Ninth House, by Leigh Bardugo

One of my favourite things about my wife is her ability to find out about stories that are exactly my thing and send them my way before I've even heard of them. Case in point, Leigh Bardugo's Ninth House, an excellent Horror/Fantasy novel set in the Secret Societies in Yale University.

The novel follows Alex Stern, a university freshman on scholarship, recently moved from California and now working for an organization which monitors the activities of the schools eight secret societies. In Bardugo's world, the societies are each able to perform different styles of magic and Stern has just joined the Lethe, who work to ensure that none of groups step out of line and upset the balance at the New Haven, Connecticut Institution.

I found the book an excellent read and think that those who grew up on Harry Potter and want to find something darker and really engaging may have found a new home in Bardugo's world. I am definitely looking forward to the sequel.

Book Review: Half Lost, by Sally Green

Last week I finished the last of Sally Green's Half Bad trilogy, Half Lost, and I think in many ways it perfectly ended the world she set up and ended up being a deeper mediation on the nature of war and its cost to the combatants than I was expecting out of a Young Adult Dark Fantasy book.

The book continues the story of Nathan Byrn, a young wizard born from mixed parentage, with one parent following Black Magic and the Other White, and his place in a world that despises him for the circumstances of his birth and raised him in an environment where he grew up knowing just how despised he was.

This series was a really great find for me (my youngest daughter actually found it first, I just followed her suggestion to check it out), and left me feeling that the series had managed to find a pretty great ending, and one didn't have me wishing for more, but simply wishing to share the series with others.

A really great read.

Book Review: Half Wild by Sally Green

A little less than a year ago I read the first of Sally Green's Half Blood series and really liked it.  The story, a dark fantasy following a boy named Nathan Byrn in a world of Black and White witches, moved with a breakneck pace and asked a lot of nature vs. nurture questions.  Nathan has mixed heritage, his father is a notorious black witch and his mother was a well loved white witch.  Raised in White witch society, Nathan is distrusted by all around him, as they feel he is destined to become as dark as his father.

Half Wild picks up almost immediate where Half Blood finished and is begins the build to the war between the Black and White witches that the series is clearly leading up to, with Nathan working for a loose alliance of Black and White witches against a draconian White rule.

The book was a lot of fun, but the immense cast of characters leads me to feel you should read the books back to back and the violence level should put the book at the upper end of Young Adult fiction.

Although it didn't wow me quite as much as Abercrombie's Half a King, it was a fun read and I'm looking forward to the next in the series when it comes out next year (hopefully).

Genre Character of the Week: Margaret Leigh

As a soon-to-be librarian myself, I’ve always been a sucker for librarians in fiction.  Whether the love interested of a time traveler on a mission in Stephen King’s 11/22/63 or the supportive mentor for a young girl in trouble in Jo Walton’s Among Others, I simply start to smile when any book I’m reading introduces a librarian as a character, rather than simply a stereotype.

In Joe Hill’s NOS4A2, that librarian is Margaret Leigh, and unlike a lot of fictional librarians I can think of, she has a pretty unique ability.

The problem is, I really don’t want to spoil any of the story of NOS4A2 – which went on sale yesterday, as the book is just so darn good. In simplest terms, I like Margaret because she comes across as a three-dimensional character, and even though there are shades of the mythical Cassandra in her, she seems very much a person with her own identity.

The novel follows a young woman, Victoria McQueen, through an incredibly dark experience in her childhood and then races forward to her own parenting years and puts her in an even darker spot, as this time her child is at risk.

The novel is definitely Dark Fantasy, is clearly influenced by the works of Stephen King (in a great way), and had me putting an immediate hold on the only Joe Hill book I haven’t read so far, his 2010 Novel, Horns.