Five Books For When You Need A Hero, fun stuff edition
A bonus recommendation, a links roundup, music, a poem, and more
Welcome to this month’s Fun Stuff Edition of Five Books For, a newsletter for people who love great stories.
This month we’ve been talking about heroes and today I have yet another great book to share with you. As always for the Fun Stuff Edition, we also have a poem, a playlist and some reading links, all in keeping with this month’s theme.
Over at Global Comment, in this month’s Great Adaptations column I take a look at another Bernard Cornwell series (what can I say? He writes great heroes) - the Sharpe novels, which were adapted into a TV series starring a young Sean Bean. If you’ve only ever seen him in Game of Thrones then you are in for a treat!
I hope you’ll find something here to surprise and delight you. If you aren’t already subscribed, then you can sign up here to receive these newsletters directly in your inbox. The newsletter is free but if you would like to support it with a paid subscription that option is also available. If you don’t have the funds for a paid subscription at the moment but would like to leave a tip instead, the button below will allow you to send an amount of your choosing as a one-off payment.
Let’s dive in!
Bonus recommendation: Throne Of Glass by Sarah J. Maas
“‘You could rattle the stars,’ she whispered. ‘You could do anything, if only you dared. And deep down, you know it, too. That’s what scares you most.’”
So what’s it about? Celaena Sardothien, an 18-year-old assassin, is imprisoned in the salt mines of Endovier for a year when Crown Prince Dorian offers her a deal: compete in a secret tournament to become the King’s Champion. If she wins, she’ll serve as the king’s personal assassin for four years, then be granted her freedom. If she refuses, she’ll die in the mines. Celaena arrives at the glass castle and commences training, slowly making friends along the way. However, when the tournament is marred by a series of murders, it looks like someone might be using magic - long banned in the kingdom - to take down the opposition. Can Celaena survive long enough to win the tournament? And is there more at stake than she might even realise?
What’s great about it? This is the first in the Throne Of Glass series, and was Maas’ debut novel, aimed at a YA audience. These are books to read for fun - hugely enjoyable and evolving as the series progresses from palace intrigue into epic fantasy battles. Calaena is a great hero - arrogant and witty, brave and fierce, and often vain. This first installment has a mystery at the core which makes for a clever combination of different genres, given the tournament premise and groundwork for the epic fantasy we see later. This is a book which could easily be unrelentingly grim, but Maas injects plenty of humour and makes the dialogue sparkle, which gives some much-needed levity. I also especially liked how it starts with quite a tight scope and gradually widens out, giving hints of what’s to come later in the series.
Give it a try if: you love a female hero; you like female characters who break the rules; you love epic fantasy; you’re looking for something easy and fun to read; you’re looking for a new series to get stuck into; you love palace drama and intrigue.
Honourable mentions
There are a few books I’ve featured previously shared which have great female heroes:
Lucky Santangelo, surely one of the best female heroes ever written.
Feyre in A Court Of Thorns And Roses has to dig deep to find her own strength.
Viv of Legends And Lattes isn’t just brilliant with a battleaxe, she makes the best coffee too. A hero you’d love to have as a friend.
Diana in A Discovery Of Witches grows into her powers over the course of the trilogy. One of my all-time favourite witches and one of the best and strongest heroes regardless of sex.
This month’s listens
I have had so much fun this month compiling two playlists which travel through a hero’s journey, one classical and one full of 1980s/90s goodies. I hope you enjoy them!
This month’s poem
From The Cure At Troy
By Seamus Heaney
Human beings suffer, They torture one another, They get hurt and get hard. No poem or play or song Can fully right a wrong Inflicted and endured … History says, don’t hope On this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme. So hope for a great sea-change On the far side of revenge. Believe that further shore Is reachable from here. Believe in miracle And cures and healing wells. Call miracle self-healing: The utter, self-revealing Double-take of feeling. If there’s fire on the mountain Or lightning and storm And a god speaks from the sky That means someone is hearing The outcry and the birth-cry of new life at its term.
This month’s reading links
An interview with Bernard Cornwell. (Guardian, free)
Lee Child was interviewed by the BBC. The link to the interview and some highlights is here. (BBC, free)
21 questions with Gregg Hurtwitz. (Penguin, free)
CJ Box talks about the person who inspired the reaction of Nate Romaniwski. (Penguin, free)
On the anxiety of writing historical fiction. (LitHub, free)
Thanks for reading!
As always, I’m grateful to each and every one of you who subscribes, free or paid. I know we all have such crowded inboxes these days and I feel so lucky to be sharing the joys of reading with you like this. I would love to hear from you - what have you been reading recently? Have you read any of the books I’ve covered this month? Let me know in the comments. I’ll be back next month with a new theme and more reading joy.
Happy reading!
Kate
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