Happy Monday all! Sorry for being MIA all of last week besides my art post. I had been working a lot on redesigning the interior for my printed version for 'Fragments of Light.' I finished it late last week, and now am waiting for a proof version before making it live on Amazon and B&N. Not only that, I've been having issues with the distributor for B&N getting it uploaded. Still waiting to hear from their tech support. And of course, to add to it all, I got food poisoning last night and am not 100%. I will probably add another post today since I have a snippet of time about other things happening.
Okay, onto my post about my recent read of 'The Floating Castle' by Craig Mills. By the photo, you can see that this book is a part of the King's Quest series, a late 80s and early 90s computer game series. I wrote about it here.
I never knew that these books existed until a random internet post from a pixel gaming account a few years ago. Since then, I had wanted to read the trilogy, but there was a problem. Since these books are out of print (1995), it's hard to find a copy of any of the books, especially book 2 and 3. Another issue - if you happen to find the books, they are EXTREMELY expensive. The first book is priced around $30. The second book runs for $70. And the final book? $300! WHAT?! Not to mention at one point, the third book was priced at $700. Over the past two years, I have been watching these books on Amazon to see if any sellers post them for less money. I got the first book for Christmas, and the second book I recently scored for $30. But, thanks to an amazing redditor, they posted all three books as PDF format so anyone can read them. The first comment in this post has the link to the PDFs. If I cannot get the third book, I will read the PDF version.
Overall, I enjoyed 'The Floating Castle' and was pleasantly surprised. The writing style is very old school 90s fantasy. Think Dragonlance, Wizard's First Rule, and Assassin's Apprentice. The pacing is slower than today's reads, so don't expect a whirlwind of a tale. The first half of the book was slower than the second half. During the first half, the characters spend a good deal of time traveling to the castle, which includes a lot of unnecessary descriptions of the forests, landscape, etc. If I had to rate the book just based off the first half, I'd give it a 3-star rating. The story picked up during the second half of the book, and at that point I didn't want to put it down. I'm a sucker for magic battles, dark knights, wizards, and royalty. If I solely rated the book for the second half, it'd give it a five star rating.