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How to get into… Kylie Chan’s Dark Heavens series

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I have a confession to make.

I am a bad nerd. I love sci-fi and fantasy TV and movies, love comics and obviously am a “hard core” sort of a nerd when it comes to conventions. But when it comes to reading sci-fi and fantasy books… well, I just haven’t got there yet.

I’m working on it though. I managed to finish all of George RR Martin’s (published) A Song of Ice and Fire books before the third series of the show started last year. But honestly, I’m not sure I would have picked them up if I a) hadn’t worked for the publisher and had people asking me about/talking about the book all the time and b) if the TV show hadn’t been so fantastically awesome.

Don’t get me wrong, I was glad I made the effort once I started and now consider myself a proper fan.

After GRRM, I went on to read Raymond E Feist’s first Riftwars Saga, Magician. I approached this one with trepidation, more so than with George, because I was well aware that it was published in the same year I was born, so I wasn’t sure if that would make it harder and denser to get through. I was pretty surprised that I really enjoyed it, and while I haven’t moved any further along in the series, I definitely will at some point.

And that brings me to my current readings: Kylie Chan’s Dark Heavens trilogy.

White_TigerThese books have been enormously successful and have a huge following. So much so, that to match the most recent releases of Kylie’s books, HarperVoyager has taken the first two trilogies of the series and bundled them into a bigger trade paperback format. While this is nice for bookshelves (all the books match together) and it’s convenient to have them all in together so you can go straight from one cliffhanger ending to the next, it makes for a huge brick of a book.

I tried for a couple of days to carry this one around with me before I downloaded the ebook and switched between the two (physical book at home, ebook when out).

Enough about the actual book, let’s talk about the content.

What I think is, that given my newb status, Kylie is probably where I should have started. These books are the perfect entrance point to the reader who interested in fantasy books, but who probably hasn’t read a lot of them.

Starting with White Tiger, the book follows the story of Emma, a 28 year old woman from Australia, who is working as a nanny for Simone, the daughter of a wealthy businessman in Hong Kong. In this job, Emma gets more than just being a nanny to a delightful little girl, and finds herself drawn into a world where gods and demons are real, magic and martial arts go hand-in-hand.

What this book did for me was a fairly typical, “follow someone who is similar to me into a world that’s completely strange and alien (or, in this case, more demon than alien).” It’s the perfect book for those of you following along with my posts here, who are wondering how to get into fantasy books. This is how to get into them!

Emma is an easy hook, she’s normal and relatable and she’s curious and she’s a good character to ease you into the strangeness of this world. However, where Emma differs from other “every woman” type characters is that she’s completely unfazed by each new revelation she gets. Demons are real? No big deal. Her charge, Simone can sense demons? Well, that’s ultra-handy. Chinese gods routinely come and go from the house? That’s pretty cool. Her feistiness and curiosity is refreshing.

Now, while I definitely think that there are characters in this series that everyone will relate to, this series has a definite skew towards female readers. I’d describe it as smart women’s fiction with demons, swords and lots of icky black demon guck. It’s an entertaining read, but not quite as full on as say a GRRM or a Feist book. I’ve read the three books all together as one (with some breaks in between to keep up with my comics), and I’ll definitely be going on to catch up with the series (hopefully by the time Demon Child is released in June).

Demon_Child


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