In this latest Bookswap! episode, I swap books with writer, storyteller, and general arts-world powerhouse Christine Hennebury. We each recommended a fantasy novel to the other. Christine recommended A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, by T. Kingfisher, who also writes as Ursula Vernon. In return, I recommended The City of Brass, book one of the Daevabad trilogy by Shannon (or S.A.) Chakraborty.
Our wide-ranging discussion touched on the world-building of both books, the heroine’s journey of young women with magical powers, what kind of mentor you get in a fantasy world if you are a young woman with magical powers, romance, and the lack thereof in novels. If you have any interest in fantasy at all, you’ll want to listen to this podcast and I virtually guarantee at the end you’ll want to read at least one if not both of these books!
The Chakraborty books I talked about in the podcast are:
The City of Brass
The Kingdom of Copper
The Empire of Gold
The River of Silver
and her brand-new release, The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi
I also gave a shout-out to the wonderful Becky Chambers, especially her book A Psalm for the Wild-Built (I highly recommend all her books, which are more sci-fi than fantasy and are great at imagining different possible futures).
Christine recommends pretty much anything by Ursula Vernon AKA T. Kingfisher, but in this episode, in addition to the Wizard’s Guide book we were discussing, she also mentioned
Shelf Esteem 