Tales from the Circle

  Kir's Fury is the second book in the Godeena Codex. I loved the first book, Godeena, which stood well enough on its own with a satisfying story that wrapped up nicely, but I was definitely thrilled when I found out the author had written a second book. Because I wanted to dive in right away, I decided not to re-read Godeena, and this showed me that Kir's Fury also works fairly well as a stand alone, though of course, I would still recommend reading Godeena first!  This book has a much wider focus, showing us many different planets, characters from various different civilizations, and all kinds of interesting tech levels and even some supernatural powers. It felt epic in scale, which I really loved. It starts on the planet Godeena, six years after the events of the first book, and starts with the archaeologist Diana and her team doing their explorations of that planet, trying to uncover the secrets of the lost civilization that once inhabited it. What they uncover exposes a t...

Everyone is making their "best of" lists for the books they've read this year (I plan to do one too, hopefully soon) and planning their TBRs for 2023, but I wanted to take a few minutes to look back on three books I read a while ago that I still think about sometimes. When reviewing and rating a book I always try to be as balanced as I can be. My reviews are always written the day of finishing a book or the day after if I finish it late at night or get busy. If I leave it for longer I'll either forget to leave a review or it'll start feeling like this looming difficult task that I'm delaying. Anyway, this means that my reviews are usually my initial reactions to the reading experience. They tell you how I felt about it right after closing the book. I'm well aware that ratings have issues, and sometimes even for me it's hard to decide how many stars I want to give to a book, because I want to be fair, but at the same time I'm very aware that this wh...

I had the pleasure of writing a guest post for FanFiAddict about world-building and some of the elements that make readers connect with the world and want to visit it.  Building an Immersive World   In it, I talk quite a bit about Tolkien's Middle Earth as well as some of my favourite immersive reads including K. S. Villoso's Agartes Epilogues and Daniel E. Olesen's Chronicles of Adalmearc.  And to celebrate the guest post I've put up my big epic fantasy book Children of the Dead City up for sale . You can get all 375K words for only $0.99 - and I'm hoping readers will find it immersive and fun! :) 

The Ikessar Falcon is the breathtakingly excellent sequel to The Wolf of Oren-Yaro. Check out my review of Book 1  here. It's going to be hard to do a proper review without spoilers, but I'll do my best. Let me start by saying that it's a must-read and shows once again that Villoso is a master when it comes to epic fantasy. I couldn't tear myself from the pages!  Just like The Wolf of Oren-Yaro, the Ikessar Falcon is written in first person from Talyien's POV and just like book 1, this limitation of POV doesn't stop the author from telling a sweeping epic tale, showing us a vast and rich world, and building several characters who feel real and have excellent development. It's not just Tali that gets development, it's all the characters.  World-building is one of my favourite aspects of reading and why I love epic fantasy so much. I loved this world when I read the Agartes Epilogues (which are being re-released soon, I think!) and I loved it when I read t...

Check out my first post on this topic: How to Make Me Care Part 1: Big Series with Immersive Worlds   in which I explored some series works and tried to pick out the things that made me invested in those worlds and made me read more than one book in the series, eagerly awaiting the next installment if it was not yet out. In this post I want to explore some great stand-alone books that made me care and pulled me in. I think stand-alone books are a little different because you're getting one complete story and the author has less time to show you around the world, but at the same time, thinking back on the stand-alone books I loved they often have extremely rich world-building that rivals long series! It's also interesting to note that this list is much more self-pub focused than my last one. There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, for the past few years I've been reading much more self-pub stuff than trad published, and second of all, I think the tendency i...