C. Comstock's Blog

We've just released the audiobook version of King Jend's Loyal Creatures.

It is performed by the award-winning voice actor, Paul Bellantoni!

If you like fantasy with humor and soul, please check it out:

https://www.audible.com/pd/B0G1ZC4696...


https://www.paulbellantoni.com/

I now have an author website:

https://ccomstock.com/

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


At first I didn’t find the book very realistic. It deals with demon summoning and other magical shenanigans in Yale’s secret societies. In the first chapters, I thought, “Well, this can’t be. Shouldn’t the Yalies be focusing on getting jobs at hedge funds and doing management consulting, instead of wizardry?”

But then the book explained that they used the spell-stuff to help make money and get the hedge funds ahead and that it was all a type of management consulting. So, then I thought, “Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Yale students would do that.”

I have met students at Yale and other Ivy League universities, and it always struck me that they would sell their grandmother in order to get a job at a hedge fund, so doing a bit of demon-summoning is reasonable and on-brand for them.

We should all thank Ms. Bardugo for bringing the practice to light.

I was going to mark it down to 4 stars because the prose is so good that it causes me, as a struggling writer, physical pain to read writing that is much better than mine. However, I don’t want Ms. Bardugo’s demon-summoning Yalie friends to come after me, so 5 stars it is.




View all my reviews

Well, sure, good books, but one clearly written by a human and very biased against the orcs and goblins.

They doesn't really explore the orcs' motivations. Couldn't they have all just talked it through? Be friends and overthrow Sauron together?

The real hero of the story, Gollum, is hardly mentioned and, when he is, it is usually just to deride him. That poor Gollum guy guarded the ring for years to keep it away from Sauron. Then, when the folks who stole it from him took it directly toward Sauron, Gollum tirelessly tracked them to try to prevent the disaster of the ring falling into Sauron's hands.

(I mean, couldn't the "Fellowship" have just found a different volcano to take the ring to? Did they really need to take it directly to Sauron? Couldn't they have been a bit faster about it? Come on humans! Get it moving...)

In the end, though, Gollum comes through for us and saves the day. We should all thank him for his selflessness and sacrifice.