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Reviews by Contributor: Tolmie, Sarah (6)

A Horse With No Name

All the Horses of Iceland

By Sarah Tolmie  

27 Jan, 2022

Miscellaneous Reviews

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Sarah Tolmie’s 2022 All the Horses of Iceland is a historical fantasy.

The nameless horse’s 9th century1journey from Central Asia to Iceland began with religious conversion. More exactly, it began because a conversion was refused. Eyvind of Eyri, an Icelandic pagan and a sailor, finds Christian attempts to covert him unconvincing. When the captain of Eyvind’s ship converts to Christianity while docked in the Volga river trading community of Helmgard (modern Novgorod), only Eyvind refuses to follow the captain’s lead. Feeling out of place on the now Christian ship, Eyvind cashes in his shares and looks for other opportunities.

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My Guide the Morning Star 

Two Travelers

By Sarah Tolmie  

13 Jan, 2017

A Year of Waterloo Region Speculative Fiction

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Sarah Tolmie is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Waterloo. Her first spec-fic novel, 2014’s The Stone Boatmen, won a starred review in Publishers Weekly and a glowing blurb from Ursula K. Le Guin. Since The Stone Boatmen, she has published four other books: 2014’s NoFood andSonnet in a Blue Dress and other poems, 2015’s Trio, and the subject of today’s review, a 2016 collection titled Two Travelers.

Two Travelers is a single-author collection containing two short pieces, a novelette (Dancer on the Stairs) and a novella (The Burning Furrow).

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Quietly addictive: The Stone Boatmen

The Stone Boatmen

By Sarah Tolmie  

15 Sep, 2014

KW Science Fiction and Fantasy

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It is a sad truth that a life spent reviewing books, particularly genre fiction, particularly fantasy, involves reading a lot of terrible books. Worse, reading variations of the same terrible book, over and over. There is a benefit, which is that a gem of the first water like Sarah Tolmie’s The Stone Boatmen stands out against the rest that much more. 

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