Reseña: Trail of Lightning (The Sixth World #1)

Trail of Lightning (The Sixth World #1)

by  

Rebecca Roanhorse

287 pages

Published June 26th 2018 by Saga Press

Edition Language:English

Series: The Sixth World #1

 

BLURB: While most of the world has drowned beneath the sudden rising waters of a climate apocalypse, Dinétah (formerly the Navajo reservation) has been reborn. The gods and heroes of legend walk the land, but so do monsters.
Maggie Hoskie is a Dinétah monster hunter, a supernaturally gifted killer. When a small town needs help finding a missing girl, Maggie is their last—and best—hope. But what Maggie uncovers about the monster is much larger and more terrifying than anything she could imagine. Maggie reluctantly enlists the aid of Kai Arviso, an unconventional medicine man, and together they travel to the rez to unravel clues from ancient legends, trade favors with tricksters, and battle dark witchcraft in a patchwork world of deteriorating technology.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My bookshelves: here-be-monsters, bloody-and-gory, post-apocalyptic, myth-and-legends, dinetah-navajo, hugo-nebula-nominee, locus-award, multiple-awards-nominee, deidades-y-dioses, 2019-readings, coyote-spirit, kick-butt-heroine

I remember the first time I saw the Wall. I had expected something dull and featureless. A fifty-foot-high mountain of gray concrete, barbed wire lining the top like in some apocalyptic movie. But I had forgotten that the Diné had already suffered their apocalypse over a century before. This wasn’t our end. This was our rebirth.
[--]
They say the hataalii worked hand in hand with the construction crews, and for every brick that was laid, a song was sung. Every lath, a blessing given. And the Wall took on a life of its own. When the workmen came back the next morning, it was already fifty feet high. In the east it grew as white shell. In the south, turquoise. The west, pearlescent curves of abalone, and the north, the blackest jet. It was beautiful. It was ours. And we were safe. Safe from the outside world, at least. But sometimes the worst monsters are the ones within.

En el mundo postapocaliptico de Magdalena Hoskie las aguas subieron y un muro se alza con ayuda de hombres sagrados para mantener a raya las aguas en la reservación Diné (Navajo), mientras que adentro hay una sequía y se desdibuja el tiempo de leyendas con el cotidiano. Magia y dioses conviven y despiertan dones de clanes entre la gente.

Reseña: Cloudia and Rex

+Digital arc gently provided by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review+

Cloudia and Rex 

by  

Ulises Farinas ,

Erick Freitas, 

Daniel Irizarri (Illustrator)

80 pages

Published November 28th 2017  

Edition Language:English

  

BLURB: A lushly rendered supernatural fantasy that follows two girls and their mother who find themselves in the middle of a vast, supernatural exodus. On their journey Cloudia is bestowed the powers of hundreds of different gods, but even those don't help her come to terms with the death of her father.

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

A mother and two daughters are moving after the father death, amidst the odiosities of the older daughter who is about to turn thirteen, when falls over the family, literally from heaven, a pantheon of gods that are fleeing from their own destruction.

First thought: what a mess!

Mix a bunch of all-you-can-think mythological mumbo-jumbo add senseless plot dump over one annoying unbereable adolescent and shake.

Reseña: Minotaur in Stone

Minotaur in Stone 

by 

Marjorie M. Liu

 55 pages

Published February 11th 2015 by Marjorie M. Liu

ASIN:B00TJ1KSYE

Edition Language:English

BLURB: A labyrinth of a library. Watchful eyes in the dark. And a woman with nowhere – and nobody – to call home. In MINOTAUR IN STONE, Marjorie M. Liu transports her heroine into the arms of the tragically cursed Minotaur. After millennia of being trapped by an ancient king, the Minotaur has given up hope of escaping the dark labyrinth that imprisons him. When he feels a connection with the woman he watches every night, however, and she returns his feelings after being summoned to his home, he realizes that she may be the champion he needs, and she realizes that she may be falling in love with the man beneath the monster.

My rating: 3,3 stars

My bookshelves: novelette-short, adult-mature, fantasy-paranormal, myth-and-legends

Adult fantasy. A modern take in the Minotaur myth. A young woman living in the fringe , secluded in a library, is conduced in dreams into a dark labyrinth with a not possible man. Both are lost in dark, lonely and with nothing to lose.

[...] to live as an uninvited guest, quiet as a book—and as a book, a dull creature on the surface, but full of the raging wild dark inside the words of my heart.

The start is better than the ending, as far as the way in which the author interweaves the words.

Creo que buena parte de esta idea del laberinto se ve después en su serie Hunter Kiss - The Iron Hunt, que por cierto la recomiendo.

Reseña: The Monarch of the Glen (American Gods #1.5)

The Monarch of the Glen (American Gods #1.5)

by  

Neil Gaiman

62 pages

Published (first published 2006)

Original Title:The Monarch of the Glen, an American Gods Novella

Edition Language:English

Series:American Gods #1.5, 

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bookshelves,fantasia-urbana, here-be-monsters, myth-and-legends, novella

"I’m not a monster,” said Shadow.
“Aye, that’s what monsters always say,” said the little man.

Set about two years after American Gods.

Shadow is just traveling backpacking, knowing places, drifting I say. And in this story ends in the north coast of Scotland when some guy offer him a job as a bouncer for the weekend in some private party.

Well, I'm aware that Gaiman is hit or miss for many. This story , to me, despite the no so big surprises in the run, is really good. Manage to evoke that sensation of timelessness, to blur , relax , the bounds between realities. I mean, when you step in some old places is easy to wonder, to imagine, to awe.

You want to believe him.

He [...] imagined time as something that pooled and puddled, wondered if there were places where time hung heavy, places where it was heaped and held—cities, he thought, must be filled with time: all the places where people congregated, where they came and brought time with them.
And if that were true, Shadow mused, then there could be other places, where the people were thin on the ground, and the land waited, bitter and granite, and a thousand years was an eyeblink to the hills—a scudding of clouds, a wavering of rushes, and nothing more, in the places where time was as thin on the ground as the people . . .

Reseña: Guardian of the Dead

Popsugar 2016: 37. Un libro sobre una cultura con la que no estés familiarizado.

Guardian of the Dead 

by Karen Healey

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

 bookshelves: teen-protagonist, fantasia-urbana, fantasy-paranormal, 2016-readings, myth-and-legends, magia, not-sure-but-not-human, new-zealand-mythology, ya-juvenil

                         3,5 mythological stars

“You’ll see the big stories, the ones that have formed the shape of the world around you. And you carry your own mythologies with you, so you can see the stories that are important to you, the ones that parts of you believe.”

Eleanor Spencer is a good girl, so after her mother survives cancer and wants to spend some quality time traveling with her husband, she offers attend a boarding school.

(Points for not whining about it. )

Then, paranormal stuff happen. Cute guys. Some crazy murders aside.