This review is based on my latest re-read, but this is a book I've read several times before (though not in a few years) and Hambly is one of my most favorite authors. So salt accordingly.In my younger days, I mainly clustered tightly around a small ring of trusted authors, devouring new books a...
This is a much-removed 4th installment of the world of Darwath, followed soon after by its 5th brother, Icefalcon's Quest. At this time in my life, I wasn't able to browse in bookstores anymore. When I saw these sitting on a shelf, I gasped and exclaimed in joy audibly, which was pretty embarrass...
tA Free Man of Color is the first book in the Benjamin January series by Barbara Hambly, and it is awesome. It’s the story of Benjamin January, a middle-aged black musician and surgeon who has just returned to New Orleans, after spending most of his adult life in Paris, after the death of his bea...
This almost-steampunk Vampire novel introduces the characters of James Asher, (think Sherlock Holmes for the Home Office), Lydia Asher, his wife and a physician fascinated by blood, and Don Simon Ysidro, one of ‘those who hunt the night.’ Don Simon has been trying to solve the mystery of murdere...
Like a lot of people, I read Dragonsbane years ago and loved it. Dragonshadow, however, was terrible by all accounts. The first portion of the book was tedious. Sure, we need to see what has been going on with John Aversin and Jenny Waynest since Dragonsbane, but here we get pages of basically n...
Dragonshadow was a book mainly about demons ruining the lives of our main characters. So how can Barbara Hambly top that you ask?Well, yeah of little faith. I mean, all she has to do is send our favorite characters to hell both physically and mentally, torture them a bit more, make them treat e...
The great Jedi Master Luke passes out - Times Four!Han, Luke, and Leia are on Ithor, enjoying the beautiful Time of Meeting, when an old associate of Han's appears and leaves them with a cryptic message. This message leads Han and Leia to the mysterious world of Belsavis, and Luke and his student...
I have enjoyed Hambly’s books since reading her vampire work Those that Hunt the Night years ago, and picked this up because I enjoy Civil War period books. I was not disappointed. This book kept my attention from the very first page. The cast of characters was so well drawn they seemed like real...
DIE UPON A KISS (Hist. Mys-Benjamin January-New Orleans-1830s) – NRHambly, Barbara – 5th in seriesBantam, 2002, US Paperback – ISBN: 0553581651First Sentence: “…nigger,” muttered a man’s voice, hoarse in the dark of the alley but very clear.Benjamin January is leaving the American Theatre, after...
It strikes me as very risky for a writer to write an historical "whodunnit" featuring an actual infamous figure from the past. This particular person is not exactly a household name, but for someone who (like me) has taken more than one Haunted History tour of New Orleans, it probably won't take ...
I wish that Goodreads allowed half-star ratings, because I would have given it 4 and 1/2. It deserves more than 4, but just misses the 5-mark of "Oh my god, this is one of the best books ever."I have to hand it to Hambly, she certainly took on an enigmatic and difficult subject. In the original...
One reviewer on Amazon stated that Dragonstar “. . . almost seems to have been written as an apology to fans for the gloom of the first two books.” And I have to one hundred 100) percent agree with that assessment.Here, Hambly begins by John Aversin and Jenny Waynest being rescued from their own...
For me, Hambly is always first a science fiction or fantasy author. This is because the first book I ever read by her was about a dragon that falls in love with a human. Her historical fiction, however, tends to be a cut above her sf/fantasy writing, though that implies that her work in that ge...
This book was a major disappointment. 1.5 stars rounded up. Uninteresting, antiquated fashion reports abound in this soporific, rambling book. On the one hand, I liked the little wifey-poo getting involved and having an intelligent, systematic approach to investigating the whereabouts of the vamp...
Benjamin January # 3! This one was way less grim than Fever Season. I realize that's easy to say, so I will give it an independent grimness rating.Grimness of content: Medium. Racism and other isms, slavery, murder; child abuse is discussed but not shown.Grimness of tone: Low. The subtitle is "a ...
-Let me begin by saying that I wanted so very much to love this book and I did at first but then it began to drag on…and on…and on. I cannot possibly imagine enduring all the suffering that she did. She certainly did go through a lot and as person suffering from bipolar disorder, it could not hav...
In Book I of this trilogy, The Ladies of Mandrigyn, it starts out with the action "over"-the mercenary troup is celebrating a victory. In Book 2 of this trilogy, The Witches of Wenshar, it begins with an argument between Sun Wolf and a witch.So Barbara Hambly starts the concluding book of this t...
This is the immediate sequel to The Silent Tower, and as such should be read immediately after you have finished the first one. (If you've read it, you know what I mean.) The opening line is one of my absolute favorites in a fantasy book, though unfortunately I do not think I should reproduce it ...
Hey, this is really good! It doesn’t beat out The Ladies of Mandrigyn as my favorite Hambly, but that’s because Mandrigyn is awesome; this is a strong second. Please ignore the cover and blurb, though, as they appear designed to fool you into thinking this is a different sort of book from what it...
This third book from the original Darwath Trilogy is so intense! I think the biggest intensity is of course, the main plot line. It's unpredictable, changing, and complex. Barbara Hambly does not telegraph her punches with pointless foreshadowing and constant reminders. Yes, she's kept certain id...
The Ladies of Mandrigyn is utterly delightful. It is, in fact, exactly what I was looking for when I attempted Jennifer Roberson's Sword Dancer, which so disappointed me. The Ladies of Mandrigyn makes no pretensions to being anything more than a pure sword-and-sorcery novel, replete with heroic a...
Once, long ago, I recall walking through the Waldenbooks bookstore at my local mall, trying to find something new to read. After having crammed everything Middle-Earth related into my brain, I needed a new fix of epic fantasy adventure. Sure, I’d loved Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant books, read Moor...
The Icefalcon is an interesting enigma of a character throughout Barbara Hambly's "Darwath" series. This book, "Icefalcon's Quest," is designed to flesh out and give the background of the Icefalcon. It's definitely a book that needed writing and actually does a pretty good job of giving us that i...
When I first started reading SF/F, Barbara Hambly quickly became one of my favorite authors, and her Windrose Chronicles in particular I reread every year. So I was excited to find that she'd also written a mystery set in Ancient Rome. I love Rome! Awesome! But... it didn't really work for me.The...
This novel picks up a couple months after the end of The Ladies of Mandrigyn, and if it isn't as surprising as that novel was it is no less delightful. While Starhawk has responded with her usual calm to all the changes in their fortunes, Sun Wolf is still assimilating the new needs his power pla...
I enjoyed the concept of this story, but it seemed that it was overly concerned with making sure all the many characters were introduced at the beginning. It begins with a ho-hum task by an agent, we later learn of the President of the United States, who is fleeting around looking for an unidenti...
I really don't know what to say about this book. At first I was captivated - by the story, characters, world, ideas, magic and the writing. But somewhere in the middle of the book I became bored by all of this, so I really started to drag with the reading.At first I thought that the idea of a hum...
This second installment of the Darwath 'Trilogy' (in much the same way the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series is a trilogy) is a romping adventure. The first book, The Time of the Dark, is so intense and fraught with terror, that I love this second book because it simply gives us a bit of a ...
I was dismayed, but not that shocked, to see the overwhelming number of negative reviews of Barbara Hambly’s novel “Children of the Jedi” on Goodreads. A quick perusal of fan reviews gives one the clear notion that Hambly is NOT well-liked by Star Wars Expanded Universe (SWEU) fans. Indeed, she s...
2.5 stars. It was nice to spend time with Benjamin, Rose and Hannibal again, and this novel was as well written as all of Hambly's work, but this isn't one of my favorites in this series. After the events of the previous book I was eager to see how their lives in New Orleans would change, but ins...