Chris

In all honesty, I'm not sure why I liked it so much. It did so many things that I have learned over the years indicate a painful reading experience, especially with authors I have never read before.

Before I dive into what I liked and didn't, a quick summary: The gist of the story is that a young half-elf prince in exile finds out he has inherited the rule of the whole elven kingdom. His father, the emperor, and brothers die in a mysterious airship accident (yes it has airships) leaving young Maia as emperor. As he clearly does not have the training or experience necessary to do the job, the book is primarily about Maia figuring out how to rule a kingdom and how to survive the process.

There are two red flags that I found in the first few pages of The Goblin Emperor that tend to make me want to put a book down before I waste too much time on it. The first one is elves for the sake of elves. Nothing about this story (that I can see) requires that Maia and company be elves. Usually this is indicative of either a) continued unoriginality or b) an inexperienced story-teller whose story will have more serious issues down the line. And the second red flag is the use of a bajillion names. So many names that it is impossible for those uninitiated in certain subgenres of fantasy to keep track of.

However, I think what kept me reading at first was the sheer quality of the prose. Usually, the red flags I mention also coincide with clunky prose and sketchy characterization. That was certainly not the case with this book. The prose was fluid and in some ways transparent like a majority of so-called “popular” sci-fi and fantasy, but in others ways Addison's prose tip-toes close to the border of “too lush” but it never quite crosses the line. I think this is a most difficult balance to achieve, and Addison did it very, very, well.

The other thing that kept me attached to the story is Maia himself. He is kind of a tragic character, but in the softest most upbeat sense. He struggles to be kind and compassionate where everyone in his life except for maybe his mother did the opposite to him. The best parts of the book were when we get to see Maia take the high road when it would be easy to be vindictive, or even violent to those that caused him pain before he became emperor.

The only small gripe I have about the book as that there really was no mystery. The guy you thought was behind the airship crash, was indeed behind the airship crash. There was not a whole lot of misdirection that happened, and I guess I had expected a deeper level of subterfuge coming from a book that was ostensibly about court intrigue. However I think all of this could be put on my expectations of the book and is not really a fault in the book itself.

So in summary, I loved it. The Goblin Emperor is a smooth read. Its an in depth exploration of a sympathetic character, but at the same time the pace never seems to lag. So if you are in the mood for something a little bit mellow, but still engaging. I highly recommend you pick up a copy.

I want to start off by saying I liked this book. I read it in about a day and a half, which is pretty normal for me. However, I loved Ancillary Justice. I have read Justice twice now, and I am sure I will read it again in the future. It truly deserved all of the awards it won,

Sword pulled me from page to page as a good space opera should, but it didn't quite stick with me the way that Justice did, and I have put off writing this review until I could figure out. And I think that I finally know what struck me the wrong way. Before I get to that I want to talk about the things that I liked, because as I said, this is a good book. I liked is Tisarwat. I love the idea of her needing to re- find her identity after being briefly taken over by the multibodied Anaander Mianaai. She is no longer who she originally was, and she is no longer Anaander Mianaai, but some of both. Part of what makes her interesting, I think, is that her experience is really not that alien to us. I think most of us have probably had at least one experience where our worldview, or personal narrative has been challenged or broken in some way. And after the shock wears off, the only thing you can do is figure out how to move on, often reconstructing your own identity in some way. I think Anne is doing a great job of exploring this with Tisarwat.

Others have commented that Sword suffers from “middle book syndrome”, and while that may be true, I felt like the whole plot is really a side quest rather than a middle book. The main threads left unresolved from Justice dealt with Anaander's war with herself, the Presger, and for Breq, contacting Awn's younger sibling. Very little of this was dealt with or expanded upon. I was expecting the complexity of all of these three plots to increase substantially so that they could be resolved in the final book. Instead, what I get was a story that seemed really more about describing the abominable sharecropping practices of the reconstruction era South. Not that the story was poorly written, or wasn't a good story to tell, its just that it was a left turn, and in a lot of ways did not fulfill the expectations that were set up in the first book.

We did get a few tidbits however, and I am looking forward to the third book, and hopefully a return to the main story threads. Anyway, in summary, I think it was a good story, I just didn't necessarily think it was a good sequel.

It's hard to know where to start with a book like Lev Grossman's The Magicians. I have never read a book that has given me such mixed feelings. And by mixed feelings, I don't mean “meh, it was ok”. I mean parts of it were absolutely brilliant, so brilliant that I find the main character Quentin is still hanging around in my head. And parts of it made me so mad that I wanted to put the book down and never pick it up again.

The people and relationships that Grossman describes are probably the most realistic I've ever seen in the context of a fantasy novel. The main character, Quentin, is moody, depressed, selfish, and a genius who gets to fulfill the average fantasy reader's greatest dream: Attending a school for magic in place of a normal college. Make no mistake, this is no harry potter tale, because the twist (which isn't really a spoiler to anyone who is old enough to have graduated from college) is that even though his most secret and unrealistic dream comes true, Quentin is still depressed moody and selfish thereby exposing the myth that circumstances can dictate long term happiness.

Grossman subverts the standard “going to magic school for training” narrative in a way that can only be compared to what Alan Moor to does to the standard super hero narrative in The Watchmen. That is, Grossman flips it on its head a tells it in a way that fulfills a lot of the tropes associated with the narrative but because Quentin is so very opposite of Harry Potter a weird upside down sort of tale forms that in the end feels way more realistic. Quentin finds all the magic he could possibly dream of, and it still he can't be happy, or not for long, then he finds his way into the secondary fantasy world he has always dreamed of, and after the shine wears off he is still not happy, not fulfilled, feels a lack of purpose. The hero is supposed to live happily ever after, not get everything he/she ever wanted and then be unsatisfied. It is made even worse from the reader's perspective because you can see the real, meaningful things in his life that Quentin just cannot, or will not, recognize. The unwritten refrain in Quentin's head through the whole novel is “this is not how the story is supposed to go” so he continues searching, thinking there has to be more somehow, somewhere there must be a place where the world is not screwed up, or where Quentin has not screwed it up himself. But by waiting and hoping for that single non-existent something, everything else slips quietly away from him in a bleary haze of booze, and self-pity.

There are a number of brilliant scenes interspersed throughout the novel that show just how deep Quentin's issues go. These scenes, most times, depict Quentin catching one of his friends or acquaintances in their own moments of quiet despair, wrapped in their own self centric narratives. But Quentin is so inwardly focused that he cannot see it. It would force him to recognize that he is not the center of every story. I think these few scenes carry an extra emotional punch because other than this, they seem to have no purpose in the book whatsoever. And so the reader reacts in the same way Quentin reacts, with a little bit of confusion and a lack of understanding, until of course, unlike Quentin, the reader does eventually understand if they are paying attention.
This strikes a number of personal chords with me, and maybe that is why I think this novel is so brilliant. I could almost forgive any writerly sin (and there a few in this book) for the unexpected vitality, and sheer weight and realness of the characters. However, I am not sure I can forgive him for the simple, unsubtle way he has ripped out some major chunks of The Chronicles of Narnia's world and to a lesser extent the Harry Potter universe and plunked them down in his story barely altered. I won't go into too much detail here, but basically Brakebills is the same as Hogwarts with less of a sense of wonder about it, and Fillory basically is Narnia. I would say Fillory is Narnia, but darker, however I think the actual Narnia can be pretty dark on its own in places.

In speculative fiction, it is an often used practice to pull bits and pieces of setting or world building from The Greats and twist them around a little bit before use by an author in a new story. This is fine because usually you can sense that the authors have treated the source material with reverence, and by doing so treats the fandom with respect as well. This comes off to the average genre reader as a nod of respect and gratitude to “those who have gone before”. I can't count how many times I have found references to Kurt Vonnegut, or Harlan Ellison, or any of a hundred other men and women who have made genre what it is today, hidden in some new book that I have recently picked up. And I love it when I find those Easter eggs. It gives me sense of belonging in a way.

I say all of this I guess because if giving a nod to Harry Potter and Narnia is what Grossman did, I would have been absolutely fine with it. Instead, especially with Narnia, Grossman made a blatant copy of it. Right down to the “in between” place as a stopping point on the way to “Fillory”, and only two girls and two boys from our world can be kings and queens of “Fillory”. Fillory just feels very irreverent to the original Narnia, and for some reason makes me feel very protective of the original. I get what Grossman is doing, at least I think I do: If you went to Narnia, it wouldn't be at all the way you imagined it would be. However, I feel that he could have shown this just as easily by making up a world that diverged from Narnia in a significant way.

Anyway, in summary: It's easy for me to see why most of the reviews for this book are either five stars or one star. I am on the fence as well, but I think that in the end, Grossman's skill as a writer wins out.

Storytelling was passable, but nothing too great. I felt like it was pretty obvious what was going to happen from the very beginning.

I really liked the parasite filled world that Thoma created however I thought I could have been realized much better.

It was good. A slow burn. Not something I would normally read, but I picked it up when I happened to be in the mood for a book more about ambiance than plot.