Blog tour: The Wizard's Promise by Cassandra Rose Clarke

Hello all. I have a blog tour for you today. I'm sure you've heard of this author and her books and I really hope you'll enjoy the review and also check out Cassandra's top ten fantasy books list. 

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Book summary: 

All Hanna Euli wants is to become a proper witch – but unfortunately, she’s stuck as an apprentice to a grumpy fisherman. When their boat gets caught up in a mysterious storm and blown wildly off course, Hanna finds herself further away from home than she’s ever been before.
As she tries to get back, she learns there may be more to her apprentice master than she realized, especially when a mysterious, beautiful, and very non-human boy begins following her through the ocean, claiming that he needs Hanna’s help.

           The Assassin's Curse is one of those series I have been seeing around for years but I haven't gotten to read it just yet. So when I got the opportunity to be part of this tour I was over the moon. Now I see that I should have read the first series first but well I never do things in order anyway.

           Here we meet Hanna, a young girls who has heard such amazing adventurous stories from her mother and adventures are all she dreams of while living in the small village and being trained by the wizard who doesn't even bother to show her any tricks. So when they set of for a relatively short journey she couldn't believe that a mysterious storm would blown them far away from everything the is used to. Once in unfamiliar land and with unfamiliar people she must find a way to go back on her own. On on the North the forces are much stronger than she dreamed of and her destiny might be different from what she thought.

        Firstly Hanna is a girl I really liked. Her ability to find a way and fight on her own are something I highly admired. I can only assume that she got that from the other girl she got name from. Now we go back to The Assassin's Curse which I recommend you read first as this whole world would be more clear and you will easily travel from one place to another. But then again it'd not be the end of the world if you don't as this whole world will be more magical and unpredictable as it was for me. In some way, you win and lose something either way.

       References for the previous series were something that didn't bother me. I had to put together the pieces of the map in my had like it was a puzzle and I enjoyed it. But other thing that bothered me is that some parts of this book were rather slow. Especially at the start which was the slowest part, till the mysterious storm hit which changed the course of the storytelling. I enjoyed vivid pictures and the mystery that surrounded the Mist.
     
       All in all, enjoyable read and I will be waiting to read the sequel (probably I will read The Assassin's Curse in the meantime).

Rating: 4 stars. 

Guest post 

Top Ten Fantasy Books! 

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: As a general rule, I tend to prefer fantasy that leans more toward magical realism than classic epic fantasies. This book is to magical realism what Lord of the Rings is to those epic fantasies, and it’s one of my favorite novels of all time. I love the way the magical elements are interwoven into the story and its themes. I love the blurring of time and the fact that this book played with the idea that time is a flat circle long before True Detective. The writing is gorgeous and the imagery stays with me long after I put the book down. Perfection.
The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury: This book always gets classified as science fiction because Mars, but I think its heart really lies with fantasy—in particular, the magical realist-tinged fantasy I’m so fond of. The book takes a lot of typical Mars tropes and reworks them to feel like something out of a dream: the Martians fade away to ghosts, the rockets taking people up to Mars burn so hot they create a global summer, and terraforming involves an entire forest of trees growing overnight.
The Harry Potter series, by JK Rowling: It’s impossible to name favorite fantasy novels without listing series (and I’ve got a couple in this list). I don’t think the Harry Potter series is perfect, but it occupies a space in my mind that’s impossible to ignore. One of the strengths of the book is the fabulous, slightly grotesque nature of the characters, and those characters are what ultimately drew me in. There are gaps in the worldbuilding, but that just makes the book all the more fun to discuss and argue about. Plus, who hasn’t sat around thinking about which House they’d be sorted into?
A Song of Ice and Fire series, by George R. R. Martin: There’s so much going on in these books. On one hand, they are a pitch-perfect deconstruction of epic fantasy tropes and character archetypes. The classic fantasy heroes die, the popular “underdog” characters become unlikeable sociopaths, and the weak characters slowly prove their strength. On the other hand, the books as a whole are basically a trashy soap opera. I mean, it is literally both of these things at once. Amazing.
The Sandman series, by Neil Gaiman: I read the entire series in college and it completely blew my mind. I mean, it’s a revival of a freaking superhero comic from the Seventies! And yet Gaiman manages to take that teeny-tiny germ of an idea and blossom it out into this incredibly complex, intricate world. The result is a fantasy series that is completely imbued with philosophy and late Eighties counterculture. It was, at the time, unlike anything I had ever read before.
Howl’s Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones: I love this book. Is there anything else to say besides that? I love the characters, I love the romance—which you hardly even realize is a romance until the very end—and I love the worldbuilding. There is literally nothing else to say other than, “I love this book.”
His Dark Materials series, by Philip Pullman: I love how this is a fantasy series that basically ignores every fantasy trope in existence, opting instead to retell Paradise Lost with a happy ending. It gets called the anti-Narnia a lot, but I don’t think that’s really fair to either series, since it’s reducing them down to their politics. I have a pretty low tolerance for didacticism in fiction, and yet I love His Dark Materials, not simply because of the message but because of the characters, their relationships, and the beautiful strangeness of the world the book creates.
Practical Magic, by Alice Hoffman: Alice Hoffman is one of my favorite authors, and this book was my first introduction to her writing. I love how it blends interpersonal and domestic drama with the drama of magic and witchcraft, and always in such a way that the two elements are inseparable from one another. It’s a charming, touching example of genre-blending, and I’d love to see more fantasy novels that follow its example.
Among Others, by Jo Walton: Like the Martian Chronicles, this book tends to be, if not classified, then at least grouped in with science fiction. That’s because it’s about science fiction—the story itself is definitely fantasy. What’s interesting about the fantasy story, too, is that the book actually shows the aftermath of what would normally be the focus of a fantasy novel—in this case, the battle between the main character and her evil magic-wielding mother. Instead, we see the narrator emotionally recovering from that battle, those science fiction books helping her along.
Magic for Beginners, by Kelly Link: So I did cheat a little bit, as this isn’t a book, but a collection of short stories (and not vaguely connection short stories, like The Martian Chronicles). But it’s one of my absolute favorite books of all time, and I love the way Link writes about magic. In these stories, magic feels like a natural extension of the world—they’re basically magical realism, really, but they have a sensibility that places them more firmly in genre. You’ve got witches and fairies and superheroes all swirled up together in a delicious postmodern ice cream.

About the author

Cassandra Rose Clarke grew up in south Texas and currently lives in a suburb of Houston, where she writes and teaches composition at a local college. She graduated in 2006 from The University of St. Thomas with a B.A. in English, and two years later she completed her master’s degree in creative writing at The University of Texas at Austin. In 2010 she attended the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop in Seattle, where she was a recipient of the Susan C. Petrey Clarion Scholarship Fund.
Cassandra’s first adult novel, The Mad Scientist’s Daughter, was a finalist for the 2013 Philip K. Dick Award, and her YA novel, The Assassin’s Curse, was nominated for YALSA’s 2014 Best Fiction for Young Adults. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons and Daily Science Fiction.

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Until the next time,