Category: Fiction
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CSFF Tour: The Ale Boy’s Feast (Day 1)
In this, my first CSFF tour in quite some time, I am proud to feature Jeffrey Overstreet’s The Ale Boy’s Feast, easily my favourite novel of the year. In the next two days I’ll be posting my review, and interview with the author, a book giveaway, and quotes from The Auralia Thread itself. Today, the…
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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…
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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.…
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Depicting Christ in Fiction (Wolf of Tebron, Day 3)
Recently, Stephen Burnett wrote a post on SpecFaith about how we depict God in our fantasy. Entitled “Fighting man-centered monsters in fiction,” it used the recent Voyage of the Dawn Treader film as a jumping-off point to address man-centeredness in our fiction: I won’t say names here — partly because, sorry to say, the titles…
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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…
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The Wolf of Tebron: CSFF Tour, Day 1
After taking December off, I am back in the blog tour! This month, we’re touring C.S. Lakin’s The Wolf of Tebron, Book 1 in The Gates of Heaven series. (that link is my Amazon affiliate link, so thanks for clicking!). I reviewed the book several months back when I first got a chance to read it,…
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When Expectations and Reality Collide (CSFF, Day 3)
In an early scene of The Skin Map, Kit’s expectation of how ley travel should work results in disaster and lands him and several other people in a great deal of trouble. Expectations are funny things, capable of depressing or enhancing a reader’s experience — and sometimes of doing both. My review of The Skin…
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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…
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“The Skin Map” by Stephen Lawhead: CSFF Tour Day 1
It’s time once again for the Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog Tour! This month’s featured book (featured late, as the astute among you may be aware, because of a delay in books reaching reviewers) is by one of the Grand Masters of Christian speculative fiction, Stephen R. Lawhead. Stephen Lawhead has been writing books…
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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…