Category: Book Reviews

  • The Wingfeather Saga: A Briefish Overview (Day 2)

    A boy who longs for freedom and adventure, who lives under an oppressive regime, who does not truly know who he is. A journey to strange lands full of strange creatures, one that is simultaneously a journey to discover the past and to shape the future. Beauty, tragedy, and wonder. Coming of age. Dragons, mysterious…

  • Review: Did Adam and Eve Really Exist?

    Origins matter. Few answers are more enlightening that those that tell us where something—or someone—came from. Origins give us insight into the shape of reality, answering not only the what but the why. Even if you are a literalist* Bible reader (which I assume most of my readers are), you’ve no doubt heard people—maybe even…

  • Review: Konig’s Fire

    Sascha Konig is a brilliant chemist, a Nazi, and a good man. That, at least, is what he tells himself. He is, after all, an educated, literate man, an artist, a man of faith. That he must sometimes obey unspeakable orders does not change that. Ah, but, It is times such as these that we…

  • Review: The Resurrection

    The Reverend Ian Clark, pastor of a small church in Stonetree, California, has been hiding his resignation letter in his desk drawer for days, working up the nerve to call it quits on his position, his faith, and his dreams. For good. Haunted by past tragedy and his own personal failures, Ian lives up to…

  • The Ale Boy’s Feast: My Review (CSFF Tour Day 2)

    He tightened his picker-staff grip, desire rotting into resentment. Most creatures of the ground had vanished from the Expanse, caught by the underground menace or fleeing its clutches. Krawg had pursued that rusty-hinge chirp, compelled by hunger and, even more, by a longing to see feathers lift a mystery into the air, to hear a…

  • Review: Wake Up, O Sleeper!

    Jack Wilson’s life is marked by disappearances. First, his entire world disappeared in a moment when the bombs fell and Americans were taken to plastic-wrapped, regulated cities where they’ll be safe from radiation, poisonous air, and freedom. Ten years later, just before his nineteenth birthday, his best (and only) friend, Lori, disappeared when she was…

  • Review: The Map Across Time

    This second book in C.S. Lakin’s “The Gates of Heaven” series follows The Wolf of Tebron with an adventure tale that echoes the tone and tropes of many a classic fairy tale—with a lot of ancient Hebrew and a little Dr. Who thrown in for good measure. The kingdom of Sherbourne is under a curse.…

  • Review (Wolf of Tebron, Day 2)

    (This post is reposted from August 12. Before you read it, go back to yesterday’s post and look at that gorgeous cover art again. Just because it’s amazing.) In the village of Tebron, surrounded by forests and peaceful mountains, Joran works as an apprentice blacksmith because his unusually sharp ability to mindspeak with animals has…

  • Review of “The Skin Map” (CSFF, Day 2)

    Kit Livingstone, like so many heroes of so many stories, is living a vaguely dissatisfying life when we first meet him attempting to navigate the London transit system on his way to meet Wilhelmina Klug, described in book blurbs as Kit’s “unpleasant girlfriend.” But it doesn’t take long for the unexpected to charge in, starting…

  • Review: The Word Unleashed

    Steve Rzasa’s The Word Unleashed is the most rip-roaring, heart-pounding space adventure since, well, since The Word Reclaimed. (Read my review here.) That book ended with the treacherous overthrow of the Realm of Five’s monarchy by Kesek, the Realm’s secret police. The Realm’s finest defenders had been lured away to a distant planet to be…