Another Peter Pan spin off that’s rather similar to Lost Boy.
Pan was first published in January 2016 as a short story for Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine whereas Lost Boy was published in July 2017, which is curious: was Pan the catalyst for Lost Boy?
But, whatever, glad to have them both as they’re both definite must reads for all fans of Peter Pan and things Neverland, and Pan definitely deserves a place in the “Peter Pan and Neverland” hall of fame.
A delightful, long poem telling the full story of the Pied Piper. Great for reading out loud to children. And much, much better than the Brothers Grimm version.
Best of all, it’s free. So why not download and give it a read today.
Not so much a fairy tale, more of a historic magazine article.
Worth a read though as it sets the stage for all later Pied Piper stories.
Click on picture for PDF file that’s a good sized font for reading on a Kindle.
This is another one of those books that i judged by its cover and title, and the fact that it was 99p in a Kindle deal certainly didn’t do it any harm in getting me to purchase it. Was it worth it? Oh yeah, very much worth every single one of those 99 pennies — and then some.
Although listed as fantasy, don’t be expecting any wizards, elves or things magical, it isn’t that kind of fantasy. It’s the kind of fantasy of a completely different place with big walled cities that keep those in power nice and secure and those not in power kept well out of it, well away and firmly under the boot heel. Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City is very much the story of the downtrodden of this world, a world ruled by people with dark blue skin, the Robur, where people with lighter skin are oppressed.
Telling this story is the colonel in charge of the Robur army’s engineers, Orhan, who, much to the chagrin of the Robur, just happens to be one of those light skinned “Milkface” types who only got the job through pure luck and because he’s very good at building bridges and fiddling the regimental accounts.
And this is the story of how Orhan suddenly finds himself in charge of defending a walled city against hoards of other pale skinned, Milkface savages on behalf of his Robur rulers.
From the very beginning one can’t help but really like Orhan. He has a very amusing, sarastic world view fuelled by an intelligence fitting with being a military engineer, and is certainly one of the most enjoyable narrators of any story i can think of from recent memory.
As an ex army engineer myself i really got into Orhan’s attitude to it all: shouldn’t the real soldiers be doing all this horrible nasty fighting and killing stuff while we just fix and build things?
This was my first K. J. Parker/Tom Holt book and i’m certainly going to be reading more books from him. Great style, great editing, great characters, great all round writing.
And i just found there’s a follow-up to this wonderful yarn: How To Rule An Empire and Get Away With It
A fun, little re-make of Little Red Riding Hood with all the usual protagonists portrayed as Venusians being banished to Earth.
This is my first story from the anthology, Once Upon A Star, which, apparently, is all fairy tales re-told in sci-fi settings. However, i would put Through Time and Space squarely in the fantasy genre as moving by magic from one planet is fantasy, not sci-fi. One certainly wouldn’t put Raymond E Feist in the sci-fi category and he has plenty of rift gate planet hopping going on in his books.
I read this so i could add it to my Little Red Riding Hood collection, and, genre disputes aside, it’s a nice little addition to my fairy tale collection and worth a read for all fairy tale fans.
All in all i quite enjoyed the first Feyland trilogy and so i’ll definitely give the second trilogy a good read as soon as i collect them all.
This book is utterly intolerable. I managed to get to 41% before i simply couldn’t take it any more.
After Legendary lead me to believe that there was hope for these two sisters, that they have grown up a bit and learned something from their previous experiences, in Finale it’s like we’ve gone back to the childish romantic stupidity of the first book, but this time it’s both sisters who are just being utterly ridiculous.
While i can accept that there are plenty of people in the world who act like these two sisters do, continuously allowing their immature, undeveloped emotions to get the better of them, they wouldn’t be able to survive in an environment like the one in these books. No one who makes such ridiculous, pathetic, nonsensical decisions in such an environment would survive for more than 10 minutes. So the idea that the immortal greats of the universe would fall in love with such pathetic creatures is as utterly ridiculous as these sisters are, as utterly ridiculous as Stephanie’s writing has become.
I’m not sure what audience this trilogy is aimed at, certainly not anyone who has had any life experience, certainly not anyone who enjoys good fantasy and certainly not anyone who thinks Night Circus is good. If you enjoyed Night Circus, if you like good fantasy, or if you’ve had any life experience at all, stay away from the Caraval trilogy, it’s woeful.
I’m certainly glad i only paid 99p for each book in Kindle deals: i’d be rather grumpy if i’d paid the full asking price for these.
It’s so bad i simply don’t care how this all ends as i simply can’t read any more of this rubbish. I’ll be deleting all three books from my Kindle and my Amazon account as i certainly won’t be finishing this one or reading the other two ever again.
Ooooh yeah, this sounds like some good hard core fantasy.