether that's describing the Final Empire from Mistborn or Pharloom from Hollow Knight: Silksong.

(There's a review of Silksong coming soon, but I hadn't finished it yet when I wrote this review--the game is really long, as befits something that took seven years to make.)

As it turns out, "grabbing random books off the middle-grade fiction shelves" does not find you books that are nearly as good as those found by the far superior method of "getting your friends to recommend them to you". This was recommended by the same person who introduced me to Cleopatra in Space.

This book is very well-written. It has a unique setting, not just Generic Fantasy Medieval Europe Setting #3587, and it feels very atmospheric within the setting.

Mistborn is apparently the start of a ridiculously long series/universe/thing, the Cosmere. If I do end up reading the entire series, it'll be over the course of years; I'm not going to binge it, both because I suspect that it would make the overall experience worse and because it sounds like too much work.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A soft T15+ for fantasy violence and some sexual references (people talk about prostitution and children born out of wedlock, and there are a couple mentions of rape in there).

4 stars.

(Endnote: This universe, instead of sandwiches, has "baywraps", which are basically fantasy burritos. I am inordinately fond of them.)

Mini-Reviews 17: Again

Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers

My mom reviewed this, here. Go there for some actual thoughts on the book.

I honestly wouldn't have done even this utter placeholder of a mini-review normally. However, this (sad excuse for a) review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+.

3 stars.

Tags for this one: 3-star, classics, junior fiction, magical realism, rated E10+

Quaint Creatures by Andrew D. Meredith

This is a book about a veterinarian in what's basically a D&D world. It's quite fun and I wish it were a series so I could read more of it.

I think it balances the slice-of-life aspect with the plot quite well. That, however, is my personal opinion; other people might think it needs more plot or more slice-of-life.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence. It could be a reasonably good videogame; I'd play it.

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, fantasy, rated E10+, slice-of-life

The Strange and Deadly Portraits of Bryony Gray by E. Latimer

This book involves (posthumously) Dorian Gray, of The Picture of Dorian Gray fame. That would be a spoiler, but come on, the book's about spooky magic paintings and the protagonist's last name is Gray.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for scary scenes and {T15+ implied past homosexuality, thanks to the subject matter involving Oscar Wilde. It's pretty veiled, and if you didn't know about Wilde you probably wouldn't notice it, but it's there and it bugged me. It was also kind of sprung on you near the end, so I'd already read most of the book before I noticed.}

1 star. Honestly I probably should have quit reading it, but I wanted to know how it ended. It's rather a shame about the above-mentioned redactedness, because Bryony herself could have been quite a compelling protagonist.

Tags for this one: 1-star, magical realism, rated T15+

(Endnote: Zac Efron is in none of these books.)

"The Golden Compass" by Philip Pullman

If you're going to get theology in your fantasy, be like C. S. Lewis and do it respectfully. Don't be like Philip Pullman and do... whatever this was.

Basically, an orphan girl named Lyra growing up in alternate-universe Oxford University is given the titular Golden Compass (actually a sort-of-prophetic clockwork measuring device called an alethiometer) and tasked, sort of, to bring it to her estranged uncle who's been imprisoned in Norway by the bears. Along the way she |gets tangled up in this whole plot with some evil child-stealing people|.

It's rather hard to pin down when this is set. From dates of lore events in the past I'd put it at some time after the 19th century (1800s), but the technology is kind of all over the place. It kind of vibes like 1800s-era scientific methods, there are firearms but also catapult things, the air travel is achieved by zeppelins (making me want a crossover between this and Leviathan), the fantasy!Romani have motorboats (or possibly steamboats) but also |charter a sailing ship| when they're |setting out to find the missing kids|, and there are occasional mentions of something called "atomcraft" which may or may not run on uranium.

(This is quite obviously an alternate history, but Lyra doesn't know a lot of history, so we don't get a lot of details. Except that apparently the Protestant Reformation may not have happened, and the Roman Catholic Church has taken over everything. Note to authors: if you want me to like your book unreservedly, you'd do well to maybe not portray the Church as antagonistic; or, if you do, make it clear that actual Christianity itself is not the problem. Like Frederick Douglass did.)

There's a character in this, Lord Asriel, who may have his own set of merits but who shares his name with Asriel |Dreemurr, a posthumous character who's mentioned in some exposition in Undertale (Toby Fox, 2015)|. The fact that to the best of my knowledge |we never see Asriel Dreemurr in-game| prevented me from imagining Lord Asriel as him, but I did have twinges of "wait, |that guy's in Undertale|" whenever Lord Asriel showed up in the book.

Oh, and giving everyone a magical animal companion? That's fine. Darkbeast did that, and the book was kinda lame, but it the animals were fine. Calling them "daemons," however, is not fine.

If you're going to namedrop original sin, you might at least get what it is right. The doctrine of original sin is the doctrine that all humans are inherently sinful thanks to the Fall, not the doctrine that the Fall actually happened. I know that, and you now know that, but Philip Pullman apparently didn't. Or he did, and he just didn't care.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for violence against children and brief suggestive content (two adults making out). That said, I don't recommend it to anyone who cares at all about Christianity.

2 stars. It's extremely well-written, I'll give it that, but it also flirts with blasphemy as much as it can get away with.

(Endnote: One of my friends recommended this book to me. He likes it. I would have liked it if it were by C. S. Lewis, or at least in the style of C. S. Lewis -- i.e. respectful of the religion it revolves around.)

"The Last Battle" by C. S. Lewis

Sing it with me now: "🎵It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine...🎵"

Well, it's the end of Narnia as we know it, and I only feel fine because I'm not actually in Narnia. For the people in Narnia, it's pretty bad.

If The Magician's Nephew is the Book of Genesis, then The Last Battle is the Book of Revalation. It has all the crazy eschatology and giant monsters and things. Also there's a pretty cool description of the Narnian version of Judgment Day nearish the end.

Eustace, Jill, and the last king of Narnia are the main characters of this, though |pretty much every POV character except Susan shows up near the end|.

I don't have much to say about this; end-of-the-world fiction isn't generally my thing. If you're going to do it, it should be grand and cataclysmic and tragic, and this hits all of those beats very well. It's a fitting conclusion to the Narnia series.

I find it darkly funny whenever the bad guys declare that they serve an even bigger bad guy, but don't actually believe in it, only to discover that the even bigger bad guy actually is real.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A soft T for scenes of violence.

4 stars.

(Endnote: This is some of the least final end-of-the-world fiction I've ever read, because it's a Judgment Day allegory, which means it ends with |everybody going to the Narnian equivalent of Heaven|. Well, not everybody everybody, but you know what I mean.)

"Five Kingdoms" series by Brandon Mull

Five Kingdoms is a portal fantasy series centering around a boy named Cole and his adventures, some more harrowing than others, in the alternate world of the Outskirts.

 

My apologies for any defects in the above image. The Windows 11 version of MS Paint is vastly inferior to the Windows 10 version, and I haven't gotten used to it yet. 

Book 1: Sky Raiders

We don't actually spend much time with the titular Sky Raiders.

This book seemed like it was going to be serious and traumatic-for-characters and somewhat depressing, and then it... kinda wasn't. I'm not sure whether to be relieved that it's less bad for the characters, or annoyed that it set itself up to be that bad and wasn't.

There's a character in this, Mira, who the main character (named Cole) has a crush on. This is somewhat of a problem, as any actual romance between them is made really weird by the fact that Cole is thirteenish and Mira, while biologically also thirteenish, |has actually been around for like 60 years and is just magically thirteenish forever as a disguise|.

Book 2: Rogue Knight

This book starts in Kingdom 2 of 5 (Book 1 was Sambria the straightforward magic kingdom, book 2 is Elloweer the illusions and shapeshifting kingdom).

Our protagonists are starting to collect a lot of people into their entourage, and I begin to have trouble keeping them all straight. Maybe I should make myself a cheat sheet.

There's a character in this, Trillian the torivor, who is too out-of-nowhere cool not to be important later. He's a sort of ageless extradimensional being who's ridiculously magical but currently stuck in a castle after some normal (well, "normal," they were overpowered wizards fighting a gratuitously overpowered magic being) people sealed him into it. He also may be from one of Brandon Mull's other series, Beyonders, but I'm not entirely clear on that.

 

(You may, but probably won't, notice that the post image actually says The Rogue Knight on the cover of this one. I didn't notice that until I'd already pasted them all into the single image.) 

Book 3: Crystal Keepers

Welcome to Kingdom 3 of 5: Zeropolis, which has decided it's done with high fantasy and wants to be cyberpunk instead. They have Internet.

This is the first book I've ever seen where the climax involves |defeating magic Skynet by siccing a different magic Skynet on her, then blowing them both up with the fantasy equivalent of an atom bomb while they're distracted fighting each other|. Brandon Mull is highly imaginative.

I really liked the twist in this with the Hunter, a character who's been chasing the protagonists in the background since like the first book. I'm not going to describe it here, since it would require explaining like half the lore; also it's a pretty major twist that I think is going to have repercussions down the line. (I'm writing each book's individual review as I read them, so I don't actually know there'll be repercussions until I've read books 4 and 5.)

Book 4: Death Weavers

And here we are in Kingdom 4 of 5, Necronum the kingdom full of ghosts and Beyonders references.

|Cole's superpowers have now been turned back on. (He sort of got them during Rogue Knight, only for that book's big bad to promptly turn them off again.)|

Y'know how I mentioned Trillian? He hasn't been really important yet, but |there's another torivor who is. He's the bad guy of this book, mostly. His name is Nazeem, but I kept forgetting that, so I just called him Craig for most of the book|.

 

Some characters from Beyonders, one of Brandon Mull's other series, show up in this as ghosts. I suspect their inclusion would be a lot cooler to people who've actually read the series they're from.

 

I think this is the first book where Cole spends a significant portion of the story separated from his giant ever-growing friend group. It was nice to see how he fares on his own for a bit when all his random friends aren't there.

Book 5: Time Jumpers

Kingdom 5 of 5 is Creon, where they screw around with spacetime. They also use a lot of crayons.

A time jumper is not an article of clothing. It's someone who does the "time" part of the screwing around with spacetime.

We have the final bossfight in this one, |against Craig Nazeem|, and |Trillian gets to finally be relevant|. I do have a bit of a quibble, in that their original plan for defeating the final boss was hyped up to be the only way they could think of to defeat it... |and then the final boss catches on to it, so they just randomly improvise another one? One that the final boss's supposed overpowered-magic-ness should have let him escape almost instantly? I'm not entirely sure what Brandon Mull was thinking when he wrote this|.

Overall Notes

I think the series sort of lost its direction toward the end. It's like Brandon Mull realized that |he'd set up the High King in such a way that he'd be an absolute pushover as a final boss|, so he decided to just |sidestep that whole plot and [ENDING SPOILERS] start a new one based around the High King's evil grand vizier, the grand vizier's torivor master Nazeem/Ramarro/Craig, and their whole evil metamagician cult|. So it went from |"let's stop the king and his minions from recapturing his coughMacGuffincough daughters, who we're already invested in because they're characters we know, and save the world from tyranny"| to |"let's stop the grand vizier and the torivor and both their minions from releasing the torivor, who just recently became relavant midway through book 4, and save the world from destruction"|. And the second one would have been a perfectly serviceable plot, if it had been there from the beginning.

I do like the inclusion of the |"shapecrafters" in this universe; basically, the normal magic (or "shaping," which does somewhat trigger the Renamed Concept Rule) changes the real world, and shapecraft is a sort of meta-magic that changes the normal magic|. That's not something I've seen a lot of things do. (In the first few books, it was still somewhat of a mystery. So I theorized the existence of what I called |"shapecraftcraft", or meta-meta-magic, which was magic that changed the magic that changed the magic|. This was mostly a joke.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for fantasy violence and some scary scenes. It could actually be a reasonably good action-adventure videogame; the quests are questy enough, and it has things that could be bosses.

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    "I'm not running because I'm guilty. I'm running because you're chasing me."

    Page 46, Rogue Knight

    Ingredients: Camels, microscopes, yams, hydrogen, coral reefs, mannequins, poems, comets, mousetraps, sarcasm, cacti, labyrinths; contains less than 2% uranium, cyanide, cobwebs, magma, polio

    Page 111, Crystal Keepers. It's the ingredients list for a candy bar. 

(Endnote: I shall now assemble the Kingdoms, the Worlds, the Nights at Freddy's, and the Guys to create the ultimate crossover series. Stay tuned.)

"The Magician's Nephew" by C. S. Lewis

Behold, it's the Creation story of the world of Narnia.

I was always oddly fascinated by Charn and the Deplorable Word. Jadis herself is just okay as a character (I'm kind of used to her existence thanks to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe), but I always get the sense that there's so much more going on with Charn that we just don't see.

The big bad of The Silver Chair is described by some owls as being "some of the same crew" as the White Witch. It's never really elaborated as to what that means, but with the reveal of the White Witch as former Deplorable-Word-using empress of Charn with no living relatives, that doesn't make much sense; the Deplorable Word killed everyone except Jadis in her entire universe, so how could the Lady of the Green Kirtle be the same kind of thing?

One theory is that she's just Jadis reincarnated, but I don't hold to that theory, because I don't think Lewis would trivialize the White Witch's defeat in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by bringing her back, only for her to be defeated again without Aslan's direct help. My theory is that she's either A) a former apprentice of the White Witch, explaining the "crew" remark because they would have worked together for a time, or B) the same sort of thing as Jadis (i.e. a powerful evil sorceress from another dimension), just not from Charn.

This book is the best argument against reading Narnia in the chronological order, because it's not a very start-of-series kind of book. Honestly, until you've read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe through at least The Horse and His Boy, it doesn't make much sense. I didn't, and it actually put me off the rest of Narnia for a while when I first tried the series years ago.

[EDIT: I forgot to mention that I really liked how this explains why there's a random lamppost in the middle of a forest in Narnia for Lucy to encounter in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.]

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence. It would be pretty hard to make this into a videogame that holds onto your attention for any length of time; the main characters are there as observers for much of the story.

4 stars.

(Endnote: I missed another day in my posting schedule. Oh, the horror.)

"The Silver Chair" by C. S. Lewis

If you assemble the Silver Chair, the Bronze Bow, and the Golden Compass, the ultimate power will be yours: Platinum, Alaska.

(I'm joking. Platinum, Alaska is actually a real town, though; as of 2020, it was inhabited by a whopping 55 people.)

For being the book's namesake, the Silver Chair is actually not in very much of the book. It appears in like one scene.

This book introduces Jill Pole, who's also in The Last Battle. I think she's the first female character to have POV for a majority of a book; there were bits from Susan's, Lucy's, and Aravis's POVs in the others, but it was mostly the guys.

Does anybody know if C. S. Lewis ever said what happens if you dig to the bottom of Narnia? We know from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader that it's flat, but to the best of my knowledge nothing ever says how far down it goes. There's the Land of Bism mentioned here, which is supposedly the underground of the underground, but what if they went down further? Would they find even more underground kingdoms--is it underground kingdoms all the way down? Does it eventually just start being infinite solid rock? Do you fall out the bottom if you go too far? Does Aslan show up and tell you to knock it off?

I don't know, and I don't know if anybody else does, either.

This was one of my least favorite Narnia books when I was younger. I think that's partially because it's relatively unlike the others in both plot and tone, partially because it's harder than the others to take as a single narrative, and partially my own fault.

Basically, a short way into the book, I decided I wanted to know how it was going to end, so I flipped to the last page and read that. Except if you don't have the context from the rest of the book, the last page will make approximately zero sense, and I got very confused. That sense of confusion then lasted for pretty much my entire initial readthrough.

(The moral of the story: don't read the last page first, it won't make any sense.)

I think this is one of the most mature of the Narnia books. There's not any inappropriate content or anything, but it just has older vibes. I don't know if anyone else gets that out of it, but I do.

Oh, and I should mention Puddleglum! He's extremely dour, but also hilarious, and he's one of my favorite characters.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence and some child abuse. It could be a reasonably good videogame in sort of the style of the newer Zelda releases.

4 stars.

(Endnote: This has a lot of allegorical-ish elements, but I can't for the life of me figure out whether it is one, and if so, what for.)

"The Horse and His Boy" by C. S. Lewis

This review is part of my first completed quest, although I'm not entirely sure why.

Basically, the puzzle that started it all has two of the Narnia books on it: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Horse and His Boy. Why whoever assembled it picked those two out of the list, I don't know. (Although, if I were assembling that puzzle and had to pick two Narnia books, I'd probably pick either this or Prince Caspian for the second one.)

This is the one set in Calormen. Now I can stop mentioning it every review.

Basically, a Calormene slave boy (named Shasta, who's actually from some nebulous somewhere else; he's not Calormene by birth) meets a talking horse from Narnia and decides to run away to Narnia rather than get sold to a jerkface. Along the way, he meets a Calormene noble girl (named Aravis) and her talking horse from Narnia, who's also currently running away to Narnia. So they run away to Narnia.

Along the way, Shasta runs into some of the Pevensies, and Aravis runs into the absolute ditziest character I think I've ever seen in fiction: Lasaraleen Tarkheena, who's somewhat irritating but also hilarious. Then they find out that |the Calormene prince Radabash is going to sneak attack Narnia and Archenland because he has a crush on Susan who doesn't like him back (because he's a total jerk), and they rush to get there before the invading army so they can warn everyone about it|.

Oh, and |Shasta is actually a long-lost prince of Archenland|.

I'm not entirely sure how old anyone is in this, but I don't think they're twelve.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence. I think it could be quite a good videogame, actually; it has a mostly linear plot and a clear sense of direction, which lends itself to a linear videogame (thus removing the problem I've seen with making less linear books into imaginary videogames: the dilemma of either "railroad the player into retracing the steps the original protagonist took through the story" or "make it truly open-world, necessitating making up a bunch of stuff that wasn't in the book to fill out the game.") Honestly, this book would probably make a better videogame than most of the ones I've reviewed recently.

5 stars. This is probably the Narnia book I've read the most often, and I really do like it.

Favorite lines:

    People who know a lot of the same things can hardly help talking about them.

    Page 44.

    "I say, is there anything to drink?"

    "No, I drank it," said Shasta.

    Page 80. This is Prince Cor of Archenland returning to the apartments housing the Narnians, after a long day of getting into fights and having Shasta mistaken for him. (Hence why Shasta is also there; the Pevensies picked him up thinking he was Cor.)

    "And anyone I catch talking about this young lady will be first beaten to death and then burned alive and after that be kept on bread and water for six weeks. There."

    Page 99. This is Lasaraleen, the total ditz character I mentioned earlier, threatening her servants into not revealing Aravis's escape.

    "Beware! Beware! Beware! The bolt of Tash falls from above!"

    "Does it ever get caught on a hook halfway?" asked Corin.

    Pages 215-216. (For context, Rabadash, who's saying this, is threatening everyone with the bolt of Tash. Which falls from above. He also, in the preceding battle, tried to jump down on someone and ended up getting his chainmail shirt stuck on a hook, leaving him hanging there looking silly and yelling at everyone.)

    Aravis and Cor prepared themselves to be bored.

    Page 221. I laughed so hard over that phrasing.

(Endnote: I have taken a few artistic liberties with the punctuation of the favorite lines. This is for readability and so I can truncate the line into the actual favorite part, rather than having the favorite bit and then everything around it.)

"Prince Caspian" by C. S. Lewis

Behold, book 2 of the Chronicles of Narnia, no matter what number it says on the cover.

Now that I'm doing the whole series, I should probably explain the thing about the reading order. Basically, there are two different schools of thought regarding the proper order to read the Narnia books in, and they are a matter of some debate.

The one most collections use is the internal chronological order, namely "The Magician's Nephew / The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe / The Horse and His Boy / Prince Caspian / The Voyage of the Dawn Treader / The Silver Chair / The Last Battle." There are several problems with that one, most notably that if you haven't read any of the other books, The Magician's Nephew is hard to understand and kind of boring.

The other one is the publication order, which goes in "2 4 5 3 6 1 7" or "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe / Prince Caspian / The Voyage of the Dawn Treader / The Horse and His Boy / The Silver Chair / The Magician's Nephew / The Last Battle." That's the order people following the books for the first time would have read them in, it's the order in which Lewis wrote them, and while it doesn't get rid of the continuity errors it makes them less jarring. This one is the order I personally prefer, and the one I'll be doing this review series in.

(Wait, I just ended a sentence with a preposition! *cue screams of horror*)

Anyway, enough minutae. Time to talk about the actual book.

I'm not sure it's actually an allegory, unlike the first one. If you have any idea what (if anything) it's supposed to be allegorizing, please let me know, because I don't.

Here we are introduced to the Telmarines, who weren't originally in Narnia. They're actually pirates who came through a portal to Narnia "a long time ago", and yet somehow arrived in the 1300ish years between the first book and this one... time in Narnia is weird, man. We also have our first mention of the country of Calormen, which won't properly show up until The Horse and His Boy.

There's a bit in this where some side characters show up and attempt to summon the White Witch to get rid of the evil king. The character who introduces them uses the logic of "any port in a storm and we're losing pretty bad right now, plus she might not have been as bad as the legends make her out to be, right?", while the characters doing the summoning use the logic of "haha we're evil." They get smacked down pretty much instantly in the book, but in the movie version they partially succeed; I mostly mentioned this so I could point out how good a job the special effects people did at making that scene look intrinsically wrong.

You can see Lewis fleshing out the lore as you get farther along in the series.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence. There actually was a videogame of the movie of the book; it was rated T and apparently wasn't very good. I think it could be possible to make a good videogame of this, though I'm not sure who you'd play as (maybe a Lego The Hobbit-like system of swapping between characters?) and a fairly significant chunk of the book would probably have to be reduced to cutscenes.

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    "Certainly, Lu. Whatever you like," said Peter unexpectedly. This was encouraging, but as Peter instantly rolled round and went to sleep again it wasn't much use.

    Page 144.

(Endnote: I can neither confirm nor deny that the title character is named after the Caspian Sea. Nothing I can find has a definitive answer.)