Jan 7
2007
Ysabeau S. Wilce’s Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Adventures of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), A House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog is...
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Dec 12
2006
Laurell K. Hamilton’s most recent book, Mistral’s Kiss, the fifth title in the Meredith Gentry series, is better than I expected. It’s not as good as the first two installments in the series, but Mistral’s Kiss has some decent action scenes, ends on a tantalizing cliffhanger, and...
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Nov 13
2006
Ellen Kushner is an acclaimed fantasy novelist, the host of the NPR program Sound and Spirit, and a popular public speaker and teacher. According to her website, she’s also hard at work on a musi...
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Nov 13
2006
World Fantasy Award-winning author Patricia McKillip is married to the poet David Lunde, lives in Oregon, and has written many books featuring covers painted by Kinuko Y. Craft. Ms. McKillip’s be...
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Nov 13
2006
Not much information is available on Mr. Renier, as his website is still under construction. All I know is that A) he has a dog named “Beluga”, and B) that he’s the author of the awesome graphic...
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Nov 13
2006
Best known as the author of The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame actually spent most of his career working in a bank. He started out as a lowly minion at the Bank of England in 1879, he retir...
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Nov 13
2006
I always encourage comic book-wary female readers to try Bill Willingham’s Fables. Not only is it unquestionably a story for grown-ups, it’s one of the few American comics I've encountered that boasts a truly involving romantic storyline. I love almost everything about this series—except for the internal artwork, which has consistently been competent but pedestrian...
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Nov 6
2006
Caroline Stevermer and Patricia C. Wrede’s 1988 novel Sorcery and Cecelia was a delightful curiosity—a cult favorite that appealed equally to devotees of Diana Wynne Jones and Georgette Heyer. The book's two sequels, 2004’s The Grand Tour and the just-released The Mislaid Magician, don’t totally recapture the magic of the first story, but they still make for very entertaining reading...
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Sep 7
2006
As anyone who’s had the misfortune of hearing me speak recently knows, I’ve been sick. Really sick. I sound like a seal with a lifelong pack-a-day habit. The only upside to the past week and a ...
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Sep 7
2006
We held off on reviewing author K.P. Bath until we were sure that there was going to be a sequel to his first book, The Secret of Castle Cant. It’s not that we didn’t love The Secret of Castle Ca...
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Sep 7
2006
Pamela Dean’s 1991 fantasy novel Tam Lin has recently been reprinted by Firebrand Books. Tam Lin is a creepy retelling of an even creepier old ballad, set in a college in the 1970s, and starring ...
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Sep 7
2006
Jonathan Stroud is the author of the excellent "Bartimaeus Trilogy", a fantasy/alternate history series starring a terrorist, a fairly unpleasant boy, and a very sympathetic demon. In Stroud’s un...
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Aug 18
2006
M. T. Anderson’s self-described “thrilling tales” are sure to delight anyone with a nodding familiarity with kids’ detective fiction. Whales on Stilts! and The Attack of the Linoleum Lederhosen p...
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Aug 18
2006
Chris Van Allsburg is the author of several stunningly beautiful (albeit kinda creepy) children’s books, including Jumanji, Zathura, The Polar Express, and The Garden of Abdul Gasazi. Van Allsbur...
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Jul 17
2006
Linda Medley is a Portland-based comic book writer and illustrator, and the author of the excellent Castle Waiting series, the subject of one of our Book of the Week reviews. Castle Waiting has b...
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Jul 17
2006
As I’ve said before, I like stories about people working. I find reading about somebody else’s labor to be deeply satisfying. I’m also a big fan of fairytales, particularly the ones that reward their characters for doing obscure tasks. (I love that one about the girl whose evil stepmother makes her hunt for fruit in the middle of winter, wearing a paper dress.) That’s why the new hardcover version of Linda Medley’s collected Castle Waiting stories had me nearly giddy with excitement...
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Jul 6
2006
Helen Hope Mirrlees was a translator, poet, and novelist, but is best remembered as the author of the obscure 1926 fantasy novel, Lud-in-the-Mist. While several authors have mentioned Lud-in-the-...
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Jul 6
2006
While William Morris is usually remembered as one of the founders of the British Arts and Crafts movement (and, to a lesser extent, as one of the first Socialists in England), he also wrote some g...
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Jul 6
2006
There's an old Bloom County strip featuring a handful of characters watching TV and wondering what they’re watching—it’s either an entertaining shoot-‘em-up movie or a horrifying news segment. It...
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May 26
2006
Gore Vidal once wrote, “[Other than Lewis Carroll] E. Nesbit is the best of the English fabulists who wrote about children”, and he blamed her books’ lack of popularity in the United States on lib...
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May 26
2006
For an author with such famous parents (not to mention a juvenile fantasy award named after her) you don’t hear much about Anne Spencer Lindbergh. Still, she wrote several excellent middle-school...
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May 26
2006
James Branch Cabell had an impressively poisonous pen. His eighth and most famous novel, 1919’s satirical fantasy Jurgen, earned him a brief period in the literary spotlight when the New York Soc...
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May 14
2006
Playwright and lyricist Edward Eager began writing children’s books after he failed to find any suitable stories to read to his young son. Himself a huge fan of children’s literature, Eager’s boo...
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May 14
2006
When I started researching Elizabeth Marie Pope, I was shocked to discover that she had written The Sherwood Ring in 1958 and The Perilous Guard in 1974 (and then I was totally bummed to find that...
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Apr 19
2006
Japanese author Miyuki Miyabe has three books currently translated into English: Crossfire, All She Was Worth, and Shadow Family. Miyabe’s novels are an intriguing mix of horror, mystery, and pol...
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Apr 19
2006
Although I’ve seen several critics comparing Carrie Vaughn’s new werewolf series to the Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake books, I think they have more in common with Charlaine Harris’s stories or...
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Apr 17
2006
Jim Butcher is the author of The Dresden Files novels, a series about Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, a wizard-slash-P.I. who’s doing his best to save the people of Chicago from various supe...
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Apr 11
2006
Suzanne Collins is the author of the critically acclaimed Underland Chronicles. Collins’s series is an Alice-in-Wonderland-on-crack story about an eleven year old boy named Gregor who tumbles thr...
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Apr 11
2006
Pretty much the only things that went through my head while reading Suzanne Collins’s novel Gregor the Overlander were My God, this book is awesome! and There’s a sequel, right?. It’s been a long...
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Apr 2
2006
Fantasy/sci-fi writer Steven Brust is best known for his Vlad Taltos novels, a series of books about a human assassin living in a world controlled by elf-like creatures known as Dragaerans. While...
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