Historical Fantasy

[suciul]

suciul, it seems we're bound to agree to disagree on historical novels. I found In the Courts to rather lop-sided. The ancient Maya stuff was fantastic and I loved it. It was the rest pf the book was rather meh: no real sense of impending doom, a Gary Stu main character, unbelievable twist ending. It's almost two novels in one book and that's the problem. The story set in the Maya timeline ended up having almost no impact on the plotline so it could have been scrapped entirely. I really wanted to like this book, but I couldn't.

I think a lot depends on how you like the narrator for the present day stuff - I am generally very meh on thrillers as such and I tend to get bored rather than "thrilled" by the approaching end of the world scenarios so I rarely read/enjoy such - very hard to suspend disbelief and make them real for me - so the suspense or lack of it did not bother me, but I loved the "gonzo" narration.

Also the novel is first in a trilogy - a fact that I had no idea of when I read it and I figured it out only after the ending which was like "huh?? what's this - should be more..." so I finally checked the author site, the small print and it says there "book 1 of the Sacrifice Game trilogy" - so who knows how the Maya stuff will develop later...

Compare this with Rapture by Liz Jensen, a book that had me enthralled for 150-200 pages when the interactions between the disabled lady psychologist and the weird girl killer were amazing, and then when it got to the "thriller" part, the heroes were frantic, the doom was approaching and I was yawning...

Anyway the sequel to ItCoS is an asap and one of the few books I would like to have *now* and would drop anything I read for it when I will get it

Back on topic there are two more books that fit here and that I found out recently, one I read and loved really a lot- Father of the Locks by A. Killeen which is an Arabian Nights like tale - stories within story - set in the Baghdad of Harun al Rashid , and one which i have an arc and plan to read soon, Triumff by Dan Abnett, a sort of steampunk, pseudo-Victoriana (tbp Oct 1 by Angry Robot)