Endearing slice-of-life drama about a young roller-skate waitress who lives in a Texas trailer park with her extended family, except for her Dad, who wandered off years before, and her uncle, who lives in a van outside. When a rich boy asks her for a date, I got the jeebie jeebies thinking this was going to turn out to be a certain type of story, but thankfully it isn't, and it's mostly about her finding her Dad, finding out the truth about her uncle and training with her fellow waitresses for a roller-skate derby. The poverty is heartbreaking, the people are wonderful, and life is full of ups and downs. Wonderful

It feels almost unfair to get Simon Vance to read a Guy Gavriel Kay book, elevating as it does the magnificent to the sublime. Returning yet again to his slightly-alternate pre-Renaissance world, this is the story of a merchant/corsair and his female partner, an ex-slave trained as a bodyguard, and the forces unleashed when they carry out an assassination culminating in an attack on another city as revenge for the fall of Sarantium years before. Kay does his usual weaving of stories that criss-cross the main narrative, tracing the effects of the actions of the main characters on the lives of people affected, for better or for worse, but the tapestry conceals a finely trained bow that send unerring arrows of bittersweet heartbreak to strike home nore often than seems reasonable even in a very good book like this.

In a medieval world that's like a seedy and disreputable neighbour to Guy Gavriel Kay's, where paganism is giving away to Christianity, the bastard son of a pagan king is invited to go seek his fortune elsewehere, and with a stableboy and tutor as his companions, he has assorted encounters and adventures that mingle the sacred and the profane more or less routinely, and which are as often baffling to everyone concerned as not. Peregrine soon gets the swing of things, however. With it high erudition and colourful characters and situations, this is Umberto Eco crossed with jack Vance, but, as with all Davidson, still very much its own thing

I find Penman's prose difficult to read - it's solid enough, to the point of stodginess. In all other regards, she is astonishing, taking events that are plagued by the arbitrary, the disastrous, the astonishingly foolish, the utterly unnecessary and more than a few bolts from the blue, and builds her novel around them with amazing skill. The fictional characters she creates out of historical personalities live and breathe, such that their responses to the unpredictable, and their own self-inflicted disasters, flow smoothly and naturally. She somehow weaves the book through a history that is often mistfying and even repetitive without the pace ever flagging or becoming unmoored. Beginning with the nation-breaking disaster of the White Ship and all the subsequent bad decisions, unhappy marriages, cheerful arrogance and entitlement, grim determination, rage and betrayal and widespread suffering and destruction, the narrative is epic, sweeping and spellbinding.

What's that you say? A simple job to pick up a waitress turns into a series of murders, mutliations, kidnappings, firebombings and funny money? Steph and Joe finally get it on, but naturally that only makes things between them even more compliacted? The usual trouble and mayhem, that's all.

Kamet, slave to the Memet ambassador whose plans ended so catastrophically in a previous volume, has a bright future ahead of him, albeit as a slave who can get beaten quite savagely at a moment's notice and who will probably be put to death when his master dies, but hey, everybody dies. The idea of running away is ridiculous and absurd to him, but nonetheless, on the run is what he finds himself after the unthinkable happens, in the company of a loyal Attolian soldier who may not be as stupid as he initially appears, and they struggle to survive and escape capture and an unlikely friendship develops, all the while Kamet is keeping a crucial secret to himself as he waits for an opportunity to escape from his rescuer. 

Another wonderful, enagaging and moving adventure in the world of The Thief.

Peter Grant gets to let his architectural freak flag fly when a series of grisly and weird events send him undercover in a tower block designed by an archtitect with a magical plan. With all the deaths and sisnister goings on, it seems clear the Faceless Guy is involved somehow. God the narration is so damn good on these.

After the shock ending of the previous book, I felt obliged to plough on with the next to keep up the impetus. In which Peter leaves London for a routine check in association with the disappearance of two local girls and becomes drawn into the case because the local police are utterly at a loss and willing to let the weirdos from the magic squad have a go, which he does, and suddenly, unicorns are chasing him about the woods on a moonlit night.

I've reached the limit of my binge, as determined by the library loan system, but in this one the simmering battle with the Faceless Man escalates after the drug-related death of a young woman involves the daughter of one of the Rivers, to whom Peter owes a big favour, said favour being called in to keep said daughter out of it. Peter being very much a lateral operator, nonethelss does his best, but there's a whole can of worms and murders let loose involving stolen magical books and artefacts and teams of US intelligence contractors running around and getting in the way. 

One has to imagine a Myles Na Gopeleen column, already prone to shaggy dogginess, grew doggier and shaggier and dressed in the splendid, if bedraggled, robes of Rome after the Fall, and Europe awash with a million Christian sects and flavours of Pagansim, but also dragons, sphinxes, Little People, petty kingdoms, small barbarian hordes and those leftover rags of the splendours of Rome vaguely trying to hold it all together. Into this wanders Peregrine, cast-out bastard son of a king, transfromed of late into his namesake, the bird, that is, and just as suddenly and unexpectedly re-transformed and tagging along in a search for some dragon-stolen treasure. The whole thing meanders near and far and wide until it finally meanders to a conclusion, leaving everyone involved even more perplexed than when it all began. Magnificent.