The “Heir of Night” Makes A Top 100 List
Thank you to Randy Price for alerting me (in a comment on last Monday’s post) to the The Heir of Night being included in Fantasy Book Review‘s list of Top 100 Fantasy Books
UK/AU/NZ
You can find it at Number 66, with a few nice words about the book as well. 🙂
Gracias, too, Randy, for saying you would have ranked it higher 😀 — but it’s very nice to see HEIR included in the Top 100, and enjoying the “crown of good company.”
To mark the moment, here’s a quote from page 66 of The Heir of Night (the UK mass market paperback edition):
The Earl’s brows had drawn together while Haimyr spoke. “Of late?” he inquired ominously. “What do you mean, ‘of late’? … Am I to understand that my daughter has been going into the Old Keep, which is forbidden, and that some or all of you knew, yet did nothing about it?”
Only Haimyr and the Honor Captain seemed unperturbed by his wrath. The minstrel was concentrating on brushing dust from his golden cuff, but Asantir met the Earl’s stare, her gauntleted hands resting on the buckle of her sword belt. “I think we all knew it, myself included,” she replied gravely. “Yet every keep child and new recruit has to go there at least once as a rite of passage—and Malian is your daughter, after all.”
— from Chapter 5, The Broken Gate
UK ( Cover
Every time someone publishes a list like this, it almost invites people to argue about which books should be left in and which books should be left out. I’d say this list actually does a pretty good job of covering the breadth of the genre and most of the books I would put on a list like this are there.
My short list of books I think should have been included:
“A Monster Calls” by Patrick Ness. Most of Ness’ books lean more towards sci-fi than fantasy, but A Monster Calls is definitely fantasy. It’s one of his earliest books but still one of his best (alongside the Chaos Walking trilogy). One of the few books where the climax brings tears to my eyes every time I read it.
“Amulet of Samarkand” by Jonathan Stroud, the first book of the Bartimaeus trilogy. Fun YA fantasy with Bartimaeus as a very snarky point of view character (he’s a millenia old demon with some very pointed thoughts about the magicians who keep summoning and enslaving him). Stroud is interesting because he’s written multiple series that are all quite different from each other (Lockwood & Co, the Scarlett & Browne books).
And one book that wouldn’t be on my top 100 list: Joe Abercrombie’s “The Blade Itself”. This might be the only fantasy series I grew to actually hate. It’s graphically violent in a way I found physically unpleasant to read, and it commits the cardinal sin of betraying the time the reader has invested in the story.
I agree, all lists are subjective, but Fantasy Book Review has always been supportive of the WALL series, which I appreciate.:) And I’m always interested in readers’ thoughts on other titles that should be in and out. 😀