Fantasy Thursday: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Buy it Here: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children 

‘With its X-Men: First Class-meets-time-travel story line, David Lynchian imagery, and rich, eerie detail, it s no wonder Miss Peregrine s Home for Peculiar Children has been snapped up by Twentieth Century Fox. B+ Entertainment Weekly’

If you like your fantasy unsettling, this is the book for you.

I never know what to expect from Young Adult books, so I was pleasantly surprised that this book was a heck of a lot creepier than it sounded. It centers around a deep, deep mystery about the precise nature of this children’s home, and with every turn you are even more confused about who to trust.

It has an air of Young Angry Man about it,  the main character feels utterly let down by the life his family sacrifice everything for, hence why he ends up going on the world’s creepiest adventure.

If you’re looking for something different than everything else on the fantasy shelves today, pick this up.

Fantasy Thursday: The Rest of Us Just Live Here – Patrick Ness

Buy It Here: The Rest of Us Just Live Here

Taken from Amazon’s listing: “Award-winning writer Patrick Ness’s bold and irreverent novel powerfully asks what if you weren’t the Chosen One? The one who’s supposed to fight the zombies, or the soul-eating ghosts, or whatever this new thing is, with the blue lights and the death? What if you were like Mikey? Who just wants to graduate and go to prom and maybe finally work up the courage to ask Henna out before someone goes and blows up the high school. Again. Because sometimes there are problems bigger than this week’s end of the world and sometimes you just have to find the extraordinary in your ordinary life. Even if your best friend might just be the God of mountain lions… An exceptional novel from the author praised by John Green as “an insanely beautiful writer”.”

For some reason, some of the marketing for this book makes it seem like a comedy. It’s not. Not that there isn’t a beautifully dark string of humour running through it, but a comedy it is not. I was blinking back tears by the end, having fallen completely in love with one of the characters.

This is a fascinating dark look about a few normal teenagers caught up in the latest apocalypse. Refreshingly, they don’t go rushing into danger they know nothing about and manage to save the world. This is a quiet book on the real life consequences of magic, lies, and not listening to your kids.

Despite living through so many apocalypses, near apocalypses and other weird events, the adults in the story refuse to believe what is going on, or anything their kids say.

It is a step away from the world today, and yet so close it makes you gnash your teeth in pain and frustration.

Even though I think adults would enjoy it, I think older (15/16+?)* teens would find it a useful and enjoyable read, since it deals with so many issues relevant to teens today.

 

Trigger Warnings

Mental Illness  – main character has anxiety, main character’s sister has eating disorder

Abuse – main character’s family not exactly fantastic examples of human beings, are blamed for said mental disorders, probably correctly

Alcoholism – main characters father is an alcoholic

Animal death

I believe the sex scene was explicit-ish, like it was definitely a sex scene but it wasn’t Game of Thrones sort of thing

 

Tropes/Features

Gay Character

Mere Mortals Cannot Solve Disaster

Disaster Not Actual Point of Story

Magic Powers

Tragic Hero/Sidekick

Unreliable Narrator

Book Review Monday: Compendium of Jewelry Making Techniques

TV Review: Outlander

Outlander – Complete Season 1 [DVD]

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‘Outlander follows the story of Claire Randall, a married combat nurse, who, in 1946, is mysteriously swept back in time to 1743, and immediately thrown into an unknown world where her life is threatened. When she is forced to marry Jamie, a chivalrous and romantic young Scottish warrior, a passionate affair is ignited that splits Claire’s heart between two vastly different men in two irreconcilable lives.’ – from Amazon

I loved the book, I loved this, it stuck remarkably well to the book, and retained it’s spirit throughout.

This is such an important book/TV show, because Claire is one of the best feminist characters around. With the exception of falling through time in the first place, things don’t happen to Claire, Claire happens to things.

She is a glorious main character, and I would urge to watch even if you’re not that interested in the Scottish Highlands, just for her and the relationships. And not just the romantic relationships, either – there’s the rebellion, prison breaks, poisoning, witchcraft trials, tax taking, murder and trying to get home that takes place. This is an adventure story with a romance at the heart of it, not a romance story.

I cannot recommend this enough. I am so excited to start watching the second season!

Tropes:

Disabled character

Gay characters

I Know the Future, Why Won’t You Listen?

Political Intrigue

Arranged Marriage

Stuck Between Two Genuinely Likable Lovers

Keeping Secrets

Jail Break

Damn the English

Unlikely Friends

New Cultures

Trigger Warnings:

Rape and attempted rape by men, male and female victims, including the main characters

Torture, both whipping and gross stabbing bits (you can fast forward most of the Jamie torture second in the last/second to last episode, everything you need to know is told to Claire by Jamie quite soon after, we watched about 1/3 of that ep cause we’re squeamish like that)

Historic and genre specific violence i.e stabbings and musket wounds

Animal death

Witch trials

Content Warnings:

Nudity, consensual sex

Swearing

 

 

Fantasy Thursday: Poison Study

Poison Study (The Chronicles of Ixia, Book 1)

 

I have honestly never read another book like it, so I can’t really compare it with something for you. It’s a fantastic book, about Yelena, a criminal who decides to become a food taster rather than be hanged.

But it turns out eating poisoned food is the least of her worries…

I really liked how Yelena is allowed to be self-centered and self-serving, I hate the recent trope that women have to give a crap what the people that are hurting them feel like. She is allowed to be angry, and afraid, and sad, she’s allowed to react like a real person to her shitty situation and that’s so refreshing.

I also like that you never know all that much more than Yelena does, so twists and turns have a lot more emotional impact because you don’t always see them coming.

Triggers: The main character is sexually assaulted and raped whilst she is sixteen, although this is handled well, and whilst graphic, the scenes are very short. Obviously, fantasy style violence, and gruesome poisons. Nothing you wouldn’t see out of a YA novel, but I wouldn’t file it as YA due to the rape scene, but others may disagree on that.

 

Read This If You Like

Tropes:

Enemies to Friends to Lovers

Political Conspiracy

Communism vs Capitalism (Fantasy Style)

Murder Mystery

Transgender Character

WoC Main Character

Betrayals and Backstabbing

 

Fantasy Thursday: Rivers of London

Buy It Here: Rivers of London: 1

My favourite sub-genre is fantasy/sci-fi police procedural. Don’t ask me why, that would take a whole other blog post and probably a book.

This is a witty take on the sub-genre that never quite removes the horror from it either. It’s a uniquely British story, which really ramps up the tension because British police can’t shoot their way out of scary supernatural situations like their American cousins.

Like all true British heroes, PC Peter Grant is constantly on the back foot – he’s not a detective, magic in this world is incredibly difficult to learn, and he’s constantly trying to juggle his new magical job whilst keeping it secret from everybody else.

There are no quick and easy solutions in these books, and a tiny decision made early on wreaks absolute havoc down the line later. The folklore explained never quite fits in with each other, which is deliberate – everyone has different opinions of what’s going on, and who’s who, and how the world works, just like real London. These books honestly seem realer than non-magic police books at times, I swear.

I like that we get to see a different side of the police – I couldn’t name you one book where the main character is anything less than a detective. I like that the magic does not overtake real life – Peter faces as much racism as he does hatred because he’s a wizard, if not more.  I like the higher mystery and meta-plot that runs through all of the books, and I like the way each character seems solid and real, even down to the side villains who take up a few pages.

I also really like that Peter loves architecture, and how that builds into the story – and that explains the whole series, really. Every twist and turn is just that little bit left of what you were expecting.

Read it if you like:

Similar Books/Shows/Films

TV: Grimm, Agent Carter , Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D

Books:

Night Watch by Terry Pratchett (Main character loves Pratchett, also 🙂 )

Tropes:

Books Where the Main Character is a Geek

Mixed Race Main Character

Disabled Character

Magic is Real but Secret

Fantasy Police

Top 5 Best Pagan Books

adayinthelifeofawitch

These are in no particular order, one, because they are all very good, and two, because they deal with such vastly different subjects it would be unfair to rank them. (Also, the first link in each, the actual name of the book is a link direct to that book on Amazon where you can buy it. It is an affiliate link which means I earn a tiny commission from Amazon should you buy anything through that link.)

1. Pagan Planet: Being, Believing & Belonging in the 21Century edited by Nimue Brown. Full review here. I’ve chosen this one, because it features so many varied  viewpoints on what it is to be Pagan, that there isn’t a person on the planet who won’t learn something new or be offered a new way of looking at the world when they read this book. This book has articles not just from writers, but from…

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3 Non-Pagan Books That Changed My Practice

adayinthelifeofawitch

Or, in the case of the first two, started it.

1. The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett. This is one of his YA novels, but don’t let that put you off. The best children’s novels have a power beyond that of the best adult ones. This book not only changed my practice, but my life. Tiffany Aching is a normal girl, with normal hair and normal eyes, who is allowed to be a normal girl. She makes catastrophic mistakes, and has flaws, flights of fancy, friends, fights and falls. Tiffany is that heroine that is denied so many little (and big) girls, someone real, someone flawed, someone good who isn’t always nice.  That has a power all of it’s own, but it’s the way magic works in Discworld that has always grabbed me, or rather the way witchcraft works. Tiffany’s main flaw is her selfishness, and she realises that it’s…

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Breaking the Mother Goose Code – A Book Review

Book Review Monday – Urban Druidry by Brendan Howlin

adayinthelifeofawitch

So this is basically a handbook, 101 style introduction to Urban Druidry as a thing removed from Druidry as a whole. Howlin says that the exercises included are open to anyone of any spiritual path.

 

The meandering, talkative nature of the book might annoy some people, but it put me much in mind of a gentleman who took the bus I used to take daily – ‘I’ll tell you another thing about the bloody Allotment Committee!’

 

That said, each small chapter is followed by a checklist of the exercises mentioned, so it is easy to put them in place and keep track of them.

 

The exercises and tips themselves are based on good evidence and sound sense. Howlin takes a balanced view of most things – in the chapter on medicine for example, he takes the sensible view – neither wholly for nor wholly against modern or…

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