Month: July 2021

The Phantom Atlas – Edward Brooke-Hitching

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This is an interesting book – it’s an alphabetical listing of lands that have appeared on maps at some point in time that don’t actually exist. It’s an interesting mix of mistakes, exaggerations, and outright lies.

I think it’s easy in this world with GPS and Google maps, to forget that there was a time when we couldn’t easily map out the entire world, and it’s amazing to see what holds on for years, even in the face of very little real evidence. A cool little book.

The Masked City – Genevieve Cogman

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Irene is now the Librarian in Residence in her particular alternate world, with her apprentice Kai. When he’s kidnapped, she finally has to track down his family (of royal dragons), and ends up diving more deeply into the Fae’s worlds of chaos then she ever thought she’d be able to go.

It was definitely interesting to delve more deeply in the dragon vs. Fae ideas of how the universe should work. I remember not always liking how things went in the first book of this series, but this book definitely flowed more easily for me – this series is starting to stick.

A Shadow Bright and Burning – Jessica Cluess

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Henrietta Howel has power over fire, and has therefore always feared being found out by the royal sorcerers, because women should not weld magic. But she is finally discovered, and it turns out that they’ve been waiting for a girl that can weld fire. And so she is apparently the Chosen One.

I enjoyed this story – the set up for the evil beings was pretty original. They’re still not fully explained, so I definitely expect more in future stories. And it’s also pretty clear early on that Nettie is not actually the Chosen One, which was also pretty interesting. This book was definitely heavy on the set up – I’m interested to see where it goes from here.