My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I don’t think there are enough words to describe the genius that Mervyn Peake put into creating the world within a world that is Gormenghast. Living in a dimension all of its own between the historical, the fantastical and the grotesque there is a land and a castle whose inhabitants’ lives are punctuated by century-old rituals. Every one in Gormenghast is peculiar – the Countess, surrounded by white cats; … (Read more)
Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A quick and easy read in the style of Jane Austen, set in a world where magic exists in the shape of glamour, complicated sensory illusions, and is considered one of the arts a proper girl must know in order to fetch a good marriage. The story follows Jane Ellsworth, a gifted glamourist but unlucky in love, as she accidentally stumbles into a series of … (Read more)
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’ve just finished re-reading this story (this time in book format) and it’s once again as wonderful as the first time. Born as a book within a book, Fairyland grew into the story of September, a young girl who is whisked into Fairyland and ends up having Adventures, meeting a Wiverary (part wyvern, part library) and several other … (Read more)
The Folded World by Catherynne M. Valente
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Wow. I am slain.
I didn’t start the second part of this tale with the best of auspices. I admit that, while I loved The Habitation of the Blessed, I found it often hard to move through, as if I too were John struggling with a new world.
But this book. I don’t know what his book is.
The second part of a trilogy is usually … (Read more)
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
First and foremost, this is a story of the circus.
I discovered The Night Circus through its advertising minigame by the same name, and that probably painted my relationship with the book in a peculiar way. The game follows one’s view of the circus as a reveur, a recurrent visitor, visiting the various tents and shows, glimpsing several mysteries that are left unexplained – until you … (Read more)
The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A little more disjointed and less intimate than the second book, but it is to be expected, as the cast and scope of this story is far wider, going from bildungsroman to political intrigue, diplomacy, travel and adventure… and applied theology, of course, this being the book of the Daughter.
If there is a fault I can find is that, with so many things happening in … (Read more)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
While it might be an interesting window in the world of the rich and careless of the Jazz age, The Great Gatsby suffers from not having a single sympathetic character. The whole cast is made of wimps, frauds, cheaters, liars and mostly people who don’t know how to fill an afternoon, and yet not a single one of them has a motivation for anything they do in … (Read more)
Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Astounding! I did not read the first book in the series as I was told this one would stand on its own, and so it was. A powerful story about an unlikely heroine: a once-crazy, middle-aged dowager queen that only wants to have a little room for herself and be treated like a human being from her peers. Of course things go downhill and Ista finds herself … (Read more)
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A delightful satire on gothic romance, full of of wit and love for the genre – for only a connoisseur would know its tropes, merits and flaws so well as to construct such a tale. I know some will not agree, but I would venture to say that Northanger Abbey did for gothic what The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy did for sci-fi, or Young Frankenstein for the horror/Hammer … (Read more)
Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’m afraid this book didn’t quite rapture me the way previous stories by the same author did. The premise is wonderful, the historical and cultural setting is spot-on, the elements are all there, but in the end they don’t quite seem to gel the right way and they often leave me wanting. Oddly enough, at times the story seems to run too fast with its gaps of months and … (Read more)
