This week I brave the mind twisting horrors of Xoriat, the evil machinations of the Space Witch, the boring schemes of demons, and the sinister plans of an evil book club.
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The Orb of Xoriat by Edward Bolme
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was a fantastic book! It fast paced without feeling rushed and the author did a great job with the fight scenes, vivid descriptions without being unnecessarily gory. I liked the main character, he was a little flat at first but the author developed him well. The book does a good job of explaining only as much as the reader would need without getting bogged down in setting details, but there is alot here for an Eberron fan to make this feel like it couldn’t have taken place in another setting. It was a fun action/adventure and I would gladly recommend it.
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This was the second of the Eberron novels that I read, and it follows up on a short story from Tales of the Last War (The first Eberron novel I read.) It follows Teron, a monk trained for war and little else, trying to prevent the disaster to come if the title relic were to fall into wrong hands while also trying to find his place in a post Last War world. I think it was one of the better book I’ve read this year and I recommend picking it up if you get the chance.
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Hunt the Space-Witch!: Seven Adventures in Time and Space by Robert Silverberg
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
It was a little different from what I usually read. I’m not used to the magazine pulp style of Sci-fi stories in the book (as a child of the nineties I’m used to a full length novel). They were interesting tales of adventure and I’d definitively read more from the author if I could find a collection of his stories that were a little more interlinked than the seven in the book.
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It was interesting. I liked the stories that were a little more developed (such as the story that gives this collection it’s name) over the stories that didn’t get a lot of development (like the very first one in the book). I gave it 2 stars because I didn’t hate it, but I also didn’t really like large parts of it.
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Here Be Demons by Esther M. Friesner
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I may be being more harsh on this book than I should be, but I didn’t like this one at all. The point of view shifted without warning, the descriptions got really obtuse in places, I wasn’t able to figure out if the plot was trying to be funny or serious or ironically serious or if it just didn’t care. I would not recommend this one.
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This book was slow, none of the characters were likable, and I’m not ashamed to say that I didn’t finish it. I know that it’s sort of a sin to review a book you didn’t complete, but nothing in the first hundred pages led me to believe that the last hundred or so were going to be any better. I’m glad that I only spent $1 on this at half priced books.
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The Library of Shadows by Mikkel Birkegaard
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This book had an interesting premise, and it was executed well enough, but it didn’t really grab me. It’s a decent enough urban fantasy, with secret societies and magic book reading powers and it has an interesting gimmick that I’ll most likely use in a future game, but for some reason I can’t bring myself to say that it was more than just ok. The characters were well written but the pacing felt slow in more than a few places and the book was a touch on the verbose side. I could go into more detail, but I don’t want to spoil it other to say that, due to the premise of the novel, the resolution was sort of corny in my opinion.
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Spoiler alert: The book is about people who read so awesomely they get super powers from it. Not cool super powers, like in Inkheart, but lame super powers, like “really making someone enjoy hearing you read a book” super powers. For what it was (the classic dismissal) it was alright. I didn’t hate it and the characters were written well, but the premise did not light my fire.
