Jan 24
2005
Like A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh series, Scottish author Sir J. M. Barrie's most famous work walks a fine line between preciousness and genuine fun--and manages, most of the time, to keep its ba...
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Jan 24
2005
Mike Carey is the author of a four-issue comic book miniseries from Vertigo entitled My Faith in Frankie. While this book won’t be the title that converts the English-speaking world into comic b...
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Jan 24
2005
As with pretty much all fantasy stories published in the past decade, Herbie Brennan’s Faerie Wars series is routinely compared to Harry Potter, although the two series have almost nothing in comm...
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Jan 13
2005
Please note: the plot of Diana Wynne Jones's novel Deep Secret is convoluted, the characters are slow to develop, and Jones's conception of magic is not the usual whiz-bang Harry Potter-style acti...
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Dec 31
2004
Cameron Dokey is yet another author of re-told fairy tales. (Pretty soon we're going to need a special icon for just for those, aren't we?) I've read more imaginative and richly characterized ex...
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Dec 8
2004
Laura Esquivel's fame hit the high-water mark with the 1993 release of Like Water For Chocolate. (The book and film versions of Like Water For Chocolate were released in the U.S. at the same time,...
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Dec 7
2004
Kurt Vonnegut is one of the very few "important" mid-to-late 20th century writers whose books are not, actually, complete downers. That's not to say that his books don't have their emotionally se...
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Dec 7
2004
A mystery/romance told entirely through letters (which have to be taken out of the book and read) and lushly illustrated postcards, Canadian author Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine stories are th...
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Nov 29
2004
Rumiko Takahashi is the creator of four long-running, influential, and insanely entertaining manga series--Urusei Yatsura, Ranma ½, Maison Ikkoku, and InuYasha Sengoku o Togi Zoshi--as well as a h...
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Nov 29
2004
Brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were a pair of 19th century German scholars who began collecting ancient German folktales as a way of researching the philological aspects of law. Naturally, I ha...
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Nov 29
2004
Relying on the Disney versions of Cinderella, Snow White, and Beauty and the Beast to give you a sense of the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales is about as effective as trying to pass a mythology class...
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Nov 14
2004
The lust, angst, and violence quotient in Kelley Armstrong's stories of werewolves and witches is perfectly balanced between Annette Curtis Klause's Blood and Chocolate and Laurell K. Hamilton's A...
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Nov 3
2004
Terry Pratchett is like God's gift to fantasy fans. Some of his books might blend a bit together, but Pratchett is witty (capable of making puns funny--it's true! Yes, it can be done!) and he ca...
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Oct 17
2004
Jasper Fforde is the author of a series of dazzlingly silly and imaginative alternate universe/adventure/detective stories, including The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, ...
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Oct 17
2004
C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia are Wordcandy classics, and I am afraid that yes, you do have to read them. If you read them as a kid, it was probably pretty easy to just ignore all the anvil-s...
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Oct 16
2004
The character of Timothy Hunter--the original black-haired, bespectacled British boy wizard--was introduced in a Neil Gaiman-penned miniseries in 1990, and DC's Vertigo Comics has trotted him out ...
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Oct 7
2004
T. H. White is the author of 1958's The Once and Future King, a "novel" (actually a collection of four of his earlier books) that begins with the education of the young King Arthur and ends with h...
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Sep 23
2004
Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is an extraordinary book, but Bloomsbury’s attempt to market it as “Harry Potter for grown-ups” is misleading. Clarke’s ten-years-in-the-making debut novel is a witty, wildly imaginative book that’s certain to knock the socks off any English Lit major...
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Aug 19
2004
Englishwoman Susanna Clarke is the author of the almost universally praised novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (the subject of one of our Book of the Week reviews) as well as a handful of shor...
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Aug 19
2004
Despite being the author of the totally awesome The Phantom Tollbooth, the geek classic The Dot and the Line, and a handful of other bizarre-but-amazing kids' books, Norton Juster's focus has rema...
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Aug 14
2004
While all of Chabon's books are excellent, two in particular are Wordcandy. His young adult book Summerland is a gorgeously written novel that does for American mythology what Susan Cooper and Ll...
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Aug 14
2004
Eoin Colfer is one of the many, many fine authors to have been relegated to the "If you loved the Harry Potter books, try ___" list, which always irritates me because it seems like so many o...
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Aug 14
2004
My little brother is incapable of reading Susan Cooper’s two-time Newbury Award-winning The Dark Is Rising series without giving this whiny speech about how none of the books’ suspense actually wo...
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Aug 14
2004
Despite the fact that he's always photographed dressed up in black t-shirts and leather jackets, looking like he'd be happier with a skull in one hand, Neil Gaiman is actually capable of being a t...
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Aug 14
2004
Mary Stewart is best known for her Merlin trilogy. They are beautifully written, and anyone who likes Arthurian legend should enjoy them. (Although I can't say that I do. But then, the only ver...
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Aug 14
2004
While most of Patricia Wrede’s early fantasy books read like sub-par Robin McKinley, her Dealing With Dragons series and her fairytale adaptation Snow White and Rose Red are both very entertaining...
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Aug 14
2004
Gail Carson Levine is like the diet version of Robin McKinley. Her books never get quite as freaky as some of Ms. McKinley's weirder stuff, but then she never gets quite as good, either. But if ...
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Aug 14
2004
If you judge by the reader comments in the review sections of Amazon.com, fans of Robin McKinley are a varied bunch. While all of her books can be filed under “fantasy”, the scope and tone of her...
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Aug 14
2004
I think lumping Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy in with the Harry Potter books is criminal. If you must compare Pullman's work to something, try Susan Cooper, and please don't press a...
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Aug 14
2004
If you don't know who J. K. Rowling is, you've been living under a rock. If you have rejected reading her books out of a knee-jerk reaction to their overwhelming popularity or the belief that no ...
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