Empire of Exiles – Shapeshifting Salty Mysteries

Happy New Year everyone and welcome to another year of The Quill to Live. Our first review of the year is of a fabulous book I read over the holidays that greatly impressed me. Empire of Exiles, by Erin M. Evans, is a hit-the-ground-running mystery about four POVs in a giant society locked in a…

Seven Epic Fantasy Series Worth The Time Investment

Picking up any epic fantasy series can be an intensely intimidating experience. With their huge page counts, multiple volumes, expansive worldbuilding, and intricate magic systems, fantasy epics can easily overwhelm readers. These enormous series are often recommended by fantasy fans as “must-reads,” but how can you tell if you will like something that big before…

The Starless Crown – Beautiful Zirconia

Sometimes a book comes along with such a powerful blurb that you can’t help but be drawn to it. The Starless Crown, by James Rollins, is one such novel. A kind editor at Tor sent me the elevator pitch for this book back in the middle of last year and I was immediately entranced. A…

A Desert Torn Asunder – Out With A Bang

And so commences my final review of The Song of the Shattered Sands. Here we are again with another gigantic book by Bradley P. Beaulieu - filled with wonderful prose and thrilling worldbuilding set in an original Arabian-inspired world. This is my final plea for you to go check it out. But, now there is…

The Blacktongue Thief – The Magic Of Student Loans

The Blacktongue Thief, by Christopher Buehlman, is the first book in the Blacktongue series and a book that left me with a profound sense of deja vu. It is a book that I both felt I had read before, yet is bursting to the seams with originality and authorial flare. It's crammed full of some…

The Shadow Of The Gods – Immortal Combat

The Shadow of the Gods is the first installment in a brand new series by John Gwynne, an author I have read consistently for the last few years. This time he takes on Norse mythology and incorporates it into a new epic fantasy trilogy called The Bloodsworn Saga. I watched the new Mortal Kombat movie…

The Shattered Realms Of Ardor Benn — Adventure Awaits

Alright, so I might have made a miscalculation. Back in (and I had to check my calendar to verify this because time has become meaningless) the distant year of 2018, I read a book called The Thousand Deaths of Ardor Benn, by Tyler Whitesides. I thought it was decent and showed promise, but I was…