 You know how it is when you're talking in front of a camera and the words are abandoning you and you feel awfully silly in your little red dotted tie, but I'm here now and I'm doing this. Hello, hello, hello! I'm Philip Magnus and I am an insufferable book nerd. It's true, most of my friends think so, they don't say it, not in so-I'll-try-to-way, but it's undeniable. Now I've wanted to do a booktube kind of spin on my gaming channel for a while, but sitting in front of a camera and talking for a long, long time has always intimidated me a little bit. It is however 2021 and what is a new year if not to challenge ourselves? Happy new year by the way! Today I'm going to talk about my favourite fantasy book of 2020. There were quite an awful lot of books that nearly made it only one one over. Before I discuss my favourite fantasy book of 2020 I would like to give a very short shout out to three of the runners up. The first one of these is The Ones in Future Witches by Alex E. Harrow which has a striking powerful feminist message about womanhood, sisterhood, motherhood and society as a whole about women and their place in society, the roles that they had been and in many aspects continue to be forced into all those horrifying little boxes that no intelligent creature deserves to be put into. Our second book, our second runner up is one of my favourite authors, Joe Abercrombie's The Trouble with Peace. This is the second novel in his Age of Madness trilogy which follows up on the glorious first law trilogy and the three stand-alones that came out from that classical grimdark trilogy of the late 2000s. Our third runner up is The Girl in the Stars by Mark Lawrence and I'm something of a newbie to Mark Lawrence. I hope to read a lot more of his works, I have heard wonderful things, I have had a few chats with him and he seems like a wonderful chap and he is of course the architect behind the SPFBO, the self-published fantasy blog of which is a great event I think for self-published fantasy authors. And now that we have all of this out of the way, let me show you. Let me talk to you and to you about The Burning God by Rebecca Kwob. This is my favourite book of the year and it is a special one. Now I could prattle on incoherent odds for you all day without managing to describe to you why The Burning God and the popular trilogy in general are so strong, so special, such unique and wonderful works of fantasy literature or I could let my inner voice do the talking. Got it boss! The Burning God is a triumph, Rebecca Kwong's conclusion to her debut trilogy The Poppy War is testament to her growth as a writer. What began with an ambitious girl looking to better her life closes with a broken young woman shaping the future of an entire nation. To speak of The Burning God divorced from the trilogy would make little sense and so I'll draw you a mental image of the teams the author examines, a fraction of the historical events she draws from. I'll keep spoilers in this discussion to a minimum. This is a military fantasy at its most intricate. Kwong touches better than almost anyone I've read, the human cost of war. She juxtaposes strategic and tactical expediency with the horrors they give birth to, creating in the process as powerful, a critique of war as I have ever come across. It was evident from the first part of the trilogy the author is not one to shy away from the brutal and ugly nature of warfare. So much of these novels is drawn from well documented war horrors, many of them from the Sino-Japanese War. I don't think I'll ever forget the haunting descriptive passages of Gollin niece, a slaughter whose brutality recalls the Nanking massacre, more about which you can find in The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang. The setup in the first half of the first book does not prepare the reader for this. The sudden breakout of war and its arrival are shocking for the brutality at display when the Nicarian Empire is attacked by the Mugenese. Children, the most promising of the new generation, unwaid by the sins of the past, are co-opted into facing unimaginable horrors long before they are ready for them, as if anyone could ever be ready for such atrocities. Protagonist Trin is triced down to be a linchpin in this conflict, once for being a student at Cinegard the elite imperial academy for the leaders of tomorrow. A second time for her shamanistic ability to call the fires of her people's god, the phoenix who consumes all things with flame, and the third time, because Ryn is one of the last two surviving spearleys, a nation with a strong bond to the phoenix destroyed by the same Mugenese who now attacked Nicaria, but 20 years ago. I don't want to write or reuse too much of my review of the third book, you can find a link to that text in the description below, what I do want to talk about is this, the burning god sees the blossoming of so many of the elements the author set up over the previous two books, in one particular aspect, showing not only the instantaneous horrors of war, but its indirect devastations too. When the river is poisoned to deter one set of attackers in the dragon republic, it's a tactical inconvenience for that side, but it's the civilians who suffer the effects long after the conflict has ended, it's the civilians whose lands are made uninhabitable, and whose main source of sustenance, fish, is removed from its natural habitat in waters among other things, ecological devastation. When the psych, the shamanistic special forces, squad of the Nicarian Empire, breaks down a dam, they kill thousands of the invading Mugenese and earn precious time for the war efforts of their military forces, but the floods displace and kill untold thousands of the empire's own civilians, the floods turn some of the most arable lands in the empire barren, for all present purposes, crops are killed and a swath of population, the survivors of this tragedy, is displaced, refugees in their own country, the breaking of the dam is a strategically sound decision, and it helps the war effort, but its human cost is unimaginable, a small thing that Rin pushes out of her mind soon after the fact. But events in the Burning God recall it more than once, the tragedies of repeated conflict have left no part of the empire untouched, and the scenes of desolation, hunger, forced migration, suffering and disease, repeat themselves anywhere Rin and her band of ragged soldiers travel to, its civilians who starve are uprooted, who are the main victims of the violence of one aggressor after another, to the ambitious leaders who have pulled Rin this way and that, no strategy is left untouched if it can offer them an edge over their foes, to Rin who sees more pain than anyone should, who is used and betrayed more than once, worries the only thing that makes sense, she lashes out time and again, trying to numb her pain, Rin is reactive and too overtaken by what she has witnessed, what she has done and what has been done to her, to look at events with any degree of clarity, Rin accepts too the guidance of anyone crafty enough to use her Burning Rage's weapon. In the first two books anyway, by the third she has wisened up, but the wounds and scars she bears from over a year of non-stop conflict has deafened her to the agony of the every man of the civilian, she does not see the pain, she does not see the inability of the everyday person in the Nicarin Empire to continue this way, she is too overtaken by ambition by what she believes is right by a need for vengeance, this is a big part of the reason the conclusion to this trilogy earned doubt-revered status as my personal favourite of 2020. The other part is, this book has shamanism, magic that draws on a pantheon of dozens of gods which Rin uses to cook and mel people, hmmm, crispy, ah, old wizard, how do you score the magic of this series overall? Ten out of ten, dis-excellent man-child, just not, no amusing remarks, no jokes about the fire-channeling being hot, so something lame like that? Well, you already said something like that, and it was very tacky, very inappropriate, cheap too. But you don't have to be mean about it, would I be doing any of this if I were a comedy writer do you think? Anyway, if you'd like to read more about the Burning God or the Dragon Republic, the second book in the series, you can find links to my reviews down in the description below. Let's go back to Philip Prime, shall we? Thanks in a voice, an old wizard whose backstory I have yet to come up with. See, I knew I had a good reason for having the Burning God as my favourite fantasy novel of 2020. If you enjoyed this video, tune in for more. If you'd like to hear more about the best reads fantasy and sci-fi of 2020, that's what I'll be looking through over the coming weeks of July, no, we are here in January, it was just Christmas, so January it is. I'll be playing around with the format, tripling anxiety in front of a camera is a thing dear viewer. Bye, special thanks to my dear friend Sean Lee for all the art, you are a lifesaver and without you this wouldn't be anywhere near as fun. And of course, thank you to all my friends who watch my videos and thank you newcomer from whatever part of the internet you are from. I'll see you next time. Bye! Wasn't it? It works. I'm not saying it's perfect, I'm not saying I had all the right jokes, but it works. Probably. Yeah.