Book Spotlight: Fire (The Seven Kingdoms Trilogy, Book 2) by Kristin Cashore

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Welcome back, Beardies!

Thanks for joining me for the second installment in my series of posts on Kristin Cashore’s Seven Kingdoms Trilogy. Today, we’re discussing Fire, the second book in the trilogy. First published in 2009, Fire is a prequel set forty years before the events of Graceling, in a neighboring kingdom called the Dells. Fire has only one character in common with Graceling, but as unorthodox as this may seem, it is a stroke of genius for the trilogy as a whole.

Book Spotlight: Graceling (The Seven Kingdoms Trilogy, Book 1) by Kristin Cashore

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Welcome back, Beardies!

Back at the beginning of May, Joshua asked me for a list of titles I’d like to feature for Book Spotlight. Bitterblue, the final installment in Kristin Cashore’s Seven Kingdoms Trilogy, had just come out, and the trilogy as a whole topped the list. I even owned all the books and had already read the first two. Because of all the reading I have to do for my job, though, often the books that I own fall to the bottom of the pile because I have all the time in the world, rather than the three weeks allowed by a library checkout, to read them. Thus, months passed, and a Spotlight on Seven Kingdoms never came. Then, one night, I asked Joshua for my weekly assignment, and he specifically asked me to read Bitterblue. Turns out, in his words, he’d “been waiting for that Spotlight with white knuckles.” Well, what could I do but oblige him?

Originally, I set out to do just one post on The Seven Kingdoms Trilogy, but quickly realized that the trilogy simply had too many strong points and too much depth for one post to do it justice. So, at Joshua’s encouragement, I have decided to cover this trilogy in three separate posts. The first installment of the trilogy, Graceling, hit shelves in 2008 with immediate success, bagging tons of literary hardware. It was named a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association; was a finalist for the William C. Morris Award for best young adult debut novel that year; and also snagged the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature.

Book Spotlight: Kiss of Pride by Sandra Hill

Hello Beardies!

This is Sara and I’m excited to write a book review for The Bearded Scribe. Joshua was correct in my introduction post—I am usually not far from a book. The fact that my Nook is about 85% full and I’m still surrounded by paper books is proof. My reading specialty is romance—specifically paranormal. There are so many series I want to write about, but I figured I’d start small.

Vikings. (Not very small, are they?) The word conjures images of giant blonde warriors traversing the European waterways to plunder, pillage and explore. This was a race that scared their time period with just their name, so how could they simply be absorbed into other cultures? Sandra Hill offers and explanation for this in her series, The Deadly Angels.