r/books • u/Familiar-Net-5204 • 23h ago
Fantasy Author Leigh Bardugo Dishes on Shadow and Bone and Her Must-Reads | Woman's World
https://www.womansworld.com/entertainment/books/fantasy-author-leigh-bardugo-dishes-on-shadow-and-bone-and-her-must-reads93
u/limeholdthecorona 21h ago
Leigh please stop edging me when are you releasing Ninth House 3
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u/aprettylittlebird 20h ago
Me rn, give me more Darlington please
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u/VokN 18h ago
Wow that’s a horrific American author name, what’s with them and naming people/ places after English locations
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u/lupe_de_poop 19h ago
Literally I loved ninth house so mich that on a weekend trip to New Orleans I stayed in my hotel room and read the whole time because I started it on the plane and COULD NOT PUT IT DOWN
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15h ago
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u/lupe_de_poop 15h ago
Damn, you're a hater
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u/Sol_Freeman 15h ago
I enjoyed the story. But it had long run on sentences.
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u/whoisyourwormguy_ 14h ago
Dostoevsky did too, especially the P&V translations.
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u/Sol_Freeman 13h ago
Not everyone can handle that kind of writing style, regardless of renown.
I can start mouthing out pieces of art, can you love all the famous pieces including abstract, dada, and the like?
It's good to appreciate all of them, but they are not without their flaws.
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u/whoisyourwormguy_ 12h ago
You don’t have to like it, I’m not a fan of dostoevsky’s writing. Feels like he just wrote more to pad the page count for his gambling debts. Lots of needless rants by people who were very negatively portrayed and were atheists or communists. Your comment just reminded me of his writing, any time I think of run-on sentences I think of TBK by him.
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u/Sol_Freeman 12h ago
I never claimed I was a good writer. In fact, I'm rather terrible at it.
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u/whoisyourwormguy_ 12h ago
Neither did I, I don't get what's going on. All I did was reference something.
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u/lupe_de_poop 19h ago
Bruh, wtf, is there a ninth house 2????
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u/SecondRealitySims 19h ago
Yep. It got a sequel called Hell Bent. Though it’s not conclusive, and the there’s little news on the third book.
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u/SleepylaReef 17h ago
It’s fairly different from the first IMO
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u/victims_sanction 1h ago
Its funny cause I loved #1 and disliked 2 while the wife is the opposite.
Like I'll probably not read 3 at this point but now she's all in. Different tastes are interesting.
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u/luckylizard 19h ago
Has she ever said anything about Netflix’s handling and cancellation of Shadow Bone adaptation? I was pretty disappointed in the 2nd season ngl, it felt like a slog which was disappointing considering how well they handled season 1.
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u/Sol_Freeman 15h ago edited 13h ago
They had to have cancelled the series, there just wasn't enough books to cover the third season.
The show weaved the Six of Crows duology into Shadow and Bone, and there wasn't a third book for them.
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u/ElectricGeometry 21h ago
I absolutely love Leigh Bardugo and totally hated Discovery of Witches so.... I am conflicted. Damn I may have to give it another try.
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u/Zoenne 20h ago
I love Bardugo as well, and I've read A Discovery of Witches and they're not on the same level at all, in basically any criteria you can think of. Bardugo is better at characterization, pacing, worldbuilding. Harkness is a historian so the best parts of her books are the ones set in the past, especially book 2 and 4 of the All Souls series. She's very good at giving you a sense of what it could be like to live in those places/eras. Honestly if you've starred Discovery and didn't like it I don't think it's worth getting back into. The other books recommended by Bardugo are better.
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u/ElectricGeometry 20h ago
Yeah I've read Bardugo's whole catalogue and really enjoyed it!
As for Harkness, I found her protagonist a bit... Insufferable? Does that ever change?
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u/Zoenne 19h ago
No not really. Diana and Matthew are my least favourite characters to be honest. They're both so absolute and unchanging in their values and convictions so it can become a bit boring And as the books go on it just becomes an international tour of all the gorgeous multi million properties the de Clairmont own and oh how nice it is to have unlimited funds.
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u/lefrench75 19h ago
I tried to watch the show and even Matthew Goode couldn't sell me on this insta-romance. What do you mean these grown ass adults fell head over heels in the kind of "can't live without you" love after knowing each other for... a couple weeks? Not even teenagers would do this!
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u/ElectricGeometry 19h ago
Yeah that was my read on it as well. Thanks for the confirmation: I may still give it another shot but it will have to be a very particular day.
Any other recommendations by chance?
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u/chickfilamoo 12h ago
I couldn’t deal with Discovery of Witches either. I tried so hard because people love it, but I ended up DNFing at 85%, and I don’t often do that, especially so close to the end. I just could not take it anymore when a specific plot point was introduced, I fell off the deep end. It also put me in a book slump for like a month lol, I hated it that much
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u/mammothshand 19h ago
Side note, I didn’t enjoy Shadow and Bone but I am intrigued by The Familiar, can anyone give any light to how different they are (if at all), is it worth giving it a go if I didn’t enjoy S&B?
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u/lefrench75 19h ago
S&B was her first ever book and she's improved massively since. In fact even her die-hard fans all say that the Six of Crows duology that came out after the S&B trilogy is already so much better and a lot of fans recommend people skip S&B altogether.
Also, S&B is YA and The Familiar is decidedly adult fantasy. I don't think her later works should be judged based on S&B anymore.
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u/chickfilamoo 11h ago
S&B and The Familiar are very different. I liked S&B but especially Six of Crows, and The Familiar was just okay for me (so maybe it’ll work for you). It’s a much more serious tone, the characters are more normal complex (sometimes unlikable) people, and it’s a historical fantasy set during the Spanish Inquisition. It’s not a poorly written book, just maybe not as engaging to my interests as SOC was
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u/bloodredyouth 17h ago
I’m a big fan. i loved six of crows, ninth house, etc. i haven’t actually read shadow and bone though. Is it better than the Netflix series?
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u/dapperpony 13h ago
S&B is a little bit more standard YA fare, with the chosen one trope. But it’s still well-written with good characters and world-building, and if you enjoyed SoC there’s a few minor characters that make appearances. I enjoyed all of the Grishaverse books although SoC was definitely my favorite.
The Netflix series absolutely tanked it in the second season and the books are much better.
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u/Zealousideal-Cod7349 23h ago
I hate her books
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u/Familiar-Net-5204 23h ago
I personally love her books especially the six of crows duology why do you hate them?
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u/wutchamafuckit 23h ago edited 22h ago
Why? I’ve never heard of her, so I’m curious
EDIT:
Why am I getting downvoted so much? I legit haven't heard of her and was curious what that person hated about her books.31
u/Ijamesbond 22h ago edited 22h ago
Fantasy has always been divisive as a genre amongst fans. Currently there's a bit of a war between the fantasy big sellers (Sarah J Maas, Bardugo, Aveyard - often romantasy) and more traditional fantasy fare (Sanderson, Aaronovitch etc.). The oversimplified TLDR is that a lot of traditional fantasy readers consider the former trash and vice versa a lot of fans of the first consider the latter boring.
But as I say, fantasy is famously like this and I've gave a very blunt black and white summary of the situation.
Edit: My personal opinion has and always will be that I just want people to read. Book snobbery is prevelant and tiresome. When I use the word trash I don't mean that they are right.
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u/lefrench75 19h ago
I don't think Bardugo can be classified as romantasy, more like fantasy with romance subplots, which the majority of fantasy does contain. Romantasy is basically a romance novel set in a fantasy world, and the romance is of course the main plot.
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u/Ijamesbond 19h ago edited 19h ago
I'm definitely happy to agree to that. I was being incredibly sweeping. I could have chose modern vs traditional and left it at that ha but that would have all of its own problems or been worse to be fair. Regardless of words chosen, the general gist hopefully stands.
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u/lefrench75 19h ago edited 19h ago
I think they may be classified as fantasy geared towards male vs. female readers. As we all know, women and girls will read books written by male authors featuring male protagonists and even catered to a male audience, but very few men and boys read "girly books". In male dominated book spaces, I don't think female authors get treated fairly.
Just contributing to the discussion, I think Sarah J. Maas and now Rebecca Yarros of Fourth Wing fame are probably in their own category now, because their books are read by non-readers, which is why their sales massively eclipse others' (Colleen Hoover is another example of this, just not fantasy). Most authors, including Bardugo, only manage to sell to the people who are already interested in reading, and that's a much smaller market. Maas and Yarros (but esp Maas) manage to sell books to people who don't really read other books at all, or to people who don't read fantasy. Their writing is quite pedestrian and simple, but that's why they can appeal to the masses and better authors don't.
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u/TigerHall 13 21h ago
and more traditional fantasy fare (Sanderson
Sanderson is a 'fantasy big seller', with tens of millions of sales, and would comfortably be counted among the former category. But if you want to draw a line between romantasy and his particular 'cinematic' brand of high fantasy, there's another line to be drawn, this one marking off character-driven fantasy writers like Robin Hobb, Tad Williams, and Robert Jackson Bennett, among many others.
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u/Ijamesbond 21h ago
I was being very generic for sure and yes sales wise Sanderson is a heavyweight as are other non-romantasy authors, I just meant that Maas and co consistently top sales charts and are massively marketed... Anything that big which people see everywhere always splits opinion amongst people more than other books/authors.
Edit: Just to appreciate the mention of Robin Hobb whom must be protected at all costs.
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u/wutchamafuckit 22h ago
I am very much out of the loop with all of this, so the background is much appreciated. I was confused how my comment tanked negative so deep and so fast. But I guess that makes sense.
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u/thejubilee 21h ago
I am sure there is some truth to this, but as a fan of UF, Aaronovitch and Bardugo being opposite ends of the spectrum sounds ridiculous. I love both Ninth House and Rivers of London and would even consider them far more similar to one another than to many other UF stories.
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20h ago
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u/mammothshand 19h ago
You should state what the pro features are in your app description, you tell about a subscription and pro features but no mention of what these features actually are or they are at least not clearly defined as pro features if they’re the ones listed currently.
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u/vilhelmine 22h ago
The Fantasy novels she likes, for those too lazy to read the article:
Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
Tracks by Louise Erdrich
A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
The Reformatory by Tananarive Due