Just to start, you should know I love
urban fantasy. I grew up on epic fantasy but the last decade has not been kind
to that genre. As a complete lack of new interesting things came out in my
genre of choice I started noticing the shiny covers of urban fantasy. They were
fresh and more important there were girls on the cover. I’ve always been
impressed how most epic fantasy managed to get by the first four decades of
it’s life with minimal female involvement between the pages.
Sadly, the problems
that plague any genre aren’t absent from this one. The heroine/hero is normally
a hard bitten PI-Cop-Magical Law Enforcement person with a murder to solve and
a Tragic Backstory™.
They usually have little to no friends or family, and if female have lots of
sex, and some kind of mutation that allows them to eat whatever they want. As
much as I love urban fantasy I’ve started to roll my eyes as soon as I open the cover.
That’s where Written in Red bursts on to the scene. It’s
from new-to-me author Anne Bishop who just blows everything out of the water.
This isn’t just an alternate world, it’s a really alternate world were humans
are kept in cities and the Others own everything else. The heroine is a
Cassandra, a blood prophet, forced to tell the truth of visions that people won’t want to
believe. The hero is were-wolf esque, but not in any way you’d expect. So
many of the tropes are present but twisted so far as to be completely
unrecognizable. The characters are written with such spot-on humanity (or
in-humanity as the case requires) that they are almost instantly gripping. Plus
Bishop got her start as a heroic fantasy writer and so all the things I love
from that genre are out in force. I’m personally dying for book 2 and think you
should be too!
If you want to check it out you can visit it on Goodreads or the Anne Bishop website.
That's all for now. Come back in two weeks and I'll have another one for you!
Tragic Backstory TM <--- Ha ha ha :)
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