#raymond e. feist

[turning-pages-seeking-sages]

Books that made me cry Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman Faerie Tale by Raymond E. Feist Roses in the Mouth of a Lion by Bushra Rehman Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson

GoodRead links, ratings, quotes, and reasons under the cut.

Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend

Goodreads link | 💧💧💧💧💧 (5/5 tears)

"[Shield Flower] had to die as all do, knowing only that to posterity the fates would undoubtedly deal both blessings and trauma; she had to die as all do, hoping that those who came after her would demonstrate the same determination to be strong that she herself had shown."

Why did it make me cry? The themes of sacrifice, legacy, and survival. As a Mexican American who has struggled with identity in environments where assimilation was a matter of physical, social, and financial safety, there is a lot of pain tied to my cultural heritage. And shame.

Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman

Goodreads link | 💧💧💧💧💧 (5/5 tears)

Thomas looked at her standing with her delicate arms and legs and thought how odd it was that children were small, and that they found this normal. He could not remember being small. What must he look like to her, standing so far above her, holding that murderous hammer? What did it feel like to know you lived or died at the whim of the giants around you?

Why did it make me cry? The usual reasons when it comes to God and human suffering. The beauty of redemption.

Faerie Tale by Raymond E. Feist

Goodreads link | 💧💧💧💧 (4/5 tears)

"They instinctively knew the rules of crossing. They couldn’t look down or back. They couldn’t speak. They couldn’t run. And they couldn’t stop. To do any of those things would allow the thing below the bridge to come rushing up, to grab the boys and drag them back to its lair. The boys didn’t make the rules, they just knew them and abided by them."

Why did it make me cry? Feist transported me back to childhood, with its wonder and terrors. The focus on feelings of powerlessness and loss of agency during the darker moments resonated and shook something loose.

Roses in the Mouth of a Lion by Bushra Rehman

Goodreads link | 💧💧💧💧 (4/5 tears)

"I had a sudden irrational desire to hug her, but there was so much distance between us. My birth had been only the beginning of our separation, the first time I was cut loose. From that moment until now, I'd just been going farther and farther away, my body a lifeboat pushing into the ocean."

Why did it make me cry? I came out to my deeply religious parents this year. It was not disastrous but I also feel like nothing has changed. I still feel separate from them and struggle to reconcile these two versions of myself. Will I ever be able to be just one person?

Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson

Goodreads link | 💧💧💧💧 (4/5 tears)

"The beauty of a thing justified its plunder."

Why did it make me cry? The pain of the characters when they felt rejected, not supported, and not protected. Thinking about strained relationships between parents and siblings.

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[fairyysoup]

reviews i have written this year on goodreads: a collection

[haveyoureadthisfantasybook]

vote yes if you have finished the entire book.

vote no if you have not finished the entire book.

(faq · submit a book)

[boooklover]

“Love doesn’t demand; it accepts. It has taken me my life to learn this."

Raymond E. Feist, Mistress of the Empire

[staringdownabarrel]

Okay, so I just finished Daughter of the Empire by Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts. (I said this was going to be a thing, and by god, it's going to be a thing.) Here's my thoughts.

In a lot of ways, this book really does smooth over a lot of the issues Magician had. Instead of just being a fairly generic fantasy story, it has a very tight focus on Tsurani political maneuvering. There's a level of political savviness in this book that literally doesn't exist in most of Feist's other works. While other characters in the Riftwar saga do have political considerations, it's usually not their only concern the same way the political considerations are Mara's only concern.

The fact that this book focuses so heavily on Tsurani politics also means that it's one of the very few Feist books that isn't heavily inspired by medieval European politics. This is one of the elements that I wish Magician had done more with as well, and it certainly had the opportunity to. I think this is a more interesting direction to go down because the Tsurani cultural elements is one of the aspects that made the original book stand out.

Mara being a woman also means that this is one of the very few books that not only has a woman with an arc not based around her current love interest (in fact, she doesn't have one), it's also one of his best written female characters ever. I suspect that this was probably largely due to Wurts' influence as cowriter, but I can't actually prove that because I haven't read any of her other books. For me, based on what I know as of this writing, it's just a suspicion.

I think the big thing Daughter of the Empire does well is that it avoids one of the big pitfalls a book like it could fall into. Because the main plot of this book is happening at the same time as some of the events as Magician (the reason I'm going with the Empire trilogy before Silverthorn and A Darkness at Sethanon), it could have easily have just been a rehash of a lot of the same plot points but from a different perspective.

And because it happens to have a much tighter focus than Magician--the plot happens over the course of maybe two or three years on the outside rather than the twelve-ish years that Magician's plot spans--it could have just been a book that amounted to, "...and here's a detailed description of this battle, and this one, and this one..." until the end of time. It chose to focus on the political aspects of what happens almost entirely.

The fact that it manages to avoid both of these tendencies means that, at least to me, Daughter of the Empire is one of the best interquels I've read.

[mrkapao]

“There are two kinds of strength. Power and the ability to wield it is obvious, but resilience, the ability to resist power, is the other.”

- Raymond E. Feist ‘The Chaoswar Saga: Magician's End’

[hyenamad]

Decided to reread Magician(1982) by Raymond E. Feist while offline for work and now the riftwar cycle is consuming my every thought. Such a good book and series, highly recommend.

[bookcoversonly]

Title: Magician | Author: Raymond E. Feist | Publisher: Harper Voyager (2012)

[zippocreed501]

AUTHOR EXTRAORDINAIRE

'Writing is hard work; its also the best job Ive ever had.'

'I don't write fantasy; I write historical novels about an imaginary place.'

'I won't say that writing is therapy, but for me, the act of writing is therapy. The ability to be productive is good for my mental health. It's always better for me to be writing than vegetating on some couch.'

'Mostly I'm writing about people, so I feel constrained to take with me my view of people, my curiosity about how people choose the things they do and why they come to certain decisions in a certain fashion and all the things that drive most writers.'

Author Extraordinaire Raymond E Feist

[turning-pages-seeking-sages]

Wanted: Recommendations for Horror Novels!

I have just started to read some books in the horror genre but don't know what I like just yet. I recently read the following books: - Faerie Tale by Raymond E. Feist (loved) - Slewfoot by Brom (sort of liked) - Between Two Fires by Michael Beuhlman (loved)

What are some good introductory horror books you recommend? And/or, what book(s) got you interested in the horror genre?

[wimsee]

Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts’ Empire series do a great justice to getting wholesale revenge on the people that wrong you. Highly recommend reading

'Revenge is bad' to YOU. i love when a character destroys everyone who wronged them. i love when they get to bite and maim and tear and rip and scratch and kill. Sorry ur catholic about it but i'm different

[somanyquestions-featuringanxiety]

I’ve just started Silverthorn by Raymond E. Feist and while I did enjoy Magician, the writing style and plot is just so HEAVY! Like, it requires sooo many brain cells that I don’t always have to spare..

Anyway, I’ve only read the prologue so far, but I’m intrigued by it, and excited to read more about Jimmy and Arutha, but especially Arutha!

[bookaddict24-7]

RECO OF THE WEEK!

Magician: Apprentice by Raymond E. Feist

Synopsis:

"A worthy pupil . . . A dangerous quest

To the forest on the shore of the Kingdom of the Isles, the orphan Pug came to study with the master magician Kulgan. But though his courage won him a place at court and the heart of a lovely Princess, he was ill at ease with the normal ways of wizardry.

Yet Pug's strange sort of magic would one day change forever the fates of two worlds. For dark beings from another world had opened a rift in the fabric of spacetime to being again the age-old battle between the forces of Order and Chaos."

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Check out my review on Goodreads here.

Add this book to your TBR on Goodreads here.

Add this book to your TBR on The Storygraph here.

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Have you read this book? Would you recommend it?

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Happy reading!

[staringdownabarrel]

Alright, so I finished Silverthorn by Raymond E. Feist; here's my thoughts.

I sorta remember this book being really bad for two things: one is having really bad romance scenes, and the other was just general "middle book syndrome". Neither of these things were as pronounced as I remember them being.

With the romance stuff, yeah, it was still there, and it still a bit hard to get through. A lot of this is due to Carline and Anita being very bare bones characters in general and their arcs are almost entirely defined by being someone else's love interest, while the men they're interested in get to have arcs that aren't centred on them. Despite there being other books where this is a less prominent problem in Feist's attempts at romance, it's still an issue here.

I think this was particularly noticeable for two reasons. One is that it's a very front-heavy problem. Basically all the main romance scenes happened in the first half of the book. The other is that once they start getting into the actual adventure, the women in the book all essentially disappear. Sure, they're mentioned a couple of times, but they're not active participants in the story, and even during the period of time they are, it's barely an active participation.

Still, this wasn't as prominent an issue with Silverthorn as I remember it being. The amount of scenes this is an issue in is fairly limited, and they're all in the first half. I think the real issue is that the female characters really aren't treated as independent entities, despite some of Feist's other books (such as Faerie Tale and the Empire trilogy) proving he is capable of writing women passably when he wants to.

The second problem I remember from this book, that it was bad for "middle book syndrome", was less pronounced than I remember it being, too. Yes, a lot of what happens here is just setting the stage for what happens in A Darkness At Sethanon, but the overall arc of this book (especially with Arutha's plotline) would have been fine as a standalone book as well.

Really most of the middle book syndrome-y stuff is in Pug's plotline. While the Arutha-centric storyline in this book has a definable beginning, middle, and end, with some clear sequel hook stuff that's meant to set the stage for the next book, Pug's doesn't really have that. It's basically all just stuff that's meant to be setting up what comes next.

I think my actual issue is that Silverthorn is a bit of a slog to get through. It's not exactly boring--some of it is quite interesting--but it isn't as captivating as some of other Feist's books. I think I probably just wrote that off as middle book syndrome because I didn't really understand what that was at the time.

I think I have a much more forgiving outlook on this book today than I did back then. While ten or fifteen years ago, I would have struggled to find anything I liked about the book, now I can tell you a couple of things.

One is just a technical thing. The book has a "our story so far" section at the start which summarises the events of Magician. The next book, A Darkness At Sethanon, also has this (though it also goes over the events of Silverthorn as well). This is something that I really wish later Riftwar books would have because this is a much better option than having passages that amount to "...and this is Main Guy, who's been in the last six books, and this is the important information which was covered there, but we'll go over it again now in case you missed it."

I get doing something like that is sometimes necessary because you can't assume that everyone reading any given book is reading them back-to-back, in the correct order, or is even aware that there were previous books. Still, having the "our story so far" summary is my preferred way of approaching this over the "character summary 100 pages in" passages.

The other is worldbuilding. One of the thing that Magician didn't do as well as I would have liked is flesh out some of the different groups that live within the Kingdom. Silverthorn doesn't really spend a lot of time doing this either, but it does at least start doing it. It talks a little bit about some of the traditions of the Hadati hill people, it introduces the Nighthawks as a group of assassins, and so on. To some extent, this is still the generic fantasy world sort of stuff that Magician's worldbuilding suffered from, but it does provide some of the depth to Midkemia that it really needed.