Servant Mage
Kate Elliott
Tordotcom
Fiction, Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: When the old kings reigned, mages of the five elements - fire, air, water, earth, and aether - were highly trained and celebrated members of society. But ever since the Great Liberation that overthrew the decadent and corrupt royal houses, magic is tightly controlled, with practitioners only allowed to learn a small fragment of their potential skills (that which serves the new government best), taught to fear the corrupting "demon" spirit inside them that grants them their powers. For all the August Protector's talk of creating a more equal and just society based on Virtues instead of bloodlines, many in this new, reformed world find themselves no better off than before... some, such as the mages, significantly worse.
Fellian has no love for the August Protector and the Liberationists, not since her mother and one of her fathers were publicly executed for "seditionist" activities. She was only spared because an oracle detected the fire magic within her. Now, she works off her indenture scrubbing latrines at a city inn by day and crafting magical Lamps by night. On the side, she still secretly teaches letters to those who wish to learn, a direct defiance of Liberationist decrees that restrict education to the most virtuous patriots. She's counting the moments until she earns her freedom to return the distant hills of her home. Then an inn guest makes her an offer she doesn't dare refuse, drawing her into the company of Monarchist rebels who seek to topple the August Protector and restore noble rule. Is this her chance at a future she hardly dared dream of, or is she walking deeper into danger?
REVIEW: There are authors I have an ambivalent relationship with as a reader, ones whose works I feel I should like, that I want to like, but for some reason I tend to feel let down by their stories more often than not, in some way I can't always articulate (which probably explains why I'm not exactly the world's best book reviewer, if I can't isolate and express my thoughts better). Kate Elliott is not at the top of that list by any means, but novellas like this remind me why she's on it, as for all the potential in the story premise and world going into it, I left it feeling subtly unsatisfied.
Things open on reasonably decent footing, as Fellian's situation and world are established in quick strokes that manage to avoid dull, intrusive infodumping... at least, at first. As the story progresses, though, there are more and more moments where she pauses to observe and think worldbuilding information for the benefit of the reader; her go-to reaction in stress tends to be lead boots. (I lost track of how often her feet or legs were described as "leaden", mostly so Fellian could stand uselessly and look around and describe things - even in the middle of high-stakes action - so the reader peering at the tale through her eyes got a full tour.) Things do at least happen, as Fellian is whisked from the inn halfway across the nation in the company of mages recruited to the Monarchist cause. She's all for undermining the August Protector and freeing herself from bondage, though at times Fellian parrots party-line ideas a little too readily for someone raised in the hinterlands by parents who were not loyal to the uprising, and having been partially educated in magic by someone outside the Liberationists and their strict, stifling, shame-infused system. The closer she and her companions get to their end goal, the more danger she's in - and the more she comes to question the ultimate motives and goal of their leader. Ultimately, she must decide where she means to stand in a politically fractured world, and what future she wants to work toward, though by then my interest was somewhat dimmed by distancing infodumps and tangled histories and relationships, and a general failure to really bond with Fellian enough to care where she ended up. I also found myself subtly irked that the cover misled me into thinking dragons would be more involved in the tale. (Aside from a somewhat-symbolic minor character/encounter, dragons are notably absent. Do not promise me dragons that you do not intend to deliver, authors and/or cover artists...) And the tail end drags out a little long, in a way that makes me wonder - along with all the worldbuilding crammed into a novella's page count - if Servant Mage was originally intended to be a full length novel or even a series but never quite fledged.
As I say too often, I've read worse. There are some interesting ideas, and when Fellian's not mired in leaden boots things happen. I just never felt drawn in like I'd hoped to be.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Kindling (Traci Chee) - My Review
The Elvenbane (Mercedes Lackey and Andre Norton) - My Review
The Jewel and Her Lapidary (Fran Wilde) - My Review
Saturday, August 23, 2025
Thursday, August 21, 2025
Lockjaw (Matteo L. Cerilli)
Lockjaw
Matteo L. Cerilli
Tundra Books
Fiction, YA Horror
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: Bridlington is a quintessential small American town, the sort of place where goodly folks mind their own business and stay out of trouble... and where, too often, the cries of the outcasts are ignored in the name of keeping the peace. When young Chuck Warren, a bullied eleven-year-old boy, died in the old mill one night, Paz Espino saw what happened, but the grown-ups don't believe that she saw a monster in the shadows below the hole in the floor. She's branded a problem child, a troublemaker, and only her three best friends stick by her as the rest of the town turns their backs. But Paz is like a bulldog with jaws locked on a bone; she's determined to find and kill the beast, and if nobody else will help her, then she'll do it herself or die trying.
The young stranger blows into town with a cruddy old car, a mutt named Bird, an envelope of money, and no name. He's looking for a fresh start far away from home, and Bridlington seems as good a place as any. But from the moment he pulls up at the gas station, he gets a sense of hidden secrets and lurking danger, a sense that grows stronger after a strange encounter with a group of kids outside the convenience store. Taking the name Asher, he starts trying to build a new life, making friends with the right sort of people, but Bridlington is a town haunted by dark secrets - and the bill for looking the other way is about to come due...
REVIEW: In the vein of Stephen King's It where children are left to deal with the problems intentionally ignored (and sometimes openly exacerbated) by adults and generations past, Lockjaw exposes the "monster" underlying the veneer of civility, in towns small and large. Though at times effectively creepy and even surreal, sometimes it gets too clever for its own good with confusing timeline shifts and some exceptionally heavy-handed messages about silence in the face of injustices by the end.
Starting with young Chuck's doomed efforts to connect with a new group of outcast friends after being bullied on the playground, the tale goes to "Asher" and his seemingly carefree arrival in Bridlington with nothing but a dog for company. This is clearly a young man with secrets in his past, and it's just as clear that this small town has secrets of its own, even as he tries to ignore the pricklings of premonition that hang over his first introduction to the group of outcast kids. Other characters who become entangled in things include Paz's older sister, who has done everything in her power to distance herself from her peculiar sibling, and Beetle, a trans teen who is counting the seconds until he can escape to college and leave the whispers and cruelties of small town life in the dust. Creepy overtones and tension drift through the tale in a thickening miasma that sometimes obscures the plot itself, not helped by how the story jumps back and forth in time at random (it's possible this is an issue with the audiobook, that there is some hint in the printed version, because otherwise it comes across as an author trying to wow the reader with a two-by-four surprise that felt more like jerking me around for half the book), and eventually the promised supernatural/gory elements come to the forefront as the metaphoric chickens of Bridlington come home to roost. Asher, set up to be the main character, became my least favorite of the bunch, far too cagey with his past and shallow in his motives (the reason is later revealed, but by then my general dislike of his apparent shallow pursuit of popularity - even in the face of glaring red flags -had set in, plus even after the reveal he remained overreactive to an almost cartoonish degree when confronted with conflict, to the point of literally jumping around and denting his car door and needing to be socked in the face by another character to calm down). The latter parts feel drawn out to grind in the main lesson about the toxicity of brushing off bullying and abuse and intolerance as "not my business" and masking it as small-down politeness, and how the interest on those injustices compounds exponentially. The heavy hand of the Message smashes the reader in the face repeatedly by the end, to an almost numbing effect. This alone dropped it down to nearly three stars; the final half-star loss concerns the unnecessary cruelty of the fate of Bird the dog.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Pines (Blake Crouch) - My Review
It (Stephen King) - My Review
Three Quarters Dead (Richard Peck) - My Review
Matteo L. Cerilli
Tundra Books
Fiction, YA Horror
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: Bridlington is a quintessential small American town, the sort of place where goodly folks mind their own business and stay out of trouble... and where, too often, the cries of the outcasts are ignored in the name of keeping the peace. When young Chuck Warren, a bullied eleven-year-old boy, died in the old mill one night, Paz Espino saw what happened, but the grown-ups don't believe that she saw a monster in the shadows below the hole in the floor. She's branded a problem child, a troublemaker, and only her three best friends stick by her as the rest of the town turns their backs. But Paz is like a bulldog with jaws locked on a bone; she's determined to find and kill the beast, and if nobody else will help her, then she'll do it herself or die trying.
The young stranger blows into town with a cruddy old car, a mutt named Bird, an envelope of money, and no name. He's looking for a fresh start far away from home, and Bridlington seems as good a place as any. But from the moment he pulls up at the gas station, he gets a sense of hidden secrets and lurking danger, a sense that grows stronger after a strange encounter with a group of kids outside the convenience store. Taking the name Asher, he starts trying to build a new life, making friends with the right sort of people, but Bridlington is a town haunted by dark secrets - and the bill for looking the other way is about to come due...
REVIEW: In the vein of Stephen King's It where children are left to deal with the problems intentionally ignored (and sometimes openly exacerbated) by adults and generations past, Lockjaw exposes the "monster" underlying the veneer of civility, in towns small and large. Though at times effectively creepy and even surreal, sometimes it gets too clever for its own good with confusing timeline shifts and some exceptionally heavy-handed messages about silence in the face of injustices by the end.
Starting with young Chuck's doomed efforts to connect with a new group of outcast friends after being bullied on the playground, the tale goes to "Asher" and his seemingly carefree arrival in Bridlington with nothing but a dog for company. This is clearly a young man with secrets in his past, and it's just as clear that this small town has secrets of its own, even as he tries to ignore the pricklings of premonition that hang over his first introduction to the group of outcast kids. Other characters who become entangled in things include Paz's older sister, who has done everything in her power to distance herself from her peculiar sibling, and Beetle, a trans teen who is counting the seconds until he can escape to college and leave the whispers and cruelties of small town life in the dust. Creepy overtones and tension drift through the tale in a thickening miasma that sometimes obscures the plot itself, not helped by how the story jumps back and forth in time at random (it's possible this is an issue with the audiobook, that there is some hint in the printed version, because otherwise it comes across as an author trying to wow the reader with a two-by-four surprise that felt more like jerking me around for half the book), and eventually the promised supernatural/gory elements come to the forefront as the metaphoric chickens of Bridlington come home to roost. Asher, set up to be the main character, became my least favorite of the bunch, far too cagey with his past and shallow in his motives (the reason is later revealed, but by then my general dislike of his apparent shallow pursuit of popularity - even in the face of glaring red flags -had set in, plus even after the reveal he remained overreactive to an almost cartoonish degree when confronted with conflict, to the point of literally jumping around and denting his car door and needing to be socked in the face by another character to calm down). The latter parts feel drawn out to grind in the main lesson about the toxicity of brushing off bullying and abuse and intolerance as "not my business" and masking it as small-down politeness, and how the interest on those injustices compounds exponentially. The heavy hand of the Message smashes the reader in the face repeatedly by the end, to an almost numbing effect. This alone dropped it down to nearly three stars; the final half-star loss concerns the unnecessary cruelty of the fate of Bird the dog.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Pines (Blake Crouch) - My Review
It (Stephen King) - My Review
Three Quarters Dead (Richard Peck) - My Review
Sunday, August 17, 2025
For the Wolf (Hannah Whitten)
For the Wolf
The Wilderwood series, Book 1
Hannah Whitten
Orbit
Fiction, YA Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Long ago, the magic of the Wilderwood was available to all who willingly laid a sacrifice beneath its branches... until the Five Kings struck a bargain to imprison the dark gods and monsters beneath their roots, diverting all power to that monumental and eternal task. But the forest would still bargain, if at a higher price. And when the Five Kings rode into the woods again, they became imprisoned in the Shadowlands too. Only the seemingly-immortal man known as the Wolf remains in the Wilderwood now, protecting the people from the shapeshifting monsters that slip free from the Shadowlands. For his service, he demands the second royal daughter of every ruler of Valleyda be sent to the Wilderwood, never to be seen again.
Red has known her fate since childhood. While her older sister Neve will someday inherit the silver crown, she is no more than a sacrificial lamb for the Wolf, and nothing her sister or her handful of friends can do will change that fate - especially not once she showed the Mark of all Second Daughters, a sign of the eternal pact between the people and the forest that keeps the gods imprisoned. Some day, the Temple priestesses declare, the Wolf will relent and let the Five Kings free, but why should Red be any different than the other Daughters who have gone before? She cannot even bring herself to be angry anymore about her fate, though Neve has more than enough anger for them both: anger at their cold and distant mother, anger at the Temple and the old gods, anger at the Wilderwood, and anger at the Wolf and his demand for sacrifices.
What Red finds in the Wilderwood beneath the boughs of the white sentinel trees is not at all what she imagined. The Wolf is no evil beast, but a man who, like her, has been bound by bargains and magicks over which he has no control. Worse, the Wilderwood has sickened, sentinel trees disappearing into gaps through which monsters emerge, and he's running out of strength to hold the prison gates closed. As much as Red yearns to escape and return to her sister, she cannot ignore the dangers that would befall everyone and everything she ever loved should the Wolf and the Wilderwood fall. But there are those who would stop at nothing to release the five lost Kings of old - and there are those too blinded by anger and love to realize what they're about to destroy...
REVIEW: I had high hopes going into this one, for all that there are obviously some familiar tropes at play. For the most part, I enjoyed it, though it never quite rose to the level of my highest expectations.
From the beginning, the dynamics of the characters and the world are well established. Neve keeps trying to convince Red that she can escape her obligations, that she can run away, and even has some friends and allies on board with the plan, but Red remains dedicated... not out of a sense of duty to her kingdom or her royal mother (both of which have always treated her as a disposable object, keeping her at arm's length) or out of piety to the Temple (neither she nor Neve really believe the priestesses who promise that, someday, the sacrifice of the Second Daughter will free the Five Kings), but because of a darker secret, one that she fears will destroy the few people she truly does love if she were to remain in Valleyda. Even then, given the chance to fight and live or lie down and die in the Wilderwood, she chooses life - and learns that almost everything she has been taught about the place, and about the Wolf, is dead wrong. As she comes to terms with her new circumstances and the new dangers around her, Neve remains desperate to rescue her sister... and here things started to shake a bit for me. The princess allies herself with a fanatical priestess seeking to subvert the traditional Temple teachings in favor of a more pro-active approach to ending the Wolf's reign and freeing the Kings, a woman who is so clearly evil that even blind sisterly devotion can't possibly be enough to mask the insanity.
With no way to communicate, the sisters end up working at cross purposes, with the fate of the Wilderwood and the greater realm hanging in the balance. Despite some occasional meandering and muddy bits, plus a little too much brooding and angst (particularly on the part of the Wolf himself, teetering on the trope/cliché line a little too often), a reasonably satisfying ending is partially marred by cliffhanger elements without being a straight-up cliffhanger, setting up the second volume in the duology... one I'm not sure I'll pursue, if I'm being honest, because it showed every sign of repeating some of the stuff that started to wear on me in this book, particularly the tormented, brooding, angst-ridden soul being redeemed by the power of love. (I will say, in its favor, that For the Wolf had a rather pointed subtext about consent and listening to women; this would've been a novella had people - even those who were closest to her and loved her best - actually listened to Red and respected her choices rather than barging ahead, convinced they knew better than she did what she really needed...)
You Might Also Enjoy:
Scriber (Ben S. Dobson) - My Review
Uprooted (Naomi Novik) - My Review
Silver in the Wood (Emily Tesh) - My Review
The Wilderwood series, Book 1
Hannah Whitten
Orbit
Fiction, YA Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Long ago, the magic of the Wilderwood was available to all who willingly laid a sacrifice beneath its branches... until the Five Kings struck a bargain to imprison the dark gods and monsters beneath their roots, diverting all power to that monumental and eternal task. But the forest would still bargain, if at a higher price. And when the Five Kings rode into the woods again, they became imprisoned in the Shadowlands too. Only the seemingly-immortal man known as the Wolf remains in the Wilderwood now, protecting the people from the shapeshifting monsters that slip free from the Shadowlands. For his service, he demands the second royal daughter of every ruler of Valleyda be sent to the Wilderwood, never to be seen again.
Red has known her fate since childhood. While her older sister Neve will someday inherit the silver crown, she is no more than a sacrificial lamb for the Wolf, and nothing her sister or her handful of friends can do will change that fate - especially not once she showed the Mark of all Second Daughters, a sign of the eternal pact between the people and the forest that keeps the gods imprisoned. Some day, the Temple priestesses declare, the Wolf will relent and let the Five Kings free, but why should Red be any different than the other Daughters who have gone before? She cannot even bring herself to be angry anymore about her fate, though Neve has more than enough anger for them both: anger at their cold and distant mother, anger at the Temple and the old gods, anger at the Wilderwood, and anger at the Wolf and his demand for sacrifices.
What Red finds in the Wilderwood beneath the boughs of the white sentinel trees is not at all what she imagined. The Wolf is no evil beast, but a man who, like her, has been bound by bargains and magicks over which he has no control. Worse, the Wilderwood has sickened, sentinel trees disappearing into gaps through which monsters emerge, and he's running out of strength to hold the prison gates closed. As much as Red yearns to escape and return to her sister, she cannot ignore the dangers that would befall everyone and everything she ever loved should the Wolf and the Wilderwood fall. But there are those who would stop at nothing to release the five lost Kings of old - and there are those too blinded by anger and love to realize what they're about to destroy...
REVIEW: I had high hopes going into this one, for all that there are obviously some familiar tropes at play. For the most part, I enjoyed it, though it never quite rose to the level of my highest expectations.
From the beginning, the dynamics of the characters and the world are well established. Neve keeps trying to convince Red that she can escape her obligations, that she can run away, and even has some friends and allies on board with the plan, but Red remains dedicated... not out of a sense of duty to her kingdom or her royal mother (both of which have always treated her as a disposable object, keeping her at arm's length) or out of piety to the Temple (neither she nor Neve really believe the priestesses who promise that, someday, the sacrifice of the Second Daughter will free the Five Kings), but because of a darker secret, one that she fears will destroy the few people she truly does love if she were to remain in Valleyda. Even then, given the chance to fight and live or lie down and die in the Wilderwood, she chooses life - and learns that almost everything she has been taught about the place, and about the Wolf, is dead wrong. As she comes to terms with her new circumstances and the new dangers around her, Neve remains desperate to rescue her sister... and here things started to shake a bit for me. The princess allies herself with a fanatical priestess seeking to subvert the traditional Temple teachings in favor of a more pro-active approach to ending the Wolf's reign and freeing the Kings, a woman who is so clearly evil that even blind sisterly devotion can't possibly be enough to mask the insanity.
With no way to communicate, the sisters end up working at cross purposes, with the fate of the Wilderwood and the greater realm hanging in the balance. Despite some occasional meandering and muddy bits, plus a little too much brooding and angst (particularly on the part of the Wolf himself, teetering on the trope/cliché line a little too often), a reasonably satisfying ending is partially marred by cliffhanger elements without being a straight-up cliffhanger, setting up the second volume in the duology... one I'm not sure I'll pursue, if I'm being honest, because it showed every sign of repeating some of the stuff that started to wear on me in this book, particularly the tormented, brooding, angst-ridden soul being redeemed by the power of love. (I will say, in its favor, that For the Wolf had a rather pointed subtext about consent and listening to women; this would've been a novella had people - even those who were closest to her and loved her best - actually listened to Red and respected her choices rather than barging ahead, convinced they knew better than she did what she really needed...)
You Might Also Enjoy:
Scriber (Ben S. Dobson) - My Review
Uprooted (Naomi Novik) - My Review
Silver in the Wood (Emily Tesh) - My Review
Friday, August 8, 2025
The Storyteller's Death (Ann Davila Cardinal)
The Storyteller's Death
Ann Dávila Cardinal
Sourcebooks Landmark
Fiction, Fantasy/General Fiction
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: Isla was eight years old and a thousand miles away when her beloved father died. She'd been sent to stay with her mother's relatives, the sprawling Sanchez family, in Puerto Rico as she had been every summer, and her mother didn't tell her about the death until she returned to New Jersey. Since then, her life has crumbled around her, as her mother escapes into alcohol and she struggles to stay afloat. Her only safe haven is her summers in Puerto Rico, in the home of her stern great-aunt and under the judgemental eye of her iron-fisted grandmother. Here, she loves listening to the vivid tales woven by her elders, stories of colorful ancestors and relatives and their seemingly larger-than-life exploits, adventures, and incidents, where truth and fiction often blend.
It wasn't until her grandmother passed away many years later that Isla began seeing those stories come to life around her, vivid recreations that play out daily.
Is it some sort of hallucination or daydream? Is her mind finally cracking under the many stresses of her life? Or has Isla inherited a gift - or a curse - that has passed down the Sanchez line for generations... and, with it, shouldered the burden of stories that the dead demand be shared with the living?
REVIEW: After a middling reading selection in July, I wanted to start August out on a better note, so I thought I'd switch up genres a bit; while The Storyteller's Death may technically have fantastic elements, it's more in the "magic realism" sense that shades into general or even literary fiction more than straight-up fantasy. (Also, this was part of a "great library read" via Libby.) By the end, though, I found the middling streak unfortunately continued.
The story, which is ostensibly told by an older Isla about her formative years and experiences, opens with an eight-year-old girl encountering the face of impending death; a relative across the street from her tia's house where she stays in summers offers hospice care to elderly, dying family members, and she ventures into the "forbidden" room... not that this is her first encounter with infirmity, what with her father hospitalized in New Jersey. There's promise in this opening, if no real hint of how any of it ties in to the concept that was promised in the blurb (the whole "stories coming to life around her" thing). But from there the story drags its feet and meanders through Isla's miserable childhood, her dysfunctional relationship with her alcoholic single mother and how it costs her opportunities for normalcy and friends, and how it's only in Puerto Rico that she has anything like the love and support and freedom she craves. Slowly, she comes to realize that there's a lot more to the island, the Sanchez clan (more of a dynasty), and class and race divides than her half-white outsider viewpoint initially sees, a point first driven home when she befriends the son of a laborer and is firmly berated by her great-aunt for fraternizing with "those" people. More foot-dragging and meandering ensues, with some foreshadowing and a sprawling cast of relatives and friends and not-friends, and eventually Isla encounters her first experience living through a story after her grandmother passes away. The Sanchez family is not big on sharing secrets, let alone discussing potential mental illnesses or supernatural events, so Isla struggles to figure out what is going on and to whom she can reach out - not at all helped by the weight the Sanchez name carries, which makes reaching out to others problematic, even if it seems they might be the only ones with the answers she needs. Eventually, she figures out what's going on and what she can do about it, but the visions only grow more vivid with each new encounter, to the point where they can actually inflict harm, even if she can't physically alter events. Belatedly, she encounters the one story that proves most pivotal to her family and her current situation, a particularly stubborn tale that becomes a mystery she needs to unravel... a mystery where she and everyone else conveniently forget something previously established (that stories, or rather the memories encapsulated in the stories, can be colored or outright fabricated by the deceased storytellers, and thus can't be trusted to reveal unvarnished truths). At some point, someone mentions how the threads Isla unearths in her research begin to sound as tangled and implausible as a telenovela - which, unfortunately, predicts the ultimate truth she uncovers (I don't deal in spoilers, but let's just say I found it stretched credulity to the point of being almost cartoonish). Along the way, Isla does a fair bit of growing up, learning to find her voice and her place and what it means to be a Puerto Rican, a Sanchez, and - most importantly - herself.
There are several good parts in the story. It paints a vivid, textured picture of what the island was like in the 1980's, and the disillusionment that comes with discovering the complexities and darkness hiding in the family tree, as well as realizing, to quote how Douglas Adams put it in The Salmon of Doubt, "how startlingly different a place the world was when viewed from a point only three feet to the left". The living stories were intriguing, but - and admittedly this comes from the fantasy reader in me, who can't help poking at general fiction or crossovers looking for deeper magic - I'd hoped more would come from them, and more explored about the whole concept, particularly how they could be solid enough for Isla to be physically harmed by them even though she alone experiences them; that point ultimately felt like an excuse to lend urgency to solving the mystery, because the story that gets "stuck" involves a firearm with a potentially-lethal-to-her bullet. I found the whole thing felt just a little too long for the story it told, some of the revelations and resolutions a little too forced.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Clap When You Land (Elizabeth Acevedo) - My Review
Whale Rider (Witi Ihimaera) - My Review
Shadowshaper (Daniel José Older) - My Review
Ann Dávila Cardinal
Sourcebooks Landmark
Fiction, Fantasy/General Fiction
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: Isla was eight years old and a thousand miles away when her beloved father died. She'd been sent to stay with her mother's relatives, the sprawling Sanchez family, in Puerto Rico as she had been every summer, and her mother didn't tell her about the death until she returned to New Jersey. Since then, her life has crumbled around her, as her mother escapes into alcohol and she struggles to stay afloat. Her only safe haven is her summers in Puerto Rico, in the home of her stern great-aunt and under the judgemental eye of her iron-fisted grandmother. Here, she loves listening to the vivid tales woven by her elders, stories of colorful ancestors and relatives and their seemingly larger-than-life exploits, adventures, and incidents, where truth and fiction often blend.
It wasn't until her grandmother passed away many years later that Isla began seeing those stories come to life around her, vivid recreations that play out daily.
Is it some sort of hallucination or daydream? Is her mind finally cracking under the many stresses of her life? Or has Isla inherited a gift - or a curse - that has passed down the Sanchez line for generations... and, with it, shouldered the burden of stories that the dead demand be shared with the living?
REVIEW: After a middling reading selection in July, I wanted to start August out on a better note, so I thought I'd switch up genres a bit; while The Storyteller's Death may technically have fantastic elements, it's more in the "magic realism" sense that shades into general or even literary fiction more than straight-up fantasy. (Also, this was part of a "great library read" via Libby.) By the end, though, I found the middling streak unfortunately continued.
The story, which is ostensibly told by an older Isla about her formative years and experiences, opens with an eight-year-old girl encountering the face of impending death; a relative across the street from her tia's house where she stays in summers offers hospice care to elderly, dying family members, and she ventures into the "forbidden" room... not that this is her first encounter with infirmity, what with her father hospitalized in New Jersey. There's promise in this opening, if no real hint of how any of it ties in to the concept that was promised in the blurb (the whole "stories coming to life around her" thing). But from there the story drags its feet and meanders through Isla's miserable childhood, her dysfunctional relationship with her alcoholic single mother and how it costs her opportunities for normalcy and friends, and how it's only in Puerto Rico that she has anything like the love and support and freedom she craves. Slowly, she comes to realize that there's a lot more to the island, the Sanchez clan (more of a dynasty), and class and race divides than her half-white outsider viewpoint initially sees, a point first driven home when she befriends the son of a laborer and is firmly berated by her great-aunt for fraternizing with "those" people. More foot-dragging and meandering ensues, with some foreshadowing and a sprawling cast of relatives and friends and not-friends, and eventually Isla encounters her first experience living through a story after her grandmother passes away. The Sanchez family is not big on sharing secrets, let alone discussing potential mental illnesses or supernatural events, so Isla struggles to figure out what is going on and to whom she can reach out - not at all helped by the weight the Sanchez name carries, which makes reaching out to others problematic, even if it seems they might be the only ones with the answers she needs. Eventually, she figures out what's going on and what she can do about it, but the visions only grow more vivid with each new encounter, to the point where they can actually inflict harm, even if she can't physically alter events. Belatedly, she encounters the one story that proves most pivotal to her family and her current situation, a particularly stubborn tale that becomes a mystery she needs to unravel... a mystery where she and everyone else conveniently forget something previously established (that stories, or rather the memories encapsulated in the stories, can be colored or outright fabricated by the deceased storytellers, and thus can't be trusted to reveal unvarnished truths). At some point, someone mentions how the threads Isla unearths in her research begin to sound as tangled and implausible as a telenovela - which, unfortunately, predicts the ultimate truth she uncovers (I don't deal in spoilers, but let's just say I found it stretched credulity to the point of being almost cartoonish). Along the way, Isla does a fair bit of growing up, learning to find her voice and her place and what it means to be a Puerto Rican, a Sanchez, and - most importantly - herself.
There are several good parts in the story. It paints a vivid, textured picture of what the island was like in the 1980's, and the disillusionment that comes with discovering the complexities and darkness hiding in the family tree, as well as realizing, to quote how Douglas Adams put it in The Salmon of Doubt, "how startlingly different a place the world was when viewed from a point only three feet to the left". The living stories were intriguing, but - and admittedly this comes from the fantasy reader in me, who can't help poking at general fiction or crossovers looking for deeper magic - I'd hoped more would come from them, and more explored about the whole concept, particularly how they could be solid enough for Isla to be physically harmed by them even though she alone experiences them; that point ultimately felt like an excuse to lend urgency to solving the mystery, because the story that gets "stuck" involves a firearm with a potentially-lethal-to-her bullet. I found the whole thing felt just a little too long for the story it told, some of the revelations and resolutions a little too forced.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Clap When You Land (Elizabeth Acevedo) - My Review
Whale Rider (Witi Ihimaera) - My Review
Shadowshaper (Daniel José Older) - My Review
Thursday, July 31, 2025
July Site Update
Well, there's another 31 days of miserable existence I'll never get back... reading (generally) excepted, of course. The month's reviews have been archived over on the main Brightdreamer Books site.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Friday, July 25, 2025
North of Boston (Elisabeth Elo)
North of Boston
Elisabeth Elo
Pamela Dorman Books
Fiction, Mystery/Thriller
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: As the adult child of a turbulent marriage, Pirio Kasparov has struggled but built a reasonably decent life for herself in Boston. The perfume company founded by her parents is doing well, and will someday pass to her if her stubborn Russian-born father ever relinquishes his control. Her best friend since boarding school days, Thomasina, isn't doing nearly so well, too frequently found at the bottom of a bottle, but Pirio does what she can to help her and her son Noah. Ned, Thomasina's ex and Noah's father, had just left a large commercial outfit for the freelance life aboard a lobster boat, with Pirio riding along to help bait traps and get him started (not that she has a particular interest in fishing, but she's always on the lookout for something new and interesting to try, and for all his faults Ned has been a great father).
Neither one saw the freighter until it was slicing Ned's small vessel in two.
While Ned was lost, Pirio managed to survive for four hours in the near-freezing waters north of Boston before being rescued. The news treats her as a novelty, while the Navy wants to investigate her unusual ability to endure extreme water temperatures. But Pirio can hardly care about those things, not with Noah's father dead - and not with that little itch in the back of her mind that the "accident" was anything but accidental. Disappointed by official investigations that seem content to brush the matter aside and spurred by her cynical and suspicious father, she starts poking around on her own. Little does she suspect what a hornet's nest her inquiries will kick up...
REVIEW: This debut thriller melds elements of commercial fishing, corruption, perfume making, immigrant diaspora, and the lasting scars of troubled childhoods and abusive relationships, set in a solidly realized Boston and starring an interesting, proactive, and somewhat flawed heroine. It also feels like the start of a series that never took off, and thus one that never got a chance to fully explore its characters or situations, making some parts feel oddly extraneous by the end.
Keeping a fairly good pace throughout, Pirio's incredible survival in frigid Atlantic waters gives her some local notoriety in the middle of a deeply personal tragedy; Ned and her school friend Thomasina may have been over as a couple, but the man always did right by his son Noah, also much beloved by Pirio, and the breakup was not exactly a one-sided matter. That notoriety gets her noticed by the Navy (a subplot that sorta sputters out after verifying something Pirio suspected but needed proof of before believing), and also gives her some "street cred" when she starts investigating the matter of who sank Ned's boat. At first, she thinks it's a tragic accident, maybe a "hit and run" as is not uncommon on a sea with many small vessels sharing space and shipping lanes with behemoths, neither of which can exactly brake on a dime. But when strange occurrences follow her first questions, she realizes that there's more to it than mere happenstance; Ned was targeted, and someone wants very much for the matter to be forgotten. Pirio is reasonably clever in her investigations, if sometimes reckless, though that's in keeping with her character. Along the way, she also has to help with Noah as his mother spirals into self-destruction and cope with her own headstrong father's mortality catching up to his outsized will and personality, one more complication in a relationship that has been nothing but complicated. Memories of her mother, a woman with her own problems but who left an indelible mark on Pirio's life (as well as a legacy of the wondrous complexities of scent; she was the one who started formulating the perfumes that would become the backbone of the family's minor empire), make her fractured family relations all the more bittersweet, though her quest to find justice for Ned helps bring some unexpected closure on that front. Along the way are numerous clues and dangerous characters, some close calls and dead ends, culminating in revelations that have far-reaching implications and put Pirio and her friends in far more danger than she ever intended. There are hints and potentials for romance, but for the most part the book is free of entanglements of the heart; she may feel some attractions, but knows her current quest must take precedence. The conclusion leaves some questions and threads loose in a way that feels intentional, as though Elo was leaving the door open for more stories about Pirio and her companions. Overall, it kept me entertained.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Hemlock Island (Kelley Armstrong) - My Review
Adrift (Paul Griffin) - My Review
Whalefall (Daniel Kraus) - My Review
Elisabeth Elo
Pamela Dorman Books
Fiction, Mystery/Thriller
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: As the adult child of a turbulent marriage, Pirio Kasparov has struggled but built a reasonably decent life for herself in Boston. The perfume company founded by her parents is doing well, and will someday pass to her if her stubborn Russian-born father ever relinquishes his control. Her best friend since boarding school days, Thomasina, isn't doing nearly so well, too frequently found at the bottom of a bottle, but Pirio does what she can to help her and her son Noah. Ned, Thomasina's ex and Noah's father, had just left a large commercial outfit for the freelance life aboard a lobster boat, with Pirio riding along to help bait traps and get him started (not that she has a particular interest in fishing, but she's always on the lookout for something new and interesting to try, and for all his faults Ned has been a great father).
Neither one saw the freighter until it was slicing Ned's small vessel in two.
While Ned was lost, Pirio managed to survive for four hours in the near-freezing waters north of Boston before being rescued. The news treats her as a novelty, while the Navy wants to investigate her unusual ability to endure extreme water temperatures. But Pirio can hardly care about those things, not with Noah's father dead - and not with that little itch in the back of her mind that the "accident" was anything but accidental. Disappointed by official investigations that seem content to brush the matter aside and spurred by her cynical and suspicious father, she starts poking around on her own. Little does she suspect what a hornet's nest her inquiries will kick up...
REVIEW: This debut thriller melds elements of commercial fishing, corruption, perfume making, immigrant diaspora, and the lasting scars of troubled childhoods and abusive relationships, set in a solidly realized Boston and starring an interesting, proactive, and somewhat flawed heroine. It also feels like the start of a series that never took off, and thus one that never got a chance to fully explore its characters or situations, making some parts feel oddly extraneous by the end.
Keeping a fairly good pace throughout, Pirio's incredible survival in frigid Atlantic waters gives her some local notoriety in the middle of a deeply personal tragedy; Ned and her school friend Thomasina may have been over as a couple, but the man always did right by his son Noah, also much beloved by Pirio, and the breakup was not exactly a one-sided matter. That notoriety gets her noticed by the Navy (a subplot that sorta sputters out after verifying something Pirio suspected but needed proof of before believing), and also gives her some "street cred" when she starts investigating the matter of who sank Ned's boat. At first, she thinks it's a tragic accident, maybe a "hit and run" as is not uncommon on a sea with many small vessels sharing space and shipping lanes with behemoths, neither of which can exactly brake on a dime. But when strange occurrences follow her first questions, she realizes that there's more to it than mere happenstance; Ned was targeted, and someone wants very much for the matter to be forgotten. Pirio is reasonably clever in her investigations, if sometimes reckless, though that's in keeping with her character. Along the way, she also has to help with Noah as his mother spirals into self-destruction and cope with her own headstrong father's mortality catching up to his outsized will and personality, one more complication in a relationship that has been nothing but complicated. Memories of her mother, a woman with her own problems but who left an indelible mark on Pirio's life (as well as a legacy of the wondrous complexities of scent; she was the one who started formulating the perfumes that would become the backbone of the family's minor empire), make her fractured family relations all the more bittersweet, though her quest to find justice for Ned helps bring some unexpected closure on that front. Along the way are numerous clues and dangerous characters, some close calls and dead ends, culminating in revelations that have far-reaching implications and put Pirio and her friends in far more danger than she ever intended. There are hints and potentials for romance, but for the most part the book is free of entanglements of the heart; she may feel some attractions, but knows her current quest must take precedence. The conclusion leaves some questions and threads loose in a way that feels intentional, as though Elo was leaving the door open for more stories about Pirio and her companions. Overall, it kept me entertained.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Hemlock Island (Kelley Armstrong) - My Review
Adrift (Paul Griffin) - My Review
Whalefall (Daniel Kraus) - My Review
Thursday, July 24, 2025
Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man (Emmanuel Acho)
Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man
Emmanuel Acho
Flatiron Books
Nonfiction, History/Memoir/Politics
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Is racism really a problem in modern times? Can Black people to be racist? What about "reverse racism" against whites? Why can't we all just stop seeing color - won't that make the problem go away? Former football player and current sports commentator and podcast host Emmanuel Acho answers questions about race that many white people hesitate to ask.
REVIEW: If nothing else has become glaringly apparent in the decade since Barack Obama's presidency, it's that American racism is not only alive and well, it's become emboldened enough to step from the shadows and openly feast on whatever progress has been made since at least the 1960's. Acho does not pretend to speak to the experience of all Black Americans, but he does honestly and thoroughly explore a number of topics related to racism, from the personal prejudices and biases that seep into daily life and color decisions to the systemic racism built into the institutions that govern all aspects of our public existence, going all the way back to the nation's founding and persisting to the present day. He even addresses "that" word, its volatile history and if it's ever okay for someone outside the community to use it. It makes for an interesting, candid, and frequently depressing and infuriating look at the many faces, many forms, vexingly persistence, and adaptive mutability of a problem that underlies so many of today's challenges, challenges that threaten everyone but that share common roots.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Why Does Everything Have to Be About Race? (Keith Boykin) - My Review
Between the World and Me (Ta-Nehisi Coates) - My Review
How to Be an Antiracist (Ibram X. Kendi) - My Review
Emmanuel Acho
Flatiron Books
Nonfiction, History/Memoir/Politics
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Is racism really a problem in modern times? Can Black people to be racist? What about "reverse racism" against whites? Why can't we all just stop seeing color - won't that make the problem go away? Former football player and current sports commentator and podcast host Emmanuel Acho answers questions about race that many white people hesitate to ask.
REVIEW: If nothing else has become glaringly apparent in the decade since Barack Obama's presidency, it's that American racism is not only alive and well, it's become emboldened enough to step from the shadows and openly feast on whatever progress has been made since at least the 1960's. Acho does not pretend to speak to the experience of all Black Americans, but he does honestly and thoroughly explore a number of topics related to racism, from the personal prejudices and biases that seep into daily life and color decisions to the systemic racism built into the institutions that govern all aspects of our public existence, going all the way back to the nation's founding and persisting to the present day. He even addresses "that" word, its volatile history and if it's ever okay for someone outside the community to use it. It makes for an interesting, candid, and frequently depressing and infuriating look at the many faces, many forms, vexingly persistence, and adaptive mutability of a problem that underlies so many of today's challenges, challenges that threaten everyone but that share common roots.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Why Does Everything Have to Be About Race? (Keith Boykin) - My Review
Between the World and Me (Ta-Nehisi Coates) - My Review
How to Be an Antiracist (Ibram X. Kendi) - My Review
Democracy in Retrograde (Sami Sage and Emily Amick)
Democracy in Retrograde: How to Make Changes Big and Small in Our Country and in Our Lives
Sami Sage and Emily Amick
Gallery Books
Nonfiction, Politics
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: It's no secret that the state of America's democracy is dire. Voting rights are under attack, the very notion of who is or is not a citizen has been thrown into the shredder, and the party that pushed a literal, televised insurrection has grasped the levers of power. Institutions and guardrails are being destroyed at exponentially increasing rates, and those doing the destruction aren't even trying to hide the anti-democratic, anti-Constitutional roots of their motivations. Is it too late to stop the complete collapse of the country we thought we knew? The authors offer ideas for finding hope and motivation even in the darkest times.
REVIEW: This book was published in July 2024. At that time, I would've agreed that there was, indeed, some chance of at least limiting damage from the bad actors who have successfully infiltrated the system and grasped control of the media narrative to push their messaging and drown out opposition. I'm not at all certain of that anymore, one year later. In any event, the authors explore ways to connect with like-minded individuals and build intentional communities - ideally in-person communities, as so much of the internet has been siloed into echo-chambers and ultimately compromised (many online public spaces being actually in the hands of private individuals pushing their own agendas and influence, rewarding outrage and divisiveness) - in order to work toward change. They discuss the different ways people can contribute: not everyone is a leader, but most everyone can likely find something useful to do, some place where their interests and passions intersect with a need. As usual, though, there are those of us who fall through the cracks; I lack access to in-person communities, for one, and for another I lack anything tangible to contribute. I'm also congenitally invisible, so even in the off chance I found a place to show up I'm not particularly useful except as an inert object. Still, ideas like these are likely the only way to turn anything around or, as I sadly suspect will be more likely, eventually rebuild anything from the rubble that will eventually be left to whoever or whatever manages to survive what's coming.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Never Say You Can't Survive (Charlie Jane Anders) - My Review
Let This Radicalize You (Kelly Hayes and Miriame Kaba) - My Review
What Unites Us (Dan Rather and Elias Kirshner) - My Review
Sami Sage and Emily Amick
Gallery Books
Nonfiction, Politics
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: It's no secret that the state of America's democracy is dire. Voting rights are under attack, the very notion of who is or is not a citizen has been thrown into the shredder, and the party that pushed a literal, televised insurrection has grasped the levers of power. Institutions and guardrails are being destroyed at exponentially increasing rates, and those doing the destruction aren't even trying to hide the anti-democratic, anti-Constitutional roots of their motivations. Is it too late to stop the complete collapse of the country we thought we knew? The authors offer ideas for finding hope and motivation even in the darkest times.
REVIEW: This book was published in July 2024. At that time, I would've agreed that there was, indeed, some chance of at least limiting damage from the bad actors who have successfully infiltrated the system and grasped control of the media narrative to push their messaging and drown out opposition. I'm not at all certain of that anymore, one year later. In any event, the authors explore ways to connect with like-minded individuals and build intentional communities - ideally in-person communities, as so much of the internet has been siloed into echo-chambers and ultimately compromised (many online public spaces being actually in the hands of private individuals pushing their own agendas and influence, rewarding outrage and divisiveness) - in order to work toward change. They discuss the different ways people can contribute: not everyone is a leader, but most everyone can likely find something useful to do, some place where their interests and passions intersect with a need. As usual, though, there are those of us who fall through the cracks; I lack access to in-person communities, for one, and for another I lack anything tangible to contribute. I'm also congenitally invisible, so even in the off chance I found a place to show up I'm not particularly useful except as an inert object. Still, ideas like these are likely the only way to turn anything around or, as I sadly suspect will be more likely, eventually rebuild anything from the rubble that will eventually be left to whoever or whatever manages to survive what's coming.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Never Say You Can't Survive (Charlie Jane Anders) - My Review
Let This Radicalize You (Kelly Hayes and Miriame Kaba) - My Review
What Unites Us (Dan Rather and Elias Kirshner) - My Review
Tuesday, July 22, 2025
Tamora Carter: Goblin Queen (Jim C. Hines)
Tamora Carter: Goblin Queen
Jim C. Hines
Jim C. Hines, publisher
Fiction, MG Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Since her best friend Andre vanished without a trace, twelve-year-old Tamora Carter has struggled to cope. Was he kidnapped? Did he run away? Have the police given up already? At least she has an outlet for her frustrations in roller derby. But one day, after practice, she finds something very strange behind the skating rink: a pair of real, live goblins! They claim they came here from another world, but won't tell her where - though a portal immediately makes Tamora suspect that their appearance may have something to do with Andre's disappearance. Maybe the reason he seems to have vanished off the face of the earth is that he really did vanish, at least off this Earth. With help from some unexpected allies, Tamora sets out to unravel the mystery, locate the portal, and get her best friend back - but the goblins aren't the only threats she'll have to watch out for, and it's going to take more than roller derby trash talk to win against real magic.
REVIEW: After some disappointing reads this month (and other disappointments and stresses in general, including a major appliance failure), I just wanted something simple and straightforward. Tamora Carter: Goblin Queen delivers exactly what it promises, with a gutsy girl who will stop at nothing to bring her best friend home, even if it means facing down goblins and pixies and even a dragon - and worse. If there's not a whole lot more to it than that, well, it never promises more.
From her first appearance in a roller derby match as one of the Grand Ridge Honey Badgers (game name: T-Wrex), Tamora is no shrinking violet of a character, a girl with strength and guts and the grit to get back up when knocked down, even if she sometimes doesn't listen and forgets that there is no "I" in a team. During and after the game, the reader learns about the disappearance of Andre and two other kids from town some weeks back, and how it's gnawing at her, part of what drives her recklessness on skates. The goblins quickly cue her (and the reader) into the fantastic elements of the story, and the overall tone; though they jeer and threaten, their stilted language and silly appearance and behavior promise blunted corners and nothing too horrific, for all that the threats become real as Tamora digs deeper to figure out what's going on and what it has to do with her missing friend. This is, ultimately, like the other side of a portal fantasy, as Andre and two other kids have been whisked away to a fantasy world (hardly a spoiler, when goblins turn up in the first chapter and the portal concept is quickly established after that) and she must work to help bring them home before something terrible happens to them. Joining her is her older brother Mac, a nonverbal autistic boy who mostly speaks using a tablet computer, and the twin sister of one of the other missing kids who seems to have a lingering, if subconscious, psychic connection to the trio. Tamora starts and remains the primary driving force of the adventure, even when she learns that she can't do it all herself and needs a team to succeed. Her father even becomes an ally rather than an obstacle or non-character (as is common in middle-grade fantasies), and actually trusts his daughter. Her half-Korean heritage becomes a strength, particularly when it comes to the quirks of the language translation spells that allow people from the nameless fantasy world to communicate in English. Things move pretty well, with Tamora and her companions facing many dangers, sometimes stumbling but always climbing back up on their feet to keep trying. It all wraps up reasonably well, without too many surprises (at least for grown-ups reading it), leaving some "sequel potential" as the saying goes should Hines ever decide to pursue it. (This was originally a Kickstarter project, so I have no idea if he's intending to write more or not.) It's enjoyable for what it is, offering characters interesting enough to care about and plenty of fun, sometimes perilous adventure.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Fairy Metal Thunder (JL Bryan) - My Review
Goblin Quest (Jim C. Hines) - My Review
The Divide (Elizabeth Kay) - My Review
Jim C. Hines
Jim C. Hines, publisher
Fiction, MG Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Since her best friend Andre vanished without a trace, twelve-year-old Tamora Carter has struggled to cope. Was he kidnapped? Did he run away? Have the police given up already? At least she has an outlet for her frustrations in roller derby. But one day, after practice, she finds something very strange behind the skating rink: a pair of real, live goblins! They claim they came here from another world, but won't tell her where - though a portal immediately makes Tamora suspect that their appearance may have something to do with Andre's disappearance. Maybe the reason he seems to have vanished off the face of the earth is that he really did vanish, at least off this Earth. With help from some unexpected allies, Tamora sets out to unravel the mystery, locate the portal, and get her best friend back - but the goblins aren't the only threats she'll have to watch out for, and it's going to take more than roller derby trash talk to win against real magic.
REVIEW: After some disappointing reads this month (and other disappointments and stresses in general, including a major appliance failure), I just wanted something simple and straightforward. Tamora Carter: Goblin Queen delivers exactly what it promises, with a gutsy girl who will stop at nothing to bring her best friend home, even if it means facing down goblins and pixies and even a dragon - and worse. If there's not a whole lot more to it than that, well, it never promises more.
From her first appearance in a roller derby match as one of the Grand Ridge Honey Badgers (game name: T-Wrex), Tamora is no shrinking violet of a character, a girl with strength and guts and the grit to get back up when knocked down, even if she sometimes doesn't listen and forgets that there is no "I" in a team. During and after the game, the reader learns about the disappearance of Andre and two other kids from town some weeks back, and how it's gnawing at her, part of what drives her recklessness on skates. The goblins quickly cue her (and the reader) into the fantastic elements of the story, and the overall tone; though they jeer and threaten, their stilted language and silly appearance and behavior promise blunted corners and nothing too horrific, for all that the threats become real as Tamora digs deeper to figure out what's going on and what it has to do with her missing friend. This is, ultimately, like the other side of a portal fantasy, as Andre and two other kids have been whisked away to a fantasy world (hardly a spoiler, when goblins turn up in the first chapter and the portal concept is quickly established after that) and she must work to help bring them home before something terrible happens to them. Joining her is her older brother Mac, a nonverbal autistic boy who mostly speaks using a tablet computer, and the twin sister of one of the other missing kids who seems to have a lingering, if subconscious, psychic connection to the trio. Tamora starts and remains the primary driving force of the adventure, even when she learns that she can't do it all herself and needs a team to succeed. Her father even becomes an ally rather than an obstacle or non-character (as is common in middle-grade fantasies), and actually trusts his daughter. Her half-Korean heritage becomes a strength, particularly when it comes to the quirks of the language translation spells that allow people from the nameless fantasy world to communicate in English. Things move pretty well, with Tamora and her companions facing many dangers, sometimes stumbling but always climbing back up on their feet to keep trying. It all wraps up reasonably well, without too many surprises (at least for grown-ups reading it), leaving some "sequel potential" as the saying goes should Hines ever decide to pursue it. (This was originally a Kickstarter project, so I have no idea if he's intending to write more or not.) It's enjoyable for what it is, offering characters interesting enough to care about and plenty of fun, sometimes perilous adventure.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Fairy Metal Thunder (JL Bryan) - My Review
Goblin Quest (Jim C. Hines) - My Review
The Divide (Elizabeth Kay) - My Review
Friday, July 18, 2025
The Last Dragon on Mars (Scott Reintgen)
The Last Dragon on Mars
The Dragonships series, Book 1
Scott Reintgen
Aladdin
Fiction, MG Fantasy/Sci-Fi
**+ (Bad/Okay)
DESCRIPTION: Throughout the cosmos, every heavenly body, from the brightest sun to the smallest moonlet, manifests an avatar in the form of a dragon. When Earth's dragon Gaia decided her world needed life, she sacrificed herself, eventually enabling humans to evolve and take her legacy to the moon and other worlds - but nowhere else in the entire solar system had a habitable biosphere. Clearly, in order to terraform a place, the world's dragon avatar must die... but why must it be a self-sacrifice? Would it really matter how they died? Through war and treachery, humans slaughtered the great dragon Ares of Mars, to claim a second planet for themselves. Only with his last breath, Ares cursed his world. Now, there is air, and with it plants and animals, but the soil is barren, the skies lashed with killer storms, and every living thing that sprung from Ares's death is half-mad with hatred for humans, an infection that even spreads to imported pets and livestock. Earth's children may live on the planet, but it will never be theirs.
The night the boy was born on Mars, the great moon dragon Luna flew overhead, giving his mother the perfect inspiration for his name... the last gift she would ever give him. Years later, the orphaned Lunar Jones lives with a dozen other children, scraping the storm-torn wastes beyond the city gates for scrap and relics that will keep them all fed for another day on a world that's slowly dying around them. Fleeing another crew while fighting over a prize, he ends up in a forbidden military zone - and discovers an impossible secret: a dragon. And when young Dread chooses Lunar as his dragoon, the captain mentally bonded to the near-godlike being, the scrapper finds himself plunged into a new world that's far more dangerous than any storm-wracked wasteland, with stakes higher than he can imagine - for, if he and Dread fail the challenges that lie ahead, the last vestiges of Mars will fail with them.
REVIEW: I'd heard good things about this book, and the concept sounded very fun. Dragons as living avatars of heavenly bodies - able to power "dragonships" that turn the transit time from Earth to Mars into mere hours? A future with tech so advanced that power generators can spontaneously generate complex machinery and matter from microchip blueprints? How cool is all that? Unfortunately, the answer turned out to be rather less cool the more I read, until by the end I was left with a bitter, ashen taste in my mouth that managed to drop the rating below three stars.
Early on, I rather enjoyed the ideas and the world, and was willing to roll with the implausibilities for the sake of a good story - and it did indeed start out good. Lunar's the sort of scrappy underdog character that's a genre staple for a reason, fighting not just for his own survival but the found family back at the "relocation house" (basically an orphanage where Martian children wait for one of the meager apprenticeships or jobs to open up and pluck them out of poverty). He even extends his protective instincts to members of the rival crew that left him for dead, when he finds they also abandoned one of their own to die in the wilderness. When he discovers Dread in a cavern beneath the base, he also discovers one rogue general's off-the-books mission and a collection of young elite soldiers, all hand-picked and trained from early childhood in the hopes that the growing young dragon would choose one of them as his dragoon... but, instead, as implied by the foreshadowing of Luna's presence over his birth, it's Lunar who gets the honor. This does not instantly transform him into a flawless hero, though. He stumbles, he fumbles, he tries to become someone he isn't... and Dread is not some all-powerful and wise god, being young and inexperienced and possibly a touch mentally unstable, with terrifying bursts of rage out of the blue where he even threatens Lunar's life. The boy has to earn his place and his title, as well as the respect of the soldiers who become his crew - and, of course, when the inevitable major crisis hits, he and the rest find themselves subject to a trial by literal fire as the fate of Mars hangs in the balance. Along the way are memorable encounters with numerous dragons, all of which are more akin to Greco-Roman deities than humans: immensely powerful beyond human understanding, but with outsized personalities and flaws, prone to ever-shifting alliances and rivalries and bickering in which fragile mortal lives can easily be extinguished as casually as swatting a gnat. Sure, several parts are strongly reminiscent of other works (dragons bearing full crews in harness reminiscent of Naomi Novik's Temeraire, the elite military school where an unconventional underdog must prove themselves like in Orson Scott Card's classic Ender's Game, etc.), but The Last Dragon on Mars should have been a gripping, wild ride through a fantastic solar system... so what went wrong?
From early on, I had a slight itch in the back of my mind about the idea of Earth's avatar dragon/essentially-goddess Gaia sacrificing herself for life... and not just for life, but seemingly for humans. (Did dinosaurs even exist in this alternate solar system, or is this more of a Creationist take that glosses over any other species than H. sapiens, and by extension the many rich and wondrous biomes that came before us, as either nonexistent or irrelevant because "chosen by the Creator"?) Then Luna, devoted to the will and memory of Gaia (as all moons tend to be devoted to their "masters", their planets), decides to help humans. She chooses to let herself be seen and make contact with the mortals, explaining concepts of mental bonds and what dragons could do when paired with human innovation and technology (the "dragonships" and more), encouraging them to spread through the solar system even knowing that there are no other habitable worlds out there and there won't be any unless one of her kin is also willing to sacrifice themselves as Gaia did.
Why would she do this? Why would this not lead to trouble? This is never questioned, because the right of Gaia's blessed mortals to go wherever they want to, to plant their flag on whatever soil - no matter how hostile - and call it their own, is undisputed.
When Ares (understandably) refuses to give the children of Earth his planet Mars, the humans and Luna conspire to slaughter him in cold blood... which makes him the bad guy. I get that Lunar was born long after the original would-be colonists struck down Ares, but still, the growing sense that humans are somehow owed the planet - and, by extension, anywhere else they choose to go - simply by virtue of being humans... does anyone else smell more than a little "manifest destiny" doctrine, here? Couple that with how Lunar's first-person narration kept throwing in anachronistic references that seemed out of place for his character and his situation - such as comparing one woman's ponytail to swinging like a clock pendulum in a far future world where pendulum clocks would likely be obscure ancient history, or casually dropping a reference about how he and his companions are expected to save an entire planet while being younger than the driving age on Earth (which assumes that teenagers on Earth still undergo the rite of passage of learning to drive a motorized vehicle, that driving ages have not changed in hundreds of years, and that a Martian boy living a hand-to-mouth hardscrabble life with minimal access to education would know or care about a bit of trivia like that) - and later developments that enforce the "divine right of kings" in a rigid social hierarchy of unquestioned masters and obedient servants (with trouble coming when the servants dislike cruel, harmful treatment from their master and try to change the status quo), and I found my suspension of disbelief plummeting through the stratosphere.
By the end, despite some high-adrenaline space battles and world-shifting stakes, I no longer cared what happened to the people or the dragons... which was just as well, as the last twist almost had me groaning as it took the very last vestigial flutter of suspension of disbelief and stomped it flat. After the early promise and wonderful concepts, little was left but ashes and disappointment... though I will admit the dragons could be quite awesome.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Dragons in the Stars (Jeffrey A. Carver) - My Review
Dragonhenge (Bob Eggleton and John Grant) - My Review
Arabella of Mars (David D. Levine) - My Review
The Dragonships series, Book 1
Scott Reintgen
Aladdin
Fiction, MG Fantasy/Sci-Fi
**+ (Bad/Okay)
DESCRIPTION: Throughout the cosmos, every heavenly body, from the brightest sun to the smallest moonlet, manifests an avatar in the form of a dragon. When Earth's dragon Gaia decided her world needed life, she sacrificed herself, eventually enabling humans to evolve and take her legacy to the moon and other worlds - but nowhere else in the entire solar system had a habitable biosphere. Clearly, in order to terraform a place, the world's dragon avatar must die... but why must it be a self-sacrifice? Would it really matter how they died? Through war and treachery, humans slaughtered the great dragon Ares of Mars, to claim a second planet for themselves. Only with his last breath, Ares cursed his world. Now, there is air, and with it plants and animals, but the soil is barren, the skies lashed with killer storms, and every living thing that sprung from Ares's death is half-mad with hatred for humans, an infection that even spreads to imported pets and livestock. Earth's children may live on the planet, but it will never be theirs.
The night the boy was born on Mars, the great moon dragon Luna flew overhead, giving his mother the perfect inspiration for his name... the last gift she would ever give him. Years later, the orphaned Lunar Jones lives with a dozen other children, scraping the storm-torn wastes beyond the city gates for scrap and relics that will keep them all fed for another day on a world that's slowly dying around them. Fleeing another crew while fighting over a prize, he ends up in a forbidden military zone - and discovers an impossible secret: a dragon. And when young Dread chooses Lunar as his dragoon, the captain mentally bonded to the near-godlike being, the scrapper finds himself plunged into a new world that's far more dangerous than any storm-wracked wasteland, with stakes higher than he can imagine - for, if he and Dread fail the challenges that lie ahead, the last vestiges of Mars will fail with them.
REVIEW: I'd heard good things about this book, and the concept sounded very fun. Dragons as living avatars of heavenly bodies - able to power "dragonships" that turn the transit time from Earth to Mars into mere hours? A future with tech so advanced that power generators can spontaneously generate complex machinery and matter from microchip blueprints? How cool is all that? Unfortunately, the answer turned out to be rather less cool the more I read, until by the end I was left with a bitter, ashen taste in my mouth that managed to drop the rating below three stars.
Early on, I rather enjoyed the ideas and the world, and was willing to roll with the implausibilities for the sake of a good story - and it did indeed start out good. Lunar's the sort of scrappy underdog character that's a genre staple for a reason, fighting not just for his own survival but the found family back at the "relocation house" (basically an orphanage where Martian children wait for one of the meager apprenticeships or jobs to open up and pluck them out of poverty). He even extends his protective instincts to members of the rival crew that left him for dead, when he finds they also abandoned one of their own to die in the wilderness. When he discovers Dread in a cavern beneath the base, he also discovers one rogue general's off-the-books mission and a collection of young elite soldiers, all hand-picked and trained from early childhood in the hopes that the growing young dragon would choose one of them as his dragoon... but, instead, as implied by the foreshadowing of Luna's presence over his birth, it's Lunar who gets the honor. This does not instantly transform him into a flawless hero, though. He stumbles, he fumbles, he tries to become someone he isn't... and Dread is not some all-powerful and wise god, being young and inexperienced and possibly a touch mentally unstable, with terrifying bursts of rage out of the blue where he even threatens Lunar's life. The boy has to earn his place and his title, as well as the respect of the soldiers who become his crew - and, of course, when the inevitable major crisis hits, he and the rest find themselves subject to a trial by literal fire as the fate of Mars hangs in the balance. Along the way are memorable encounters with numerous dragons, all of which are more akin to Greco-Roman deities than humans: immensely powerful beyond human understanding, but with outsized personalities and flaws, prone to ever-shifting alliances and rivalries and bickering in which fragile mortal lives can easily be extinguished as casually as swatting a gnat. Sure, several parts are strongly reminiscent of other works (dragons bearing full crews in harness reminiscent of Naomi Novik's Temeraire, the elite military school where an unconventional underdog must prove themselves like in Orson Scott Card's classic Ender's Game, etc.), but The Last Dragon on Mars should have been a gripping, wild ride through a fantastic solar system... so what went wrong?
From early on, I had a slight itch in the back of my mind about the idea of Earth's avatar dragon/essentially-goddess Gaia sacrificing herself for life... and not just for life, but seemingly for humans. (Did dinosaurs even exist in this alternate solar system, or is this more of a Creationist take that glosses over any other species than H. sapiens, and by extension the many rich and wondrous biomes that came before us, as either nonexistent or irrelevant because "chosen by the Creator"?) Then Luna, devoted to the will and memory of Gaia (as all moons tend to be devoted to their "masters", their planets), decides to help humans. She chooses to let herself be seen and make contact with the mortals, explaining concepts of mental bonds and what dragons could do when paired with human innovation and technology (the "dragonships" and more), encouraging them to spread through the solar system even knowing that there are no other habitable worlds out there and there won't be any unless one of her kin is also willing to sacrifice themselves as Gaia did.
Why would she do this? Why would this not lead to trouble? This is never questioned, because the right of Gaia's blessed mortals to go wherever they want to, to plant their flag on whatever soil - no matter how hostile - and call it their own, is undisputed.
When Ares (understandably) refuses to give the children of Earth his planet Mars, the humans and Luna conspire to slaughter him in cold blood... which makes him the bad guy. I get that Lunar was born long after the original would-be colonists struck down Ares, but still, the growing sense that humans are somehow owed the planet - and, by extension, anywhere else they choose to go - simply by virtue of being humans... does anyone else smell more than a little "manifest destiny" doctrine, here? Couple that with how Lunar's first-person narration kept throwing in anachronistic references that seemed out of place for his character and his situation - such as comparing one woman's ponytail to swinging like a clock pendulum in a far future world where pendulum clocks would likely be obscure ancient history, or casually dropping a reference about how he and his companions are expected to save an entire planet while being younger than the driving age on Earth (which assumes that teenagers on Earth still undergo the rite of passage of learning to drive a motorized vehicle, that driving ages have not changed in hundreds of years, and that a Martian boy living a hand-to-mouth hardscrabble life with minimal access to education would know or care about a bit of trivia like that) - and later developments that enforce the "divine right of kings" in a rigid social hierarchy of unquestioned masters and obedient servants (with trouble coming when the servants dislike cruel, harmful treatment from their master and try to change the status quo), and I found my suspension of disbelief plummeting through the stratosphere.
By the end, despite some high-adrenaline space battles and world-shifting stakes, I no longer cared what happened to the people or the dragons... which was just as well, as the last twist almost had me groaning as it took the very last vestigial flutter of suspension of disbelief and stomped it flat. After the early promise and wonderful concepts, little was left but ashes and disappointment... though I will admit the dragons could be quite awesome.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Dragons in the Stars (Jeffrey A. Carver) - My Review
Dragonhenge (Bob Eggleton and John Grant) - My Review
Arabella of Mars (David D. Levine) - My Review
Friday, July 11, 2025
Grimpow: The Invisible Road (Rafael Abalos)
Grimpow: The Invisible Road
The Grimpow series, Book 1
Rafael Ábalos
Delacorte Books
Fiction, MG Fantasy/Historical Fiction
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: It was winter in the mountains when the boy Grimpow stumbled across the stranger's body, frozen in the snow. When he and his companion and friend, the thief Durlib, investigate, they find silver coins, jewel-handled daggers, a message with a golden seal, and a small, strange stone that glows when Grimpow picks it up... a stone that lets him read the odd symbols on the man's message, though the boy is illiterate and the message is in code. Even more mysteriously, the stranger's body melts like frost on a spring morning after the discovery, as though bespelled.
He does not yet know it, but by taking the stone and the seal, Grimpow has begun a long and dangerous path, one that winds through long-lost histories of the Holy Land, the halls of the outlawed heretical Templar Knights, the centuries-long quests of alchemists, even the cruel and corrupted machinations of the King of France and the Pope. For that nondescript little pebble is the true Philosopher's Stone, an artifact that can lead a chosen mind along the Invisible Road to the Secret of the Wise and the very keys to creation itself - a stone for which many have died. At stake is nothing more or less than the future of humanity, whether people will rise above the age of superstition and brutal ignorance that grips whole nations, or whether all hope of enlightenment will be snuffed out like a candle.
REVIEW: Early on, it looked like Grimpow had promise, an old-school historical fiction yarn with fantasy elements incorporating alchemy and its pursuit of ultimate knowledge and the Philosopher's Stone (as much a symbol of pure wisdom and understanding as a physical object), weaving in real-world events and figures from early 14th century Europe and the corruption underlying the church and its persecution of the Knights Templar. There was a certain straightforward sense of adventure, or at least the promise of adventure, as the illiterate boy finds himself drawn on a path of learning and enlightenment. But it often drags its heels in details and repetition, not to mention numerous points where it felt like the author was lecturing the audience about the history of France, corruption in Catholicism, the origins and brutal ending of the Templars, and medieval secret societies and symbolism as embodied in alchemy and related pursuits and mystery cults. The story and characters often meander and dither without actively progressing the plot (when they aren't repeating themselves as though the reader hadn't been there with them the whole time and remembers full well such details as who Grimpow used to be before finding the stone, or what fate befell Durlib, or his time in the remote monastery studying with the monks who took him in, and so forth). Every so often, the tale manages to be exciting and even interesting, but by the end it had become far too tedious, the plot too orchestrated by Fate and Destiny. The conclusion was a non-event, though this may be explained by the fact that the book was intended to have a sequel, one which I only learned of when searching online and which was apparently never translated into English... a moot point, as I have no interest in pursuing Grimpow's adventures - or lack thereof - further.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Rebel Genius (Michael Dante DiMartini) - My Review
Merlin's Mistake (Robert Newman) - My Review
No Such Thing as Dragons (Philip Reeve) - My Review
The Grimpow series, Book 1
Rafael Ábalos
Delacorte Books
Fiction, MG Fantasy/Historical Fiction
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: It was winter in the mountains when the boy Grimpow stumbled across the stranger's body, frozen in the snow. When he and his companion and friend, the thief Durlib, investigate, they find silver coins, jewel-handled daggers, a message with a golden seal, and a small, strange stone that glows when Grimpow picks it up... a stone that lets him read the odd symbols on the man's message, though the boy is illiterate and the message is in code. Even more mysteriously, the stranger's body melts like frost on a spring morning after the discovery, as though bespelled.
He does not yet know it, but by taking the stone and the seal, Grimpow has begun a long and dangerous path, one that winds through long-lost histories of the Holy Land, the halls of the outlawed heretical Templar Knights, the centuries-long quests of alchemists, even the cruel and corrupted machinations of the King of France and the Pope. For that nondescript little pebble is the true Philosopher's Stone, an artifact that can lead a chosen mind along the Invisible Road to the Secret of the Wise and the very keys to creation itself - a stone for which many have died. At stake is nothing more or less than the future of humanity, whether people will rise above the age of superstition and brutal ignorance that grips whole nations, or whether all hope of enlightenment will be snuffed out like a candle.
REVIEW: Early on, it looked like Grimpow had promise, an old-school historical fiction yarn with fantasy elements incorporating alchemy and its pursuit of ultimate knowledge and the Philosopher's Stone (as much a symbol of pure wisdom and understanding as a physical object), weaving in real-world events and figures from early 14th century Europe and the corruption underlying the church and its persecution of the Knights Templar. There was a certain straightforward sense of adventure, or at least the promise of adventure, as the illiterate boy finds himself drawn on a path of learning and enlightenment. But it often drags its heels in details and repetition, not to mention numerous points where it felt like the author was lecturing the audience about the history of France, corruption in Catholicism, the origins and brutal ending of the Templars, and medieval secret societies and symbolism as embodied in alchemy and related pursuits and mystery cults. The story and characters often meander and dither without actively progressing the plot (when they aren't repeating themselves as though the reader hadn't been there with them the whole time and remembers full well such details as who Grimpow used to be before finding the stone, or what fate befell Durlib, or his time in the remote monastery studying with the monks who took him in, and so forth). Every so often, the tale manages to be exciting and even interesting, but by the end it had become far too tedious, the plot too orchestrated by Fate and Destiny. The conclusion was a non-event, though this may be explained by the fact that the book was intended to have a sequel, one which I only learned of when searching online and which was apparently never translated into English... a moot point, as I have no interest in pursuing Grimpow's adventures - or lack thereof - further.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Rebel Genius (Michael Dante DiMartini) - My Review
Merlin's Mistake (Robert Newman) - My Review
No Such Thing as Dragons (Philip Reeve) - My Review
Thursday, July 10, 2025
Kindling (Traci Chee)
Kindling
Traci Chee
Clarion
Fiction, YA Action/Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: When nation fought nation on the Kindar peninsula, kindlers were the ultimate weapon: boys and girls with special gifts focused by balar crystals, unleashing powers to protect or destroy... but at a steep cost. For to use their magic, kindlers burned up their futures, days or months or years, few surviving past their teens. Thus, they were found and trained young, sacrificed as heroes in the name of glory - until the arrival of gunpowder and hand cannons rendered them obsolete almost overnight, followed by the end of the war with Amerand's victory. The long tradition of kindler warriors was outlawed as "barbaric", and those left alive were cast aside to wander in a world that no longer wanted or needed them.
In a small backwater near the mountains, a desperate young woman seeks help. Her village of Camas has been plagued by a pack of bandits who raid the mountain passes and keep her people on the very knife-edge of starvation with their raids and demands for tribute, to the point where they may not survive the coming winter on the scraps left behind. All ignore her pleas... all except for a handful of kindlers, all of whom have fallen on their own hard times, carrying their own scars. Can they remember and honor their old war codes to defend the helpless, or is the old age of heroes and magic truly gone from the land?
REVIEW: Kindling crosses the brutal reality of child soldiers with the familiar storyline exemplified by classics such as The Magnificent Seven, where a small band of antiheroes is gathered for one last shot at redemption (a shot where not everyone is guaranteed survival, let alone success), all told in a second-person present tense perspective (that's actually a first-person plural, from a sort of collective ghostly or spiritual host that focuses on each would-be hero in turn). Does it work? In general, yes, though at some point it started wallowing in its own trauma, gore, and helpless misery (not helped by rotating audiobook narrators who sometimes lean a little hard into the emotion and gulping, traumatic hesitations) to the point where it ultimately lost a half-star in the rating.
After a brief overview of the setup and setting, the tale opens with the classic trope of a stranger drifting into town and a young woman in distress (even though the latter's pleas are initially dismissed by the former, who doesn't want to get caught up in other people's problems when her own shoulders are nearly broken under the weight of her own troubles as it is). Not until a second stranger turns up - this one a former war hero of formidable skill - that the first character gets pulled into the plot/problem, drawn as much by the magnetism and authority embodied in the legendary "Twin Valley Reaper" as stubborn loyalty to the old kindler Codes of war that nobody, not even fellow kindlers, seems to remember, let alone honor; the leader of the mountain raider band is herself a former kindler, choosing to use her training to harass and kill innocent civilians rather than defend them. Of the seven would-be heroes, six of them cope with post-traumatic stress in various unhealthy ways, while the seventh is a cadet who was mere weeks from graduating and following her dream of becoming a true kindler on the battlefield when peace was declared and wrecked her future; this lattermost character was rather over-the-top in her childish innocence and eagerness to join her elders (in experience if not quite years; all of the characters are under 20, though war aged them all decades and kindlers were never expected to live to see their twentieth birthday anyway), actively envying their clearly broken lives and restless nights full of nightmares and completely ignorant why they'd resist finishing her training and letting her join them in slaughter even after she finally bloodies her blade and realizes (or seems to, for about half a minute) that death leaves a mark on the soul. (Why are they holding out on the big "secret" that binds them all like kin, she whines to them more than once, even as she sees them struggling...) All of them are looking to redeem themselves or prove something, to the ghosts of their past if nobody else, by joining the cause to defend Camas... and all fail themselves and their fellows more than once before finally coming together to show the village, the raiders, and the world that tried to erase them just what kindlers could do when united in common cause against evil.
You may notice a lack of names in this review; this was an audiobook I listened to, so I didn't catch spellings, and I'm having one heck of a time finding any but a couple names written down anywhere. They are distinct characters, and are generally interesting if not always likeable, save when they're repetitiously wallowing in their own miseries and clinging stubbornly to ideas and attitudes that not only aren't working but which might get other people killed. I was ready to smack each of them upside the head at least once, particularly when some terrible thing was happening or mere moments away from happening and they were lost in bad memories or doom-and-gloom observations instead of, y'know, actually doing something - even the wrong thing, just something - about the terrible thing. I get that this was part of the point, exemplified by how the power of kindling is quite literally about children being burned on the pyre of war for the sake of nations and leaders who not only consider their lives disposable, but who ignore and erase them as soon as it becomes politically convenient. Even given that, though, Kindling feels like it hammers those ideas, and the traumas of its characters, past the point of effectiveness, the end of the nail coming out the far side and catching up the story from telling itself.
You Might Also Enjoy:
War Girls (Tochi Onyebuchi) - My Review
The Builders (Daniel Polansky) - My Review
Guns of the Dawn (Adrian Tchaikovsky) - My Review
Traci Chee
Clarion
Fiction, YA Action/Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: When nation fought nation on the Kindar peninsula, kindlers were the ultimate weapon: boys and girls with special gifts focused by balar crystals, unleashing powers to protect or destroy... but at a steep cost. For to use their magic, kindlers burned up their futures, days or months or years, few surviving past their teens. Thus, they were found and trained young, sacrificed as heroes in the name of glory - until the arrival of gunpowder and hand cannons rendered them obsolete almost overnight, followed by the end of the war with Amerand's victory. The long tradition of kindler warriors was outlawed as "barbaric", and those left alive were cast aside to wander in a world that no longer wanted or needed them.
In a small backwater near the mountains, a desperate young woman seeks help. Her village of Camas has been plagued by a pack of bandits who raid the mountain passes and keep her people on the very knife-edge of starvation with their raids and demands for tribute, to the point where they may not survive the coming winter on the scraps left behind. All ignore her pleas... all except for a handful of kindlers, all of whom have fallen on their own hard times, carrying their own scars. Can they remember and honor their old war codes to defend the helpless, or is the old age of heroes and magic truly gone from the land?
REVIEW: Kindling crosses the brutal reality of child soldiers with the familiar storyline exemplified by classics such as The Magnificent Seven, where a small band of antiheroes is gathered for one last shot at redemption (a shot where not everyone is guaranteed survival, let alone success), all told in a second-person present tense perspective (that's actually a first-person plural, from a sort of collective ghostly or spiritual host that focuses on each would-be hero in turn). Does it work? In general, yes, though at some point it started wallowing in its own trauma, gore, and helpless misery (not helped by rotating audiobook narrators who sometimes lean a little hard into the emotion and gulping, traumatic hesitations) to the point where it ultimately lost a half-star in the rating.
After a brief overview of the setup and setting, the tale opens with the classic trope of a stranger drifting into town and a young woman in distress (even though the latter's pleas are initially dismissed by the former, who doesn't want to get caught up in other people's problems when her own shoulders are nearly broken under the weight of her own troubles as it is). Not until a second stranger turns up - this one a former war hero of formidable skill - that the first character gets pulled into the plot/problem, drawn as much by the magnetism and authority embodied in the legendary "Twin Valley Reaper" as stubborn loyalty to the old kindler Codes of war that nobody, not even fellow kindlers, seems to remember, let alone honor; the leader of the mountain raider band is herself a former kindler, choosing to use her training to harass and kill innocent civilians rather than defend them. Of the seven would-be heroes, six of them cope with post-traumatic stress in various unhealthy ways, while the seventh is a cadet who was mere weeks from graduating and following her dream of becoming a true kindler on the battlefield when peace was declared and wrecked her future; this lattermost character was rather over-the-top in her childish innocence and eagerness to join her elders (in experience if not quite years; all of the characters are under 20, though war aged them all decades and kindlers were never expected to live to see their twentieth birthday anyway), actively envying their clearly broken lives and restless nights full of nightmares and completely ignorant why they'd resist finishing her training and letting her join them in slaughter even after she finally bloodies her blade and realizes (or seems to, for about half a minute) that death leaves a mark on the soul. (Why are they holding out on the big "secret" that binds them all like kin, she whines to them more than once, even as she sees them struggling...) All of them are looking to redeem themselves or prove something, to the ghosts of their past if nobody else, by joining the cause to defend Camas... and all fail themselves and their fellows more than once before finally coming together to show the village, the raiders, and the world that tried to erase them just what kindlers could do when united in common cause against evil.
You may notice a lack of names in this review; this was an audiobook I listened to, so I didn't catch spellings, and I'm having one heck of a time finding any but a couple names written down anywhere. They are distinct characters, and are generally interesting if not always likeable, save when they're repetitiously wallowing in their own miseries and clinging stubbornly to ideas and attitudes that not only aren't working but which might get other people killed. I was ready to smack each of them upside the head at least once, particularly when some terrible thing was happening or mere moments away from happening and they were lost in bad memories or doom-and-gloom observations instead of, y'know, actually doing something - even the wrong thing, just something - about the terrible thing. I get that this was part of the point, exemplified by how the power of kindling is quite literally about children being burned on the pyre of war for the sake of nations and leaders who not only consider their lives disposable, but who ignore and erase them as soon as it becomes politically convenient. Even given that, though, Kindling feels like it hammers those ideas, and the traumas of its characters, past the point of effectiveness, the end of the nail coming out the far side and catching up the story from telling itself.
You Might Also Enjoy:
War Girls (Tochi Onyebuchi) - My Review
The Builders (Daniel Polansky) - My Review
Guns of the Dawn (Adrian Tchaikovsky) - My Review
Thursday, July 3, 2025
Alice Payne Arrives (Kate Heartfield)
Alice Payne Arrives
The Alice Payne series, Book 1
Kate Heartfield
Tordotcom
Fiction, Adventure/Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: In 1788, Englishwoman Alice Payne leads a secret life. By day, she's the respectable spinster daughter of a moneyed colonel, crippled in mind and body by the conflicts in the American colonies. By night, however, she is the Holy Ghost, masked highwayman and terror of the nearby roadways, mystique further enhanced by a clockwork automaton assistant... and if the fact that the Holy Ghost only ever strikes monstrous, wealthy leches hasn't been noticed by the constabulary, well, that is their problem, not hers. Besides, it's not like she's a robber only for thrills or vengeance; between the upkeep on the estate and her father's drinking and gambling problems, her ill-gotten gains are the only boundary between the Payne family and utter ruin. But one evening, what should be an ordinary robbery goes strangely awry when the carriage inexplicably disappears on the roadway. When Alice investigates, she discovers a strange clockwork device - and when she and her special friend Jane start poking around, they make a most marvelous discovery...
In 1889, Major Prudence Zuniga races to prevent the Austrian archduke's son from committing a suicide pact - again. For ten years, she's relived the same disastrous string of events over and over again, and all she's managed to do is change the name of the young woman he takes to the grave with him. It's part of an ongoing time war between two factions, the Farmers and the Guides, who each exploit time travel to reshape history as they each believe it "should" have gone... and both are doing little but mess everything up until the far future is nothing but utter, unlivable chaos. Her own life keeps getting rewritten, as does every soldier's, changes she only knows of due to a diary she keeps sequestered away in a secret spot of uncorrupted time. And she is tired of it. Unbeknownst to her superiors, she has a plan to sabotage the entire time travel network - a plan that involves making contact with a tinkerer in 1788 England...
Or, at least it did, until Prudence opens her portal in 2070 Toronto and the Holy Ghost rides out of history.
REVIEW: I had a specific window of time to fill at work, and this audiobook looked like it would do the job. A little steampunk, a dash of swashbuckling, a sprinkling of time travel hijinks... it sounded entertaining enough. Unfortunately, it never quite comes together before it hits the cliffhanger ending.
Things kick off with some promise, with Alice in her "Holy Ghost" role anticipating the thrill of another ambush on a scoundrel nobleman who deserves to have his purse lightened - but, even early on, there's something just a touch off-kilter. The style and writing, the actions and reactions of the characters themselves, often feel more like they belong in a young adult novel, as though they're in their teens or (at most) early twenties. But Alice is in her thirties, and other characters we meet are pushing forty or more. I kept having to remind myself of their ages, because my mind kept trying to roll them back. Anyway, the tale establishes a few separate times and the overall concept. Alice and Jane, ignorant of time travel (at first), are just trying to keep Alice's father and estate above water, even as Jane (her household companion and, more recently, lover) provides cover, having crafted the automaton that's become the Holy Ghost's signature... an automaton who really doesn't have much of a plot purpose, except to show that Jane is a proto-gearhead and introduce a little steampunk flair in a story otherwise lacking in steampunk anything. When Alice encounters the impossible device after the inexplicable carriage disappearance, she and Jane are quick to figure out that it's not fairy magic or deviltry but some manner of science - and, given the desperate state of the Payne household, Alice hardly hesitates to try using it for her own advantage.
Meanwhile, Major Prudence suffers one defeat too many in her efforts to change the would-be archduke's fate; when she's pulled from the operation, perpetually thwarted by manipulations from Guide enemies (which she, as a Farmer loyalist, derisively calls Misguideds, though to be honest the lines between the two are rather blurry and hardly seem to matter from the standpoint of a timeline irretrievably polluted by meddling across the board), she becomes more determined than ever to pull the proverbial trigger in her secret project to bring down time travel. But one of her first efforts (that we see) is bungled quite spectacularly, only salvaged when a bystander leaps into the fray. Alice Payne rather bowls over Prudence insofar as adapting on the fly and taking charge, which is probably why the series is named after her, but Prudence still tries to cheat and manipulate her into becoming another tool in her plan. Somewhere along the way I started feeling like the author was trying to cheat and manipulate me as a reader, too... and when the whole thing ended on a cliffhanger, I was more certain of that than ever.
The story moves relatively fast (most of the time, at least), and has some nice parts and ideas. The time travel problems and politics, though, get a little convoluted and don't quite mesh well with the swashbuckling, vaguely steampunk parts. I just plain didn't like Prudence, though I ultimately wasn't especially attached to anyone, and don't feel compelled to find out what happens next.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Sky Coyote (Kage Baker) - My Review
Recursion (Blake Crouch) - My Review
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland) - My Review
The Alice Payne series, Book 1
Kate Heartfield
Tordotcom
Fiction, Adventure/Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: In 1788, Englishwoman Alice Payne leads a secret life. By day, she's the respectable spinster daughter of a moneyed colonel, crippled in mind and body by the conflicts in the American colonies. By night, however, she is the Holy Ghost, masked highwayman and terror of the nearby roadways, mystique further enhanced by a clockwork automaton assistant... and if the fact that the Holy Ghost only ever strikes monstrous, wealthy leches hasn't been noticed by the constabulary, well, that is their problem, not hers. Besides, it's not like she's a robber only for thrills or vengeance; between the upkeep on the estate and her father's drinking and gambling problems, her ill-gotten gains are the only boundary between the Payne family and utter ruin. But one evening, what should be an ordinary robbery goes strangely awry when the carriage inexplicably disappears on the roadway. When Alice investigates, she discovers a strange clockwork device - and when she and her special friend Jane start poking around, they make a most marvelous discovery...
In 1889, Major Prudence Zuniga races to prevent the Austrian archduke's son from committing a suicide pact - again. For ten years, she's relived the same disastrous string of events over and over again, and all she's managed to do is change the name of the young woman he takes to the grave with him. It's part of an ongoing time war between two factions, the Farmers and the Guides, who each exploit time travel to reshape history as they each believe it "should" have gone... and both are doing little but mess everything up until the far future is nothing but utter, unlivable chaos. Her own life keeps getting rewritten, as does every soldier's, changes she only knows of due to a diary she keeps sequestered away in a secret spot of uncorrupted time. And she is tired of it. Unbeknownst to her superiors, she has a plan to sabotage the entire time travel network - a plan that involves making contact with a tinkerer in 1788 England...
Or, at least it did, until Prudence opens her portal in 2070 Toronto and the Holy Ghost rides out of history.
REVIEW: I had a specific window of time to fill at work, and this audiobook looked like it would do the job. A little steampunk, a dash of swashbuckling, a sprinkling of time travel hijinks... it sounded entertaining enough. Unfortunately, it never quite comes together before it hits the cliffhanger ending.
Things kick off with some promise, with Alice in her "Holy Ghost" role anticipating the thrill of another ambush on a scoundrel nobleman who deserves to have his purse lightened - but, even early on, there's something just a touch off-kilter. The style and writing, the actions and reactions of the characters themselves, often feel more like they belong in a young adult novel, as though they're in their teens or (at most) early twenties. But Alice is in her thirties, and other characters we meet are pushing forty or more. I kept having to remind myself of their ages, because my mind kept trying to roll them back. Anyway, the tale establishes a few separate times and the overall concept. Alice and Jane, ignorant of time travel (at first), are just trying to keep Alice's father and estate above water, even as Jane (her household companion and, more recently, lover) provides cover, having crafted the automaton that's become the Holy Ghost's signature... an automaton who really doesn't have much of a plot purpose, except to show that Jane is a proto-gearhead and introduce a little steampunk flair in a story otherwise lacking in steampunk anything. When Alice encounters the impossible device after the inexplicable carriage disappearance, she and Jane are quick to figure out that it's not fairy magic or deviltry but some manner of science - and, given the desperate state of the Payne household, Alice hardly hesitates to try using it for her own advantage.
Meanwhile, Major Prudence suffers one defeat too many in her efforts to change the would-be archduke's fate; when she's pulled from the operation, perpetually thwarted by manipulations from Guide enemies (which she, as a Farmer loyalist, derisively calls Misguideds, though to be honest the lines between the two are rather blurry and hardly seem to matter from the standpoint of a timeline irretrievably polluted by meddling across the board), she becomes more determined than ever to pull the proverbial trigger in her secret project to bring down time travel. But one of her first efforts (that we see) is bungled quite spectacularly, only salvaged when a bystander leaps into the fray. Alice Payne rather bowls over Prudence insofar as adapting on the fly and taking charge, which is probably why the series is named after her, but Prudence still tries to cheat and manipulate her into becoming another tool in her plan. Somewhere along the way I started feeling like the author was trying to cheat and manipulate me as a reader, too... and when the whole thing ended on a cliffhanger, I was more certain of that than ever.
The story moves relatively fast (most of the time, at least), and has some nice parts and ideas. The time travel problems and politics, though, get a little convoluted and don't quite mesh well with the swashbuckling, vaguely steampunk parts. I just plain didn't like Prudence, though I ultimately wasn't especially attached to anyone, and don't feel compelled to find out what happens next.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Sky Coyote (Kage Baker) - My Review
Recursion (Blake Crouch) - My Review
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland) - My Review
Resurrection (Derek Landy)
Resurrection
The Skulduggery Pleasant series, Book 10
Derek Landy
HarperCollins
Fiction, YA Adventure/Fantasy/Horror/Humor/Mystery
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Five years ago, the impossibly powerful sorceress Darquesse devastated the magical city of Roarhaven before ascending to near-godhood and leaving this dimension behind... and Valkyrie Cain, who was once part of Darquesse, was left a shell of her former self. She still has magic, but of a wild and erratic sort never before seen by Sanctuary scholars, a magic she herself barely understands and controls. Not that she really wants to control magic anymore. She spent five years hiding out in rural America until assassins tracked her down, drawing her back to Ireland and the company of her one-time partner, Skulduggery Pleasant. A shadow organization known as the Anti-Sanctuary has been working for centuries to trigger war with the mortals; now, they're seemingly on the verge of success, potentially resurrecting a powerful new leader from the days of the war against Mevolent. The world needs saving again, and when the world needs saving Skulduggery and Valkyrie are expected to step up to the task - but can the traumatized young woman remember how to be a hero in time to stop disaster?
REVIEW: Apparently, the series originally ended after the previous installment, but Landy realized he had more stories to tell. However, even though Valkyrie has aged out of the Young Adult protagonist category, this book still pitches itself as being in that category, justified by the introduction of a "next generation" would-be hero: fourteen-year-old Omen Darkly, the overlooked brother of a prophesied "Chosen One", attending Roarhaven's first boarding school for young sorcerers, Corrival, in a not-so-subtle jab at a certain famous wizard-based series. This gives Resurrection a slight split personality, as on the one hand it wants to continue growing up and growing darker with Valkyrie as she struggles with PTSD and her wild magic, while on the other it's trying to be a light reset/reboot with younger characters who can't help but be bowled over by Skulduggery's sheer force of personality and the weight of series history. The two more or less work together, but at times can't help conflicting, and this (plus a matter of one subplot and bad timing) help explain the slight drop in the rating.
In the beginning, Valkyrie has returned to Ireland and her late uncle's estate, along with the dog Xena, but is still far from recovered, and far from eager to jump back in the world-saving game. She has trouble even visiting her family after six months in the country, still guilty over what she had to do to her kid sister Alice in order to secure the scepter of the ancients and still traumatized by the danger she put them all in. She also can't exactly stroll down the streets of Roarhaven without being the object of stares and hatred, as many still blame her for Darquesse's rampage (though there are a few who still worship the ascended sorceress - almost one subplot too many, here, as very little ultimately comes of that in this volume). Roarhaven itself is not the town it used to be, as China Sorrows has used her new power and influence to amass even more power and influence, even granting legitimacy to a "reformed" Church of the Faceless Ones and diminishing the role of the council and others who might stand in her way. Skulduggery, now an independent Arbiter working with Sanctuaries worldwide, could very much use his partner and friend Valkyrie Cain again as he seeks a missing undercover agent who tried to infiltrate the Anti-Sanctuary, but the Valkyrie he needs is not the one he has, and she may never be that person again... though that doesn't mean she's entirely helpless, even as she grapples with her traumas and growing list of enemies.
Necessity makes them reach out for more allies beyond China's reach, which leads them to Corrival and Omen. The boy used to try to live up to the example set by his brother Auger (a Harry Potter-like savior, if one who grew up in the magical community knowing full well that he was intended to be the hero, whose extracurricular exploits are glimpsed and hinted at but not explored in depth), but eventually gave up trying when even his own parents dismiss him as the "also-ran". Being contacted by no less a celebrity than Skulduggery Pleasant gives him hope that maybe, just maybe, he can be someone, maybe he can have his own adventures and be his own person, giving him the courage to step up and try even when the skeleton detective himself tells him he can go back to his safe and unseen existence. He is not a second Valkyrie, being his own character, though he's so much tied into the clearly-riffing-on-Harry-Potter Augur that he sometimes feels slightly out of step with the greater series universe.
Meanwhile, the Anti-Sanctuary mages progress their dark plot, which involves the literal resurrection of a former powerful mage - helped by a sorcerer with the power to turn anyone they touch into a temporary psychopath under his control, which leads to some serious complications and dark moments when he gets his hands on Skulduggery Pleasant (another development that forces Valkyrie to stand up and resume her reluctant heroine mantle, as her friend and partner becomes an enemy). As is typical for the series, the action just keeps coming, interspersed with some sharp dialog and humor and some dark twists. I just couldn't help wondering throughout what the series would've become had it been allowed to shake off the last ties to its young adult category.
One of the subplots, as mentioned, also helped contribute to the drop in the rating. It involves a mortal American president who was clearly inspired by the one currently occupying the nation's highest office (whose first regime coincided with its writing and release), using clandestine sorcerous connections to gain power and turn the nation into his own personal evil empire. The fact that the same occupant has returned, with more power than ever, destroying institutions and ideals that used to actually mean something to the very people gleefully and gloatingly kicking them down... As I mentioned before, timing made it very hard for me to even listen to a fictitious version of said occupant, facing the very real and not-fictional long-term damage and terror unleashed... I want to continue the series at some point, but now, today of all days, as a major portion of that cruelty is codified into law and literal actual not-in-an-Onion-satire-article merchandising is being sold glorifying a concentration camp on American soil... I just can't. (And if this is too topical and political for a book review, well, I'm livin' this nightmare and it's my blog, and I don't experience literature in a vacuum so my reality can't help bleeding into my reading.)
You Might Also Enjoy:
Stoneheart (Charlie Fletcher) - My Review
Skulduggery Pleasant (Derek Landy) - My Review
The Amulet of Samarkand (Jonathan Stroud) - My Review
The Skulduggery Pleasant series, Book 10
Derek Landy
HarperCollins
Fiction, YA Adventure/Fantasy/Horror/Humor/Mystery
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Five years ago, the impossibly powerful sorceress Darquesse devastated the magical city of Roarhaven before ascending to near-godhood and leaving this dimension behind... and Valkyrie Cain, who was once part of Darquesse, was left a shell of her former self. She still has magic, but of a wild and erratic sort never before seen by Sanctuary scholars, a magic she herself barely understands and controls. Not that she really wants to control magic anymore. She spent five years hiding out in rural America until assassins tracked her down, drawing her back to Ireland and the company of her one-time partner, Skulduggery Pleasant. A shadow organization known as the Anti-Sanctuary has been working for centuries to trigger war with the mortals; now, they're seemingly on the verge of success, potentially resurrecting a powerful new leader from the days of the war against Mevolent. The world needs saving again, and when the world needs saving Skulduggery and Valkyrie are expected to step up to the task - but can the traumatized young woman remember how to be a hero in time to stop disaster?
REVIEW: Apparently, the series originally ended after the previous installment, but Landy realized he had more stories to tell. However, even though Valkyrie has aged out of the Young Adult protagonist category, this book still pitches itself as being in that category, justified by the introduction of a "next generation" would-be hero: fourteen-year-old Omen Darkly, the overlooked brother of a prophesied "Chosen One", attending Roarhaven's first boarding school for young sorcerers, Corrival, in a not-so-subtle jab at a certain famous wizard-based series. This gives Resurrection a slight split personality, as on the one hand it wants to continue growing up and growing darker with Valkyrie as she struggles with PTSD and her wild magic, while on the other it's trying to be a light reset/reboot with younger characters who can't help but be bowled over by Skulduggery's sheer force of personality and the weight of series history. The two more or less work together, but at times can't help conflicting, and this (plus a matter of one subplot and bad timing) help explain the slight drop in the rating.
In the beginning, Valkyrie has returned to Ireland and her late uncle's estate, along with the dog Xena, but is still far from recovered, and far from eager to jump back in the world-saving game. She has trouble even visiting her family after six months in the country, still guilty over what she had to do to her kid sister Alice in order to secure the scepter of the ancients and still traumatized by the danger she put them all in. She also can't exactly stroll down the streets of Roarhaven without being the object of stares and hatred, as many still blame her for Darquesse's rampage (though there are a few who still worship the ascended sorceress - almost one subplot too many, here, as very little ultimately comes of that in this volume). Roarhaven itself is not the town it used to be, as China Sorrows has used her new power and influence to amass even more power and influence, even granting legitimacy to a "reformed" Church of the Faceless Ones and diminishing the role of the council and others who might stand in her way. Skulduggery, now an independent Arbiter working with Sanctuaries worldwide, could very much use his partner and friend Valkyrie Cain again as he seeks a missing undercover agent who tried to infiltrate the Anti-Sanctuary, but the Valkyrie he needs is not the one he has, and she may never be that person again... though that doesn't mean she's entirely helpless, even as she grapples with her traumas and growing list of enemies.
Necessity makes them reach out for more allies beyond China's reach, which leads them to Corrival and Omen. The boy used to try to live up to the example set by his brother Auger (a Harry Potter-like savior, if one who grew up in the magical community knowing full well that he was intended to be the hero, whose extracurricular exploits are glimpsed and hinted at but not explored in depth), but eventually gave up trying when even his own parents dismiss him as the "also-ran". Being contacted by no less a celebrity than Skulduggery Pleasant gives him hope that maybe, just maybe, he can be someone, maybe he can have his own adventures and be his own person, giving him the courage to step up and try even when the skeleton detective himself tells him he can go back to his safe and unseen existence. He is not a second Valkyrie, being his own character, though he's so much tied into the clearly-riffing-on-Harry-Potter Augur that he sometimes feels slightly out of step with the greater series universe.
Meanwhile, the Anti-Sanctuary mages progress their dark plot, which involves the literal resurrection of a former powerful mage - helped by a sorcerer with the power to turn anyone they touch into a temporary psychopath under his control, which leads to some serious complications and dark moments when he gets his hands on Skulduggery Pleasant (another development that forces Valkyrie to stand up and resume her reluctant heroine mantle, as her friend and partner becomes an enemy). As is typical for the series, the action just keeps coming, interspersed with some sharp dialog and humor and some dark twists. I just couldn't help wondering throughout what the series would've become had it been allowed to shake off the last ties to its young adult category.
One of the subplots, as mentioned, also helped contribute to the drop in the rating. It involves a mortal American president who was clearly inspired by the one currently occupying the nation's highest office (whose first regime coincided with its writing and release), using clandestine sorcerous connections to gain power and turn the nation into his own personal evil empire. The fact that the same occupant has returned, with more power than ever, destroying institutions and ideals that used to actually mean something to the very people gleefully and gloatingly kicking them down... As I mentioned before, timing made it very hard for me to even listen to a fictitious version of said occupant, facing the very real and not-fictional long-term damage and terror unleashed... I want to continue the series at some point, but now, today of all days, as a major portion of that cruelty is codified into law and literal actual not-in-an-Onion-satire-article merchandising is being sold glorifying a concentration camp on American soil... I just can't. (And if this is too topical and political for a book review, well, I'm livin' this nightmare and it's my blog, and I don't experience literature in a vacuum so my reality can't help bleeding into my reading.)
You Might Also Enjoy:
Stoneheart (Charlie Fletcher) - My Review
Skulduggery Pleasant (Derek Landy) - My Review
The Amulet of Samarkand (Jonathan Stroud) - My Review
Monday, June 30, 2025
June Site Update
2025 is half over and I still can't find anything good to say about it. Anyway, the month's eight reviews have been archived and cross-linked over on the main Brightdreamer Books page.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Sunday, June 29, 2025
Dinosaurs (DK Smithsonian)
Dinosaurs: Prehistoric Life from Dinosaurs to Humans
DK Smithsonian
DK
Nonfiction, YA? Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life/Science
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: By the start of the Mesozoic - the "Age of Dinosaurs" - life in some form or another had been proliferating on Earth for several hundreds of millions of years, until a mass extinction event (not the first, but one of the most iconic) that ended the Permian Period. From the devastation would rise many grand, diverse plants and animals that would define an era... and the same would happen at the end of the Cretaceous Period, when the Cenozoic began. Using numerous diagrams, fossils, and reconstructions, this book charts life on Earth from the start of the Triassic to the appearance of modern humans.
Material in this volume was previously in Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life from DK Publishing.
REVIEW: I picked this up in the Barnes and Noble discount section because it included many non-dinosaur life forms (plants, insects, and invertebrates, as well as covering Cenozoic times) that are often glossed over in other books on prehistoric life I have... well, that, and I had a gift card that made it free to me. Considering what I paid for it, and the new-to-me material it covered, I can't say I'm entirely disappointed, but I can also say that I would've liked more.
After the overview at the start - giving a quick look at what evolution is, what fossils are, and how we know what we know about biomes that died out long before our own ancestors began walking upright, let alone writing science books - this book starts with the Triassic. I admit I'd hoped for a little on the pre-dinosaur life forms, which I have found frustratingly little on in armchair-accessible works, but at least this volume covers something more than the usual suspects, offering fossils and a few reconstructions of plants, invertebrates, and several non-dinosaur (or non-dinosaur-ancestral, as the "terrible lizards" themselves took some time to rise to dominance) entries. Some were interesting, but most feel like quick post-it notes that only tantalize, that don't always explore what's significant about this particular entry to justify inclusion over others... and a few are just plain irritating, showing only fragments while others that claim in the text to have excellent fossils aren't show well, or at all. More than once, I found places where text contradicted itself, likely the result of incomplete editing as content was revised over subsequent editions. And there are several scientific terms that the book throws around without including a glossary. Those frustrations aside, books like this rest largely on visual appeal, and Dinosaurs does deliver fairly well there. In addition to the bite-sized entries, there are several insets comparing extinct life forms to modern counterparts. This may not be the only book on dinosaurs and prehistoric life one will ever need (no such book exists that I'm aware of), but it's not a bad entry point or addition to a layperson's library on the matter.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Dinosaurs Rediscovered (Michael J. Benton) - My Review
The Last Days of the Dinosaurs (Riley Black) - My Review
Dinosaurs (Carl Mehling, editor) - My Review
DK Smithsonian
DK
Nonfiction, YA? Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life/Science
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: By the start of the Mesozoic - the "Age of Dinosaurs" - life in some form or another had been proliferating on Earth for several hundreds of millions of years, until a mass extinction event (not the first, but one of the most iconic) that ended the Permian Period. From the devastation would rise many grand, diverse plants and animals that would define an era... and the same would happen at the end of the Cretaceous Period, when the Cenozoic began. Using numerous diagrams, fossils, and reconstructions, this book charts life on Earth from the start of the Triassic to the appearance of modern humans.
Material in this volume was previously in Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life from DK Publishing.
REVIEW: I picked this up in the Barnes and Noble discount section because it included many non-dinosaur life forms (plants, insects, and invertebrates, as well as covering Cenozoic times) that are often glossed over in other books on prehistoric life I have... well, that, and I had a gift card that made it free to me. Considering what I paid for it, and the new-to-me material it covered, I can't say I'm entirely disappointed, but I can also say that I would've liked more.
After the overview at the start - giving a quick look at what evolution is, what fossils are, and how we know what we know about biomes that died out long before our own ancestors began walking upright, let alone writing science books - this book starts with the Triassic. I admit I'd hoped for a little on the pre-dinosaur life forms, which I have found frustratingly little on in armchair-accessible works, but at least this volume covers something more than the usual suspects, offering fossils and a few reconstructions of plants, invertebrates, and several non-dinosaur (or non-dinosaur-ancestral, as the "terrible lizards" themselves took some time to rise to dominance) entries. Some were interesting, but most feel like quick post-it notes that only tantalize, that don't always explore what's significant about this particular entry to justify inclusion over others... and a few are just plain irritating, showing only fragments while others that claim in the text to have excellent fossils aren't show well, or at all. More than once, I found places where text contradicted itself, likely the result of incomplete editing as content was revised over subsequent editions. And there are several scientific terms that the book throws around without including a glossary. Those frustrations aside, books like this rest largely on visual appeal, and Dinosaurs does deliver fairly well there. In addition to the bite-sized entries, there are several insets comparing extinct life forms to modern counterparts. This may not be the only book on dinosaurs and prehistoric life one will ever need (no such book exists that I'm aware of), but it's not a bad entry point or addition to a layperson's library on the matter.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Dinosaurs Rediscovered (Michael J. Benton) - My Review
The Last Days of the Dinosaurs (Riley Black) - My Review
Dinosaurs (Carl Mehling, editor) - My Review
Thursday, June 26, 2025
The Great Texas Dragon Race (Kacy Ritter)
The Great Texas Dragon Race
Kacy Ritter
Scholastic
Fiction, MG Adventure/Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: For all thirteen years of her life, Cassidy Drake has loved three things: her family, her home state of Texas, and dragons. She grew up on her parents' sanctuary for the beasts, who are too often misunderstood, hunted, or - even worse - abused and exploited, particularly by the world's energy corporations. Many of the rescues on the Drake ranch were former "workers" for FireCorp, the biggest company and the one with the worst reputation for how they treat dragons, for all that their public relations people sweep it under the rug. Corporate money keeps buying up small ranches and sanctuaries, but her father has held out... only now bills are piling up faster than donations are coming in. When Grandma falls ill, that may be the last financial straw on the sanctuary's back - unless Cassidy can pull off a miracle.
Like her mother before her, Cassidy is a talented rider, tamer, and racer. She has the stats to enter the biggest challenge in the state: the Great Texas Dragon Race. Part speed race, part endurance trial, part scavenger hunt, the Race draws competitors from across the country, with a prize purse big enough to end the Drake ranch's financial problems for years... only, ever since Cassidy's mother died from a venomous dragon's bite, her father's been reluctant to let her take risks, not even for the good of the family and their dragons. Besides, the winners are almost always the corporate sponsored riders, with the best training and the best equipment, not outsiders - and especially not outsiders riding scarred, undersized dragons like her favorite mount Ranga. But Cassidy Drake doesn't see another choice, and she's never backed down from a challenge - not even a challenge that has claimed the lives of far more experienced dragon riders, with far more experienced dragons.
REVIEW: This is far from the first story to riff on the classic "underdog girl and her overlooked horse" formula with fantastic creatures and wild competitions. The alternate Earth it creates, with various sizes and species of wild dragons alongside mundane critters, also isn't a first, and in this case is probably best not poked at too hard for plausibility holes. But The Great Texas Dragon Race does present a decent, high-energy story with a protagonist who isn't flawless, in a world that isn't as morally black and white as she first imagined... and it has dragons, who may be only a step or two removed from "scaly puppy" or "scaly pony" territory (where dragons are just bigger, scalier, and more incendiary pets/companions/mounts), but still make for some nice peril and adventure.
From the start, Cassidy Drake is a bold personality, more at home in the saddle of a dragon than anywhere else. She already dreams of entering the big Race, both because of her inherent competitive nature and because her late mother Aurora was once a victor, and much of Cassidy's young life has been spent trying to live up to Mom's reputation (spurred in part by grief and childhood guilt; she was there when Aurora was struck by a venomous wild drake, but was too young and scared to get help). She has less than a week to convince her father, though, and he's stubbornly overprotective of her. When an executive of FireCorp starts poking around the ranch, she's initially confident that, once again, the Drakes will keep the wolves at bay and protect their many charges... but when her beloved grandmother, the glue that holds their little family together, falls suddenly ill and needs expensive testing and treatment, the girl only grows more determined (aided and abetted by Grandma, who believes in the girl more than she even believes in herself). There's a touch of plot convenience here and there to even get her, a late entrant, into the race to begin with, but once she's there she has to find her own way through and fight her own battles - and fail, more than once. She resists making alliances or friends among other competitors; eventually there can be only one winner, but the early stages at least can go easier with a little help, or at least knowing that not everyone else is actively looking to stick a knife in her back. Plus the FireCorp sponsored riders are clearly working together from the beginning, leaving those without corporate backers at a disadvantage right out of the gate if they can't pull together. Worse, one of the FireCorp riders, a boy named Ash, keeps trying to befriend her - and letting her guard down once almost costs her everything. But there's more to his story than she knows, just as there's more to the other racers and the Race itself than she knows, and one of the many things Cassidy has to learn is to listen now and again. This is a whole different league than the regional races she and Ranga have run, and Cassidy is in over her head for some time before she learns to tread water, let alone swim. Along the way, she has to re-evaluate just what she stands for and why she's competing, and whether victory should be something more than just a prize purse at the end.
More than once, there's a sense of other characters existing to help or hinder the main character specifically (particularly most of the "baddies" in the FireCorp riding group). As mentioned previously, there are also some issues of plausibility if one looks too closely or too critically at the world in general and the race in particular; the often-potentially-deadly nature of the challenges feel like something one would find in a Harry Potter world where wizards with magic are not far away and can potentially bespell an antagonized wild dragon in an emergency (or can at least possibly magick up a cure to critical injuries inflicted along the way) or in a more dystopian place like Panem from The Hunger Games, where the amped-up spectacle and deadly nature of the competition is the point, not in a world that's more or less our own but with dragons. But on the whole the story doesn't slow down enough for too much introspection or examination, and Cassidy's a bold enough personality, undertaking a wild enough adventure, to generally make things work, especially for the target audience.
You Might Also Enjoy:
House of Dragons (Jessica Cluess) - My Review
Dragonsdale: Skydancer (Salamanda Drake) - My Review
Cold the Night, Fast the Wolves (Meg Long) - My Review
Kacy Ritter
Scholastic
Fiction, MG Adventure/Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: For all thirteen years of her life, Cassidy Drake has loved three things: her family, her home state of Texas, and dragons. She grew up on her parents' sanctuary for the beasts, who are too often misunderstood, hunted, or - even worse - abused and exploited, particularly by the world's energy corporations. Many of the rescues on the Drake ranch were former "workers" for FireCorp, the biggest company and the one with the worst reputation for how they treat dragons, for all that their public relations people sweep it under the rug. Corporate money keeps buying up small ranches and sanctuaries, but her father has held out... only now bills are piling up faster than donations are coming in. When Grandma falls ill, that may be the last financial straw on the sanctuary's back - unless Cassidy can pull off a miracle.
Like her mother before her, Cassidy is a talented rider, tamer, and racer. She has the stats to enter the biggest challenge in the state: the Great Texas Dragon Race. Part speed race, part endurance trial, part scavenger hunt, the Race draws competitors from across the country, with a prize purse big enough to end the Drake ranch's financial problems for years... only, ever since Cassidy's mother died from a venomous dragon's bite, her father's been reluctant to let her take risks, not even for the good of the family and their dragons. Besides, the winners are almost always the corporate sponsored riders, with the best training and the best equipment, not outsiders - and especially not outsiders riding scarred, undersized dragons like her favorite mount Ranga. But Cassidy Drake doesn't see another choice, and she's never backed down from a challenge - not even a challenge that has claimed the lives of far more experienced dragon riders, with far more experienced dragons.
REVIEW: This is far from the first story to riff on the classic "underdog girl and her overlooked horse" formula with fantastic creatures and wild competitions. The alternate Earth it creates, with various sizes and species of wild dragons alongside mundane critters, also isn't a first, and in this case is probably best not poked at too hard for plausibility holes. But The Great Texas Dragon Race does present a decent, high-energy story with a protagonist who isn't flawless, in a world that isn't as morally black and white as she first imagined... and it has dragons, who may be only a step or two removed from "scaly puppy" or "scaly pony" territory (where dragons are just bigger, scalier, and more incendiary pets/companions/mounts), but still make for some nice peril and adventure.
From the start, Cassidy Drake is a bold personality, more at home in the saddle of a dragon than anywhere else. She already dreams of entering the big Race, both because of her inherent competitive nature and because her late mother Aurora was once a victor, and much of Cassidy's young life has been spent trying to live up to Mom's reputation (spurred in part by grief and childhood guilt; she was there when Aurora was struck by a venomous wild drake, but was too young and scared to get help). She has less than a week to convince her father, though, and he's stubbornly overprotective of her. When an executive of FireCorp starts poking around the ranch, she's initially confident that, once again, the Drakes will keep the wolves at bay and protect their many charges... but when her beloved grandmother, the glue that holds their little family together, falls suddenly ill and needs expensive testing and treatment, the girl only grows more determined (aided and abetted by Grandma, who believes in the girl more than she even believes in herself). There's a touch of plot convenience here and there to even get her, a late entrant, into the race to begin with, but once she's there she has to find her own way through and fight her own battles - and fail, more than once. She resists making alliances or friends among other competitors; eventually there can be only one winner, but the early stages at least can go easier with a little help, or at least knowing that not everyone else is actively looking to stick a knife in her back. Plus the FireCorp sponsored riders are clearly working together from the beginning, leaving those without corporate backers at a disadvantage right out of the gate if they can't pull together. Worse, one of the FireCorp riders, a boy named Ash, keeps trying to befriend her - and letting her guard down once almost costs her everything. But there's more to his story than she knows, just as there's more to the other racers and the Race itself than she knows, and one of the many things Cassidy has to learn is to listen now and again. This is a whole different league than the regional races she and Ranga have run, and Cassidy is in over her head for some time before she learns to tread water, let alone swim. Along the way, she has to re-evaluate just what she stands for and why she's competing, and whether victory should be something more than just a prize purse at the end.
More than once, there's a sense of other characters existing to help or hinder the main character specifically (particularly most of the "baddies" in the FireCorp riding group). As mentioned previously, there are also some issues of plausibility if one looks too closely or too critically at the world in general and the race in particular; the often-potentially-deadly nature of the challenges feel like something one would find in a Harry Potter world where wizards with magic are not far away and can potentially bespell an antagonized wild dragon in an emergency (or can at least possibly magick up a cure to critical injuries inflicted along the way) or in a more dystopian place like Panem from The Hunger Games, where the amped-up spectacle and deadly nature of the competition is the point, not in a world that's more or less our own but with dragons. But on the whole the story doesn't slow down enough for too much introspection or examination, and Cassidy's a bold enough personality, undertaking a wild enough adventure, to generally make things work, especially for the target audience.
You Might Also Enjoy:
House of Dragons (Jessica Cluess) - My Review
Dragonsdale: Skydancer (Salamanda Drake) - My Review
Cold the Night, Fast the Wolves (Meg Long) - My Review
Wednesday, June 25, 2025
This is Our Story (Ashley Elston)
This is Our Story
Ashley Elston
Little, Brown Books
Fiction, YA Mystery/Thriller
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: Five teenage boys, united by wealth, influence, and wild streaks broad as an interstate, were at the private River Point Hunting Club after one of their notoriously raucous parties when they decided to go into the woods in the wee hours to try their luck with the local deer.
Only four returned.
Due to the power embodied in the families of the suspects, the district attorney Mr. Gaines is eager to see the death of Grant written off as an unfortunate hunting accident. There's no way to know which of the boys actually fired the rifle that killed him, as they all admitted to using it for target practice earlier, and there seems to be no solid evidence to go on when the only eyewitnesses are the only suspects, each backing up the stories of the others. Five boys, dark woods, deer... surely, it was all just a terrible mistake. Thus, the case lands on the desk of an aging public defender, Mr. Stone, in the expectation that he'll do little more than give the appearance of considering charges before giving up. But the DA underestimated the old man... and his intern, Kate Marino.
A gifted photographer and member of her school newspaper and media club, Kate dreams of going to school in New York City, and hopes that an internship in a law office - courtesy of her best friend Reagan's family contacts, and helped by her own mother working for Mr. Stone - will make the resume of a small-town girl stand out. But her time there has taught her a certain cynicism about the notion of justice... until young Grant's death and the case of the "River Point Boys" (as the foursome come to be known in local media) land on Mr. Stone's desk. She never told anyone, but she and Grant had met briefly some weeks before his death, and had been texting each other almost nightly - communication that Kate had hoped would spark into something real, until they had a falling-out the night before the tragedy. Now, she has a chance to help see justice be done. But investigating Grant's death is more dangerous than she realizes, unearthing secrets and corruption that spread far behind the bounds of teenage hijinks to infiltrate through her whole town... secrets that have already proven deadly once...
REVIEW: At the start, this looked like a nice, thrilling, potentially twisty tale, unraveling stories and unearthing motives and stopping a killer (or killers) from getting away with cold-blooded murder, a case complicated by friendships and rivalries and class divides; Kate and her friends are firmly on the opposite side of the tracks and town influence as the River Point Boys and their well-connected families, who have their fingers on the scales of justice from the start. Kate's not-quite-illicit, not-quite-romantic (yet) relationship has an air of potential narrator unreliability, adding another wrinkle, in addition to giving the girl extra incentive to step a little beyond her minor role as intern in figuring out whodunit. But it isn't long before Kate's potential as an investigator is undermined by her intellect dropping to single digits partway in, compromised by a growing attraction to one of the suspects, whom she trusts too readily given the circumstances and her earlier skepticism about the River Point Boys. She does increasingly boneheaded things, taking increasingly implausible risks, to the point where I started to wonder just what she'd been doing as an intern in a law office for all these months. Heck, I wondered if she'd ever caught five minutes of any given law show on TV, because the things she ended up doing were so monumentally inept that I can't believe she understood a single, solitary thing about anything. Meanwhile, the story keeps teasing the reader with interludes from the killer's point of view (written in a way to obscure their identity), in what starts as a nice way to raise tension but eventually becomes just tiresome. At some point, despite herself, the motive and culprit are unmasked, but not before Kate's ineptitude jeopardizes literally everything she's spent the entire novel working towards... after which she does even more inane things. I only finished because I didn't feel like swapping audiobooks by the time I lost all faith in Kate's ability to do anything but trip over her own metaphoric feet. The earlier parts worked well enough to barely keep it afloat at the Okay line of three stars.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Like Never and Always (Ann Aguirre) - My Review
One Of Us Is Lying (Karen M. McManus) - My Review
Five Total Strangers (Natalie D. Richards) - My Review
Ashley Elston
Little, Brown Books
Fiction, YA Mystery/Thriller
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: Five teenage boys, united by wealth, influence, and wild streaks broad as an interstate, were at the private River Point Hunting Club after one of their notoriously raucous parties when they decided to go into the woods in the wee hours to try their luck with the local deer.
Only four returned.
Due to the power embodied in the families of the suspects, the district attorney Mr. Gaines is eager to see the death of Grant written off as an unfortunate hunting accident. There's no way to know which of the boys actually fired the rifle that killed him, as they all admitted to using it for target practice earlier, and there seems to be no solid evidence to go on when the only eyewitnesses are the only suspects, each backing up the stories of the others. Five boys, dark woods, deer... surely, it was all just a terrible mistake. Thus, the case lands on the desk of an aging public defender, Mr. Stone, in the expectation that he'll do little more than give the appearance of considering charges before giving up. But the DA underestimated the old man... and his intern, Kate Marino.
A gifted photographer and member of her school newspaper and media club, Kate dreams of going to school in New York City, and hopes that an internship in a law office - courtesy of her best friend Reagan's family contacts, and helped by her own mother working for Mr. Stone - will make the resume of a small-town girl stand out. But her time there has taught her a certain cynicism about the notion of justice... until young Grant's death and the case of the "River Point Boys" (as the foursome come to be known in local media) land on Mr. Stone's desk. She never told anyone, but she and Grant had met briefly some weeks before his death, and had been texting each other almost nightly - communication that Kate had hoped would spark into something real, until they had a falling-out the night before the tragedy. Now, she has a chance to help see justice be done. But investigating Grant's death is more dangerous than she realizes, unearthing secrets and corruption that spread far behind the bounds of teenage hijinks to infiltrate through her whole town... secrets that have already proven deadly once...
REVIEW: At the start, this looked like a nice, thrilling, potentially twisty tale, unraveling stories and unearthing motives and stopping a killer (or killers) from getting away with cold-blooded murder, a case complicated by friendships and rivalries and class divides; Kate and her friends are firmly on the opposite side of the tracks and town influence as the River Point Boys and their well-connected families, who have their fingers on the scales of justice from the start. Kate's not-quite-illicit, not-quite-romantic (yet) relationship has an air of potential narrator unreliability, adding another wrinkle, in addition to giving the girl extra incentive to step a little beyond her minor role as intern in figuring out whodunit. But it isn't long before Kate's potential as an investigator is undermined by her intellect dropping to single digits partway in, compromised by a growing attraction to one of the suspects, whom she trusts too readily given the circumstances and her earlier skepticism about the River Point Boys. She does increasingly boneheaded things, taking increasingly implausible risks, to the point where I started to wonder just what she'd been doing as an intern in a law office for all these months. Heck, I wondered if she'd ever caught five minutes of any given law show on TV, because the things she ended up doing were so monumentally inept that I can't believe she understood a single, solitary thing about anything. Meanwhile, the story keeps teasing the reader with interludes from the killer's point of view (written in a way to obscure their identity), in what starts as a nice way to raise tension but eventually becomes just tiresome. At some point, despite herself, the motive and culprit are unmasked, but not before Kate's ineptitude jeopardizes literally everything she's spent the entire novel working towards... after which she does even more inane things. I only finished because I didn't feel like swapping audiobooks by the time I lost all faith in Kate's ability to do anything but trip over her own metaphoric feet. The earlier parts worked well enough to barely keep it afloat at the Okay line of three stars.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Like Never and Always (Ann Aguirre) - My Review
One Of Us Is Lying (Karen M. McManus) - My Review
Five Total Strangers (Natalie D. Richards) - My Review
Thursday, June 19, 2025
Admiral (Sean Danker)
Admiral
The Admiral series, Book 1
Sean Danker
Roc
Fiction, Sci-Fi/Thriller
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: The moment he wakes on the floor of a derelict spacecraft, surrounded by strangers in Evagardian military uniforms, he knows something has gone terribly wrong... especially when he is informed that he was pulled from a malfunctioning sleeper pod that designated him as an admiral. He is nothing of the sort - and what he really is hardly seems to matter anyway. His three rescuers, green cadets every one, don't belong on this vessel any more than he does; they were en route to assignment on the flagship of the empire, and have no idea how they ended up on this run-down old junker of a freighter. Worse, it seems that something has gone terribly wrong: the power is gone, the engines are dead, the gravity feels strange, and nobody answers the comms. The "Admiral" and his companions of circumstance may not trust one another, but they'll have to band together to figure out what happened if they are to have any hope of surviving, let alone escaping.
REVIEW: Sometimes I'm just in the mood for a straightforward story, so this one, from the description, seemed right up that alley: a small isolated crew facing a mysterious threat, the book equivalent of a popcorn space thriller flick in the vein of numerous Alien knock-offs, which even if it can't come close to the inspiration can at least entertain. But this thriller just does not deliver, playing out less like Alien and more like one of those video games where it takes too long to get to the meat of the action and game play becomes repetitious as threats basically recycle and scale up endlessly.
The main character, who never gets a name, wakes to confusion and an imminent threat. It immediately gave me vibes of SyFy's space adventure series Dark Matter (another victim of the channel's infamously overzealous axe before it could conclude its arc, curse them), making me wonder/hope about whether his memories might be similarly compromised... but, no. Everyone else knows who they are, even if they don't know why they're here, and it's the Admiral who, despite narrating the entire story, is playing games with the reader by deliberately omitting his own past and identity. This little dance routine, perpetually teasing but never revealing like an obnoxious kid playing keep-away on the playground, grows tiresome very fast, even when the author tries to distract by throwing everyone into danger from the start. Forced to overcome their mutual distrust for the sake of mutual survival, the four begin exploring, finding few answers but innumerable new problems, with little to no down time to process each development. The near-constant stress and adrenaline rush also grows tiresome, not helped by characters that feel like stock-bin archetypes (including one who, naturally, starts to fall for the theoretically charming and likely dangerous Admiral, because of course). As for the dangers, there's only so much running around on a derelict ship from one crisis to another, then across a desolate alien landscape doing the same, that can occur before reader burnout sets in, particularly when I started growing indifferent at best to the characters whose survival was on the line. None of this was helped by Danker's efforts to shoehorn in galactic history and politics (which was hindered rather than helped by the Admiral's continued smug refusal to let the reader know who the heck he was) around the edges of the endless dangers piling up on the crew's backs. Eventually, the real face of the danger is revealed (not a huge surprise, really), but even that loses its shock value when it becomes just more and more of the same basic threat, eventually inflated to just plain unbelievable degrees. Then it ends in a way that made much of the effort that went into character building feel pointless, though it does finally answer some questions about the Admiral... even if by then I'd long since stopped caring.
In its favor, the story does not drag its feet (even if it's sometimes running itself in circles), and it more or less delivers exactly what it promises, a sci-fi thriller with nonstop action and "mystery" (if in that subset of the genre where the actual nature of said "mystery" is just a thin veneer of the usual Big Scary Threat in the Dark material where specifics don't really matter so long as there's sufficient action involved in evading death). I just never felt engaged by it, not even in a popcorn-flick way.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Scourge Between Stars (Ness Brown) - My Review
Retrograde (Peter Cawdron) - My Review
Beacon 23 (Hugh Howey) - My Review
The Admiral series, Book 1
Sean Danker
Roc
Fiction, Sci-Fi/Thriller
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: The moment he wakes on the floor of a derelict spacecraft, surrounded by strangers in Evagardian military uniforms, he knows something has gone terribly wrong... especially when he is informed that he was pulled from a malfunctioning sleeper pod that designated him as an admiral. He is nothing of the sort - and what he really is hardly seems to matter anyway. His three rescuers, green cadets every one, don't belong on this vessel any more than he does; they were en route to assignment on the flagship of the empire, and have no idea how they ended up on this run-down old junker of a freighter. Worse, it seems that something has gone terribly wrong: the power is gone, the engines are dead, the gravity feels strange, and nobody answers the comms. The "Admiral" and his companions of circumstance may not trust one another, but they'll have to band together to figure out what happened if they are to have any hope of surviving, let alone escaping.
REVIEW: Sometimes I'm just in the mood for a straightforward story, so this one, from the description, seemed right up that alley: a small isolated crew facing a mysterious threat, the book equivalent of a popcorn space thriller flick in the vein of numerous Alien knock-offs, which even if it can't come close to the inspiration can at least entertain. But this thriller just does not deliver, playing out less like Alien and more like one of those video games where it takes too long to get to the meat of the action and game play becomes repetitious as threats basically recycle and scale up endlessly.
The main character, who never gets a name, wakes to confusion and an imminent threat. It immediately gave me vibes of SyFy's space adventure series Dark Matter (another victim of the channel's infamously overzealous axe before it could conclude its arc, curse them), making me wonder/hope about whether his memories might be similarly compromised... but, no. Everyone else knows who they are, even if they don't know why they're here, and it's the Admiral who, despite narrating the entire story, is playing games with the reader by deliberately omitting his own past and identity. This little dance routine, perpetually teasing but never revealing like an obnoxious kid playing keep-away on the playground, grows tiresome very fast, even when the author tries to distract by throwing everyone into danger from the start. Forced to overcome their mutual distrust for the sake of mutual survival, the four begin exploring, finding few answers but innumerable new problems, with little to no down time to process each development. The near-constant stress and adrenaline rush also grows tiresome, not helped by characters that feel like stock-bin archetypes (including one who, naturally, starts to fall for the theoretically charming and likely dangerous Admiral, because of course). As for the dangers, there's only so much running around on a derelict ship from one crisis to another, then across a desolate alien landscape doing the same, that can occur before reader burnout sets in, particularly when I started growing indifferent at best to the characters whose survival was on the line. None of this was helped by Danker's efforts to shoehorn in galactic history and politics (which was hindered rather than helped by the Admiral's continued smug refusal to let the reader know who the heck he was) around the edges of the endless dangers piling up on the crew's backs. Eventually, the real face of the danger is revealed (not a huge surprise, really), but even that loses its shock value when it becomes just more and more of the same basic threat, eventually inflated to just plain unbelievable degrees. Then it ends in a way that made much of the effort that went into character building feel pointless, though it does finally answer some questions about the Admiral... even if by then I'd long since stopped caring.
In its favor, the story does not drag its feet (even if it's sometimes running itself in circles), and it more or less delivers exactly what it promises, a sci-fi thriller with nonstop action and "mystery" (if in that subset of the genre where the actual nature of said "mystery" is just a thin veneer of the usual Big Scary Threat in the Dark material where specifics don't really matter so long as there's sufficient action involved in evading death). I just never felt engaged by it, not even in a popcorn-flick way.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Scourge Between Stars (Ness Brown) - My Review
Retrograde (Peter Cawdron) - My Review
Beacon 23 (Hugh Howey) - My Review
Friday, June 13, 2025
I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons (Peter S. Beagle)
I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons
Peter S. Beagle
Saga Press
Fiction, YA? Fantasy/Humor
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: There is no greater act of heroism than the slaying of a dragon... granted the dragon is one of the great beasts of legend, big enough to devour a horse or man, and the hero is of noble birth. Those who exterminate the smaller pest species, the ones that infest walls and crawl spaces, are considered little better than vermin control - and Robert, recent inheritor of his father's trade, is tired to his bones of it. He hates having to kill dragons, hates seeing them butchered in the dragon markets; he even keeps a few as pets, rescued from traps when he can manage it, and knows full well how intelligent they really are. But, as the main breadwinner of the household now that his father is dead, he can't exactly run away to pursue a more prestigious trade. And it's not like he'll ever have to take on any of the great, legendary species, the ones that haven't been seen in generations and whose slaying would make him an instant celebrity, not in a little kingdom like Bellemontagne. He may be unfortunately talented at extermination, but he's no hero.
Princess Cerise, like all princesses, knows she'll have to marry a prince at some point... but, despite the seemingly-endless stream of candidates riding to the castle, has yet to find any remotely interesting enough to consider. She has other dreams, such as teaching herself to read, and can't be bothered with the dull-witted braggarts strutting around court. Then she meets a handsome stranger, and for the first time finds herself smitten. Only Prince Reginald seems reluctant to actually propose. He left his home in order to prove himself to his father and kingdom through adventure and an act of heroism, and despite his wanderings has yet to so much as rescue a kitten. Before he'll ask for Cerise's hand, he is determined to find and slay a great dragon - a feat that will require a little help from his ever-patient valet Mortmain and the kingdom's best, and most reluctant, exterminator and dragon expert, Robert.
REVIEW: Like many fantasy readers, I read and enjoyed Beagle's classic The Last Unicorn. I also adore dragons. So, crossing Beagle's storytelling and prose with dragons... this should've been a no-brainer of a favorite tale. Unfortunately, while there are several decent elements at play here, I just was not feeling the magic in this story of reluctant dragon slayers and unexpected destinies.
After a prologue that foreshadows a darker danger on the horizon, it opens with solid promise as the reader meets Robert (or Gaius Aurelius Constantine Heliogabalus Thrax, his full given name) at home, a dragon exterminator who keeps little dragons as pets in a house full of children and a widowed mother. It's clear he hates his job (even though it's also clear early on that there's a reason that he's needed; unlike rats, a dragon can spit fire and even deliver a venomous bite, so they're hardly a benign presence), and just as clear that he sees no viable way out of following in his late father's footsteps, for all that he seems to feel an empathy for his victims that his father never did. The reader also meets Prince Reginald and Mortmain, the latter increasingly despairing over how the former has yet to fulfill the traditional royal quest of earning heroism and prestige away from home. Reginald, for his part, doesn't even really want to be a hero (or get married, even), and knows that he could slay a thousand dragons without earning the respect, let alone love, of his cruel warlord father. Princess Cerise has taken to treating the selection of a suitor as a job interview of sorts, giving each day's batch a number and an interview (which more often than not sends the would-be fiances packing, though some determined hangers-on linger in the hopes of changing her mind). She would much rather be out in the woods teaching herself to read (though the lower class girls like Robert's sisters are expected to study while the boys are expected to labor or apprentice, apparently royal women are to be kept illiterate, not the only head-scratching bit of contradictory worldbuilding in the tale) than dealing with most of them... especially when her parents can't help but stick their noses into her selection process. Eventually, after some excessive meandering, the characters end up together on the quest to find and slay a large mountain dragon, a journey undertaken reluctantly by Robert, not just because he'd rather not kill dragons if he can help it (and traveling to a wild dragon's domain specifically to kill it, for no other reason than ego, falls well outside that line), but because Cerise's blinding crush on Reginald evokes a kernel of jealousy, for all that he knows full well that lowly exterminators have as much chance of marrying a princess as the vermin-ranked dragons he exterminates. By this point I was, frankly, finding the characters mildly irritating and obtuse, all in their own ways, and was just waiting for the story to really take off - which it does, rather explosively, when what was supposed to be a (relatively) choreographed and routine hunt goes terribly awry. Even after that, though, there's a tendency for things to derail and wander, visiting too many side characters on too many side tangents, not all of which ultimately justify the "screen time" they take from the core trio. (There are also some odd vibes around women that tends to reduce their roles and minimize their efforts, where even Cerise's attempts to help the guys comes across as more a complication or irritation than an asset, and another side character's chief contribution to a relationship was bickering. Why bother including women at all, if that's all they are to a writer, stubborn little girls who need to love a man in order to begin to grow up, and even then are better off sitting to the side of the action?) Even the dragons, while initially interesting, start feeling oddly plot-convenient in the threat level they ultimately present and what they can or cannot (or will or will not) do. The big climax takes far, far too long to unfold and involves some serious handwaving on plausibility, even fantasy-world-with-dragons-and-wizards plausibility. By the end, I was thinking that Robert and his world's many dragon species ultimately felt a little too much like a muddled reworking of Hiccup and the dragons of Berk from the animated How to Train Your Dragon trilogy.
I liked some parts of this book; some of the descriptions were effective, and Robert's early conflicts over admiring and empathizing with the creatures he is obligated to exterminate, that nobody else sees as anything but scaly rats, has a lot of promise. But somehow I lost track of that promise and that spark as the story went on, a feeling that wasn't helped by the audiobook narration.
You Might Also Enjoy:
How to Train Your Dragon (Cressida Cowell) - My Review
Blue Moon Rising (Simon R. Green) - My Review
Domesticating Dragons (Dan Koboldt) - My Review
Peter S. Beagle
Saga Press
Fiction, YA? Fantasy/Humor
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: There is no greater act of heroism than the slaying of a dragon... granted the dragon is one of the great beasts of legend, big enough to devour a horse or man, and the hero is of noble birth. Those who exterminate the smaller pest species, the ones that infest walls and crawl spaces, are considered little better than vermin control - and Robert, recent inheritor of his father's trade, is tired to his bones of it. He hates having to kill dragons, hates seeing them butchered in the dragon markets; he even keeps a few as pets, rescued from traps when he can manage it, and knows full well how intelligent they really are. But, as the main breadwinner of the household now that his father is dead, he can't exactly run away to pursue a more prestigious trade. And it's not like he'll ever have to take on any of the great, legendary species, the ones that haven't been seen in generations and whose slaying would make him an instant celebrity, not in a little kingdom like Bellemontagne. He may be unfortunately talented at extermination, but he's no hero.
Princess Cerise, like all princesses, knows she'll have to marry a prince at some point... but, despite the seemingly-endless stream of candidates riding to the castle, has yet to find any remotely interesting enough to consider. She has other dreams, such as teaching herself to read, and can't be bothered with the dull-witted braggarts strutting around court. Then she meets a handsome stranger, and for the first time finds herself smitten. Only Prince Reginald seems reluctant to actually propose. He left his home in order to prove himself to his father and kingdom through adventure and an act of heroism, and despite his wanderings has yet to so much as rescue a kitten. Before he'll ask for Cerise's hand, he is determined to find and slay a great dragon - a feat that will require a little help from his ever-patient valet Mortmain and the kingdom's best, and most reluctant, exterminator and dragon expert, Robert.
REVIEW: Like many fantasy readers, I read and enjoyed Beagle's classic The Last Unicorn. I also adore dragons. So, crossing Beagle's storytelling and prose with dragons... this should've been a no-brainer of a favorite tale. Unfortunately, while there are several decent elements at play here, I just was not feeling the magic in this story of reluctant dragon slayers and unexpected destinies.
After a prologue that foreshadows a darker danger on the horizon, it opens with solid promise as the reader meets Robert (or Gaius Aurelius Constantine Heliogabalus Thrax, his full given name) at home, a dragon exterminator who keeps little dragons as pets in a house full of children and a widowed mother. It's clear he hates his job (even though it's also clear early on that there's a reason that he's needed; unlike rats, a dragon can spit fire and even deliver a venomous bite, so they're hardly a benign presence), and just as clear that he sees no viable way out of following in his late father's footsteps, for all that he seems to feel an empathy for his victims that his father never did. The reader also meets Prince Reginald and Mortmain, the latter increasingly despairing over how the former has yet to fulfill the traditional royal quest of earning heroism and prestige away from home. Reginald, for his part, doesn't even really want to be a hero (or get married, even), and knows that he could slay a thousand dragons without earning the respect, let alone love, of his cruel warlord father. Princess Cerise has taken to treating the selection of a suitor as a job interview of sorts, giving each day's batch a number and an interview (which more often than not sends the would-be fiances packing, though some determined hangers-on linger in the hopes of changing her mind). She would much rather be out in the woods teaching herself to read (though the lower class girls like Robert's sisters are expected to study while the boys are expected to labor or apprentice, apparently royal women are to be kept illiterate, not the only head-scratching bit of contradictory worldbuilding in the tale) than dealing with most of them... especially when her parents can't help but stick their noses into her selection process. Eventually, after some excessive meandering, the characters end up together on the quest to find and slay a large mountain dragon, a journey undertaken reluctantly by Robert, not just because he'd rather not kill dragons if he can help it (and traveling to a wild dragon's domain specifically to kill it, for no other reason than ego, falls well outside that line), but because Cerise's blinding crush on Reginald evokes a kernel of jealousy, for all that he knows full well that lowly exterminators have as much chance of marrying a princess as the vermin-ranked dragons he exterminates. By this point I was, frankly, finding the characters mildly irritating and obtuse, all in their own ways, and was just waiting for the story to really take off - which it does, rather explosively, when what was supposed to be a (relatively) choreographed and routine hunt goes terribly awry. Even after that, though, there's a tendency for things to derail and wander, visiting too many side characters on too many side tangents, not all of which ultimately justify the "screen time" they take from the core trio. (There are also some odd vibes around women that tends to reduce their roles and minimize their efforts, where even Cerise's attempts to help the guys comes across as more a complication or irritation than an asset, and another side character's chief contribution to a relationship was bickering. Why bother including women at all, if that's all they are to a writer, stubborn little girls who need to love a man in order to begin to grow up, and even then are better off sitting to the side of the action?) Even the dragons, while initially interesting, start feeling oddly plot-convenient in the threat level they ultimately present and what they can or cannot (or will or will not) do. The big climax takes far, far too long to unfold and involves some serious handwaving on plausibility, even fantasy-world-with-dragons-and-wizards plausibility. By the end, I was thinking that Robert and his world's many dragon species ultimately felt a little too much like a muddled reworking of Hiccup and the dragons of Berk from the animated How to Train Your Dragon trilogy.
I liked some parts of this book; some of the descriptions were effective, and Robert's early conflicts over admiring and empathizing with the creatures he is obligated to exterminate, that nobody else sees as anything but scaly rats, has a lot of promise. But somehow I lost track of that promise and that spark as the story went on, a feeling that wasn't helped by the audiobook narration.
You Might Also Enjoy:
How to Train Your Dragon (Cressida Cowell) - My Review
Blue Moon Rising (Simon R. Green) - My Review
Domesticating Dragons (Dan Koboldt) - My Review
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)