The beaten and bloodied sole survivor traversing a field of dust is replaced by a smiling monk riding down a forested path. This calmer scene is the vision of the future that Becky Chambers presents in her novella A Psalm for the Wild Built and its sequel A Prayer for the Crown Shy which follow […]
With fashion resurgences and a 2012 movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby captures not just a period of time, the 1920s in America, but a lifestyle that seems to be perennially fascinating to a wide audience. However, it is very much a product of its time and lacks representations of […]
In one of my photography courses this past semester we talked about the idea of ‘darkest Africa’ and how images of the continent intentionally excluded the evidence of the cultures that already existed in order to present a view of Africa as an empty place for Europeans to come in and illuminate through industrial development. […]
For most readers David Robertson’s The Barren Grounds will be in many ways a familiar stroll through something similar to C.S. Lewis’s Narnia. But despite all the ways in which this new Candian book for young readers parallels the classic story, The Barren Grounds is a powerful challenge to European ways of knowing that challenges […]
There is nothing particularly wrong with young adult fiction, it makes readers out of people who might not otherwise pick up a book, but it does rely on a different set of tropes. The ‘magic pixie dream girl’ trope is one of many to becoming a mainstay in teen books and is also the subject of mocking from the wider literary world. Some of that mocking is well deserved as it speaks to the continuing unrealistic representations of young women in media, but other aspects are just traits that make characters interesting to read about – especially in the kind of light fantasy that dominates YA books.
Lord of the Rings is not known for its subtle layers of moral complexity. There is no flicker of doubt regarding Sauron’s evil plans or the innate goodness of hobbits. JRR Tolkien was consistent in his use of clear moral coding both with characters and with world building which is particularly clear in the contrasting […]
Note: I have not read the rest of the books in the Darker Shade of Magic series, this is an opinion formed purely on the way the first book was written and my predictions about how the rest of the series panned out could easily be wrong. It’s a fine line between subtly and cheesiness […]
The notion of alternate universes lives in a strange place in popular imagination. It is used by popular movie franchises, debated by science and the topic of the occasional joke. The multiple universes of C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia predate most of these interpretations and their presence is often forgotten within the wider image of […]
Children in most fantasy fiction decidedly do not act their age but instead behave like adults whose appearance has just been adjusted for emotional impact. Most often this is in pursuit of giving the book a gritty or disturbing feel rather than an actual need for child characters. Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks is […]
Whether drawn from faiths in the real world or completely constructed by an author, divinities of all sorts are a useful way to explain the source of a character’s power. The ways in which these characters are positioned in relation to their presiding deity allows for different kinds of conflicts. In novels like R.F. Kuang’s […]
Res Gestae 