I am reviewing the fantasy novel Small Gods by Terry Pratchett which is a very good book which I bought from a car boot sale. This is one of the funnier installments in the Discworld series. The Discworld series is a fantasy series about a world which is discworld and populated by various entities like dwarves, trolls, vampires, humans & other things. I think certainly most of the books would appeal to all ages and Terry in his own unique style does away with logic in favour of humor and they are very funny. The story to this book is his take on religion. A god called Om is communicating with a young student at the local boarding school and he tells the monk in charge that they need to travel to a far off land over desert and ocean and convert the people to the Omnian religion. Of course he has got the om word because it's a well known mantra in transcendental meditation and does make a good name for a god. Anyway a group of them including a tortoise make the journey but all doesn't go according to plan and some of them decide to settle in the far off land where they have their own ideas about religion. I think it does have a reasonably happy ending. I did quite enjoy reading it and some of the humor did make me laugh aloud.

I am reviewing the fantasy novel The Crippled God by Steven Erikson which is an excellent book which I bought from a local bookstore. This book was part of the Malazon Book Of The Fallen fantasy series which has to be one of the greatest of this type of series ever written. Quite a long time ago before I did fiction book reviews I read the first 8 books of this series and this is the 10th and final book and there is a kind of spin off book of short stories. Each of the books of the series is around 900 pages so it will take up a lot of time reading it but it's quite rewarding. Also they are really for adults as they are quite violent but apparently it did well in a poll of fantasy book series of the Millennium. The books are set in and around a country called Malaza & in this book there are various groups vying for control including someone with an impressive army who wishes to challenge the gods, little realizing you need to be dead to become a god. There is another group who wish to reintroduce dragons to the desert where they once roamed and they do come in handy in one of the battles where they smell blood and decide to eat the enemy who at the time are winning. There is a female good character who leads a coalition on a knife edge of collapsing. It turns out she is pregnant and even who own troops think they are done for and suggest slaughtering the horses for food. She does insist on sticking with it and there is a happy ending. There is also a group who want to slaughter all humans and start the evolutionary cycle all over again. I would suggest if you read this series start with the 1st book because otherwise it gets quite confusing keeping up with what is going on. The early books have a section that explains the various characters which is handy although it's a nuisance having to keep referring to it. I am going to re read this series again and I can review it on here so that might be quite interesting. The last few hundred pages of this book are very exciting and I think this final book is a worthy ending to what is a great series. It's strange to think the 1st book was turned down by many publishers before a relatively less well known publisher decided to take a chance with it.

I am reviewing the novel Daughter Of Smoke And Bone by Laini Taylor which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. I haven't got a lot of experience of reading teen fiction but although this book is good I think there are other authors who do it better. Also because many of the characters are meeting for the first time there is more emphasis on that than the story which is not all together a bad thing but I think maybe the sequels might be an improvement. I do think it is quite original having the heroine fall in love with a devil who is quite a good character and her having a mother who did the same thing and that is how she came to be born. The ending is a cliff hanger which is obvious when you realise this is a fantasy series. Much of the story is set in Prague the capital of the Czech Republic. I did quite enjoy reading this book which is around 350 pages so is a decent length. I don't like it if a book is really short as I think it reflects how much effort the author put into it and I can speed read so have no problem reading a long book.