Posts about book review

Oct202012

October Reading: Murder Among the Fae

Urban fantasy has some common mainstays: a magical world lying next to ours (whether or not the mortals know it), a mystery to solve, usually by a character who is marked by both worlds.

I’ve read a lot of urban fantasy series in recent years, but nothing has quite grabbed me as tightly as the October Daye novels. Maybe it’s the fact that there’s nary a vampire nor werewolf in sight, or that October, Toby to her friends, routinely survives things that should kill her. Just when she gains some ground on a case, things get worse.

Craft-wise, McGuire has an excellent handling of exposition. She cloaks explanations of politics and world mechanics in cranky exchanges where the imparting character disdains Toby’s ignorance. This method helps her get the essential information across without taking the story out of the first person. McGuire draws heavily on Irish fairy lore, never leaving out the downright bizarre. She veers a bit into Kim Harrison’s turf with her take on pixies in the first book, but she quickly recovers and distinguishes herself by focusing on more intriguing elements.

As a half-breed changeling, Toby is too fay for the mortal world but will never be pureblood enough to live happily ever after with the fairies. While she’s a knight with a powerful liege lord, her own magic is so faint that’s she’s regularly overpowered. Her allies are often compromised, with conflicting obligations and motivations that make them less than trustworthy. McGuire hooked me right away with an early, outlandish twist in book one. She soon followed it up with a shooting scene that captured the sense fading life better than anything I’ve read. The stakes stay high and nothing comes for free. Toby bleeds a lot, and she often loses it all, giving you the sense that she’s not going to make it. This keeps the tension high, and when she gains traction, whether in her case and her personal life, you just know it could all fall apart without a moment’s notice.

Like a lot of series, the tension peaks though the books keep going. The first five books weave and resolve multiple threads, leaving Toby with an important dilemma in the sixth that just can’t feel quite as crucial. That’s no fault of McGuire’s, and you simply can’t sustain crisis levels of tension (Harrison hit a similar plateau in her ninth Hollows book, which made the tenth a bit of a letdown). Plots aside, McGuire gets better and better at her craft. While I found the plot of the second novel, a Local Habitation, the weakest, she’s redeemed it by incorporating the mystery’s outcome into her ever-expanded world. Book three, an Artificial Night, is outright spooky.

I picked up the first book, Rosemary and Rue on a whim, like I often do with books and once I started I couldn’t put it down or stop recommending it.

Jan132012

Historical Mysteries Out Among the Stars


Big ideas are the foundation of a great Science Fiction story. Where fantasy enchants, science fiction inspires. I know I’ve enjoyed the read when I put down a Sci Fi book and find my brain spinning as I ponder the implication of a technology or social development.

Science Fiction isn’t an easy sell these days. Most agents won’t touch it and few publishers show interest. In a time when fantasy is thriving, largely due to the urban, Science Fiction is languishing. I suspect that a large part of the issue is that Sci Fi is often inaccessible. It isn’t easy on the brain, and stories based on science can be dull.

A good science fiction story needs neither aliens nor lasers (look at Battlestar Galactica) to work. Not that I’m opposed to aliens and lasers. I am after all, a devoted Farscape fan who never got over its cancellation, but it’s depth I’m seeking in a good science fiction novel. I want that feeling of my brain spinning, of big ideas looming on the horizon, and of course I want to be entertained.

Jack McDevitt’s Alex Benedict novels give me all of these things in a slick package. Alex isn’t the most highly regarded guy around: an antique dealer accused of damaging historical sites, he’s nevertheless very good at his profession. McDevitt made a good turn when he switched the point of view in the books from Alex to his partner Chase. She’s a more dynamic character and being out of the loop of Alex’s brilliant insights, is more relatable for the reader.

McDevitt places a juicy mystery at the heart of each novel, and it’s usually something Alex and Chase stumble into on their way to something else. The reveal is always bigger than life, though the victory is occasionally bittersweet.
My original intent in reading this series was to read one, review it, then read another; but I became so entranced that I ripped through the series in a couple of weeks.

I enjoyed Polaris, but find that the books get better with time.* Seeker, with its discussion of the role of history in contemporary life, captivated me. McDevitt seasons the plot with questions on government and politics. The place of religion in a cosmos where man has spread out among the stars is a major theme in all of the books, particular in Firebird, but I think my favorite so far has been the Devil’s Eye. It has everything I love in Science Fiction: the big idea, a terrible secret buried by authority, remote stellar outposts, and even an appearance by McDevitt’s one alien species, the telepathic mutes. The Devil’s Eye delves into the tensions we all face with our governments and our place in things. All of the books use quotes to start new chapters, usually these are from future books McDevitt has created. The Devil’s Eye draws heavily on a series of horror novels, and McDevitt uses them to inject some commentary on the art of writing into things.

*There’s a point I’d like to make on this, which is that mid-list authors are struggling these days. A lack of high sales is pushing a lot of writers out of writing and it’s unfortunate. McDevitt is a perfect example of a talent that needed time to mature, and he’s a great example of tenacity too.

Jan22012

Faith and Fantasy: Why You Should Read the Curse of Chalion

I was raised with a strict ban on magic, during the 80s when people thought playing Dungeons and Dragons might cause you to kill yourself. Mike Warnke’s the Satan Seller was required reading in our house, and there lurked this terrible fear that Satanists and witches lurked around every corner, ready to maim or kill you. But by banning fantasy, my mother deprived us of a mirror that might have helped us think about good versus evil and our relationship to religion. Fantasy can open the mind, and theology, as it often arises in fantasy, can lead to deep discussions on the nature of faith.

It’s easy to ascribe a coincidence to divine intervention. You think of someone you haven’t seen for a while and run into them the next day, or the person you sit next to on a plane turns out to have been in your high school class. Coincidences often demonstrate that the world is truly a little place.

In fiction coincidences are common by necessity. A good plot relies on chance encounters, connections and events driven by nothing more than the need for them to happen. Connecting plot elements through coincidence can reduce the number of extra characters and help keep the reader interested.

In the Curse of Chalion, coincidence reflects the will of the gods and their limited ability to affect the actions of mankind. I’m going to try and discuss Lois McMaster Bujold’s technique without spoiling too much, but it may not be possible to avoid giving some key elements away. Bujold’s theology holds a logical depth that goes far behind the simplistic deus ex machina employed in so many stories. The gods struggle with their own goals, which might coincide with the goals of man, but in Chalion, the gods simply cannot work upon the world. They are barred by man’s free will. To effect a change upon the world, they must find an agent who’s willing to cast their own will aside. Most often this takes the form of characters who’ve been driven far beyond their limits. Their broken nature leaves them open to the gods’ use.

The Curse of Chalion ignores many of the typical fantasy devices: there are few action scenes or swordfights. Bujold could have chosen to tell the story of the handsome young prince new to his throne, or she could have focused on the Royess Iselle, a fascinating character who despite the limitations placed on her power by her gender, is a powerful young woman who finds ways of succeeding inside those limitations. Instead Bujold chooses for her protagonist Caz, a broken man in his thirties who’s middle-aged in his society. He arrives on the scene irrevocably changed by unfortunate circumstance, unable to lift pen or sword, poor and unrecognizable to even those few nobles who might remember him. From there Bujold weaves Caz into the politics of his day. Caz finds himself caring about more than mere survival again as his spirit heals from his terrible ordeals. Yet it’s not long before he’s once again pushed past his limits, and in that space, the broken man takes actions he never would have considered before.

The Curse of Chalion is a thoughtful fantasy, the sort of story that you ponder long after the book is closed. I put it down and immediately wanted to read more theology and philosophy.

Dec172011

The Magic in the Mundane: A Home at the End of the World


Genre fiction offers escape, entertainment, and release from the boring. Reading it, we spend time with vampires and witches, sexy wizards, and complex villains. Genre fiction is often bigger than life, with an almost comic book feel. Regular life, and literary fiction, don’t usually involve the fate of the world.

Instead, the best literary books amplify. They hold a lens up to simple, common experiences, and if written well, encourage us to see them in another light. A good book can take a cliché event, polish it off, and find a new facet we haven’t seen before. That facet, often something universal, strikes a chord with us because it reflects our own lives and experiences.

Michael Cunningham’s a Home at the End of the World is such a book. Transformative, it’s a book that revels in events that could be sentimental but resists painting them with those colors. Four points of view cross and overlap at just the right intervals. Big events in the characters’ lives often occur off screen, between points of view that highlight more important, more intimate moments. What shapes these characters isn’t the death of a parent, at least not by the end. Rather, they grow through the tiniest bit of personal introspection and struggle to explain this to one another.

At its core a Home at the End of the World is dealing with a particular existential malady, one we all feel: the sense that we’re waiting for our lives to start, even as life passes us by. Yet it doesn’t try to remedy this feeling. The characters move through the decades without a resolution until the very end, when Cunningham conjures an ending for them that perfectly reflects much earlier moments while showing us that the characters have truly found a change in their internal landscape.

I read a lot of good books. A Home at the End of the World is a truly great one.

Nov252011

A Mirror Too Dark?


I wasn’t too kind to Richard K. Morgan’s the Steel Remains when I read it, and yet I found myself eager for its sequel, the Cold Commands. What happened? The initial shock of Morgan’s brutal world wore off, and I saw past my expectations for his protagonists. I say protagonists, and not heroes, because there is often little about these characters that’s heroic. They don’t stride victoriously through Morgan’s world. They survive it, and what that takes out of them makes them often highly unlikeable people.

Morgan’s trio are war heroes who’ve seen better days. As in the first book, their separate plot lines eventually converge. Along the way the world gets built up from the foundations laid in the first volume. We learn history at the hands of a sentient, sarcastic, and possibly disingenuous machine. There’s raw sex and enough adult language to make the writers of Deadwood sit up and take notice. The gods multiply, remain enigmatic, and perplex with their deus ex machina intervention. Magic is madness-inducing, or possibly just madness on the part of its wielder; and the action is fierce and bloody. Morgan knows how to turn a phrase and some of the dialogue made me chuckle out loud.

Yet as I read the Cold Commands, I often found myself asking if a protagonist needs to be likable? The main doubt for me surrounds Ringil, the swordsman whose homosexuality makes him hated where he should be famed. Early in the book, Ringil pays a slaver back by allowing her repeated gang rape at the hands of the mercenaries under his command. This choice strongly overshadowed any pity I wanted to feel for Gil. Yet I still followed his story to the end.

I’ve often thought that good fantasy should hold a mirror up to life, provide us with questions we ask ourselves, and take us down roads that we’ll never follow in reality. Compelling characters cross lines, inside themselves, outside themselves, and we watch them do this out of admiration or shock.

Gil, and his companions, cross every line imaginable. While not likeable, Morgan’s trio are more proactive than many protagonists, and it makes them compelling. They make the hard choices, bleed for it, and most definitely don’t walk away unscathed.

I suspect I’ll ponder this book for a good while, just as I pondered its predecessor, and about the time third volume is ready for purchase, I’ll be ready for it.

Oct192011

There’s always a door that’s not to be opened…


There’s always a door that’s not to be opened.
A thing you promised you would not do.
A warning, unheeded, instinct ignored.
The person you said you wouldn’t become.
Not quite seen,
Chasing after you.

With autumn and the first snow looming over Colorado, I’m reading the Shining with a couple of friends. It’s my first exposure to Stephen King’s fiction, and I find myself looking over my shoulder and double checking the locks on the doors at night as he builds to the inevitable thing that’s coming for his characters.

I see now why King is considered a master of suspense: the three characters, a tight little family, struggle with their personal demons or limitations in the narrowing window of a looming external threat. What might be strengths in the outer world are turned against each character as they’re isolated and marooned amidst the deep mountain snowfields. Each is given multiple warnings as the plot advances, multiple hints that their course is unsafe, and each fails to heed the voice telling them not to go.

The son, Danny, has the strongest voice. Five years old, precocious and psychically gifted, he can’t read the warning signs as they’re presented to him. His age limits his vocabulary and understanding, preventing him from being able to communicate his dread or help his parents. Wendy, the mother, is haunted by the specter of her own hideous mother, and the fear of that woman overrides Wendy’s maternity and instinct for self-preservation. Jack, the father, a writer reminds me of the dark cave in the Empire Strikes Back: the demons he finds in the Overlook Hotel are the ones he brought with him, packed tight in the spacious hallways with his wife and son.

Bluebeard comes up more than once, and the reference is more than passing. There’s more than one door in the Overlook that should not be opened, whether it’s the hotel’s past, revealed in a morbid scrapbook Jack digs out of the hellish basement, the inner door to Danny’s burgeoning psychic powers in his own mind, or locked door to room 217: in which the question of whether the unreal things in the Overlook can truly harm you or not is answered.

King’s talent lies in a twisted form of magical realism where the mundane, and everyday things, can be deadly. I’ve never seen a better transformation of a simple thing, an old-fashioned fire hose, into something to fear. But this too, like Bluebeard’s tale, is something we can all remember when we were Danny’s age: things in the shadows that might be a lurking devil face. An item we first mistook for one thing that proved to be another. In reality, we always find the face was just a shirt hung to dry. In the Shining, it’s quite likely not a shirt at all. And that chill you felt, that sense that you can be hurt by something that first appeared quite innocuous? You should have listened to your instincts.

Oct182011

Saving the World One Parasol at a Time


I took a long road to my Lit degree: four schools in two states over fifteen years to be exact. While I earned my History degree somewhere inside that, I never felt like I’d finished my undergraduate schooling until the Literature degree was in my hand.

Every school attended found a reason to consider my knowledge of British Literature inadequate. In the end I completed six Brit Lit and two Brit Drama courses. I am well acquainted with Austen, Donne, Shakespeare, Marvel, and many others.

Reading Gail Carriger’s Alexia Taraboti novels takes me back to my Brit Lit immersion. I laugh out loud as she weds comedies of manners and paranormal romance with bits of steampunk window dressing and snappy dialogue.

Alexia is an outcast in Victorian society: half Italian, too big, and a spinster at twenty-five. Soulless, the first book, starts in media res with a vampire slaying whose silent victim is a treacle tart the voracious Alexia had been eyeing.

While the romance elements in the first book dive into the sexual (an essential component of paranormal romance), they are a culmination after a novel’s worth of awkward flirting which isn’t recognized as flirting for a long while.

My favorite element is the language: Carriger captures the Victorian overspeak and neatly weaves in facts I’d forgotten, like novels being considered lowbrow, popular, entertainment. Soulless has a bit of a mystery to its plot, as the vampire Alexia dispatches is neither registered nor part of the regular, well-dressed supernatural community permeating and ruling London society. Soulless is a satisfying read.

While I felt like Changeless, the second book, loses some of the first’s steam in a journey to Scotland, it does introduce an excellent new character and delves nicely into Alexia’s nature. More mysteries are set up, some of which aren’t resolved until the end of the fourth book, Heartless.

The third book, Blameless, continues the second’s book travel theme. Alexia flees to Italy, getting deeper into her own history and that of her rakish father. The chase, adventure, and conflict resolution is quite satisfying.

Fourth, and as strong as the first in my opinion, is Heartless. Several long boiling mysteries come to fruition. Alexia has physical challenges to her goals of protecting kin and country that I’d rather not spoil; but she manages it with the intensely pragmatic nature of the Soulless.

The series has me hooked, and I’m quite ready for the fifth, which is out next year. If you’re looking for a charming read with quick wit and a fun take on the tired paranormal tropes of vampires and werewolves, bring a cup of tea, take a seat, and spend some time in the world of the Soulless.

Sep32011

Bone Shake, Rattle and Roll



When her son takes off into the ruins of Civil War Seattle, Briar Wilkes packs up her father’s rifle, her gasmask, and her polarized goggles to go in search of the boy. But Seattle is walled off for a reason. A disaster brought the city low, infesting it with poison gas and the walking dead, a disaster caused by the husband Briar left for dead sixteen years ago. To get her son back, she’ll face all that and the specter of her past: a specter in the form of a man claiming to be her dead husband.

There’s an elegance in two points of view that tangle, overlap, and eventually converge. When it’s done correctly, you jump from train to train with a building sense that the two will soon collide. You wait with baited breath at every near miss. When the two finally come together, it feels organic, natural, and often explosive.

Boneshaker, by Cherie Priest, isn’t just a great steampunk read: it’s a well-oiled machine. Priest locks down every bolt as Briar and her son, Zeke, slide towards the conclusion. Secrets get dosed out in just the right amount, and Priest brings her alternate history alive without burying you in exposition or description. The first chapter, a little light on action and a bit heavy no backstory, get the necessities out of the way. From there Boneshaker hums along. We follow Briar’s desperate search for Zeke even as we’re treated to his perspective as he foolishly enters the ruined city. Priest slows things just right at the end, and the conclusion holds a few more surprises while feeling altogether natural.

Jul302011

Multiple Masks: Hero, by Perry Moore


Thom Creed is keeping two secrets from his father, and it’s a toss up on which one’s revelation will cause the most disappointment: Thom is gay, and he has superpowers. His father’s past as a masked crime fighter is responsible for one being a problem, his desire for a family legacy, the other. Yet Thom can’t help either fact. When an aborted runaway attempt brings him to the attention of the League, the world’s premier superhero team, Thom is soon juggling his own dreams against his father’s. Family secrets, including the cause of his mother’s disappearance will get outed, and Thom will have to choose between doing the right thing and losing his anonymity along with his father’s love.

Perry Moore’s Hero is yet another book, highly recommended, award-winning, and endorsed by no less than Stan Lee, that I’ve meant to read for a long while. I finally pulled it off the shelf this week and found myself deeply engrossed. It’s not often I finish a book, put it down, and contemplate immediately cracking it open again.

Hero draws a lot on themes of romance, being an outsider, and the search for a parent’s love and approval; but they’re given a good twist in the protagonist’s dual secrets. Moore weaves a world deeply inspired by those drawn by DC and Marvel. He lets the super-hero motif come to life with all the camp that spandex and capes imply. Moore writes frankly, imbuing Thom with honest commentary on his sexuality while perfectly capturing many awkward young adult moments. I cringed at a lot of these, because they often felt so genuine and familiar. The romance, a slow burn, is touching and difficult, as only first love can be. Thom’s need to be his own person while keeping his father’s respect is the central conflict, and it’s that issue which resonates the most.

Hero was especially hard to read knowing that Moore recently died and that we won’t be getting a follow up to Thom’s adventures or see any other great stories. I’m sad to see such a voice silenced so young and with so much potential. I will re-read Hero. It’s earned a permanent place on the shelf. This, and a strong recommendation, are the best testaments I can give.

Jul292011

Our Ancestors Were Us, but They Also Weren’t


“The past is a foreign country.” It’s a quote many of my History professors were fond of. What they meant of course is that the culture differences between us and say, the ancient Romans, are vast. Religious practices, sexual mores, familial relationships all might see familiar, but there’s a danger in ascribing modern perspectives to people who lived thousands or hundreds of years ago.

While accepting the differences, it’s also important to remember that they had the same minds, the same capacity for belief and treachery, love, and betrayal.

I’ve been a long time listener of Mike Duncan’s History of Rome podcast. It’s been a great way to remember details I’ve forgotten since my History degree and for filling in many blank spots. The audio book recommendations, couched in a plug for Audible.com, given at the start of each show have really rounded out my library. A recent fiction recommendation was the Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis, a Roman noir novel.

Marcus Didius Falco literally collides with a fresh case in the Forum. The girl he saves from a pair of thugs knows far less than the full plot, but Falco is soon protecting the lady while avoiding his landlord, an aggressive Aedile, and his overbearing mother. Despite her innocence, the girl is tangled up in a crime whose reach crosses the Roman empire.

Davis does a fun job of weaving the ancient with more modern detective conventions. Falco has a big case to solve, and the job will take him from Rome’s seedier districts to the emperor’s palace and across the sea to Britain, a place he hoped to never see again.

Written in 1989, the Silver Pigs is a bit older, but you can do far worse in a detective story. There’s a bittersweet flavor to the ending that I really enjoyed, and if I happened to learn a bit about ancient history, well, that’s just a bonus.