Reviews and Comments

A fantastic foray into the history of painting pigments across the spectrum, divided into short, lucid descriptions of history, composition, and interesting notes. Well illustrated with artwork highlighting each pigment.

This is the book version of the wonderful video shorts on the same theme posted to the Jackson's Art account on Instagram.

This would make a great coffee table book, or for reading in brief installments. For example, I read about a few pigments daily while waiting on the kettle to boil.

Interesting and different, like the other China Miéville books I have read. With everything else going on during the holiday season, this took a bit to get through, but it held my attention. Excellent steampunk world building.

This was more readable than I expected. There were a lot of notes before the story, explaining the history of the text.

A quirky tour of Japanese folk tales with extensive commentary about the meaning, historical context and, the connection to modern Japanese culture. A bit chaotic but, fascinating and easy to read. These are more detailed, more in-depth versions of the sort of stories the author posts daily on Instagram.

You would be forgiven for looking at a pithy summary of the Scholomance series and thinking this is yet another magical school wish fulfillment story. There’s a magical school, an extra-magical misfit main character who unexpectedly makes friends, a prophecy, monsters and sinister forces. Yet, for all that, this is a tale with a spirit firmly planted in reality that bends all the tropes.

What do you do when you are the best at defeating monsters when the real monster is deep systemic injustice?

Naomi Novik is producing some of the most interesting and creative fantasy stories of this generation. They are well worth your time.