“I’ll make an offer you can’t refuse”; those are the words echoed and mocked in so many movies. But they originated in a little book called “The Godfather” by Mario Puzzo in the late 60s and became a movie phenomenon. When I read “Jade City”, those words came to mind as this book is very much an organized crime novel. And if you add the touch of magic included in the story, from the Jade driven powers the characters have, it feels very much like gangster Urban fantasy.
Urban Fantasy
Review: Jade City and Jade War (The Green Bone Saga #1-2) by Fonda Lee
All the pieces of this jade puzzle worked so well for me. Jade City wowed me with its empathetic characters, engaging worldbuilding and tense action. Jade War amplified that in all the best ways with the addition of an international scope, political intrigue and a more integrated sense of where Kekon and its clans fit within the broader world. And, amidst all of this, the intimacy of the Kaul family bleeds through every page. Fonda Lee has crafted a masterful fantasy world with these two books, gifting me with some of my favorite fictional characters of all time.
Review: Hounded (The Iron Druid Chronicles #1) by Kevin Hearne
I’ll admit that urban fantasy is one of the genres of speculative fiction that I am the least familiar with. For the longest time, I would see the covers in bookstores and just assume that they were like the fantasy romance novels that I grew up watching my grandmother tear through, one after another. I have since learned that this is not (always) the case.