Fantasy Reviews

Rampant

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I think this book and story line could have a lot of potential as a young adult novel and future fantasy series but I think it ended up being too big and ambitious for one book. It also ended up losing a lot by going for the easy way out in characterization and in trying too hard to cater to a teen audience.

In this story poor Astrid has to switch gears pretty hard to go from a typical teenage girl seriously considering letting a guy sleep with her to get asked to the prom to having him be almost murdered by a renegade unicorn (a being that, until that moment, Astrid had firmly believed was a myth). As a result Astrid, a virgin from a bloodline of unicorn hunters, gets sent abroad to a special cloister for training in becoming a fearsome hunter of these bloodthirsty, semi-intelligent beasts. Unfortunately Astrid does not want to become a unicorn hunter and finds out that the cloisters contain more secrets than answers and that perhaps the world of unicorn hunting is not all that it seems.

The Fellowship of the Ring

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A long time ago the Rings of Power were forged by the Elves and distributed amongst the leaders of Middle Earth. An evil Dark Lord named Sauron then forged the One Ring to rule them all and used it to gain completely dominion over the people of Middle Earth. He fell in a great battle and the Ring was taken from him and everyone thought it was lost forever. Then the events of The Hobbit occurred and the Ring passed by chance onto a Hobbit named Bilbo.

Now years have passed, the Dark Lord Sauron has been slowly regaining power and the fact that the One Ring has fallen into the hands of a Hobbit has become known to him. The Ring passes to Frodo, Bilbo’s cousin and heir. With the help of his friends Frodo must flee the Shire and manage to take the Ring to the Cracks of Doom, the only place the Ring can be destroyed, or risk having Sauron rise to power once again. With the help of the elves a Fellowship is formed to help Frodo with his quest to bear the Ring to its destruction. But, can this quest possibly succeed when so much depends on one so very small?

Ice

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Would you risk everything for a fairy tale? Cassie was a young girl growing up in an Arctic research station. Her grandmother used to tell her stories about Cassie’s mother, the daughter of the North Wind. The story went like this:

When the North Wind wanted a daughter he asked the Polar Bear King to kidnap for him a child. In return the North Wind promised his new daughter in marriage to the Polar Bear King. Before she came of age she met a human man and fell in love with him. When the Polar Bear King came to claim her it was to find her heart already belonged to another. The daughter of the North Wind asked him to hide her and her human love from her father and in return she would give him their first born daughter as a wife. The Polar Bear King hid them in snow and ice but it wasn’t enough. The North Wind found her when the cries from her new born was heard by one of his brothers. He came and whisked her away to a Troll Castle and she was never seen again.

Now that Cassie is grown up she realizes that her grandmother’s story was just a nice way of telling her that her mother was dead. She lives in the real world now, working at her father’s Arctic research station. She is a very literal minded aspiring scientist and is very passionate about her work tagging and tracking polar bears as part of her father’s research. On the night of her eighteenth birthday she stumbles across the largest polar bear she has ever seen. Her attempts to tag it come to naught as the bear actually seems to dissolve into a wall of ice. She breaks protocol and attempts to track the bear for hours only to return to the station defeated. When she tells her father of meeting the bear he freaks out, but not for the reasons she expects. All of a sudden he wants to send her to Anchorage. Now. Before it’s too late. It turns out her father and grandmother actually believe the fairy tale she was told in childhood is true and that the Polar Bear King has come to claim her as his bride. Thinking her family has gone insane she sneaks out to try and tag the bear again to prove it is just a bear once and for all, only to have him appear before her, and start to speak…

The Hobbit

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It’s hard to write a review about a classic like The Hobbit. You can’t help but be awed by the history and literary significance of the books (and I include both The Hobbit and the trilogy that follows when I say this) upon which so much of epic fantasy literature is now based. Everything from the heroes quest to the world building, from the wizards and dragons to the goblins and elves scream fantasy to you and you can’t help but realize that this was one of the first, and that definitely gives you pause and something to think about.

The Cambist and Lord Iron

by Daniel Abraham

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This short story was originally part of a collection of short stories titled Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories, a collection of stories based on winning words at the Scripps National Spelling Bee. It was also published in The Years Best Fantasy and Horror 2008. “The Cambist and Lord Iron”, of course, was based on the word cambist. A cambist is a person that exchanges money from one exchange rate to another (franks to pounds, yen to dollars). In this story the cambist is approached by a rich man (Lord Iron) who wants to make trouble and exchange some very rare and practically unknown type of bills for pounds sterling. By English law the cambist must legally exchange the money in 24 hours. In this both Lord Iron and the reader learn an interesting lesson about economics that begins about money and ends about far greater things than that.