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| 1941360319
| 9781941360316
| 1941360319
| 3.74
| 103
| Apr 21, 2020
| Apr 21, 2020
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really liked it
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Recommendation: An enjoyable novella ostensibly about a Chinese immigrant to California (but which is so much more).
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Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 21, 2024
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Aug 28, 2024
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Nov 16, 2024
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Paperback
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| B0DM15W5DD
| 4.18
| 7,622
| Jun 24, 2016
| Jun 24, 2016
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it was amazing
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 27, 2024
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Jul 30, 2024
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Jul 30, 2024
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ebook
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| 0593564065
| 9780593564066
| 0593564065
| 3.89
| 523
| Feb 28, 2023
| Feb 28, 2023
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liked it
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Recommendation: a fun tween adventure story Critique: I really enjoyed reading this story, in large part because it is set in the place where I live - Recommendation: a fun tween adventure story Critique: I really enjoyed reading this story, in large part because it is set in the place where I live - the SF Bay Area. For once, it's not a children's book that is set in New York City! There's a lot of fun banter between the characters. The contrast between the contemporary and the mythological should feel familiar to fans of the Percy Jackson stories, though it is refreshing to feature Japanese mythology rather than the European mythologies we see more often in children's literature. Review: A social outcast, preteen Momo Arashima is drawn into a high-stakes adventure and discovers things about herself and her family along the way. (view spoiler)[Momo interacts with Niko, a talking fox, on her 12th birthday. Not long after, she is being humiliated by some peers - including her childhood friend, Danny, who recently has started to mock her to fit in with his popular friends - at the mall when she attacked by a shikome. Danny, Niko, and Momo flee together. On the way, Niko reveals that Momo's mom is actually the goddess of an island that guards the gate to the underworld where a demon was sealed ages ago. Momo's mom was banished from the island for falling in love with a mortal - Momo's father. Because she hasn't been able to return to her home, Momo's mom has been weakening, and so have the wards placed on the portal protecting our planet from the demon. They become convinced that, to save her mom, Momo must wield Dojigiri, a legendary Japanese sword of heroes that happens to be on display at a museum up the peninsula in San Francisco. They try to steal the sword from SFMOMA, but are thwarted by some yokai. In desperation, they climb out onto the Golden Gate bridge, where Niko opens a portal to the Land of the Gods, where they beseech the gods for aid. The gods suggest a plan that involves using Kusanagi, the Sword of the Wind, that belongs to Susano'o, lord of the gods. The kids undertake a series of quests, including descending to a nation of centipedes below the ocean and stealing Kusanagi from Susano'o, in order to finally get their hands on the sword of the wind. Then there's a big showdown on her mom's island, where Momo is confronted by Izanami, the horrible insidious goddess of the underworld, who reveals that many of Momo's powers are a gift from Izanami. Momo manages to seal the gate again...for now. The kids return to the Bay Area and are reunited with Momo's mom. But they have a nagging suspicion that it's not the last they've seen of Izanami... (hide spoiler)] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 2024
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Jun 30, 2024
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Jul 30, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 0765310554
| 9780765310552
| 0765310554
| 3.59
| 3,971
| Oct 17, 2006
| Oct 17, 2006
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it was amazing
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"Spirit Gate" (Kate Elliott) - review Recommendation: A great novel that combines the fantasy of the "Harper's Hall" series with the creeping doom of " "Spirit Gate" (Kate Elliott) - review Recommendation: A great novel that combines the fantasy of the "Harper's Hall" series with the creeping doom of "A Song of Ice and Fire." Critique: Spirit Gate is the first book of a trilogy. It follows five characters: Joss, a reeve (a sheriff and arbiter who patrols a region with a giant eagle); Mai, a beautiful young merchant; her uncle Shai, the youngest brother of seven who gets no respect and can see and hear ghosts; Keshad, a caravan merchant slave who is gambling everything on a chance to buy freedom for him and his little sister Zubaidit, who was sold to a temple as a child and has been trained to be a courtesan assassin. The world-building is very engaging; none of the characters are white, though it's not entirely clear that the names of characters - which map to real-world cultures - completely correspond to the people of those real-world cultures/nations. The people of the Hundred are all explicitly described as black, but the people of the Empire are Indian or Arab (very dark skin and wavy black hair), and though the Qin share the name of a real-world culture, they can be imagined as either southeast Asian or Poly/Micronesian (golden skin with completely straight black hair). So the setting is very atypical, the characters are all very distinct from one another but all quite endearing, the plot is pretty good, and the writing is excellent. All that said, it's not clear for most of the book that the reeves are not technically eagle riders. That is to say, they're not riding the eagles. Instead, they strap themselves to the eagles' breasts like infants in a baby carrier, or as if each reeve had a giant backpack that was actually a living creature. It's never really clear in the text how this is supposed to work; the reeves have enough freedom of movement to throw javelins and fight with spears, neither of which is something you could do while pressed up tight against a living creature above and behind you. The text describes how the reeves "strap their legs into the harness," which makes sense if you think that the reeve is riding the bird, with legs straddling its neck. But if their legs are strapped in while they are below the bird, they'd be hanging upside-down! The illustration on the cover shows a person (not a black person as described in the book, but rather a strange humanoid tree person) wearing the eagle like a backpack. My daughter loved to ridicule this art the entire time I was reading this novel. Who can blame her? Wearing a bird like a backpack is extremely silly. That makes it sound like I had major issues with this book; not at all. I point it out here because it was the biggest thing that stood out as false or jarring in an otherwise stellar novel that entertained me from start to finish. It is very, very good. As always when the trope appears in books, I love the idea that the big threat is something that we know as the readers of the novel, but the main characters remain ignorant of the Real Issue and instead focus on lesser, trivial-by-comparison, issues. The book is VERY well-written. But I have to say that I was bothered a bit by the way this trope was presented in this novel. (view spoiler)[Given that the Guardians' undead status is firmly established in every citizen of the Hundred, it's hard to believe that none of the Hundred characters even take a guess that the Guardians are involved somehow. Yes, they think the Guardians have all been killed. But when the evidence grows that all the legends of the Guardians were foretelling this specific sequence of events, you'd think that some of them might entertain the idea. Review: In ages past, supernatural immortal demigod beings called Guardians united a hundred city states into the nation called "The Hundred." They created a long list of rules for every aspect of the society and inscribed them on Law Rock: a huge tor in the center of the nation. To uphold and enforce the Laws, the Guardians tamed giant eagles and created the system of Reeves who ride them to hear disputes and pass down judgments. The eagles select their riders from the populace of the Hundred, and those people are then trained and live their lives bonded to the eagles, whose lifespans far exceeds humans'. (view spoiler)[The first chapter fairly elegantly introduces enough of this history for us to have a rough idea of what's going on, and then it pulls the rug out from under us (and the characters). Joss is with an older reeve, his lover Marit, and they lament that more and more people are greeting reeves with hostility and suspicion rather than honor and gratitude. Frustrated that the Guardians have abandoned them, they break the Law and visit one of the Guardian strongholds...where they find an inhuman corpse! Marit climbs up to the body and touches its cloak, and she has a vivid vision of a Guardian's last moments as it was hacked down by a warrior with an axe. With their entire worldview of the inviolate, untouchable, immortal Guardians shaken, they split up to carry the news. But on the way, Marit stops to carry out her regular duties, which involve a routine check of an area, Iliyat, where some other reeves had disappeared. She finds a bunch of locals who have built a temporary encampment. The Iliyat people act really shady, but she doesn't react fast enough and she and her eagle are captured. She discovers that Radas, the Lord of the region, has radically transformed in his mien and behavior, apparently possessed by an evil force who is bent on destroying all traces of devotion to the Hundred's gods. Marit is scheduled to be mass raped, but she has a hidden dagger and enlists the aid of another girl to help her...but the girl, in her terror, interprets "escape" as "suicide." So she kills Marit and then herself. When Marit doesn't appear, Joss returns to find her, but the Iliyat locals have cleared away their temporary encampment. It is only months later that they find where Marit's bones were buried, and they never found her eagle. Eighteen years pass. Grieving, Joss throws himself into a hedonistic lifestyle of drunken debauchery to cover his pain. Things have gotten much worse, with more and more territories rejecting the reeves and the number of reeves dwindling, and nobody knows about the evil forces responsible. Another sign that people have forgotten the Law is that the wealthy (who are permitted to indenture slaves) have been charging their slaves many compounding fees so that the slaves are not manumitted after the required 8 years of service. Meanwhile, in a country far, far to the southwest of the Hundred, the Qin people have been conquered by horseclans. The beautiful daughter, Mai, catches the attention of the horseclan's captain, Anji. Anji pays the bride price to her family, they get married, and then Anji takes her with his cavalry and head out to return to the east. With them is sent two others: a freakish woman - a slave whose white skin marks her as the spawn of a demon but also makes her an object of lustful obsession to nearly everyone who lays eyes on her - and Mai's uncle, Shai, who is a bit of a sad sack not just because he's always been treated as useless because he's the youngest of seven brothers, but because he's in a semi-permanent state of fear because he can see and hear dead people's ghosts. The patriarch of the family gives Shai a mission: find out what became of their beloved eldest brother, who dishonorably abandoned the family and his duties years ago to go traveling to the east. Anji, Mai, Shai, and the cavalry troop suffer many hardships returning to the Empire, and during a sandstorm the white slave girl wanders into the desert and is lost. Later, when the troop finally arrives back in the Empire, they discover that the Emperor has died and the struggles for succession have begun. Anji, who is actually the son of the old Emperor's favorite concubine and is thus a Prince of the Empire, has been in hiding for years so as to not be considered a contender for the throne. As he has no interest in becoming Emperor, Anji decides that they will all travel north out of the Empire into the Hundred. On the way, they have a brief interaction with two interesting characters: Keshad, a slave of a wealthy Hundred businessman who has been entrusted to make his master a profit; and an Imperial priest, who horrifies Shai to no end when Shai sees the priest banishing some dead people's ghosts, destroying them so that they don't pass through the Spirit Gate. Keshad has been saving his money for years, working to gather his own goods that he can sell on these business trips, buying and selling again and again for fifteen years or more so that he can buy his freedom from his 8-year contract and earn enough to buy his little sister Zubaidit out of sworn service at the Lady's temple, where she has had to grow up as an entertainer, prostitute, and assassin. The plan gets accelerated when Keshad finds the white slave girl in the wilderness and hides her in a secret compartment in his wagon so that no one would grow covetous enough to steal her from him. He realizes the effect that she has on everyone, and that she would be considered incredibly valuable to the Temple where his sister is ensconced. The situation in the Hundred has deteriorated even further: an actual army has been gathered in secret in the north, hidden in caves and forests where the reeves can't observe, and has laid siege to the largest city in the north, having conquered much territory in the north and east of the nation. The commander of the reeves gives Joss some authority to investigate, and Joss flies south to see why one of the reeve's Aeries, Argent Hall, is not responding to summons or communiques. Having outdistanced the troop (because he headed straight for the Hundred rather than heading into the Empire), Keshad reaches the Hundred only to find that the area is controlled by corrupt guards. He is spared from disaster by the presence of an itinerant monk, a motley devotee of one of the Hundred's many gods, who still garners some fearful respect: they dare not steal from a merchant when the monk is around. But the guards are clearly in cahoots with the dark powers spreading through the Hundred, because that night, after Keshad has crossed the border, a murderous gang of bandits attacks the caravan, clearly looking for Keshad and his white slave. He defends his wagon with the help of another merchant's guard and the monk, who are both killed in the fighting. Keshad would have been killed, too, except that Anji's cavalry arrived and efficiently slaughtered the bandits. It turns out that Joss had met Anji on the road some hours earlier and the two had an instant rapport and respect for each other. So when Joss saw the bandit troop riding to attack another village (as it seemed), he flew back and implored Anji to help. The foreign soldiers made short work of the murderers, and they captured the border guard captain for his obvious collusion with the bandits. Keshad's prize was still safe. They held a funeral service for the monk and the next day, Keshad, Mai, Anji, and all the cavalry headed on to the city of Olossi with their captive while Joss parted ways to continue on to Argent Hall. Argent Hall's reeve commander had grown ill last year, and had died suddenly. A replacement had appeared and taken charge, but this person was actually a revenant sent by the dark powers...in particular, a dark woman (who, it is strongly hinted, may be the revenant of Marit). This revenant commander had cut off all contact with the other reeves, had murdered the reeves sent from other aeries as well as any reeves of Argent Hall that had objected to his takeover, and had inducted thieves, crooks, thugs, and psychopaths as replacement reeves (thus showing that the process of eagles choosing their riders is FAR from foolproof). Joss arrives and is immediately captured. A beautiful assassin - Keshad's sister, Zubaidit, all grown up - arrives in Joss' prison cell and pulls a knife on him; he attacks her and manages to overwhelm her mostly by luck, for her skills are formidable. He escapes back to his eagle and they fly away when the criminal reeves of Argent Hall are too drunk to even notice. But when Joss and his eagle land in Olossi, they are captured and thrown into prison. Zubaidit wakes up and leaves Argent Hall, making her merry way along the trade road disguised as a musician. She plays a merry tune on her flute as she passes through the merchant caravans (unaware that she was passing her brother's wagon) and shoots a poison dart at the imprisoned guard captain as she strolls past, killing their prisoner. So when the troop arrives in Olossi, they do not have a guilty party, and so it is the word of a bunch of "foreign killers" that the guard captain had done anything wrong at all. So Anji, Mai, Shai, and the others are all put on trial, and the Olossi council decides that they must leave immediately: as dangerous foreign soldiers, they cannot stay in the Hundred. Keshad just barely manages to buy his freedom from his master through some shrewd negotiations and cunningly withheld information. He then goes to the Temple and brazenly asks them to return Zubaidit. They ask for more money than he could ever provide, and he is crestfallen for a moment...then he produces the white slave girl and the temple's matriarch agrees to make a trade. Zubaidit and Keshad enjoy a reunion, but both of them have changed drastically since they were children first sold off into servitude. He has become a crafty, conniving, paranoid merchant, and she has become a cold-blooded killer and courtesan. Realizing that both the temple and Keshad's former master might try some sort of revenge, they leave Olossi. On the way, they run into bandits: an advance scouting party of a huge army that is approaching to occupy the city (a move which had been arranged with the collusion of the senior members of the Olossi city council). Keshad survives by disguising himself as a bandit, donning the symbol of teh dark powers that they all wear, and Zubaidit survives by charming one of the corrupt reeves of Argent Hall, who are also working with the dark powers. She plays upon his lust and vanity until she can escape, and she gets Keshad out, too, but not before he has a run-in with "the woman:" the revenant who is the general of this southern army, who arrives on a flying horse made of smoke. She terrifies him and the two siblings return to Olossi, realizing they're hemmed in on all sides by a hostile army. The junior members of the Olossi city council execute a coup, aided by the news brought by a courier that the surrounding villages have all been massacred. This news shocks everyone, including the senior members of the Council who'd met with the dark forces in secret to arrange for the peaceful surrender of the city. The newly-formed city council invites Anji and his troop back into the city to help with preparing a defense, with the explicit agreement (drawn up by Mai) that if the city survives, each soldier will be granted a plot of land and resources to start a farm at new citizens of the Hundred. Joss returns with a flight of his fellow reeves, and together he and Anji create a plan to eliminate the threat posed by Argent Hall. They draw the eagles out into a long chase and series of skirmishes (which is horrific to all the reeves, as the Law says that "no reeve shall harm another" and "To harm an eagle is the basest of crimes"). While Argent Hall's eagles were all away from the roost, Anji, Shai, and the rest of the troop scaled the walls of Argent Hall to secretly enter and capture the place while it was only lightly manned. Shai stumbled across Argent Hall's commander (no one has ever seen him with an eagle) and ran him through with a scimitar...he is puzzled, though, because he sees no ghost. Anji and the rest of the troop celebrate Shai's prowess in killing the enemy leader, but later, when they return to show off what he's done, they find that the revenant has just got up and walked away, like revenants do. Without the advantage of the eagles scouting the air for them, the enemy proceeds to the gates of Olossi and are taken by surprise by a bunch of dramatic tricks and traps that Anji and the citizens of Olossi had set to slow down/eliminate the invaders. After some fierce fighting and a fire that burns a large section of the city, the city's defenders finally manage to rout the enemy army. The reeve commander arrives and appoints Joss as the new commander of Argent Hall. Anji and his troops get their plots of land. But then the itinerant monk appears at the Temple in Olossi, seemingly unharmed now, though he was trampled to death by bandit horses a week earlier. He speaks with a dread authority to the matriarch and all the other priestesses, reminding them of the ancient legends about the Guardians of the Hundred: how they rode on winged horses and strove with each other for control. They were called immortal because they would live on in others' bodies, souls jumping from body to body. He has arrived now to welcome the new incarnation of a fellow god: the white slave girl. The novel ends with him announcing that the war for the soul of the guardians will continue. (hide spoiler)] (hide spoiler)] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 13, 2023
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Sep 25, 2023
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Oct 13, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 0778309401
| 9780778309406
| 0778309401
| 3.45
| 2,038
| Feb 11, 2020
| Feb 11, 2020
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really liked it
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Recommendation: An overall enjoyable but occasionally frustrating fantasy read about five children growing to adulthood without any control over their
Recommendation: An overall enjoyable but occasionally frustrating fantasy read about five children growing to adulthood without any control over their lives: the Unwilling. Review: I really enjoyed the writing in this; in particular I liked (most of) the worldbuilding, the characters, the plot development - I didn't know where the story was going, exactly, which was delightful, and I liked the syntax and sentence structure. The idea of a world that had had magic in the past and then had that magic bound up, sealed away for generations: that's brilliant. Having a secret society that for generations has been working a Grand Plan to restore magic to the world is wonderful, as an idea and as a metaphor for a worker uprising to restore power to the populace. Each of the characters we follow, Nate, the Worker; Gavin, the Prince; Theron, his younger Brother; Eleanor, the Hostage; and Judah, the Foundling, all of them are nuanced, with both endearing and reprehensible qualities. The reprehensible stuff came later, artfully presented at a time that the reader is already sympathetic to each character, and so the reader feels disappointment in the character, rather than revulsion; pity and sadness rather than hatred and rejection. It came across as tragedy rather than horror, and that's good. The difference between tragedy and horror can be a fine line, and how Braffet massaged that boundary worked for me. The ending of the book (view spoiler)[was abrupt and unexpected for me, and I was stunned. In the end, though, I think I was more delighted with it - like being fooled by a magic trick - than annoyed. Even though there is no resolution, the enigmatic ending resonated with me more like the end of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (which also ends with the young woman leaping from a height to an uncertain outcome - is she dead? Is she alive? Is she transformed?) than like any number of other stories where it was clear that there was no ending, that the story just stops. It's the sort of unclear ending that somehow remains provocative, where I want to discuss with others: "What do YOU think happened at the end?" (hide spoiler)] Again, this is a tough trick to pull, and Braffet did it well. The sentence structure and word choice did a lot to help these things along, of course. It may be that I read a lot of books that are aimed at a lower reading level, so writing at a higher than 6th-grade comprehension impresses me. But then I think about Clute's book Appleseed, forcibly reminding me that a higher reading level absolutely doesn't mean better writing. This is just done well. It's not a perfect book, of course. It's very, very dark, with a lot of villainous people being horrible to each other, and the protagonists only occasionally being noble (which is an accomplishment, since they only have horrible, abusive role models). In addition, there were a few small irritants or weirdnesses that struck (or sometimes frustrated) me precisely because of their rarity. A writing weirdness: For the first several chapters, I thought Judah was black, because she had dark eyes and everyone kept trying to touch her hair (which is famously a thing that black girls get all their lives). So I was surprised to discover that she was a redhead. I wasn't expecting it. While I'm familiar with the prejudice that redheads get, it is trivial relative to what black folks get, and also doesn't usually involve people touching their hair (rather it tends to be expectations of hotheadedness, unreliability, or licentiousness). But this is fantasy, maybe people behave differently there. That's on me, I admit; I actually found it sort of a cute surprise, playing on expectations like that. But it was bothersome that there were no people of color in the book: everyone in the City is very pale and blonde. The Slomini are described as of wildly differing shapes and sizes, but none of the characters we see are anything but white (they are bred and chosen for their ability to blend into the City populace). There is hope as you read that the foreigners with the magic power, the Nali, will have some melanin, but it turns out that the one Nali we see, a captured shaman/chieftain, is even paler, with milk white skin. A setting weirdness: The castle from Elban on down is very medieval, but the presence and particularly the presentation of foppish, modish courtiers rang false for me...because historically, the monarch set the mode. Courtiers would dress as dandies to emulate the monarch and/or curry his/her favor. But Elban doesn't care about fashion in the slightest. The courtiers competition for fashion stands out because it seems utterly pointless. A plot weirdness: (view spoiler)[Judah pitches the idea of using her and Gavin as a means of instant communication. Elban is clearly taken with the idea, and declares that he is going to try it. WHY then doesn't he follow through and take them on his next military mission? Why? It makes no sense for the character at all. (hide spoiler)] It has to happen for the plot to advance, but it felt very, very awkward. A publishing weirdness: Normally I like maps in books. But the inclusion of maps in this book is completely unnecessary. The action never takes place outside of the City of Highfall (if a future book does, that book should have the eastern territories map), and the relative positions of the locations in the City are completely unimportant to the story. It's rare to get a fantasy book that is so well-contained and tightly-written that it doesn't need a map, but here's this book. Yet it has two maps! I didn't refer to the maps once in my eager reading of the book. Review: What follows is the plot summary. (view spoiler)[Everyone believes the Slonimi are groups of wandering vagabonds, but in fact they are a tightly-knit society of revolutionaries who are carrying out a multi-generational breeding plan to arrive at a group of powerful chosen ones who will together break the bonds that sealed magic away from the world hundreds of years ago. In ages past, a Mad King hired mages to harness the power of magic in the world to destroy his enemies. The result was that a large swath of the continent was rendered completely lifeless, destroying his strongest rivals. But with no opposition, the Mad King grew paranoid, fearing that someone else would use magic against him. So he caused his council of mages to perform another Great Work, but this one resulted in their death and the sealing away of magic. Before this, everyone had access to magic, but afterward, only the strongest and most gifted had any trace of Power at all. The Slonimi exist to find others who have some magical ability, to recruit them, and to breed them with others to gradually increase the magic power so that their distant offspring will be able to destroy the seal and release magic to the world again. Nate, Charles, and Judah are the result of decades and decades of selective breeding, combining bloodlines to refine and concentrate magic talent to the utmost: Slonimi with amazing Power. Judah was a babe yet unborn when her parents snuck into the Castle of the Mad King's descendant, Lord Elban. As intruders, her parents were thrown to the dogs to be brutally murdered by fang and claw. But a boy working in the kennel took pity and dragged her disfigured, dying body out of the dog pen. There he discovered that the mauled woman was giving birth. He ran to fetch a midwife, not knowing she was another powerful Slonimi (hilariously named Derie). The midwife helped to deliver the baby from the dying woman's womb, and then took the baby with her to visit Lord Elban's wife who was also in labor that night. The midwife manipulated the Lady, and the Lady decided that she was going to care for the "foundling," which they named Judah. Derie completed the ritual and Judah was forcibly bonded with the Prince who was born, Gavin. From that point on, they could feel each other at all times and at any distance. Lord Elban was concerned that his heir would have such a weakness, so he tested the limits of this bond as the kids grew: every instance of torture carried out on Judah left wounds on Gavin, too. Out of fear for his posterity and succession, Lord Elban caused Gavin and Judah to be raised together. A year or two later, Lord Elban tried to get another heir without that handicap, but his Lady died giving birth to Theron, and Gavin's younger brother was too sickly to be considered true ruler material. Years of torturing and otherwise trying to break the bond later, Lord Elban arranged a marriage for Gavin by taking a hostage from a noble family: 8-year-old Eleanor, who'd been physically and emotionally abused by her father and brothers. The four of them became known as The Children, and there was a lot of popular fantasizing about them, particularly about "The Foundling" as Judah came to be known. She was the living embodiment of hope for the working class: people from humble beginnings could go far. But plans set in motion decades before were already in motion: the Slonimi smuggled Nate and Charles into the city. Charles masqueraded as a courtier who introduced Nate to the Royal Physician (they call it "magus") at a time when he could be persuaded to take on an apprentice. Well-trained by his mother and all the other Slonimi, Nate easily improved the magus' work, and also began to treat commoners. In addition to getting very popular with the working class people, Nate soon made himself indispensable to the magus, and was finally trusted enough to accompany the old man on trips to the Castle. Once he was a familiar face in the Castle, Nate began to poison the magus. He took his place when the magus finally died, and began to treat the Children (who were by now adults themselves). Judah in particular needed a lot of care because Elban had never stopped torturing her, trying to break "the curse" of her bond with his heir, Gavin. Lord Elban felt that his son Gavin was getting too soft-hearted from Judah's influence, so he pressured Gavin to murder his brother Theron. It was a close thing, but Gavin resisted and did not kill his brother. Shortly thereafter, the Royal Physician poisoned Theron (though Nate slipped Judah the antidote that kept the boy from dying completely). Theron recovered enough to walk and talk, but all the animation, drive, and passion was gone from him. Lord Elban discovered that a distant country was famed for its shamans, and so he went to war with that country in part to capture some of their Powerful wise men and coerce them to break the bond. But before he could do this, the other hidden plan was put into motion. Lord Elban's Seneschal arranged a coup, killing Lord Elban while he was on campaign in a foreign nation but making it look like it happened at the hands of the opposing army, not assassins from his most trusted advisor. The Seneschal captured one of the Wise Men and brought him back, with the ambition not of breaking the bond but of duplicating it so his forces could instantly communicate across vast distances, enabling a vast empire of industry. The Seneschal's men killed all but the most powerful nobles, and from the survivors he extracted mercantile pledges. He reordered the empire into a capitalist collection of company towns, but he kept the Children around as insurance (they couldn't foment rebellion or become martyrs if he kept them as living prisoners), and because they - particularly Judah - were still popular with the masses. Nate realized that it was the Seneschal, not Lord Elban, who'd ordered Theron's poisoning. He was in many ways worse than Lord Elban, because he did all these awful things dispassionately, only motivated by a calculation of benefit rather than bloodthirst or hatred. Realizing the danger, the Slonimi accelerated the timetable. Nate managed to get Judah to give him a tour of their prison - the old Castle - and gained more of her trust through that companionship. Then he coaxed her into going into the ruined Tower of Power, where the remnants of the bound magic made her woozy and dull. He worked his blood magic on her a little more each day, while the other Children felt that she was angry and hurt and needed time alone (a jealous Gavin had years before lied to her that her one lover, the stablehand, had been murdered rather than smuggled out of the city; she'd just found out about it, so this story was believable). Nate trained her in the use of the Power each day; she was the most powerful Worker he'd ever seen, able to do things effortlessly that took everyone else months or years to learn. Finally, Nate began the big ritual (using Royal blood that he took when murdering Theron minutes before) to break the Seal, bringing Gavin up to the Tower so that she could murder him and thus end the Royal line that had kept magic from the world. But Judah realized what he was doing and recognized Theron's blood. Rather than sever the connection and kill Gavin, she threw herself out of the tower. They did not find a body, but Gavin could no longer detect her. The Seneschal sent him and Eleanor away as prisoners, and the book ends with Judah waking up on a country road and going for a walk to explore the world. (hide spoiler)] ...more |
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Oct 24, 2022
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Oct 27, 2022
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Oct 29, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 1401231608
| 9781401231606
| 1401231608
| 3.80
| 1,044
| May 01, 2011
| Jul 12, 2011
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liked it
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Recommendation: Good, gory tales of brutality, murder, and struggle to titillate and astonish. Critique: The artwork is decent and appropriate of the Recommendation: Good, gory tales of brutality, murder, and struggle to titillate and astonish. Critique: The artwork is decent and appropriate of the subject matter: often gnarled and twisted, with a predominantly dark palette that presents a world in perpetual gloom. Every character looked anguished, contorted in line as well as in mind. The writing is filled with modern expletives, which makes sense: it is portraying the characters through modern language. Just as it would be jarring to have the characters speak in language closer to the time depicted (medieval Swedish, English, or Gaelic), it would create distance between the reader and the characters if they used modern translations of 1,000-year-old curses. All that does make sense, but at the same time I felt like the repeated "fucks" and "shits" (used in the way we use them, as emphasis or exclamation) pulled me out of the story a bit. I have no idea how to have done it differently. More than in any previous Northlanders volume, the stories in this one reminded me of classic science fiction comics stories (I was a particular fan of Time Warp when I was a kid, which itself was an homage to golden age SF), where there was always a horrific twist or bad ending. Review: This fifth volume contains three unrelated stories reminiscent of old pulp science fiction comics, except instead of on hostile alien worlds, they all take place in our own hostile world, and involve Northlanders (people raised in the wintry northen reaches of the northern hemisphere such as Norsemen or Celts) in some fashion. (view spoiler)[The first story, "The Sea Road," has to do with a poor longboat captain who sails his ship into unknown waters far to the west of the North Sea in a vain search of riches. The second story, "Metal," is about a young dumb Norwegian, Erik, in the 8th century who is so nostalgic for an imagined pre-Christian golden age that he makes a pact with the Goddess of Death, Hulda. She gives him a holy mission to destroy Christians. After much destruction, he rescues and falls in love with a teenaged albino girl, Ingrid. He then stops killing Christians, and Hulda tries to enact her wrath: to her glee, the Christians hire Black Karl, a revenant, to hunt down Erik. Black Karl kidnaps Ingrid, and Erik defeats the undead warrior and swears his defiance to Hulda. They flee into Lapland to escape any other Hulda agents. The last story, "The Girl in the Ice," involves an old Christian hermit in Iceland. He finds a dead girl frozen solid in a lake, tries to retrieve the body without alerting anyone so that he can perform the proper burial rites, but he attracts the ire of some local warriors. He fights them off, but they overwhelm him, find the dead girl, and accuse him of perversion and murder. Before he is killed, the girl's mother secretly tells him she knows that her daughter just ran off with a bauble and drowned. But they need a scapegoat, so the hermit must die... (hide spoiler)] ...more |
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Aug 25, 2022
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Aug 26, 2022
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Oct 25, 2022
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Paperback
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| B0DLSPSPJQ
| 3.86
| 136,821
| Jan 10, 2011
| Feb 01, 2011
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really liked it
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Recommendation: An enjoyable blend of pop culture, police investigation, and British occultism, Midnight Riot is tonally a more modern Dirk Gently. Cri Recommendation: An enjoyable blend of pop culture, police investigation, and British occultism, Midnight Riot is tonally a more modern Dirk Gently. Critique: It's a good urban fantasy police procedural yarn. It reads how I think John Constantine would be if it was written as a collaboration between Terry Pratchett and Tim Powers. This was a book I'd set out to read because it was a summer selection for one of the Goodreads book clubs I've joined. I got to it late and read it on the last day of the month where it was the selection. Then I had to return this book to the library before I was able to finish my summary, so coming back to review it now, I had to search to remind myself of the name of one of the major characters, Peter's friend and contact (and hoped-for love interest) in the Criminal Investigations department. Bizarrely, almost none of the reviews here on Goodreads mentioned Lesley May at all, even though she is a central character that provides key resources in the investigation. Normally I don't read others' reviews before I write my own review, but because I was trying to find Lesley's name, I read many of them. Not only did almost none of them mention Lesley at all, but several of them talk about the book as if it has two separate stories/plot lines...which absolutely is NOT the case. There is one plot, with one villain causing all the murder and mayhem, which was never in doubt in my mind. (view spoiler)[What may have confused some readers is that the villain is a body-jumping spirit that is sowing madness and causing people to murder, so the normal police think there are separate killers on the loose. Peter and Thomas confer with various authorities to solve the case: the Criminal Investigations unit, ghosts, and local water spirits, the Rivers of London (which is where the series gets its name). The Rivers are not a separate plot, they are a resource for this investigation (and future ones). (hide spoiler)] That the murders and madness and consulting spirits is all of a single supernatural piece should be really obvious to the reader, given the nature of urban fantasy and mystery fiction, let alone the opening chapter which presents both the murder scene and an actual ghost giving eye-witness testimony. The book is very, very whimsical, with a lot of pop culture humor in a first-person voice that makes the protagonist, Peter Grant, really relatable and lovable. I was so delighted with some of the humor that I read passages with Pratchett-like jokes aloud to my family, such as "Carved above the lintel were the words SCIENTIA POTESTAS EST. Science points east, I wondered? Science is portentous, yes? Science protests too much. Scientific potatoes rule. Had I stumbled on the lair of dangerous plant geneticists?" These doses of self-effacing absurdity really kept me going in a story that contains supernatural, police procedure, and horrific murder otherwise...two of those are things I don't enjoy on their own. But the humor and the engaging characters kept me reading and enjoying the novel. I'm likely to read more. Review: In London, a black constable-in-training, Peter Grant, longs for a workplace romance with his fellow probationer, Lesley May. We meet them as they watch over the site of a brutal murder, where someone's head was knocked clean off their neck. During the night as he's trying to figure out how to chat up Lesley, Peter is approached by a shady character who gives testimony as a witness to the murder. But Peter is unable to summon the nerve to make a pass at Leslie then or at any time before they go through their placement interviews (where they finish their probation and are assigned to their permanent divisions within the Metropolitan police force). He is assigned to the Filing division while Leslie is assigned to Criminal Investigations. (view spoiler)[Resigned to never seeing her again except maybe sometimes in the commissary, Peter is surprised when his assignment is revoked temporarily so he can be assigned to assist Detective Chief Inspector Nightingale, the official wizard on the London police force. Apparently, Nightingale heard that Peter had taken that eyewitness testimony of that shade - something that everyone, including Peter himself, had doubted - and recognized that it was actually a ghost. Thomas figured Peter might be useful if he could indeed interact with the supernatural. They investigate another crime scene where a similar murder had happened, and Peter is able to see another spirit. The husband and wife who murdered each other had a dog; this dog gloms onto Peter, and hapless Peter is unable to figure out anything to do with the dog other than adopt it. Amused at the constable's lack of willpower, DCI Thomas is nevertheless impressed that Peter has the Sight. After thus reassuring himself that Peter is a good candidate, Thomas invites Peter to become his apprentice. Peter has to perform a ritual and swear a binding oath to enter into a formal magic contract with his master. Then he is able to enter Thomas' sanctum: a mansion in a very posh old London neighborhood. Peter meets the mansion's housekeeper/maid, Molly, who is quickly established to be some kind of horrible fey creature that has been bound to meekly serve the household. She never speaks, but she takes a liking to the dog. Thomas begins training Peter in magic while the investigation continues. As part of the investigation, Peter encounters various witnesses and authorities, including Leslie May (now his contact in Criminal Investigations), various ghosts, and the living avatars of the Thames and its various tributaries. A schism has built up between the two spirits of the Thames: the old man River (whose avatar and allies present as "pikeys" - an extended family living in caravans that move from place to place, representing the old country) and Mama Thames (whose avatar and allies present as West African immigrant Londoners, representing the cosmopolitan city). In exchange for information on the case, Peter has to do them favors, which boils down to brokering a marriage between their two families. With the help of all these, Peter is able to figure out that the murders have all been caused by the vengeful spirit of a 17th-century actor: a hack who gets his jollies by forcing ever-expanding numbers of people to act out scenes from Punch & Judy. "That's the way to do it!" Knowing this helps Peter chase down the spirit and put an end to it, stopping the cycle of murder at last. Peter continues his wizard training, nicely set up for an ongoing series of supernatural investigations where he will consult with the earthly police and the avatars of the Rivers. (hide spoiler)] ...more |
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0812524268
| 9780812524260
| 0812524268
| 3.80
| 21,178
| Jan 28, 1988
| Jul 15, 1992
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really liked it
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Recommendation: Well-crafted with a lot of supernatural world-building that is almost not connected to the first book, Red Prophet will appeal to fans
Recommendation: Well-crafted with a lot of supernatural world-building that is almost not connected to the first book, Red Prophet will appeal to fans of the supernatural or alternative history in general or Stephen King fans in particular. Critique: One of the more interesting and also frustrating things about this book is how little it continues the themes of the first book. While Alvin Maker appears in this book and plays a pivotal role, the book is not ABOUT him, nor is it about the primary tension established in Seventh Son: the conflict between creation and destruction, the Maker and the Unmaker. Instead, it is a chronicle of the struggle of Native Americans and the land itself against the foreign (mostly white) invaders, who have no connection to the land and who deaden the land by their very presence. This is interesting in that it is a bold move by the author to effectively abandon the primary conflict and make us care about another, separate supernatural struggle, but of course it's irritating if you as a reader were invested in that first conflict. It's really a strange choice. It's engagingly written, and by the end I certainly cared about the characters and exulted at the comeuppance of the villainous William Harrison character. It has some cool ideas regarding magic - that there is power in blood that connects natives to the land, and that settlers who have no connection to the land perforce cannot help but destroy the land by their very presence - and it's cool to see more of the alternative version of our world presented. We find out more about the colonies and free lands, and a bunch of alternative French historical figures also appear: Napoleon and Lafayette among them. Card's concern that we might get offended at portraying Harrison as a villain - the book begins with an "Author's Note" to explicitly make clear to us that the real-world William Harrison was not the blackguard he is in this novel - is a little weird, given that we're reading a book so clearly not actual history. Maybe some descendant of the real-world analog of one of Card's fictional characters got very publicly offended in the past, so he felt the need to explicitly state that "Hey, this is NOT your great-great-great-great-great-great grandpa," perhaps? It only occurs to me now that he doesn't provide such a disclaimer about Andrew Jackson. I wonder why that is...? The book is a celebration of Native Americans as well as early US history, and presents the indigenous people as completely sympathetic, in opposition to various groups of foreign settlers with varying degrees of villainy. But it also presents Tenskwa-Tawa, the Red Prophet of the title, foretelling the major events of the book. Prophecy is always difficult in fiction, particularly when it is presented so clearly and explicitly as it is here. We know what is going to happen because Tenskwa-Tawa foretells it. So a lot of the tension is removed for us as the reader: we never feel like "Oh, how is it going to turn out in the end?" Instead, it is like a Shakespearean or Sophoclean play that tells us what is going to happen in the very beginning, and our tension as viewers is watching the characters tragically play out what we know will occur, despite all their efforts to change or avert their fate. I really liked the sympathy for the natives in this book and the ultimate resolution was satisfyingly cathartic despite the horror, but I didn't care for how it abandoned the conflict of the first book. I was really engaged with the characters of Tenskwa-Tawa and his brother Ta-Kumsaw, and so for most of the book I wasn't bothered by this divesting of the first book's conflict, but Card is not content to just have Alvin present as an observer (I expect - and hope! - that what Alvin witnesses in this book will show up later as a foundational aspect of his character), but jars us with an occasional reference to the previous conflict, without developing it at all. He's almost rubbing our noses in the fact that he's not doing anything with the first conflict. The way he mentions the Unmaker without it having any effect or role to play in the entire novel is thus more irritating than satisfying. It would've been far more preferable for Card to omit any mention of the first book's supernatural antagonist than to name-drop off-hand references like he did. It's one of the few sour notes in the novel for me. La Fayette is an amazing character with a fascinatingly cunning mind and an inspiringly tragic sacrifice. His is a really compelling side-plot, which reminded me of most of the plots from A Song of Ice and Fire, where the reader is horrified and enthralled at the struggles of the characters in schemes and machinations that ultimately don't matter because they ignore the giant problem that somehow they've overlooked. With his intentional sacrifice for his higher goal, I expect that we will not see La Fayette again, though we *might* see Napoleon again. A final note: the massacre at Tippi-Canoe feels like the climactic event of the main plot to me. In writing the review summarizing the events, I initially got the order wrong, because it felt right to have the massacres at Tippi-Canoe and the battle for Detroit happening at roughly the same time. The massacre and the curse at the Mizzipy feels like the emotional peak of the story, so I was surprised to realize I was remembering it wrong: the massacre and the curse happens months before the other battle. I think a big part of that is that Harrison is built up throughout the novel as a traditional, almost melodramatic, villain in direct opposition to the main characters. So his defeat feels like the climax; the other conflicts, though they are important and engaging, don't have the same emotional weight for me. Review: There's a lot here. Don't click if you don't want to read the book's plot. (view spoiler)[William Harrison is a rat bastard who oppresses the native americans he despises by forcing whisky addiction upon them. We meet two brothers, Ta-Kumsaw, who has a strong connection with the land and impresses everyone with his fierce nobility, and Lolla-Wossiky, whose connection with the land is off the charts but who experienced such hideous trauma when his father was murdered in front of his eyes that he forever attempts to dull his senses with alcohol. But when Alvin is born, Lolla-Wossiky begins to feel a call to head north. Eventually he steals a tun of liquor and heads north to Vigor. He has a spiritual experience and is reborn as Tenskwa-Tawa, and it is Tenskwa-Tawa who visits Alvin when he uses his power to entice roaches to torment his siblings (a foundational scene in Seventh Son). Tenskwa-Tawa begins to preach to an ever-growing number of natives who gain a mystical sobriety from alcohol and settle just across the river from Vigor. Harrison gets more and more furious, because his native workforce has dwindled and he has to make up for it by hiring white thugs, vagabonds, criminals, and other lowlifes. He schemes and schemes how to get his slaves back and/or exterminate the natives to appease his bruised ego. Most of his ire is directed at Ta-Kumsaw, an uppity Red who has been seen to escort natives out of their slums and north toward Vigor (that he's doing this as Tenskwa-Tawa's lieutenant is lost on Harrison). Meanwhile, in Canada, the famous general Napoleon Bonaparte has been sent from France, both to lead the Canadian forces as the army commander fop De Maurepas' second-in-command and to get him out of France where his popularity was starting to scare the powers-that-be. The governor of Detroit, La Fayette, sees in Napoleon two things: a brilliant strategist who has a knack for making people love him, and a hope for the democratic future of France free from the tyranny of Kings. La Fayette has a talisman that was sent to him by the Cardinal of France that blocks Napoleon's power. While the unprotected De Maurepas falls under Napoleon's spell, La Fayette hatches a plan for the best hope for France. In parallel, Tenskwa-Tawa and Ta-Kumsaw develop plans of their own to restore the land from the depredations of the mostly white invaders, and have a falling out because they cannot agree on which is the correct course. Ta-Kumsaw believes in uniting all the tribes into one nation that can crush the collected military might of the settlers, after which they can force all the aliens to leave the continent. Tenskwa-Tawa doesn't think this will work; he has had visions of all the different ways the conflict between natives and settlers can play out, and he prophesies that the best possible outcome - which will be very difficult to accomplish - will be to split the continent between them, with the natives all moving across the Mizzipy River to the West, leaving all of the East to the invaders. Most other outcomes lead to the extinction of the native tribes, through war, disease, and relegation to reservations. Livid and more than a little fearful that the natives are going to destroy him, Harrison hatches a plan of his own. He hires some alcoholic native mercenary criminals to frame Ta-Kumsaw to stoke settler paranoia/xenophobia against their neighbors, which will give him an excuse to move in his troops in the name of "protection" but really to preemptively massacre the nascent native nation. It is unclear how much of this Tenskwa-Tawa has actually planned, and how much he has just foreseen. This is where the narrative of this book arrives at the end of Seventh Son: Alvin, escorted by his brother Measure, is leaving for his apprenticeship when they are the ones captured by the mercenaries. The mercs plant a bunch of evidence that wouldn't stand up to any scrutiny or skepticism, but is enough to enflame the prejudices of the Vigor populace. They are convinced that Ta-Kumsaw has stolen the boys to torture and/or kill them. A huge search party is formed. Miles and miles away, the mercenaries are preparing to torture and vivisect Alvin and Measure, but Alvin uses his powers to dull their captors' blades and also to loosen the ropes binding them. This delays their captors long enough that they are found by Ta-Kumsaw. Tenskwa-Tawa charges Ta-Kumsaw with looking after Alvin, which Ta-Kumsaw really doesn't want to do. But he begrudgingly acknowledges Tenskwa-Tawa's wisdom and accepts his authority. Tenskwa-Tawa knows that the boys need to be not found so that Harrison's forces will be called, which will result in tragedy, but it needs to happen so that the least terrible of all the possible futures will come to pass. Ta-Kumsaw takes Alvin with him as his sidekick. Alvin gradually learns some of Ta-Kumsaw's native lore, and begins to experience the union of man and land that comes naturally to nearly all of the natives. In their distress to find the boys and frustration that their leader Armor of God isn't doing more (he urges caution and consideration but is ignored), Alvin's family and their neighbors in Vigor send to Harrison for help. Harrison arrives and quickly turns Vigor into a military camp. They make a show of searching for the boys while actually searching for Ta-Kumsaw and stoking the xenophobia and anti-native feelings. The longer Harrison remains in Vigor, the more he asserts martial law in the region. Far away, Tenskwa-Tawa joins Ta-Kumsaw and Alvin at the Great Lakes, and the prophet uses his blood to still the waters so that he and Alvin can walk out on the waters and summon a twister that bears them aloft. There, suspended in the sky, Tenskwa-Tawa shows Alvin how he sees his visions. They each have their own visions, and then return to earth. Tenskwa-Tawa follows his vision back to Prophet Town for the completion of his plan. Harrison, having raised all the settlers and his mercenaries to a fever pitch of hatred, mobilizes everyone in Vigor to massacre all the peaceful natives in Prophet Town. Measure, who has been racing across country to testify that Ta-Kumsaw didn't kidnap them and hopefully thus prevent the massacre, arrives just too late. The mercenaries - with the help of almost all the men of Vigor - have already turned their cannon on the thousands of native families who stand defenseless on the shores of the Mizzipy River at Tippi-Canoe. The natives are mown down like wheat, and Tenskwa-Tawa works a great curse using all their blood: everyone who participated in the slaughter will permanently have blood leaking from their hands until they tell honestly how they murdered tens of thousands of innocent, unresisting people to anyone in the vicinity who has not already heard the story from their mouths. Harrison has a further geas: every day he must find someone who has not heard the story of his murderous obsession and its eventual outcome, and then he must tell it to them completely and truthfully. Then Tenskwa-Tawa uses the blood to turn the water solid. The few hundred survivors are joined by all the corpses who animate and all walk across the river. Forevermore, the power of their blood will prevent any non-natives from crossing the Mizzipy. Ta-Kumsaw, filled with even more righteous wrath at the news of Tippi-Canoe, roves the continent with Alvin at his side, recruiting different tribes for a vast army with his inspiring vision of a land completely free of any foreigners. The dove did not work, so time for the sword! The various nations of settlers catch wind of this, and they, wary of any threat to their homelands, begin to build up a huge army of their own, led by Andrew Jackson. The plan Ta-Kumsaw has hatched is to build up the native tribes into such a vast force that they must be matched in kind by a vast army of settlers. Then he will use the united tribes in a climactic battle against the white men, breaking the strength and thus the will of the white settlers: showing them that they can be defeated, so that they, demoralized, undefended, will pull up their roots and leave for other lands, recognizing that they're not welcome here and that it would mean death to stay. Instumental to that plan is an alliance with Napoleon, the brilliant strategist, whose French forces will serve as the anvil upon which Ta-Kumsaw's vast native army will hammer the American army into nothingness. Alvin's vision draws him to the Eight-Sided Mound, an ancient sacred site for the natives that is a gate to a space between worlds. Ta-Kumsaw reluctantly takes Alvin there, where they are met by Talespinner, the sort of mountain man character from the first book whose job is to chronicle all the stories. Alvin easily climbs the Eight-Sided Mound, but the way is impassable for Ta-Kumsaw until he hugs Talespinner and they walk three-legged up the Mound. Alvin has a vision of the imminent betrayal and bloodbath that the native army will suffer at the hands of the American army, and he and Ta-Kumsaw rush off to prevent it. Finally it is time for La Fayette to complete his plan. He must have Napoleon return to France in disgrace, so that Napoleon's patriotism will reject the authority of the King and he can lead a popular rebellion to overthrow the monarchy. But for that to happen, Napoleon must be sabotaged. La Fayette prays, and then forges a number of letters to De Maurepas, including the magic talisman. La Fayette, no longer protected, falls under Napoleon's charm, but De Maurepas in his vanity is filled with wrathful spite that he was manipulated by Napoleon - a commoner! - and so he relieves Napoleon of his command and ships him (and La Fayette) back to France as traitors. When the battle comes, the French troops, without Napoleon's leadership, fail to hold their ground against Jackson's American army, which breaks through their lines and sacks Detroit. When Ta-Kumsaw's native army arrives, they find a strong fortress manned by their enemies armed with many cannon. The native army is massacred. Ta-Kumsaw survives only because Alvin is using all his power to instantly heal all of his mortal wounds, and in the end they escape capture by dint of Alvin concealing the two of them from detection. They leave once Alvin recovers enough strength to heal Ta-Kumsaw completely, and they part ways. So the book ends with the continent divided and Alvin returning home to Vigor, the only male free of the curse. (hide spoiler)] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 16, 2022
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Feb 23, 2022
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Apr 16, 2022
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0385392524
| 9780385392525
| 0385392524
| 3.79
| 72
| Apr 27, 2021
| Apr 27, 2021
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liked it
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Recommendation: I recommend this standalone fantasy story told with the logic of dreams or comic books to anyone who wants a multiverse story but migh
Recommendation: I recommend this standalone fantasy story told with the logic of dreams or comic books to anyone who wants a multiverse story but might find Lewis' Space Trilogy too complicated, Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy too dark, or L'Engle's Time Quintet too long. Critique: First of all, I have to gush about the evocative title: The Thief of Worlds! There is something very Romantic, powerful, and feeling about that title. So much so that I had to read it, knowing absolutely nothing about it. The Thief of Worlds starts with a Khalil Gibran quotation. It then starts the story about Hurricane and the day the winds died. It's always a big shift for me to go into reading a book like this from other fiction, because most other fiction - even a lot of children's fiction - makes an attempt to establish a world and explain what is happening within it. But this doesn't, and so it feels like a dream (where it doesn't matter that things aren't explained) or a comic book (where the illustrations provide some context, obviating much of the need for explanation). Hurricane accepts all the fantastical things that happen to him without question, and that feels strange to me. But a LOT of strange stuff happens in this book, and omitting the standard "What is going on?" and "How is this happening?" questions that are present in most other fantasy books is a fascinating and very deliberate choice on Coville's part, because it saves a TON of space. Reading it, I had to make a conscious decision: was I going to be annoyed at how unrealistic characters are that don't wonder at wondrous things, or would I emulate them and just accept it? I waffled on this for some time, but in the end I decided to run with it, because it is just so novel and daring. "I could have the characters boggle at what's happening and try to explain it, but everybody does that, so I choose not to!" is audacious, and I admire it. It still feels slap-dash because all the storytelling moves at a racing speed - for the middle of the book, each chapter is on a completely different world - and we aren't given any space to catch our breath or really experience any of the fantastical settings. It's a little bit of Flash Gordon or Star Trek TOS - here we are on a new planet: it's all jungle and everyone's blue! - but even those serial stories spent more time allowing us to experience their settings. But I did find the villain Mokurra to be odd. It is clearly a monster - in its way more an Eater of Worlds than a thief of them - but the book cannot decide whether it is a sympathetic monster or not. (view spoiler)[Near the end of the book, Hurricane joins minds with Mokurra and feels its vast pain. He clearly empathizes with Mokurra, but then has no qualms about destroying it a few pages later. (hide spoiler)] In this case, omitting any meditation or reflection by the characters was weird, and makes them feel callous...and little bit monstrous themselves. Review: Here's an overview of the set-up, and then the rest of the story: Hurricane is a boy who was born during a tornado, and he has an affinity for wind. That's not it exactly: the winds love him the way machines loves Rajandra Das in Desolation Road: the winds go out of their way to please him and play with him. So he notices the day that the wind dies. (view spoiler)[His mom - along with many others throughout the world - fall sick, so he goes on a journey to meet the Keeper of Winds, whose horn has been stolen by a dimension-hopping thief. So Hurricane chases after the thief, traveling through portals to arrive at other worlds whose comparable elements (water, fire/light, earth/physical form) have been stolen. In each one, he is joined by an analogous character from that world who can sense the direction of their world's stolen item. They eventually arrive at an Eden-like world and meet the thief, a god-like being named Mokurra who is composed of all the souls of an entire planet that destroyed itself in a sudden cataclysm (Hurricane imagines it like nuclear war). Mokurra, filled with the insanity, shame, and remorse of billions of people who all died in the same moment because of their own mistakes and/or inaction, has stolen from other worlds to make a new one. Mokurra is delighted that the kids have come to visit his world - in fact, Mokurra left a path for them to follow, so they could prove they are worthy to populate this new world. But the kids manage to trick Mokurra, distracting it long enough to explore its temple, and they are then able to steal back the key items from their worlds and leave. Rather than destroy them, Hurricane convinces Mokurra to surrender into death via remorse instead. The kids flee back through the portals as Mokurra's world begins to dissolve. They restore the key items, and form, light, water, and wind return. (hide spoiler)] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 08, 2022
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Library Binding
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| 1982613416
| 9781982613419
| 1982613416
| 4.06
| 4,660
| Sep 10, 2019
| Sep 10, 2019
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liked it
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Recommendation: A well-written story about weird characters dealing with minor talents rather than superpowers, Lost and Found is an adult story about
Recommendation: A well-written story about weird characters dealing with minor talents rather than superpowers, Lost and Found is an adult story about teens rather than for teens. Critique: A lot of SF authors like to write their characters as always intelligent, always ready with witty repartee. The more this is done, the more entertaining it is, but also the more removed from reality the stories seem. The most obvious, egregious example of this is Jack Vance, of course. But in this book the incessant banter is nearly as jarring because the primary characters are all young teens. Part of this can be attributed to the idea that the main protagonist, Ezekiel, probably has Asperger's Syndrome. Like many people with Asperger's, he is hyper-focused, very smart, and not particularly concerned with what others think about him. But he keeps meeting other characters who are very similar to him. This makes for wonderful dialogue, but at the same time it's very jarring how none of the other characters react to the constant unintentional rudeness. There's something about the cover of the book - probably the cartoonish art style depicting two kids - that made me approach this book as if it was a YA novel. This impression may have been enhanced by the fact that most of the other novels I've read recently ARE for the YA audience. No matter how I got the impression, I did, and so I was surprised at the dark adult turn that the story takes pretty quickly: murder, rape, abduction, torture, pornography. This is a dark, DARK story. There's a lot of stuff that happens in the story that doesn't make sense and is never explained. Not only are the adults very willing to overlook how incredibly rude the teens are, but they also are very quick to trust the teens. An example: (view spoiler)[At one point, they discover that Beth has been secretly living with the corpse of her mother decaying in the upstairs bedroom for six months. The FBI investigator who discovers this never even once suspects that Beth killed her mom, even though it is SUPER SHADY behavior and she'd be the first suspect! (hide spoiler)] So the book is fun to read, but light on verisimilitude. The plot developments happen more because they need to happen than that they proceed from any resemblance to how things would play out in reality. Review: 15-year-old Ezekiel, an orphan with Asperger's Syndrome, has been living alone with his dad since his mother was struck and killed by a car when he was 4. He has a talent: a supernatural power to sense objects that have been lost by their owners, and to also know how to find the owners to return the objects. As a result, he is a social pariah, because everyone suspects him of being a thief. Everyone except his father shuns him. A little person, a 13-year-old girl named Beth who, due to her genes looks 6, chooses to ingratiate herself with Ezekiel because she is also a pariah (view spoiler)[(and also because her mom died in her sleep months earlier and she needed companionship as well as a "beard" to appear more like a normal kid) (hide spoiler)]. A cop mysteriously approaches Ezekiel and asks him to help him find a missing girl. The rest of the book is about him exploring how his ability works, and trying to solve crimes. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Mar 19, 2022
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Mar 19, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 4800004225
| 9784800004222
| 4800004225
| 4.34
| 5,571
| Mar 10, 2015
| Mar 10, 2015
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liked it
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 06, 2022
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Jan 07, 2022
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Jan 07, 2022
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Comic
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| 162692192X
| 9781626921924
| 162692192X
| 4.33
| 7,300
| Sep 10, 2014
| Sep 01, 2015
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 11, 2021
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Dec 11, 2021
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Jan 07, 2022
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Paperback
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| 1626921873
| 9781626921870
| 1626921873
| 4.26
| 24,334
| Apr 10, 2014
| May 12, 2015
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liked it
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Recommendation: It's an OK beginning to a pretty decent series about an abused girl figuring out how to find solace in a situation that is completely
Recommendation: It's an OK beginning to a pretty decent series about an abused girl figuring out how to find solace in a situation that is completely alien to her...the world of fae magic. Review: This book series really hits home the horror of magic. There are definitely personifications of evil and portrayals of the perils of dealing with capricious fey creatures, but the story begins with horror, as the inhuman magus buys a young Japanese girl named Chise as an object, a bit like a spell ingredient. Chise is so broken, and so abused that she somehow takes this as a good sign, a sign that finally somebody in the world wants her, and values her enough to PAY MONEY FOR HER. Human trafficking is a really steep hurdle to cross at the beginning of a teen graphic novel, but it adds a tension to the rest of the series: is Chise going to gain enough self-image to get angry that she was sold, or to realize that selling people is wrong? Or is the morality of magic already so muddled that she can never get that clarity? As a storytelling conceit, it is an interesting challenge: how would you show a character's development out of abuse and neglect in a world that also regularly interacts with magic and the amorality of inhuman monsters? The first volume doesn't really get into that, going more into fish-out-of-water slapstick routines for most of the volume, as the book is mostly just establishing Chise's current circumstances. (view spoiler)[After being bought, Chise is spirited away to England, where her owner, Elias, reveals that he is a magus...and an inhuman one at that. When he is out in public, he usually goes about with his face covered, or in a seeming of a unexceptional human male, but he is not a man at all. In private, he usually appears as a humanoid body with a fanged cow skull and mandible for a head. He has purchased Chise because she is something called a sleigh beggy - a rare type of human who generates her own magic energy and is thus beloved of the fae. He also reveals that he is (comically?) bad at social cues, and that human emotion is a bit confusing to him. Chise is quite awkward at first, for two reasons: 1) she doesn't know if she will be rejected again and so is in constant fear, and 2) she doesn't know what she's supposed to be doing. She doesn't speak English and so she can't communicate with others in the neighborhood at first. So Elias instructs her in English and calls her part of the family. But what else is she supposed to be doing? For a while, she attempts to slide back into the familiar - she had performed as a servant in previous homes. But Elias has a strange, emotionless doll called "the Silver Lady" (she is either a construct or a captive fey creature), and that creature performs most of the housework. So there is some slapstick conflict as the Silver Lady keeps swooping in to complete its tasks despite Chise's amateurish attempts. But Chise meets one of the fey that Elias draws upon for his magic, Jade Ariel, and that creature comforts and admires Chise in the bath. Then Jade appears later and entices Chise to leave the house, beguiling her with the help of other fey to leave Earth for the land of Faerie. But at the last moment, Chise remembers that Elias called her "family" and she turns away. This gives enough time for Elias to appear and rebuke the fey creatures. (hide spoiler)] Critique: I cannot over-emphasize how problematic the slavery aspect of the story is, not even so much the fact that she's been purchased as property - domination and ensorcellment is a staple horror element of faerie stories, after all - but that her slavery isn't an issue for anyone (including her!) for the rest of the book. It's a shadow that hangs over the reader for all of the book, and any enjoyment of the book is experienced around and despite this really big issue. In another way, it's a very standard Japanese manga, with lots of slapstick and situational comedy that veers briefly into maudlin melodrama and back again (the dramatic feelings Chise has are not about being a slave, but rather standard tween concerns about fitting in despite feeling out of place). The artwork is decent, with lines and shading that testify that it was drawn or at least finished on a computer. The artwork mostly portrays talking heads; wider establishing views of landscapes are rare. Sometimes in fast-moving sequences, the action can get a little jumbled and the dialogue is insufficient to inform the reader what exactly is happening in a given frame. The characters act weird. It's tough to say, reading this, how much of the awkwardness stems from the weirdness of the magic world, and how much stems from Japanese cultural mores that I don't know. For example, Chise repeatedly gets agitated, at which point one or another adult (even strangers) will put a hand on top of her head, like she's a pet animal, but this contact clearly thrills and comforts her each time. When I used to take my cat to the vet, she would get upset, and so I would stroke her head and gently murmur "Subside...subside..." which would calm her down in pretty much exactly the same way that Chise reacts. Is the author intending to show that everyone is treating her like an animal, or is it the intent to show that they are treating her like a beloved toddler? I have no idea, but that uncertainty enhances my read of the story, making it seem more otherworldly. Aside from the big elephant in the room (being property), the writing is gratifying because it incorporates a lot of classic European faerie mythology. Chise being an outsider is the set-up for the author to effectively give the reader a curated tour of a different faerie creature in each chapter. The exposition is very like a guidebook, sort of a manga version of the Spiderwick Chronicles. Being a fan of faerie stories like "Sabriel" or "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell," I really enjoyed this aspect of the book. It's a tough read, and I hope that the slavery aspect does get addressed more directly in the series...soon. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 10, 2021
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Dec 10, 2021
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Jan 07, 2022
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Paperback
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| 125012252X
| 9781250122520
| 125012252X
| 4.28
| 60,633
| Sep 26, 2017
| Sep 26, 2017
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really liked it
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Recommendation: A wonderful collection of short stories, each one a variant retelling of an existing classic fairy tale. Critique: I love short story a Recommendation: A wonderful collection of short stories, each one a variant retelling of an existing classic fairy tale. Critique: I love short story anthologies. This one is particularly good. There's a certain style and didactic rhythm to fairy tales, and Bardugo captures that perfectly. The stories work well on their own, but there is an additional delight in recognizing the source material - which classic fairy tales (whether from Aesop, Grimm, or Andersen) are being combined and retold. Like all fiction, fairy tales are products of their time. In the morals of the stories as well as the situations described, you can glean a lot of information about what was important to the author and their audience. Traditional fairy tales from the middle ages present a dangerous world where death is always close by, the family is the primary protection, and behavior that doesn't benefit the family is inherently perilous. Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales reflect post-Enlightenment, Romantic sensibilities of love and passion (abetted by his own fantasies of requited love). Bardugo's stories reflect our modern sensibilities of individualism and fairness, with characters often rejecting the family as toxic. In our culture, most of us don't have to worry about wild animals attacking us. Instead, the threat of abuse or neglect from the ones closest to us is far more real than stranger danger or death from exposure. Similarly, we as a culture don't have illusions about romance being all we need to be satisfied in life. So these stories of Bardugo's can resonate with us in a way that classic fairy tales seem antiquated and unrelatable. The artwork is fantastic as well: each story has its own illumination: a color-coded page border that simultaneously signals to the reader which story you're reading AND where you are in the story. The borders subtly change over time, in the way that a flip book's animation changes almost imperceptibly from one page to the next, but by the end you're gone on a journey. The artist, Sara Kipin, deserves a lot of praise for this. I picked this book up on a whim from the library, trying once again to find something new that would interest my son. With a provocative title like "The Language of Thorns," how could I resist? I don't know anything about Bardugo, having never read anything by her previously. This book stands alone just fine, though I gather that it relates thematically to some of her other books. I think it's a perfect way to start with this author. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 30, 2021
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Jan 04, 2022
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Jan 06, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 076534775X
| 9780765347756
| 076534775X
| 3.87
| 36,601
| Jul 01, 1987
| Apr 1988
|
really liked it
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Recommendation: This book is for anyone who likes the idea of a cross between "The Stand" and "The Devil and Daniel Webster." Critique: I went into thi Recommendation: This book is for anyone who likes the idea of a cross between "The Stand" and "The Devil and Daniel Webster." Critique: I went into this book with pretty much no foreknowledge; all I knew is that it was a celebrated series that I'd always thought I'd eventually get around to reading. So I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Seventh Son is about an alternative-history North America around the turn of the 19th century. Folk magic is real, and the monarchy was never restored in England. These two foundational premises lead to a series of logical consequences that together form an interesting setting in which there never was an American Revolution, Native Americans have a separate nation composed of many tribes, and people have legitimate knacks for doing different things. Alternate universe stories nearly always appeal to me, and this one is well-written. The dialogue and internal monologues are written in a country slang reminiscent of Cooper or Irving, which lends a feel like "The Devil and Daniel Webster," and there are supernatural forces in opposition to each other, using people as pawns in the conflict, which feels like "The Stand." Review: (view spoiler)[Alvin Miller loses his mill in a flood, so he decides to pack up all his family and remaining belongings to homestead in the Eastern Wilderness, out by the Hio River. HIs wife, pregnant with their 13th child, goes into labor as they are on the road. Another flood - a flash flood occasioned by a sudden storm - causes the small stream they are fording to swell enough to founder the wagon. Their eldest son, Vigor, sacrifices himself to save his parents by using his body to deflect an uprooted tree that would have destroyed the wagon otherwise, but he lives long enough for his baby brother to be born at a country smithy across the stream. Alvin takes his surviving family further on into the wilderness and founds a settlement they call Vigor. That seventh son, Alvin Junior, grows up in Vigor with an inquisitive mind, a charming demeanor, and knack for making things. But the water that keeps trying to destroy his family represents an evil, insidious force that is determined to obliterate Alvin Junior. We find out the story is about the people inspired by and working for the constructive force in opposition to the powers of the destructive force. The destructive force insinuates itself into all kinds of places, including into people's hearts, so that at times nearly everyone in Alvin Junior's life desires to murder him. It is only when Talespinner the bard arrives and observes the family dynamic that anyone ever considers sending Alvin Junior away to both learn a trade and remove him from immediate danger. (hide spoiler)] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 13, 2021
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Dec 16, 2021
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Dec 16, 2021
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0545582954
| 9780545582957
| 0545582954
| 4.57
| 3,860,864
| Jul 08, 2000
| Sep 2013
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really liked it
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 09, 2021
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Dec 12, 2021
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Dec 12, 2021
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Paperback
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| B005LWR514
| 3.64
| 8,025
| May 01, 2007
| May 30, 2018
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We went on vacation the week before Memorial Day, and I took some beach reading with me: The King of the Crags and Cart & Cwidder. I finished the Deas
We went on vacation the week before Memorial Day, and I took some beach reading with me: The King of the Crags and Cart & Cwidder. I finished the Deas novel on the first day, but by then my daughter had grabbed the Jones book. She offered me one of hers in exchange: Stoneheart is, as she put it, "basically a new Doctor Who adventure." So far that's a pretty good description: the bleak, nihilistic world view combined with the supernatural weirdness fits right into the Doctor Who novel genre.
...more
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Notes are private!
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May 26, 2021
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not set
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Jun 01, 2021
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Kindle Edition
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| 0062227327
| 9780062227324
| 0062227327
| 3.81
| 34,933
| Aug 06, 2013
| Aug 06, 2013
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it was amazing
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Recommendation: a good fairy tale combined with historical fiction. Critique: This book is pleasingly well-written. Very often when reading a book I am Recommendation: a good fairy tale combined with historical fiction. Critique: This book is pleasingly well-written. Very often when reading a book I am distracted by viewing the text as an editor, copy-editor, and sometimes even as a proofreader. But this book has the sort of rare writing where I could cease noticing the writing and just get absorbed in the characters and plot. One facet of this writing that particularly impressed me is that I didn't know for certain how the story was going to play out; a lot of novels broadcast how the conflicts in the book will be resolved, but with The Ghost Bride, while I could see different paths that the story could take, I was never sure which path it would take. That uncertainty is a precious thing, and I remain very impressed by it here. The story involves a blend of many faith traditions and a variety of folklore that presents an original, synthetic view of the afterlife. Souls inhabit their bodies, but exist discretely from them, and can be separated from the body without death. These souls then exist in a superliminal version of the waking world: a combination of the dream world of the subconscious and the afterlife. This space is occupied by human souls, but also the souls of animals and objects, as well as spirits, monsters, and demons that only exist there. This land of the dead is filled with non-euclidean geometries. Review: (view spoiler)[Near the end of the 19th century in Malaya, teenaged Li Lan is the only daughter of a Chinese family living in Malacca. The family has fallen on hard times: the mother died long ago of smallpox, which left the father horribly scarred. In his grief, the father gambled the family fortune on a series of bad investments and has become addicted to opium. Li Lan has been raised by as much by the family's amah (maid/housekeeper) and cook as by her father. As an infant, Li Lan was promised in a marriage arranged with the wealthy Lim family to the patriarch's nephew, Tian Bai. But with the many misfortunes, that agreement was not spoken of for years. In that time, the first son of the Lim family, Lim Tian Ching, grows sick and dies. The Lim family offers to pay all of Li Lan's family's debts...if she will agree to become Ching's ghost bride. A ghost bride was an actual custom, where a woman would be welcomed in as the "wife" of a deceased male. She got to become part of the family in exchange for honoring the memory and performing various rituals for the deceased. But in this novel, it goes a step further, since Ching's soul persists in the land of the dead and he visits her in dreams. She's filled with revulsion at the idea but she dutifully entertains the idea for a while since it would solve her family's financial troubles. While visiting the Lim household, she meets Tian Bai and is instantly attracted to him for all the qualities he has that distinguishes him from his spoiled, vindictive, dead cousin, Ching. What follows then is a coming-of-age story in which Li Lan gets very sick and finds her soul separated from her body. Not only is she a ghost bride, she has also become a ghost! Much of the book is taken up with her quest to figure out what is happening to her and if there's any way that she can leave the spirit world and the land of the dead to re-enter her body. On the way, she uncovers a number of unpleasant details about all the people in her life and matures a great deal as a result. (hide spoiler)] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 20, 2024
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May 27, 2024
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May 16, 2021
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Hardcover
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| 073941688X
| 9780739416884
| 073941688X
| 4.06
| 33,976
| 1967
| 1967
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it was amazing
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 2014
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Jun 02, 2014
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Jun 01, 2014
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Hardcover
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| 1401230970
| 9781401230975
| 1401230970
| 4.43
| 3,520
| Jun 14, 2011
| Aug 23, 2011
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really liked it
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Having misplaced my copy of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, I picked up a bunch of comics I'd set aside for just such an occasion. That's OK, because I
Having misplaced my copy of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, I picked up a bunch of comics I'd set aside for just such an occasion. That's OK, because I was getting pretty tired of Heinlein's social philosophy. "Fables" is the perfect break. This is the third deluxe edition, which combines books 5 and 6 of the "Fables" graphic novels, which are themselves collections of the monthly comic issues. So this is a spread of issues, something like issue 18 - issue 29. It's hard to say for sure, as both the graphic novels and these deluxe editions switch some of the one-shot stories around a bit, as they don't really advance the main story. This one is primarily the "March of the Wooden Soldiers" plot, in which (view spoiler)['The Adversary' sends an initial invasion of wooden soldiers built by Geppetto to assault Fabletown and The Farm, the two real-world enclaves for fairy-tale characters in New York. (hide spoiler)] I continue to like this series and wish that I'd paid attention to it when it was first published. That was sort of a comics Dark Ages for me, though, so I'm glad that I've at least found this now. An aside: I've finally been watching the anime Bleach, and I can't help but be struck by the plot similarities between the two. (view spoiler)[In both, there's an awesomely powerful enemy in another dimension. All the protagonists know that the enemy is planning to invade, and live in dread preparation for the day when the invasion happens at last. The difference is that in Bleach, they sort of know that the invasion will use Arrancar, and in "Fables," they don't know what the Adversary will use. So they're surprised when the Pinocchio clones show up to attack. (I liked the artwork, that each 'wooden soldier' actually has Pinocchio's head, implying either that Geppetto is a one-trick pony, or that he misses his son so much that he keeps trying to make him anew out of an obsessive love) (hide spoiler)] This is not revealing too much to say that, in this story arc, the tale turns a bit darker, with many supporting characters being killed. The invasion has begun! ...more |
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not set
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May 31, 2014
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Jun 01, 2014
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Hardcover
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 3.74
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really liked it
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Aug 28, 2024
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Nov 16, 2024
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| 4.18
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it was amazing
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Jul 30, 2024
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Jul 30, 2024
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| 3.89
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liked it
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Jun 30, 2024
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Jul 30, 2024
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| 3.59
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it was amazing
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Sep 25, 2023
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Oct 13, 2023
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| 3.45
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really liked it
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Oct 27, 2022
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Oct 29, 2022
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| 3.80
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liked it
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Aug 26, 2022
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Oct 25, 2022
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| 3.86
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really liked it
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Aug 31, 2022
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Oct 03, 2022
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| 3.80
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really liked it
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Feb 23, 2022
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Apr 16, 2022
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| 3.79
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liked it
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Mar 10, 2022
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Apr 13, 2022
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| 4.06
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liked it
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Mar 19, 2022
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Mar 19, 2022
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| 4.34
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liked it
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Jan 07, 2022
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Jan 07, 2022
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| 4.33
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Dec 11, 2021
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Jan 07, 2022
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| 4.26
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liked it
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Dec 10, 2021
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Jan 07, 2022
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| 4.28
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really liked it
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Jan 04, 2022
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Jan 06, 2022
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| 3.87
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really liked it
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Dec 16, 2021
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Dec 16, 2021
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| 4.57
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really liked it
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Dec 12, 2021
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Dec 12, 2021
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| 3.64
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not set
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Jun 01, 2021
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| 3.81
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it was amazing
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May 27, 2024
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May 16, 2021
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| 4.06
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it was amazing
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Jun 02, 2014
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Jun 01, 2014
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| 4.43
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really liked it
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May 31, 2014
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Jun 01, 2014
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