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

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.

[Lisa’s Take] Boneshaker – Cherie Priest

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.

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

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.

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

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...]

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

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?

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

[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.