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In seventh grade, more years ago than I care to remember, I needed a book to occupy me for a week-long trip to Williamsburg, Virginia. I'd seen a really cool-looking book on the shelves of one of my local bookstores, and the day before I left I bought it.
It was The Broken Crown by Michelle West, and that has to be one of my best book-buying decisions of all time.
This was back in the Day before days when there was virtually no Internet, and it took me years to figure out that more books would be and were published and that the story told in TBC didn't start with that book. But we're living in the future now, and I can recommend the entire sequence of books to you just like this. And I do.
The Argument
I've said other places that most authors only have one or two themes in them. Michelle West's is unquestionably the end of the world, and what people will do either to stop it or to bring it about.
I'm going about this the wrong way, though. Michelle West is a Japanese Canadian author who also writes as Michelle Sagara and Michelle Sagara West. The Sagara books are The Chronicles of Elantra, which are also very good but are very different from the West books--if you like urban fantasy, definitely check Elantra out.
I don't really like "epic fantasy"--listing all the series I've bounced off, hard, that other people love would probably earn me a sporking, but thinking about it, I'd argue both that West's novels are epic fantasy, and that her books are qualitatively different from most conventional epic fantasy in their focus, which is first and foremost on the characters, and then on their cultures, and only finally on epic trappings such as battles and gods and games of thrones. Not that these things don't matter in her writing--there is a very large, truly epic plot going on in these books, and I love it to death--but the plot is revealed first and foremost through the characters' thoughts and feelings and emotional arcs.
So, yes. There are the trappings of epic fantasy in here--gods, demons, mages, seers, Bards--but they are never allowed to upstage the characters, and the end result is some very dense writing about fully imagined cultures populated by heartbreakingly human people (even when these people are demons, or gods, or the children of gods, or half-humans). The way West writes politics ought to bring many more well-known authors to tears, let alone cultures and its impacts on the people born into them.
At this point I should probably launch into talking about the books themselves. No spoilers beyond the dust jackets, I swear. In publication order, they are:
( Amazing books are amazing. I kid you not. )
It was The Broken Crown by Michelle West, and that has to be one of my best book-buying decisions of all time.
This was back in the Day before days when there was virtually no Internet, and it took me years to figure out that more books would be and were published and that the story told in TBC didn't start with that book. But we're living in the future now, and I can recommend the entire sequence of books to you just like this. And I do.
The Argument
I've said other places that most authors only have one or two themes in them. Michelle West's is unquestionably the end of the world, and what people will do either to stop it or to bring it about.
I'm going about this the wrong way, though. Michelle West is a Japanese Canadian author who also writes as Michelle Sagara and Michelle Sagara West. The Sagara books are The Chronicles of Elantra, which are also very good but are very different from the West books--if you like urban fantasy, definitely check Elantra out.
I don't really like "epic fantasy"--listing all the series I've bounced off, hard, that other people love would probably earn me a sporking, but thinking about it, I'd argue both that West's novels are epic fantasy, and that her books are qualitatively different from most conventional epic fantasy in their focus, which is first and foremost on the characters, and then on their cultures, and only finally on epic trappings such as battles and gods and games of thrones. Not that these things don't matter in her writing--there is a very large, truly epic plot going on in these books, and I love it to death--but the plot is revealed first and foremost through the characters' thoughts and feelings and emotional arcs.
So, yes. There are the trappings of epic fantasy in here--gods, demons, mages, seers, Bards--but they are never allowed to upstage the characters, and the end result is some very dense writing about fully imagined cultures populated by heartbreakingly human people (even when these people are demons, or gods, or the children of gods, or half-humans). The way West writes politics ought to bring many more well-known authors to tears, let alone cultures and its impacts on the people born into them.
At this point I should probably launch into talking about the books themselves. No spoilers beyond the dust jackets, I swear. In publication order, they are:
( Amazing books are amazing. I kid you not. )