Secret History & Saints

[talkstowolves]

This week at Green Man Review sees the publication of two reviews by me. The first up for review is the fantastic book The Secret History of Giants by Ari Berk:

"Anyone first laying eyes on The Secret History of Giants must surely exclaim as I did: "What a charming little volume!" From its textured cover featuring an intriguing root-bedecked giant face (with a serious reflective gleam in his eye) to its earth-toned tassel, this is a book meant to enchant and captivate.

The marvelous nature of this book continues on its title page, where The Secret History of Giants is given the subtitle Codex Giganticum and author Ari Berk is described as "Magister and Scribe." Yes, indeed, the book's conceit is that it reads as if it truly were a secret historical document chronicling the affairs and natures of giants. This is not merely a collection of folklore and fairy tales about giants from around the world. Instead, this is a fully immersive experience: a text woven into a mythological whole cloth from the worldly and diverse fibers of myth, legend, folklore, fairy tale and imagination." [Read the rest of the review at this link.]

Thank you to the editors at Green Man Review for awarding the above review an Excellence in Writing Award!

The second review looks at Jacqueline Carey's latest departure from high fantasy in the form of Santa Olivia, an urban fantasy exploring the superhero concept:

"Fans of Jacqueline Carey will be pleasantly surprised, I think, by her latest offering and its inherent divergence from her usual style. There is nothing of the lush language and sensuous worldbuilding of the Kushiel's Legacy series here, nor any of the tragic melancholia and subverted fantasy tropes of The Sundering duology. No, Santa Olivia is the essence of the desert: sparse, bright, gritty, and full of visions that might mean hope or death.

Santa Olivia is set in an analogue of our world. It's almost identical to our current time, except a terrible pandemic has devastated the human population (at least in America and Mexico) and led to a military cordon being established along the border of Texas and Mexico. The cordon is a sort of no-man's-land, with the small town of Santa Olivia and its citizens unwilling to forsake their homes having been converted into Outpost No. 12, a settlement serving the soldiers from the nearby United States' military base established to police the cordon. Life is hard and hopeless for the citizens of Outpost; there are no civilian police, but gangs tolerated by the MP keep things in a grim semblance of order and arrange nightlife for the soldiers. There are barely enough necessities to go around for Outpost's denizens, much less amenities or distractions. There's no escape: no one from Outpost is allowed to leave, and its uncertain whether anyone outside of the military base knows they're still there." [Read the rest of the review at this link.]