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Russ Albery whose SF/Fantasy book reviews we at LitPundit often feature in this section, has a nice review on J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Children of Húrin", edited by Christopher Tolkien.

The story in The Children of Húrin is told in more summarized form in The Silmarillion, so those who have read it will recognize this book, but this is a much-expanded version assembled by Christopher Tolkien from various manuscripts written at different times in his father's life.

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This is not going to be to everyone's taste. Indeed, I'll go a step further and say that The Children of Húrin is not particularly compelling in isolation. The strength of its tragedy is considerably muted by a distant tone full of the stylings of epic: geneologies, extensive place names (the map is helpful but not quite sufficient), many references to other parts of Tolkien's mythology, and a somewhat archaic tone in all the dialogue.

As concluding remark, he says

(...) if you're looking to explore Tolkien's mythology beyond his popular novels, The Silmarillion is a much better starting point. If, however, you already have a copy of that (particularly the nice hardcover with similarly exceptional art) and have the...

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As a child I, like most Indian kids, used to get a larger than usual dose of fantasy stories thanks to national obsession with Mahabharata, the longest epic poem in the world. Back then it was just a long story with Gods and demons, incredible weapons and wars and ever so often a moral lesson on how to lead your life. When we grew older, the fantasy angle seemed childish and was left completely ignored while we went off searching for the deep truth s and philosophies buried inside the epic. Embarrassed for no reason, I refused to read any more stories labeled 'Fantasy'. It didn't help that the novels that I glanced at on rare ocassions were turgid piece of work that I promptly put down before someone caught me reading them. Then someone recommended The Lord of the Ring (mind you, long before the movie came out) and I surprised myself by finishing the trilogy in a week or so. Sadly no other work captivated me after that, that is until I started reading Rothfuss's debut fantasy "The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day One)".

It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and...

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Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full
of weeping than you
can understand.

- W.B. Yeats

Keith Donohue draws inspiration from a Yeats poem to pen an imaginative albeit unconventional first novel. "The Stolen Child" is a fantasy book set in the early 20th century, and requires complete suspension of disbelief from page one. The reader who is willing to do that is rewarded with a rich narrative of the life of changelings, whom I had never heard of before, but later understood to be an ancient legend popular in the British Isles.

The Stolen Child tells the story of Henry Day, who runs away from home and hides in the hollow of a tree, where he is kidnapped by a changeling who switches lives with Henry. The book follows the life of the real Henry and the changeling Henry from that point on. The central theme of the book is the double life that the two protagonists lead - intertwined and complicated. Each lives with resentment, anger and fear until, eventually, they come to terms with their own lives. This... Continue reading