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Reading Excuses / First!
« on: December 15, 2010, 02:04:34 AM »
Welcome back everyone.
Glad to have the forums back again.
Glad to have the forums back again.
A lot of people describe Scalzi’s Old Man's War novels as military science fiction, but I would classify its sequel Zoë’s Tale as a space opera. It’s a story about, well, Zoë, a teenage girl whose parents are invited to take leadership roles in building a colony on a new planet. Zoë is an enthusiastic member of the group sent to colonize Roanoke, despite the risks—and the risks are considerable even before the political machinations of greater powers boil to the surface. Continue reading Zoë’s Tale
Review by Silk
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“All who can fight are needed,” the woman said. “And all who have a desire to fight should be compelled to come to Alethela. Fighting, even this fighting against the Ten Deaths, changes a person. We can teach you so that it will not destroy you. Come to us
Holding his breath, he clung to the Stormlight. He could still feel it leaking out. Stormlight could be held for only a short time, a few minutes at most. It leaked away, the human body too porous a container. He had heard that the Voidbringers could hold it in perfectly. But, then, did they even exist? His punishment declared that they didn’t. His honor demanded that they did.
-Szeth, Prologue
“I do, my king. Your daughter is an oathbreaker. Which all in the Dovre know, even if none dare to speak it,” said Reginn, the huldu my father had long ago betrothed me to.
He turned towards me, smiling. The gold etched into his black horns gleaming in the glow of my father’s throne. “The boy is no more ‘greater than all of the trolls in the mountain’ than I am. She is an oathbreaker and her life forfeit.”
A cold shiver ran through me as he spoke. The air beside me dropped in temperature as Kail glared down at my accuser.
Reginn continued, “She has shared both Rings and Blood with a mortal boy . . .”
Oh no.
“. . . and taken him as her mate and husband, in one of our most ancient rituals of marriage, one never before performed with an outsider, going against her own father’s wishes.”
Kail took a step back from the stand, obviously shocked by Reginn’s words.
“Husband?” he turned to me and asked.
His reaction did not go unnoticed by the other huldrene in the courtroom. My father lowered his head, unable to meet my gaze.
Reginn laughed. “Do you see! She has deceived even her own mate!”
As Kail looked at me, his eyes suddenly narrowed and flared brightly in anger. I looked into the cold windows of death.
It happened . . .
“She has no honor!” Reginn shouted.
I sobbed, my eyes welling up with tears. Kail stared at me, gritting his teeth in a look of pure hatred and wrath.
. . . I’d made him hate me.
Kail turned his back on me, leaping down from the stand.
The novel is about two high school kids that use a magic sword to travel to other worlds where a lot of our legends about faeries, gods and other mythological figures come from. They get separated and the girl gets involved with the plots of a dark faerie goddess, while the guy meets and falls in love with a beautiful troll.
In the book the guy is forced to make a choice: save the troll he loves. Or go up against the dark god who's taken his magic sword and save the world.