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We are an opinionated group of friends reviewing all sorts of fantasy and science fiction media. Don’t forget to get to know the curators and visit our curated Collection, where we discuss the stories that never cease to transport us to another world.
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- Novel written by Heather Fawcett
- Published in January 16, 2024
- Part two of the Emily Wilde series
As you can probably tell from my 4,5 star review of Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries, I really enjoyed the first book in this series. It’s just the right amount of cosy with some stakes to keep it interesting. I actually rushed out to buy the sequel once I finished it because I didn’t want to leave the world of Emily Wilde quite yet.
Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands did not disappoint. It has all the same cosy vibes as Encyclopedia of Fairies, though perhaps they don’t charm me as much as they do in the first book. However, the plot is slightly stronger in this one. We also finally get some indication of when the story takes place, something that is left out of Encyclopedia of Faeries. It seems to be set in the 1910’s.
I liked the characters a little less in this book. Everyone seemed a little flatter than they were in the first book, and the side characters of this book weren’t as charming as their predecessors.
Overall, Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands is a worthy successor to Encyclopedia of Faeries. Maybe it’s not quite as good, but if you loved the first book, it’s definitely worth picking up the sequel!
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- Book written by Frank Herbert
- Published April 1976
- Part three in the Dune Chronicles
2.5 stars – I bet you didn’t see that one coming. Neither did I. Or, at least, I wasn’t expecting a drop that big compared to Dune and Dune Messiah. Let’s examine what happened.
One of the things I noticed is that Herbert’s style is getting boiled down further and further in Dune Messiah and Children of Dune: Dune has palace politics, hard-to-follow conversations on the edge of a knife, and occult tradition – but it also has really interesting worldbuilding and a plot that ultimately fits our traditional understanding of a fantasy plot. Dune is a complex, layered book that offers the reader something on many levels.
Dune Messiah has a lot more of the palace politics and the conversations-as-duels, and less worldbuilding, but the plot and theme connect to Dune very well. It also wrapped up Paul’s storyline nicely. I think Dune Messiah is a lot less layered than Dune, leaning more heavily on Herbert’s signature style. But it leaves enough of a ‘traditional’ novel to make the more surreal elements of Herbert’s writing feel mysterious rather than breaking your suspension of disbelief.
Children of Dune takes another step on the road, with even more of that trademark Herbert and even less traditional novel: sometimes, it felt like it was only palace politics and esoteric conversations that us mortals can only half follow along with. Perhaps the Dune Chronicles finally arrived at the point where it got too smart for me: While reading Children of Dune, I kept trying to distil meaning from long pages of platitudes and to understand why characters were doing certain things.
As a result Children of Dune was a pretty draining read, mostly in the sense that it took a lot of focus and I had to put it away after about half an hour each day. That effect is not helped by the fact that the plot of Children of Dune is really rather limited for how long the book is; I didn’t feel like I was progressing through the narrative much.
The plot is also pretty back-loaded – the most important development happens about 80% into the story, and I can’t help but feel like it wasn’t really foreshadowed. Perhaps I just wasn’t smart enough to notice; perhaps I would have to read the novel again to pick up on clever hints that I now missed.
That begs the question: will I read Children of Dune again? I’m not sure.
This review up until this point reads like I hated it, and I need to clarify that I didn’t. I enjoyed reading more about Arrakis, I enjoyed the mystery injected in the story by the character of the Preacher, I enjoyed the Bene Gesserit scheming, I enjoyed poor old Stilgar trying to make sense of a world that had outgrown him. I like Herbert’s style of prose and I even though it was perhaps a bit much in Children of Dune, I like those 3D-chess conversations and that sense of mystery. And I love that Herbert fully commits to his choices in the previous novel, leaning into the surreality of it all.
But I also need to be honest: I read Children of Dune because it is a Dune-novel and because I love Dune. Had this been a standalone, I might not have made it to the end.
And as a side note, I now understand why Denis Villeneuve wanted his Dune-trilogy to only cover Dune and Dune Messiah rather than having to find a way to commit Children of Dune to film.
I knew that the quality of the Dune Chronicles steadily falls off as it progresses, but to be honest, I was still a bit disappointed by Children of Dune. Knowing what Herbert can do if he is held back just a little from going all-out on his surreal style, one cannot help but wonder what Children of Dune and the rest of the series could have been like if Herbert’s editor would have stood their ground a bit more firmly (though I understand the novel was initially serialised, making that a much harder task).
As a big fan of Dune and the type of sci-fi nerd that even has a review website for a hobby, I am duty-bound to continue the series and to be honest, I am genuinely curious about God-Emperor of Dune. I wonder, what does a novel look like when it is just Frank Herbert’s mysticism? Only one way to find out…
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- Novella written by Nghi Vo
- Published 7 May 2024
- Part 5 in the Singing Hills Cycle
Listened to the audiobook with Cindy Kay – her style really fit The Brides of High Hill well.
Because of the mystery at the core of The Brides of High Hill, I’m going to have to be a bit more cautious in my review.
I’ve said in the past that I like it when a series reinvents itself over time and shifts genre somewhat. The Brides of High Hill does just that. Without going into detail, the novella takes an unexpected dark turn, setting it apart from the rest of the Singing Hills Cycle. And I love it! It helps keep the series fresh and interesting.
After Mammoths at the Gates, which focussed on Chih’s character and background, Vo takes us back on an adventure that is more about atmosphere, though in keeping with the series’ transition away from frame-narrative style stories, Chih is very much the main character of the story.
Vo does a great job with dark atmospheric horror. The Brides of High Hill is dripping with spine-tingling moments and constantly keeps you guessing at the next page. The novella format is very well suited to this kind of story where the writer is constantly wrong-footing the reader. After all, in such a short format, the reader never feels strung along for too long and the tension never snaps.
There is little else I can say about The Brides of High Hill other than that I think that Vo is once again underlining how good she is with novellas.
Unfortunately for me, The Brides of High Hill is the last instalment in the Singing Hills Cycle that has been released at the time of writing… I can only hope Nghi Vo will continue to give us stories about Chih in the near future!
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- Novel written by Peter S. Beagle
- Published in 1968
I love unicorns. I hope I won’t have to defend that position in the year of our lord 2024. It’s an extra sparkly horse with a horn. What’s not to like? It should surprise no one, then, that I expected to really enjoy The Last Unicorn.
I had heard of this book, but I hadn’t really heard anything about it. I just knew that there was a classic novel about a unicorn. In a way it makes sense, because I find this book very hard to describe.
The start of this book was very confusing. It’s very much a fairy tale, and the first couple of chapters feature some very florid language that, for me, was very hard to comprehend. I had to reread sentences a couple of times to even understand what was going on, and even then that didn’t always help. It gets better eventually, but I unfortunately was never truly dazzled in the way Patrick Rothfuss said I would be in the introduction. This book just didn’t feel groundbreaking.
What I do really like is how the unicorn is, essentially, a complicated woman. Like, I’ve read much longer fantasy novels that really want to be feminist, whose women have less depth of character than this one sad unicorn.
I think this definitely a fun book to read to children, and I don’t resent having read it at all. However, I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s one of those children’s books I would recommend to adults.
- Movie directed by Mahalia Belo
- Starring Jodie Comer, Joel Fry, Katherine Waterston and others
- Released 19 January 2024
- Runtime: 101 minutes
I’m struggling a bit to know what to say about this movie, because I thought it was just simply really good. The movie starts off with two kinds of ‘floods’: while London becomes submerged during a climate disaster, our heroin’s water breaks and her baby is born. The internal upheaval and sense of displacement a new parent might feel at finding their lives completely altered by the arrival of their baby, is therefore reflected in the chaos of the wider world as civilization breaks down. At the same time, having a newborn to care for makes the crisis even more acute: throughout the story you can really feel the desperation and terror of having to find shelter and safety for the baby.
The main focus of the story is not the events playing out in the larger world, but the internal struggles, worries and impossible decisions that come with being a new mother. Jodie Comber’s amazing performance manages to convey all of this, often without it even needing to be spoken aloud. Add this to the beautiful cinematography and great supporting performances, and this is definitely a movie to recommend.
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- Novella written by Nghi Vo
- Published 12 September 2023
- Part 4 in the Singing Hills Cycle
Listened to the audiobook with Cindy Kay – good narrator as with the previous instalments.
Finally, Chih returns home!
I’ve been reading the Singing Hills Cycle with a certain level of awe at how Vo is constructing her series of novellas – how she balances the main plot and frame narrative, worldbuilding versus character development and plot.
Mammoths at the Gates is perhaps the best instalment in the Cycle so far. It completes the transition from a series focussed on the stories Chih encounters to a series focussed on Chih’s own story. And of course it does so in a novella focussed on Singing Hills monastery, Chih’s home.
I think this timing is perfect: three novellas into the series, the reader is starting to get really curious about Chih’s background and character. Mammoths at the Gates gives us that exactly that worldbuilding hit that we crave. I especially loved the attention lavished on the until now mysterious neixin, the talking spirit-birds with infallible memory that accompany the clerics of Singing Hills.
What is even better is that Vo uses the opportunity not just to solidify the readers’ understanding of her world, but also of her main character. Chih returning home is the perfect plot device to tell us a little about their upbringing at the monastery. Mammoths at the Gates is also full of little character moments for Chih, like the way they interact with the novices of Singing Hills, that help flesh them out as a character.
The cherry on top is that Vo manages to stick with the formula of the series by perfectly integrating a round of storytelling in the story, even if the emphasis this time around is squarely on Chih’s own tale.
Perhaps Vo’s greatest achievement is how much storytelling she does in so little space. I can’t quite wrap my head around how Vo manages to include so much narrative in a novella format. But Vo is showing us what is possible, and I sure hope this format catches on.
Overall, I think Mammoths at the Gate is both great individually and also does a lot of work for the series as a whole – I am looking forward to the Singing Hills Cycle become a long-running fixture of the speculative genre. If there is any series that should have 15 instalments, it should be this one!
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Review: Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands – Heather Fawcett
After finishing her Encyclopedia of Faeries, Emily Wilde sets out to create a map of the “Otherlands”, the realms of Faerie. She plans to find the nexus, a door to several faerie realms, including the world of her colleague (and exiled faerie king) Wendell Bambleby. When Wendell suddenly finds himself in the crosshairs of his stepmother’s assassins, he and Emily take off to find the nexus, and face Wendell’s aggressors, in the Austrian Alps.
Review: Children of Dune – Frank Herbert
Part three in the Dune Chronicles – the Known Universe is ruled from the temples of Arrakis by Alia, the sister of Paul “Muad’Dib” Atreides, the Fremen messiah who walked off to disappear into the desert. But the the Atreides’ hold on power is not a secure as it seems, and enemies old and new stir. Meanwhile, the pre-born children of Muad’Dib, who combine the knowledge and experience of all their ancestors in the body of a 9-year-old child, are moving to exert their own influence and claim their place at the halls of power in Arrakeen.
Review: The Brides of High Hill – Nghi Vo
Chih is a cleric from the Singing Hills monastery, travelling the world gathering stories. When they arrive at a great lord’s estate to attend a wedding, they are surprised at the little tensions they find. And what to think of the lord’s son being kept away from the guests? When Chih starts exploring, things quickly take a dark and mysterious turn.
Review: The Last Unicorn – Peter S. Beagle
The unicorn has been living undisturbed in her forest for hundreds of years. That is, until she overhears a human saying she may well be the very last of her kind. She decides to leave her peaceful forest and sets out on a dangerous quest, in search of other unicorns.
Review: The End We Start From – Mahalia Belo
When an environmental crisis sees London submerged by flood waters, a young family is torn apart in the chaos. As a woman and her newborn try and find their way home, the profound novelty of motherhood is brought into sharp focus in this intimate and poetic portrayal of family survival. (Rotten Tomatoes movie description)
Review: Mammoths at the Gates – Nghi Vo
Chih is a cleric from the Singing Hills monastery, travelling the world gathering stories. When at long last they return home to Singing Hills to enter their stories into the archives, they find the monastery in a curious crisis: mammoths have come down from the north, the empty halls echo as the divine and most of the clerics are off on a mission, and the neixin aviary is in uproar over the grief of one of their number.
