Booked Panda Reviews

  Book Review: The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson Release Date: August 31, 2010  Genre: Fantasy Age Range: Adult Series: The Stormlight Archive Goodreads  Avg. Rating: 4.66 stars Oh this reread was so much fun. I could see characters in a state of naivety to the events that would befall them. There were also so many little things that get forgotten or just glanced over on a first read. Now how to break this review down to such a wonderfully complex book. Well, let's start as we always do with the world-building. This is a daunting task as Sanderson puts so very much into his world. The story takes place in the world of Roshar, an interesting planet where high storms reign causing life to be quite different than what we might expect. Planets evolved to shelter themselves when people or storms draw near. Creatures have hard shells of carapace more often than fur it seems. The content is broken up into several kingdoms but for the bulk of the story, we are at the Shattered Planes w

   Book Review: The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer Release Date: July 16, 2024  Genre: Fantasy Age Range: Adult Goodreads  Avg. Rating: 4.16 stars This story was nothing short of beautiful and touching. While I would love to dive into the world-building here it might be too much of a spoiler so I must resist. However, just know that if you choose to pick this book up there is a beautiful world waiting. This is a lite fantasy, maybe due to this the scale and details of said beautiful world aren't fully gone into. We are given a few great descriptions of places in West Virginia and elsewhere. This book begins in West Virginia and will end there as well, with a few side trips in between. Let's lay the cards on the table that this is a fairy tale of sorts. Thus the magic that comes up is ruled by the normal bounds of fairytale worlds. In this particular case, there is nothing over the top, no godmothers, pixie dust, or even healing enchantments unfortunately. In terms of magic, we don&#