Karen Miller’s Empress, the first in the Godspeaker trilogy, is a book of epic high fantasy that clocks in at a whopping 717 pages. The length makes it look like a bit of a chore, but Miller’s tight prose and interesting representations of religious fervor will keep readers riveted. Lush action scenes filled with gore and righteous godly anger compliment the unforgiving harshness of the desert setting Miller has chosen. The unforgiving God of Mijak, who communicates through scorpions and pools of blood and who protects its people even as it horribly kills those who question it, is also well suited for the environment. The pace of the book is excellent, so the first 500 pages go by surprisingly quickly. However, in the last couple hundred pages when other protagonists begin to take center stage in preparation for the rest of the trilogy, Miller stumbles a little. The pace shifts and jumps time in odd ways, expecting us to connect and care about some characters that have only been secondary through most of the work. It’s a bit of a tough sell but it’s obvious that Miller is setting up the two remaining books in the trilogy, so some of it is forgivable…

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Puddlejumpers, by Mark Jean and Christopher C. Carlson, is the story of Ernie Banks, an orphan boy from Chicago who knows nothing about where he came from or the special destiny he’s meant to fulfill. Despite this overly familiar premise, the book managed to reel me in with an action-filled plot, an engaging main character, […]

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Barth Anderson’s latest work, The Magician and The Fool, is a dense descriptive piece that informs the reader of a possible history of the tarot while leading you into a netherworld full of rich conflicting images. The historical facts and speculation are engaging, but the pacing of the book is so slow and disjointed that […]

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The premise of The Duke in His Castle is that, many generations ago, all the nobles of an unnamed kingdom rose up against the Just King, who punished them by confining them and their heirs to their own castle grounds. He promised that any one of the nobles who learned the secret powers of each […]

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