fantasybooknerd

Warning, this is not a review, just some musings

I am late to the party with Joe Abercrombie. I don't know why, but I am. I wasn't going to write a review of this book. My intention was to just put up some stars and direct you to the much more accomplished reviews that are about this book.

However, I changed my mind and thought I would put some thoughts down on paper.

When it comes to Joe Abercrombie, and the amount of stars this bloke receives on review sites, he could literally throw them up in the sky and create his own universe. I mean the general consensus is that Abercrombie is such a good writer he could write a story that would convince a donkey it's a horse.

So needless to say, I had some pretty high expectations for this book. I expected this to be a masterclass in grimdark writing (I think you can see where this is going, can't you. There seems to be an unwritten ‘but' here doesn't there. However, before you all start howling at me that I don't know what the hell I am talking about, give me a minute!)
So, the book starts with Logan fighting a Shanka, or a flathead as they are also known. I am reading this. I think this is not a bad start, I haven't got a clue what a Shanka is, but I will go along with it and see where it goes.
The point of view then moves to Inquisitor Glotka. A member of the kings inquisition who is very good at his job of torturing people and has a severe dislike of stairs. His no.1 greatest enemy. Partway through his torture session, he suddenly has a job appraisal with his boss who gives him a secret mission
I've got to say, there's nothing grabbing me here. You know, it's just not doing it for me at all.
After Glotka, there's the introduction of another character, Jenkal. Now the book throws me because all of a sudden in my head it changes to a William Thackery type setting and reminds me of Vanity Fair.
Ok, we have a nifty bit of world building going on here. The barbarian north and Thackery's London.
Still a bit unsure about it to be honest with you , but I think I will plough on because this book is supposed to be like goldust.
Well, a few things happen in the first book and it keeps changing pov between these three characters. Logan is quite good, Glotka constantly tells you what is going on in his head and then there's Jezal, who, to be quite honest is a bit of a dick.
So for this first part, I an generally plodding along with the book, thinking ‘I might just give this a miss because its brilliance seems to be passing me by and I am not getting the hype at all. I mean seriously, I was thinking of ditching this book. It seemed to me there was no plot and it seemed to be just moving form POV to POV.
However, something weird started happening, in that I was laughing along with the prose. There seems to be some pretty dark humour running all the way through this book.
And then when Bayaz does his magic thing and starts blowing up the forest, the same way that Gandalf never would, I start to get really in to it. Then, I cannot put the book down and all of a sudden the pacing goes through the roof and I have finished it.
So, if you are just starting with Abercrombie, don't be put off. Stick with it, the payoff is ace. If you want a review, there are loads, with Petrik being the most notable, but other reviewers are available.

Well, this is a terrific trilogy of books. V. E . Schwab, where have you been all my life.

The book begins immediately from the end of the second book and then gallops along at breakneck pace.

You do think that this pace cannot be maintained and it does slow down.

One of the things that is really good about Schwabs writing is that her world building skills are really impressive. Rather than bogging down the reader with complicated prose that describes the world, Schwab moves her characters through the world as part of the story.

She also has a brilliant skill of expanding the characters and she does with the minor characters as well as the major characters like Holland and Alucard.

The relationship between Rhy and Alucard is explored further, and one of the best things about this is that it is completely natural and there is no fuss about it.

Definitely, one of my favourite fantasy series.

So it is, with any reviewer that we read books, and then we move on. In most cases, we love the books that we read. In some cases we don't, but above all we remember that the words that have been put in front of us are something that someone has put time and effort into. However, sometimes there is that special book. The one that touches you in some way. The one that captures your imagination or pulls at your emotions. When I started my journey with the Bone Ships by RJ Barker, I was caught up in the imagination of the world that he describes. This brave new world with strange creatures such as the Gullaimes or the Arakeesians. A world that is filled with steel woven characters who are at once harsh and unforgiving, and yet can show tenderness and belief in others. So how could this be followed?
Could this be bettered? Could the world be expanded and what would happen next on the journey of Joron Twiner and the crew of The Tide Child.

Let me tell you, I did not expect this!

In Call of The Bone Ships, RJ Barker raises the sails of The Tide Child and takes us on a completely different path than the one you would expect. My goodness, this book is harsh! I simply couldn't believe what Barker puts his characters through in Call of the Bone Ships. He takes them through ferocious maelstroms and my goodness, when they come out they come out as different people.
With most of the world building done in the first book, Barker gives himself the freedom to hit the ground running with the second book and the pace never lets up from there. We are immediately thrust into the narrative of the story and are placed into a tale that is full of high crested waves. Barker chucks everything at you with as much ferocity as the seas that The Tide Child sails in, leaving you just enough time to breathe before the next wave takes your breath away.
It is very difficult to discuss the plot as to do so would take away the enjoyment that you experience as you plough your way through Call of The Bone Ships, but my goodness, this is such a masterfully crafted tale that Barker tells. So much happens in the book it is difficult to recall how many things are going on. And that is the beauty of the book
Barker doesn't explain every little detail, he trusts that you will keep the pace and that you will keep up with him as events happen one after the other.
Of the many things that occur in this book, we must talk about the structure of the book. There are so many things structurally that had me exclaiming ‘Oh that's clever'.

In The Bone Ships, the story is told through Joron Twiners eyes. However, in Call of the Bone Ships, Barker introduces other points of view and he phrases them as little Vignettes within the story, such as telling the story of the Courser Aelleren, and how they were condemned to the the black ship, or when Lucky Meas undertakes a seperate mission and he describes the events that happen on diary format. It works so well.

And at other points he will use repetition as a device to increase tension, employing the same phrase repeatedly to convey a sense of urgency to the situation.

The book is just gorgeous (you'll have to excuse, I have just finished the book and I seem be having an attack of the emotions after finishing), but be prepared. Call of the Bone Ships is hard, really hard. I don't mean in the reading sense, but in the emotions that the book evokes. Barker pulls no punches in Call of the Bone Ships. I found myself regularly fluctuating between shock and awe, between utter elation to the lowest doldrums as the story unfurls like the sails of a ship, and once the story catches the wind it glides through the pages of the book happily stealing the hours as I became completely engrossed in the book.

There is a fantastic quote by the great film critic, Roger Ebert that states that ‘movies are like a machine that generates empathy, it lets you understand a little bit more about different hopes, aspirations dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us'.

The same notion, for me is applied to books, and this book certainly generated the emotions and empathy akin to watching a summer blockbuster, feeling the swell of excitement or the feeling of having the ground tilted at an angle so that you are completely blindsided by unexpected events. For me, this book is simply brilliant.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Do you want to be a mighty wizard?
Do you want to join a group of like minded sociopathic individuals to get on and join the elite of the wizarding world? Then:

Welcome to A Deadly Education!
(Or how to win friends and influence people, so that the nasty things don't eat you)

Right, let's get the obvious out of the way. This is a magic school for witches and wizards and this is not the sole property of he who shall not be named. Okay? Phew, glad we got that sorted.

What we have here is a tale of friendship against adversity. The old romantic mismatch. A kind of Harry met Sally situation in which the good guy is annoyingly good and the damsel is constantly distressed at being regularly rescued by the good guy, even though she is some mega evil witch that has a prophecy attached to her (whoa, stop it! We got those comparisons out of the way in the first sentence. Didn't you know that in quite a lot fantasy stories, there's a chosen one with a prophecy attached? Well, don't you? Jeez anyone would think that this is a HP reference. Well it's not! Okay?).

Glad we got that out of the way!

The story revolves around Galadriel (or El for short) who is a pupil at the Scholomance, a school for witches and wizards whose first lesson that they have to learn, is to get safely through breakfast before they become breakfast. The Scholomance is a magic school that is populated by magical teens that have been whisked away from their parents and have to board in a school that has a vast array of different ways to kill you in some horrible way. From flesh eating maggots in the porridge to demonic corridors that will strip the skin from your bones, there is an endless way to get yourself killed. Add to that psychopathic students who will happily kill you for no apparent reason, this makes my days at school seem positively balmy in comparison.

On top of that, you have to have political skills that are reminiscent of a medieval court. Where you have to form alliances or trade something of worth in order to fix your door, brush your teeth or even get a shower This place is tough beyond belief and our hero, El is always letting us know how dangerous, how tough and how many different ways to kill you there are. On every page. Okay, okay we get it.

This school is flippin dangerous!

Surprisingly, El does not have many friends. However, this changes when the handsomely, charming popular kid, Orion Lake, starts to take an interest in her and forces his friendship on her, whether she likes it or not. However, as the story progresses we see that even though they are at the opposite ends of the popularity spectrum, they both share similar experiences and are both equally isolated.

In a Deadly Education, Novak's wizarding school is not all jolly hockey sticks and full of quaint little traditions that hark back to a corner of England that is stuck in the innocence of yesteryears. It's filled with scary monsters and super creeps. It is the dog eat dog world of a capitalist society where the more power and influence you have, the more likely it is that you will survive. It juxtaposes the world outside, which again is not filled with a lovely, cutesy world that resides in the past. In Novak's world, being a wizard is a dangerous lifestyle which attracts the monsters that live under your bed so that they can kill you and eat you.

Once you get past the myriad ways in which you can die, be eaten or be killed and then eaten, you get to the heart of the story. Which is, survive. Simple as that. Everything is geared towards surviving the experience of school and hopefully get out of there. That is if you can get past a cornacopia of nightmarish beasts at the graduation ceremony that are hell bent on doing all the things mentioned earlier.

Why anyone would want to be a wizard in A Deadly Education is beyond me. I would use the same tactics that the mundanes (the non - magical community) use. Don't believe in magic. Simple as that. The mundanes do not believe in it and that saves them from the monsters. Otherwise, it looks like you are in for a life of looking over your shoulder and elevating yourself to the rank of paranoid sociopath.

On the whole, I enjoyed A Deadly Education and the story of the snarky main character and how she manages to get through everyday and how her world expands from a world of one to her development of ‘friends'. This is a fantastic setup for the rest of the series, it sets up the world, the characters and is just the start of the story. Will I be reading the next one? Hmmm, I think I will, I wouldn't mind seeing what happens to El and the gang.

The familiar setting of the school for witchcraft and wizardry gets an upgrade to intergalactic academy for Superheroes in Rob Edwards' exciting and action packed adventure for Middle Graders.

The story centres around an unnamed artful Dodger type, who lives hand to mouth doing various con jobs on numerous galactic space stations, until one day he is offered a job that seems too good to be true. All he has to do is to pretend to be some rich kid for a little while so that said rich kid can escape from his magnificently rich family and disappear into the cosmos to make his fortune.

Seem simple? Yeah you would think so, but he should have heeded the advice that if something seems too good to be true, then it probably is, as the seemingly simple job as masquerading as some rich kid gets him taken to the aforementioned super hero academy and ends up with him continuing to live the life of the rich kid, Mirabor Garvane and actually finding something that he didn???t know that he needed - friends and family.

Rob Edwards???s book is a delightful romp from start to finish. The superhero academy works well and whilst it may remind you of certain other educational institutions, it does instil a little bit of realism into the curriculum, as there is the constant question of who does the superhero academy actually belong to, and are all these superheroes doing it for the love of saving people or is there a question that they may be in league with the larger corporations.

The ensemble cast led by the enigmatic Grey, as he becomes known as, is strong and well realised, with certain members of the team standing out more than others in this first adventure. Sevenfourthirty is implacable in his friendship and honest nature. He readily accepts Grey as his best friend and kind of provides his moral compass. Whereas, it is Gadget Dude who shines the brightest and while he doesn???t necessarily converse much throughout the story, he communicates so much with simple verbal expression and gesture.

The narrative itself is fast paced and easy to follow. It's full of well placed humour and lovingly crafted quips at the superhero genre as a whole. The story itself is full of adventure and familiar themes, such as the found family aspect, which when done well is always a delight. There is a little bit of spy thriller thrown in there to up the ante somewhat. On top of that, there is a legitimate feeling of threat in the book, as whilst there are no graphic details of injury, not everyone fares as well as you would expect in the story.

The Ascension Machine is an entertainingly fun packed story, full of action and intrigue and will appeal to both budding sci-fi and superhero fans.