Skip to main content

REVIEW: Goodbye, Goddess by Breanna Teintze

Goodbye, Goddess by Breanna Teintze is a beautiful and well-written collection of high fantasy short stories that I would not hesitate to recommend to my friends.

I loved how even though the stories were self-contained, the world described in them seemed to be larger than it appeared and while the stories had a small element of "sensawunda" they really focused more on the characters rather than the fantastic.

One of my favourite stories in this collection was about a rogue mage who is reluctantly asked by some villagers to investigate a recent murder. It's at once a fantasy story, a Western story, a whodunnit, rolled into one and even has a big showdown in the end. Brilliant!

My other favourite story is about a village idiot who is asked to slay a dragon. The story is simple, but the loving care in which it is written and the humourous but logical way in which the dragon is ultimately vanquished makes this one memorable.

That's not to say the other stories in the collection aren't any good. Far from it! They are all excellent and wonderful reads and you owe yourself to check them out, especially when the ebook can be had for a very cheap price on Amazon or Smashwords.

For more on Breanna Teintze, check out her blog.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Breanna Teintze13/2/12 11:36 pm

    Thanks for reading, Ted! I always love hearing which story was a reader's favorite - and the murder mystery/western/fantasy piece has been a winner for a lot of people. (Which has surprised me because I wrote it in three days.)

    Thanks again!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ted Mahsun14/2/12 11:48 am

      You're welcome, Breanna. I've already told you I'm awaiting your novel with bated breath but now I'm thinking whether I should goad you into writing more short stories instead.

      *evil laugh*

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I'm going to Clarion West!

So yeah! I'm going to Clarion West this year! If you didn't know, Clarion West is a really awesome science fiction and fantasy writing workshop that runs for six weeks in summer every year at Seattle and is usually taught by a faculty of award-winning authors and editors. Many students who attend this workshop also go on to have illustrious writing careers of their own too. I've been meaning to attend this workshop (or its sister workshop, Clarion UCSD, which is the original Clarion workshop but runs in San Diego around the same time) for years now but never had the courage to apply. Many reasons as to why: didn't think I'd have money for the most part, didn't think I was good enough, didn't think I could leave work long enough, didn't think I could leave family behind, etc. But something sparked inside of me late last year. I felt I should at least give it a go this time round. So I did. They requested a sample of my best work and an applicatio...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dedicated by Burgess.

I've been wanting to blog this for ages, but I've never managed to make the scanner work properly... that is till now. Some years back, my dad was browsing the shelves of NovelHut, Ipoh's best second-hand bookstore, and found a copy of Anthony Burgess's Time for a Tiger . Price? RM2. (That would be approximately USD$0.60 or GBP£0.30). Did I mention it was a hardcover first edition? Here's the dedication page, with the famous dedication written in Jawi. Jawi is the Malay language written in Arab script, a norm early last century. Nowadays, Malay is written in Romanised form. The dedication says: " Kepada sahabat-sahabat saya di Tanah Melayu " which translates into "To my friends in Malaya." On the opposite page, proof this is the first edition. A first edition is probably valuable by itself. But this copy has something extra that makes it even more special--a personal dedication by Burgess himself to a friend: If you can't make the writing out...
15 comments
Read more

REVIEW: Pinball, 1973 by Haruki Murakami.

UPDATE: My Wind/Pinball review can be found here . ISBN: n/a Publisher: n/a Paperback: 160 pages In Murakami fan circles, simply owning a copy of Pinball, 1973 is a mark of hardcore-ness. Like Hear the Wind Sing before it, Haruki Murakami does not allow English translations of Pinball, 1973 to be published outside of Japan. Back in the 80s, Alfred Birnbaum translated it into English and Kodansha published it as a novel for Japanese students who wanted to improve their English. While the English edition of Hear the Wind Sing continues to be reprinted and sold in Japan (and available for a moderate sum via eBay, see my review ), Kodansha stopped its reprint runs of the English edition of Pinball, 1973 and has now become a collector's item, fetching vast amounts of money on auction sites and reseller stores. Last time I checked, the cheapest copy went for USD$2500. Of course, Murakami addicts or the curious can always download a less than legal PDF of the book, painst...
18 comments
Read more