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REVIEW- Shackled Fates (The Hanged God #2) by Thilde Kold Holdt
Bend me over and call me Sally. Shackled Fates was somehow better than Northern Wrath and I LOVED it. Close your eyes and imagine waking up in another time, a time for brutality, a time for pain, a time of the gods. Holdt as always transports me into the rugged Norse landscape and has me instantly picking up a shield ready to defend both honour and family. You are walking through the blood-soaked plains, weapons are discarded, the ravens are flying overhead and the sound of metal upon metal can be heard in the distance. That’s why Holdt’s books are a special kind of magic. Shackled Fates is a story…
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The Long Walk by Stephen King – REVIEW
In my crazy attempt to read all of Stephen King’s back catalogue, I chose The Long Walk at random. Written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman you can instantly recognise King’s cutthroat style. The story has no build-up other than for a few pages, you are instantly catapulted into this dystopian America, you have no reference to why The Long Walk takes place or how the boys ended up there. It’s a story that has a mental and physical assault upon you. Your legs feel like they will cramp up the further along you read. Never has a story pulled me in so quickly and left me with so many more…
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The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley – REVIEW
The Loney was on my shelf for about four or five years and maybe subconsciously something was keeping me from reading it. Perhaps I should have listened to myself. It’s been shelved numerous times as horror, but I didn’t feel any elements of horror to the storyline apart from the atmospheric edge that The Loney held. Was the storyline slow, yes. Was I frustrated with the plot, also yes. Anyone that knows me well knows that struggle with religious storylines and had I known how heavily this story focusses on it I would probably have left well alone. I think possibly my expectations were way too high going into this…
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Review: Red Country by Joe Abercrombie SPOILERS!!
Red Country for me anyway, was a bit of a departure for the First Law Series. I was very excited at the prospect of a western type fantasy novel but it fell flat. Why do you ask? Firstly, it was slow as all hell. I understand that a new novel based in an entirely new area needs build-up but it just failed to grasp my imagination, unlike, the previous novel, The Heroes. Also, Abercrombie is renowned for his stellar characterisations, but, one character, in particular, Cosca ended up falling, it isn’t what was expected from him. He ended up turning a bit sociopathic and child-killing is something I thought that…
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Review: The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie
“Armour …’ mused Whirrun, licking a finger and scrubbing some speck of dirt from the pommel of his sword, ‘is part of a state of mind … in which you admit the possibility … of being hit.”― Joe Abercrombie, The Heroes What kind of magic does Joe Abercrombie spin? From first reading The Blade Itself I have become entranced at both his unparalleled skill of taking a small minor character and transforming them into huge players of the game, he also is a supreme creator of intricate plots. This has been my favorite installment of the series by far, the NORTH fascinates me. I loved the POV’s from Logen, dogman, and Black…
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Last Argument of Kings by Joe Abercrombie | Book Review
Well shit…. Put a fork in me, I’m done. Between my recent readings of John Gwynne and Joe Abercrombie, this has finished me off. I have a book hangover that would rival some of my wilder student days spent drinking tequila on only a few hours sleep. These days it takes the recovery time of minor surgery to get over both drinking and books that are this bloody sublime! “I have learned all kinds of things from my many mistakes. The one thing I never learn is to stop making them.” Last Argument of Kings is the third and final instalment in the First Law Series and what an absolute…