{"id":11287,"date":"2024-03-23T23:40:29","date_gmt":"2024-03-23T23:40:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/?p=11287"},"modified":"2024-03-23T23:40:29","modified_gmt":"2024-03-23T23:40:29","slug":"the-half-life-empire-liches-get-stitches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/the-half-life-empire-liches-get-stitches\/","title":{"rendered":"THE HALF-LIFE EMPIRE &#038; Liches Get Stitches"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Shami-Stovall\/e\/B07KXXPJ74\">Shami Stovall<\/a>&#8216;s first <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/B0CJCMVD1K\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Half-Life Empire<\/a> novel has quite an interesting and well-developed setting&#8230; so it&#8217;s rather unfortunate that the protagonist gets victimized so often. Apart from the very first theft she&#8217;s constantly getting captured or fully reliant on someone else to save her (sometimes in a less than believable manner). While the third book&#8217;s description hints that she eventually develops power of her own, I&#8217;m not thrilled by the idea of wading through two books worth of &#8216;damsel in distress&#8217; to get there.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/B0CHQQ8XRK\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Litches Get Stitches<\/a> books, by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/HJ-Tolson\/e\/B09GNW6JX3\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">HJ Tolson<\/a>, tell the story of a gardening and crafts-loving witch who gets in touch with her inner axe-murderer after unexpectedly transforming into a lich. The contrast between her homemaking interests and (occasionally self-destructive) impulsive bloodlust works rather well and the stakes rise from defending a house in the first book, all the way to planning to oppose a god in the fourth. I&#8217;m interested to see if it escalates further or actually concludes the story with deicide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Shami Stovall&#8216;s first Half-Life Empire novel has quite an interesting and well-developed setting&#8230; so it&#8217;s rather unfortunate that the protagonist gets victimized so often. Apart from the very first theft she&#8217;s constantly getting captured or fully reliant on someone else to save her (sometimes in a less than believable manner). While the third book&#8217;s description hints that she eventually develops power of her own, I&#8217;m not thrilled by the idea of wading through two books worth of &#8216;damsel in distress&#8217; to get there. The Litches Get Stitches books, by HJ Tolson, tell the story of a gardening and crafts-loving witch who gets in touch with her inner axe-murderer after unexpectedly transforming into a lich. The contrast between her homemaking interests and (occasionally self-destructive) impulsive bloodlust works rather well and the stakes rise from defending a house in the first book, all the way to planning to oppose a god in the fourth. I&#8217;m interested to see if it escalates further or actually concludes the story with deicide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[28,835,833,64,62,836,834],"class_list":["post-11287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-related","tag-fantasy","tag-hj-tolson","tag-liches-get-stitches","tag-romance","tag-science-fiction","tag-shami-stovall","tag-the-half-life-empire"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11287\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}