I clearly had enough of just light reading so I changed it up a little by branching out to a new sub-genre: historical fantasy. This coincided with my decision to join a historical fantasy book club on FB.
The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley
This wasn’t that engaging a read in that there’s no urge for me to binge read it (in fact I haven’t been reading it in one go on a day-to-day basis but the pacing certainly picks up towards the end) but I’m intrigued by the characters enough to stick to the end (which I didn’t get 100% not that it bothered me that much). I think the author has written a solid story overall (despite the fact that the actual genre isn’t really to my taste- it’s really more straight historical fiction rather than historical fantasy as I was led to believe it is and it’s really very literary fic in nature) but I’ve certainly read worse debut novels than this. Not that keen to follow the sequel to this though.
A Gathering of Ravens by Scott Oden
In essence, what the author has done was taking Tolkien’s orcs as inspiration, adopting them for his own while retaining that lore-rich feel of Tolkien’s so while I have no fascination with Orcs in general, I’m sucked in by glimpses of the Old Way that we saw throughout this book. This is an anti-hero story, a story of vengeance (which I have to say doesn’t appear on my usual diet) so I don’t expect to root for Grimnir and I don’t, not really. However, I prefer him vastly to Etain at the start (who annoyed me cos she had established this blindfold for herself due to her faith and wouldn’t acknowledge the Old Ways that she saw right in front of her eyes but luckily that changed with the character development) and certainly by the end of the book, I’ve grown comfortable with Grimnir.
To be honest, this book has a chance at 5 stars from me except that the underlying premise of this book is about the start of the downfall of the Old Ways and that’s what I love about fantasy so I wasn’t as immersed in this book as I could have been if I was to read a book before such a downfall (but that would have been another story, I know). For this same reason, I’m a bit apprehensive of picking up book 2 of the Grimnir series since I expect that the downfall of the Old Ways will happen in earnest there. I’ve since been reassured by the author that book 2 is actually about the rally of the Old Ways and so I’m eagerly awaiting its release which is very soon- it’s on pre-orders when I last looked at it. My current plan is to read the whole trilogy and then decide if I want to acquire it for my personal collection which is reserved for books that I would at least award a Goodreads 4 stars to.
Anyway, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this book despite the fact that I don’t have a personal fondness for orcs and that I’m really just a fantasy reader and I have no personal knowledge to appreciate the historical element in this book (but from what I heard from the historical fantasy book club, the history elements are great too).
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