CurrerBell's Fantasy for 2024

Jan 13 ,,, Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six 1½*
Mar 15 ... Heather Fawcett, Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries 3***
Apr 25 ... Diana Wynne Jones, Howl's Moving Castle 3***
May 16 ... Evie Woods, The Lost Bookshop 3½***
May 31 ... T. Kingfisher, Thornhedge 4****

June 3 ... Diana Wynne Jones, Castle in the Air 4****
June 6 ... Diana Wynne Jones, House of Many Ways 4½****
July 8 ... The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Winter 2024 2**
Aug 20 ... Sarah Beth Durst, The Spellshop 3½***
Sep 26 ... Hannah Whitten, For the Throne 3***

I'm with you on The Atlas six. I finished it to see if it improved. It didn't.

However I liked Howl and Emily Wilde quite a bit more than you did.

>2 Sakerfalcon: I don't think I'm going to bother with any more of Emily, but Castle in the Air is definitely upcoming on my agenda. Howl's Moving Castle was actually a reread from over a decade ago, prepping for the rest of the trilogy, and I did rate it higher on this reread than I did umpteen years ago.

It's just that I found it difficult to get to the point of HMC. Once I got to the end, everything did start to tie together, so I do want to go on with Howl and Sophie.

Probably won't get to the rest of the trilogy until next month, though, because I still have a couple books by Rumer Godden to read for this month's Virago author read.

I enjoyed the riff on fairy-tale tropes in Howl. I like it the best of the trilogy.

Looking forward to your Godden feedback in the Virago group!

>4 Sakerfalcon: I just finished Castle in the Air 4**** and I like it the better of the two, so on to House of Many Ways and I'll see how that stands up. HMC 3*** was a little too difficult to understand, a little to cluttered with unfamiliar characters I had to get used to. This second one, with the focus on Abdullah, seemed to work better because of his Aladdin connection along with the genie and the djinn and other accouterments of Arabian fairy tales.