If you ever go to the Faerie realms, there are things you should know. One of the first is this: Your true name is your real self. Don’t share it lightly. You are not likely to hear a Faerie’s true name, for they are bound by the same laws and keep their names carefully. But…
Tag: blog tour
CSFF Blog Tour: Starflower
Eanrin has always known to never get involved in the affairs of mortals. If all Faeries had that policy, the Hidden Land would have lived out a happier story. But as the lost daughter of the Eldest walked a road darkened by Faerie, so her path will fatefully cross a Faerie’s again. And again. In…
CSFF Blog Tour: Weird R Us
“I’ve been coming to Montserrat for a few years now. On one early visit I actually arrived and realized I had returned before the last time I was here! From Brother Lazarus’ point of view, we had not yet had the previous visit.” She gave a little laugh. “That was a real mind bender. In…
CSFF Blog Tour: Proceeding by Inquiry
When the Bright Empires series began with The Skin Map, I found the religious element to be scant. It grew stronger in The Bone House, a quiet but steady undercurrent throughout the novel. In The Spirit Well, religion has a stronger presence yet. This comes mainly from the Zetetic Society, a group devoted to exploring…
CSFF Blog Tour: The Spirit Well
There are certain things you know. The ground is solid, death is death, yesterday is past, and tomorrow is coming. But if ever you cross the ley lines and slip into the muliverse, you may end up deciding that you never really knew anything. In The Spirit Well, Stephen Lawhead continues the grand adventure of…
CSFF Blog Tour: Creative License
Yesterday I wrote that, in Karyn Henley’s Angelaeon Circle, God is not really God and the angels are not really angels. Chawna Schroeder and Julie Bihn wrote similar criticisms, going into Scripture to show the difference between Karyn Henley’s angels and God’s. Becky Miller wrote that the angels in the Angelaeon Circle are invented beings…
CSFF Blog Tour: Eye of the Sword
Trevin, newly made a comain for the king, was sent on a quest to find allies for the kingdom. And the missing comains. And an oracle. And a magical harp. And himself. He quickly got sidetracked into the right direction. On a ranging search, from the mountains to the edge of the sea, he found…
CSFF Blog Tour: Breath of Angel
It is one thing to wonder if angles are real; it is another to wonder if you should trust them. And it is something else entirely to wonder if you are an angel. Karyn Henley’s Breath of Angel begins in a temple, where everything is clear and the world is limited. When the novice priestess…
CSFF Blog Tour: Attercop, Shelob, and Ungoliant
Human beings seem, by nature, to find something loathsome about spiders. Jonathan Edwards compared sinners in the hands of an angry God to spiders. Others have found spiders even more creepy than repulsive, and to many they’re the stuff of nightmares and phobias. Speculative fiction has responded to this old human fear with giant spiders….
CSFF Blog Tour: Red Shirts and Snapped Threads
In my last post, I criticized Beckon for its high casualty rate. I thought it would be good, today, to consider why characters are killed, and why they ought to be. One common reason for killing characters is to (in the words of one author) “create peril”. Many poor red shirts* have lost their lives…