Fantasy Archives — Keeping Up With The Penguins

Category: Fantasy (page 1 of 4)

A Court Of Thorns And Roses – Sarah J Maas

March 10, 2026 / Sheree / 0 Comments

Every #Bookstagrammer and #BookToker worth their salt has thoughts about A Court Of Thorns And Roses, the quintessential romantasy novel of the social media age. I resisted reading it – for longer than most – but I eventually succumbed.

Straight off the bat, the opening chapters of A Court Of Thorns And Roses felt eerily similar to those of The Hunger Games. An eldest daughter (Feyre in the former, Katniss in the latter) keeps her impoverished family alive, with no help from the useless surviving parent, by illegally hunting wild game. She is swept away by representatives of the oppressive ruling class, leaving behind a hopeless love interest and sibling(s) who will almost surely starve without her. There’s even a petite bourgeoisie class of bootlickers who do nothing about the poverty and destitution they see around them. The protagonist is pulled into a world of opulent indulgence, though she refuses to be seduced by it, and forms unlikely alliances.

The story isn’t “bad” so much as it is just boringly familiar. I don’t mind the use of genre tropes, and I usually enjoy adaptations and retellings, but A Court Of Thorns And Roses isn’t positioned that way. It’s positioned as a story all its own, and in that sense, it’s poorly done. It doesn’t only echo The Hunger Games; it also draws heavily from Beauty And The Beast (which Maas, to her credit, cites as her inspiration for the novel), and the third act weirdly reminded me of Jabba The Hutt’s whole deal in the original Star Wars films.

In terms of pitch and tone, the protagonist is revealed to be 19 years old, and yet it would be completely believable – given her lack of sophistication and naivete – that she was even younger. I couldn’t shake the suspicion that Maas originally conceived her as 16 or thereabouts, but aged her up in order to properly capitalise on the “sex sells” maxim. That said, the age gap between her and her 510-year-old love interest is undoubtedly problematic, and a few years either way hardly makes a difference.

Speaking of spice: I don’t know what everyone’s so up in arms about, banning A Court Of Thorns And Roses on account of its supposed “indecent” material. I counted two whole sex scenes, and a couple of passionate make-out sessions. Maybe my gauge for what’s appropriate and what’s not is broken, but I didn’t raise a single eyebrow, let alone blush, at anything in this book. And yet, it’s tied for tenth in the American Library Association’s tally of the most banned and challenged books in the United States.

I took a couple more issues with it, too. The pacing is wildly uneven, and it’s often unclear just how much time is passing between scenes of heightened action. But that didn’t bother me as much as the villains, who are lazily drawn. Either they’re two-dimensional power-hungry sadists, or they’re actually good guys underneath – and it doesn’t take Sherlockian deductive reasoning to figure out which is which.

I’ve heard a lot of romantasy readers say that A Court Of Thorns And Roses is the worst book of the series, and it “gets so much better” from here, but I doubt I’ll find out for myself. While I guess it’s nice to know what everyone’s talking about (“Tamlin” and “Rhysand” and “Prythian” are no longer meaningless patterns of vowels and consonants for me), I’d have to be really, really hard up for reading material to dive into it any further.

Read A Court Of Thorns And Roses on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

My favourite Amazon reviews of A Court Of Thorns And Roses:

“I’m seventy years old and I’m running out of time to spend reading shallow rewrites… Half a book should have been enough to engage but that’s when stupid took a steep dive into awful.” – Karen
“Read fan fiction for something you like instead because the plots will be better And there will be better sex.” – Abbie
“The protagonist kills a fae and as punishment has to live at the dead fae’s buddy’s house to live in the lap of luxury after nearly starving to death at her own home? Did a tween write this?” J.Nelson
“The rising action is stupid. The protagonist accidentally kills a fairy that looks like a beast. This means she broke a law and committed murder. This would all be fine as a rising action if the punishment wasn’t stupid. So this big buff fairy man comes to her house and is like “hey you, you killed my friend. That’s illegal and you have to be punished. You have two choices: We can either kill you for your crimes because you’re a murderer, or kidnap you and raise you in our huge palace filled with luxuries and you never have to hunt again.” And the protagonist is all like “Id rather die than be with a fairy man–take my life!” and the fairy man is like “Nah, we taking you with us even though you broke a law.” LIKE MAAM BROKE THE LAW. SHE SHOULD BE PUNISHED.” – Luz Noceda

Fourth Wing – Rebecca Yarros

May 20, 2025 / Sheree / 0 Comments

Fourth Wing is a high fantasy romance novel, the first book in the Empyrean series, and it’s one of the biggest BookTok books in recent memory. For a few years now, it’s been near impossible to scroll a bookish social media feed without seeing it. So, of course, I had to pick it up for myself to see what all the fuss is about.

The story is set in the fantasy kingdom of Navarre, specifically the Basgiath War College. Navarre is constantly under attack, protected by dragon magic and maintained by the graduates of the college, each of whom trains in one of four quadrants: healers, scribes, infantry, and riders. The main character, Violet Sorrengail, has geared her whole life to becoming a scribe as her late father was before her, but her mother – General Lilith Sorrengail – insists that she become a rider instead. The book takes its name – Fourth Wing – from the squad to which Violet is assigned for training.

Training to ride dragons is no picnic, and Violet faces danger on a daily basis. Each student is hoping to ‘bond’ with a dragon that they will ride for the duration of their military careers (a dangerous enough pursuit in and of itself), and there are more students than there are dragons, so in addition to facing fire-breathing monsters and the physical risks that entails, the students often kill each other off to increase their own chances of success. Oh, and the children of the rebels in the last big war are training at the military college now too, so as the daughter of a General who killed most of their parents, Violet has a big ol’ target on her back.

This is the barest bones explanation of the magic and lore of Fourth Wing. I’ll admit, I don’t often read high fantasy, and my eyes tend to glaze over when authors start using a lot of made up words to describe complicated magic systems. So, fair warning: if you’re not into that kind of thing, this probably isn’t the book for you. There are also a lot of very drawn-out battle sequences, and they often introduce a lot of new information that’s hard to process while you’re trying to focus on whether the characters live or die. The main character recites historical facts under her breath to ‘calm herself down’ (laziest world-building ever), and there are telepathic connections between whomever-is-convenient so crucial information can be communicated without any timeline/geography issues. That all might be par-for-the-course for most high fantasy fans, but it’s a bit of a drag for recreational readers.

What I did like about Fourth Wing – and what I found most interesting – was the depiction of the main character’s disability and the accessibility accommodations made for her during her training. That might sound out-of-left-field for a romantasy novel, especially one that isn’t widely marketed as being About Disability or For People With Disabilities (that I’ve seen, anyway), but it’s a significant factor in the story.

Violet lives with a non-specific chronic condition that weakens her joints and ligaments, making it hard for her to develop the physical strength she needs to become a rider or recover the injuries she incurs in training. Yarros does a good job of weaving this into Violet’s narrative – she’s not a two-dimensional Disabled Character, rather her disability is one of her many dimensions. Her character is clearly informed by Yarros’s own experience living with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Yarros said in interviews after Fourth Wing‘s release that she intentionally set out to write a story about a heroic character with chronic illness, the kind of character she herself would have loved to read.

There’s a fairly simple black-and-white response to Violet’s disability in Basgiath War College: the good guys accept Violet’s specific needs and support her in finding accommodations for them, the bad guys make fun of her for being “weak” and try to exploit her challenges for their own gain. It’s not the most creative characterisation you’ll ever see, but it’s a handy shorthand at least. What sticks in my mind most is the scene where Violet is presented with a saddle to wear while riding her dragon. All of the other able-bodied riders can simply hold on, but Violet’s condition makes this challenging, so her dragon and her superiors work together to find a solution for her. Even though Violet is reluctant to use it at first, it evens the playing field. It’s easy to see the real-world parallels for, say, someone who is initially reluctant to use a wheelchair or a walker and subsequently discovers how much freedom and independence it gives them.

It’s also nice to read a high fantasy books that integrates genuine queerness for its characters – too often, queer characters in traditional fantasy either don’t exist or are coded as villains. Fourth Wing isn’t a Queer Book, and there’s not a single ‘coming out’ storyline, and the queer characters aren’t punished or killed. It’s just a regular ol’ fact of life in this world that some characters sleep with people who have the same bits, or use they/them pronouns. I wish that wasn’t such a breath of fresh air.

Speaking of sex: I came to Fourth Wing expecting a lot of it. It’s a BookTok book after all, and we know how much romantasy readers love smut. As it turns out, there are only two sex scenes – they’re pretty good, but they felt a little jarring. The tone of Fourth Wing is very Young Adult, it could easily be read as a teenage boarding school novel (with dragons), so when a character suddenly mentions orgasms or casually objectifies a hottie in the training room, it feels dissonant with the whole Vibe. It’s like if Katniss Everdeen occasionally mentioned how horny she was while fighting for her life – weird, right?

Finally, without spoiling anything, I will say that Fourth Wing has an excellent twist presented on the final page. So, even with my qualms about it, I finished it with a smile and a respectful tip of the hat in Yarros’s direction. There have been two subsequent books published in the Empyrean series – Iron Flame and Onyx Storm. I don’t know that I’m desperate to seek them out, but I’d probably give them a go if I was shipwrecked with them on a desert island.

Read Fourth Wing on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Fourth Wing:

“It is too YA for adults and the sex scenes are too adult for young readers, so there is no one left.” – Nite Ize Customer Service
“I didn’t make it to page 2. I don’t need to read 250+ F-bombs to know this book isn’t for me.” – dHoward
“I don’t want to read the book thru another gender. I have been reading SCIFI for 50+ years and am disappointed. Is this what SCIFI has become? One must be willing to become another gender?” – sveikas
“This book is an insult to writing.” – Will o.
“If Fourth Wing has 0 haters, I’m DEAD… This is a book bout how the main character is h0rny all the time, anything else past that is shotty, cheap writing. WHICH IS FINE IF IT WASNT MARKETED AS A FANTASY!!! Any fantasy element in here is watered down more than a church’s communion wine!! IM SERIOUS! FANTASY READERS, don’t get your hopes up!! The dragons are just big telapathic horses with swords for tails… and the magic and lore is utterly ABSENT… I would burn it if I didn’t respect written word.” – Alaura

That Time I Got Drunk And Yeeted A Love Potion At A Werewolf – Kimberly Lemming

March 4, 2025 / Sheree / 0 Comments

You might recognise the title That Time I Got Drunk And Yeeted A Love Potion At A Werewolf from viral tweets and short think-pieces decrying it as the death of literature (*eye roll*). It’s silly, yes, but I knew as soon as I saw it that I wanted to read it. Even though fantasy/paranormal romance isn’t normally My Thing, I thought it looked fun and like it didn’t take itself too seriously.

Unfortunately, I didn’t realise until after I got my hands on a copy that That Time I Got Drunk And Yeeted A Love Potion At A Werewolf is actually the second book in the Mead & Mishaps series. Given what a hard time I had finding it to begin with, though, I didn’t want to wait until I found a copy of the first and read that too, so I went in blind.

Oh, and I know this is important to some readers in this genre, so I’ll mention it here: it has a map in the front. Personally, I don’t care that much about the geography of a story and I didn’t refer back to it once, but whatever.

Anyway, That Time I Got Drunk And Yeeted A Love Potion At A Werewolf begins exactly where the title suggests. The heroine, Brie, is drinking with friends at a bar when an unwelcome would-be suitor attempts to goad her into drinking from a cup spiked with love potion. Rather than succumb to his overtures, Brie tells him to piss off and chucks the love potion – only to have it land right on Felix’s head.

Felix falls instantly in love with her. He tells her that they are “fated mates” and he has “imprinted” on her. He also happens to be a werewolf.

There’s a lot of telling (as opposed to showing) in That Time I Got Drunk And Yeeted A Love Potion At A Werewolf, which might explain why it’s so short, despite the complex world and wide cast of supernatural characters. Lemming takes a lot of short cuts with the exposition to get us straight to the good stuff.

It’s also a little bit earnest, and clearly written for a very specific Type of reader. The heroine likes to crochet and knit and read romance books. The hero does chores around the house to win her over, and offers to act out the steamy scenes from her romance books with her. She makes cheese for a living, he’s lactose intolerant. You get my drift?

All that said, That Time I Got Drunk And Yeeted A Love Potion At A Werewolf isn’t as cozy as you’d might expect with the insta-love and the cottage farming lifestyle. There’s some very explicit sex (including, inexplicably, tentacles at one point) and a fair bit of mortal peril. Ghouls emerge from the woods to kidnap women in the night, and Felix is only too happy to rip the arms off a few beasts to keep his “true love” safe.

A level of familiarity with fantasy worlds and paranormal creatures would definitely enhance your reading experience and appreciation of the story (or, failing that, having simply read the first book in the series before picking up the second). I doubt this one is destined for the canon, but it’s good fun and occasionally quite delightful. It’s definitely not the sign of the end times that a bunch of literary snobs claimed it to be.

Read That Time I Got Drunk And Yeeted A Love Potion At A Werewolf on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

My favourite Amazon reviews of That Time I Got Drunk And Yeeted A Love Potion At A Werewolf:

“I was enjoying the books – snappy dialogue, funny moments, etc., but then, DEMON TENTACLES. Did two book drafts get dropped in the blender?!? That makes NO sense!” – Abby Martin
“The plot kinda went off the rails a bit but was saved by a snarky talking sword” – AR Shaw

Interview With The Vampire – Anne Rice

April 30, 2024 / Sheree / 2 Comments

Going into Interview With The Vampire, I only really knew Anne Rice by reputation – if at all. I’d heard a lot of women around my age talk about reading her books as a formative experience, sneaking them home from the library and devouring them under the covers, but somehow I missed out on that rite of passage. I’d never even seen the Oscar-winning film adaptation of her most famous book, so I went into it with pretty much a blank slate.

Interview With The Vampire is a gothic-horror vampire novel (duh), styled as a centuries-old vampire – Louis de Pointe du Lac – telling his life story to a reporter. Rice drops you right into the middle of the conversation, or that’s how it feels anyway. I wondered for a minute whether there was an introductory chapter or two missing, because the action takes off before you know what hits you and doesn’t stop.

Louis was 25 years old, back in 1791, when he became a vampire. He was an indigo plantation owner (ahem, slave-owner, but more on that in a minute) grieving the shocking loss of his pious brother Paul. In the midst of a self-destructive spiral, he is approached and bitten by a vampire, Lestat de Lioncourt. Soon, he’s allergic to the sun and sleeping in a coffin and hungry only for blood hot and fresh from the vein.

Lacking any other options for vampire buddies, Louis and Lestat become frenemies. Louis hopes that Lestat will teach him The Ways of being a vampire, but everything Lestat shows him seems either completely stupid or morally reprehensible. Louis feels stuck with him, though – and the fact that they’re immortal, so this arrangement might have to last forever, adds another layer of conflict and complexity. And, it hardly needs saying but I’ll say it anyway: it’s all deeply homoerotic. There’s no subtlety to it at all.

Even though this all happens very quickly in Interview With The Vampire, you’ll still find yourself working through long, long chapters. Rice is wordy, and she loves an ellipsis, which gives you the feeling of reading extended texts from a baby boomer.

Anyway, Louis and Lestat’s relationship is coming apart at the seams. In desperation, Louis escapes to New Orleans, and finds himself drawn to ‘feed’ (sorry, gross, I know) on a plague-ridden five-year-old girl, whom he finds crying next to her mother’s corpse (double gross, but hold onto your hat, there’s worse to come). Lestat is worried that Louis is going to abandon him, so he has the bright idea of also feeding on the five-year-old and completing the process of turning her into a vampire, too. I guess it’s the old-timey vampire equivalent of a surprise pregnancy in Anne Rice’s world. Louis can’t leave Lestat now – they have a baby.

That might be repellent enough to put a swathe of would-be readers off Interview With A Vampire altogether, but what I read about that particular plot point afterwards changed my feelings about it. Rice began working on the short story that would eventually become Interview With The Vampire shortly after the death of her daughter Michelle, at just six years of age. She’s even said specifically, in interviews and so forth, that the young vampire girl (Claudia, in the book) is directly inspired by her late daughter. Knowing that makes the story less horrifying and more horribly sad, for me anyway. What mother wouldn’t want to give her daughter eternal life, even if it meant turning her into a vampire (or, as it were, a fictional character)?

Whether you can stomach the attack, abuse, manipulation, and corruption of a child, described in yearning and tender prose, is just one deciding factor in whether Interview With The Vampire is the right book for you. There’s also the aforementioned homoeroticism (though that endears me to it more, if anything). One of my favourite critical comments on this point came from Edith Milton, writing for The New Republic: “To pretend that it has any purpose beyond suckling eroticism is rank hypocrisy,”. LOL!

What I really take issue with in Interview With The Vampire is the depiction of slavery, and the inherent racism in the narrative. I suspect you’d need a few years to write a thesis that really gets to the bottom of it, especially now with the newer screen adaptation transforming the story with a Black man in the lead. As I read this one, though, purely on a surface level, you’ve got Lestat feeding on slaves and their families, Louis exploiting their fear, and zero question or concern about their well-being or the systemic problem of race-based slavery.

It’s particularly surprising given that Rice seemed to style herself as a chronicler of the plight of the down-trodden. “I wrote novels about people who are shut out life for various reasons,” she wrote in her memoir. “This became a great theme of my novels — how one suffers as an outcast.”

I suppose Rice did try to nod to social justice when she had Louis refuse to feed on his own slaves (he predominantly drinks the blood of animals, making him the vampire equivalent of a vegetarian, I guess), but I mean… he had no issue enslaving them, so…?! Basically, in Interview With The Vampire, slaves are background characters that occasionally pop their heads up to keep the plot in order, they’re spoken about in denigrating ways and treated as disposable resources, and it all just gave me the ick.

Still, I can see the book’s appeal. What’s particularly interesting is the recasting of the vampire as tragic anti-hero, rather than self-evident villain. I don’t know if that was Rice’s intent in having the vampire narrate his own story in Interview With The Vampire (we’re never the villains in our own story) or just an interesting by-product of taking a different perspective, but either way, it works. That’s probably why it went on to sell ten million-odd copies, and spawn twelve sequels. I probably won’t go out of my way to read any more of them, but I can see why others might.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Interview With The Vampire:

“I just read this pile. The main character, Louis, is just incredibly whiny. The book has pages upon pages of whining, but I can never really identify what the character finds so loathsome about his creator. The book is painfully descriptive, yet incredibly vague. Save the time and fall asleep in front of the movie.” – Erik Pearson
“The first and the biggest problem is the main character – he is so unlikable and such a pushover for about 95% of the story, you can’t just be annoyed with him ALL THE TIME. Most of the negative events in the book are his fault because he’s such an idiot.” – Kindle Customer
“In a word: AWFUL! Ann Rice has taken her love for penning overblown sexual fetishes (both hetero and homo-erotic) and single-handedly ruined the vampire as myth originally described the foul demon. Lestat’s character was so lavishly overblown as to verge on the comical. Each scene in the book was more or less a wishful description of an orgiastic costum party.” – J. Pemberton

The Eyre Affair – Jasper Fforde

April 2, 2024 / Sheree / 0 Comments

The Eyre Affair is Jasper Fforde’s first novel, and he had a long row to hoe to get it out into the world. He persisted through no fewer than 76 rejections before finally pulling together this manuscript that was accepted by a publisher.

The novel’s central character, Thursday Next, is a detective in an alternative world (circa 1985). England has been at war with Imperial Russia in the Crimea region for over a century, the occasional time travel wormhole opens up in the countryside, and there’s a whole branch of the police force dedicated to solving literary crimes. That’s where Thursday works, and how she ends up pursuing a super-villain through the pages of Jane Eyre.

This isn’t the kind of sexy morally grey villain you’ll find in your cartoon cover romantasies, though. Acheron Hades is impervious to bullets, can walk through walls, manipulates people into killing themselves, and worse. His schtick in The Eyre Affair is stealing the original manuscripts of classic works (Martin Chuzzlewit and the aforementioned Jane Eyre), and using the technology he stole from Thursday’s uncle to pull key characters out of the story. He holds them to ransom, as readers around the world bemoan the loss of their favourites from the pages.

While all that’s going on, Thursday’s father occasionally stops time in order to visit her and ask about pivotal moments in history – he’s on the run from the Chronoguard, the cops that oversee time travel, and his wife worries that he’s having an affair with a woman a hundred years ago. There’s also an ongoing society-wide debate as to the true authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, with door-knockers stopping by to evangelise for their leading theory periodically.

So, yes, The Eyre Affair is a bit kooky – big Terry Pratchett vibes, all throughout. It’s a bit hard to follow, especially at first, though I suspect that’s more my fault than Fforde’s. Seasoned fantasy readers would surely understand the world and follow the plot no problem, but having little experience in the genre myself, I found it all a bit overwhelming.

It’s not just fantasy, though. The Eyre Affair works in elements of science-fiction, mystery, thriller, satire – even romance. It’s like Fforde took an element from each of his 76 rejected manuscripts and cooked it into one. That didn’t really help with the “hard to follow” thing. You don’t realise how much you rely on the tropes of a given genre to understand what’s going on until you read a book that throws the rules out the window.

Unsurprisingly, then, The Eyre Affair was a mixed bag for me. I liked the small details Fforde worked in, like the dodos revived from extinction to be kept as house pets and the character named ‘Jack Schitt’. I didn’t like the gratuitous gun violence and the casual fat phobia and ableism (which probably would’ve flown unchecked twenty years ago when The Eyre Affair was first published, but not so much today). I’d recommend this one to fans of Pratchett (and Douglas Adams, come to that), but tell the average non-fantasy reader that they can probably skip it if they’re short on reading time.

My favourite Amazon reviews of The Eyre Affair:

“It’s funny, I was just reading an article about how indie authors are ruining the book industry. How about mainstream books that charge too much and they suck?” – MEA
“The characters have silly names, the plot is unbelievable and it’s just tedious over all. I will never believe the reviews again.” – pdh
“Contrary to other reviewers, this book is NOT Douglas Adams, NOT Jonathan Lethem, NOT Monty Python, NOT Stephen Hawking, NOT gripping, NOT witty, and certainly NOT Bronte. AVOID.” – Mark Malamud
“Look, alternate time lines and such don’t faze me; I’m a Trekkie and a Whovian, so you want to stir things up, I say, have at it. This however is just plain silly and pretentious. You still want to read it ’cause you figure you are no doubt smarter than I am? It’s entirely possible, but do your bank account a favor and check it out of the library.” – Peach Blossom Lane