Regarding book reviews

I was told not to smile for this
picture, but I love this MINK Viking
photo too much not to use it.

"Welcome stranger. The paths are treacherous today." - Binabik

Evidently this humble blog has gained enough of a reputation that I am now getting requests to do book reviews with greater frequency. If you are one of those newly published and/or established authors or publishers who wish me to review your book(s), this post (and identical page) is for you and I have formatted it in an FAQ manner. Please read the ENTIRE page if you are thinking of contacting me. (I am only making a post out of this to make sure people see it.)

Will I answer emails?

If you want me to review an actual book and if I can find unimpeachable evidence online that the book exists and it is not a spam email, then yes. However, I might not if comic books is what you want me to look at and absolutely will not if you want me to watch a movie. (Someone wanted me to review a zombie-apocalypse style comic once and the cover alone made me ill).

Do I write book reviews?

Tough question. I suppose I end up writing a book review for everything I read yet, as was the case with the Monarchies of God by Paul Kearney, the Novels of Tiger and Del by Jennifer Roberson, The Bone Queen by Alison Croggon, George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, and even The Book of Dust by Sir Philip Pullman, I do the same for books I quit and am seldom complementary. I would feel terrible accepting a book to review only to find myself less than fond of it. So, in answer to the question "Do I write book reviews", the short answer is: possibly, but do not hold your breath. The long answer is that I love the freedom of reading and fear that knowing I was reading a book purely to review it would sap my enjoyment of it; so while you are welcome to send me book-review requests there is a strong possibility that I will say no and a better one that, in the event that I say yes, I will hold off until I finish my current book. (I only read one book at a time, as otherwise I would spread both my mind and concentration too thin.) Remember that Stars Uncounted was meant to be a public diary of sorts rather than a review site, so please do not take a "no" answer personally.

What books would I review?

Not Dark/Gothic Fantasy. Not Science Fiction. Not Grimdark. Not graphic novels and/or comic books. If you want to know why then read my Types of Fantasy page. I read high-minded High Fantasy as per the Spirit of Tolkien. In short, I would review books I would naturally pick off the shelf and buy at a bookstore. Best just look at the Bookshelf here to see what I like reading and/or the other pages on Stars Uncounted.

 

If I agreed to read and review a book, how long would it take me?

As long as it takes. I read at the my own pace and will not be rushed. If you need a quick review then do not bother asking me. Given my busy schedule and the other hobbies any well-rounded person has (such as Kung Fu), I can usually read a 400+ page book every month or so.

One last thing...

If you were not thinking of asking me to write a review and only got the idea from reading this page then please pretend you never read this page. The point of this was not to open the floodgates but rather lay out basic expectations and ground rules. Why? Because most of those who have asked me for a book review have clearly not read much of Stars Uncounted, asking me to read and review urban romances, Dark Fantasy Horror novels, or a mix of both – and write as if I was an active fan of such things. If you are one of those authors and/or publishers and are reading this page now then I apologize for what might be justly called uncharitable bluntness; I am merely trying to make a point, because I get no joy out of refusing people and thus wrote this page in hopes that those who do desire to contact me will do so knowing both their chances and what sort of books I might actually agree to read and review.

What about the red ship on the horizon?

If you are a publisher and are interested in looking at the Fantasy series I wrote then by all means contact me. (Forgive any perceived conceit, but did anyone really expect me to write a Contact Me page without including this question? Everyone knows how difficult it is getting published these days, so I will use every advantage I have to do so – this my not always entirely humble blog included.)

"There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after." - J.R.R. Tolkien

"Follow your bliss." - Joseph Campbell

"Each of you is a separate, individual you. You are a unique person, with wild ideas about what's truly important. Each of you has a gift that only you can bring to the world. A way you can help that others couldn't. And the way you express that gift is to hear this: trust yourself. Trust your gift." - Chandra Nalaar

Tokyo 2020 Olympics Opening Ceremony honors Fantasy gaming

The opening ceremony for the Tokyo 2020/2021 Olympic Games featured a compilation of classic video game soundtracks to welcome its athletes to the stadium. Games made in Japan, of course, for there are some of the most time-honored ones made.

My jaw dropped on hearing them, but only because the Final Fantasy Main Theme sounds a lot like the Golden Sun one.

My father and I just finished Juniper Wiles by Charles de Lint

My father and I just finished Juniper Wiles by Charles de Lint. 

I have learned to expect the unexpected, even by Fantasy standards, from de Lint, and a teenage former actress who once played a plucky teen detective being asked by a ghost to solve a real-life case certainly qualifies as such. A solid urban Fantasy that seamlessly blends the complications of personal life and past careers with magic that walks in plain sight everyday for all to see yet goes unseen, Juniper Wiles – both the woman and book – shows that the best way to take life is in stride, accepting past triumphs and failures while forging ahead even if you really have no idea where the road will end so long as true friends have your back every step of the way. And that life, regardless of how it came about, is always worth defending.

So long Juniper Wiles, Jilly Coppercorn, Gabi, Nick, Tam, Joe, Saskia, and all the many other quirky characters who call Bramleyhaugh home.

I have again started The Other Wind by Ursula K. Le Guin

I have again started The Other Wind by Ursula K. Le Guin, the fifth and final book of her Earthsea Cycle. 

This is it. This is the book that is the crown jewel of Earthsea, showing Le Guin at the height of her skill. For now does the matter and mysteries of death and Dragons, of Kingship, power and its price, and peace come together. 

"Farther west than west

beyond the land

my people are dancing

on the other wind." - The Song of the Woman of Kemay

I have just finished Tales from Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

I have just finished Tales from Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin, which I began for the very first time before deciding to reread the whole Earthsea Cycle in its proper, chronological, order; meaning I just finished the book's final novella, which was written as a dragon-bridge between volumes four and five of the main series. Twas a privilege and wonder to witness the founding of the School of Roke, see that love ranks higher than magery, how Ogion stilled the earthquake with his teacher and, at last, learning the origins of Orm Irian who journeys west of west. Frankly I cannot believe I never read this before.

 

“What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives.” - Azver, the Master Patterner

Golden Sun

 Stars Uncounted is a proud supporter and fierce advocate of Operation Sunrise, which is the effort to garner support for a reboot and fourth game of the Golden Sun gameboy game series. Golden Sun is, in my mind, the pinnacle of handheld RBG games, and not only because it was the first I ever played. Indeed, the game has a very special place in my heart and memories. When I was little I loved watching my older cousin playing video games as a rule, but my earliest recollections of such is of Golden Sun. We were all staying at our maternal grandparents house and he was always the first one up, and often I was the second; so I would tiptoe through that silent house, downstairs, through the dining room and kitchen to the Family Room where he would invariably be sitting with a Gameboy Advance in hand. I was lucky, for I joined him playing through the first dungeon, Sol Sanctum, and when I asked were he was he said "the Temple of the Sun," which is what I called the game for years afterwards. But even then, knowing next to nothing about the game, I was invested in it, for Kraden was my favorite character and him getting kidnapped mightily offended my young mind. I also loved watching him (my cousin) find and use the various Djinn and their Summons.

Eventually I was gifted the games and, with the Prima Official Strategy Guide in hand, I began playing myself. And fell in love. There is no other way to describe it, for the story was so utterly unique, personable, and gripping, all coupled and augmented by a brilliant role-playing-based battle system and puzzles which so inventive, brilliant and complex that even with the strategy guide I stumbled, occasionally having to ask my parents for help. Ask my mother about Air's Rock in Golden Sun: The Lost Age and she will remember how it took all we had not to get lost. Frankly, I could go on and on, for even now, with many and more games under my belt, I still rank Golden Sun as the crown jewel. I laughed and cried with the characters, for it was like a favorite book that just kept getting better and, to this day and despite never having played through it again, I still remember all characters' names and most of the conversations. I will not breathe a word more about the storyline, though, so as not to rob others of the chance to enter into the world of Weyard as I did, free of foreknowledge and ready for an epic adventure.

And yet, after two phenomenal games, no news ones came out until I was in high school - Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, which follows the children of the original heroes and was a solid game in its own right. But no new Golden Sun titles have come out since. Frankly, I still do not understand why nearly a decade passed between the first two games and Dark Dawn, much less why Nintendo has seemingly dropped the ball so completely since, because if we accept as true the aphorism that it is folly to change a winning game then it is doubly so for stopping one. Golden Sun still has a large and devoted fandom, and we want to see our dear friends again (and finally get a chance to fight Alex.) That is why I have made this a page as well as a post: to stand as undimmed reminder that Operation Sunrise must succeed.

Age of Legends - a The Wheel of Time movie trilogy

I will leave the dramatics aside this time. Along with Amazon’s The Wheel of Time T.V. series, there is to be three prequel movies set during the Second Age, the Age of Legends. As The Hollywood Reporter describes it, "Age of Legends will be set several millennia before the time of the books and in a futuristic utopia powered by a magical force shared by men and women known as the One Power. When an unspeakable evil is unleashed upon the world and men using the One Power become insane and destroy much of the planet, a small band of women unite under the White Tower and are humanity’s last hope of survival."

Not quite sure what to think of this, to put it bluntly, as the basic implication is that this triad of movies will feature the War of Shadow and the Breaking of the World leading up to the founding of the Tower by the surviving female Aes Sedai. Not that there is anything wrong with that from a lore prospective, but this will make for a harrowing set of films seeing that the Dragon, Lews Therin Telamon, did not have the happy ending his reincarnation did.

"And the Shadow fell upon the Land, and the World was riven stone from stone. The oceans fled, and the mountains were swallowed up, and the nations were scattered to the eight corners of the World. The moon was as blood, and the sun was as ashes. The seas boiled, and the living envied the dead. All was shattered, and all but memory lost, and one memory above all others, of him who brought the Shadow and the Breaking of the World. And him they named Dragon." ~  from Aleth nin Taerin alta Camora, The Breaking of the World. Author unknown, the Fourth Age.

I guess it depends on taste. Reading about it is one thing, but watching a whole utopian world-spanning civilization collapsing first into horrific war against the Shadow and then back into the stone age in what can in slight understatement be called an apocalypse would be rather distressing, though seeing the White Tower getting founded might indeed be worth a venture into what is called the Second Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past.