Hi BEB faithful,
It’s been hard to know what to say lately, but we have some good news, and a fun get away.
We’ve acquired a new book that’ll be coming out in May called Nothing But Good by Kess McKinley! Mark your calendars and get hyped for that!
And for your fun get away, we’ve got a little romp through Fantasy written by women by TK Huynh!
Five High Fantasy Books Written by Women
Most of the big-name high fantasy books are written by men. Tolkien, George R. R. Martin, Brandon Sanderson are some of the most well-known. But where are the women? They make up half the population, but somehow, they rarely take the spotlight in either high fantasy narratives or in authorship. I promise, however, that the landscape beyond Middle Earth, Westeros, and Roshar is just as rich and exciting with a woman behind the pen.
1. Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
You’re probably at least familiar with the Ghibli film based on the book of the same name. The film differs from the book mostly in its portrayal of the main character, Sophie. In the film, she’s a plain girl who’s shy, but looks after the people in her life. Book Sophie is not so put together. She’s got anxiety and low self-esteem, but also stumbles into an enigmatic and possibly evil wizard of renown’s house and then just tells him she lives there. And she does.
When a witch curses Sophie to become old, she does what any reasonable person would do and seeks out a powerful wizard, Howl, to become his cleaning lady. She then proceeds to fall in love with Howl, an absolute disaster of a man, who does nothing but avoids his problems and can’t handle having more than one feeling at a time. He even spreads terrible rumors about himself, so people won’t ask him for things.
I personally favor Book Sophie (as a hot mess who gets things done) and her relationship to Howl (an even hotter mess), but both adaptations have their merits.
2. Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb
This book features Fitz, the most introspective protagonist I’ve ever had the patience to care about. I’m pretty sure he just likes the sound of his own internal voice—to a comical degree. But if you enjoy the Tolkien-esque prose that reads like an academic paper on European colonialism, then you’ll probably enjoy Assassin’s Apprentice.
Fitz is the bastard son of a royal, who is adopted into a royal household and trained to become an assassin. He’s got a penchant for talking with animals, which helps him overcome the trials of his new position and his crushing loneliness—but mostly the crushing loneliness.
The narrative reads as something of an autobiography with Fitz reflecting on his lonely life as a young boy, through his training as an assassin, and eventually, the bloody consequences of his life choices.
3. The Mirror Empire by Kameron Hurley
Did you want trauma? Did you want the apocalypse, but in a different world? Did you want the gore and horror of old gothic novels with none of the Catholic iconography and all of the thinly veiled homoeroticism? Look no further than The Mirror Empire.
The world is on the brink of destruction, and the book follows a couple players in the kingdom of Saiduan, where invaders from another realm are wrecking the place. All manner of people must band together to save themselves and their world.
The Mirror Empire has five POV characters, all with questionable motives and methods of achieving their goals and surviving an invasion of beings from another realm. If you’re looking for a clear cut good and bad institution of morality, you won’t find it in this book. Only one main character is a traditionally kind, compassionate type, and that doesn’t last forever. The narrative is a patchwork of perspectives on how people justify their means and struggle to band together to fight a common enemy.
4. Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey
So if you did want the Catholic iconography and homoeroticism, you should read Kushiel’s Dart. My first impression of this book was that it embodies every sapphic impulse I’ve ever had, and it’s good to re-visit your gay roots every once in a while. My second impression was that Jacqueline Carey really likes femme fatales and BDSM—the latter, which we all know, is about as Catholic as one can get.
The story is set in a French-ish, British-ish, medieval-ish world, with the racist and religious righteousness that would make European colonizers proud. The narrative centers around Phèdre nó Delaunay, an indentured servant turned courtesan and spy. She is pricked by Kushiel’s Dart, marked by a scarlet mote in her left eye. That is all to say that she experiences pain and pleasure as one, and she doesn’t discriminate between genders when it comes to bedfellows. Her gift makes her particularly hard to combat, as pain is nothing to fear for Phèdre. However, neither her gift nor training saves her from being trapped in the enemy lands of Skaldia where she discovers the Skaldi plot to attack her homeland.
5. The Rifter Series by Ginn Hale
The final station of our homoerotic train, The Rifter Series is not so much thinly veiled as it is tastefully overt with its queerness.
This whopper of a portal novel was initially serialized in ten episode-like installments all of them together amounts to about 200,000 words, which is slightly larger than Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. The first episode is The Shattered Gates, which spends a decent chunk of time in a modern setting. The rest of the series is firmly in another world.
We start off with John, a nature enthusiast who finds a strange key belonging to his enigmatic roommate, Kyle. As it turns out, Kyle is actually Khalil—an assassin-ish, soldier-ish, priest-ish man who’s sent from another world to locate their destroyer god incarnate, the Rifter. While Khalil searches for the Rifter, however, John stumbles upon the gates to the other realm and lands in a foreign space(time).
John sets out to make a life for himself in this strange, new world while he searches for a way back home. Meanwhile, Khalil isn’t sure where he is, but his realm isn’t what it once was.
I’m not sure if I could classify this series as an epic fantasy or an epic romance. It has it all: fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles. I read the whole thing in ten hours, and I wasn’t bored for a moment.