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.
I liked this collection. I find that more and more i'm moving away from novels and towards short story collections.
This collection is part surreal fantasy, part embellished memoir, and part random.
I can only pick out a couple of stories that i absolutely liked and I think those were the “weirder” ones like: “Relic”,”Daltharee” and “The Wish Head”. Some others fell absolutely flat. However the completed collection I feel seems to be more than the sum of its parts. The stories are subtly connected by theme, motifs, or characters. Doppelgangers abound and so do severed feet, and in the words of Ford himself “secret passageways abound” between his stories. The most interesting part however is the reuse of Ford himself and his wife Lynn as characters. It makes reader feel like we get an almost intimate glimpse into the workings of their long marriage. Maybe that's true, maybe its not, but it kept reading all the way to the end.
Other than that, as other reviewers have commented, Ford's language is not complex or verbose, but that does not diminish the effect of his stories, in fact it may enhance them.
If your looking for something a little different, read this collection.
I feel like if I had had read this in high school I would have loved it, but I guess I just read too much similar stuff. I did appreciate the unique world-building and magic system. However, I almost put the book down a couple of times because of the frustrating way that information was dumped on the reader. I also felt the characterization was a little too blunt and heavy-handed.
This book came close to 5 stars, but i couldn't quite bring myself to do it. Then on the last page Mitchell blew past a cardinal that I can't really forgive him for. He started preaching at me. Probably the main theme of the book is the constancy of humans trying to dominate other humans. More succinctly it was an exploration of Nietzsche's “will to power”. This was shown from story to story with the nested novella's, but usually with one exception (ie, one person in each story who stood up against, or became enlightened enough to move past the will to power). All of this was fairly easily picked up throughout the book (in fact it wasn't that subtle at all), but at the very last page he literally spells this out for the reader. The last lines of the book are something to the effect of “everything you can do in this life is nothing but a drop in the ocean, but then what is an ocean but a multitude of drops?” This was in reference to Adam Eweing's impending life as an abolishionist in pre-civil war USA. Not only was the last line full of cheese, but any reader who could make all the way through the book would have known what Mitchell was driving at, and to have him state it so blatantly ruined the effect of the rest of the book, and substantially cheapened the experience over all.
In summary. Good book, clever ideas and use of various voices. The sermon at the end ruined the message it was trying to preach.
I was really looking forward to this one because of how much I enjoyed the first book in the series, The Winds of Khalakovo, which I gave 4-stars to. However, I ended up being pretty disappointed.
This I had to give only 2/5 stars to.
The book itself has three main characters: Nikander, Atiana, and Nasim. There a myriad of short chapters in the mix from the POV of other characters as well, but the main focus is on the three mentioned above. I would try to give a synopsis, but the plot sprawls so far and wide that I almost don't know where to start. Anyway it starts five years after the events of Winds with Nasim being restored to some sense of normalcy. So he spends most of his time wandering around somewhat aimlessly, but loosely in search of various parts of the Atalayina which is the stone used to open the rifts in the world that were the prominent feature in the first book. Nikander spends time using his new found connection with a wind spirit trying to heal people, and Atiana volunteers to get married to a far off prince for political purposes. These three threads all start to revolve around the exiled inhabitants of Gayahvard, the originators of the rifts that trouble Anuskaya and there attempt to escape the island and finish what they started.
The pros primarily revolve around the worldbuilding and characterization. When I read the first book I was a little skeptical of the vaguely Russian flavor of world Beaulieu was building, but strangely he made it work pretty well, and the second book is no exception. In general the world is nice and complex, although in this book I felt there were a couple of inconsistencies which I'll talk more about in the next paragraph.
Ok the cons . . . Unfortunately there are quite a few. First of all, the plot had pacing issues. I can't be more specific than that, but I picked up and put this book down (metaphorically speaking, as I own it on my kindle . . . ) around 4 times before I actually finished. While I'm on plot, I think Beaulieu tried to do too much with this book. In Winds there were also many story threads, but each one was woven appropriately into the story to further the book as a whole, whereas in this book I felt a lot of the storylines just kind of wandered around in the great swampy middle without forwarding the progress of the book very much. Then as the climax approached it was like all of a sudden these meandering threads were pulled straight together in a very short time, in an unrealistically short time. It seemed that Beaulieu was just wandering through the book and then all of a sudden decided he needed to tie everything together. In his defense, he did tie it all together in the end, it just seemed sort of un-natural and direct given the way the rest of the book had progressed. On a side note the book was really, really, long . . .
The biggest issue I had with this book, was the way Beaulieu played fast and loose with the rules of his own world. If there is one thing a genre writer needs to maintain the “fictional dream” for me consistency is it. The different gemstones played a serious role in the first book as to how the various spirits and whatnot were wrangled, but in this book it seemed they weren't really necessary. The last example I will cite is the random transportation abilities developed by certain characters at the end. Distance seemed no object, just kill some poor soul and a tunnel opened to where ever you wanted it to go. And the kids man . . . why was there so much child sacrifice? One instance is ugly, but acceptable as a plot point, by the end it just seemed gratuitous.
So in summary, a followup to Winds that was less than spectacular. I can only hope that number three redeems the series.
See other reviews that I have written at my blog http://lazerbrain.wordpress.com
The best way to describe it is as some sort of cross between a Dan Brown novel and a techno thriller with a snarky narrator and a D&D analog named “Rockets and Warlocks” tossed in for flavor. As interesting as this may sound, my reaction to it was a more or less resounding “meh”.
This book is about a down and out web designer named Clay who's last chance at putting supper on the table is a job at an odd book store that he just happens to pass by. Of course the book store turns out to be more than what it seems. Its actually a front for a secret society of what amounts to code breakers, and Clay brings all his technology whiz buddies to bear in cracking the centuries old code that consumes the lives of the code breakers.
I really wanted to like this book, and one interesting thing about it was the way it brought together elements of an old fashioned, mystical, secret society with the technology of google, and the internet age in general. And the plot pacing was pretty good, good enough to keep me reading through the end anyway. However . . .
In the beginning the prose alternated from being readable to being really clunky. Most of this was smoothed out by the beginning of the second though. I wasn't kidding when I said the book was sort of like a Dan Brown novel. I'm not going to give the end away, but if you have read either Angels and Demons or The DaVinci Code its not hard to guess the gist of the ending of Mr. Penumbra. I guess there is more I could say about the characters, and especially what seemed to me to be the contrived (and painful) use of a fictional fantasy series as a necessary piece of the plot, but I think I'm going to stop there.
In summary, it wasn't a great read, but if there is a dearth of reading material this will keep you entertained for a while.
If you liked this review, check out other ones by me at http://lazerbrain.wordpress.com
See this review and others at my blog: http://lazerbrain.wordpress.com
Among others is at heart, a coming of age story. Jo Walton herself characterized it as a woman's intellectual coming of age story. Mori (short for Morwenna), is fifteen years old and has run away from her crazy witch of a mother (no, she is actually a witch) not too long after the untimely death of her sister Mor (short for Morganna). We meet her after she has been through a children's home and is meeting her Father, who left her mother just after the girls were born, for the first time. The book follows Mori over a few month period in which she deals with being an outcast, her evil witch mother, faeries, boys, coming to grips with the death of her twin, and a squishy kind of magic that doesn't have any clear rules or laws, all through the ideological lens created by the great sci-fi and fantasy books of the late 70's and early 80's.
There is really only one or two things about this novel that I didn't like. The biggest, I think, has to do with the character of Mori. Walton's characterization is definitely first rate (which I may get to later), so my quibble is not with that, but I had this nagging feeling that Mori was too pragmatic, too sensible in thought and action for any 15 year old that I have ever known, (or been, I suppose). By pragmatic, the most obvious examples are the way she thinks about sex and homosexuality, and the way she thinks about class and class division. It feels like Mori is constructed to be an ideal fifteen year old by today's world's standards, and then put back into the early 80's. I just had a little trouble believing it.
The second thing is that I was disappointed that I had not read a lot of the books mentioned in Among Others, even though I consider myself fairly well read in sci-fi and fantasy. To put a finer point on, I think book was meant for those who love fantastical fiction and grew (or at least read widely during) the 70s and 80s, not someone like me who has read widely in the late 90's up to today. Anyway, that being said, I have read Lewis, Tolkein, some Zelanzy, some Heinlen, some LeGuin, some Vonnegut etcetera. But apparently not most of the ones that are mentioned in the book. I guess I'm really just sad that there is at least one layer to Walton's book that is currently inaccessible to me.
So I wrote much more on the negatives than I meant to . . . The positives are much more numerous, but I honestly don't think I'm going to have time to treat them all appropriately.
Probably the best praise that can be given to a book is verisimilitude, Among Others positively reeks with it. I don't usually associate fantasies with verisimilitude, but if faeries and magic did exist, Walton does a pretty convincing job of telling me what it might look like. I love how the faeries are somehow more natural, they are sometimes beautiful, but most often strange yet believable if incomprehensible. And I love the way the magic is squishy; it doesn't have rules per se and there is no ways to be certain that magic was being used, because its effects can be easily rationalized away.
I guess this is kind of a counter to my critique of Mori's character. One of Mori's defining characteristics is pragmatism and clarity of thought regarding “real” life. Walton beautifully sets this up as both contrast and complement to the fantastic elements of Mori's life. Consequently, the main flaws in all of “the real world” based characters are highlighted. While the majority of the characters are totally in the “real world”, they have an utterly unpractical and fantastic outlook on life, regarding what things are important in life, such as class, sports standings, etc.
Walton brilliantly uses magic and fantastic literature to inform Mori's relationships throughout the book, which provides new perspective on old themes Here are a couple of examples. Fantastic literature is used as an escape from the reality, because the reality is almost unbearable for Mori, at least until she meets the SF book club. Also, talking about SF books with Daniel serves as both a way to connect with her estranged father, and a way to keep him at a distance so that Mori doesn't have to ask him hard questions, and her father doesn't have to answer.
Finally, I really enjoyed how Walton gave Mori some serious emotional baggage. Not just the obvious stuff, like the crippled leg, loneliness and dealing with the loss of her sister, but she is so used to getting shafted by life that she feels guilty when good things happen to her. Another example is her relationship with Wim. She feels guilty about the whole korass thing, and so tells him about it and then she gets worried that he is only hanging out with so he can see the faeries!
In summary, this book was fantastic. If you like character driven books as opposed to plot driven, you just have to read it. Even while a bit unbelievable, Mori is such and interesting character that if you don't get to know her through this book, you are really missing out.
See this review and others over at my blog: http://lazerbrain.wordpress.com
I've never read anything by Cory Doctorow before, but I know he has a fairly big presence on the internet as co-editor of boingboing.net, and is a very vocal propponent of liberalizing copyright law, as well as proponent of creative commons law, which this particular book was published under. This is his first novel (published a while ago), and I was actually pretty interested to see whether his writing as going to include a polemic against digital rights management or not. Luckily this turned out to not be the case.
Down and out in the Magic Kingdom takes place in what I guess could be described as a post-scarcity world. Death has been conquered by the means of regular brain backups, socioeconomic problems have been overcome by the advent of an idealized “meritocracy” where how wealthy you are depends on how much the people around you admire and respect you. And even if you don't have any respect, you can still get the essentials to keep you alive. On top of all this, everyone is connected by “hyperlink” implants which connect them 24/7 to a future version of the internet. The story follows Julius, who is basically an average joe, who after having lived for lifetimes and acquired a couple of doctorates and a penchant for studying crowds, ends up working at a future incarnation of Disney World. Here he makes a series of well meaning but stupid decisions in an attempt to prevent the encroachment of a rival “team” on his team's territory running the haunted mansion. In the process he more or less dismantles his life, one piece at a time.
So the positives. The prose was good. No cringe inducing sentences. That always gets a book at least two stars from me. The plotting was pretty good, and those two things together usually get at least three stars out of me, but in this case I just couldn't do it. I also thought Cory did a pretty good job of speculating what a post-scarcity society might look like. However . . .
I think the biggest issue is that I was just super ambivalent about the main character. The other side of this is that he made so many obviously stupid decisions throughout the course of the book, well, it just seemed gratuitous. Maybe I would have liked the character more if he even made just one logical decision, but Cory Doctorow seemed to think up all the different ways Julius could respond to a given situation and then pick the worst one every single time. I know this can be a kind of plot device that adds some tension to a novel, and even Jim Butcher admits to thinking this exact way in his Dresden Files books (over at his live journal somewhere), but whereas I still felt invested in Harry Dresden, I didn't much care for Julius. The only thing I can say is that there must be a fine line somewhere in when using this technique and Butcher and Doctorow fall on opposite sides of it.
The other big issue I had was with the plausibility of the merit based wealth system. Usually I try not to critique this sort of thing because, hey, the author can do what he wants. On the other hand if the author does something implausible he/she had better be good making me suspend my disbelief (admittedly that's not too hard in my case). In Doctorow's system, wealth is based on public opinion. If people like you and think you do good work, you are automatically wealthy by some nebulous “whuffie” score. While reading, I kept thinking, “why is this world not run by used car salesmen?” Doctorow implies that only the best people for the job would be doing the job, because everyone would recognize that they are the best. Two fundamental assumptions here are a) everyone's opinion is based on logical thought, and b) everyone has all the facts needed to form an logical opinion. I find it much more likely that those with the best rhetoric/publicity would end being the wealthiest. Anyway, I kept thinking about this the whole time I was reading the book, and felt it detracted from the experience.
So I guess, in summary, technically speaking its not a bad book, but I had enough issues with it for the read to not be as enjoyable as I had hoped.
See this and other reviews at my blog: http://lazerbrain.wordpress.com
I read the omnibus version, picked it up for a cool $1.99, although having read it now, I would willingly pay the $5.99 that it is usually sold for. Anyway, the Wool series so far is made up of five smaller stories of varying lengths from short story to novella in length. Put them all together and it makes something roughly the size of a novel.
The wool stories all take place in a post apocalyptic world, where the surface of the Earth is toxic, and the remains of humanity is stuck underground in a massive silo in order to survive. However, as you can imagine, life stuck inside a silo is not particularly suited to human flourishing. The “powers that be” are not who everyone thinks they are and most of the social constructs (eg, being sent to clean the silo sensors, high costs for electronic communication) have been designed by the silo progenitors with manipulation and crowd control in mind. Broadly, the 5 stories that make up Wool follow events in the silo that are set in motion when a mysterious computer program is discovered, revealing that all in the silo is not as it seems.
The short of it is that I loved this book! The only thing that kept me from giving 5 stars was some pacing problems that sensed in the last story. The last book turned out to be a lot of exposition an explanation which, while it fulfilled my desire to know more about the world of Wool, it dragged the plot pace, distanced me from the story a bit, and I think detracted from the emotional payoff of the climax/resolution of the pentology (pentad, pent something else?).
Two things I love in a science fiction yarn are a creative world, which includes both elegance of description and plausibility, as well a sense of mystery or maybe a better way to phrase it is “secrets yet to be revealed”. I've seen this done very well before, and Wool is no different. Howey gets both just right. Its like Howey makes his characters fight for every piece of his world that he shows them and by extension the reader. Not in the sense that Gene Wolf does (where the narrators are always suspicious, and 90% of the plot can only be figured out by extrapolating on small textual clues), but in the sense that Howey's characters go through a lot of grief to earn every piece of information that the reader gets. While I can imagine a scenario where this kind of tension filled plotting can be frustrating to a reader if taken too far, Howey did it just right and I felt a visceral satisfaction whenever a particularly large part of the puzzle fell into place.
The characters themselves were ok. I liked a lot of the side characters (Knox, Solo, Walker) and the main characters from the first two stories (Holston, Marnes and Jahns), I kind of felt that Juliette and Lukas, who are the protagonists in the last three stories, were a little bit cookie cutter. I also felt that Lukas was a little bit whiny and sometimes irritating and not necessarily well suited for Juliette or as the primary love interest in the latter portion of the book. Anyway, the important pieces were there so I did indeed engage with even Lukas and Juliette, and since for me, this book was more about exploring the post-apocalyptic setting than identifying strongly with the characters, I didn't think it detracted from the experience very much.
In summary, if you like a post-apocalyptic mystery, you can't go wrong with Wool. Its action-packed and sinister mysteries abound!
See this post and other sci-fi/fantasy reviews at my blog www.lazerbrain.wordpress.com
Fundamentally this book is a “cityslicker” story. It follows the transformation of one James Holtzclaw from snobby city dweller of dubious moral quality to protector (sort of) and hotel entrepreneur in Auraria a small mining town in Georgia. However, this is not your ordinary cityslicker tale. It is steeped folklore and fantasy, from Great and Invincible and Harmless Terrapins, to gold covered moon maidens, to mushroom hunting ghosts, to treasure finding will ‘o the wisps, and all sorts of talking plants that moan or sing to varying degrees. The plot follows Holtzclaw, who is H. Shadburn's property acquisition agent, as he first seeks to purchase the town of Auraria, by hook or by crook, from its residents, only to find out that his boss is not actually interested in turning a profit in this particular deal. In the process Holtzclaw deals with all of the ghosts, and fairies with a matter of factness and determination that can only come from a person so besought with making money that everything can be taken in stride. The first section follows the progress of Holtzclaw's land purchasing, the second section follows the building and running of a resort placed on the shore of a man made lake which now covers old Auraria. The final section, well, I won't talk about it because it would spoil the book.
I found this book to be fun and amusing, although the style is extremely reminiscent of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I liked JS&MN very much, but it was never a thriller and never meant to be. I feel like Auraria falls into a similar category, where the prose is almost Austinesque. As soon as I recognized the similarities, I was actually a little off-put , because I felt like this kind of thing has already been done and done very well. Not that this was done poorly, I just think it is tougher to draw the reader into the story using the sort of old style voice, and since I have already read JS&MN, I felt this detracted from the reading experience.
On the other hand, Westover's world building is just spectacular. I loved the giant terrapin and his rumbly songs and stories, the ghosts who play piano, cook, hunt mushrooms, and hunt heads. I loved the house with infinite stories, and Ephraim and Flossie's trading game. I loved the fact that a refrigerator left open could freeze whole farms. I basically loved everything that Westover did with his world, and I kept turning the pages at some points in the book for no other reason than to see what quirky and ridiculous thing was going to happen next. He manages to capture the spirit of a backwater, washed up mining town, while still giving the reader a healthy dose of the fantastic.
In summary, I loved the world Westover made so much, that I enjoyed the read overall. However the plot dragged in places, and the voice of the book was such that I found it hard to really engage with the characters.
From my blog at www.lazerbrain.wordpress.com
This first novel by Jason Jack Miller follows the story of Preston Black, a never been famous lover of music, who is trying to make it big in the shadow of approaching middle age. He is mostly stuck playing covers of his favorite musicians, but his luck changes (whether for the better or worse is up for debate) when he simultaneously discovers an old record in a music store with his name on the back of it and meets a mysterious woman named Danicka from the Czech Republic. Preston unknowingly makes a deal with the devil partially incarnated in Danicka, and then tries to find the answers to the ensuing chaos in his life by tracking down the source of the record with his name on it. This leads him through a world of Appalachian superstition and old timey music, ultimately culminating in his seeming redemption through one brilliant live performance after alienating most of his friends and family throughout the entire book.
So, I have to admit that I had a really good time with this one. I read free ebooks from time to time, and have had to train myself to put some books down after a few chapters. Otherwise I'd spend all my time reading crappy books! Anyway, that is where I found The Devil and Preston Black, in the amazon freebie aisle, and really lucked out.
Miller does a great job of making the reader identify with the Preston regardless of personal experience. I found my self getting a little bit depressed when Preston was depressed, and getting angry when Preston makes some really stupid decisions. Plot pacing was perfect. I felt invested in Preston without ever feeling like there was significant down time. I also enjoyed the exploration of Appalachian mythology/ superstition that Preston dealt with on his musical adventure, only as a fantasy/sci-fi fan, I found my self wishing for more of it.
A few thoughts (spoiler alert):
One of the interesting motifs in the book is that “people have a piece of the devil inside them”, or I guess can have a piece of the devil inside them, or something along those lines. I think that Miller wants us to associate the devil with Danicka in a Faustian sort of way, since over pillow talk with Preston she asks him for three wishes and shortly there after two of his wishes are fulfilled in a sideways manner. His buddy Stu never gets to the battlefield (although its because he dies instead of because he is disharged), and Preston's brother Pauly quits the band, but in the process generates a lot of bad blood between them. Not the amicable professional separation Preston seemed to be hoping for. I don't know if the author intended this or not, but I think the complexity of the novel can be deepened considerably if we consider the possibility that more than one devil incarnate and more than one Faustian bargain. I think that Preston, while the “victim” of one bargain was the perpetrator of another. It jibes with the repeated idea that “a piece of the devil is inside me” most developed in Preston's discussion with the priest. The second bargain is even more subtle occurring with Katy the fiddler who was getting her PhD and is Preston's “uncorrupted” girlfriend. At the end of the book just before Preston's big performance, he asks if Katy would play with him on stage, and she accepts. This is significant because elsewhere in the book Katy talks about how she “didn't always want to get a phD” and was in a situation analogous to Preston's prior to his deal with Danicka. Also, we find out that Katy knows about Preston's deal and still seems interested in him. If this a second deal with the devil is present, it adds some nuance to the ending scenes that do not exist otherwise. For example, Danicka's suicide by jumping off the bridge is no longer an unqualified victory over some inhuman demon, but now her character is much more sympathetic, and we can see her as just a woman who made some bad decisions, but is ultimately still partly human. Not only is Danicka's death no longer an unattenuated good, but Preston's success is tarnished as well. He has enticed Katy into a similar deal, and so the ending becomes bittersweet instead of triumphal ending that the book has at first blush.
Anyway, Like I said, I had a good time with this book, and think it has a level of complexity that might be easy to miss on a first read.
From my blog at www.lazerbrain.wordpress.com
Ok so, Michael Swanwick, has won a lot of awards. I loved his book “Vacuum Flowers” and I also liked two of his short stories, on of them being “Dalla Horse” I can't remember the other. Unfortunately this book was not nearly up to those standards. I give it two stars, simply because the book was well written, even if I had major issues with the plot and the characters.
The book is an extension of some short stories that Swanwick wrote (I think) about two confidence men, Darger and Surplus. This book follows their adventures to and in Moscow, Russia.
First off, I don't really feel like I understand the main characters any more after having read the book, than I did before hand. Maybe Swanwick did a lot more characterization in his other stories (which I haven't read), but basically I had no investment in these two. And these were ostensibly the protagonists, I felt even less attachment to the minor characters.
The second big beef I had was the humor. I feel like Darger and Surplus were supposed to be funny and amusing, and endear themselves to the reader because of it. Unfortunately this did not come across very well. It took me half the book to realize that scenes /circumstances that I had just read through without much thought, or even a, “That sound a bit rediculous, why is that here?” were supposed to be humorous in a slapstick/awkward circumstances kind of way. It just didn't come across very well.
Final beef: The plot. It seemed a little thin to me. It seemed mostly focused on the aforementioned “humorous” circumstances, and less on the plot as a whole. I think this could have been pulled off, if the humor worked better. However, I don't think we ever really have a good understanding of what Darger and Suplus's con was supposed to be. Ostensibly, this was the whole reason for their trip to Moscow in the first place, and if the con was a failure, it seems to me that it might have been better if we knew more of what their plan was, so as to see how much the con was blown to bits. That is just one example.
Anyway, I don't want to finish this review without giving Swanwick some pros for the world he built. It seems like it has a lot of potential. Post utopian decline precipitated by the rebellion of AI's and the resulting destruction of the internet. Really cool, I think it could be a great setting for stories to come, I just don't think its potential was fully realized.
From my blog at www.lazerbrain.wordpress.com
As usual with Gene Wolfe, cryptic is the word. Unlike his more famous works in The Book of the New Sun, this one is not ostensibly science-fiction in nature, but like The Book of the New Sun (beloved by me . . .) you can't take anything at face value. I took a look at an essay trying to tease out some of the mysteries of this story, and it sent my head spinning.
Ostensibly Peace is a not very well organized, non-linear memoir of Alden Dennis Weer, the last of a wealthy family. If that's as far as you want to look, then even by itself its seems (to my limited critical abilities) to be a decent piece of literature. But . . .
The first page, we find an elm tree crashing to the ground followed by the first comments of the narrator that it was one of Elenor's tree. Much later, we find out (in passing only) that Elenor only plants trees on top of graves to keep the dead in place. So the timing of the tree falling and the sudden appearance of the narrator seems suspicious. There is also, that fact that we find various letters and note cars “nailed” to Dennis's desk, but who nails letters to desks? the more likely scenario is that he can't pick the letters up . . .
That's just one of about a bajillion mysteries in the book, and i only mentioned that one because I think I've got it figured out.
The book seems to get its title from the very last folk tale told about a fairy like race that is going extinct. The patriarch turns his children into geese so that they may never die (eg, even if one or a few geese die, the flock as such still lives), but after the geese have been hunted to death, the very last goose finds and befriends a hermit. The hermit says something to the effect of “your time here is long over, it is the time of man now, and in the future Man's time will be over too.” After this the goose is baptized in to Christianity, and turns back into its native form, and it is implied dies peacefully. After, this story Dennis, gets up and goes to a doctors appointment as usual. The story implying that Dennis's time is long past as well, but the fact that is still going about his business as usual shows that he has not found peace. So after all that, in typical Gene Wolfe form the title of the book actually implies the opposite.
I said all of this to say, that if you like neat closed off endings don't read this book. Half of the anecdotes related in the story don't have a narrated ending, but the conclusion are usually given in an off hand and most unsatisfying way 30 pages later. However, Gene gives you enough figure out how all the stories end, as long as your paying attention. I admit I probably, only actually found the ending to a few of the stories.
Anyway I gave it four stars. A spectacular thinker of a book, but its not something you read just for a good story. If you want to understand it you better bring your A game.
I gave it a more thorough review on my blog:
http://lazerbrain.wordpress.com/2012/09/26/particle-horizon-by-selso-xisto/
Excellent action, and fairly well written. Its action packed and fast paced. This is the author's first novel, and it has far more polish and less stilted dialogue than most science fiction, especially for a first book. I look forward to see what else he comes out with.
Dystopian, graphic, and edgy. Follows a young gang member in his realization that there is more to life than drugs and violence. Harshest commentary on society I have ever read. Only read it if you want to hate capitalism for a frew days after you finish. Its kind of like an adult version of THE FEED.
King did just enough world building to draw me in, and it was just plot driven enough to keep me reading . . . But the characters were pretty two dimensional and tropey. Even the climax was a big let down. It took place in the course of about 2 or 3 kindle pages. I guess I shouldn't be complaining too much because it was free . . .