Monday, May 16, 2022

Book Review: Chronicles of Riss Adventures in Sorcery

Title: Chronicles of Riss: Adventures in Sorcery 

Author: Jeanne Owens

Date: 2015

Publisher: Jeanne Owens

Length: 222 e-pages

Quote: "IT'S BEEN ABOUT A YEAR since I saved the world from the crazed God of Evil, Yangul, and for most of that time my dear friend, Arianna, has been nagging at me to share some of my earlier adventures - to chronicle them for posterity, she says."

This is fantasy in the Freudian, rather than the literary, sense. In this prequel Marissa Cobalt doesn't yet have friends, or seem to want them. It's pure girl-power all the way as the teenager (fourteen when these stories begin) bashes, slashes, and fireballs through a series of confrontations. Her enemies are older and bigger and ought logically to be more of a challenge; they know how to use things like first flirtations, alcohol, and PMS against her, but Riss always takes them down just the same. If her super-strong fists don't get them, her magical firebombs will. The only thing she can't do is undye her bright blue hair, which she punked once (in a short story not included in this book), may never be able to change back, and has changed her name to celebrate. (So we know she's really trying to make her hair less distinctive, in a fictional world where wigs are so cheap.)

Well, I laughed. The stories are episodes, don't seem to be leading up to the novel the first sentence (quoted above) promises, and aren't easy to believe if you step back and think about them, but if you're in the right mood they're delicious. Probably habit-forming.

The e-book I received links to a web site that's no longer any help at all toward purchasing the book, so here are the Amazon links:


(Blogspot is not behaving well today. If the book image doesn't take you to this page, here's the URL: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00U1UCNC2/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i0 

And: 


should take you to this URL: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0791MSLSF/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i1 .)



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