What Janna Ruth, author of Time to Remember, is reading

Janna Ruth. Photo / Supplied

I am an avid urban fantasy fan. I grew up on Buffy and Charmed and enjoy Supernatural and the newer UF series. I've also been writing an urban fantasy series for more than 15 years now but, when I looked back last year, I realised that I hadn't actually read much urban fantasy - and certainly not the heavy-hitters like Seanan McGuire.

So, Rosemary & Rue (the first October Daye novel) it is and so far it's really interesting how her fae worldbuilding meshes with the human world on the United States' West Coast, be it a fairy court in a soggy cave in the San Francisco Bay or the night haunts that eat the deceased fae bodies and replace them with a carbon copy so that human forensics don't find out about their true nature.

In 2014, Sebastien de Castell pulled me out of my deepest reading slump when I read his Greatcoat series, which is like a reimagined fantasy version of the Three Musketeers and just has it all: drama, intrigue, love, dark magic, and lots of humour. His Spellslinger series is in a similar vein, though the two worlds couldn't be more different.

Crownbreaker is the finale of this second series. It's where Sebastien pulls out all the stops. I think every reader will agree that the most important part of these books are Kellan's and his squirrel cat's Reichis' relationships. They're business partners - as the squirrel cat likes to stress - but really, they're best friends who would do just about anything for each other, while showing their love in endless squabbles, scratches, and bites.

It's probably uncommon to highlight a manga series here and one as old as Mitsuru Adachi's baseball series H2 but, having read hundreds of books and mangas, I still can't grasp what a great storyteller Adachi is. His drawings are fairly simplistic and so is his storytelling - but boy does he know how to pack a punch. Without spoiling anything, there is a page in total black with only two sentences on it. It had me bawling like few books before.

I also can't commend the ending enough. On the surface, H2 is a baseball manga but it is really about friends going through their high school years, growing up and learning how to let go of their childhood dreams. H2's end isn't a sad end, it's a real end. The characters may not have ended up where you'd want them to but they've grown and they've got a future in front of them. I like to think that I captured a little of that in Time to Remember's last pages.

Janna Ruth's novel Time to Remember ( Janna Ruth, $37), marking 10 years since the Christchurch earthquakes, is out now.

- As told to Eleanor Black