Smorgasbord Fantasia

A weird western zombie? I was definitely intrigued when I heard about David Towsey 's daring debut, Your Brother's Blood that promised to be a fun mashup but what I wasn't expecting was the emotionally draining narrative and a deftly executed story that never loses its tight personal focus till the surprising climax. Yes - I'm late to this party and I discovered David Towsey's excellent debut pretty late ( this book was released in 2013 by Jo Fletcher Books ) but I'm glad I did and I really am jazzed up now that I've finished the intriguing story. Are there more books set in this universe? ( Edit: The trilogy is now complete - with Your Servants and Your People (2014) and Your Resting Place (2015) ) So at the heart of this story is unflinching faith - gone a bit too extreme in it's interpretation. The biblical references are very strong - be it the character names like Thomas, Mary, Sarah, Samuel or the very cool transcriptions from 'Counc...

The Red Country by Joe Abercrombie has been the only book written by my favorite grimdark author which I had not read. Perhaps I had been saving the best for the last. I had left the World of the First Law far behind and already switched loyalties to the cunning Father Yarvi and his rag-tag bunch of rebels in the cruel and cold Viking-esque world of the Shattered Sea . But I had to come back – a full circle to the blood-drenched black and vile country that Joe has so vividly and expertly created in his past few books. The Circle of the World – where all his First Law based books are set in. This time, for one last plunge. Back into familiar grounds – a surfeit of bloody corpses, chopped heads and brutal violence – all laced with dark black humor and razor-sharp banter that digs deep and comes up with bitter truths about life.   Red Country is Western spaghetti by way of the good, the bad and the Joe Abercrombie. It is truly amazing how he m...

A few weeks back, I had stumbled onto the post-apocalyptic YA series, Penry and the End of Days written by Susan Ee - a lot of hype around the "explosive" conclusion End of Days, Book-3 coming out next month. I actually LOVED book-one ( AngelFall ) and was looking forward to diving back into this fascinating struggle between Humans and Angels - and of course the hesitant but surely budding "relationship" between Raffe ( fallen angel, greek god extraordinaire) and Penryn ( the heroine ). Well, of course this was a second book in a series and so I had to keep my expectations curbed in, I knew that. Sadly - inspite of knowing this in advance, the second book failed to live up to the expectations, especially coming on the heels of such a soaring refreshingly original first volume  YA-dystopian story - Susan completely misses the mark. And it's frustrating because there are so many ways she could have expanded her world and the plot. It's this immense p...