Seven Foot Shelves

[JD's Take] Year Review 2011

2012-01-24T14:18:00.003-05:00

Another year, another even shorter book list. At least my trending is going down! 2009 I had 48 books, 2010 36, and this year... 36 again. Maybe I've stabilized? Still, my total pages dropped from 15,403 to 14,545 and my pages/day from 42.3 to 39.8.

My top 5 books for 2011 (drum roll please!), with the standard "order not relevant" disclaimer:
1. The Black Prism (Brent Weeks)
2. The Wise Man's Fear (Pat Rothfuss)
3. The Stranger's Woes (Max Frei)
4. Allow of law (Brandon Sanderson)
5. The Desert Spear (Peter V. Brett)

The other books I read in 2011 are a pretty big step down from those, actually. I was lucky to get 5 that really excelled. It's not that I didn't enjoy them (I did!) or that there weren't excellent and well written books in the remainder (there were!) but I just can't bring myself to set them next to those five, which were truly outstanding. Honorable mention definitely goes to Embassytown, which was excellent but wasn't "enjoyable" in the usual sense. Plus it killed my numbers for the year because it took me like 2 months to read those 300 odd pages!

Here's the full list:
The Child Thief (Brom)
Red Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (N.K. Jemisin)
The Desert Spear (Peter V. Brett)
The Name of the Wind (Pat Rothfuss)
The Wise Man's Fear (Pat Rothfuss)
Machine Of Death (North, et al)
Tiassa (Brust)
Summer knight (Jim Butcher)
Death Masks (Jim Butcher)
Blood Rites (Jim Butcher)
Thunderball (Ian Flemming)
On Her Majesty's Secret Service (ian flemming)
You only live twice (Ian flemming)
Empire in black and gold (Adrian)
The Way of Shadows (Brent Weeks)
Chasing the moon (A. Lee Martinez)
Shadow's Edge (Brent Weeks)
Beyond the Shadows (Brent Weeks)
Embassytown (China Mieville)
The princess and mr whiffle (Pat Rothfuss)
The man with the golden gun (Ian Fleming)
Casino royale (Ian Fleming)
Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art (Steve McConnel)
Tooth & Claw (Jo Walton)
Nobilis (Jenna Moran)
The Black Prism (Brent Weeks)
The Stranger's Woes (Max Frei)
Broken kingdoms (N.K. Jemisin)
Snuff (Terry Pratchett)
Stations of the tide (Michael Swanwick)
Live and Let Die (Ian Fleming)
Bitters (brad thomas parsons)
The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins)
The osiris ritual (George Mann)
Alloy of Law (Brandon Sanderson)

[Lisa's Take] Year Review 2011

2012-01-24T10:07:00.001-05:00

And this year, in 2012, I resolve to post reviews in a more timely fashion... hah. Yeah. That's off to a good start! Sorry for the delay - better late than never, right? Here's my 2011 roundup.

I only reached my yearly goal of 50 books this year by the broadest definition. If you include the 8 books that I didn't finish (many of which I didn't even give my usual "100 page test" before discarding) and if you include the two books I'm (er, I _was_ at the time of drafting this) only half way through as the new year begins, then you can VERY generously say that I read 51 books in 2011.

That said, my page count was slightly higher than the previous year, clocking in at 22149. I read an average of 62 pages a day, and my average book length was 434 pages. So I suppose that's not too horrible.

The best books of the year? Honestly for a good portion of the year I expected to not even be able to pick a full 5 books (see: How Pat Rothfuss Ruined my Life). When I went back through my list I found that such a thought was awfully pessimistic; though I discarded many mediocre books, there were still some gems mixed in. So, in no particular order (well, no particular order save for the first book) here are my top 5 for 2011:

1) The Wise Man's Fear by Pat Rothfuss
3) Mechanique by Genevieve Valentine
5) The Black Prism by Brent Weeks
2) The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman
4) The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson

The two big surprises on that list are Gilman and Valentine; both of them deserve far more publicity among fantasy readers than they are currently getting. I would happily turn around and re-read either of their books, and will be adding both of them to my "buy their new releases without question" list. As for the other 3 authors - well, I am nothing if not predictable. Brent Weeks was new to me this year, and I am jonesing badly for anything he writes now. Sanderson and Rothfuss - what is there to say? Two wonderful Old Reliables.

Now, without further ado - the full list!

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N K Jemisin
The Broken Kingdom by N K Jemisin
The Affinity Bridge by George Mann
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay
Never Knew Another by J M McDermott
The Name of the Wind by Pat Rothfuss
The Wise Man's Fear by Pat Rothfuss
Flirt by Laurel K Hamiliton
Liriel by Garth Nix
The Scar-Crow Men by Mark Chadbourn
The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie
Bullet by Laurel K Hamilton
The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart
Bayan's Gold by Peter V. Brett
Tiassa by Steve Brust
The Dragon's Path by Daniel Abraham
Farlander by Col Buchanan
Machine of Death by (Misc)
Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks
Chasing the Moon by A Lee Martinez
Shadow's Edge by Brent Weeks
Beyond the Shadows by Brent Weeks
Cowboy Feng's by Steve Brust
The Stranger's Woes by Max Frei
The Magician King by Lev Grossman
The Osiris Ritual by George Mann
Mechanique by Genevieve Valentine
Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi
The Black Prism by Brent Weeks
Halo by Alexandra Adornetto
The Scarab Path by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Ghost Story by Jim Butcher
The Half-made World by Felix Gilman
The Winds of Khalakhovo by Bradley P. Beaulieu
Creatures of Light and Darkness by Roger Zelazny
The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
Acacia by David Anthony Durham
Kingdom of Gods by N. K. Jemisin
Other Lands by David Anthony Durham
The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson
Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson
Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey
Cold Magic by Kate Elliott
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Cold Fire by Kate Elliott
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
The Sacred Band by David Anthony Durham
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
Desert of Souls by Howard Andrew Jones
The Paths of the Dead by Steve Brust

I feel I should say a word about the books I didn't finish, in hopes that someone can encourage me to give them another go (or learn from my mistakes)… but this post is already quite long and full of lists. I’ll save that for another time. Here’s to hoping I finish more books in 2012!

[JD's Take] Unfinished books 2011

2011-12-28T13:38:00.002-05:00

Well as the year comes to an end, I thought I'd do some very small reviews of the books that I didn't manage to finish this year. Hopefully there aren't so many that this goes long.

Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton
I got about a third of the way into this before giving up on it. Lisabit liked it a lot, but I just couldn't get into it. While the idea for the world was original and well executed (it's a world where dragons are the primary and dominant species, and the details and implications of that are interestingly explored and well though out) the actual plot and characters just didn't draw me in. It's very much "Pride and Prejudice and Dragons" and the whole drama of manners things just didn't do it for me.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
I tried. I really, really tried. I read 393 pages of this and I can see why it's such a classic, but... ugh. This shares many of the flaws of Heinlein-esque hard science fiction that drive me so crazy. The engineering, physics, terraforming, and other science are extremely well though out, well presented, and fascinating. I loved those parts! However, so much of this book is taken up with the worst kind of interpersonal melodrama that I just couldn't bring myself to read another page. It's the worst kind of overwrought, badly charecterized, soap-opera style nonsense. There are also pretty serious pacing issues, if I recall, but the "science writer trying to be dramatic" is what killed it for me.

Well, that wasn't so many failures this year! Of course, that's likely because I didn't read so very much this year. I suppose my year-in-review post will tell.

[Lisa’s Take] The Alloy of Law (Brandon Sanderson)

2011-11-28T16:53:00.000-05:00

Candy candy candy! 100% self-indulgent, unabashed, delicious candy. This is the only way to describe The Alloy of Law; written during one of Sanderson’t “brain break” periods, it is clearly that – a vacation from the Deep an Serious, and an exploration of entertaining elements of the Mistborn world. I mean, c’mon, it’s a freaking steampunk-western with allomancy. How much more mindlessly amusing can you get?

There’s not a lot to say about Alloy of Law – I downed it in an afternoon and a half and I adored every minute of it. I enjoyed it so much that I turned around and re-read Mistborn in the following three days; amusingly enough, that re-read left me with more to mull than reading the new Allow of Law. I was highly entertained to pick up on all the little hints strewn throughout Mistborn that I missed on the first reading. I was also struck by just how much more immature Sanderson’s writing was then; he’s come a very long way in the last few years. I had to resist the urge to count the number of times he used the word “maladroitly” throughout the text.

Anyway, this isn’t much of a review, I know, but I feel the need to make a quick post highly recommending Allow of Law. It’s the perfect reading for the holiday season, when you can curl up in front of a fire for a long afternoon and consume it in one go.

[Lisa’s Take] Acacia – David Anthony Durham

2011-10-20T15:17:00.004-05:00

I do so love being proven wrong about a book. I recently posted in a comment over at The Tattered Scroll:

I’m about 200 pages into Acacia right now, and I’m finding it… ok. I’m not super caught up by the plot or massively engaged with the characters, and the writing style is only so-so. The world is interesting enough that I’ll keep reading, but I do hope it perks my interest a bit as it goes on,

As promised, I stuck with Acacia… and I was richly rewarded. Eventually.

This first volume in the trilogy is broken up into 3 books, each in the 200-250ish page range. Book 1 was almost entirely setup and background, and didn’t grab me at all. The main POV characters seemed dull and one dimensional, with the exception of the relationship between Leodan and Thaddeus. It felt like the author was doing a lot of telling and not a lot of showing; I discovered a new pet peeve in the form of:

“Let’s talk, Person A,” said person B.
“How do you feel about X,” Person A asked.
Person B began to speak about {insert long exposition here}

This is an odd thing to get caught up on, but given how much I enjoy witty dialog it was extremely jarring any time a conversation progressed for 2 or 4 statements, then branched off into a long exposition that was supposed to be dialog, but not presented as dialog.

Then book 2 started and Acacia got GOOD. Suddenly the characters were no longer flat and uninteresting. The four main(ish) POV characters grew up, which helped a great deal (so often children in literature are one dimensional). Suddenly Acacia seemed less “remote historical drama” and more character-driven drama, with personal struggles and gains. From this point on I positively chewed through the book, delighting in each turn.

And then book 3 hit and we discover that David Anthony Durham has a little Joss Whedon in him – or perhaps George R. R. Martin, given that this is the book-realm, rather than the TV-realm. Durham becomes absolutely vicious and isn’t afraid to send heads flying. I don’t think I’ve felt so stabbed by in-book betrayals since reading The Lion of Senet 6 years ago. Book 3 ends in a tumult of action that surprises and horrifies, cuts, thrills, and induces shivers. The best part of all of that? The part where it Actually Ends. I get so sick of “trilogies” that are truly just a single book broken into 3 pieces with no distinct narrative arc in each book. Acacia defies that trend and leaves you with a entire story to mull (while still managing to leave you craving more).

So there you have it – I went from totally tepid to pretty pleased with Acacia. I'm going to write off the rocky start to "new trilogy growing pains." I’ll be bouncing my way over to the bookstore tonight to pick up the second and third books right away (though I may break them up with a couple of other recent releases I’m anticipating, such as The Broken Kingdom).

[JD's Take] Thunderball (Ian Fleming)

2011-10-10T13:51:00.003-05:00

This is the first of what I hope will be a series of "movie vs. book" comparisons of the James Bond books. I've been reading through the series in no particular order, and my intent is to compare the film treatments and the novels, because it amuses me.
These reviews will contain spoilers!

First though, I feel like I can and maybe should give a general review of Ian Fleming's legendary series of spy thrillers in general. The James Bond stories were written between 1953 and 1966, and it shows. The conflicts are classic postwar and cold war struggles of nations, mixed with some rogue actors who tend to operate at the same scale. They are also sexist and racist in the casual way of novels from this era. To a modern reader this can be very off-putting, although half the time it just comes across as vaguely hilarious. If you're familiar with the movies, Bond himself might come as a bit of a surprise. He's a dangerous spy with a love for fast cars and fast women. That much came across pretty well. What you don't see often in the books is his cruelty and obsessive focus when he's on a job. And where in the movies he's a smooth-talking charmer in the books he's... not. Oh, and the gadgets are far more realistic in the books. :)

So without further ado.... Thunderball!

The Book
Because I'm a rebel, I boldly started with the 9th book in the series. Take that, established conventions! So, we start out with a James Bond being lectured by his boss. M thinks that he smokes too much (around 60 cigarettes a day, of the unfiltered variety he imports from eastern Europe somewhere), drink too much (a bottle of bourbon a day to take the edge off) and is generally in poor health. So, M sends bond to a health spa to be treated the finest in 60s-era health treatments! Bond is... not amused. So, he goes through a whole infomercial of steam baths, near-starvation, toxin purging, massage, traction, and hot nurses. There he casual starts some shit with another of the patients when he discovers that he might be associated with some drug smugglers. The smuggler tries to kill with with a traction machine, so Bond returns the favor by locking him in a steam box. Hilarious trips to the hospital for the smuggler, recovery sexing from the hot nurse for Bond... overall, that's a win.

Next, we are introduced to Blofeld, the most famous Bond villain of all time. He's a master schemer, manipulator, and secret keeper who has gathered a team of the best criminal minds in the world to form a co-op of evil (SPECTRE) that arranges extortion, thefts, murders for hire, kidnappings, drug smuggling and probably littering around the world for shared profit. They have a new scheme now, intended to be their last hurrah before breaking up so they never get caught. They're gonna steal some nukes, hide em, and blackmail the US and the UK with the threat of nuking a major city if they don't pay up. Pretty solid plan, really.

Anyway, one thing leads to another and James Bond is sent to catch them in Jamaica. He does, and it's actually pretty cool. There's an underwater fight scene, some actual sleuthing, a bad guy with freakishly large hands, and a gadget! The gadget, in this case, is a Geiger counter disguised as a camera. He woos the bad-guy's chick and manipulates her into helping him track down the nukes. This gets her tortured. Um. Did I mention he's kind of a dick?

The Movie
Sean Connery does all that same stuff! The movie version is actually pretty close to the book in terms of plot. They combined some characters (and gave Felix Leiter an extra hand), naturally, but that's no tremendous sin. They added a totally boring section where the Jamaicans have a big... voodoo... party of some sort. I'm not going to lie, I actually nodded off a bit through that section (I've seen this movie dozens of times though, to be fair). They made the bad-guy's boat into a boat/submarine just for laughs, and gave Bond some extra gadgets while they were at it. Oh, and no torture.

Still, on the whole the movie followed the book very closely, and I enjoyed both of them.

[Lisa's Take] The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)

2011-10-07T08:24:00.003-05:00

When I was 13 or so and just starting to get pretty hard-core into fantasy, I remember my mom borrowing The Mists of Avalon from the library to read. It seemed like it was always in a place of honor at the library - I was constantly noticing it and wondering about it. When my mom brought it home I grilled her with great curiosity, but received tepid feedback; something to the tune of "oh, it's not really worth the time" or "you probably wouldn't like it." Given my reverence for my mom's opinions, I shrugged and never thought twice about it.

Years later, Mists of Avalon comes onto my radar as part of NPRs top 100 fantasy and sci-fi novels. I decide that regardless of teenage experiences, it is probably pillar of fantasy I should have read - and frankly after reading Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave, I'm looking for some Arthurian Legend that's a little better (I was only middlingly impressed by Crystal Cave). So I pick up Avalon, and discover that my mother is quite clever - what better way to keep a 13-year-old from getting over her head in sex and mature themes than by feigning indifference? Well played!

Anyway, I digress. Mists of Avalon is a re-telling of Arthurian legend over 70-years that are best well known - that is to say, from about the time Uther hooks up with Igraine until the end of Arthur's reign. For an added twist, the story is told entirely from the perspective of the women of the legend - primarily Morgaine (Morgana le Fay) but also Igraine, Guinevere, and others. After finishing the book I delighted in reviewing Arthurian legend (something I've never before taken much interest in) on wikipedia and comparing how Bradley interpreted the core events of the tales.

Mists of Avalon is not a page turner - it is sedate and composed; it never rushes or hurries, but likewise it never lags. It has pulses and crescendos, but never races towards one event or another. It reads very much like life, with passions and tragedies, but also with the every day. The characters are all incredibly real, an effortless mix of good and well-meaning tempered with jealousy and flaws. There aren't really any villains in the book; you can understand why each character takes the actions they do, and it's always perfectly reasonable (be it inspired by envy or misunderstanding or a hope that they are Doing the Right Thing).

I would not have appreciated this book at 13, and 15 years later I feel like I can only appreciate it in part. I think this is one I might need to revisit in 30 years when I have more life experiences under my belt. On this reading it was engaging and moving, but I can see where it would move me more when I've had more applicable experience (motherhood (or not), growing old, etc). I'm also... not entirely sure how this book would be received by a male audience. I feel like any comment I make is going to raise hackles, so maybe I'll just push it on JD and see what he thinks (though given his reaction to the delicious Victorian drama Tooth and Claw, I have some idea of how that will go).

My goodness - I had a lot to say about Avalon! I still have a lot in my head, honestly; it was a very thought-provoking read, and I have the great and overwhelming desire to go read Once and Future King now. Arthurian Legend Obsession - Go!

[JD's Take] The Black Prism (Brent Weeks)

2011-10-05T11:46:00.005-05:00

I enjoyed Brent Weeks' first series (as he calls it: "That Ninja Book") enough that I read it back-to-back-to-back. I certainly didn't think that it was the most sophisticated or deep, but it was a really fun story and it pulled me along thanks to tight pacing and exciting action. It was, in a word, popcorn. So, I picked up The Black Prism expecting, more or less, more of the same.

Boy was I surprised.

The Black Prism introduces a world that is dominated by two things: the immensely powerful magic users (known as Drafters) that craft different colors of light into a magical substance (Luxin) with various properties and the brutal war fought 16 years before the story starts that tore the kingdoms apart as they battled to decide which of two brothers was the rightful head of the magical college that all drafters attend. To add fuel to this fire, the magical college is also the church, and its leader (called the Prism) is the pope-equivalent (and the only person capable of drafting all 7 colors).

The story primarily follows four characters. Gavin Guile, who is the Prism. A member of his elite guard who was once betrothed to him name Karris Whiteoak. Kip, boy growing up in a tiny village devastated by the war and personally devastated by his mother's drug addiction. And Liv, a student at the magical college who is from the same village as Kip.

Shockingly, I just remembered all of that off the top of my head... which says a LOT about just how into this book I got. And that's really the beauty of this novel, the world is fascinating, the magic system is well designed and deep, and the characters just draw you in, both into their troubles and their struggles and their triumphs but also into the world itself. This ends up being one of those books that you stay up too late reading, only to find yourself dreaming about the world all night.

One of my favorite things about the book was the way the war served as a backdrop, a subtext, to everything that happens. A lesser storyteller would have told me about the war, the causes of it, the battles that were fought, who won and why and how. Instead, Weeks tells the story of these characters who have all, one way or another, been totally ruined by the war. Each of them struggles to deal with the mess that the war made of their lives. The characters are interesting not because they spend the whole time angsting about it, but because they are realistically damaged goods trying to overcome that damage. This style of slow, contextual reveals of the details about everybody's past and place in the world also lets Weeks show you how these people are in the present... only to mess with your whole view of them later when their past is revealed. Everything turns grayer, more morally ambiguous, less obviously the story you think you are being told as the book goes on.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that in many ways, this book feels like a Bradon Sanderson novel. The magic system has that scientific styling and attention to detail that I associate with Sanderson. The scope and style and characterizations are similar enough that if you didn't tell me who wrote it, I'd have guessed that the Sanderson-Tron 3000 had managed to spit out yet another book without me realizing it.
This should, in no way, be taken as criticism.

Here's the part where I list bad things, but I'm not in the mood. I loved this book, and I highly recommend it.

Finally, here are some of my favorite/least favorite things that are BIG SPOILERS:

-At page 100 I guessed that Gavin was actually his brother. I was very pleased that this wasn't the Major Reveal at the end of the book as I was afraid it would be.
-I loved how my opinion of Gavin kept shifting. He kept wavering between Noble and Monster. Towards the end of the book, I think I hated/loved him on a 20 page cycle.
-The green prison. Holy shit, THAT surprised the hell out of me.
-Liv switching sides was completely in character, but surprising to me from a meta-story kinda level.
-Is it just me or are there 4 prisms alive in the world right now? Man, this religion has some holes in it.
-I hope he wraps up this "Kip keeps the dagger a secret and ruins everything" plot line in the first 50 pages of the second book. It's not going to be terribly interesting.
-In the acknowledgements he says the whole idea came from a friend saying "wouldn't it be neat if instead of [fantasy trope], [the opposite of fantasy trope]?". My current theory is "The main character is the good twin/evil twin".

[Lisa's Take] Mechanique - Genevieve Valentine

2011-07-20T14:31:00.003-05:00

The world is at war. It has been at war for as long as anyone can remember - maybe a couple of generations, maybe a few hundred years; it's hard to say. One woman, a singer, survives the bombing of her opera house and discovers that she suddenly has the ability to meld gears and metal and human bodies; suddenly she could restore and control life. So she started a circus.

Mechanique is not a lighthearted tale. It is not a story of clowns and laughing children. It is a story of a bleak world filled with vivid, gritty, real characters with fantastic bodies and amazing abilities. It is a story written by an author who has thought through all of the implications of her premise, and who doles out the details little by little - a literary flower slowly blooming.

Rarely have I seen an author use perspective so skillfully. When I first started reading I was skeptical of the changes between first, second, and third person. Once I got into the rhythm of the novel, however, this device served as a subtle and smooth way to transition you between characters and viewpoints. What I initially thought as a contrivance instead melted seamlessly into the background and added unexpected depth to the narrative flow.

Surely Mechanique had flaws - it is, after all, a first book - but they've melted away in my memory. I keep returning to the vivid images evoked throughout the novel, and these mental pictures chase away anything but a wash of grey, stormy emotion. Genevieve Valentine might be the next China Mieville - don't take your eyes off her.

[Lisa's Take] The Night Angel Trilogy - Brent Weeks

2011-07-20T14:26:00.003-05:00

Ok, Lisa, it’s time to admit that you’re finally over Wise Man’s Fear. You’ve moved on. It took a long time, but you’re back to enjoying fantasy again. This also means you need to stop neglecting your book blog and start writing reviews again. So here it comes – the motherload of catch-up posts.

After a whole litany of failures, the book that finally snapped me out of my fantasy-malaise was The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks. I picked it up on a whim going into a week of vacation, and then proceeded to devour all 3 (quite hefty) novels in about a week. This included leaving a tropical island in order to find a bookstore so I could immediately read books 2 and 3. Talk about an excellent week: nothing but mai tais, poi spinning, and reading 14 hours a day.

The Night Angel Trilogy (Way of Shadows, Shadow’s Edge, Beyond the Shadows) is everything I like in a fantasy novel. Big, interesting world; intriguing magic system; a wide range of flawed characters; a wry sense of humor; love, hate, revenge… you get the idea. Imagine Brandon Sanderson meets Peter V. Brett, mashed up with Joe Abercrombie’s unwillingness to pull punches, and you’ll have a pretty clear picture. The pacing of the novels is non-stop, and it is disgustingly easy to sit down with the book, then look up and realize 3 hours have passed.

The trilogy is not without its flaws; some of the romance aspects were a bit overwrought (think early Robin Hobb, or Elizabeth Haydon’s Rhapsody as a comparison). Sometimes the main character grates on your nerves a little, and sometimes the author stretches believability for just how clueless people can be. One plot element in the 3rd book (moon dragon? What??) wasn’t explained well enough.

But those are all minor gripes, and can be 100% ignored. This review isn’t going to be long or rambly: get these books, read them, and then start slavering for more Brent Weeks. He’s a keeper.

[Not a Review]How Pat Rothfuss has Ruined my Life

2011-04-27T09:34:00.002-05:00

Dearest Readers,

Remember me? I used to write reviews here all the time! I used to read 50 books a year! I used to have all sorts of passionate things to say about fantasy literature, both good and bad!

But then a mean, mean man named Pat Rothfuss came along. After a long and painful 3 year wait, he released the second book in a trilogy of his; a trilogy called the Kingkiller Chronicle. Knowing that this excellent novel would soon be in my hands, I re-read the first novel in the series. This was no mean feat, as it clocks in near 1000 pages. Then I worked my way greedily through the newest installment, The Wise Man's Fear, also quite lengthy. I laughed, I cried, I yelled, and I did nothing but read for over a week. When I finished it, I turned it over and started reading it again.

"But Lisa," you may ask, "How could such a wonderful experience possible ruin you in any way?"

Here's how, gentle readers: nothing else is good enough anymore. I've tried all of my tricks for getting out of a "reading rut" and nothing seems to work.

I've tried a little low quality smut (Two! Freaking TWO Laurell K. Hamilton books). Usually if I read something throw-away it will clear out my system and make me excited to get back to "the good stuff". But no. This time it just made me angry that such utter crap could exist and be making money when shining paragons of perfection like Wise Man's Fear exist.

I've tried reading fantasy at the opposite end of the spectrum. Surely some nice gritty, bloody, cursing-filled Joe Abercrombie would reset my fantastical moral compass? I made it to the last 80 pages of The Heroes and then I completely ran out of steam. I couldn't force myself to continue reading anything that engaged me emotionally so little. The characters were real, but they weren't lovable... and once you have loved Bast and Kvothe, how can you care about anyone less worthy?

I've tried some non-modern fantasy, in a sub-genre I've never touched before: The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart is a 40-year-old novel in the lore of King Arthur and Merlin. Vastly different from almost any fantasy I've read - and still it neither moved me nor engaged me.

I've tried young adult novels, knowing they will be middle of the road, but maybe guide me back towards a good mindset (Lirael by Garth Nix). I've tried short novellas by my favorite authors set in my favorite universes (Bayan's Gold by Peter V. Brett). I've tried new, exciting looking titles (The Scar-crow Men, Never Knew Another) - nothing seems to work.

I was roused from my malaise for approximately 4 hours while I read Steve Brust's latest Vald novel, Tiassa. It is utterly unthinkable that I'd not respond to the literary voice of my favorite historian (One Paarfi). I cackled through Tiassa with utter delight; enraptured, thrilled, engaged, and happier than I had been in months. But then, 4 hours later, Tiassa was over. I started to re-read it, as well, but eventually set it aside as a futile effort: I am doomed to be forever ruined on fantasy novels.

2 months later, I'm still mournfully gazing at my stack, wondering what possibly could shake me out of this literary depression into which I've sunk. I'm looking at Daniel Abraham's newest novel, The Dragon Path... perhaps he will succeed where a solid 10 other books have failed.

Woefully yours,
Lisa the Reviewer, Forever Ruined by Rothfuss

MIni Review: [JD's Take] The Child Thief (Brom)

2011-02-10T22:41:00.003-05:00

After 50 pages, I described this book to a friend as "the darkest possible interpretation of Peter Pan". Another couple hundred pages and I was willing to concede that I may have been wrong... there could be slightly darker interpretations. Once I set it down, I'd decided I was pretty much right from the beginning.

That's not to say it isn't good! It's really quite an enjoyable read, particularly if you're in the mood for some old-school fairy tales retold in the style of a modern fantasy novel. If you read fantasy or play RPGs, you're almost certainly familiar with Brom's work as an artist. He brings the same richness and detail to his writing and the fantastic is vividly realized through his words (and accompanying drawings). It reads quickly and kept me turning the pages long after I should have been asleep.

Still, there's just no getting around it: dark.

JD's 2010 Book List

2011-02-10T13:19:00.000-05:00

Well, it wasn't a great year for quantity! I'm way down from last year's 48 book count with a mere 36 (and a total of 15,403 pages average 42.3 pages a day). And two of those aren't even fiction. Ouch. Still, there were a great deal of wonderful books this year. Some of them, like Heart of Darkness and Kraken were the sort that simply enchanted me with words. Some of them, like The Lions of Al-Rassan and The Way of Kings engrossed me completely in their worlds and people. Two authors managed to perform the rare "back-to-back", getting me to pick up a sequel as soon as I set down the book (I'm looking at you Daniel Abraham and Pierre Pevel). There are some gems in there I'd forgotten about too. Agent to the Stars and The Exile Kiss in particular made me smile as I glanced through the list.

It wasn't all tea and roses though. I wrote a rare terrible review (down from two last year though, so either I'm learning or getting more forgiving!), and there were plenty of books too mediocre to care enough about to write a review. There were, of course, amazing books that I never got around to reviewing too. The top of my damn-I-should-have-reviewed-that list are: The Magicians (super fast: I didn't like it nearly as much as everybody else), The Name of the Rose (being bored has never been so engrossing), and The Warded Man (!).

1. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) - 102 pgs - Finished 1/7/2010
2. Boneshaker (Cherie Priest) - 416 pgs - Finished 1/8/2010
3. Odd and the Frost Giants (Neil Gaiman) - 128 pgs - Finished 1/9/2010
4. The Magicians (Lev Grossman) - 416 pgs - Finished 1/22/2010
5. Riddle of Steel (Roleplaying) - Finished 1/23/2010
6. The Makers (Cory Doctorow) - 416 pgs - Gave up at page 350 on (2/15/2010)
7. The Steel Remain (Richard Morgan) - 432 pages - Finished 2/24/2010
8. The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco) - 600 pages - Finished 3/7/2010
9. Agent to the Stars (John Scalzi) - 365 pages - Finished 3/11/2010
10. The Exile Kiss (George Alec Effinger) - 315 pages - Finished 3/17/2010
11. The Windup Girl (Paolo Bacigalupi) - 300 Pages - Finished 4/7/2010
12. Divine Misfortune (A. Lee Martinez) - 320 Pages - Finished 4/15/2010
13. A Betrayal In Winter (Daniel Abraham) - 384 Pages - Finished 4/30/2010
14. An Autumn War (Daniel Abraham) - 366 Pages - Finished 5/5/2010
15. The Price of Spring (Daniel Abraham) - 352 Pages - Finished 5/22/2010
16. The God Engines (John Scalzi) - 136 Pages - Finished 5/22/2010
17. Houses of the Blooded (John Wick) - 428 Pages - Finished 5/21/2010
18. Anathem (Neal Stephenson) - 960 Pages - Finished 7/1/2010
19. Territory (Emma Bull) - 432 Pages - Finished 7/15/2010
20. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Stieg Larson) - 608 Pages - Finished 7/26/2010
21. The Lions of Al-Rassan (Guy Gavriel Kay) - 528 Pages - Book ruined. Finally Finished 11/17/2010
22. The Affinity Bridge (George Mann) - 356 Pages - Finished 8/3/2010
23. Kraken (China Mieville) - 528 Pages - Finished 8/18/2010
24. Dies the Fire (S.M. Sterling) - 592 Pages - Finished 9/7/2010
25. The Evolutionary Void (Peter F. Hamilton) - 704 Pgs - Finished 9/16/2010
26. Use of Weapons (Iain M. Banks) - 512 Pgs - Finished 9/21/2010
27. Getting Naked (Patrick Lencioni) - 240 Pages - Finished 9/30/2010
28. Way of Kings (Brandon Sanderson) - 1008 Pages - Finished 10/7/2010
29. Raving Fans (Ken Blanchard) - 160 Pages - Finished 10/12/2010
30. Deathstalker (Simon R. Green) - 528 Pages - Finished 10/22/2010
31. The Cardinals Blades (Pierre Pevel) - 309 Pages - Finished 11/2/2010
32. The Alchemist in the Shadows (Pierre Pevel) - 336 Pages - Finished 11/3/2010
33. Elantris (Brandon Sanderson) - 496 Pages - Finished 11/17/2010
34. Green (Jay Lake) - 368 Pages - Finished 11/29/2010
35. Iron Angel (Alan Campbell) - 512 pgs - Finished 12/15/2010
36. The Warded Man (Peter V. Brett) - 480 Pgs - Finished 12/27/2010

And because Lisa demands it, here are my top 5 for 2010:
(In no particular order, and again excluding sequels to make my life easier)
1. The Warded Man
2. Lion's of Al-Rassan
3. The Windup Girl
4. Kraken
5. Way of Kings

Month of Sequels – a series of Mini-Reviews

2011-01-12T12:13:00.003-05:00

Without really meaning to, I have spend a solid month at the end of the year reading the 2^nd or 3^rd book of a lot of different series. I always find writing reviews for the second book in a series challenging for a few reasons: I don’t like to re-hash the details of the world and events of book 1, it’s hard to recap or give a summary while avoiding spoilers, and I often feel like I’m repeating myself in my praise and critiques.

So, instead of writing full reviews for each of these books, I present a pile of mini-reviews!

The House on Durrow Street (Galen Beckett – Sequel to The Magicians & Mrs. Quent)

….wow. How is it even possible that I had forgotten so much from the first book? The Magicians & Mrs. Quent was one of my favorite books of 2009, so you would think I would have retained "minor" details like the fact that Ivy married Mr. Quent, not Mr. Rafferdy (and that the two of them were distinct people). Or maybe the fact that Eldyn existed as a character at all –or illusionists for that matter. Just, you know, trifling details.

In spite of the huge gaps in my memory, I entirely adored The House on Durrow street. Though it didn’t feel like a lot Happened (with a capital H) in the first 2/3 of the book, I was still very engaged and eager to keep reading. I feel confident in writing off this sedate pace with a nod to the Victorian influences in the whole series. Though the book was long, I munched through it very quickly, savoring each page. The characters are still lovable and flawed, and Beckett did a good job both jogging my memory and “re-developing” his characters, rather than relying solely on the character development from the first book to sustain them (*cough* Tchaikovsky *cough*). Durrow Street was an excellent read, and I can’t wait for Beckett to continue exploring his world and characters.

Salute the Dark (Adrien Tchaikovsky – Shadows of the Apt book 4)

Better than books 2 and 3, not as good as book 1. I’m glad Tchaikovsky wrapped up the major plot arcs, but frankly kind of pissed at the seeds he planed that make me want to keep reading. Since the second book this series has consistently been good enough to keep me begrudgingly reading, but with many protests. I don’t have too much to say, save that the book made me cry (well done!) but didn’t resolve many of the issues I had with the previous books. It will be a toss-up whether I continue with the next story arc.

The Alchemist in the Shadows (Pierre Pevel – Sequel to The Cardinals Blades)

The mere fact that I paid out the ass to buy the UK edition of this book and have it shipped overseas should speak loudly for my opinion of the series as a whole. I will be entirely distraught if the remaining books are not translated. Pevel’s work is candy, pure and simple, but candy with extremely lovable characters who are both wonderful and conflicted. The fast paced plot and entertaining sword-play doesn’t hurt, either. My one complaint: I can’t believe that ass ended book 2 on such a cliff hanger. Bastard.

Antiphon (Ken Scholes – Book 3 of the Song of Isaak)

Once again I had forgotten quite a bit about what happened in book 2 of this series, though much of it came back to over the course of Antiphon. Honestly… I’m not quite sure what Scholes going for in this book, as far as which emotions he was trying to evoke from his reader. For me, I spent most of the book growing more and more frustrated because of all of the dark secrets and unknowns. Once the revelations started, they came waterfalling down, but for 6/7ths of the book I was gnashing my teeth due to all the deliberate opaqueness and mystery. I was also a little discomfited by the sudden change in the world, which went from hard fantasy with steampunk overtones to kinda-sorta-sci-fi pretty quickly. By the end of the book, even though a lot of things were revealed, I just felt confused and frustrated. I’ll pick up book 4 because I want to know what happens, but I’d kindly thank Scholes quit leaning on the suspense device and actually tell a story.

Judas Unchained (Peter F. Hamilton – Sequel to Pandora’s Star)

Once again, I had forgotten a lot of what happened in Pandora’s Star since I read it a full year ago, but Judas Unchained reminded me of the past events without being invasive about it. The story and characters were excellent, and the plot kept me riveted. I have virtually none of the complaints about the second book that I had about the first book, and I’ll certainly be looking into some of Hamilton’s other series when I need a scifi fix. My one caveat is that Judas Unchained was really, really long and a little dense – I offset this by reading Antiphon in the middle of it and giving my brain some breathing room.

Dreadnought (Cherie Priest – indirect sequel to Boneshaker)

If Boneshaker was “take it or leave it – edging towards take it” then Dreadnought was “take it or leave it – edging towards “leave it.” Where Boneshaker kept me engaged with interesting steampunk themes and dark interpersonal relationships, Dreadnought lost me with a zombie invasion and a lone, distant heroine. The writing was good, the main character sympathetic (if not isolated), and the story moved at a good clip (though lacking the ebb and flow of a dynamic novel – it was full tilt ahead all the time, much like the train that the protagonist was stuck on). I think most people who enjoyed Boneshaker would enjoy Dreadnought…. Unless you’re like me, and SO OVER the whole zombie thing.

The Desert Spear (Peter V. Brett – sequel to The Warded Man)

The Desert Spear took a ballsy step, spending the first 120-odd pages focusing on perhaps the most hated character from the first book. At first I was irked, but Brett did such a good job with the story that my annoyance quickly melted away. I reveled in the new aspects of the world and culture he got into, and became surprisingly attached to the new character, in spite of his vicious nature. Rarely do authors pull off such a delicate balance of personal conflict. I was once again irate at the end of the book – but the good kind of outraged, where you find yourself going “Aaaaaugh, I can’t believe he DID THAT!” Desert Spear absolutely lived up to the promise of The Warded Man, and I’m on the edge of my seat waiting for the next installment. Peter V. Brett has vaulted onto my list of favorite authors this year.

Lisa’s 2010 Review

2011-01-07T11:50:00.001-05:00

I just barely made it through my baseline number of books this year, passing the 50 book mark the last week of December. This is significantly worse than last year, when I read 71. I read 20336 pages this year, averaging 55 pages a day (down from 27590 pages last year, 75 pages a day). The only statistic I went up on was average book length: last year was 388 pages, this year was 398.

I started to rant that picking a top 5 would be a pain this year since overall it seemed like I read a lot of mediocre fantasy, but as I went back through my list it became obvious that several stood out above the others. For once it wasn’t an onerous task to pare down my list of favorites to 5, however. I’m a little dithery on the last item on the list – I could have happily interchanged The Cardinals Blades with The Child Thief… but I wasn’t feeling dark enough to include the latter in the list today. So, in no particular order, my top 5 favorites of 2010:

1) The Warded Man
2) The Lions of Al Rassan
3) The Price of Spring
4) The Way of Kings
5) The Cardinals Blades

And the full list of books that I read this year:

• The Ninth Circle by Alex Bell
• Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton
• Iorich by Steve Brust
• Bone Dance by Emma Bull
• The God Engines by John Scalzi
• Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susana Clarke
• An Autumn War by Daniel Abraham
• Dragon Keeper by Robin Hobb
• The Price of Spring by Daniel Abraham
• Mean Streets - The Warrior by Jim Butcher
• The Stepsister Scheme by Jim C. Hines (Didn’t Finish)
• Servant of a Dark God by John Brown
• The Steel Remains by Richard K. Morgan
• Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress
• Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaimain
• Tuck by Stephen Lawhead
• Changes by Jim Butcher
• The Lions of Al Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay
• Brave Story by Miyuki Miyabe (Didn’t Finish)
• The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley
• The Child Thief by Brom
• Empire in Black and Gold by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Dragonfly Falling by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Dragon Haven by Robin Hobb
• Microserfs by Douglas Coupland
• Kraken by China Mieville
• The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
• Sisters Red by Jackson Pierce
• How to make friends with demons by Graham Joyce
• Budayeen Nights by George Alec Effinger
• A Magic of Dawn by S. L. Farrell (Didn’t Finish)
• Blood of the Mantis by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Memoirs of a Bookbat by Kathryn Lasky
• Nights of Villjamur by Mark Charan Newton
• Salute the Dark by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Judas Unchained by Peter F. Hamilton
• The Cardinals Blades by Pierre Pevel
• The House on Durrow Street by Galen Beckett
• Dreadnought by Cherie Priest
• The Alchemist in the Shadows by Pierre Pevel
• Antiphon by Ken Scholes
• The Misenchanted Sword by Lawrence Watt-Evans
• The Warded Man by Peter V. Brett
• Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
• Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero by Dan Abnett
• Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman
• King's Peace by Jo Walton
• Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor
• The Desert Spear by Peter V. Brett
• Dawnthief by James Barclay (Didn’t Finish)

Here’s to hoping for a more booky (and higher quality) 2011!

[Lisa's Take] The Waded Man - Peter V. Brett

2010-12-14T00:30:00.000-05:00

I’m currently in India for work, and the office network is extremely locked down: no gmail, no twitter, no google docs, no facebook, etc. I assumed that blogger would likewise be blocked, so I’ve been sitting on a pile of reviews for the last 2.5 weeks – imagine my delight when I discovered that blogger is not access controlled after all!

This year has been a year of overwhleming “mediocre” among the fantasy books I’ve chosen to read. There have been few truly excellent books in the stack of 40-odd novels I’ve consumed in the last 12 months. There has been some tasty candy, and one or two gems (*cough*Daniel Abraham*cough*) but overall it has been a very so-so year.

The Warded Man is a flagrant exception to that blanket statement about mediocrity. Granted, I read two thirds of it on the plane to India in a sleepy fog, but even allowing for that Brett has produced a truly excellent book. Unlike the last book that I read (that review is coming; it’s not pretty) Brett put in place the full history of his story, and thought through the social and economic implications of his hundreds-of-years war. To say that the characters grow and develop over the course of the book is a gross understatement – his characters positively transform through the flow of the narrative. The transformation of each character is believable, sincere, and utterly moving.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Brett’s first work is the realism of the world. He is not afraid to show the gritty side of humanity, all their faults and cruelties. However, unlike some current authors (Abercrombie is my favorite offender to pick on, the poor guy), Brett does not take the grittiness so far that it jumps the shark and falls off the cliff of believability. Brett also tempers the grittiness with a healthy dose of life’s loving and humorous aspects.

My single complaint with The Warded Man is that the last 20% of the book felt a little rushed – we had been meandering through the growth of each character, and suddenly they are all mature adults and all sorts of events happen all at once. I suppose this might be commentary on adulthood. Overall I did not take issue with the change in pace, but it did make certain things (the love-story aspect in particular) feel a bit tacked-on.

I finished The Warded Man gunning for the sequel. Alas, the only bookstore I can get to in Delhi is pretty small. I was VERY surprised to see the UK edition (called The Painted Man) on the shelves – I bought it just for the novelty of owning two identical books with different titles. The moment I get back to the states I’ll be picking up The Desert Spear, and I will spend the first couple of days of my vacation tearing through it.

JD's Take: The Lions of Al-Rassan (Guy Gavriel Kay)

2010-11-23T17:44:00.006-05:00

Kay writes historical fantasy. This isn't a thing I knew the first couple books of his I read. I finished Tiganna without every making the connection that it was a fictionalized Italy that was being portrayed, and I didn't care. The book was phenomenal, and knowing that it was historical fantasy would probably have prevented me from reading it. It smacks of Alternate History, which I typical don't enjoy at all. Clearly, I am a fool, and only luck and ignorance saved me in this case. I am a learning animal, however, and capable of accepting that Kay is a gentleman of phenomenal talent who I should in no way discount for arbitrary reasons. And so I read The Lions of Al-Rassan, and was richly rewarded for my open-minded, cosmopolitan, and generous nature. Lions takes place in a Kay-ian fictionalized version of medieval Europe, circa the 11th century and focusing, in part, on the life of an El Cid analogue and the conflict between Muslims, Jews, and Christians. If you are a student of history, you will see many historical parallels here. Otherwise, don't sweat it.

This is, in many ways, a book about a war that everyone knows is coming. One group, previously ascendant and militarily dominant has fallen into decline. Another group, largely exiled from their historical holdings prepares to return in force now that their centuries-old foe has weakened. A third group, historically persecuted by both sides has finally found a sort of safety in obscurity, and (correctly) predicts that the coming war will crush them between both sides. At the center of the story are three unlikely companions from all sides of the conflict who forge a strange but powerful friendship... knowing all the while that it is likely doomed.

The characters are well written, brightly characterized and interesting. They do tend towards being super-human, but then, they are extraordinary people. Their relationships are compelling, engrossing, tragic, and often gut-wrenching. The plot is tight and moves this pretty weighty volume along with ease. Overall, Lions is excellently written and I highly recommend it. My only real complaint, and I'll be the first to admit that it's pretty nit-picky, is that Kay uses one particular literary device far too often. While effective in moderation, there are only so many times that I'm willing to deal with the whole "let's tell you someone dies and then spend 10 pages teasing you about how you don't know who it is" before it starts to get on my nerves. Honestly, after the first time it actually detracted from the drama of the moment because I was pissed that he was "pulling that crap again".

Final balance: Lions is Kay at or near his very best, and I highly recommend it. It's emotionally compelling and deals with some pretty interesting Big Issues without ever getting bogged down in them.

[Mini Review] JD's Take: Territory (Emma Bull)

2010-11-23T17:36:00.003-05:00

Territory really impressed me. It's a retelling of the Wyatt Earp/Doc Holiday/OK Corral story from the point of view of a young widow working in Tombstone as a typesetter for the local newspaper. It's filled with interesting historical flavor and the characters are nuanced and morally gray and interesting almost to a person. As the story unfolds, we slowly realize that there are magical forces at work in Tombstone influencing events in unpredictable ways. The slow plot pacing and character development work extremely well here, allowing us to assimilate the fantasy elements of the story into the familiar framework of a tale we know the broad outline of already without ever feeling jarring or forced. The introduction of those elements also warns us early that this story isn't going to play out the way we might expect either...

My only real complaint is that the book just... ends. There's no climax, no denouement, it just stops in mid-narrative. Clearly intended to be the first book in a series, I'd recommend waiting to read this until the sequel is available, lest you finish feeling unsatisfied.

[Nano Review] JD's Take: The Alchemist in the Shadows (Pierre Pavel)

2010-11-23T14:20:00.002-05:00

This is the sequel to Pavel's "The Cardinal's Blades". See that review, but add in a "ARG WHY WOULD END THE BOOK THERE THE THIRD BOOK BETTER GET TRANSLATED DAMMIT" to it. :)

JD's Take: The Cardinal's Blades (Pierre Pavel)

2010-11-23T13:33:00.004-05:00

Not one, but two of my friends responded the exact same way when told the title of the book I was reading was "The Cardinal's Blades": "Is it reverse The Three Musketeers?". My response was the same to both of them too: "Yeah, but with dragons. Kinda."

By "reverse Three Musketeers" what they meant was that the protagonists of the story are an elite squad of Cardinal Richelieu's Guard who are tasked with... delicate acts of force. The kind that get you disavowed and disbanded for five years as a matter of political expedience (which is where the story picks up). The squad is made up of a wonderful and diverse cast of french musketeers, duelists, gamblers, sneaks, nobles, and lovers who are fiercely loyal to their Captain. The Captain, and by extension the entire squad, are loyal to Richelieu, France, and the King (in roughly that order)... though honestly it seems like they just really like their jobs.

Oh and the dragons. So in THIS France of 1633, an ancient race of Dragons has long since taken human form and manipulate the politics of Europe from behind the scenes. There are little shoulder dragons flying about serving as pets and pigeons. There is a race of dragon/human hybrids that were created by the dragons of yore to serve as minions. So. There's some dragon-y stuff in there as well.

It took me a little while to really get into this book. For starters, it was written in French and like any translation has its fair share of quirks. However, the thing that really got to me was the author's tendency to break the immersion of the story by describing the city of Paris in historical terms. For instance, he might say while describing a chase through the muck-filled alleys of 17th century Paris that the villian turned down the Rue-De-Marque, which wouldn't become a bustling thoroughfare until 1850 blah-de-blah. It kept jarring me out of the story. However, eventually I became used to the author's style and really enjoyed the story. It's a fun, action-packed intrigue filled with exciting characters who all have a Dark Secret or three. Much of these are only hinted at in this book, and the prospect of occasionally breaking up my future readings with further forays into this Dumasian fantasy delights me.

It's candy, but sweet sweet candy indeed. I ended up enjoying it so much that I picked up the sequel immediately after finishing it and started right in without so much as a snack-break.

[Mini Review] JD's Take: The Way of Kings (Brandon Sanderson)

2010-11-05T10:18:00.002-05:00

The Way of Kings is the first entry in what is going to be one of those series that takes up an entire shelf in my library. Projected to be 11 books long (and this first one weighs in at 1008 pages), I've made the regrettable decision to begin reading as soon as the first book was published. Those of us who read fantasy and science fiction have a name for people who start reading long, epic series at the onset: suckers. We've been burned, you see, by the Robert Jordans and the GRRMs of the world. With luck my blind, idiot faith that Sanderson's machine-like ability to churn out words at the feverish pace to which I've grown accustomed won't burn him out in the next 12 years or so will be justified. Alright so yeah, I'm a sucker.

Sucker or not, I'm glad I decided to read this now. This book was amazing. It completely engrossed me while I read it, and I've found myself thinking about it long past the end. The world he builds is fascinating and alien and wonderful. There's so much going on that I have no doubt at all that he'll be developing not just plot threads, but world details for years to come. Roughly, it's a world populated by humans, various near-human races, crustaceans wildlife, weird flora, magic, techno-magic, creepy spirit jellyfish things that are attracted to emotions and natural events, scholars, warriors, wanderers, strange societies, echoes of history long forgotten (and barely past), and enough plot-hints that don't get developed to keep your mind churning for the year(s) it'll take the next book to come out. Oh, and the world is constantly battered by vicious storms that sweep across the landscape in semi-regular, semi-predictable cycles. And gravity magic. And vast armies, and social injustice, and morally gray decisions, and miracles, and prophecy, and....

...and it's a very full book, is what I'm saying. I loved it. I eagerly await the next book. Now if Sanderson just keeps up his writing pace and doesn't go insane in the next decade, I'll be all set.

[Lisa’s Take: Tooth and Claw (Jo Walton)]

2010-10-07T14:35:00.000-05:00

I’ve been a bad little reviewer (and fantasy reader) lately; though I’ve started traveling for work again (giving me copious free time), I’ve been filling the hours with crocheting instead of consuming books at an ungodly pace. I may have to investigate picking up some audio-books to accompany my crafting binges, as it’s putting a severe limit on my “books read this year” list!

Anyway, I wanted to put up a quick review of Tooth & Claw by Jo Walton. In a word: delightful. I enjoyed Tooth and Claw more than I’ve enjoyed any book for a while. I enjoyed it unabashedly, I enjoyed it with no caveats, no buts, no places that the author needed to tighten up her work; no gripes about the characters or the settings or the pacing. When’s the last time I said that? I think it has been a distressingly long while.

Tooth & Claw is a Victorian fantasy or a fantasy of manners, much like The Magicians & Mrs. Quent or Swordspoint. Instead of humans, the characters are all dragons. It sounds a little silly as a premise, but it’s superbly executed; Walton has seamlessly retooled her world to accommodate the change. She’s thought about the economy, the religion, the landscape and the history – it’s artfully done. The story follows the heirs of a family as they are left reeling and fighting over their inheritance – it’s not deep nor epic in the premise, but the execution is truly wonderful.

I’ll keep this one short – I truly have nothing other than resounding praise for Tooth & Claw. It was a breath of fresh air amid the books I’ve read this year; all of which I’ve enjoyed, but most of which I’ve also had loud complaints about. It’s nice to know that I can still be impressed.

JD's Take: Kraken (China Mieville)

2010-08-24T15:56:00.005-05:00

Firstly, let me say that this book isn't for everyone. The text is dense and can be confusing. I'm sure there are plenty of critiques that could be made about the depth of the characters, the pacing of the plot, the weirdness, the deus ex machinas, the sea. I'm not going to make those critiques. Seek those details elsewhere.

This was a book that was a joy to read, not so much for the content as for the manner it was written. When Perdido Street Station came out, I reveled in the way that Mieville examined and explored the amazingly creative world he created without ever describing anything. We learned sentence after sentence, page after page, by little more than context clues. The story plowed through the world as it would, and we figured it out or we gave up. It was a wild pleasure, a native's-eye-view of the mad city that clearly existed whole cloth in the author's imagination. In Kraken, for really the first time since Perdido Street, I am once more caught up in the chaotic power of Mieville's ability to write without apparent regard for his audience. Instead, Mieville writes like a lover possessed and possessive. He mangles the language in beatiful ways. Fragmentary sentences, verbs very optional, are stitched together with London slang. He never misses a chance to use a five dollar word when the sound of it is more musical than a fifty cent word[0].

Kraken is set in modern day London, and a giant squid is stolen. In a way that feels very familiar to anyone who has read Gaiman, an everyman Londoner is brought suddenly into a world of hidden magic lurking in the secret places beneath the surface of London. I enjoyed the story in its own right. The magic of his London is powerful, striking, and (as the protagonist points out at one point) almost disappointingly obvious. The weirdness is like much of Mieville's work: neat. The creatures living in London reminded me a bit of The Weaver from Perdido. The characters surprised me in several instances, and made me smile often.

But that's not why I loved this book. It isn't for everyone. If you like your plots water-tight, your pacing metronomic, and your prose accessible... maybe skip this one. If you're in the mood for a weird modern fantasy about the end of the world written by a man who knows the worth of a good word... pick it up right away.

[0] Geeky moment of the review: in many ways this book reminded me of Tycho's writing in Precipice. A love of the language melded with a passion for the apocalyptic.

[Lisa’s Take] Shadows of the Apt Book 3: Blood of the Mantis (Adrian Tchaikovsky)

2010-08-23T15:41:00.001-05:00

Series of books are always harder and harder for me to review the deeper I get into them, since there’s really no good way to do a good summary or recap without getting spoilery. Bear with me!

I’ll say this first: Blood of the Mantis was Good Enough. Good Enough to keep me reading the next book. Good Enough to be a pleasant diversion. Beyond that, I was fairly ho-hum about it. The story was interesting, but lacked a great ebb and flow. Tchaikovsky bounced around between characters and plot points so much that the whole book felt a bit frantic (though it did keep the pages turning). The characterizations were a little on the weak side, hanging VERY heavily on past character-building. I didn’t get a great feeling for the new characters introduced, but they also were Good Enough to stand, if not shine.

In lieu of a true story summarization, allow me to instead do a point by point recap of my thoughts on book 2 and discuss how they changed in book 3.

Easily the first 30% of the book was spent re-capping events from the previous book in excruciating detail.

This problem is totally resolved, thank goodness. Whether it was because I waited a little while to pick up book 3 (so the recaps were needed, rather than irksome) or whether he really did tone it down a notch, over-recapping was a non-issue in Blood of the Mantis.

The reader is introduced to several new characters and new powers come into play in the war as a whole. Personally, I did not find this change in scope appealing, as I’m more a fan of character-fantasy than epic/war fantasy.

The scope of book 3 was still more broad than the first book, but it did gravitate back towards more character and action centric than battle- and politics-oriented. I approved, with the caveat I mentioned above about character depth.

An additional problem I had with Dragonfly Falling was that it felt like Tchaikovsky kind of ran out of new ideas for the world.

This was definitely no longer the case in Blood of the Mantis. Tchaikovsky did an excellent job introducing new parts of the world and making the entire setting more rich. I highly enjoyed some of the framework he put in place for future books.

So… yay? Overall improvement? I don’t exactly have a glowing review to give to Blood of the Mantis, but as I said before: it was Good Enough. Amusingly, I think I can just copy-paste the final paragraph of my review of book 2, and it stands perfectly well for book 3:

> On the whole, all my complaining aside, I enjoyed ~~Dragonfly Falling~~ Blood of the Mantis enough that I want to pick up the ~~third~~ fourth installment and see where it goes. I’ll probably take a break of a few months before book 3 4 so I don’t run into the over-summarizing issue again, and I do hope the series returns to the excellence of the first book.

[Lisa’s Take] Rainwilds Book 2: Dragon Haven (Robin Hobb)

2010-08-10T13:10:00.003-05:00

I was pretty unimpressed with the first book in this two book series, but as I predicted in that review I still buckled and picked up the second book. I’m a sucker for Robin Hobb; what can I say.

Dragon Haven picks up immediately where Dragon Keeper left off – a few folks have told me that the abrupt ending to Keeper was because the two books were supposed to be a single volume, but the publisher snipped it in half at the last minute. The result was an extremely jarring end to book 1, and a weirdly paced beginning to book 2. As a reader you kind of just get dumped in the middle of everything with no ramp up… and not in the good way (where the good way is to the tune of: “OMG the middle of a sword fight! What could possibly be going on!?”). Much like book 1 ended me wrong-footed, book 2 started me off wrong-footed even though I was expecting it.

A few of my gripes from book 1 were resolved in book 2. In Dragon Keeper I felt like the editing was truly horrible: lots of repeated and contradictory information made the narrative tedious to follow. Dragon Haven suffered from this problem a lot less – there were still some reminders of past events, but they were a little more organic since they were meant to trigger your memories of the first book. A moderate improvement, to be sure.

After the initial juddering start, the story flowed fairly well. I munched the book down in a couple of days, and it kept me engaged enough…. But on the whole the story was like eating rice cakes. Kind of bland, don’t really fill you up, lacking in interesting ingredients – but you can keep munching on them indefinitely. I wasn’t emotionally tied to the characters, and the events in the book were enough to drive a story but not enough to really engage me as a reader. Furthermore, the interpersonal drama read like a teenage soap opera or romance novel: who’s sleeping with whom, who isn’t sleeping whom, and who would like to be sleeping with whom (but isn’t because they are repressed and shy). You know what the characters are going to do (“Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!”), you know how the story is going to end, and the world is preciously light on interesting fantasy tropes. Dragons! Meh.

I think part of the problem with the book is that it was missing Robin Hobb’s signature: searing, devastating, guttural angst. It’s what she does best, and boy does she ever know how to twist the knife. Sadly (Happily? Ironically?) Hobb’s usual kidney-punch was missing from Keeper and Haven, and I think that lack contributed to the very ho-hum nature of the book.

Bottom line? I’d say skip it, and keep your high opinion of Ms. Hobb as a fantasy author. Fingers crossed that her next undertaking is more gutsy and more potent.

[Lisa's Take] The Stormlight Archive Book 1 - The Way of Kings ARC (Brandon Sanderson)

2010-08-04T09:16:00.001-05:00

First and foremost, a plug! If you live in the Atlanta area, go check out Blue Elephant Bookshop in Decatur. They have a lovely little shop filled with a labyrinth of shelves, friendly book-geek employees, and an excellent fantasy section, especially for a smaller indie store. Plus, you’ll be in Decatur, which means you can stop and stuff yourself full of excellent food and drinks at Brickstore or Iberian Pig.

Now, why exactly am I plugging a little Decatur bookshop? You see: for reasons entirely unfathomable to me, a friend to one of my best friends decided she loves me far too much. I can tell because she works at Blue Elephant, and they received a stack of ARCs for The Way of Kings from the publisher. And friend-of-a-friend (who has now replaced best-friend in my affections – sorry, Christin!) decided to let me have one. Just over 1000 pages of unedited Sanderson-ey goodness, 2 months before the book release date. I don’t deserve such love.

*cough* Right, ok, I’m done effusing for real this time – on to the review!

Um. Wow. Where do I even begin? Sanderson has really outdone himself this time – according to his blog is has a whole pile of books to write in this series, and I am 100% thrilled by this news. Perhaps the most astounding thing about the ARC is that Sanderson tweeted his revisions (going from the ARC to the final product), and was cutting 10%-20% of each chapter, which is just unfathomable to me. Sure, there were times when he waxed verbose, but it certainly didn’t seem like the prose needed tightening up much. I’m very much looking forward to a re-read of the final draft. Either way, Sanderson has a ton of story to tell, and I am incredibly excited about it.

Goodness, I’m tangenting all over the place today: reign it in, Lisa!

The Way of Kings is everything you would expect from a Sanderson novel. There are 3 main viewpoints and perhaps 3 or 4 more supporting viewpoints, much like Elantris or Warbreaker. All of the viewpoint characters are nuanced, deep, and interesting. I really appreciated the variety of ages, backgrounds, and opinions the characters held – it was really nice not to have to follow 3 teenage urchins, or 3 noble but sheltered young women. All of the literary voices were distinct and exciting; only one viewpoint dragged at all for me (impressive in a book this long!) and even then not for long. Perhaps most impressively: Sanderson managed to create characters that bucked the standard fantasy tropes without falling off the other side, back into “your character is hackneyed, you’re trying too hard.”

Speaking of characters, the world that Sanderson has created for this book is practically a character in itself. I don’t even know how he comes up with so many ideas; the world is incredibly rich and intriguing. He investigates the country in which most of the action takes place very thoroughly, but you also get glimpses of other countries and parts of the world – tantalizing little tastes that reveal just how much story Sanderson has to tell. I also loved the sprinkling of maps and drawings that were included, it was fun to see how close my mental pictures were to what Sanderson and the illustrator had in mind.

As always, Sanderson is amazing at describing fight scenes, and he has way too much fun playing with physics. If you’ve seen Inception (the only movie I’ve seen in theaters since Christmas…) you have an idea of just how awesome fights with variable gravity can be. Sanderson has a very similar mechanism in The Way of Kings; we only get a small taste of it in this book, but it is incredibly cool. Sanderson is always great at character building and action, but one thing he also got me with in this book was suspense. He really managed to get me keyed up and on edge a couple of times… and he did so skillfully enough that I’ll overlook the fact that he kind of ganked the device from the Doctor Who episode “Blink.”

Phew. This is getting long – I should wrap up. In case you couldn’t tell, The Way of Kings pretty much rocked my face off. It was incredibly good and amazingly diverse; now that I’m finished with it I keep finding myself thinking “oooo, I’m going to read some Way of Kings! Oh, wait, it’s over, nooooo!” Perhaps the most impressive thing about the book is not Sanderson’s characters, world, or magic systems, but this: when you finish Way of Kings, you realize that all of that plot, all of that character development, all of that world building…. was still just set-up for book 2 and the rest of the series. It’s probably not fair for a setup book to be this freaking awesome.

JD's Take: Anathem (Neal Stephenson)

2010-07-01T14:14:00.002-05:00

Anathem is a big, think, dense book. There's no getting around it, so I'll just open with that. It's around a thousand pages long, thick enough to serve to reach the pack of the high shelf in your kitchen, and dense enough that you could pass it off as "intellectual" if you're feeling self-conscious about all the science fiction you've been reading. Don't let it intimidate you! This one is worth settling down with for the long haul and giving a good mulling-over. Don't worry, I'll try not to borrow Stephenson's loquaciousness for this review.

The first fifty pages or so were difficult for me. Not because of the denseness of the text, but because I thought Stephenson was trying to pull one over on me. The story takes place in a medieval-feeling monastery on an alien world, though we quickly learn that the world outside the monastery walls is more technologically advanced than the cloistered world within them. As the narrator, a monk named Erasmus, introduces us to life in the monastery we are necessarily introduced to the philosophy of the people who founded it. I've got a solid background in philosophy, so I immediately picked out the elements of Plato, Thales, and other early greek thinkers. However, they were presented with slightly different metaphors, new names, tweaked personal histories. I really thought for a time that Stephenson was trying to pull one over on me, trying to pass off the works of great historical thinkers as his own!

Fortunately, I kept reading. Before long, it occurred to me that rather than trying to co-opt the philosophers ideas, Stephenson was writing a primer on ancient thought and philosophical advances across the centuries, but couching it all in a fascinating new setting and some science fiction[0]. Clever! I settled down to enjoy myself. It was only much, much later that I realized what Stephenson was *really* doing, and by then I was already completely sold on the book both as a narrative and a source of interesting ideas. I won't spoil it for you any further, I'll only say: give it some time. If you don't know any philosophy, enjoy discovering it in an interesting way! If you do, you'll have fun seeing what he did with it.

So, that was my complaint with the book. I've heard another from a friend who didn't give it enough time: too much unnecessary new vocabulary. Yes, there are new words for simple things. Truck, phone, student, TV, monastery. These all get new words, and I can see where a casual reader would get frustrated having to learn vocabulary just to understand the story. It's a valid complaint, but you'll quickly become used to it (he's good at defining with context) and stop paying attention to it at all once you settle in... and there *are* good reasons for it. Partly it's just to emphasize that the culture you're reading about isn't of Earth. The rest I'll let you discover, but I have to emphasize this again: this is a book that you need to really invest some time and mental energy towards, not some throw-away space opera yarn.

Complaints out of the way, I loved this book! It was crammed with fascinating ideas from the very old (like Plato) to the very new (like quantum mechanics). The story that plays out on top of these ideas (I assure you, it's not the other way around) is well told, interesting, and occasionally completely gripping. The world is deep and fascinating, and I'm more than a little sad that I have to stop half-living in it now. The characters tend towards the flat, and there are times when it's easy to lose track of who a particular name corresponds to. There are exceptions to this, of course, and it's not nearly bad enough to be a show-stopper, just a weakness.

So, bottom line: I highly recommend this book. Next time you're feeling like you need something a little meaty, pick it up and make sure to give it some time to ramp up. You'll be well rewarded, both narratively and intellectually.

[0] In the acknowledgements, Stephenson mentions that the conceit of the book prohibited footnotes. That said, he created a truly excellent online reference for the sources of the idea seen in the book: http://nealstephenson.com/anathem/acknow.htm. Bravo.

[Lisa’s Take] Shadows of the Apt Book 2: Dragonfly Falling (Adrian Tchaikovsky)

2010-07-01T10:16:00.001-05:00

Disappointment, thy name is Book 2. After how much I enjoyed Empire in Black and Gold, Dragonfly Falling was kind of a sucker punch to my enthusiasm. I started the second book in the Shadows of the Apt series immediately after completing book 1, with no room to breathe in between. This was a very big mistake. Easily the first 30% of the book was spent re-capping events from the previous book in excruciating detail. Not just little reminders to trigger your memory, but full-on rehashing of conversations, characters, and events. Every time I picked up the book I was annoyed – which is not a state of mind to enjoy anything.

The events of Dragonfly Falling pick up immediately after the end of Empire in Black and Gold, and the story quickly broadens both the scope of the characters and the breadth of the conflict. The reader is introduced to several new characters and new powers come into play in the war as a whole. Personally, I did not find this change in scope appealing, as I’m more a fan of character-fantasy than epic/war fantasy. The characters that I liked from the first book got less attention, and the characters I didn’t like got more face time. In particular, I was disappointed with Salma’s character development (he started out as one of my favorites, but the whole “Grief-in-chains” thing ruined him for me) and I was very, very bored of Totho’s whiny love-lorn drama by half way through the book.

An additional problem I had with Dragonfly Falling was that it felt like Tchaikovsky kind of ran out of new ideas for the world. In book one he had a 100% new world to explore and he gleefully ran around talking about all the incredibly cool and creative stuff in that world… but then in book two realized he had already explored everything, and there was nothing new left to talk about. He did manage to introduce a few different ideas, but they were all related to the old ideas –nothing truly original came into play.

Thankfully, after a thoroughly mediocre first couple hundred pages, the last third of the book picked up quite a bit. Totho got less whiny, Tchaikovsky quit summarizing past events, and Thalric continued his trend from the first book of being quite interesting. The book ended on a good note, and I even managed a healthy enjoyment of the more epic aspects (battle after battle after battle).

On the whole, all my complaining aside, I enjoyed Dragonfly Falling enough that I want to pick up the third installment and see where it goes. I’ll probably take a break of a few months before book 3 so I don’t run into the over-summarizing issue again, and I do hope the series returns to the excellence of the first book.

[Lisa’s Take] Shadows of the Apt Book 1: Empire in Black and Gold (Adrian Tchaikovsky)

2010-06-28T15:25:00.001-05:00

It’s a good thing I generally listen to Jeff over at Genre Reader when he says a book is worth reading, because otherwise I would have taken one look at the cover of Empire in Black and Gold, laughed myself silly with the ridiculousness of it, and never picked the book up. I know I shouldn’t judge content based on cover art… but EiBaG’s cover is just SO awful and SO trite and SOOO video-game-over-the-top that I couldn’t take it seriously.

Luckily, I bought the book on a glowing review, sight-unseen, so I never had an opportunity to be put off. I was rewarded with a novel containing a rich world, fun and relatively complex characters, and really exciting blend of fantasy genres. There were pure fantasy elements, certainly, but also a healthy dose of steampunk and a bit of sci-fi. The three genres blended together very nicely and made for a very unique experience. I’ve seen a couple of reviewers complain about there being too much focus on battle sequences, but I didn’t find that to be the case; rather I thought the balance between intrigue, characters, and fighting was pretty well done. Additionally, the author has a Sanderson-esque ability to depict fights between several people extremely clearly and with a high level of bad-ass-ness.

On the characterization-front, I admired Tchaikovsky’s ability to build a cast that mostly bucked character- and fantasy-stereotypes without going so far as to fall off the other edge and end up back at “ridiculous.” This has been a big gripe of mine with a lot of modern fantasy authors (with Joe Abercrombie perhaps being the worst) so it’s nice to see someone who strikes a balance. His characters were well rounded and complex, often grappling with real issues. I particularly liked the character of Thalric, and Tchaikovsky’s investigation of good and evil and loyalty. Of the other main characters, the only one I didn’t feel particularly sympathetic towards was Totho, but that was likely because he got so much less “screen time.”

I will admit Tchaikovsky did toe the line a bit with his character relationships; sometimes his characters attitudes were refreshing and insightful, but other times they edged towards just a little trite. I called almost all of the major character developments, but not to an extent where I found myself saying “of COURSE that’s where this is going, get ON with it already.” Overall, it was not a flaw that reduced my enjoyment of the book.

Definitely give Empire in Black and Gold a read. It is refreshing and solid and did a great job shaking up the standard fantasy world and character tropes.

JD's Take: The Long Price Quartet (Daniel Abraham)

2010-06-02T15:44:00.002-05:00

This is the first time in years that I've read more than one book in a series back-to-back. In this case, I read the three entries in Abraham's quartet in a 2.5 week period. What made me perform this strange and uncharacteristic act? Was I trapped without a giant stack to tempt me after each one? Was I so thoroughly enjoying them that I couldn't stop? Was Lisa nagging me to finally read them and get them off of our stack once and for all? Yes, yes, and yes.

I read the first book, A Shadow in Summer, years ago when it first came out. I enjoyed it quite a bit at the time for it's interesting and well developed world and interesting and well developed characters. This despite the fact that I really hate the "sudden but inevitable betrayal" trope, where an author foreshadows the tragedy so broadly that you spend the whole novel cringing whenever anyone is happy. So. Years pass. Lisa write not one, but two reviews of this series for some reason, both of them glowing. Eventually, we go on a weekend trip and she slips the second and third volume into my luggage, and I get started.

I really enjoyed the series as a whole. For starters, each of the books actually feels like a separate tale that could stand on its own (a little less so with book 4, such is the nature of conclusions). This is a rare and wonderful thing. Bravo Mr. Abraham! The scope of the narrative is narrow and deep, meaning that we follow a small cast of characters across an entire lifetime of experience. This allows for a level of character development that you very, very rarely see. In fact, the wholse series could be viewed as an elaborately couched character study. An in-depth exploration of friendhip and rivalry and good intentions and the flaws that make us human.

The series could also be seen as a vast fantasy epic in which immensely powerful magics are used to shatter the world. Twice. Of course, you have to squint a little bit to see it that way. For starters, a fantasy epic basically requires a Villain, and there just isn't one. There are people who do terrible, terrible things, but even while I watched in horror I had a hard time criticizing them. It's said that everyone is the hero of their own story. Abraham's gift is in telling us those stories so convincingly that we believe them all. Every single one is wrong, of course, and conflicting. But while a given character is on the screen, we believe it. We see how they do what they do, and why. We see how they couldn't act in any other way. We believe that a good man is humble, even while acting with sweeping power and intense arrogance. We see how murdering thousands is the safest, most moral choice. We understand that a good man is a terrible, jealous, blind fool.

Another reason I'd never call this an epic is that the camera stays too close to the characters to show the breadth of destruction that is occurring in the story. Even while whole nations fall, we only see the very personal aspects of the change. It's like watching a movie about some great and tragic battle, but the camera never strays from tight closeups of one soldier's face, or a victim's, or a general's.

So yeah. Good story, good world, great characters. Not all perfect, of course. The final book fell short of many of the best things about this series. It didn't really stand on its own, it had a real villain (without a particularly compelling personal story), and it dragged pretty badly until halfway through. On the other hand, it did wonderful things with many of the characters, and the ending was one of the best wrap-ups to a long series that I've read in a very, very long time.

Overall, I'd say that this series is excellent. Well written, entertaining, different, deep, character driven and fun. Not perfect but awfully, awfully good.

[Lisa’s Take] The Hero and the Crown (Robin McKinley)

2010-06-02T09:22:00.002-05:00

While clearing some of JD’s childhood books out of boxes in the office, I came across The Hero and the Crown, a Young Adult Newbery winner from 1984. Figuring it might be good light reading to break up some harder fantasy, I threw it into my stack. It ended up being a quick little read, and quite enjoyable. I also have to give it props for being pretty revolutionary, given that it was written 26 years ago.

The plot follows Aerin, daughter of a king, who is ostracized from the court and her peers for being awesome, strong, and dragon-slay-ey, rather than docile, fashion-obsessed, and girly. The plot follows her as she grows up from an awkward ugly duckling into a strong woman who stands against the darkness threatening the land. The flow of the story is a little jumpy, unexpectedly going back in time at points and then lurching forward faster than the prose suggests – in reality, this book wanted to be 600 pages, not 250. Still, pacing issues aside, the author makes some ballsy moves for a YA novel, being especially vicious with her main character’s well-being, and investigating themes that are touché even in adult novels (such as loving more than one person).

Also, let it be known that Robin McKinley writes horses better than any fantasy author I’ve ever read. I get so very sick of authors making stupid horse-generalizations and talking about galloping to a halt, neglecting gaits, ignoring personalities and ear-gestures, etc. If you don’t know anything about horses, don’t call attention to your ignorance. Either don’t talk about horses, ride a horse for a few weeks, or read McKinely’s book.

Anyway, the long and short of this review is this: if I had read The Hero and the Crown at 14 or so I would have been a die-hard McKinely fan for life. As it is, I can appreciate her potential and might pick up another book of hers from time to time and will definitely recommend her to my bookworm sister, who might still be young enough to appreciate her.

[Spring Cleaning][Lisa's Take] Kushiel's Legacy Series (Jacqueline Carey)

2010-04-09T16:11:00.003-05:00

[Reviewer's Note: want to know just how bad I am about leaving partially-finished reviews sitting around? Here's a review I started over 4 years ago. I'm presenting it with no changes (and resisting the urge to comment at length). My only disclaimer is: yes, this is a very, very old and incomplete review.]

Kushiel’s Dart

It took me somewhere in the range of 2 and a half years to read this book. The first time I tried I made it a little over two hundred pages before I decided it was trite and dull, so I put it down. Buuut… then lots of people whose opinions I trust started saying how great and amazing it was. For quite a while I ignored them entirely, but eventually I was looking for a nice epic read, so I decided to give Kushiel a second chance. So I started over from the beginning… and as it turns out, I stopped within 10 pages of the plot thickening and the book actually getting good. Go figure.

This book is the first in a trilogy that follows Phedre no Delauny, a girl who has been marked by the god of punishment. Called an Anguisette, she is cursed to find pleasure in the taking of pain. Kushiel’s dart follows her through childhood and her training in the arts of espionage, and then (once the plot –finally- thickens) out into the wide world as she struggles to return home and foil a plot to overthrow the ruling powers in her home land of Terre d’Ange.

What originally turned me off about these books is that Carey relies heavily on the catch of the Anguisette to carry (no pun intended) her through the first half of the book. Until she proved to me that there was a lot more to the novel than what came across as a fairly trite twist on “life of a god-touched individual” I was a skeptic. Eventually though, she really hit her stride and the book opened up to be truly epic. The history and theology of Terre d’Ange may well be the most interesting and intriguing of any epic fantasy that I’ve had the pleasure (or pain) of reading.

Once I finally got around to giving Kushiel’s Dart a second chance, I ate through all thousand pages in perhaps a week and a half. It was just that tasty. Then I went on to read each of her next 3 books in rapid succession – so on to the next review!

Kushiel’s Chosen

The first thing I noticed when I started when this second installment in the Kusheline Trilogy began is that the map in the front of the book was zoomed out by a few levels. My first thought was “what? It can get more epic than the first?” and my second thought was “Hah, that’s totally Europe. I didn’t realize she ripped off Europe!” …but really the second thought is sort of peripheral. I was just entertained.

ANYway, Kushiel’s Chosen opens with Phedre resolving to track down and bring to justice the participant at the heart of the thrown-overthrowing-plot from the first book. Have I mentioned that this summary is exceptionally hard to write without spoilers? Phedre sets out with the aid of her Perfect Companion to follow a set of rumors surrounding said perpetrator. Of course, the plotting goes deeper than anyone could have guessed and when the pieces of the puzzle start to come together we end up with political intrigue, imprisonment on an island dungeon, kidnapping by pirates, and all sorts of other excitement.

Much like the map, the plot in this book takes a step out to be even more expansive and impressive. Where the first book examined Terre d’Ange’s history and theology, this second book studies the nature of love and betrayal. Yet again I was caught up and powered through this epic in a week or so – and it was oh so worth it.

Absolutely excellent.

Kushiel’s Avatar

Gyeh. Here I thought writing a plot summary one-book-removed was difficult… how do I summarize two books removed without being horribly spoileriffic?

[Spring Cleaning][Lisa’s Take] The Long Price Quartet – Daniel Abraham

2010-04-09T16:08:00.000-05:00

Gods. I don’t even know how to begin to review this series. I read books 1 and 2 over two years ago and never got around to writing full reviews for them, though they richly deserved it. A few months back I tried to start An Autumn War but put it down after 30 pages because I was afraid I didn’t remember enough about book 2 to enjoy book 3. Eventually my curiosity at all the buzz overwhelmed my reservations and I tried again – and ended up reading An Autumn War and The Price of Spring basically back to back.

I won’t attempt a plot summary of 4 books that span 50 years – instead I’ll just ramble on a bit.

Never in all of my reading history have I seen such amazing character development. I’ve certainly read other books that span many years (or even a lifetime). The Long Price Quartet blows all others out of the water. His core cast of characters mature from teenagers to old men over the course of the 4 books – and they actually change and mature. Their outlooks and maturity levels vary, as do their handling of situations.

[Reviewer’s Note: this is where I set the review down and neglected to come back to it]

There’s no way I can pick this review back up and do The Long Price Quartet justice, and for that I apologize. It’s been a long time since I finished a book series and the hand a good cry (the last one was The Khaavren Romances, by Steve Brust, if you’re curious), but I finished The Price of Spring, closed the book, and then sobbed my eyes out. Finishing this series left a hole in my heart, like losing an old friend. Watching the characters grow and change, the way they interacted with each other and handled situations, their love of the vibrant world – it all had a huge impact. Sure, the books had flaws and weaknesses, but the overall picture they painted was astoundingly good.

I absolutely cannot wait for Abraham to get another book in the works – he has vaulted into a very high position on my list of favorite authors.

JD's Take: The Windup Girl (Paulo Bacigalupi)

2010-04-07T13:28:00.003-05:00

You might as well learn to pronouce that name. Although he has been around for a few years making quite a name for himself with short stories, this is his debut novel and it made for his 5th Hugo and 3rd Nebula nod, so it's not just me who thinks it was pretty damn good. He's young, talented, getting noticed, and I expect to see a whole stack of books with his name on the spine on my bookshelf in the coming years. Oh crap, I just gave away the conclusion of the review. Oh well, I shall press forward regardless!

What impressed me most about the novel was the world building. That's a phrase that is usually reserved for fantastic planets circling distant stars, with unknowable aliens populating them and strange religions pulling the strings. I use it quite deliberately in that sense, even though the story is set in a nearish future version of Thailand. This Thailand is set in an Earth whose global economy was annihilated not so long ago by a sudden and drastic oil crisis, leading to each nation (or smaller entity) contracting in on itself and readjusting. Around that same time, advances in genetic engineering made it possible for powerful agricultural companies to release plagues into the wild designed to destroy food crops around the world. This made it possible to corner huge markets with custom engineered staple crops that were immune to the plagues and sterile. Against that background each country struggles to remain independent of the agricultural companies, to improve their generipping abilities to create new foods, to gather and maintain seed banks of precious plants that can no longer survive in the wild. Bacigalupi does a great job of extrapolating this world, subtly changing everything from transit to weaponry to cooking. This Thailand has lost nearly every source of plant food. There are only a couple kinds of tree that can resist the GE beetles roving the landscape and only a few crops that they've managed to keep ahead of the rapidly mutating plagues that blight the land.

The people of this novel live in a world that is alien to our own, but echoes with elements of the world we know. They live in the skeleton of our world, but in stark contrast to books of the post-apoc genre (a label that I would have great difficulty applying to this book despite the fact that it takes place after an apocalypse) they are learning to thrive in it. They engineer crops to stay one step ahead of the constantly mutating plagues, they engineer specialized animals to power factories where they produce the kink-springs that power everything from radios to motorcycles. They create police forces dedicated to stopping the spread of human-vector plagues at any cost, they create networks of methane pipes to heat homes, provide light, and cook. Their religions have mutated to match the challenges of their world, and these too feel alien and strangely familiar. It's a wonderful setting, one that surprises and grounds the reader in equal degree. By setting this book in Thailand, Bacigalupi makes the people seem exotic and surprising without being unknowable.

Moving away from the world, which I've already spent far too much time on! The characters are nuanced and interesting! They have resources that aren't immediately apparent, they grow and change and learn. They are well varied, and they all act consistent with their character. The story is interesting and unfolds in sometimes surprising ways, branching suddenly and changing the plans of everyone (and the expectations of the reader). It also defies genre. It is science fiction certainly, but with a fantastic element or two. Post-apoc without any of the conventions of that genre. Not urban fantasy despite being very urban and having fantasy elements. Not steampunk despite the propogation of spring-and-gear powered everything and methane lights. Go in with an open mind... this was an excellent read and I highly recommend it!

[Lisa’s Take][Spring Cleaning] Servant of a Dark God (John Brown)

2010-04-07T09:20:00.001-05:00

I need to poke around at the review database over on Fantasy News & Book Reviews, because I really have no idea how to feel about this book. I’m not sure the last time a fantasy novel engendered such a feeling of “meh?” in me – usually I either love it, hate it, or like it but have something solid to pick at. I’m curious to see what other folks thought of this book to see if they have any points that will sway my opinion one way or the other.

Pretty much everything about Servant of a Dark God is standard. Standard agrarian society – farms and villages, tradesmen and fairs. Standard cast of characters – young boy and young girl who are obvious love interests, father figures, young savants, bad guys, badder guys, and dubiously bad guys. Standard magical set up – magic that is known, magic that is outlawed and practiced covertly, and latent magical powers.

The author does through in some interesting(ish) twists – the conflict of the young male lead with his father and the investigation of family through the book are something you don’t see as often in this type of novel. Brown’s main character is highly conflicted and behaves exactly how a 16 year old boy should (forget the heroics, bring on the indecision and the angst). He also doesn’t mind being brutal with his characters – he’s happy to beat the crap out of them, kill them off, or otherwise.

Standard tropes or moderately interesting twists aside, I never had a feeling of attachment or emotional investment in any of the characters. I could tell when the author wanted me to be upset or happy, but the connection was never fully forged.

[Reviewer’s Note: at this point I set this review aside and forgot about it, so I’m picking it back up and wrapping it up.]

I dithered for quite a while about whether to put this book back on The Stack for JD, or to just shelve it in the library, and in the end I went for the latter. With as many fantasy novels as there are out there right now, there’s just not a place for “ok” books. That said, if someone came to me and said “Holy crap, John Brown wrote another book and it’s SO GREAT!” I would probably believe them, and pick it up without hesitation.

Spring Cleaning!

2010-04-07T09:18:00.003-05:00

I'm really horrible about starting reviews then never finishing them. As such, I have a pile of reviews half finished in my drafts folder. In the spirit of spring cleaning, I'll be posting them this week in various states of completeness - I'll try to complete the ones that deserve it, and maybe just leave the others "as is." I recommend that my other slacker reviewers on this site do the same!

Happy spring!

[Lisa’s Take] Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Susanna Clarke)

2010-03-12T09:36:00.001-05:00

I first picked up this book about 5 years ago. I read the first 20 pages or so, decided it wasn’t for me, and put it down. This was before I started giving all books at least 100 pages to woo me. Past-Lisa was dumb. I’m GLAD Past-Lisa was deprived of this book – she didn’t deserve to read it. Present-Lisa is much cleverer, and realized after about 40 pages what a gem Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is.

This book is classed solidly in the historical/Victorian fantasy genre. Think of a similar setting to Naomi Novik’s “His Majesty’s Dragon” or Galen Beckett’s "The Magicians & Mrs. Quent", and you’ll have a good idea of what the world is like. The story starts of slowly, and moves at a sedate pace throughout many parts of the narrative, but Clarke’s language and subtle character building are engaging enough to get you through the slow parts. Her use of footnotes is especially interesting; while she does occasionally use them for comic relief, she more often uses them for careful world-building, fairytale tangents, foreshadowing, or clarification of past events. An interesting side-effect of the footnotes is that they makes you a very careful reader – you better damn well be paying attention if you want to get the full story!

I’ll be frank – I’ve had a very hard time writing “good” reviews lately. It’s simple for me to snidely pick at a book’s flaws when I don’t like it, or even when I do like it but the problems are glaring enough to be easy pickins’. But this year when a book has been truly good – solid throughout, plot-hole-free, unencumbered by trite characters or over-done fantasy tropes – I’ve had trouble coming up with a review that does that goodness justice. It seems like I’ve praised “good books” every way they can be praised, so when a truly exceptional gem appears I have no new descriptors to do it justice with.

I suppose I’ll have to fall once again to the hackneyed words of praise that I use so often. Strange & Norrell is an excellent book, and absolutely worth the patience required to get through the first 50 pages. It’s unique, intriguing, subtle, and vibrant. I count myself lucky – those who those who read this book when it came out have been waiting 5 years for more stories by Ms. Clarke; I’ve only been waiting a few months, but I’m already beside myself with anticipation.

[Lisa’s Take] The Stepsister Scheme (Jim C. Hines)

2010-03-03T16:25:00.001-05:00

The Stepsister Scheme is book number 12 for me this year, and has the dubious honor of being the first book I’m putting down without finishing. A couple of months back I picked up the second book in this series (The Mermaid’s Madness) without realizing it was a sequel. The description was intriguing; a continuation/retelling of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella, only with all the princesses being ass-kicking bad-asses. I started on The Mermaid’s Madness, quickly realized it was Book 2, and stopped to backtrack and pick up book 1. Don’t get me started ranting about how much it pisses me off when publishers don’t list on the cover or spine that a book is part of a series.

The only reason I gave The Stepsister Scheme 150 pages of my time is because I was stuck on a plane and had nothing else to read. The characters are stereotypical and hackneyed, the plot is incredibly pedestrian, and the jokes and attempts at humor made me roll my eyes every time. The book reads like something aimed at 13-year-old girls, except that from time to time it throws in some adult themes and dirty language. I dog-eared 10 pages out of the first 100 that had contradictions or repetitive language. I really have absolutely nothing positive to say. Oh – and the cover was embarrassing to be witnessed holding, just to add insult to injury.

I won’t wax poetic on this one – just skip it. If you’re looking for books that take a fairy tale or fantasy basis then twist it and add hilarity, pick up Company of Ogres or Too Many Curses by A. Lee Martinez.

[Lisa’s Take] Rainwilds Book 1: Dragon Keeper (Robin Hobb)

2010-02-23T16:22:00.000-05:00

I have a backlog of half-written reviews right now, but I wanted to write a quick blurb about this one while it was fresh in my mind.

Robin Hobb is one of my favorite authors. Her Farseer Trilogy was probably the series that turned me into a hardcore fantasy buff at 16, severing my ties to scifi and standard fiction. Usually she has amazing characters, interesting plots, and boy can she spread on the angst like no other.

That said, Dragon Keeper was a huge disappointment. It picks up a few years after the events of the Liveship Traders trilogy as the inhabitants of Bingtown struggle to recover from war and deal with dragons being returned to the world. It follows a small cast of characters (strong independent woman stuck in a stifling marriage, her husband’s suave secretary, a rough and uncouth captain of a river boat, and a young outcast girl trying to find her place in society) as they converge from various walks of life and end up traveling up the rainwild river with a clutch of stunted young dragons. The characters themselves are pretty strong, but unfortunately that’s not enough to offset the flaws.

First and foremost: who the hell edited this book? I gripe about poor editing a lot these days, but Dragon Keeper takes the cake. Every 40 pages some information was repeated or restated, sometimes contradicting earlier statements. It was annoying an jarring to the flow of the narrative, and a problem that would have been completely avoided with minor editing.

Secondly, while the repetition of info got me off on the wrong foot, but frankly the story itself was flimsy. Not a lot happened, and there wasn’t really any suspense or tension, outside of minor character drama. I enjoyed the story well enough, but didn’t feel any ebb or flow in the narrative. Adding to that feeling was the fact that the book didn’t have an ending – pages just stopped existing after one chapter. It could have stopped 3 chapters earlier and had the same effect. I practically experienced a sense of vertigo when I turned the page and there was nothing there. Words can’t express the sound of disgust I made.

Speaking of flimsy stories – I felt like the author leaned far too heavily on the contents of The Liveship Traders novels for a series that is supposed to stand on its own. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that a new reader would have been fairly lost, and wondering who the hell a lot of the bit-part characters were (characters that had a rich history in Liveship Traders, but drifted in and out of Dragon Keeper with no intro or explanation).

Was I happy with Book 1? Absolutely not. I did enjoy the book overall, kinda, but there was so much wrong with it that I finished it feeling angry. Will I pick up book 2? Probably. I’m a sucker for Robin Hobb, and I’ll cling to the hope that she (or her editor) will correct some of the problems in the sequel. Even if the next book is of equally poor quality, the strong characterizations will get me through it… I hope.

JD's Take: Makers (Cory Doctorow)

2010-02-19T17:02:00.003-05:00

This one is gonna be pretty quick. I was very disappointed by this novel and don't really want to dwell on it. Cory's usual mad-creative ideas were in evidence, and his characterizations were better than usual. However, compared to his previous works this one just doesn't hold up. There are sections of page-turning-fun as you follow the cast of unique and flawed characters through a near-future pseudo-industrial revolution led by (who else?) the DIY tinkerers. However, the flow of the story is repeatedly stopped short and you'll be forced to endure 50 page long screeds about the evils of corporations, the dangers of "selling out", the corrupting influence of "suits" and lawyers, and the general shittiness of people in general.

I really enjoyed much of Cory's prior work (Eastern Standard Tribe and One Comes to Town, One Leaves Town, and Little Brother are particularly enjoyable). He has a knack for writing near future science fiction that ignores the practical, he just throws around ideas about cool things and pretends that the world will go along with them. This leads to weird future worlds that are LIKE a future we could imagine, filled with references to current-era events and people, but are so fundamentally UNreal that they become belief-suspending micro-worlds for us to play in. It's like the opposite of Halting State. That style is very much in evidence, but it's so bogged down by soapboxing and hystrionics that it's just not any fun to read.

Full disclosure: I gave up on this one 350 out of 450 pages in. This... might be the first time I've ever read that much of a book and quit.

[Lisa’s Take] Pandora’s Star – Peter F. Hamilton

2010-02-02T16:28:00.000-05:00

First thing first. Pandora’s Star is a great book. It’s exciting and interesting and original. It is to Sci-Fi what Tad Williams’ Otherworld is to Fantasy: epic, sweeping, exploratory –full of awesome and strange worlds that house interesting and sympathetic characters. Weeks after finishing it I’m still mulling over certain themes and situations. That said, I have a few words for Mr. Hamilton...

Dude. Seriously. Close to a thousand pages and you couldn’t write a damn ending to your book? Really? A cliffhanger is the best you could manage? Oh, and we need to have a little discussion about character names. In the first 50ish pages, you accidentally named 2 characters “Nigel.” One is a major player, and one is a little bit-character. I know this sort of thing happens in real life, but do me a favor and don’t confuse me while reading. On a related note, it would be fantastic if you could do a better job differentiating your characters and making them memorable. You had it down by the 2/3 mark of the book, but for at least 500 pages it was a struggle to figure out who was who. Oh, speaking of things you had down by the end of the book – good god could your chapter structure have BEEN more formulaic at the start? For hundreds of pages every single chapter started with a character-context-free, long-winded description of a technology or planet that went on for pages and pages before you finally remembered what was going on and reigned yourself in with a quiet little “ahem, where was I? Oh yeah, I was supposed to be talking about THIS character.” I know from the second half of the book that you can build worlds and environments incredibly well without going on tangential rants – why didn’t you apply that approach to the first half of the book?

*pant...pant... deeeeep breath*

Sorry. That got away from me a bit. I don’t know why anyone ever lets me rant.
Anyway, I obviously had quite a few gripes about Pandora’s Star but for all of that it was a fantastic read and I will absolutely be picking up the sequel. I loved Hamilton’s world building and his ideas about technology were incredibly cool. I was especially impressed by his investigation of body rejuvenation and the potential effects on marriage, friendship, and family. Maybe it’s just my lack of sci-fi reading for the past 10 years, but I also thought it was insightful to come up with a space exploration mechanism that made ships and shuttles obsolete. Like I said – still mulling over the book’s themes weeks later.

Bottom line: I think I’d classify Pandora’s Star as a staple of any sci-fi diet. Yes, it tweaked quite a few of my pet peeves, but it also managed to pretty much blow me away. Excellent.

[Lisa’s Take] Boneshaker – Cherie Priest

2010-01-11T12:45:00.000-05:00

I admit that I’m a little put off by all of the Steampunk themed literature coming out lately. It feels like a late arrival to a bandwagon that is already pretty full. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Steampunk movement and I have the costumes to prove it… I just feel a little weird about the huge influx of Steamy books. Blame JD, he’s the one who got me thinking that things that are “in” are inherently not good.

Boneshaker is very Steampunk, complete with sky pirates, gear-filled clockwork, and wondrous inventions. And then there are zombies, another topic that puts me off a lot. Still, in spite of all of the thematic elements that are so popular right now… I managed to enjoy Boneshaker quite a lot. I’m not feeling very verbose at the moment, so I’ll break this down piece-mill.

Characters – The two main characters, Briar and her son Zeke, are solid and sympathetic. The supporting cast is colorful and varied, and I enjoyed each new character introduction. I thought it was really cool that Cherie Priest could pull of a good 35-year-old protagonist when so much fantasy these days centers around the “young adult” aged characters. My only character complaint was that Zeke read to me more like a 12 or 13 year old than a 15 year old… but that’s pretty minor.
Plot - I very much enjoyed the story, and I am always thrilled when an author can write a great, colorful story in a single volume. I’m getting a little fed up with the trilogy fad, so I’m happy to heap some praise on a single volume. Boneshaker had a strong setup, good narrative, and solid conclusion. There’s some space in the story for Priest to write another story in the world if she would like, but no real dangling plot lines.

Pacing - In spite of its 400-odd pagecount, Boneshaker reads incredibly quickly. I sucked this one down in about a day (hooray vacation!). The breakneck speed was fun… but I also would have liked to see a bit more ebb and flow in the pacing. There was a small reprieve before the book’s climax, but more contrast overall would have been nice.

There you have it; in spite of all my biases, Boneshaker was a good read. Not amazing or world-changing, but a nice bit of fun. Readers who are new to the idea of Steampunk will find some cool gems, those who are familiar with Steampunk will have a bit of fun, and even readers like me who are a bit jaded on the whole thing will eat their words by the end.

[Lisa’s Take] The Fionvar Tapestry (Guy Gavriel Kay)

2010-01-11T12:44:00.000-05:00

Three books make up the Fionvar Tapestry: The Summer Tree, The Wandering Fire, and The Darkest Road. Usually I don’t read books in trilogies back-to-back-to-back these days, but the three Fionvar books were engaging enough to keep me reading. That said, I was a little burnt out by the second half of the last book so I was pretty happy to be done with everything. Next time remind me to take breaks between the books, if you please.

Anyway, the Fionvar Tapestry is straight up fantasy – 5 college-age students get transported to a fantastic world called Fionvar. They get caught up in the fight to save the people from a dark force that has awakened. Pretty standard fantasy trope.
Things I liked: I think my favorite thing about these books is that none of the characters really know what they’re doing, or what they need to do. When magic calls to them they often just go with it without really stopping to think things through… and often there are catastrophic results. The characters aren’t at all Mary-Sue-ish. They make lots of mistakes, they aren’t always likable, and they’re very real. As always, Kay does relationships, love, life, and death very well. The world was very believable and well developed – the races and magical systems were interesting, original, and varied.

Things I didn’t like: these three books were filled with things that I know Kay can do amazingly… but in this instance only did ok. The deaths didn’t quite make me hurt, the emotional connections didn’t quite make me grin. It’s frustrating to know the author is so capable of hitting the mark, but missed by half an inch this time. The death of one of the main characters during book 2 was particularly poorly done – the event was obviously supposed to have a monumental impact, but the character wasn’t solid enough by that point for me to care much. I also wasn’t a huge fan of the Arthurian Legend tie-ins… it felt a little like cheating.

Now, all of that said – the Fionvar Tapestry is still a significant cut above most other high fantasy out there. I’m holding it to an unfair standard by comparing it to Tigana, which is the best Strictly Fantasy book I’ve read in years. It’s also hardly fair of me to say “I know Kay can do better” when he wrote the Fionvar Tapestry much earlier than some of his later great works.

I’m not really sure what my bottom line is here. The Fionvar Tapestry is good, but not great. If you’re only ever going to read one or two books by Guy Gavriel Kay, skip these… or if these are your first Kay, don’t let them set a tone for all of his work, because goodness knows a lot of his later books are amazingly good. If you’re looking for some good, solid fantasy, the Fionvar Tapestry is probably worth reading… just give yourself some breathing room between them.

[Nano Review] JD's Take: Boneshaker (Cherie Priest)

2010-01-08T14:25:00.003-05:00

Steampunk versus zombies versus steampunk. In walled off post-apoc alt-1890 Seattle.

I liked it, obviously.

JD's Take: Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)

2010-01-08T14:08:00.003-05:00

There's really nothing I can say about this book that hasn't been said a thousand times before, that's the problem with trying to review classics. Nevertheless, it was the first book I read in 2010 so I wanted to make sure I started the year off right by actually writing something down!

Heart of Darkness is sumptuously written with prose that flows like honey, and the actual narrative just gets dragged along by the sheer inevitable viscosity of the text. It's great fun to read because Conrad has such fun with the language, even if (if I may be allowed a quibble) the speaker (a gnarled old sailor) and the writing style don't really match. Still, any book that manages to get this quote in there is fine by me:

"For months--for years--his life hadn't been worth a day's purchase; and there he was gallantly, thoughtlessly alive, to all appearances indestructible solely by the virtue of his few years and of his unreflecting audacity."

There's a lot of content crammed into that short work, and it makes you think. About solitude, and ethics, and society, and darkness. Reading this from the relative comfort of 2010, I already know how I feel about most of the overt issues tackled here (for instance, I'm pretty solidly against exploiting other cultures or treating human beings as less valuable than animals because they're colored different, and reading vivid accounts of that sort of behavior isn't necessary to jar my thinking), but there are plenty of more subtle issues here that honestly did make me spend some time contemplating the nature of man as a social creature and of power and temptation and self delusion.

To sum up: this is a quick, powerful, worthwhile read with glorious (if baffling) writing and plenty of actual meat on it's bones to chew over even now.

JD's 2009 Review

2010-01-05T09:36:00.000-05:00

Me too! Me too! I didn't get nearly so much reading done this year as LisaBit (I blame gaming) it still ended up being a pretty healthy stack. Also, I'm terrible at both remembering things (that's why this blog exists!) and keeping up with things (that's why this blog updates so infrequently!) so this list may not be complete. Also also, I don't feel like looking up how to spell the authors' names so... I'm not gonna.

1. Whitechapel Gods
2. Jhegaala
3. Little Brother
4. Graveyard Book
5. Clay's Ark
6. World War Z
7. Counting Heads
8. Domino Men
9. Glass Books of the Dream Eaters
10. CthuluTech*
11. CthuluTech: Vade Mecum*
12. Tigana
13. Temporal Void
14. Mistborn
15. Halting State
16. Alpha Omega*
17. The Well of Ascension
18. The Hero of Ages
19. Dark Arts
20. Monster
21. Warbreaker
22. Blood of Ambrose **
23. The Family Business
24. The Man with a Golden Torque
25. Manual of Detection
26. Old Man's War
27. Misspent Youth **
28. The Forever War
29. The City & The City
30. Thirteen
31. The Ghost Brigades
32. As You Wish
33. The Devil You Know
34. Bar None
35. Red Wolf Conspiracy
36. Slaughterhouse Five
37. The Sheriff of Yrnameer
38. The Last Colony
39. Daemons Are Forever
40. Inheritor
41. Sandman Slim
42. Unseen Academicals
43. Frankenstein ***
44. Debatable Space
45. Matter
46. The Stranger
47. Zoe's Tale
48. Bridge of Birds

* Roleplaying
** Did not finish
*** Out of order (badly)

As for my top 5 (in chronological order, naturally).... Little Brother, World War Z, Tigana, The Forever War, and The Stranger. Several others deserve to be in that list but I left off because they are part of a series, which was a relatively simple way of trimming my list to 5. That said, I read all four books of Scalzi's Old Man's War universe this year, so it deserves particular mention.

Lisa's 2009 Review

2010-01-04T12:57:00.002-05:00

In 2008 I read 51 books, and in my year-end review glibly said “maybe in 2009 I can make it to 60!” Well. This year I accidentally read 70. A grand total of 27590 pages, which equates to about 76 pages a day. I blame all the work travel – lots of plane time to bump up my totals! Here is the full list:

1. Backup by Jim Butcher
2. Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay
3. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
4. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
5. Life, the Universe, and Everything by Douglas Adams
6. So Long and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams
7. The Sword by Deborah Chester
8. A Magic of Twilight by S. L. Farrell
9. Last Watch by Segei Lukyanenko
10. Small Favor by Jim Butcher
11. The Black Company by Glen Cook
12. A Magic of Nightfall by S. L. Farrell
13. The book of lost things by John Connolly
14. Lamentation by Ken Scholes
15. The Domino Men by Jonathan Barnes
16. Hand of Isis by Jo Graham
17. Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson
18. The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson
19. Steward of Song by Adam Stemple
20. The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson
21. Peter and the StarCatchers by Dave Barry & Ridley Pearson
22. Nation by Terry Pratchett
23. Wizard of the Pigeons by Megan Lindholm
24. Conqueror's Moon by Julian May
25. The Stranger by Max Frei
26. Victory of Eagles by Naomi Novik
27. The City & The City by China Mieville
28. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
29. Skin Trade by Laurel K. Hamilton
30. WarBreaker by Brandon Sanderson
31. Clay's Ark by Octavia Butler
32. The Exile Kiss by George Alec Effinger
33. Namah's Kiss by Jacqueline Carey
34. Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi
35. Act of Will by A. J. Hartley
36. Old Man's War by John Scalzi
37. Song for Arbonne by Guy Gavriel Kay
38. Dead Until Dawn by Charlaine Harris
39. The Enchantments of Flesh & Spirit by Storm Constantine
40. The Bewitchments of Love & Hate by Storm Constantine
41. Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie
42. The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi
43. The Last Colony by John Scalzi
44. Monster by A Lee Martinez
45. Turn Coat by Jim Butcher
46. Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett
47. Mountain of Black Glass by Tad Williams
48. Sea of Silver Light by Tad Williams
49. Basket Case by Carl Hiaasen
50. Red Wolf Conspiracy by Robert V. S. Redick
51. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
52. Elantris by Brandon Sanderson
53. Havemercy by Jaida Jones & Danielle Bennett
54. As You Wish by Jackson Pearce
55. The Woad to Wuin by Peter David
56. The Magicians by Lev Grossman
57. Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link
58. Thomas the Rhymer by Ellen Kushner
59. Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi
60. Wolfskin by Juliet Marillier
61. World War Z by Max Brooks
62. Canticle by Ken Scholes
63. 500 Years After by Paarfi of Roundwood (re-read)
64. The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay
65. The Wandering Fire by Guy Gavriel Kay
66. The Darkest Road by Guy Gavriel Kay
67. Ariel by Steven R. Boyett
68. The Martian Chronicals by Ray Bradbury
69. Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart
70. Boneshaker by Cherie Priest

Books that I read 100-250 pages of before putting down were: The Sword, Conqueror’s Moon, Basket Case, Woad to Wuin, and Wolfskin.

Picking my top 5 favorite this year is easier than most years – it seems like I read a whole lot of “so-so” books, with a few bright gems. In no particular order, my favorites are: The Magicians, Tigana, The Stranger, Mistborn, and The Ghost Brigades. And of course it goes without saying that I re-read 500 Years After because the Khaavren Romances remain solidly lodged as my favorite fantasy novels of all time.

I’m starting off 2010 already 400 pages into Pandora’s Star, setting myself up for some more sci-fi in my reading diet. I also have a backlog of several half-written reviews that I hope to post soon. Happy reading in the new year!

[Lisa's Take] Magic for Beginners (Kelly Link)

2009-12-11T16:58:00.002-05:00

I don’t do short stories, as a rule. They always frustrate me because they just give me a taste of something, rather than bringing a story to fullness. I haven’t read any short stories in probably 10 years – I have no interest in short story compilations or anything of the kind.

Magic For Beginners made it into our stack when JD randomly bought a bunch of cheap books from a small publishing house, through some special. I didn’t know it was a short story collection when it was the only book I packed for a weekend away. I’m glad that it was the only book I packed, because I had brought anything else I would have dismissed it out of hand and never had the pleasure of reading it.

Kelly Link’s short stories are absolute gems. They are mostly rooted in real life with fantastic elements thrown in to shake up the worlds of the characters, but a few are straight fantasy. They all have great hooks, bizarre and intriguing storylines, and thought-provoking literary wanderings. Months later I still find myself pondering the implications of some of the stories, or what might have come next had the story been a whole book. On more than one occasion I’ve found myself thinking about “that weird dream I had” before I realized that I was actually thinking about one of the stories. Talk about impressive, to be able to grab you and hold you and integrate with your brainmeats so well.

I did have one gripe about the compilation as a whole. Ms. Link loves to end her stories with a sense of melancholy longing (or at least that’s the best set of words I can come up with to express the slightly sad, achy, wanting-more feeling her stories inspired). She does it incredibly well, especially considering the shortness of her stories. The problem is that almost every story ends that way… a fact that becomes glaringly apparent when you’re reading all of the stories back to back to back. An emotional tug starts to lose its effect when repeated that many times, so I started to get indifferent after 3 or 4 stories. Still, not her fault so much as mine for reading the whole book straight through, rather than breaking up the stories over a few month period.

So, consider my aversion to short stories somewhat assuaged. I’ll do my best not to be so horrifically biased in the future!

[Mini Review] [Lisa's Take] Canticle - Ken Scholes

2009-12-08T12:57:00.000-05:00

I have a problem with Ken Scholes. His books read too fast. Seriously, I suck them down like candy – ok, that’s a bad analogy since I don’t really like candy. I suck them down like coffee with Baily’s that has cooled to chugging temperature. I read both Lamentation and Canticle so quickly that I kind of almost don’t remember them. The story was great, the characters were great, the prose was great… but the pace was so fast and the text so consumable that reading and finishing it was like a dream – fleeting and already fading.

I honestly don’t have a whole lot more to say about Canticle other than “I enjoyed it,” but there are a couple of things Scholes did well that deserve highlighting. Thing One: characters that were complex but still believable. Sometimes when you have characters that are both good and bad, it’s contrived. Not so with Canticle – I always believed the turns and changes of heart that the characters had. Thing Two: Subtle character development. Scholes did a masterful job maturing and changing his characters from the start of Lamentation to the end of Canticle, and he did so subtly enough that you barely realized it had happened until you stopped and compared. Thing Three: introducing potential future plot developments without being glaringly obvious or saying “ha, ha, I know something you don’t know!”

Ok, stopping with the numbered Things before this mini-review becomes a Dr. Seuss book. Lamentation was good. Canticle was better. I’m very much looking forward to book three, and I’ll do my best to slow down and savor it.

[Lisa's Take] Wolfskin - Juliet Marillier

2009-12-08T12:44:00.000-05:00

Warning: this isn’t really a review. I read the first 2/3 of Wolfskin, then lost interest and let other things distract me. This is a rarity – usually I either hate a book and suffer through 100 pages out of obligation before putting it down, or I enjoy it enough not to keep reading to the end, faults aside. The premise was kind of boring to me (young Viking boy wants to be a Big Strong Fighter! Follow him as he grows up, meets a grey/scheming counterpart, then sails across to Greenland and meets the people there). Nothing about the book hooked me, and I only kept reading as long as I did because I was trapped on a plane with it.

Now. I see Juliet Marillier’s name ALL OVER the place. She publishes like a mofo and has a bunch of books out there. I know for sure that I have a couple of other books in my stack that were written by her. So – can one of you other fantasy lovers tell me if any of her books are more worthwhile? Unless I get a vote of confidence, I’m probably going to prune her out of my stack and move on. It just seems a shame to dismiss a prolific author who has at least a little promise without getting a second opinion.

Thoughts?

[Lisa's Take] The Magicians (Lev Grossman)

2009-11-23T18:27:00.002-05:00

Hoo boy am I ever behind on reviews. Work got quite busy for a while, so that plus traveling means I have been unabashedly slack about keeping my various blogs up to date. So! Let's see if I can remedy that.

Before I start gushing about The Magicians, I need to get one thing out of the way: I had a problem with the end of this book. After how excellent and solid the rest of the story was, the ending kind of rubbed me wrong for reasons I can't go into without spoiling.

However! Ending quibbles aside, The Magicians was an absolutely excellent book and I enjoyed it immensely. It will definitely be in hot contention for "Lisa's Top 5 of 2009." The setup is this: Quentin is a smart kid, late high-school, a bit geeky and shy. Like many smart kids, he has a big place in his heart for a childhood book series featuring swords and sorcery. Quentin is also about to head off to college, and on the day he has an interview for Princeton he's thrown off course by a mysterious package and instead ends up in another world taking an entrance exam for a school that teaches magic.

I know, it sounds a bit "Harry Potter" but please don't lower it to that level. This book is so much more.

Here's the thing: The Magicians does "magic school" without being trite. So very many books just don't pull that off. Even Name of the Wind - which was excellent overall - had moments of triteness when it came to magic school. Grossman has none of that. Everything about the characters, worlds, and situations he builds is real and visceral and moving. He touches on themes that everyone has to deal with between age 20 and 30, and he does so with poignant insights and cutting realism. Magic school is just a vessel for a much deeper investigation about character, personality, and learning what the "real world" is like.

I won't say more about the plot lest I spoil things, but I think the climax of this book deserve special mention. You remember when you were a kid, reading a fantasy story by one of the masters and they managed to build the intensity such that it got your heart racing and just scared you? When Shelob attacks Frodo, or when you see the Jabberwocky for the first time? Yeah. Grossman did that to me as a 26-year-old adult curled up in my cozy hotel room. He did it without blood or gore or any other "easy" pretense - he just built up his atmosphere and layered on the suspense more and more. I was nervous about turning off the light at bed time.

I recommend The Magicians more highly than anything else I've read in the last 4 months. It is fresh and original (in spite of all of the preconceptions you might harbor upon reading the summary) and it twinges the emotional strings like nobody's business. Huge thumbs up.

JD's Take: Foreigner Series [Books 1-3] (C. J. Cherryh)

2009-10-22T11:30:00.003-05:00

I have now read something like six C.J. Cherryh books, and have yet to write a single review. This is a shame, and since I just wrapped up reading Inheritor, I thought I'd rectify this failing. The books covered here are Foreigner, Invader, and Inheritor. These stories are all set in the same world, and follow the same character. I've read them over the course of 3 years... so I'm not going to pretend that I remember a lot of specifics. Instead, this will be a sort of holistic review.

First: the world. A human colony ship jumps into a distant galaxy and is promptly lost. It manages to find an inhabitable planet, builds a space station and eventually colonizes the planet thanks to a political rift between the pilots and the passengers. This planet has intelligent life already, a race called the Atevi who are tall, ebony skinned humanoids with golden eyes and a steam-engine level of technology. At first things go reasonably well, but what with one thing and another the ship leaves orbit in search of home (leaving the humans on-planet stranded) and war breaks out between the Atevi and the humans. The Atevi win quite handily and the humans frantically make a treaty that leaves them control of a large island off the mainland but nothing else. The treaty's basic idea is that a single human will live amongst the Atevi, learn their language, and act as a interpreter and diplomat to ensure the peace (he is called the Paidhi). In return, the humans will slowly release their technology to Atevi hands, in a way that is carefully calculated to not overturn the economic stability while still advancing their technology level to eventual parity. Fast forward 200 years and we meet Bren Cameron, the young new Paidhi and our protagonist.

These books aren't about things happening. In general, only two or three things happen in the entire book (and they aren't short books). They aren't about romance, as Bren is totally isolated from other humans and Atevi don't feel love. They aren't about action either. Though violence happens it is just as often off-screen as on. These are books about a smart and a good man trying to understand an alien psychology well enough that he can prevent the violence that always lurks just under the surface... a goal that often puts him at odds with his own species. This psychological understanding is primarily driven by an understanding of the Atevi language, and musings on the language fill a large portion on each book, along with explorations of the complicated political structures that make up Atevi society (which, because of their alien psychology, don't translate well into human thinking).

Reading this books is intellectually engaging, and you need to be prepared to actually think while you read. Previous description aside... they aren't boring books at all. Although very few big events happen in them (in fact, the goal is often simply to prevent big things from happening), there are small things happening all of the time. I think I could best describe reading these books as becoming wholly engrossed in a masterfully played game of chess. It becomes your world, and you spend as much time as you need to understand the implications of each move. As the game progresses, every motion ripples outwards and forward as pieces are moved into extravagantly complex arrangements... each piece protecting another, or blocking some gambit, or maneuvering for an attack. Your heartbeat speeds up every time a player picks up a piece, your shoulders tighten, your palms sweat... not because the move itself is explosive or surprising but because you can feel the game building to a crisis point and once the tension builds too far everything is going to tip and all of the structures are going to collapse. When the crisis finally comes, the casual observer might see very little to react to. A piece or two is taken... and the players continue to stare impassively at the board. But you, who are totally absorbed in the game see something else entirely. You see a power structure that shifted irretrievably. A mistake! Someone slipped, and his opponent moved to take advantage and now the tone of the board is completely shifted and it's all just careful mopping up from now on. Unless, of course, it wasn't a mistake at all...

And nobody who wasn't totally absorbed even noticed that anything happened. By the end of the game the board is totally changed. Someone will look at it and ask you "how did he win?" and you will shrug, unable to find the words. They will think "what a boring game", and in a sense they are right. Until you commit there is very little for you in the game, it is only in engrossing yourself that you see the drama and the excitement and the slow buildup of tension. Cherryh makes it easy for me to become engrossed... I imagine that is not true of everyone who picks up these books, and I imagine many people will walk away thinking "what a boring game".

So yeah. These are challenging books, they require you to think and to be willing to feel your heartbeat raise and your shoulders tense for five or six hundred pages. The writing is solid, but the first fifty pages will feel weird to you each time you pick one up. I'm not sure why, something in the way sentences are phrased perhaps, but the feeling always fades (at least for me). The Atevi, and the Atevi world, aren't all that different from humans and earth... it isn't world building on a grand and original scale. Rather, the focus is very much on understanding the way a similar but alien race thinks and reasons and lives. It's subtle and certainly not for everyone. I can only handle one of these books a year or so, and there are something like seven more waiting for me. This might actually be the only long series of books that I read more slowly than they are written, but I'm basically totally fine with that.

JD's Take: Sandman Slim (Richard Kadrey)

2009-10-22T11:05:00.006-05:00

So this guy comes back from Hell bent on revenge, the way one finds oneself doing, for the brutal killing of his girlfriend. He was sent, still living, into hell and ended up fighting in the gladiatorial arena down there to stay alive. So he's pretty much awesome at killing things, and before being sent down he was an incredibly gifted magician (both of which equip him solidly for his chosen career path (Mayhem Application Engineer)). So anyway, he comes back to revenge himself on the people who sent him to Hell and who murdered his girlfriend.

The problem with Sandman Slim is that the main character, by dint of living in Hell for seven years or just natural inclination, is an unrepentant asshole. He isn't a very sympathetic character, and it's hard to really care all that much about his suffering and whatnot because he's largely an emotionless revenge machine. That sort of thing *sounds* really badass on paper (especially if that paper is a character sheet, I've found) but it makes it hard to become emotionally involved with his story. He moves through a world filled with interesting characters, cool magic ideas, horrible creatures, awesome cosmology and all that sort of urban fantasy stuff, and it is all very cool! The friends he makes *are* quite interesting and sympathetic, but they are very marginalized and rarely get any screen time and don't get to develop at all... the same could be said about all of the cool elements. Kadrey just seems to neglect the parts of the book that were interesting and stay tightly focused on a protagonist that doesn't draw the reader in.

Then there's the revenge bits: these were all... weird. None of his victories felt like triumphs, perhaps because it never seemed like it was any effort or risk to him. I'm not sure how to describe a revenge fantasy novel in which the various revenges aren't actually cathartic at all. Firstly because you don't care all that much about the wrongs that were done to this guy, and secondly because the obstacles seem trivial and he walks through the actual revenges like he's out getting groceries.

All this sounds pretty negative, and I guess it is. I didn't *hate* the book but I don't feel like I got anything out of it either. There were lots of very, very cool ideas that could have been fleshed out into fascinating aspects of the story and I dearly wish they had been. Give me a scene of the arena fights! Show the immortal alchemist more! Play with the punk rock girl spider person more! Instead, I found that the most singularly positive thing about the book is that it's form factor is totally awesome, if you're into kinda weird sized printings. Which I am. So there's that.

Otherwise? Pass probably.

[Lisa's Take] Thomas the Rhymer (Ellen Kushner)

2009-10-21T18:27:00.003-05:00

You don't see this particular book of Ellen Kushner's in bookstores all that often, so I nabbed a copy when I happened to spot it at Borders. It's a slim little volume, clocking in at only 260ish pages, but it is the winner of the World Fantasy Award in 1991 and has a glowing cover-blurb from Neil Gaiman. Needless to say, my expectations were high.

The story is a novel-style re-telling of the classic ballad of Thomas the Rhymer (who is in turn based upon a real 13th century Scottish laird). According to the ballad, Thomas is seduced be the queen of Elfland and tricked into staying in her fairy world for 7 years. When he returns to the human world she gives him a parting gift of prophecy.

Kushner's take on the story is true to the traditional ballad, but she takes the tack of telling the tale from the point of view of 4 characters: Meg and Gavin, two surrogate parental figures; Elspeth, a friend and potential lover; and Thomas himself. Her approach is interesting and lends a certain depth and sense of realism to the legend.

The prose is lovely, as is always the case with Kushner's work, and the story moves along fairly quickly. Unfortunately, the book never quite connected with me - there was something missing, though I can't for the life of me put my finger on what. I think part of it was that Meg and Gavin seemed a bit shallow as characters; I didn't empathize with them as greatly as I did Thomas and Elspeth. I also thought the story laid it on a little too thick with some of enchantments of the Elfland queen - it got to the point where I found myself thinking "ok, I get it, she's unfathomably desirable and Thomas is hopelessly entranced. Can we move on?"

In the end, I suppose this book was a mixed bag. The writing style was lovely, and it was an interesting way to approach a classic story. Sadly, I felt let down from where my expectations were set by so much glowing praise, which cast a pall on my opinion as a whole. Take from that what you will, and maybe only pick up Thomas the Rhymer if you're in the mood for something classic and poetic.

[Related Aside: I realized in writing this review that I've now been disappointed by 3 or 4 books that I picked up (at least in part) because of a cover-blurb by Neil Gaiman. Maybe I should take a hint: read his books, but not the books he recommends...]

JD's Take: The Sheriff of Yrnameer: A Novel (Michael Rubens)

2009-10-09T14:03:00.002-05:00

After my first few pages of this book, I took a moment to try to describe it to myself. The best I could come up with was if you asked Terry Pratchett to write a story in the style of Douglas Adams. This seemed... hyperbolic to me but there is a fair amount of truth in the description. The setting has the same absurd-but-recognizable futurism of Douglas Adams that makes you think "well of course in the future the dust kicked up by a scuffed foot will form the logo of the planet's sponser!", and the writing has a style that cannot help but remind you of Pratchett.

We enter the story in medea res with the main character Cole (think Han Solo being played by Space Quest's Roger Wilco) being dangled upside down and preparing to have his brain filled with the ravenous young of the collector his loan shark sent. He had just robbed a fellow smuggler who in turn had just robbed an adorable pair of dwarves. Who in turn had just robbed a casino. Sadly, that money was nowhere near enough. The creature dangling Cole is Kenneth, a Lovecraftian horror of an alien creature with a pleasant and soothing baritone voice that belays his natural inclination to lay eggs in people's brains and his unconscionable love of soap-opera style drama. One thing inevitably leads to another and we follow Cole across the galaxy with a ship stolen from his arch-rival and filled with smuggled freeze-dried orphans on a search for a Utopia. Adventures are had along the way, the way they so often are.

The plot is well-paced, but predictable... you will in no way be surprised by the character development arcs of any of the half-dozen characters who have them. Sadly too, some of the more interesting secondary characters are quite regrettably left to languish, narration-less, along the borders of the story. These are, of course, quibbles. Yes, it's a tad predictable but this story will have you flipping pages with complete disregard for work schedules or sane sleeping habits. The witty writing, inventive world, and flawed characters make it challenging to find that perfect break to set it down.

Is it as good as a book by the aforementioned giants? Not quite. It is fun, frantic and highly entertaining however; a page-turner that will make you wish Mr. Rubens would quit wasting his considerable talent on that no-good day job of writing for the Daily Show and focus on what's really important: expanding and improving the desperately under-served genre of humorous imaginative fiction. Pratchett won't be around forever and it's totally unfair of us to depend on A. Lee Martinez to see us through those dark days ahead. Verdict: absolutely pick up this book.

[Lisa's Take] Havemercy (Jaida Jones & Danielle Bennett)

2009-10-09T10:02:00.001-05:00

Havemercy is the debut novel from Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennet, two newbies to the fantasy world. The first line of the Barnes & Noble synopsis characterizes it as a “stunning epic fantasy debut” – the back of the book also loudly exclaims the epic-fantasy-ness of the book, as well as harping upon it’s steam-punk roots.

…no. Sorry, but no and no. There is nothing “epic” about Havemercy. It follows 4 main characters (a magician in exile, a student, a tutor, and an airman) in first-person format through what is mostly a character-examination and romance. There’s a bit of action near the end, but overall the book is a relationship study – which is a fine sub-genre of fantasy, but is most certainly not “epic.” A more apt description would be that Havemercy is “a fantasy of manners,” much like Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint – in fact I’d go so far as to say that Havemercy wanted to BE Swordspoint, as it investigated a lot of the same themes and had a very similar overall feel… only without Kushner’s refined language and ability to build emotion and attachment.

Oof, I’m rambling and edging towards a rant… let me reign this back into something resembling a review.

Havemercy started off with a lot of promise. As is my habit, rather than reading the back of the book for an idea of what to expect I opened it up and read the first few pages. The first section was from the point of view of Royston, aforementioned magician in exile. The first person tone was interesting, refined, and a bit tongue-in-cheek, which always suits my fancy. The next view point was Rook, the whore-loving, foul-mouthed, hotshot dragon-rider. I laughed my way through his whole chapter, pretty much loving his dirty, jaded commentary, especially when taken next to Royston’s more courtly air. Thom and Hal, the other two POV characters, were a bit dull in comparison… but they were distinct and well-developed, which is more than I can say for many books.

Sadly other than solid and entertaining characterizations, there isn’t much good to say about the rest of the book. By half way through not even Rook’s internal monologue was keeping me interested. The story and the relationships started to fall victim to a lot of relationship clichés as well as standard fantasy clichés. There was one revelation in particular that actually caused me to say “seriously??” out loud – the woman on the plane next to me gave me quite a look of confusion.

Anyway, the bottom line is that Havemercy started strong and then just sort of did a slow, leisurely spiral into mediocrity and finally into outright poorness. It was a relief when the book ended (none of the big emotional hooks in the last 50 pages did so much as twinge at my heart, even though they were clearly meant to). Skip this one, unless it happens that Ellen Kushner is your favorite author and you don’t mind reading her inferior little sisters.

[Mini Review] JD's Take: The Devil You Know (Mike Carrey)

2009-10-05T11:43:00.005-05:00

There's a guy named Felix Caster (what IS it with serial-modern-fantasy authors and ridiculous names? It's like newscasters and terrible puns!) who exorcises ghosts for a living. This is a convenient talent to have, it turns out, since the world was positively overrun with the buggers a few years back and they can really be a hassle. He's out of the game now because he did Something Bad, and because all of the best heroes are reluctant heroes and coming out of retirement earns you hero-bonus points. Aaaanyway he needs some cash to help a friend so he takes a job, it turns weird and the mob gets involved and he gets his ass kicked by one person after another until in the end he uses his Clever Clever Brain to outwit the badguys, save the day, find and lose a lover, and still get paid (or not).

If this sounds an awful lot like Harry Dresden, you'd be pretty spot on. The primary difference is that this is British. It was enjoyable and I'll probably pick up more, but I keep saying that about ol' Harry too, and time is making a liar of me. When it comes right down to it, these books all feel the same and while I enjoy them while I read them, it's hard to feel motivated to pick up another. This series might be more likely to catch my interest because I get to decipher obscure London-isms while I read it, and it left me with an intriguing next book hook. If you loves you some Dresden Files, this is absolutely worth a look.

JD's Take: Daemons Are Forever (Simon R. Green)

2009-10-05T10:38:00.002-05:00

Guilty Pleasure. Those are the words that I find myself hiding behind as I try to summarize the world of Daemons (and the first book in the series: The Man With The Golden Torc). Starring Eddie Drood (AKA Shaman Bond) who is a rebellious member of the Drood family, the all-powerful family that has been secretly protecting humanity from all things supernatural, extraterrestrial, magical, super-scientific, and generally weird since time immemorial. They fight secret battles clad in invincible golden armor and they control the governments of the world, all without rumour of their existence ever reaching the mundane humans they protect. Oh, and obviously there are some James Bond overtones.

Sure, it's a ridiculous world, and the events of the books don't do a terribly good job of making it seem convincing. That's the second biggest flaw with this series so far: you suspend a truly epic amount of belief to swallow the story. The biggest problem with the writing is that Green has a really bad habit of using the same phrase more than once within a couple pages. It's jarring as hell to hear a distinctive phrase like "wind of fury"[0] twice on the same page, and it happens over and over throughout the book. I think it annoyed me in the first book too. Basically: it needs a crueler editor. There are other problems as well: the characters sometimes act out of character and the much-vaunted invincible armor is pretty casually penetrated by any and all foes of the Drood family up to and including a guy in a bar.

That said, the writing is fun, the plots are fast moving and engaging, and I find the books to be highly enjoyable fluff. I like that, unlike Bond movies, the world changes and the actions of the characters have lasting and meaningful impact. The first book shifted rather dramatically the world in the second book, and that's a nice thing to see and rare in modern-fantasy-serials. There's a lot of very fun side-characters and world-building weirdness to enjoy, and the supporting cast is definitely one of the strengths of the series. I mean come on! Jack the Ripper is a recurring character and they've dubbed him "Mr. Stab". Just like the first one, I found myself flying through the book in obsessive-mode and thoroughly enjoying it... I just felt a little guilty when anyone asked what I was reading.

The short answer: these are books that are best described as "fun", and left at that. I'll certainly keep picking them up... in paperback.

[0] Not an actual example

[Lisa's Take] The Red Wolf Conspiracy (Robert V. S. Redick)

2009-10-03T19:02:00.001-05:00

You know that kid from school when you were 7 years old? The one who always had to be the absolute best and everything? You say “I got a lollipop!” and he says “Well I got a magical lollipop that was made from ground unicorn horn and brought across the sea by pirates and it glows in the dark and makes it so I never have to take baths!” He’s probably not a bad kid at heart, he just has to one-up everyone; he over-embellish even the most mundane situation and tacks on more and more unbelievable things trying to make himself look cool.

I kind of felt like Red Wolf Conspiracy was that kid. There was a core of a good story and some really nifty ideas about magic and history and worlds… but the author just took on too much. It’s as though he had a hundred cool ideas, and rather than dole them out in a few stories or books or worlds he decided that he had to get them all into this book right now or he might never get another chance.

The story started out pretty strongly, introducing interesting characters and setting the scene with skill. The world felt a bit like Victorian London at the start, and Redick skillfully added layers of intrigue and magic to his basic premise through the first third or half of the book. I was quite engaged, I enjoyed the characters, and tore through the first 200 pages with alacrity. I absolutely loved the idea of the Sisterhood (Sisterhood of the Lorg, maybe? Can’t recall the name now) and I desperately wanted the author to do more than just toe at the implications of it. The main character’s language-magic was also really neat and original.

Sadly, after a solid start the second half kind of fell apart. It stopped reading like a well-crafted, subtle, adult-fantasy and started feeling more like a slip-shod kids book, with magical elements thrown in to impress and awe rather than to serve any useful purpose in the story. Several of the character meetings and plot points felt extremely contrived, and I couldn’t suspend my disbelief enough to get over it and enjoy the book. I stopped feeling an emotional connection to the characters because I was so grumpy with the downward turn in quality – it was a terribly frustrating experience.

Luckily the ending of the book managed to salvage things a bit, so I finished the story just “disappointed” instead of “actively annoyed.” I really don’t know how to resolve such a great first half with such a shoddy second half. Did the editor get sleepy half way through the book and not finish it? Or did the publisher insist on a limited page count, so rather than exploring concepts at a leisurely pace, Redick felt like he had to smoosh everything in quickly? I don’t know, but it didn’t work out.

I want to be optimistic and say that surely some of the “first writer foibles” will be remedied in later books. I guess I’ll see how accommodating I’m feeling when book 2 hits the shelves – I’d love to see a story that is as polished overall as the first half of Red Wolf Conspiracy.

[Lisa's Take] Basket Case (Carl Hiaasen)

2009-09-19T10:01:00.000-05:00

I’m not entirely sure how this book made it onto my shelf, but I know that it has been lurking in my “stack” bookcase for at least 6 or 7 years now. After an epic undertaking such as Otherland I needed a reset book, and I figured a random unknown outside of my usual genre would work well for that task, so I picked it up.

Basket Case is straight-up mystery, set in (more or less) present day. The main character, Jack, is a mid-forty-something writer who was once a hot-shot at his paper, but got consigned to the career-ending hole of Obituaries after dressing down the new, pompous owner of the paper. One day a death notice for a famous singer from his youth comes across his desk, and when he goes to interview the remaining family he finds out there might be more to the death than just an accident.

Pretty ho-hum, as far as stories go but damn if Carl Hiaasen isn’t one funny bastard. He had me laughing about something every couple of pages, be it the blithe and death-obsessed tone of his main character, or the bizarre situations the character managed to get into (ex: mauling a burglar with a 30foot frozen lizard).

Unfortunately, great humor is not enough to make up for my apathy towards non-scifi/fantasy genres. There just isn’t enough escapism for me in a modern day mystery, I suppose. I kind of… forgot that I was reading Basket Case. I just slipped my mind. I started in on Red Wolf Conspiracy and a day or two later found Basket Case in my purse and went “Oh, oops!” I got about half way through before it was lost to the recesses of my forgetful brain – it’s not like it was boring, it just didn’t have that escapist hook that I need to enjoy a book.

Ah well. So goes my yearly foray outside of my usual genres.

[Lisa's Take] Otherland - Tad Williams

2009-09-19T09:41:00.001-05:00

There’s been a bit of review silence from me lately, by and large because I was reading the last two books of Tad Williams’ Otherland quartet: two books that totaled 1850 dense pages. Needless to say, these novels slowed down my usual rate of bookish consumption for a few weeks, thus why I’ve been so quiet.

When it comes down to it, I wasn’t actually planning to do any sort of review of the Otherland books (in order: City of Golden Shadow, River of Blue Fire, Mountain of Black Glass, Sea of Silver Light). I read the first book 2 years ago, took off a year before reading book two, then took off another year before picking up book 3. Each book is so very thick and robust that I needed the reset time between stories. I fully intended to take another year long break between books 3 and 4, but found that I couldn’t focus on any of the books I tried to pick up after Mountain of Black Glass, so I gave in to the inevitable and finished it off.

Anyway, the scope and content of these books is so epic and ranging that I was going to wimp out on a review simply because there was SO MUCH content that I was daunted by trying to summarize anything. However, chatting about the story with JD the other night I realized that I had quite a lot to think about, so I figured I may as well put down a few thoughts. No plot summary or character recap, but allow me to ramble on some themes.

Thought the first: Otherland should be Required Reading for anyone who considers themselves and fantasy or sci-fi fan. The books are definitely a blending of the two genres, and they epitomize epic scifi/fantasy much in the way George R. R. Martin’s work epitomizes “hard” epic fantasy. The story in Otherland is enormous in scope and unbelievably imaginative. I often talk about books being multi-genre, but Otherland covers all of the ground between fantasy and science fiction and goes down several rabbit holes even further into their sub-genres. Tad Williams pretty much hits all of the bases.

Thought the second: pacing. How impressive is it to maintain acceptable pacing through 4 books that range from 600-1100 pages? It’s a feat in and of itself to tell that huge of a story and only very rarely have it drag. I will gripe a bit that each book was not a stand-alone package – the books had nice swells and lulls in action, but each one definitely ended on a cliff-hanger and the next book picked up right where it left off. A small gripe, but still something that irks me. That said, the last book still managed one of the more impressive resolutions that I’ve seen in a series. All of the loose ends were neatly tied off and resolved, but each in a believable fashion. It was not a stretch to see how each storyline was resolved, and none of the many, many resolutions seemed contrived.

Thought the third: characters. There are a LOT of characters in Otherland. If I were they type of person to re-read books, I’d re-read Otherland and keep a huge diagram of characters and how/when they meet other characters. Tad Williams does a very impressive job of making each character very memorable, in spite of such a large cast – even with year-long gaps between the books, I was always quickly reminded who was who. Even more impressively, all of the characters are realistic, flawed and individual. I can think of maybe 2 characters that seemed at all flat to me, which is quite good in a cast of 30ish. Williams also managed to create some characters that I truly despised, as well as using them on-screen without burning me out on having to deal with them. Additionally, he wrote one of the scariest mother-loving bad guys of all time.

Thought the fourth: relationships. Much as all of Williams’ characters were interesting and distinct, so were his character interactions and relationships. Everyone had very different chemistry, and he illustrated many of the different aspects and levels of love and hate. More than anything, I was impressed by how varied and nuanced the relationships in the core characters were, especially when everyone’s threads started crossing during the third book. My emotional string were definitely played like a harp. Rarely have I seen an epic work that developed its characters and relationships as carefully as its world.

Well. I guess I did have a lot to say – this ramble has gotten quite long! More of a discussion than a review, but whatever you call it I’m going to bring it to a close. Otherland is a spectacular set of books and you owe it to yourself to read all four if you are a fan of the fantasy/sci-gi genre!

JD's Take: As You Wish (Jackson Pearce)

2009-09-01T16:05:00.005-05:00

Let me begin by saying that I'm pretty sure this book wasn't written for me. That is to say, it's target demographic does not extend so far as straight white men in their mid-to-late-twenties who still think that digital watches are a pretty neat idea. My confidence in this fact relies largely on the following:

It is "hidden" over in YA, and my usual excuses for venturing over there do not apply (ie, neither Gaimen nor Pratchett wrote it)
The cover is... not compelling. (Yes, I judge books by their covers. It usually works out.)
My almost unhealthy lack of fixation on unicorns
The alarmingly pink cover (sans dust jacket)
My friend's gleeful exclamation when I told her I finished: "I knew there was a 15 year old girl in you!"

I picked it up anyway! Ha ha! See how I defy expectations! True, I know the author but still! Expectations!

The story follows a young woman named Viola as she struggles to deal with her status as a liked-but-ignored outsider in high school, and her devastating breakup with her it-turns-out-quite-gay best friend. Also she manages to summon a genie on the third page or so, so there's that. It's a story about love and self-reliance and loyalty and wishes.

Jinn (that's the jinn Viola summons. Try to keep up.) comes from a world called Caliban where all of the jinn were exiled to in time immemorial. Pearce had fun with Caliban, and some of my favorite parts of the book were explorations of that world. It is very possible that this says more about me than the book. Caliban is basically timeless; jinn only age when they are on earth granting wishes. It is ruled by an elite of ancient jinn who parcel out assignments to Earth, punish jinn who break the rules, and try to convince everyone to please have sex before we all die out please thanks. Once summoned, Jinn just wants to grant the requisite three wishes and get back to being immortal with the scantily clad jinn chicks in the perfectly beautiful world and delivering flowers and not knowing anybody's damn name.

Viola, on the other hand, rather sensibly wants to make sure she doesn't squander her opportunity by screwing up her wishes. Which I thought was smart, but apparently Caliban looks ill on that sort of behavior and sends jinn MPs to stress her out and make her wish faster. They are dicks. Meanwhile, Jinn starts actually liking her and her insistence on treating him as a friend so he makes rather a mess of the whole following-the-rules shtick. Hi-jinx ensue!

No lie: this book reads fast. I chewed through it in a single Saturday, and still had time for kayaking. More importantly: I was compelled to finish it in a single Saturday. I wasn't immediately drawn in, but I found it extremely difficult to put down once I hit the halfway point or so. The characters are fun and believable. The world is very-authentic feeling high school with interesting and non-standard fantasy elements. The ending satisfies, and everyone learns at least one valuable lesson. Even the mean ones. Bottom line: while not something I would pick up unprompted, this was a very enjoyable read.

Holy crap is that cover ever pink though. Seriously.

[Lisa’s Take] Best Served Cold – Joe Abercrombie

2009-08-18T17:20:00.001-05:00

Oh, Joe. Joe, Joe, Joe. Why must you try me? Is it because I initially tore into The Blade Itself so badly? I apologized for that, you know, and in my review of Before They Are Hanged I recounted all the ways in which you had remedied my gripes and turned out to be a pretty darn good author after all.

So tell me – why! Why, oh, why must you persist in writing out all your sound effects in text? Haven’t I impressed upon you how distressing, disturbing, and laughable it is to be trying to take your story seriously only to have it broken up by “HUUUUUUUUURGH!” or “slap, slap went his skin, grunt grunt went the barbarian”? While the later does conjure up some highly amusing parallels with the kids book “Pat the Bunny,” it also serves as a detriment to the tone of the story.

*cough* Sorry, I think I’m done with that little segue. You have to understand quite how hard I’ve ranted about Joe’s Sound Effects (tm) in the past. Anyway: Best Served Cold! A story of betrayal and revenge, also known as “Joe picks his favorite secondary characters from The First Law Trilogy and plays dress up with them!” And a damn fine job he does at it, too – Best Served Cold blasts The First Law out of the water in terms of awesome. The plot is much tighter and more polished, the character flaws much more realistic and understated, and the pacing and scope of the story are just spot-on.

I will disclaim my endorsement with the following: know what you’re getting into with this book. If you read The First Law, you have a good idea: really graphic violence, really graphic language, and really graphic sex. No, really. Take all of the fantasy books that you’ve read and munge them up together, then add about 10 degrees of raunchy and you’ll have a good idea of how NC-17 Best Served Cold is. Definitely not for the faint of heart – I don’t exaggerate when I say that the opening chapter made me green around the gills. I do appreciate that Joe is as visceral in his sex as he is in his violence; way to even up the score across the board, buddy!

Anyway, I don’t have a lot more to add to this silly little ramble. I quite liked Best Served Cold, and Joe Abercrombie is now solidly on my list of authors whose books I will pick up no questions asked. I would like to see his next book try out a new setting, just for variety, but no huge hurry there. Just try to keep the sound effects to a minimum next time, eh?

[Mini Review] JD's Take: World War Z (Max Brooks)

2009-08-18T09:16:00.004-05:00

Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, and that goes double for us now, as the long rebuilding process continues and the horrors of the war begin to fade into memory. Before long, there will be few alive who remember the heroism, the bravery, the depravity, and the fear of that time. You owe it to yourself, to your family, to those you lost and those you love and those who will come later to read this book. It will be hard to revisit those years, hard to listen to enablers and profiteers justify themselves, hard to listen to survivors forced to remember what they did to stay alive.

Almost a series of short stories, this account can be frustrating at time when it leaves you desperately wanting to follow a story further. The storytelling varies from amazing to decent, but on the whole the stories are gripping and engrossing. This is not the cold accounting of facts of the official reports. No survival rate comparisons or infection maps. This is the war in the words of the people who lived it and it is essential for us to remember the human cost (and the human causes) of the war that nearly destroyed us all.

[Lisa’s Take] The City & The City (China Mieville)

2009-08-14T16:58:00.003-05:00

[Editor's Note: this was supposed to be a mini-review, but then it ballooned. My apologies for the rambling]

I have a viciously love-hate relationship with China Mieville (ok, that’s a lie – I have said relationship with his books, not with him personally, though the latter would be nice too). Perdido Street Station and The Scar top my list of “all time favorite books” and I can’t get enough of his amazing, subtle world building. But then on the other end of the spectrum are books like Un Lun Dun (meh) and King Rat (super-meh edging on loathing). I’m not sure where the disparity in my feelings is sourced (after all, Un Lun Dun and King Rat are extremely different books) but there it is.

Based on this background, you can imagine my surprise when I didn’t at all have a strong reaction to The City & The City. It was a good book with some interesting elements, but I didn’t love it. It had some shortcomings, but I didn’t hate it. Dammit, China, what am I supposed to think of our relationship now!?

The City & The City is set in more-or-less present day in a fictional country somewhere in eastern Europe. The story starts out reading like a detective novel, and then slowly introduces the concept that there’s something a bit odd about the setting – gradually a picture is painted that there are in fact two countries that exist on top of each other in space. The residents of each country are trained to “unsee” the elements of the sister country, and the border between the two places is enforced by a supernatural force known as Breach. The story follows Detective Tyador Borlu as he investigates a murder that takes him across country lines and gets him involved in all sorts of historical intrigue.

As always, what Mieville does best is build a world without explicitly calling attention to its weirdness. He tells the story from the point of view of someone who lives in that world – someone who takes in their surroundings, but doesn’t exclaim “Wow, Holy crap!” every time something strange happens… because to that character it’s not strange: it’s every-day. The City & The City was no exception to this excellent world-building approach, but the “real world” elements made the journey less fantastic than PSS or The Scar.

The characters were solid and real – flawed without being contrived. The story was interesting – starting small but expanding to examine some bigger issues. The ending was a bit predictable, but the plot turns throughout the story were surprising enough that I didn’t feel cheated. The whole narrative read very quickly, and left me pleased and satisfied.

So – good book. Not as good as some of my favorite Mieville work, but not as bad as some of my least favorite. Worth reading, especially if you want to give someone a gentle ramp-up to PSS and The Scar.

[Mini-review] Lisa’s Take: Dead Until Dawn (Charlene Harris)

2009-08-14T16:57:00.000-05:00

Excuse me for a moment while I ruin this blog’s credibility:

*apply face to keyboard repeatedly* @(*&!HASHDJH!U!@*#$&!)($(#*!!HFKJH#*YR&@!*&@*#($^(*^!@$#. *repeat at least 4 times*

Good gods. How is it even possible that books this abjectly horrible exist? And are read by wide audiences? And have a zillion sequels and have been turned into TV shows? Seriously? I bitch about Laurell K. Hamilton’s work having turned to tripe in recent years, but compared to Dead Until Dawn the Anita Blake books are up on a shining pedestal of literary achievement. If books could make one’s eyes bleed with badness, this book would have made me weep bloody tears. I can’t even begin to express how awful it was.

The protagonist made me want to kill. The fact that the sentences were so choppy made my internal monologue shudder. The juvenile character relationships made my hands quite literally curl into fists. This may be the first time that I’ve ever actually rolled my eyes at a book. Needless to say, that is the last time I take a book recommendation in the form of “Oh, they’re actually not bad – they were made into a TV show, after all.” That’s also the last time I consider reading Twilight just so I can disprove all the people who say it’s good; after the pain of Dead Until Dawn, which has a similar audience and level of acclaim, I can’t bear the thought of subjecting myself to more.

Ok. I think I’m done. Consider this the end of my most unfair, unbalanced, viscerally-inspired review ever.

[Mini-review] Lisa’s Take: Zoe’s Tale (John Scalzi)

2009-08-14T16:53:00.000-05:00

This is the first book by John Scalzi that I’ve ever picked up, and I grabbed it based solely upon the fact that it was in the running with Little Brother and The Graveyard Book for several YA-related fantasy awards. Surely such good company would imply a good yarn?

Absolutely, in this case. I read Zoe’s Tale in one day, practically in one sitting. It was certainly YA, but not overly so. The characters were fun and colorful, the history behind the book was rich, and the plot rushed along very satisfyingly. Most impressively: I didn’t realize that Zoe’s Tale was a re-telling of The Last Colony from a different perspective until the author told me so in the afterword. How freaking impressive is that?

I’ll keep this short since this is a mini-review: Zoe’s Tale is quite good, and it turned me on to Scalzi’s other work, which I proceeded to eat through in a matter of days. I’d suggest reading Zoe’s Tale last, rather than first, but his books are all stand on their own so it won’t hurt one way or the other. Great characterization (Zoe might be a little socially advanced for a 16-year-old, but it works), fun story, all around good times. Hooray!

[Sean's Summation] The Prefect (Alastair Reynolds)

2009-08-05T23:15:00.005-05:00

Continuing my fascination with UK-based SF, I grabbed a hardback copy of The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds from Amazon awhile back. Unfortunately, quite a bit got between me and reading it, so it was only recently that I was able to sit down and tackle it.

The Prefect is set in Reynold's Revelation Space universe [0], complete with the complement of Demarchists, Conjoiners, Ultras, and his other usual factions and freaks. The novel takes place at the height of the Demarchy's power in the Glitter Band, a group of more than 10,000 space habitats orbiting the terrestrial planet Yellowstone (which is in turn circling around the star, Epislon Erandi). In the Glitter Band, the Demarchists have constructed an anarcho-capitalist utopia, powered by seriously far-out nanotech. The central characters are prefects, specialized police officers, charged with maintaining the machinery that allows the populace to vote -- and prevent the same populace from tampering with it. The plot of the novel forces the prefects through increasingly deeper and broader conspiracies, threatening the very existence of Glitter Band society.

There are obvious shades of current debates on liberty vs. the police power reflected in the story. The prefects are denied actual firearms, much like today's UK where most constables carry only truncheons. The billy-club, however, is replaced with semi-autonomous whiphounds that attack and defend using monofiliment and a limited AI. The gruesome, up-close-and-personal attention dished out by our primitive implements is preserved, however.

Throughout the book, Reynolds waxes philosophic with a purpose. Through the mirror of his universe, he critiques our current culture of safety over freedom in the face of threats to national security. When is it acceptable for the executive to disregard the wishes of the populace and the contract by which it governs? What evils can be committed in the name of the state and insurance of future safety at the cost of individual lives and freedoms? Is the benevolent tyrant preferable to the will of the mob?

Of course, any libertarian hack can write a story like that [1], Reynolds keeps it unique and engaging in two ways:

1. His universe is unique in its believability. While I doubt he is the first writer of hard SF space opera, his work represents the state of the art. Most of the elements of Demarchist, Conjoiner, and Ultra society seem believable, considering both the technological and sociological possibilities. His universe becomes almost a three dimensional character unto itself -- it possess depth, rationale, and a human touch.

2. His characters are also three dimensional constructs inside this universe. There are no heroic, dashing Captain Kirk's or infallibly prophetic Hari Seldon's. While Reynolds does rely on quite a few familiar tropes -- the maverick cop, the the scheming vizier [2], etc. -- their use is to give us something to identify with inside the framework of the story. The characters, after all, must seem somewhat human to us, as they exist in a nearly fantastic setting.

The whole thing, of course, is enhanced by the dramatic irony if you've read the other books in the series. The Prefect takes place well before the events of Chasm City or Revelation Space, so the foreshadowing contained takes a much more ominous note once one knows exactly what is to come.

I have quite enjoyed the other books in this series and The Prefect did not let me down. It may have certain formulaic elements but the questions posed by the intertwining of the familiar plot elements with the unique framework of his universe make it well worth the weekend read.

[0] While it's not as voluminous as, say, Terry Pratchett's Discworld, it's got 4 novels and a slew of short stories and novellas comprising it.
[1] I'm only poking a little bit of fun at Cory Doctorow.
[2] First order of business if I ever become a CEO, President, or Evil Overlord: fire/impeach/execute anyone with a goatee on my staff.

JD's Take: Misspent Youth (Peter F. Hamilton)

2009-07-29T13:04:00.003-05:00

I love Peter F. Hamilton so it was without thought or hesitation that I picked up Misspent Youth. I barely even complained that it seemed to come out between The Dreaming Void and The Temporal Void, figuring that maybe he wrote it before those. I don't know. Publishing is a weird game. Besides, I correctly assumed, I'll probably still end up reading the Temporal Void first, my stack being what it is and my priorities being what they are.

So, I finally got around to pulling this off the shelf last week, and discovered that Hamilton had put aside Space Opera to take a stab at Near Futurism. This, I thought, ought to be good. Hamilton is an absolute master of extrapolating technology in interesting ways! However, my excitement slowly faded into... not disgust but at least apathy. By halfway through the book, I had no desire to open it again and placed it, sadly, on the shelf.

So what went wrong? The story follows a well-off family in 2038-ish England. The father is missing, gone to get the world's first Rejuvination treatment. This rare honor was given because of his massive popularity and fame, having invented a crystal memory lattice that could be grown cheaply and provided unlimited storage space... and then giving it away for freesies. His beloved son and trophy wife are waiting for him to return from the 8 months in isolation, and the security teams from the EU are setting up shop to protect against terrorist assasination attempts. So far so awesome, yeah? The problem is that when Hamilton turned in Space Opera, he traded it out for Soap Opera. The first part of the book was spent following the son and his friends in their drama-tastic sexual exchanges. Then the dad comes back and we get more of the same with the father. And the Wife. And the neighbors, the old friends, and probably the postman.

The technological and societal extrapolation was interesting, but very much in the background. Normally I'd consider that a good point, but in this case the foreground was filled with vapid, unlikable characters. The greater sin, however, was that like all Soap Operas, this novel lacked any kind of real plot. There was no conflict, no villian, no political intrigue. There was nothing to keep me reading unless I actually cared if the Father and the Son's Girlfriend would hook up (really. That was the big suspense when I set it down).

So give this one a miss, and busy yourself reading everything else this man ever wrote.

[Mini Review] JD's Take: The Forever War (Joe Haldeman)

2009-07-29T13:03:00.004-05:00

Honestly I'm not even going to bother to really review this book. Every nice thing about it that can be said has, at some point in the last 35 years, been said. If you happen to see a copy, you will be assaulted by quotes from authors you respect singing it's praises on every visible surface. I think it had a blurb on the spine. You will wade through 8 or so pages of review blurbs they couldn't fit on the cover, carefully chosen to represent only the creme de la creme of the sci-fi world.

They are all basically right: Haldeman took his experiences with war in Vietnam and crafted an amazing story about humanity and war and relativity. There is only one real character in it, and the ending is little trite, but those are extremely minor quibbles. The technology is very "future viewed from the 70s", but that's not a complaint at all... it's just an interesting perspective.

So yeah, I'm not going to spend any more time with this one: it's a solid, thoughtful, quick-reading exploration of war and human psychology set in a sci-fi warzone. Good times.

JD's Take: Personal Effects: Dark Art (Hutchins, Weisman)

2009-07-23T10:27:00.000-05:00

This was a book with a gimmick. It's a supernatural detective novel that comes with a stack of papers, invitations, business cards, drivers licenses, maps, and artwork. The idea is that the added content will make the mystery more engrossing, drawing you in by letting you see the evidence, piece together the clues, call cellphones and check voicemail, investigate online information and so on. I picked it thinking "well gosh, Alternate Reality has really caught on and here's a book version. Clever!"

Predictably, the gimmick fell far short of the premise. The book itself was passable... a pretty bland little mystery filled with some supernatural stuff that failed to tingle the spine sufficiently. The characters themselves were... almost painfully "in-touch"? You have the main character: an Art Psychologist who is dedicated to making the world a little brighter by having viscious killers that society has locked away in a stereotype of an insane asylum (they built it DOWN instead of up! Spooky!) by making them do finger paintings, through which they tell him all about their insecurities and whatnot. He has a younger brother who is a genius NYU film student who is heavily into parkour, and a girlfriend who is smoking hot and tattooed and a huge nerd who eats potato chips and plays videogames all day for her blog and never needs to work out. Oh, and she's also a fact-checker for a newspaper, giving her great connections for researching stuff. Oh, and his father is the Assistant DA trying the case he is assigned to. How convenient that we will use all of these disparate skills and connections in the solving of this mystery!

Anyway, one of the things the book does well is to impart a sense of peril about the characters who surround the protagonist. Throughout the book you feel like you are one panicked moment away from utter devastation. In part this is because he loves them all so hard and appreciates them and needs them and you just KNOW that's the Kiss of Death. Partly it is because their deaths are fortold like 10 pages in, and that is also a Kiss of Death. But here's the thing: nothing bad happens to anyone. Even the *very* secondary character who is marked for death early in the book (and whose death would have made the whole plot more convincing and impactful) comes out unscathed. By the end, I felt kinda... ripped off that all of the foreshadowing and dread and suspense ended with smiling rainbows and chocolate.

If you've noticed that I haven't mentioned all of the non-book content so far, you've made a very good observation! On the plus side, the quality of the inserts was quite good. The drivers license was laminated plastic, the certificates were on crappy government paper while the CIA memos were on nice stationary. Nice production value! The problem with the Book Tied Into Clues concept is that it totally falls apart if you neglect to make any of the non-book content meaningful. Let me itemize:

Most of the stuff ends up being very tangentally connected (birth and death certificates for a couple of minor, off-screen support characters, for instance, which have no bearing on the mystery).
When there are phone numbers you can call (to, say, check voicemails) the messages aren't reprinted in the book (good! Make me do it in real life!) but they are also WORTHLESS. Every single syllable of the messages can be easily extracted from the in-book context and they are totally mundane anyway ("Son. I'll be late to the funeral. Love, Dad.").
On top of the above, the outgoing messages on the voicemails are totally out of synch with the book. At a point in the book where the main character has only barely heard of the case, the outgoing message you get is "Sorry I can't come to the phone. This case has taken hold on me in unexpected ways. I love you all" or something. It totally destroys the sense of immediacy that the whole concept is doing its best to impart.
Some of the clues have puzzles in them. Neat! I spent 15 minutes deciphering a card that was totally blank except for some brail writing. This was a fucking waste of time and opportunity, since it was never mentioned in the book, added absolutely nothing, and provided no clues or insight. Gah!
Websites! There are several! One of them was missing, one of the them provided a clue to the characters in the book but NOT TO THE VISITOR, and one of them was actually kinda cool (a blog run by the protagonists girlfriend that actually developed her character a bit and lent authenticity... though had no relevance to the story).
There was some artwork included. There was artwork in the book, the clever manipulation of which led to important clues. There were not connected. The included artwork had no relevance to the book at all.

Basically, in order for this to have been a compelling gimmick, the toys had to have relevance to the story. I needed to be able to solve puzzles and work out connections that weren't given to me in the book. Honestly, the book shouldn't even have *had* an ending until I solved things my damn self. The narrative should have cut off suddenly at the end and begun with a "Previous researcher missing: see what you can do" introduction. As is, they could have dropped all of the props... I'd still be left with a mediocre mystery novel but at least I wouldn't be angry about it.

[Lisa’s Take] Act of Will – A. J. Hartley

2009-07-17T15:47:00.002-05:00

[Editors note: This review sat for a few days before I was able to post it, and when I got back around to re-reading it I think I may have been a bit harsh, especially due to some of my biases from related books. I'd be happy for someone to contradict me on this review and give me a reason to try the second book]

I really, really, really hate to pan this book, because it’s soooo close to being everything I love in character-fantasy: snarky first person narrator, main character with dubious morals, betrayals, plot twists, magic, &c, &c. Unfortunately, either due to my own personal bias or perhaps due to the lack of polish that sometimes comes with first books, these ideal elements didn’t quite coalesce into a good book. A passable book, perhaps, but not the excellent, rollicking, laughter-inducing tale that I hoped for.

The setting: Will Hawthorne is a young actor (think Elizabethan era) who writes some stories, but more often than not gets stuck playing female characters - dress and all. On the day that he’s set to graduate from his role as an apprentice and become one of the big players, a decree is sent out to close all theaters and arrest all writers of note (repressive government and all that jazz). Will makes a run for it and is sheltered by a mysterious collection of men and women. They turn out to have things like Morals and Scruples (unlike our Will) as well as a firm belief in Doing The Right Thing. Will is forced to tag along with them in order to stay out of the government’s clutches, and ends up being sucked into an investigation of strange attacks and magical happenings in a nearby province.

Will as a character is a lot of fun – just the sort of narrator that I love to read: witty, scrupulous, tactless, and a big self-serving coward. Unfortunately, a couple of problems kept him from being ideal. First, as the book goes on Will “develops” and “changes” but it seems forced. His shenanigans and reactions also get a bit predictable, so he’s less and less fun to read as the story progresses. The second problem is more a personal problem: Will is basically a clone of the main character from Sir Apropos of Nothing. If you hadn’t read the aforementioned excellent little novel by Peter David, it probably wouldn’t present an issue for you. But since I read it last year, Apropos was fresh enough on my mind that Will seemed like an imitation – and a pale one at that. Very Sad.

Still, that’s getting pretty picky. Overall I liked the narrator and the themes in the book; a strong story or supporting cast would have done a lot to remedy my gripe. Sadly, the supporting cast were mostly one-dimensional and predictable (though I did have a soft spot for Orgos), and at their worst moments annoying. The story tried for political intrigue, but mostly ended up with a plot line of “then they went there and discovered ‘this.’ Then they went somewhere else and discovered ‘that.’ Gasp! A revelation!” The “big reveal” at the end wasn’t much of a surprise, and honestly the tedium of the storyline by 250 pages in had me close to giving up.

So – it is with much disappointment that I can’t really recommend Act of Will. I wanted so much for it to be great, and given so many promising elements it’s a travesty that it didn’t come together as excellently as promised. That said, I think there’s a pretty good chance that I’ll give book two a try – the story’s (fictitious) translator promises it will be out in a year… I guess we’ll see. I want very much for Hartley to live up to the promise he shows. Perhaps it will just take him a couple of novels to hit his stride.

[Mini Review] Lisa’s Take: (Temeraire Book 5) A Victory of Eagles – Naomi Novik

2009-07-17T15:44:00.001-05:00

I’ll keep this review short and sweet: I think I’m done with this series. The first book was a very novel idea and quite interesting and engaging... and then the books steadily went downhill. A Victory of Eagles was more of the same: Laurence is exiled and bummed about it, Temeraire is obstinate and disliking of the state of affairs, Iskiera is annoying, and there’s a war. Same old, same old. The characters don’t change or develop (in fact I’d go so far as to say that Laurence regresses and becomes more boring and flat as a character) and while the story does move along at a brisk pace, it’s not new and exciting anymore.

I don’t want to disparage the series as a whole, because the first book really was excellent, and the second book was enjoyable. I just wish that Ms. Novik had kept an end in sight for the story as a whole, and maybe limited the whole ordeal to 3ish books. Damn shame. Someone do tell me if the 6th book suddenly turns around and redeems the series, ok?

JD's Take: Manual of Detection (Jedediah Berry)

2009-07-16T16:52:00.004-05:00

I actually picked this book up in the mystery section of all places, though it could comfortably hang out in the seedy hive of the fantasy section as well. Actually, it could probably dress up nice and at least stroll through the "Fiction" section, as it certainly has a literary* character to it. It is Berry's first novel, though he has published short stories before and he is an editor at Small Beer Press (making me want to read the stack of $1 books I ordered from them rather more than I did).

So. Let me set the scene. The story is set in the city, an unnamed noir style metropolis dominated by a monolithic building housing the Agency. The city is dark, and rainy, dirty and dismal, and structured. The city honestly feels more like Bas Lag than Metropolis. There is nothing openly fantastic about it, but the people are too structured, too neurotic, too obviously and subtly broken to be entirely mundane.

Charles Unwin is a orderly man, a clerk by trade, and the best in the business. His job is to chronicle the cases of Detective Sivart, a legendary figure who is a cross between Holmes (in stature) and Sam Spade (in attitude). Our story starts as Unwin is suddenly promoted to the rank of detective and his life spirals rapidly outside of his ability to cope. He meets a cast of characters feel like they are in color against the black and white of their world. They are broken, strange, intriguing. Many would not be out of place in a Dick Tracy story, and others feel lifted straight out of Chinatown. Unwin is forced to stretch outside his comfort zone (a zone that is 7 blocks long and 14 stories high), his only strong motivation to make sense of his life and go back to the way things were.

As details emerge about cases past and present, they are filled with fantastic elements. I'm not talking dragons and high magic though... one of the cases that is often referenced in the story quite literally focuses on the theft of November 11th, a Tuesday. Certainly the book is imaginative, along with being well written, well plotted, and engrossing. There are weak points, perhaps, in the resolution though that is largely a matter of taste I think. I strongly recommend this book for anyone who enjoys noir, urban and weird fantasy, and/or great writing in general. Honestly, it's a shame that the book is in the mystery section, because it doesn't read or play out like a mystery, and true fans of the genre will probably be disapointed. There are no clever clues for you to work out while you pretend to work, and the butler most certainly did not do it. The biggest mystery is figuring out what exactly "it" is that was done.

* Used in the sense that it plays with language, and at time flirts with poetry. There were paragraphs I stopped and read aloud, just for the pleasure of doing so.

[Lisa's Take] Stranger in a Strange Land (Robert Heinlein)

2009-07-02T13:03:00.002-05:00

There are some books that every book geek should have read, and I have an embarrassing number of them that have been sitting in my stack for many, many years. Cache 22 has been in there since 2001, along with Fahrenheit 451. Catcher in the Rye, Dorian Grey, something by Ayn Rand, not to mention all of the strictly-fantasy books that people tell me I have to read.

Stranger in a Strange Land has been in my stack for a very, very long time. I remember in early high school my mother said "you really need to read this" then quickly changed her mind after re-reading it herself and deciding I didn't need that much candid sex as a 13-year-old. The novel unofficially joined my stack around that time, and then officially a few years later when I received a copy as a gift.

Honestly, now that I've finished SiaSL, I'm unsure about how best to review it. Much like when I read 100 Years of Solitude I find myself struggling with evaluating the elements of "real literature" versus "fantasy candy." I didn't find the story of SiaSL particularly compelling, and it dragged painfully through the second half. I was counting down the pages to the end, so very ready to get it over with. I didn't like or care about any of the characters with the exception of Jubal Harshaw, who reminded me far too much of an old friend to dislike.

I did, however, appreciate some of the very progressive ideas that Heinlein touched upon, especially considering the book was written over 40 years ago. His diatribes on love, lust, sex, relationships, and polyamory were impressive and well considered. Early in the book I enjoyed Jubal's dissertations on religion, media, and lifestyle, though Heinlein's portrayal of religion shifted so heavily towards the end of the book that I was left with a sour taste in my mouth.

What I didn't appreciate about the book were the rampant undertones of sexism and the blatant gay-bashing. Generally my rule is that it's ok for an author to have opinions opposite of mine (Orson Scott Card comes to mind) so long as those viewpoints don't creep into his literature. Heinlein did not manage to maintain this separation, and his diatribes on the matters left me quite grumpy. Saying things like "9 out of 10 women who get raped probably were asking for it" and generic gay bashing is more than I can deal with. I especially have a hard time reconciling all of the "free love, open relationships, orgies!" talk in-story with the blatant statement that "being gay is wrong and immoral."

I don't really have a bottom line for this review. As with many books that are "more serious" rather than strictly fantasy, I don't know whether to recommend it or not. It's a lot like Wicked in some ways - not a very pretty story, but one that has some really interesting themes. Take from that what you will.

JD's Take: The Mistborn Trilogy (Brandon Sanderson)

2009-06-25T10:11:00.004-05:00

The really, really short version:

2,272 pages of extremely high quality fantasy.

The slightly longer version:

Lisabit already covered this series, and we feel about the same about it, so I'll let her review stand. This series features an intricate and fascinating world/magic system, an ensemble cast of compelling and interesting and flawed characters, an evolving storyline that works quite well at escalating the threat while not seeming tacked-on, a witty and entertaining writing style, and several fantastic and unexpected twists on fantasy tropes. I'm not too proud to say that the ending had me tearing up pretty bad, and the final resolution was simultaneously satisfying without being over-done, brief without feeling truncated, touching without being sappy, and open for more books without feeling like an obvious set up. I'd rate the ending as one of my favorites in any series.

There were times when the work dragged a little bit. I agree with Lisabit that the angst in the second book could have been cut in half and that would have been fine with me. The first half of the third book dragged pretty bad for me as it ventured too close to Epic Fantasy Purgatory for comfort (that being: endless marches. Everyone just moving around the board in excruciating detail, but not actually *doing* anything). One of my favorite characters (TenSoon) got the shaft, story-wise, in the third book too, which was a shame to me. I think his character's resolution could have been more meaningful if his narrative had gone another direction (West, actually).

There are also times when you'll be screaming at the characters to pay attention to some small detail, that they are making life far more difficult and it's Just So Obvious. Of course, the first time I did that I was totally wrong about it... so you might want to keep those yells bottled up lest you be embarrassed when you're wrong...

That said, I highly recommend this series to any reader of fantasy. If you are the type of person who happens to get a little *too* excited by well-executed and fiddly magic systems (in other words: if you are a tabletop roleplayer) then all the more reason why these books should immediately go onto your must-read stack. At the top.

Oh: and Lisabit is totally wrong about the "glaring plot hole" she claims to have found. Nyah. :)

[Sean's Summation] Saturn's Children (Charles Stross)

2009-06-16T18:06:00.006-05:00

If Mr. Stross has been on this blog a bit much of late, you can blame me. I've been an unabashed fan of his after reading Accelerando, and though JD beat me to Halting State, I agree with his solid recommendation to read it. Thus, when I saw the wonderfully...ahem...provocative cover of Saturn's Children, I was genuinely excited -- would this be a Heinlein-eqse, risqué sexbot on a mission romp? The answer, it turns out, is equal parts "yes" and "well, kinda."

Quick setting summary: Saturn's Children is set some several hundred years into our future. Humans have built robots with relatively powerful AI to do all manner of jobs -- from asteroid mining to entertainers to spaceships to whatever else that humans, being squishy or easily bored, couldn't do. Stross gets around our current problems with AI by hand-waving that these robots are based on human intelligence patterns (essentially, computer-based copies of our brain's structure). Robots have a "soul chip" that stores their consciousness, which can be slotted into another copy of the same model, carrying over its experiences and personality. Copies of the same model form lineages that typically stick together, pooling the soul chips of their dead brethren/sisters so that the deceased's memories live on. In addition to their soul chip, robots can have slave chips installed (usually unwillingly), which allow near total control of the robot in question.

By the way, "robot" is a slur equivalent to some of our more pernicious racial slurs. So, apologies to any persons that happen to be non-pink goo reading this. Though, I really should apologize for much more, because, you see, there are no more humans (or any biological life) in Saturn's Children. Somewhere in the next couple of centuries, humans disappear (Stross isn't particularly clear on the how or why, but it's not really necessary to the story), leaving behind our robot slaves and a destroyed Terran ecosystem. Problematically, since robots were generally property rather than people, this left most in a peculiar legal state. Some enterprising robots that happened to have legal powers of attorney used their now defunct masters' funds to buy up around 90% of the robot population. This created a solar system of a incredibly small, cruel and insane aristocracy and enormous slave population. The few remaining "free" robots were essentially self-owned LLC's barely scraping by, attempting to avoid falling into debt and becoming indentured servants themselves.

Enter into this world our protagonist, Freya, a free robot of modest means. Unfortunately for her, her lineage's purpose died out with humanity: she was to be a hyper-advanced sex toy for the few remaining humans. (Is it any wonder we died out?) Thus, she starts the story down on her luck somewhere in the high atmosphere of Venus.

Looking back over those last couple of paragraphs, I can conclude that I'll never be a jacket-cover writer. Moving on.

In continuing theme with his previous fiction, Stross depicts space-travel as realistically as possible. Thus, it is very Hobbesian: solitary, nasty, and brutish, but not so much with the short. Travel to Jupiter from Mars on even some of the fastest ships takes over a year and that journey comes with a hefty dosage of ionizing radiation from the ship's nuclear engines. Colonization efforts are also depicted in realistic, but nonetheless fantastic, detail: a city moves on rails around Mercury to keep its temperature optimal, while Mars gives birth to a massive space elevator. While settlement would have been impossible for squishy humans, robots manage to proliferate, colonizing the solar system in our stead. While this is terribly disappointing to those of us raised on Star Trek, it sadly has the support of quite a bit of scientific evidence behind it.

Stross cheats a bit with his characters and makes them mostly clones of each other, but this sort of fits in a world dominated by many clones of a few basic models. There is a background cast of various more fantastic non-anthropromophic bots, but their details are usually shallow. There are a few colorful exceptions to this, of course: Dechs seems to fill the role of the plucky dog sidekick, but reveals to be much more. The hobo bots on Mars are also wonderful bit of the familiar yet absurd.

Perhaps one of my favorite theme in the story were the debates concerning creation myths from a robotic perspective. As creatures created rather than evolved, the majority of robots had trouble believing that their creators came to be in such a messy manner. This leads to the comedic reversal of evolutionists being treated as the intellectual parriahs that today's creationists fill, complete with cultists, "skeptics" and the like.

Though I am admittedly a Strossian fan-boy, we now come to the part of the essay where I must lambaste him for failing: Mr. Stross needs an editor with a chainsaw and plenty of duct tape. As was the case with Accelerando, Saturn's Children is occasionally non-linear. Unlike previous works, however, these transitions are unexpected and confusing. At several points in the book the transitions were so jarring, I found myself checking page numbers to make sure my copy wasn't missing pages. A zealous editor should notice these sorts of things and berate Mr. Stross until they're fixed.

(As a note, from reading his blog, it appears he's been releasing and editing quite a number of books of late. While I'm all for output, I really would prefer a more paced release schedule. Quality, not quantity!)

Further, his characters motivations and personalities fall flat, especially towards the novel's climax. I was left wondering, "So, that's why so-and-so did that? Ho-hum." It just really didn't feel believable or interesting. The overall plot, too, felt a bit weak. It was very Mission: Impossible (the Tom Cruise movies, not the TV show): needlessly complicated, with too many, "Oh no, X was really Y all along!" moments.

Despite these complaints, I had a good time with the novel, and would definitely recommend it to fellow SF readers for their enjoyment.

[Lisa’s Take] Conqueror’s Moon (Julian May)

2009-06-15T14:16:00.001-05:00

It seems like I see Julian May’s name a lot on the book shelves, so when I saw a used copy of the Conqueror’s Moon hardback a few months ago, I snagged it for $4. I’m nothing if not willing to try out new authors, and a $4 hardback is usually a steal. Sadly, I was very disappointed in this particular bargain. As always, I gave the book 100 pages to impress me (a generous 102 in this case) and I was beyond relieved when I could finally call it quits.

I’m not really up to trying to put together a plot summary, so instead I’ll just bitch (because who doesn’t like to listen to me rant about bad fantasy?).

The story started with a very promising prologue – first person with a touch of wit and a very human tone… but after this brief introduction there was a subsequent switch to 3rd person omniscient and the author started waxing poetic about the world and the characters. Is there nothing less enticing in a book than extended droning about the history of a nation? Especially when said history is neither particularly original, nor particularly interesting? The author went on at length and started to lose me right away. Once characters started showing up on screen (on page?) I though the book might turn itself around and hook me… but I found quickly that the characters were much like the history – dull and over-described. I want to be shown what my characters are like, not told “he was loyal, oh so loyal.” And heaven forbid that more than a sentence or two should be spent describing totally mundane clothing – please spare me. I especially enjoyed (didn’t enjoy) the few pages that introduced 16 characters and spent a paragraph describing each one. Let me tell you how exciting that was – I do so love incorporating memorization exercises into my reading experience!

Oh dear, I seem to be waxing sarcastic and not a little bit caustic. I’ll just stop before I get really carried away, shall I?

I do see that Ms. May has written quite a lot of scifi – can anyone out there tell me whether it is more worth reading that her disappointing fantasy foray?

[Lisa’s Take] Labyrinths of Echo Book 1: The Stranger (Max Frei)

2009-06-15T13:45:00.003-05:00

Max is your typical loser – 30 something, down on his luck more often than not, and a chronic night-owl to the point that he can’t keep a regular day job. The only thing remarkable about Max is that he has very vivid dreams. Then one day a man in Max’s dreams offers him a job… and seeing nothing better about his life Max accepts and is transported to another world – vibrant and exciting where magic is commonplace, but highly regulated. A little bit of acclamation and training and he is officially instated as the Night Time Representative of the Secret Investigative Force (think the CIA, but with magic).

Do you remember when you first read Harry Potter? Even if you weren’t completely blown away, you have to admit that the world that Rowling painted was gorgeous, colorful, and enthralling. My experience reading The Stranger was a lot like that – the world was just so very engaging and convincing. I really felt like I had been plucked out of Boring Old Real World and dropped into the fantasy city painted by the author.

There are some quirks to the storytelling in The Stranger. The first is that it’s a translation from Russian, and while it is very well done, there are references or jokes made from time to time that don’t quite make sense. Very minor things that don’t at all take away from the major themes or humor in the book as a whole. After finishing all 4 Night Watch books and now this new piece of Russian Fantasy, I’m gaining a serious affinity for the genre – both in the originality of the stories and worlds, as well as the variety of wry, askance humor that seems to pervade.

The second quirk to the book is that rather than one large arc (The hardcover weighs in at a middlingly-dense 544 pages), the book is broken up in to 5 large “chapters,” where each chapter is its own story, largely self-contained. Each of these chapters has its own hook, plot, crescendo, climax and resolution, which is nice, but it made the book feel a bit choppy, rather than being a smooth continuous narrative.

What else is there to say about this book? The characters are vibrant and exciting, the wit is beyond measure, and each chapter is nearly impossible to put down. I absolutely loved it, and I’m desperately hoping that the rest of the books in the series will be translated soon and published in the US.

[Lisa’s Take] Wizard of Pigeons (Megan Lindholm)

2009-05-20T10:18:00.000-05:00

Robin Hobb is one of my favorite authors – I’ve read her Farseer trilogy several times now, and it was one of the fantasy series that really solidified my love of the genre back in high school. As such, I’m always watching out for books written under her old pseudonym of Megan Lindholm; whenever I hit a used book store I go straight to the L section to see what I can dig up. I usually strike out, often finding “book two” in her old trilogies, but never book one or standalone books. You can imagine my excitement when I happened across Wizard of Pigeons, a short stand-alone novel.

Wizard of Pigeons is urban fantasy set in modern(ish) Seattle. It revolves around a homeless man who goes simply by Wizard, and who is granted certain powers of urban survival so long as he does not break a few rules. The magic system is fairly interesting a has a level of subtlety that is rarely seen – in some ways the powers of the characters in the book reminded me of aspects of the magic in the Nightwatch series. However, where this book really shines is in its description of downtown Seattle – the images and geography are spot on. Maybe it’s just my great love of the Emerald City, but I found the city descriptions to be incredibly evocative, so much that I could smell the air, feel the misty rain on my face, and taste the rich coffee.

After such a rousing endorsement of the setting I almost hate to type this next line, but alas… I’d be lying if I said I thought Wizard of Pigeons was worth the read. Where the environment and magic system where intriguing, the characters were less so. Wizard was kind of well developed, but the major secondary character drove me absolutely insane. I hated her so much that she actually managed to ruin a lot of the book for me. I wanted about 90% less screen time for her and 300% more screen time for the other wizards in the story, who were all interesting but didn’t get to be featured very heavily.

By the last quarter of the book I was literally only reading because it seemed like I didn’t have many pages left and it would be a shame to quit so close to the end. I wanted the final chapters to redeem the middle section that made me so angry, but I don’t think I was in much of a mindset to let it. I ended the book grumpy and disappointed, and though I recognized that the author made a bid at including her signature bittersweet finale, I couldn’t appreciate it.

I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone unless you are a particularly die-hard Robin Hobb fan, and also only if you have a strong stomach for extremely obnoxious female characters (ex: if Malta pissed you off during the Liveship Traders, don’t touch this book with a 10 foot pole). It may also be worth reading for lovers of Seattle, if only to see a beloved city in text form, and to have a little magic lent to the Market.

JD's Take: Halting State (Charles Stross)

2009-05-20T10:08:00.004-05:00

Halting State is a near future science fiction novel that uses a mysterious digital theft in Scotland as a backdrop to both explore the Stross's projections of technology (and the world political stage) for the next 20 years and to posit some of the possible dangers of that technology's advance. While doing so, Stross adeptly writes a compelling story with reasonably good twists, likable characters, and enough action and suspense to keep you turning the pages long after you should have packed up and gone back to work.

The basic technological premise of the novel is that human interaction with technology continues to become more and more pervasive. Most everybody wears digital eyeglasses that give them an internet-enabled overlay (or several overlays) on the real world in order to augment it with additional information. For instance, the police use an overlay called CopSpace which recognizes people in their field of view and gives instant information about them (arrest record, personal information, etc). People can overlay maps onto their field of view to navigate, gamespaces into their view to seamlessly immerse them in a fantasy world while they navigate the real one, and endless other applications are hinted at or explored. All of this is powered by distributing the processing across everybody's (extremely) smart phones. Basically? The future is sweet. And really, there's nothing here that's particularly farfetched for the future of technology. I won't say that I believe the predictions, but it is certainly a compelling argument for the way that tech might progress.

We join our heroes as they are gathered together to investigate the theft of Sweet Gear from a bank in an MMO. The implications of this theft are that *someone* has broken the cryptography on the networks, and that is Bad. It quickly becomes clear that this is Very Bad Indeed, and has implications for national security and worldwide politics and economics.

The story is told entirely in the second person, and switches characters each chapter between one of 3 POV characters. This sounds awkward, and it could have been, but Stross handles it masterfully. Instead of being jarring, it feels like a DM narrating a scene to the character as you read. This, in turn, helps to subtly draw you into the very gaming-centric story in a very effective way. The other thing it does is to reinforce the importance of perceived reality to the story. In a world where you can augment your reality however you want, the second person perspective really drives home that "you see a man" is a much better construction than "there is a man". Frankly, this was a subtle and wonderful and clever decision and I loved it.

The story wasn't without flaws... there were weak characterizations in the supporting cast and some unconvincing technological guesswork, but that's all nitpicking. This was a great book and I highly recommend it. Just read it now, while it still sounds like compelling futurism and not one of the other two options (reality and "flying cars" futurism).

[Lisa’s Take] Peter and the Starcatchers (Dave Barry, Ridley Pearson)

2009-05-20T09:50:00.001-05:00

After reading Peter David’s most excellent novella Tigerheart, I was feeling a soft spot towards Peter Pan stories. So the reason I picked up Peter and the Starcatchers was threefold: it was sitting on a “staff recommended” shelf at the book store, I was feeling fond of Neverland, and Dave Barry writes such a great news paper column that I figured his fantasy would have to be great.

Peter and the Starcatchers is kind of a Peter Pan Prequel (mmm, alliteration), the first in an ongoing series. It follows the story of a group of young orphans who get sent off on a ship that will take them to live in the employ of an evil prince. Their voyage does not go as planned, however, and through the course of the story we find out just how the ordinary boy Peter becomes the legend that can fly and defy pirates. We also meet Captain Hook’s precursor and discover the events through which he came to be plagued by a crocodile.

This book is definitely a kids book; I think a child between 8 and 12 would really love it. Sadly, it doesn’t live up to the “timeless tale” measure, like Tigerheart did. I chomped the book down on a flight home from Memphis, all in one sitting, but I really only kept reading it because I had nothing better to do. The story was fun and it was a creative and interesting take on Peter Pan, but there was no real substance to it. At times the narrative aaaaalmost took on a self-aware tone and injected a bit of humor… but in the end it fell short and missed the mark.

Peter and the Starcatchers is a good book for youths and young adults, but lacks the punch or depth to make it appeal to all audiences. If you pick it up looking for Dave Barry’s usual wit and humor, I fear you will be disappointed.

[Lisa’s Take] Mistborn Book 3: Hero of Ages (Brandon Sanderson)

2009-05-13T15:37:00.000-05:00

I kind of thought I’d have a lot to put into my review of the final book in this trilogy, but now that the time has come I don’t have all that much to say. I can’t do a plot summary without spoilers, and there just isn’t much that I feel like waxing poetic about. If you’ve read my reviews of books 1 and 2 you know that I adore the story, and book 3 continues to deliver on that promise. I didn’t enjoy it as much as book 1 (like book 2, book 3 is Good but not Great), but it was an entertaining tale. I’m pleased that the ending brought such great closure, and I was very surprised by the bold strokes that the author took in wrapping up the story.

Oh, I did have one little gripe: did anyone else feel that there was a pretty serious screw up (retcon?) in the capabilities of allomancy during one of the big final battles? Trying to remain unspoilery: the one involving a lot of Inquisitors? Maybe I was racing through the book’s climax so quickly that I missed the explanation of why this particular thing worked in that battle, but didn’t work in a number of other battles – I’d like to think that surely the author and the editor couldn’t both have miss it. Regardless, the fact that I got fixated on it in a “that’s not supposed to be possible” sense really broke up the book’s climax for me.

Anyway, at this point I’m really just rambling because I don’t have the juice to do a full review of Hero of Ages. I’ll wrap this up by reiterating that in spite of its (very few) faults, the Mistborn trilogy is truly excellent. It’s definitely the best fantasy trilogy I’ve read in a couple of years, sporting a compelling plot line, an amazingly awesome magic system, epic scope, and very well developed characters. I look forward to reading more of Bradon Sanderson’s work in the future.

[Mini Review] Lisa’s Take: Mistborn Book 2 - The Well of Ascension (Brandon Sanderson)

2009-05-06T11:30:00.000-05:00

I suppose I should post just a brief note on the second book of the Mistborn trilogy, as I’m already ¾ of the way through the final book. I’ll keep it short, and forgo the potentially spoilerfull plot summary.

The Well of Ascension was a Good Book, though perhaps not a Great Book. I felt it wasn’t as impressive as the first book for a couple of reasons, the biggest one being that it’s hard to rival the slow reveal of a world and magical system that took place in book one. There were still some cool new concepts in book two, but you didn’t spend 200 pages learning about Allomancy and going “Oh, awesome!!” so the overall novelty was lower.

I was also kind of annoyed by how Sanderson handled the relationship aspects of book 2 – a lot of the back and forth just annoyed the hell out of me, regardless of how much you could argue that it was in character. For about two thirds of the book I ground my teeth whenever the Elend/Vin dynamic came up, and the weird conservative overtones that snuck into the narrative rubbed me the wrong way.

Luckily the end of the book did a lot to rectify my gripes; when I finished The Well of Ascension I had a very “Empire Strikes Back” feeling in my chest. I wasted no time getting my hands on book 3, which I have been summarily tearing through. I also feel it worth mentioning that Zane might be winning the “Lisa’s favorite character of the year” award – some of the aspects of his characterization were really great.

Right, that’s it. Keeping this short, with the expectation of a longer ramble when I wrap up The Hero of Ages in a day or two.

[Lisa’s Take] Mistborn Trilogy Book 1 (Brandon Sanderson)

2009-04-20T14:41:00.001-05:00

Praise be to the Flying Spaghetti Monster: the fantasy genre is still good! I have to admit that I was having doubts this year – since Tigana, which I finished in January, I haven’t read a single fantasy (or extended/related genre) novel that really blew my socks off. There have been a few good things, but nothing that really drew me in, made me believe, and felt obligated to deliver the occasional sucker-punch to the gut.

Before I get too far into this review, let me issue a preemptive apology for the number of times that I compare the book to Lies of Locke Lamora – I’ll try to keep the number less than 5, but no hard promises here. Sorry.

So, the world of Misborn. If you’re feeling a little sci-fi, you could call the world post-apocalyptic: some event in the past caused huge volcanic eruptions that turned the sky permanently grey and ensured that ash falls like snow when the wind is blowing right. If you’re leaning in a steam-punk direction, you’ll note that the men and women nobles in the book wear complicated dresses and vests and carry pocket watches. If you’re feeling straight up fantasy, no ifs-ands-or-buts… you won’t be disappointed, either. The world is filled with magic, monsters, and evil overlords. The fantasy-tropes are definitely the strongest, but there are some cool genre-crossover points that spice the world up from the standard fantasy setting.

Next, politics and magic! The political system in Mistborn is pretty standard fantasy-fare: Immortal, God-Like Overlord reigns with an Iron Fist ™. Nobles live a life of luxury, filled with balls and riches and intrigue. The poor folks (called skaa, in this particular case) work as the slaves of the nobles, constantly beaten down and subjugated. As for the magic – Mistborn might have the most interesting magical system I’ve ever read about. I’d love to play a video game based upon this magic system: it’s just that awesome. I’m not going to go into it in this review, as finding out about it in the story is part of the fun, but I will say that it’s awesome, intriguing, and thought provoking.

Right – we have this awesome world and magic system, so what’s the plot? Remember how Lies of Locke Lamora was kind of a fantasy-heist? And how there weren’t really many other books that fell into the same genre? Mistborn definitely qualifies as another fantasy-heist, which is the most wonderful news I’ve ever heard. I could read fantasy-heist novels all day and never get bored, I think. The plot of the story follows a group of thieves and con-men as they plan to… well, I could tell you, but like the magic system I think I’ll let you read for yourself. Suffice to say that much like Lies, the plot doesn’t fall out quite how you expect it to, and there are plenty of twists and roadblocks along the way.

This review is getting long already, but I feel the need to put a word out there about Sanderson’s characterizations. They’re good – kind of standard, but with some of the generic archetypes shaken up a bit to keep them interesting. What Sanderson really excels at are the conversations and interactions between the full crew of characters (think the scene in Lies where they discuss why they steal). The interplay is spot-on, and the camaraderie is genuine and compelling.

The one negative I’ll dish about is that I didn’t always like how the action scenes read. Especially when you got two magical badasses fighting each other, Sanderson would often wax poetic about the fight scene – which is cool, because the magic system allows for that in a big way – but in a lot of cases I felt like he had a really clear picture of every movement and action that was supposed to occur in the scene, but when he described it I was missing something, or all the pieces didn’t fit together. It was a small thing, but I figured I have to mention something critical in this praise-fest if I’m to maintain any credibility.

One final note on the plot: Sanderson managed to put a couple of big old twists into the story that I didn’t see coming, which is always impressive. There was perhaps one item that I think might be a little plot hole, but I’m reading the book annotations now (which he has on his website, along with deleted/revised chapters – so cool!) and I’ll see if they clear up the problem. I do appreciate a story that manages to pull the wool over my eyes. Also, I managed to keep to my promise of mentioning Lies of Locke Lamora fewer than 5 times in this review, but let me be clear on one thing: while the genre and level of awesomeness in Mistborn are similar to Lies, they are very different books, especially in the scope of implications and world. Don’t let my comparisons make you think that they are in any way clones.

I finished Mistborn around 2:00 on Sunday afternoon. By 4:00 I had gone to the bookstore and bought the sequel, and I chewed out 100 pages of it amid my other Sunday evening festivities. This is the first time in a while that I immediately picked up Book 2 in a trilogy without needing a breather – I very much hope that the rest of the trilogy delivers.

The bottom line: get this book. Read it now. I was late to the party on this one, but it’s definitely a staple of new fantasy releases that you need to read. Is my recommendation resounding enough?

[Lisa’s Take] Hand of Isis (Jo Graham)

2009-04-16T13:35:00.001-05:00

Last year two brand new authors each released their first book. Jo Graham’s Black Ships and Jonathan Barnes’ The Somnambulist both blew me away and made it solidly onto my “top 5 books of 2008” list, along with two other first time authors (Galen M. Beckett and J. M. McDermott, if you’re curious). Within the last couple of months, Graham and Barnes each released a second novel – you can imagine my surprise and delight, both at the quick turnaround and that so many great new authors were succeeding.

I tore through Barnes’ new book in a day. I was a little disappointed – it was ok, but not great. I’m no good at delayed gratification, so I turned immediately to Graham’s new release, Hand of Isis, hoping author #2 could fix me up. Sadly I ended up being doubly disappointed: I’m now 0-2 on second books by promising new authors this year.

Hand of Isis is a re-telling of Cleopatra’s life story from the perspective of one of her handmaidens (though handmaiden is a bit misleading, given the strength and power that said sidekick wields). While it has some vague ties back to Graham’s first book (implications of characters reborn, old souls, and repeated destinies) it stands on its own as a story. There is a lot of good to be said about the book – the descriptions and portrayal of the world are absolutely lush, and the amount of research Graham put into this book might be even more impressive than the research she did for Black Ships. The character relationships were strong and poignant, and her interweaving of magic and gods with the established belief system of the time was very impressive.

Now for the less good bits. The most compelling part of Black Ships was Graham’s strong characterizations. You really got to know all of her main characters at a very deep and emotional level – thus why I ended up sobbing over the last chapter at lunch time. However, in Hand of Isis the characters weren’t as solid – I’m not positive what caused this problem, but I think in part it had to do with the idea that the main characters were reborn versions of the main players in Black Ships. I didn’t remember their quirks and defining features well enough to project them onto their reborn counterparts, and Graham didn’t spend time re-developing them. As a result – no big emotional connection.

The second problem I encountered was in the book’s pacing. The first third of the book was excellent and moved along very swiftly. The last third also was filled with action and major plot points that kept me reading. The middle third, however, dragged horribly. While Graham excels at relationships and world building, she really fell down on the political aspects, and the middle of the book read like a litany of politically-based, distant actions. It made for a very underwhelming middle of the book, and did a lot to lessen my overall opinion of the story. If I’d gone into the final section less grumpy, I imagine my review for Hand of Isis would be much more glowing.

This third item might be me feeling touchy, but I feel like Hand of Isis seemed a little “romance novel” in sections. I’ve seen at least one other author go from “promising new fantasy author” to “relegated to the romance section” and I’d hate for Graham to head that direction. That said, I did very much approve of her portrayal of sexuality and love, in all of it’s not-quite-standard forms. I know it sounds like a weird dichotomy to say that I liked her approach to sexuality but that some of the relationships seemed like a romance novel… but there it is. I honestly can’t think of a good way to clarify.

Finally, I touched upon a similar idea in my review of The Domino Men, but I think the world in Cleopatra was a little too “real” for me. In Black Ships I wasn’t at all familiar with the historical period Graham based her story in, so it felt to me like straight up fantasy. It’s pretty much impossible not to know a bit about ancient Egypt and the world of Cleopatra, though, so Hand of Isis really felt like historical fantasy, rather than “fantasy” fantasy… which always decreases my enjoyment a bit. Entirely a personal bias, and not at all the author’s fault.

So all in all Hand of Isis was fairly balanced between things I liked and things that were gripes, but my high expectations meant that I had further to fall from the disappointments. Unless you’re particularly a fan of Jo Graham, I’d say skip Hand of Isis and just read Black Ships – the latter of which I do highly recommend. I’ll definitely be keeping my eye on Jo Graham’s work and I’ll no doubt be excited when she releases her next book, in hopes that it will make it up to the level of her first release.

[Lisa's Take] The Domino Men - Jonathan Barnes

2009-04-11T19:05:00.004-05:00

The Somnambulist was one of the top 5 books I read last year, so you can imagine my excitement when JD came home with a copy of Barnes' new book, The Domino Men. He sent me a picture of it when he found it in the book store - as I hadn't even known Barnes was working on a new book, you can imagine the sort of thrilled noise I made.

Anyway, I think JD did a fine job describing the gist of The Domino Men in his review, so I'll cut straight to the chase.

Domino Men was good, but not great - not even in the same league as The Somnambulist, though to say so is definitely rooted in my own bias against "real world" settings. Unlike the Victorian and slightly Steam Punk setting of The Somnambulist, Barnes' latest endeavor is set in the same world, but modern day. Maybe it's just not "fantasy" enough for me, but whenever too much realism sneaks into my books my opinion immediately turns south.

The book also didn't seem as nuanced as I would have hoped - as JD mentioned, there was much less an air of mystery. Most of the plot was predictable and I called nearly all the major twists. I wasn't a huge fan of most of the characters, and though they were constantly suggested to be great schemers and mad geniuses, these aspirations were only thinly realized in the plot. I will admit that I made a decided sound of glee when The Domino Men came on screen (on page?) but few of the other players elicited such a response.

That said, I finished The Domino Men in one day (admittedly a day where I wasn't feeling great, so I did nothing but sit about and read all evening). Barnes' best feature as an author is his ability to write a damn good narrator - much like in The Somnambulist, my favorite character was the snarky, acidic narrative voice that starts breaking into the main character's accounting a few chapters into the book.

This powerful and entertaining voice coupled with Barnes' ability to keep a plot racing meant that while The Domino Men wasn't as good as its predecessor and wasn't quite my cup of tea... I very much enjoyed it. I'm thrilled that Barnes' fist novel was successful enough to merit a second, and I look forward to his future work (and hopefully work with a less futuristic setting).

[Lisa’s Take] (Song of Isaak Book 1) Lamentation – Ken Scholes

2009-04-07T10:36:00.002-05:00

I’ve felt a little “meh” about the last few books I read, so I was looking for something really stellar to get me out of my funk. Based solely on the recommendation of Jeff over at Fantasy Book Reviews I decided to pick up Lamentation. No questions, no research – I didn’t even read the jacket flap, just picked it up and added it to the stack.

Granted that didn’t stop JD from reading the jacket flap, and then he almost talked me out of buying the book. I know better than to put any stock in jacket-flap descriptions, but with text like the following I was almost scared off by the level of triteness packed into a few sentences:

An ancient weapon has completely destroyed the city of Windwir. From many miles away, Rudolfo, Lord of the Nine Forest Houses, sees the horrifying column of smoke rising. He knows that war is coming to the Named Lands. Nearer to the Devastation, a young apprentice is the only survivor of the city – he sat waiting for his father outside the walls, and was transformed as he watched everyone he knew die in an instant. Soon all the Kingdoms of the Named Lands will be at each others' throats, as alliances are challenged and hidden plots are uncovered.

I mean… wow. Do you get more hackneyed than that? Named Lands. Kingdoms at war. Ancient weapon. Orphaned Apprentice. Hidden plots. Check! We’ve hit all of the standard fantasy tropes with nothing that sounds even slightly original. It didn’t help that when I took the dust-cover off the book was kind of a mauve-ish-pink color, so coupled with the title it kind of looked like I was reading a romance novel. Still, in spite of JD’s skepticism I held my ground and started Lamentation as soon as I got home.

I’m very pleased that I did. I won’t say that Lamentation blew my socks off – it didn’t bowl me over like Last Dragon or delightfully surprise me like The Magicians and Mrs. Quent – but it did prove to be far less trite than the description suggested, and definitely worth the read. The world is an original combination of fantasy mishmashed with sci-fi and a touch of steampunk, and the characters a fantastic balance of vibrant and subtle. I found myself instantly attached to all of the major POV characters, though I’ll admit that Scholes did touch on my pet peeve of establishing X-number of POVs then throwing in a random +1 from time to time. I certainly don’t mind prologues or epilogues that diverge from POVs, but random chapters thrown in irk me, as it really breaks off the close relationship and flow that sucks you into the main POVs. Very minor gripe, and I can see why he felt the need to switch it up to cover all the major action.

In addition to the great characterization, I loved how evocative Scholes’ prose was. While he didn't use any particularly exciting words or flowing sentence structure that characterizes some of my favorite books, he still managed to draw me in with his descriptions. Scholes created a very rich world of sights and smells and tastes - so rich that I’ve been on a stint of drinking sweet chilled white wines (both while reading Lamentation and well afterwards) because of his meal descriptions. Oh, and did you know that girls’ breath always smells like apples? Sorry – random silly thing that caught my attention and I latched onto it. Twice in the book Scholes described women’s breath as apple-scented, and it struck me as chuckle-worthy.

Perhaps the thing I appreciated most about Lamentation was the fact that Scholes didn’t insult his readers’ intelligence. When it said “Hidden Plots” it really meant it, and Scholes doesn’t feel the need to over-explain or treat you like a 4-year-old. He tells the story with all its intricacies, and you’d damn well better be paying attention if you want to put it all together. I appreciated the chance to engage my brain.

I ended lamentation with a renewed purpose when it comes to completely disregarding jacket descriptions, and a new appreciation for blindly following the recommendations of other geeky fantasy bloggers. Though there were a few first-time-author hiccoughs, Lamentation was still more evocative and intriguing than most of the other fantasy novels I’ve read this year. I’m definitely looking forward to finishing the rest of the series.

[Micro Review] JD's Take: Clay's Ark (Octavia Butler)

2009-04-06T11:48:00.002-05:00

Heroic(?) sex criminal astronaut fights alien invasion... in the form of sexy mind-control virus.

I enjoyed this. It was an interesting take on invasion and free will both, and was short enough that "thought experiment" isn't a condemnation. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon, basically.

[Micro Review] JD's Take: The Graveyard Book (Neil Gaiman)

2009-04-06T11:45:00.003-05:00

Boy raised by ghosts after brutal murder of his entire family. Copes.

Young adult? Maybe. Awesome? Hell yes. Gaiman's usual excellence in imaginative writing is on full display here, this is probably my favorite of his novels. Until I reread Stardust. Or Neverwhere. Shit. It's really good though.

JD's Take: Glass Books of the Dream Eaters (Gordon Dahlquist)

2009-04-06T08:19:00.002-05:00

I'm certain that Lisa's Take will give you more detail, but here are my thoughts...

I didn't really want to like this book. Well, that's not entirely true. Rather, I should say that after the first 30 pages I was pretty convinced that I wasn't going to like this book. I even put it down for several months at that point. Here's why: The first section of this book feels like a Victorian romance novel. Although entertainingly written, it had me utterly convinced that I was about to have to sit through nearly 800 pages of a poor repressed woman's burgeoning sexuality in the hands of her whip weilding new lover(s). Seriously. I challenge you to read 35 pages and think otherwise.

So a few months pass, and I pick the book back up because Lisa *insists* it's worth my time. She tells me that I need to at least read the first point of view chapter for each of the three characters. This was a very sneaky thing to tell me, it turns out, since that takes you about 300 pages. Sneaky or not it was good advice, though in truth I was thoroughly hooked by the beginning of the second character. The writing is phenomenally entertaining, and the characters are unique and engaging.

First you have Celeste, who manages to not burgeon after all, which is probably for the best. She's a strong character who does not, in truth, take shit from anyone. Next we have "Cardinal" "Chang" a mercenary of a philisophical bent with a snazzy coat and very little sense of self preservation. Finally, we've got Doctor Svenson. He's not a great secret agent as it turns out, but a dandy doctor and entertainingly conflicted about everything he's ever encountered. The three of them, for reasons that are tenuous when viewed out of context, get involved in a plot to take over the world using Creepy Science. Hijinx ensue.

This isn't the first book I've read recently that I was tempted to describe as a book about sex in which nobody actually has any, but in this case the description is unfair. Better to say that this is an awesome Victorian adventure/mystery/fantasy novel with some sexual overtones. The pace of the book never lets up despite its intimidating length, the characters are consistant and fun, the world is fascinating, the fantasy elements are introduced sneakily and blend into the world seamlessly.

Basically, I highly recommend it.

[Lisa’s Take] The Book of Lost Things (John Connolly)

2009-03-27T14:55:00.000-05:00

Imagine The Wizard of Oz: a young child experiences trauma and gets whisked away to an alternate, magical world inside his brain. Instead of munchkins and scarecrows, mix in a handful of well known fairy tales – the gruesome Brothers Grimm versions, not the squeaky clean Disney kind. Add a dash of philosophical dithering on destiny and growing up, and you pretty much have a solid picture of the plot and themes in The Book of Lost Things.

It’s a really promising premise, and John Connolly delivers a solid book. The plot moves along nicely; his takes on the classic fairy tales are interesting, dark, and sometimes humorous. And yet... I’m having a hard time coming up with the rousing endorsement that you’d think would logically follow. I’m not really sure what the cause of the disconnect is – I just didn’t get as caught up in the plot and characters and stories as I wanted to be.

I suspect there are a couple of contributing factors here – first is that I’ve read Tad Williams Otherland books, which are really the master work in fantasy when it comes to taking existing folk and fairy tales and mashing them up. Once you’ve seen it done so well, it makes later works feel less original; much like trying to go back and read Neuromancer after reading contemporary cyberpunk.

The other problem is that my internal heuristic for when the book would end was thrown off in The Book of Lost Things. You know how when you’re reading a book you get a feeling for the pacing of the end of the story by how many pages you have left? If you have 20 pages left to turn, you figure “wow, the end is really near! Things are going to happen quickly!” but if you have 100 pages left, you think “this can’t be the big climax – I still have chapters and chapters to read!” Unbeknownst to me, The Book of Lost Things had about 100 pages of author interviews, reprintings of the original fairy tales, and discussions of the author’s use of the tales. So as I was nearing the end of the story, I kept thinking I had a hundred pages left, so surely there would be so much more to tell—then I turned the page and it was over and I was confused and disappointed.

Neither of these items is really Mr. Connolly’s fault – only my own preconceptions and expectations coloring my enjoyment of the book. As such, I’ll neither recommend nor discourage you from reading this book. I think it could be enjoyable and entertaining (perhaps even rewarding) to the right reader in the right mindset, and I think it was a good work – just not for me right at this moment.

[Lisa’s Take] The Nessantico Cycle Book 2: A Magic of Nightfall (S. L. Farrell)

2009-03-24T10:10:00.003-05:00

Even though my reaction to A Magic of Twilight was rather lukewarm, when I saw A Magic of Nightfall in the bookstore I was excited and picked it up right away. For all of the flaws in book 1 it still left me wanting more, so Nightfall got prioritized pretty quickly in my stack.

I’ll say one thing for A Magic of Nightfall – it’s ballsy. Book 1 didn’t exactly end of a cliffhanger, but it did leave off in the midst of some action, and I was fully expecting Book 2 to pick up right where that action left off. Farrell, however, had other ideas, and Nightfall starts after about a 25 year gap in time. Needless to say, I was quite surprised…. but Farrell pulled it off pretty well. I was impressed by how naturally and organically the jump in time was executed. The characters had all aged and changed and developed in the intervening period, and I think the gap was necessary to move the story a long and really take it to the epic level that Farrell was aiming for.

Speaking of ballsy, the author makes a couple of moves within the first few chapters that left my jaw hanging open – I won’t elaborate since it would be impossible to do so without spoilers, but I will say that Farrell really stepped up to the plate and showed that he’s not afraid to take charge of his characters. Very Martin-esque in that regard.

For all the panache and promise that Nightfall started out with, I had high hopes for the book. Unfortunately, a lot of my gripes from the first novel wormed their way back into play. The biggest trouble surrounded characterization, yet again. Much like in Twilight, I didn’t feel all that attached to any of the characters and I felt like they had some inconsistencies. Farrell did a better job this time around of making his characters motivations make sense (and some of the motivational ambiguities from the 1st book were cleared up), but I just didn’t feel an emotional “umph” around any of the characters. Even some of the characters that I had started to sympathize with in the first book just didn’t quite make a connection with me during book 2. It was frustrating – I wanted to be emotionally wrapped up in the characters and their plight, but there was just something missing.

Character gripes aside, the story itself was (much like the first book) pretty solid, pretty engaging, and pretty good.
“Pretty” is cropping up a lot in this review – I should work on my synonyms. Fairly solid. Somewhat engaging. Moderately interesting. Reasonably good. A decent variety of words to express how I felt about the other aspects of the story. It had a nice ebb and flow with good buildups and lulls, all climaxing towards a solid finish. That said, by the end of the book I was kind of ready for it to be over. I raced through the last 80 pages not because I was on edge about how the story would end, but because I just wanted it to be done with already. I think this might be a personal problem, rather than a problem with the book itself – I do know better than to load too much epic fantasy into one month, so it may be that I just didn’t get enough variety in literature the last few weeks since I packed in both Twilight and Nightfall.

Well. A lot of that text sounds mediocre-to-negative, but believe it or not, A Magic of Nightfall was a good book. If you enjoyed A Magic of Twilight you’ll certainly enjoy its sequel, and (like me) will probably appreciate some of the polish to the characters and the risks that Farrell was willing to take as an author. I very much approve of the epic scope the Nessantico Cycle, and I look forward to seeing where the author takes his readers for book 3 – since just at this moment I have no idea where the plot could be headed! The bottom line: read it, but maybe give yourself a sufficient breather between books 1 and 2. Fill the gaps with some nice funny Pratchett or clever Doctorow, then be ready to plot head-long into the more dense epic fantasy that Farrell provides.

[Lisa’s Take] Last Watch (Sergei Lukyanenko)

2009-03-11T09:54:00.001-05:00

I kind of never thought this book would come out in the US. After all of the drama with the movie side of things, and after the release date getting pushed back so many times, I had pretty much given up hope on ever getting to read the final book in the Night Watch series. I was down about it, but more or less resigned to my fate.

So you can imagine the sound I made when I saw Last Watch on the shelf – or rather the string of excited curses that were entirely inappropriate for a quiet little bookstore, but that escaped before I could contain myself. This was the 3rd fantasy release in a week that caught me totally off guard, and definitely the most thrilling of the 3.

It occurs to me that many people might not be familiar with this little gem of the fantasy, so let me explain a bit. The Night Watch quartet is a series of books by Russian fantasy author Sergei Lukyanenko. They qualify for my mental niche of “massively multi-genre fantasy.” The books are set in modern day Russia, so they have a dash of “urban fantasy.” The books are built on the premise that in addition to humans, there are people who are called Others who have other-worldly powers. These Others fall into two factions – Light Others and Dark Others. The Light Ones have the powers that we usually equate with high fantasy – witches, prescience, healing, spell casters. The Dark Ones have powers from the “fantasy horror” end of the spectrum – vampires, werewolves, dark wizards. A truce was made between the Light and Dark to prevent them from warring each other into oblivion, and the Night Watch was set up as a coalition of Light Ones to watch over and monitor the Dark Ones, while the Day Watch was set up as a coalition of Dark Ones to monitor the Light Ones. Maintaining the balance of power is paramount, and the main character spends a lot of time playing a political balancing game while philosophizing about the nature of good and evil. Add that dash of political fantasy and philosophy, and you have a book series that touches on practically every fantasy sub-genre there is.

The books garnered enough claim in Russia to inspire a movie that smashed all sorts of nation-wide box office records. In 2004 the movie was subtitled for an English audience (with awesomely engaging text, I might add – lots of interesting after-effects and interplay with the on-screen action). It was pretty well received, though it never saw more than a limited release in independent theaters. The film did well enough to secure the US-release of the second movie, Day Watch, which also gained the attention of Fox Searchlight. Good old Fox secured the rights to the 3rd movie and promptly ditched most of the original cast and ran the project into the ground.

Luckily, the movies did well enough to inspire Miramax to pick up the novels, translate, and publish them in the US. I loved the movies for their somewhat bizarre, abrasive, but engaging approach to dark fantasy, and I especially loved their take on magic. As such, when I saw the books on the shelves I picked them up right away. I never got around to writing full reviews for any of the books in the series, but I figured that I should at least highlight them in this blog as I finished up the final installment.

I really can’t say enough good about the Night Watch books – they are an incredibly fresh breath of air amidst all of the ho-hum, been-there-done-that fantasy on the market these days. They make me wish that the US saw more foreign translations, because it’s just a marvelous experience. The premise of the series at first glance seems a little “comic bookish” (not to disparage any of the excellent graphic novels out there) but the deep characterizations and human aspects of the main characters, as well as the keen examination of “good” and “bad” really elevates the whole shebang to a higher level. For all their depth the books still read incredibly quickly, but manage to be both emotionally engaging and have a dash of self-aware humor that keeps it interesting. All four books are great, but I will say that Last Watch was the strongest, and finished off the series on a high note for me.

Well, this has gotten longer than I expected, so I’ll wrap it up. Procure these books. Read them all in a long weekend. They’re so very worth it, and a great change from the established fantasy norm in the US. Also, if you happen to read them without seeing the movies first, I’d love to hear your feedback, as I’m not sure how much my prior exposure to the films influenced my opinions. Happy reading!

[Lisa's Take] The Black Company - Glen Cook

2009-03-08T17:40:00.002-05:00

Allow me to start off this review by saying, loudly and passionately: Damn it. I'll get back to why in a moment.

The Black Company is a dark, gritty, military fantasy following a group of elite mercenaries as they are pulled into a struggle between good-- well, no, not good. Between evil and potentially more evil. Published in 1984, The Black Company is definitely one of the pioneers of the military fantasy genre and it wouldn't surprise me if a number of current authors who are a fan of R-rated gray fantasy (*cough* Joe Abercrombie *cough*) looked to this series for inspiration.

I'll admit that even though The Black Company only clocks in a little over 200 pages, it took a bit to engage me. The first 3 or so chapters read as though they came out of a magazine serialization - repeating of character information we'd already been presented with, odd re-stating of plot points in each chapter, and a very story-like quality to the chapters, with each presenting its own introduction, conflict, and resolution. This seemed to abate a bit by the mid-point of the book - either that or I just got used to it.

As I mentioned, The Black Company clocks in at about 218 pages. Today so much fantasy seems to be judged on the thickness of the book, rather than the quality between the covers - and this book pointed out to me just how much I've fallen victim to the stereotype of "thicker is better." When I picked up The Black Company I assumed it was a big, fat tome of a fantasy novel, but discovered that it was actually the first 3 books of the series republished in one volume. I immediately soured on the book, but continued reading - and I'm extremely glad I did. Cook manages to pack more plot, conflict and characterization into 200 pages than most contemporary authors do in 500. He has a way of laying out the plot in what seems a stark, plain telling, but that in reality has layers of implications and a lot of depth. When I first started reading I actually had a hard time because I was charging through the text so fast that I was missing important plot details - he really expects you to pay attention to every word, every sentence, and every character nuance. Cook trusts his reader's intelligence and plows ahead through the major plot points assuming you'll be able to keep pace.

At first I was a little put off by the stark styling of The Black Company, but by the end of the first book I found myself very emotionally engaged. I didn't mean to start in on the second book right away, but I was 10 pages in before I realized what I was doing. Somehow, unbeknownst to me, Cook had tied me up in his characters - made them deep and complex and compelling in spite of the spare words used to describe them. The fantasy genre has changed a lot in the 25 years since Cook published the first book in The Black Company, but I think a lot of contemporary authors could take a couple of pages from Glen Cook's book (so to speak).

Now - back to why I started this review off with a bit of passionate cursing. From the time The Black Company really hooked me, about half way in, I kept having a niggling sensation that it felt a lot like The Book of Amber (10 short fantasy novelettes published in one big omnibus. Well worth reading). However, I kept assuring myself that this was only a trilogy - after all, I had all 3 books in one volume! Then I started this review and did a bit of digging about the books' history and discovered that The Black Company is, in fact, the first of 10 books. I didn't mean to throw myself head long into another huge series, dammit! (read: Woohoo! I have another 9 books to enjoy!)

Goodness, this review really go lengthy, given the relative shortness of the book in question. The bottom line here is that in spite of its bumpy start The Black Company is a really great read.

[JD's Take] Domino Men (Jonathan Barnes)

2009-02-27T14:55:00.005-05:00

Wooo! Barnes wrote another book! This is the good fellow who brought us The Somnambulist, which I loved. It was a great pulpy Victorian mystery with a healthy smattering of the occult, the supernatural, the alien, and the downright weird.

Domino Men is set in the same world as The Somnambulist, something that took me a while to figure out since the time has been moved forward to modern day London. Still, even my legendarily bad memory was prodded before too many chapters had passed me by, which was a nice surprise. I have now ruined that surprise for you. Sorry.

Though some of the players are the same, this is a very different novel. It's less a mystery and more a horror story. Not one of those namby-pamby horror stories you get these days. There are no evil dogs or sleep deprived men wielding axes. This is more like Lovecraft with a decidedly British bent (you'll get to a point in the story, stop reading, and think "did Adams write this?". Honest!) and less of the racism. It ignores literary tropes, classic story arcs and the like. You know from the beginning how it will end (more or less), and then it does (more or less). Though he kept some elements from The Somnambulist (a surprise narrator, for instance!) it's clear that this isn't so much a sequel[0] as another story in the same world.

The bad news: some of the characters were disappointing. There were at least two (maybe more like three) parties that were described, pretty much everywhere, as these elaborate schemers. Masters of the long game, slowly setting up their plots to change the fates of men and gods. That sort of thing. None of that really... came up though? Like they set up all these elaborate plans and they were largely totally meaningless. I'd tell you more, but I think I'd spoil some things. However, to prod my memory after you read it, I'll give you keywords[whited to avoid minor spoilers]: [glass gun][old man waking up][domino men]. Here's the counter-argument keyword: [child actors].

That kind of segues to my other complaint, which is that nobody's actions ever seemed to make any difference. The story reads as a series of things happening to the world, and then resolving themselves, and none of the many character's many actions mean a damn. Of course, that plays into the whole Lovecraft thing, so it might be a wash.

In any case, I thoroughly enjoyed the solid writing, the engrossing story, the imaginative world. Though not a perfect gem, it's still a worthy use of your time and money, and I recommend it.

[0] Actually, my memory is bad enough that the events in this book *might* have been set up in the first, but I don't think so.

[Lisa’s Take] A Magic of Twilight (S. L. Farrell)

2009-02-27T13:56:00.001-05:00

I wasn’t overly impressed by the first S. L. Farrell book I reviewed, so I haven’t been going out of my way to pursue his work. But a couple of weeks back I found myself on a business trip having grossly underestimated the number of books I needed to keep me entertained, so I had to hit the airport bookstore (which are hardly known for their impressive fantasy selection). Pickins’ were slim, so I went with an author that I knew would probably be at least marginally entertaining, and ended up with A Magic of Twilight.

A Magic of Twilight reads a lot like something by Jennifer Fallon, which is to say that it’s solid political fantasy with good characterizations and plenty of drama, betrayal, and intrigue. The setup is pretty classic for this sub-genre: there are POV characters, a magic system, governmental factions at odds, strong but aging monarchs, and persecuted minorities. Hmm. I’m making a lot of lists, which never codes well for the overall tone of my review. Let me skip to some details.

Characters, delicious characters! First and foremost, I have a question. What is it with S. L. Farrell and sexually abused young girls? Sorry, I just had to put that out there – both books I’ve read by him have involved exploitative sex, which seems an odd recurring them. Anyway, glib questions aside, there was good and bad to be had in regards to the characters in A Magic of Twilight. My biggest complaint is that while there were a whole handful of PoV characters, only one or two of them really felt all that real. Even though we were inside a lot of different heads, the tone and emotions didn’t change very much. The only truly distinct voices where Dhosti and Ana (and later the commandant), which is a shame since they all had so much potential.

The other big character gripe I had is that… hmm. How to express this. I feel like the author wanted to create “gray” characters, rather than ones that were distinctly black and white, good and evil. This worked out ok with one or two characters, but with some of them it just made them seem wishy-washy or underdeveloped. I feel like Farrell needed to establish a stronger character personality baseline before he tried to muddy the waters with ambiguity. Still – all of that said, the characters managed to be interesting and engaging. I was emotionally invested in their wellbeing, and I found myself picking rather unexpected favorites towards the end of the book.

The story itself was quite good, though for the most part it can be codified down into major political fantasy archetypes. Regardless, it was still entertaining, and save for a lull in the middle it moved along quickly. There was one particularly neat aspect: I felt like most books would have stretched the first half of the book longer, and ended it at the major plot turning point near the middle of the book. AMoT kept that first half more condensed instead, and moved along from said Big Plot Point into a whole second chunk of story. It was kind of cool, and definitely shook up what I expect from the standard “trilogy” breakdown. I’m really interested to see where book 2 goes.

I do have one serious gripe about the plot: without being too revealing, the “big twist” at the end put a sour note on the entire book for me. I felt like it broke a couple of characterizations, lacked motivation, and was included more as a way to make the reader want book 2, than as a well considered story progression. Honestly if not for the last few pages the tone of this review would have been much more positive overall – but finishing that way put me in a grumpy place.

Regardless, for all of the negatives I found to harp on, I did enjoy A Magic of Twilight. I may not run out and buy the sequel immediately, but I’ll be looking to it to tide me over until the next Jennifer Fallon book makes it to US shores.

Lisa’s Take: The Sword (Deborah Chester)

2009-02-10T13:35:00.002-05:00

Ok, I’m going to state right up front that I didn’t give this book a particularly fair shot. Honestly I never intended to from the start. Call me a bad person and a naughty book reviewer, but it’s the truth. I’m doing my best this year to get some of the chaff cleared off my shelf, which means trying really hard to not pick up the newest, shiniest book that I just bought, but rather take out some things that have been sitting there for years.

I’m not actually sure how The Sword made its way onto my stack. I know that it cropped up new sometime during my junior year at Tech, so… about 6 years ago? It doesn’t look like something I’d buy – the back and first few pages are very trite, and there’s nothing about it that would have drawn my interest. Who knows, maybe I grabbed it solely because it was pretty and blue. Needless to say, its lack of immediately interesting features didn’t give me any particular compulsion to pick it up whenever I went back to the shelf for a new book.

Then last week I was packing for a business trip and feeling a little belligerent. General “I have to go out of town” testiness. I went over to my bookshelf and said “you know, I think I’m going to pick something that I know will be awful, just so I can write a particularly vicious review!” Like I said above, I wasn’t really looking to give anything a fair shot. So I picked up The Sword.

I gave The Sword my usual 100-page grace period, choking it down in a couple of hours one evening on my business trip. By the time I started it I was in less of a mood, so I was approaching it with a much more open mind, but the book was determined to live up to all of my preconceived notions. The plot could have been from an instruction manual about how to write a fantasy novel – some complex names, a king who gets predictably betrayed, elves, precocious children, terrifying beasts and handlers with mythical talents who can calm and harness them. Throw in a couple of magical artifacts and you’ve pretty much got a textbook fantasy plot.

It’s not really that there was anything particularly bad about the book… sure, the author’s description of the King’s body guard started as “protector” then moved to “possible betrayer” and finished up as “best friend in the entire world and I can’t believe he’s DEAD DEAD DEAD” but other than that one little bobble the plot and characters were consistent - just… very shallow. Chester toed the line of painting some evocative images, but always fell short because of her propensity for “telling” the reader, rather than showing them. The text was often a bit stilted and even when describing great beauty it didn’t flow. The result was a distinct lack of emotion for the characters and their peril on my part, and an overwhelmingly blasé reaction (is it even possible to be overwhelmingly blasé ? Seems like an oxymoron, but I don't know how else to describe it) when I reached the end of my 100 page trial.

So, there you have it: my completely unfair and biased appraisal of The Sword. If someone out there wants to speak up and tell me I made a mistake, I’ll be happy to pick it up and finish – I was left with the impression that if I had read a bit more the plot might have gotten meatier, but I just didn’t care enough to persevere. One more book knocked off my distressingly large stack, and probably -10 points to my reviewer credibility score! Hoorah!

Lisa’s Take: Tigana (Guy Gavriel Kay)

2009-02-02T16:51:00.000-05:00

Tigana has some issues. The author pulls some tense-switcheroos that are a device to try and pull the reader into the current action; these switches don’t work. The prose at times gets choppy. Kay sometimes puts his words to the paper in such a way that it’s hard to really sink into the text and go with the flow. The editor missed some seriously glaring grammatical issues. There was one minor plot hitch that seemed a teensy bit contrived. One of the characters rang ever-so-slightly untrue to me.

There. It’s out of my system. On to the more important point:

Tigana is a masterpiece.

Really. I don’t think I’ll be able to put together effusive enough text to describe how much I enjoyed this book, nor portray just how astoundingly impressive it was. I’d be starting this review off with text along the lines of “this may be the best book I’ve read this year,” except that since Tigana is the first book I finished in 2009, it just wouldn’t sound quite as impressive. Regardless, it has certainly set a high bar to reach for the other 59 books I’d like to finish this year.

The book’s prologue opens with a man sitting on the bank of a river on the eve of a battle. He’s reflecting on the fight to come and the sure defeat that he and his comrades face. In a few short pages, a mellow, soft, sweet mood is set, overlaid with both sadness and pride. It’s an impressively subtle setup, and was certainly a portent of the mastery with which the rest of the book would be presented. Fast forward some unspecified amount of time, and we start getting into the meat of the book – which is to say meeting all of the excellent characters. As these many and varied individuals are introduced, the underlying current of the story begins to be revealed: one of the provinces of The Palm, where the story takes place, has been magically erased from history due to the vindictive actions of a dictator. The story follows the cast as they work to free The Palm from the two wizards who hold it in thrall, and restore the name of their beautiful homeland.

I know, the wizard thing sounds a little hokey, but I assure you it’s presented with enough subtlety so as not to become clichéd. Magic as a whole in Tigana is a very understated thing – it simply exists as a part of society without the author (or the characters) needing to fixate on it and expound at length. Which leads me nicely to my next point. The word “subtle” keeps coming up in this review. The reason is that everything about Tigana is subtle. The ways the author introduces the characters. The definitions of good versus evil versus gray. The conflict and pain and plans and resolutions: Kay does a magnificent job subtly showing, painting, demonstrating all of these things without having to explicitly tell you so. It makes for a gorgeous and seamless depiction of his characters, story, and world.

Ok, ok, I’m kind of starting to wax philosophical, so I’ll try to bring things back on track here. The story was magnificent – it was personal but still had an epic feel to it, and it covered a reasonable passage of time. I absolutely loved getting a fully flushed out fantasy story that was in a single volume, rather than being broken up into a “trilogy” (air-quotes included due to the fact that so few fantasy trilogies these days are actually trilogies, but rather most a single volume broken into three chunks). The characters were gorgeously developed and easy to relate to, and so very real that the choices they faced left me feeling torn up inside. The book’s pacing was superb and it never lagged or stretched on too long, nor did it rush at any point. Finally, taking this review a little further than I usually do – the themes that Kay addressed in the book were much deeper and more profound than most fantasy novels dare take on. This exploration might have raised my bar for meaningfulness in fantasy.

The ending of the book left me aching and teary, but still bittersweetly happy and very satisfied. I don’t know what I expected from the end of this book when I started it, but Kay managed to both surprise and fulfill me in ways I couldn’t have anticipated. So, if you couldn’t tell – a couple of very minor knit-picks aside, I absolutely adored Tigana. I’m glad that I continued to read Kay’s work; I enjoyed Ysabel well enough, but it was nothing compared with the subtlety and mastery he exhibited in Tigana. I’ll definitely be picking up some more works by him soon.

Lisa’s Take: The King Raven Trilogy Book 2 – Scarlet (Stephen Lawhead)

2009-01-21T10:56:00.000-05:00

I’m posting this review close on the heels of my review for Hood because I don’t want anyone to get away with reading my Hood review and thinking that King Raven isn’t a trilogy worth reading. I’ll admit that after Hood I was a little ambivalent – the story dragged in places and my own preconceptions about the characters muddied the waters of the characterizations that Lawhead was trying to establish. Still, something about the book sparked a craving for more in me, so I picked up Scarlet a week or two later.

If I hadn’t read so many other Damn Good Books last year, Scarlet would probably make my top 5 list. I really, really enjoyed reading it, and I was quite grumpy when I finished it since book 3 (Tuck) isn’t out yet. Talk about a serious turnabout from book 1!

Scarlet takes a significantly different tack from Hood. Rather than being third-person-omniscient with a penchant for POV character profiles, Scarlet begins as a story told in the first person. Our narrator finds himself imprisoned, being forced to tell his jailor anything and everything about the current terror to king and crown – our very one Hood, who else? Will Scarlet is an immediately likable character for his wit – his manner of speaking and personal touches had me drawn in within a few pages. As the story progresses we find out how Will came to join Hood’s band, and the events that lead up to his capture and imprisonment.

Like the first book, the main flow of the story sometimes jumps over to another 3rd person POV character – it was a little more jarring in Scarlet than in Hood, since it broke up the smoothly flowing narrative, but overall I think it was a necessary decision to introduce conflict and suspense into the story. By the second half of the book the disjointed views synchronize, and the change was done very smoothly.

The second best thing about Scarlet was that it introduced several new characters – and knocked off a few that I never liked in the first book, anyway. It also started to get much more into the shenanigans and plots that you expect out of a good Robin Hood story. So much more happens in the second book than the first, it’s hard to believe that they’re really related.

Anyway, if it isn’t obvious by now, I truly enjoyed Scarlet and I’ll definitely be buying Tuck as soon as its out. I hope that book 3 can continue to live up to the high standard set!