Quote Originally Posted by Eldan View Post
Oooh. I haven't read Uprooted, but I did read Deadly Education and its sequel. Which is a book I really didn't expect to like as much as I did, it has so many elements I thought I'd dislike. A borderline Grimdark setting, a protagonist who looks painfully edgy and very woe-is-me at first, a magic high school (sort of), teenage romance, working together through the power of friendship... and yet, it works and it's tons of fun.
I found Deadly Education a bit too, I'm not sure of the word - fanfic-baity maybe? - for my taste. It was enjoyable enough, but I also had not a lot of desire to pick up the sequel.

Recently finished the four main volumes of Margaret Weis' Star of the Guardians series. These are fun, and deeply, deeply odd. What starts as a straightforward Star Wars knockoff takes a violent left turn for parts unknown when it becomes very, very interested in the super-dramatic tragic romance between, basically, Darth Vader and Obi-Wan's sister, but also with loads of allusions to Paradise Lost and Shakespeare. I had a load of fun with these, particularly the fourth one, they're sort of like reading a 19th century Gothic novel version of space opera.


Now on to Tanith Lee's extremely oblique and very long The Blood of Roses, another of her sort of vampire novels. The novel is one of her more difficult works, things frequently dip into surreal dream logic without warning, the plot seems to hardly exist beyond a method to do horrible things to the characters and move them between strange and beautiful and often terrible imagery, and I couldn't for the life of me guess where this thing is going. There seems to be something going on with a religious schism, or a new belief papered over an old, but it's very background to the surreal dreams cape of the main plot. So far I like it, but it wouldn't be my top pick for Lee in maximally weird mode; the Lionwolf trilogy has a stronger plot, and, although still a challenging read, is less baffling than this seems to be.