Fantasy

Having found the first season of The Witcher forgettable and generic fantasy fare (yes, even with Henry Cavill, I wasn’t planning to read the series. However, Season 2 came around and I was totally drawn into the lives of Geralt, Ciri & Yennefer. I felt invested in the myths, the relationships and this weird, monstrous world and wanted to know more. I started my Witcher journey with The Last Wish, the first novel of this…

This 2008 BBC production gives its own unique twist to the legend of Arthur and Merlin; but the tale of Arthur and his knights has always been mired in myth, and so we really can’t hold it against this show. The Concept of ‘Merlin’ In this interpretation of the story, Arthur’s father, Uther Pendragon(played by the excellent Anthony Head) is alive and kicking, as the King of Camelot. He is a stern and a wise…

The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place series caught my attention by its lovely cover jacket and an intriguing premise — a young governess hired to educate three children who appeared to be raised by wolves. While I rarely wade into children’s books, I have to say this was a joyful discovery. In The Mysterious Howling, the first book in the series, a very young Penelope Lumley of Swanburne Academy finds employment at Ashton Place. She is to…

So this is a bit of rant and I usually stay away from really negative reviews, but I just couldn’t get over how appalling I found these books. And I admit I haven’t read only two-thirds of the Meluha Trilogy, but that’s enough to conclude that these are not for me. Before I make a case for why these were not worth my time, the series has been constantly on the best-seller list and is…

Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London (Midnight Riot in US) suffers a bit from an identity crisis. It tries to be a fantasy-fiction novel, a police procedural, a London guide, a commentary on race all at the same time, but never quite succeeding. There is so much going on in every single page, that it was often hard to remember how I arrived at a particular point in the story and whether it was significant. The…

In The Lost Queen, Signe Pike dives deep in Welsh and Scottish myth to bring a fresh look at the legend of Arthur & Merlin.  Pike takes us back to 550 A.D to Goddeu, a small kingdom in Scotland, where  Languoreth, a ten-year-old princess and her twin brother, Lailoken, are mourning the death of their mother. Bereft and grieving, both the young kids are fearful of what the future holds for them. Plot Summary In…

After having read the entire series of LOTR and Harry Potter, and never taking a liking to Terry Pratchett, I naively believed that I had read all there was to be read in fantasy fiction. In the end, there are only so many underdog heroes, dark lords, and imaginary worlds that you can take. But the beauty of fantasy fiction has always been in the power of magic and the belief that such a world…

Assorted tales of comic fiction – edited by Peter Haining I always appreciate an entertaining or thought-provoking story-line and I got plenty of those as I read the ‘The Flying Sorcerers’. A motley collection of humorous fantasy fiction tales with a mix of both science fiction and the supernatural. What makes the book really special is: A) It has the earlier works of some of the best names in the business – Terry Pratchett, Arthur…