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…
Tag: fantasy
Review: Daughter of Light
It looks like a snowflake etched into her flesh, covering her palm, curling toward her fingers, white as snow. And it glows. There are several possible explanations of this. Witchcraft is only one. Rowen Mar covered up her mark with a sword glove, but she couldn’t extinguish the power that pulsed behind it. It was…
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: When Pop Culture and High Fantasy Collide
In my review of Realms Thereunder, I said that Ross Lawhead was like D. Barkley Briggs in rejecting the ideal Elves of Tolkien for the ambiguous fairies of folklore. There is another way in which they are similar: Both invoked pop culture in their fantasy novels. I’ve been pondering this. Is it a bad idea…
CSFF Blog Tour: The Realms Thereunder
He’s a homeless man living on the streets of Oxford, trying to eat and yearning for the realms thereunder. She’s an Oxford student with a lifetime of lies and an abundance of compulsions – dreading every day the realms thereunder. It’s hard to say which of them has the bigger problem. As children, Daniel and…
CSFF Blog Tour: Tinkerbell vs. Elrond
Modern fantasy was weaned on J. R. R. Tolkien. Among the precedents he yielded to us is that of the tall, beautiful, wise Elf. This Elf’s principal rival in modern culture is the Fairy – the Pretty Butterfly Fairy, glittery and about fifteen inches tall. You would ask the Elf what to do with a…
CSFF Blog Tour: Aion, Aslan, and Balder
Many Christian fantasy worlds have, as their right religion, a simple monotheism. Characters will speak of, and pray to, the One God – the Maker, He is sometimes called, or the Creator. But holy books are elusive, the places and practices of worship are vague, and redemption is a belief rather than the finished work…
CSFF Blog Tour: Corus the Champion
The sky was yellow with a strange storm. That was their first sign. Their second, less subtle sign was the messages the ravens dropped at their feet. “You have been chosen,” they read, “for a life of great purpose. Adventure awaits you in the Hidden Lands.” Now the four Barlow brothers are in the Hidden…
Blog Tour: Worlds Unseen
The past comes back. Forty long years ago the Council for Exploration Into Worlds Unseen came apart, ending tumultuously after an all-too-brief quest for hidden truth. Its members scattered, took up new lives. Died, a few of them. Now, four decades after they knocked at the door of worlds unseen, the worlds unseen are knocking…
Blog Tour: Interview with Rachel Starr Thomson
November’s CSFF blog tour has been moved to early December, but no fears – we’re still going to have a blog tour this month. This tour’s book is Worlds Unseen, book one of the Seventh World Trilogy. It is written by Rachel Starr Thomson, a freelance editor and writer who has authored numerous fiction and…