Brightdreamer's Book Reviews

Heroes of the Valley (Jonathan Stroud)

2012-01-25T22:01:00.000-08:00

Heroes of the Valley
Jonathan Stroud
Disney Hyperion
Fiction, YA Fantasy
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: In ancient times, the great hero Svien came to the valley as a babe; strangling a serpent with his bare hands, it was clear he was destined to become a hero. He fought many a monster, squabbled with many a man, and - at the end - joined forces with 11 other mighty heroes to destroy the foul, tunneling Trows. Upon his death, he was laid to rest in a cairn, sword in hand, to defend the valley forevermore.
Halli, born to the House Svien, never fit in with his family. Bandy-legged, short, and homely, full of restless energy, he chafes at the sedate life of the peaceable household. He dreams of being an elder-day hero - but, in these times, blood-feuds have yielded to dull laws, with rivalries settled by marriage more often than murder. Only his uncle, another family outcast, seems to understand... but even that small solace is stolen from him when a drunken insult spirals out of hand at a Gathering. Witnessing his uncle's murder at the hands of House Hakon, the boy's anger knows no bounds. Unsatisfied with the prospects offered by the laws of the valley, Halli determines to settle the score as Svien himself would have done... no matter what the consequences.

REVIEW: Many tales, especially Young Adult tales, tell of heroism in its many forms. Few explore its meanings and complexities as Stroud does here. Halli starts off, frankly, as a bit of a brat, selfish and short-sighted. His emotions rule him, as do his dreams based on elder-day tales of daring and bravery and brutal justice - dreams that cannot work in the real world. Slowly, through many mishaps and harsh lessons that return to haunt him, he learns the truth about the heroes and the stories he so long held dear. Along the way, he learns just what it means to become a real hero, not just a tale-teller's grandiose vision of one. The story drug now and again, taking its time setting up Halli and his world. Once it starts moving, it takes some unexpected turns on its way to a fitting finale. An enjoyable tale!

The Darkslayer (Craig Halloran and Ernie Chang)

2012-01-25T21:51:00.000-08:00

The Darkslayer
Craig Halloran and Ernie Chang
Two-Ten Book Press
Fiction, Fantasy
*+ (Terrible/Bad

DESCRIPTION: Through the infinite reaches of eternity, ascended races of immortals seek the Meaning of Life, the ever-elusive Edge of the Universe... and ways to alleviate the crushing boredom of omnipotent powers and endless existence. To this end, the being Tritos created the unique world of Bish. Unlike other worlds, natural laws of evolution and entropy do not apply here. It is a planet of constant chaos, without learning or science, filled with monsters and magic. On Bish, the forces of Good and Evil eternally struggle for the amusement of the onlooking Tritos... and, lest one ever gain an upper hand (and ruin the fun,) an equalizing failsafe always keeps things in balance.
Venir the warrior travels the wilds of Bish, slaughtering evil underlings as the supernaturally powerful Darkslayer. Among civilization, though, his ego and his love of mind-clouding grog land him in no end of trouble - which is how he found himself, hung over and chained, in the dungeons beneath the city of Bone. With his thief friend Melegal, he escapes, but the wealthy Royal princeling he angered prior to his arrest won't let him go that easily. Nor is he Venir's only pursuer: the underlings tire of his predations, as they tire of the irritatingly fast-breeding humans of the surface world. They determine to end the threat of the Darkslayer once and for all. Even by Bish's chaotic standards, things are going to get wild...

REVIEW: This free-for-Kindle edition was billed as a "fun," "hilarious" fantasy.
Put simply: It wasn't.
The inhabitants of Bish are, to a man (or, very rarely, woman), flat, uninteresting entities, too stupid and annoying to even be self-parodying stereotypes. They wander aimlessly through a series of events that, I suppose, constituted a plot, but read more like the results of a Random Plot Generator. Along the way, they trade modern-sounding dialog that must've been hilarious within the author's head, but which came across as forced and stilted. For one particularly lousy example, Melegar earns the illogical nickname "Me." Why "Me" instead of the more natural "Mel?" Apparently, to justify the following (paraphrased) zinger towards the end: "Listen to me!" "Me? is Me here?!?" Ha, ha. This setup, sadly, is one of the few examples of follow-through to be found; the author was evidently too busy chuckling over the dialog to remember such basic writing steps as proofreading (countless misused apostrophes-as-plurals and misused homonyms, not to mention setups to story threads that never happened) and beta-reading. (At least, beta-reading by people who aren't pals, and are willing to point out such minor flaws as his utter failure to generate a micro-iota of reader interest.) This edition also features a number of original illustrations, all of which look strangely distorted and blandly generic. Naturally, there is every hint of a sequel.
This being a free download, it's hard to say that I overpaid, but I did spend my irreplaceable time slogging through this rotten turkey... and rarely have I so desperately wished I could get a refund!

The House of Silk (Anthony Horowitz)

2012-01-25T21:38:00.001-08:00

The House of Silk
(A Sherlock Holmes novel)
Anthony Horowitz
Mulholland Books
Fiction, Mystery
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: Throughout his long acquaintance with the famed detective Sherlock Holmes, Dr John Watson faithfully chronicled the many cases, conundrums, and characters that crossed the threshold of 221B Baker Street. Now nearing the end of his twilight years, Watson finally pens the story of Holmes' darkest case, a case whose details were so scandalous and depraved in nature that he dared not even set them on paper until now; indeed, he even leaves instructions with his heirs that the story not be released to the public for a further hundred years.
When the distraught art dealer Mr Carstairs seeks help against a vengeful stranger, Sherlock and Watson both expect a fairly straightforward investigation. But the matter takes an unexpected turn with the death of a young street urchin, one of the detective's squadron of Baker Street Irregulars. Searching for the killer, black rumors reach their ears of the "House of Silk" - but where, what, or who it refers to, even Sherlock Holmes cannot decipher. Their hunt for justice leads to a scandal that could destroy the very heart of London itself.

REVIEW: The first officially authorized Sherlock Holmes adventure in over a century, The House of Silk meshes seamlessly with the characters and the world of history's greatest detective. Horowitz crafts a compellingly complex new mystery that faithfully evokes the spirit of Doyle's original works. The aging Watson reflects on the case with a certain air of nostalgia for his long-lost days as a detective's biographer and friend, perfectly understandable for a man whose final days are upon him. A fun, unpredictable investigation unfolds, with a resolution as satisfying as it is elementary.

Forbidden Mind (Kimberly Kinrade)

2012-01-24T22:15:00.001-08:00

Forbidden Mind
(The Forbidden Minds trilogy, Book 1)
Kimberly Kinrade
CreateSpace
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: 17-year-old Sam never had a normal life, but then she's never been a normal girl. Like all the kids at her secluded school, known by the students as "Rent-A-Kid," she has paranormal abilities - in her case, telepathy. Clients pay big money to borrow teens like her for special projects, but it's not like she isn't being paid for her services. Over the years, she's built up quite a bank account. Now on the edge of 18, she's been assured acceptance into a New York college, where she'll go on to build a normal life among normal people with her earnings. That's what happens to everyone at Rent-A-Kid when they graduate. Or so Sam always thought...
She first saw the strange boy at the campus health clinic, strapped to a gurney with a bloody head wound. He cried out to her for help with his eye and his mind. Nobody wants to talk about him, and this close to graduation Sam doesn't want to rock any boats, but she can't get him out of her mind... literally. Because of him, she starts to question everything she knows about her life, her talent... and what's really going to happen when she turns 18.

REVIEW: This grabbed me with a fast start, quickly sketching in Sam's life and her world, and establishing the vaguely questionable staff of "Rent-a-Kid." When she learns that she's been involuntarily enrolled in a breeding program, the tale threatens to wobble, but instead of degenerating into pro-life simpering Sam uses it as fuel to stoke her own determination to free herself, her mystery man, and her friends. Unfortunately, it unravels at the end, as the previously strong heroine collapses into a useless, weeping wreck. I'd hoped for a little more paranoia, more of a sense that even among her friends there might be spies and traitors willing to sell her out for her growing doubts, but the friend-versus-foe count breaks down pretty much as it appears, even without telepathy. While I've definitely read worse, it failed to engage my interest sufficiently for me to follow the rest of the trilogy.

Pyramid Scheme (Eric Flint and David Freer)

2012-01-24T22:04:00.000-08:00

Pyramid Scheme
(The Pyramid series, Book 1)
Eric Flint and David Freer
Baen
Fiction, Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: When it hurtled through the atmosphere, crashing into the library on the University of Chicago campus, it seemed harmless enough. A five-sided black pyramid, little larger than Sputnik, only its extraterrestrial origins made it in any way worthy of attention. Then it started growing... and people started disappearing.
As scientists race to study it and the military tries to destroy it, nobody suspects the alien probe's true power or purpose. Only those who have been "snatched" by its violet beam, transported to a world seemingly cobbled together from ancient myths and legends, can hope to figure it out... but do they have a chance of stopping it, when the very gods Themselves are arrayed against them?

REVIEW: A serviceable tale, Pyramid Scheme introduces several vaguely distinctive characters, throws them into all sorts of trouble (within the pyramid's "Ur-universe" and without), saturates itself in pun-heavy efforts at humor, scrambles the mixture, then finally ends. The sense of wonder, of walking in a world that never existed on Earth amid marvels that defy modern science, never comes through, hazed by bad jokes and shallow characters. The logic of the plot never gels, either, but it's not really about the logic, or even the sense of wonder. It's about a mismatched collection of modern people blundering through classical myths, spreading the gospel of their superior age and culture while trumping even the gods with American know-how and mining the depths of inane punnery. Oh, yeah... there also happen to be just enough single modern men to hook up with lonely classical-world women, more because this kind of plot needs that sort of thing than out of any genuine chemistry. Overall, despite a vaguely intriguing idea, Pyramid Scheme is largely forgettable.

Profit from the eBook Revolution (John Hadyn)

2012-01-24T21:52:00.000-08:00

Profit from the eBook Revolution
John Hadyn
Amazon Digital Services
Nonfiction, Business/Writing
**+ (Bad/Okay)

DESCRIPTION: The debut of ebooks has revolutionized the centuries-old world of publishing, creating opportunities and markets that traditional printhouses have yet to understand, let alone explore. Even if you've never written a word in your life, learn how to capitalize on these lucrative opportunities and write your own success story!
A Kindle-exclusive title.

REVIEW: This low-effort/high-profit sales pitch only needs a little synthesized music and stock footage to become a full-blown infomercial. Hadyn glosses over the important considerations of why, what, and how to write; indeed, he happily informs the would-be profiteer that it's just as easy - easier, even - to outsource that particular tedious and unrewarding step. The rest of his information, on how to actually publish and market "your" ebook for maximum exposure and profit, was equally vague, and only occasionally enlightening. While I understand and appreciate that marketing's a big part of success in any field, especially the competitive world of writing and publishing, this sort of get-rich-quick "plan," glorifying speed and greed, just rubs my little writer soul the wrong way.
(And, no, I have no idea why the graphic of the "title" on this Kindle-exclusive book lists the author as Bob Perry.)

The Sea Fairies (L. Frank Baum)

2012-01-24T21:40:00.001-08:00

The Sea Fairies
(A Trot and Cap'n Bill Adventure, Book 1)
L. Frank Baum
Public Domain Books
Fiction, YA Fantasy
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Bold young Mayre, affectionately known as Trot, has always loved the sea. No wonder her best friend is Cap'n Bill, a peg-legged old sea dog who used to sail with her skipper father. With pockets full of wonders and a head full of stories, he regales her on their many walks beside the seashore. One fine day, Bill tells Trot about mermaids, sea-dwelling fairies so beautiful yet so dangerous that no sailor who ever met one lived to tell the tale. His story awes the girl, but inadvertently offends eavesdropping mermaids. They offer to show Trot and Bill their wonder-filled world beneath the waves, to set the record straight. It's an offer neither of them can refuse. Trot and Bill dive into an adventure far grander than any salty sailor yarn - but will they live to tell the tale?

REVIEW: A frivolous little fancy by the author of the Oz series, it follows the basic, non-threatening formula of many elder-day children's tales. A young hero (and often a friend or two) encounter a friendly guide who takes them to a magical world, shows them pretty things, introduces them to benignly odd characters, then returns them home with minimal fuss or bother. Any threat, usually minimal, is dealt with not by the young visitor but by the guide or another magical ally (save, perhaps, once or twice toward the end, when the hero/heroine might make a minor, even accidental, contribution to their own survival.) Such tension-free adventures remind me of those bland, unappetizing yet healthy "treats" that well-meaning parents sneak into their children's lunches: no-calorie, sugar-free, fun-shaped objects that appeal more to overprotective parents than the kids stuck eating them.

The Explorer's Guide to Drawing Fantasy Creatures (Emily Fiegenschuh)

2012-01-24T21:30:00.001-08:00

The Explorer's Guide to Drawing Fantasy Creatures
Emily Fiegenschuh
Impact Books
Nonfiction, YA? Art
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Creating fantasy art is about more than just the dry fundamentals. It's a process of exploration, discovering all manner of peculiarities within the limitless realms of the imagination, then capturing their wonder and beauty for all to see. Follow the brave adventurer Paki as he introduces you to the basics of art and media selection, then guides you through drawing a number of fantastic beasts and beings from his homeworld.

REVIEW: A fun, somewhat original idea adds a little zest to an otherwise generic how-to-draw-fantasy book. Not that Fiegenschuh's works count as "generic." Bright, interesting, and fun, she draws a variety of creatures, each designed to live in a different environment, fulfilling different ecological roles. Still, her original works aside, there's not much covered here that one wouldn't find elsewhere. I might've enjoyed a little more play on the "explorer" gimmick - perhaps some instructions on designing and sketching plants or environments to go with the animal "discoveries" made by the book's mascot. That minor quibble aside, I enjoyed it, even as an armchair artist and not an active explorer myself (at the moment, at least.)

Metropolis (Thea von Harbou)

2012-01-17T22:53:00.000-08:00

Metropolis
Thea von Harbou
Public Domain Books
Fiction, Sci-Fi
**+ (Bad/Okay)

DESCRIPTION: The great, shining city of Metropolis, brainchild of Joh Frederson, basks in wealth and prosperity... all thanks to the massive machines that thrum like a heartbeat through the streets. But the men who give their lives to the machines, working in gruelingly inhumane conditions, reap none of the rewards of their efforts, while the sons of privilege know little and care less about the workers who make their carefree lives possible.
Freder, son of Joh, never thought to question his world, nor the designs of his father, who sees humanity as a mass of imperfect machines designed to serve his dream. Then he saw the Woman, the shining face of God's beloved Virgin. That glimpse, that moment, shattered his world. He becomes obsessed with finding her again, even defying his own father and descending into the bowels of the machine-works, to walk among the workers and taste their exhaustion, their despair... and their growing anger.

REVIEW: Published in 1926, this book formed the basis for the 1929 Fritz Lang movie of the same name. The film (or, rather, the 1980's version of the film) has long been a family favorite, so when I found the book as a free public-domain download for my Kindle, I eagerly gave it a try.
The movie was better.
Messages - about class struggles, about sin and redemption, about machines corrupting and dehumanizing humanity - run rampant through the book, crammed down the reader's throat in long, repetitive tracts of hallucinogenic metaphors. I started feeling insulted, as though von Harbou thought I was too stupid to understand her Profound Insights and thus had to hammer yet another metaphor and yet another Biblical reference into my sore little brain. The characters (who aren't really characters, but rather archetypes created to deliver the aforementioned Messages) are drawn in such caricatured strokes that I simply couldn't believe in them. These archetypes descend into outright stereotypes more than once - Asians tend to be smiling purveyors of drugs and sin, while women do nothing but fret and wait to be saved - but I suppose that's to be expected from a European writer in the 1920's. But, I digress... Freder, a graduate of the Victor Frankenstein School of Suffering, throws himself into his soul-rending despair and frequent fever-fits until it seems a marvel that the man can actually walk upright. Maria is less a love interest than a manifested Virgin Mary, too innocent and pure and impossibly serene to ever return Freder's passions... save, perhaps, as God returns the passions of his most pious followers. Despite the hedonistic lifestyles of the wealthy and the machine-worship that dominates Metropolis, somehow the Bible and the Church survive - not just as quaint relics of an imperfect and bygone era, but as a culturally relevant subtext to city life, as blue-garbed worker slave and white-silked sons of privilege both have common casual knowledge of church doctrines. This is especially inexplicable in Freder's case; raised by his machine-loving father after his mother's death in childbirth, just where and when was he exposed to what his father clearly considers (for most of the book, at least) to be savage superstition, a blasphemy against his glorious City and the perfection of the Machine? (He does have a pious grandmother, but it seems a bit of a stretch - not everyone in Metropolis can possibly still have grandmothers...) Between Message and Metaphor and over-the-top archetype characters, the story slips along almost as an afterthought.
I'm sure, when this was published, it was a profound and insightful commentary on the Industrial Age, mankind's willingness to sell its soul for earthly pleasures, and what-have-you. I'm sure students of philosophy and literature still gush over the many intricate metaphors. But I'm just as sure that, for me, the story loses something in translation. While many of von Harbou's images are indeed memorable, I just don't like this kind of book. (And I couldn't help thinking that the movie, much as it trimmed and subtly rearranged, made the same points without nearly so much brow-beating deadweight.)

Shadowrise (Tad Williams)

2012-01-16T15:58:00.000-08:00

Shadowrise
(The Shadowmarch series, Book 3)
Tad Williams
DAW
Fiction, Fantasy
***** (Great)

DESCRIPTION: Between the warships of the mad god-king Sulepis of Xis to the south and the wrath of the ancient faerie Qar to the north, the mortal land of Eion suffers greatly... but worse may be coming.
In the north, deep in the perpetual twilight beyond the Shadowline, the lost Prince Barrick struggles to reach the faerie king in Qul-na-Qar - the only hope of sparing Barrick's former home, the castle Southmarch, from the faerie armies encamped on its doorstep. His faerie guide lost and his mortal companion long gone, he stumbles from one disaster to the next, narrowly avoiding a hundred deaths, under the unreliable guidance of the raven Skurn. Even as Barrick struggles to make sense of this mad world in which he's trapped, he fears he may already be too late.
Barrick's twin sister, Princess Briony, is once more adorned in the robes and honors of her station in the Syannese court of Tessis... but is in more danger than ever she was fleeing Southmarch in a peasant boy's guise. The king is a fool, his mistress a viper, and the royal court itself an ever-shifting maze of allies and traitors, always with too few of the former and too many of the latter. Briony quickly realizes she's out of her depth, a rustic and suspiciously ungirlish oddity whose name has already been tainted by agents of Southmarch's usurpers, the Tollys. Her dreams of securing assistance to reclaim her throne dashed, all she can hope for now is to escape with her life.
Meanwhile, the autarch Sulepis continues to rain terror on Eion, following his own mad and inscrutible plans as he reaches for a prize none of his ancestors, omnipotent as they were, dared achieve: true immortality itself. Such a lofty goal cannot happen without sacrifices, naturally, but what mere unwashed mortal wouldn't happily lay down their life for the pleasure of the Chosen One?
All eyes, all armies, all hopes and fears seem to fall upon Southmarch, where a long-forgotten force lies waiting to be awakened... or utterly destroyed.

REVIEW: Williams crafts an excellent, gripping continuation of the Shadowmarch series, which eclipses even his excellent Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy in sheer scope and sense of wonder. He begins, as he did in Shadowplay (Book 2), with a brief synopsis of the series thus far - a welcome refresher to remind old readers where things stand and help bring newcomers up to speed. (Many authors seem to forget that reader memories can fade between published installments.) From there, he picks up right where he left off. Ancient tales and religious tracts that were once mere background color become integral keys to the plot, as the wars of the long-absent gods stand poised to replay themselves upon the earth. The cast of characters is large, but never too large to keep track of, each one adding a unique and necessary thread to the overall tapestry. By the end, much has changed, and the stakes are higher than ever. I can hardly wait to get my hands on Book 4!

Fantasy - A Writer's Short Guide (Linda McNabb)

2012-01-14T10:43:00.000-08:00

Fantasy - A Writer's Short Guide
Linda McNabb
Amazon Digital Services
Nonfiction, YA? Writing
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Fantasy author Linda McNabb presents an overview of fantasy, with workshop activities to spark story ideas.
A Kindle exclusive title.

REVIEW: As stated in the title, this is a short guide... so short I managed to read it in under an hour. The advice is so basic that I wonder if her target audience was people who hadn't read fantasy, and/or those who have never attempted writing at all. What is here isn't bad for an introduction, but it paints its subjects with such broad, simple brush strokes that no details can be discerned at all. (At the very least, McNabb could've offered a "Further Reading" section at the end, for those who wanted to learn more about fantasy and writing in general.)
If you were trying to organize a simple writing workshop for school or some manner of young adult club (an after-school book club, a Scout group, etc.), this might be an ideal course outline. Otherwise, aspiring fantasy writers would probably get much more out of Gail Carson Levine's Writing Magic.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

2012-01-12T22:26:00.001-08:00

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
(A Sherlock Holmes collection, Book 1)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Public Domain Books
Fiction, Anthology/Mystery
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: For several years, the London doctor and war veteran John Watson was privileged to be a companion and friend to Sherlock Holmes, the greatest detective of all time. Following along on his investigations, he chronicled their various adventures - the scandalous, the dangerous, even the occasional minor diversion - in these stories.

REVIEW: After the character Sherlock Holmes proved wildly popular, Doyle featured him in several short stories beyond his novels. This, the first collection of those stories, includes many titles made famous by various interpretations through the years. Sometimes Holmes seems a little too brilliant to be believable, and one story at least - the infamous "Case of the Speckled Band" - simply could not happen in our universe, but even at their most implausible the characters remained interesting and singular. Given my notoriously poor luck with anthologies, I gave it an extra half-star for not boring me to tears or making a mockery of its stated subject matter. I expect I'll be reading more of Holmes in the future, especially as the originals have lapsed into public domain (and are therefore available free on my Kindle.)
(I've also greatly enjoyed the latest BBC revival of the character; the more stories I read, the more references I'm finding in the new Sherlock episodes.)

December Site Update, Reviews Archived

2011-12-31T12:23:00.000-08:00

So long, 2011!

I've archived and cross-linked the previous nine reviews at the main Brightdreamer Books website. I also rotated the site's Random Recommendations again.

Enjoy, and have a happy New Year!

The Dragon Book (Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, editors)

2011-12-25T11:41:00.001-08:00

The Dragon Book
Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, editors
Ace
Fiction, Anthology/Fantasy
**+ (Bad/Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Fierce, proud, magical, majestic... Few fantastic creatures have infiltrated the human imagination like the dragon. This short story collection contains 19 tales from some of the top names in fantasy and science fiction literature today.

REVIEW: After finishing this book, I started wondering if, perhaps, my problem with anthologies isn't with the stories, but with me. Maybe I don't understand what a short story is. I always thought that a short story was a condensed tale, either taking place in a very short time or simply distilled into its purest form, without the subplots or scenery or false starts or deadweight characters that populate longer works. After reading this collection, each one written by a best-selling author who presumably knows more about writing and stories than I could begin to comprehend, I've been forced to conclude that I was mistaken. Apparently, most short stories are about unlikable characters doing unlikable and uninteresting things which only rarely advance whatever passes for a plot, only to end with either a non-event or an out-of-the-blue twist that feels like it was spliced in from another work of fiction. "Short" also apparently can be expanded to cover forty or more pages worth of this aforementioned meandering prose.
Anyone who has read my reviews knows that I have notoriously bad luck with short stories; Bruce Coville, who seems to rely more on story integrity than celebrity name-dropping, seems to be the only safe bet, in my experience. But I've read and enjoyed books by several authors included here, such as Naomi "Temeraire" Novik, Jonathan "Bartimaeus" Stroud, and Tad "Shadowmarch" Williams. (It was also at Half Price Books for a very good price.) So, I figured I'd make an exception to my standard No-Anthologies-Edited-By-Anyone-But-Bruce-Coville rule. Sadly, the stories by two of my favorite authors, had I read them alone, would've turned me off of their larger, better books completely: Williams gets too clever for his own good with malapropisms and other English language maulings in "A Stark and Wormy Knight," while Novik's "Vici" - about the beginning of the dragon-human bonding that forms the heart of her alternate-universe series - lacks the character depth and sense of historic realism that I so love about the Temeraire books. Out of the whole book, I only enjoyed maybe three or four of the stories (including the one submitted by Bruce Coville.) The rest varied between pointless and boring, lacking sympathetic characters or situations I gave a rat's tail about, and often relegating the titular dragons to bit parts. Once again, this seems to be a case of editors (or, I suppose, publishers) collecting Big Names to drop rather than good stories. Lesson learned the hard way... again...

The Art of War (Sun Tzu)

2011-12-23T23:19:00.001-08:00

The Art of War
Sun Tzu
Pax Librorum
Nonfiction, History/War
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Since before the dawn of history, war has been an integral part of mankind. A wise general, however, does not simply rely on tribal chaos or pure chance to dictate the outcome of a battle. Based on the 1910 English translation by Lionel Giles, this edition of the classic Chinese text offers timeless advice on the subject of war.
(NOTE: The Amazon link is not the exact version reviewed.)

REVIEW: Though the identity - and even the existence - of Sun Tzu is a matter of scholarly debate, the book attributed to him offers basic, sound advice on the matter of warfare and troop movements for rulers, generals, or would-be writers of fictional rulers and generals. While the weaponry and technology of warfare have advanced considerably since this was penned, the basic logistics and strategy remain much as they were when Sun Tzu lived (if he, indeed, lived at all.) I might have hoped for a little more depth, but on the whole I can't complain... especially as it was a free, public domain download for my Kindle.

The Guild of the Cowry Catchers: Embers (Abigail Hilton)

2011-12-13T22:25:00.000-08:00

The Guild of the Cowry Catchers: Embers
(The Guild of the Cowry Catchers series, Book 1)
Abigail Hilton
Abigail Hilton Books
Fiction, Fantasy
**+ (Bad/Okay)

DESCRIPTION: The myriad islands of Wefrivain, populated by all manner of beasts, talking animals, and animal-human hybrid shelts, have long been under the sway of the Priestess of the wyvern gods. Grishnards, half-griffin shelts, dominate their lesser kindred in her name, even exercising their blood right to enslave and consume hoofed fauns. Between the Temple Sea Watch on the waters and the Police on land, the Priestess intimidates and controls all within her domain... but, keen as the eyes and ears of the wyverns may be, sharp and deadly as their fangs, they cannot quash all whispers of rebellion.
Gerard was once in line for the throne of the Wefrivain kingdom of Holovarus, until he defied the temple and his father by taking to wife the low-born but gifted court minstrel. He finds himself in the Temple Sea Watch, where he catches the eye of the Priestess herself with his heroism. She promotes him to captain of her dreaded Police... a promotion that might prove to be a death sentence. Most captains don't last out a year, and the Police are in a sorry state, picked off by the Rebellion faster than they can be replaced, let alone trained. Gerard grimly sets himself on the trail of Gwain, the near-legendary leader of the Rebellion... only to find that trail leading him right back to the Temple Sea Watch and the domain of Admiral Silveo. A rare foxling in the grishnard ranks, the thoroughly unpleasant little shelt hasn't made himself any friends in his vicious climb up the ranks. Gerard himself has crossed paths with Silveo before, and nearly lost his life. Silveo harbors no love for grishnards and even less for the former princeling Gerard. The thought of having to work with each other knots both their tails no end. But, as the Priestess demands, they must obey.
Assuming one of them doesn't wind up dead along the way...

REVIEW: Some time ago, I saw a humorous little graphic on the Internet, a graph showing how the likelihood of a book being good dropped in increasing proportion to the number of words invented by the author. Hilton's story falls on the wrong side of that line. Don't get me wrong - she has obviously taken her time to craft her complex world, with three moons and numerous sapient species and shifting alliances and rivalries and all. She even starts her chapters with information about said world, purportedly written by the leader of the Rebellion - an amateur trick, but one that provided clues to the world's make-up that the biased viewpoints of the protagonists couldn't provide. I cannot fault her for stinting on the world-building, here. But the story she attaches to that world suffers, albeit not solely because of the many made-up words that the reader must learn to keep up. The cult of the Priestess and the pseudo-god wyverns, the cruel dominion of the grishnards over every other sapient species, sets up an Establishment so corrupt and so thoroughly unredeemable that I couldn't sympathize much with any character, protagonist or otherwise, who in any way supported its continued existence. Yet, somehow, out of this stew of injustice comes Gerard, an almost laughably naive hero who inexplicably has a heart of gold, even rejecting the common practice of slavery despite having obviously been raised to consider it normal and, indeed, a privilege of his race. His wife Thessalyn, the blind singer whose gifts border on magical, is another anachronism in this mean-spirited world, so lovely and so innocent (yet so capable of melting even the hardest and most wounded of hearts with her voice) that she's downright ridiculous. As Gerard squirms his way through his unpleasant job of torturing innocents and oppressing the masses, he finds himself surrounded by characters who revel in their power and their sadism. The Rebellion itself remains a nebulous concept throughout the book, only briefly gaining a human (or rather a shelt) face that quickly dissolves into the unreal again... a shame, as I fully sympathized with their plight, while I barely could stand the so-called protagonists' point of view. This e-book edition features several illustrations, which had the unfortunate effect of making the shelts look like cartoons rather than characters. Their boots inexplicably lace up to their true ankles, making them look like they're walking around on tiptoe in clown shoes, and the one illustration of Gerard's companion griffin shows a significant lack of knowledge of feline or avian anatomy. (Combine the sub-par artwork with misused words - "compliment" instead of "complement," "censor" instead of "censer" - and the whole thing took on an amateur sheen.) Then, after all the unpleasantness, it ends on something just shy of a cliffhanger, but equally unsatisfying.
Much as I could appreciate the painstaking lengths Hilton went to in constructing the world of Wefrivian, I just could not enjoy my visit to her world. I blame the company I was forced to keep during my journey... and an itinerary that never took me where I most wanted to go.

Just My Type (Simon Garfield)

2011-12-12T21:18:00.001-08:00

Just My Type
Simon Garfield
Gotham Books
Nonfiction, Art/Typography
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Since the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in the 15th century, letters took on a new form, one that relied not on a scribe's quill but on a tooled stamp. These new alphabets, these fonts, soon broke away from their hand-written progenitors, veering off in directions both simplistic and complex, understated and overpowering. Today, anyone with a computer and a word processor can list a dozen off the top of their head - Times New Roman, Arial, Comic Sans and more - and can drop them into any given document or web page without knowing the first thing about how they were designed, or by whom, or what message they're conveying to the world with their choice of font. Simon Garfield discusses the past, present, and future of fonts, a journey of over five centuries that winds through cultural upheavals, political minefields, designer eccentricities, and more.

REVIEW: As my bulging Windows Fonts folder attests, I have an armchair interest in fonts. This book, naturally, seemed to appeal to that interest. Garfield presents some interesting information on typefaces, both their use and impact and the people who create them. Like many graphic artists, font designers don't often get the recognition that their work deserves; they still struggle to get any sort of copy protection to prevent or even discourage outright piracy of their efforts. Unfortunately, he threw me a few times by wading too deep into "shop talk," leaning on industry terminology that I, as a layperson, didn't understand. (He offers a brief introduction to the history of movable type, describing a few terms, but not all of them.) Chronologically, the chapters wander all over the 500-odd-year-history of printing, often with little cause-and-effect in sequencing. Still, he offers some interesting and amusing anecdotes, discussing the peculiar paradox of font design: the "best" fonts are invisible, conveying the information they contain without delay or confusion, yet within that invisibility lurk a thousand and more ways to express (or repress) creativity. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to look at my pull-down Font menu in Word the same way again...

The Lost World (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

2011-12-06T00:58:00.001-08:00

The Lost World
(The Professor Challenger series, Book 1)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Public Domain Books
Fiction, Adventure/Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: Malone, a hapless reporter, has been - yet again - spurned by his love Gladys, who yearns for a hero to hitch her wagon to, that she may bask in his reflected glory. For the sake of her hand, he heads to his editor and requests the most dangerous, most challenging assignment on the books... little realizing how his life is about to change.
Professor Challenger, recently returned from South America, shocked England with his claims of finding prehistoric monsters on a remote plateau in the Amazon Basin. Without sufficient proof, he is quickly labeled a liar and a braggart - slanderous allegations that lead the hot-blooded man to blows with his detractors, not to mention the few reporters brave enough to approach him. Into the lion's den Malone marches. Unexpectedly, he comes away convinced of the professor's claims... and, when a return expedition is proposed, to prove or disprove Challenger's tale once and for all, Malone finds himself volunteering.
Hostile natives, poisonous snakes, uncharted swamps, impassable cliffs... all before even reaching the plateau, where even greater dangers await the expedition. The love of Gladys may well be the death of him.

REVIEW: One of the landmark "lost world" adventure tales, Doyle's story weathers the years well. Surrounded by singular characters and moving at a brisk pace, The Lost World takes readers into the heart of the Amazon, to a world that, even today, remains a scientific enigma... if a significantly more threatened enigma than it was in the author's day. Naturally, the rumors of dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasties prove only too true - and, like many such relics, they're all too eager to snack on these new, pale-skinned little treats that so obligingly wander into their domain. By today's standards, of course, Doyle's dinosaurs seem dated, but they nonetheless retain a certain sense-of-wonder fascination, as does his "lost world." I also wouldn't vouch for the scientific accuracy or plausibility of Malone's adventures, but this is an adventure yarn, not a science journal; it's no coincidence that the story is viewed through the eyes of the layman Malone rather than Challenger or the other members of the expedition. Touches of humor underlay the action, with the larger-than-life characters clashing even amid mortal danger. It earned an extra half-star by hooking me into staying up late to finish reading it. (I also just finished reading an exceptionally disappointing book, which I admit may skew my perceptions slightly.)

Guardian Cats and the Lost Books of Alexandria (Rahma Krambo)

2011-12-03T10:03:00.001-08:00

Guardian Cats and the Lost Books of Alexandria
Rahma Krambo
Reflected Light Books
Fiction, YA Fantasy
*+ (Terrible/Bad)

DESCRIPTION: The housecat Marco loved snuggling with his owner, Lucy, while she told him wonderful stories... but, until he watched the light of the full moon fall upon the strangely-marked sheets of paper, he never realized where those stories came from. After dark, when Lucy and her grandmother sleep, Marco delights in using his new-found gift of reading, becoming the hero of a thousand adventures. Then came the terrible night of the screaming red lights, when the men with the squeaky-wheeled bed took away Grandmother and Lucy, leaving Marco alone in an empty house. Screwing up his courage, he steps out into the world... and into his own story.
His paws lead him to the Angel Springs library, where more books than he could ever have imagined existed wait on the shelves for his perusal. But Cicero, the aging library cat, thinks Marco may be up to a greater challenge. For, deep within the library, a singular Book lies hidden, a Book that once resided in the lost library of Alexandria. Since those days, Guardian cats have kept close watch, lest its unimaginable power fall into the wrong hands. Little do either of them realize that, even as Cicero begins Marco's training, a terrible enemy aided by dark forces plots to steal the mystical Book.
For all the books he's read, Marco never realized that being a hero could get you killed...

REVIEW: This is a book of contradictions and cliches. Marco, a cat who can follow the elder-day English of The Three Musketeers and - it is implied - has read his way through a good portion of the library, nevertheless is confused by basic human concepts such as ambulances. He's even startled to learn that humans cannot see in the dark... despite the fact that, in all his reading, it seems inconceivable that he's never encountered a scene where a human hero found themselves in danger in a dark place because their eyesight failed them. But, then, Marco seems blissfully unaware that he is a human, in all but the fur on his face; the cats in this book don't behave at all like cats, but rather simplified cartoon sketches of people in cat skins. (To be fair, the people also didn't behave like real people, but rather cardboard-thin caricatures that happened to be person-shaped.)
During his adventures, Marco meets other cats who can read, all of whom can be summed up in the simplest of terms (the vain one, the mother cat, the one-eyed fighter, etc.) They mostly exist so Marco has a "posse" to call on for help when the library is threatened. No, wait - the "Dead Cats Society" (I'm sure Krambo thought she was being extra-kitty-clever with that name) mainly deals with an annoying subplot about a gang of raccoons. We readers know they're bad because they're illiterate, they talk like lower-class street toughs out of a bad movie, and they're raccoons... because, you know, in a world where some cats are good and some are bad, obviously all raccoons are incapable of learning and beyond redemption. There's also a friendly, supposedly funny ferret named (wait for it) Polo, who is no more a ferret than Marco is a cat; not only is it implied that Polo is a free-roaming ferret, when domestic ferrets have a notoriously difficult time surviving on their own, but his only defensive maneuver seems to be giving up and/or fainting - even though I know, from personal experience, that a hacked-off ferret is more than capable of leaving a mark that even an illiterate raccoon would feel.
But this book is about more than the characters. It's about Magic, about the grand legacy of the Guardian cats. That should be interesting, shouldn't it? No, sadly it isn't. Cicero takes after the Majicou of Gabriel King's The Wild Road, an aging feline guardian of Great Powers who recruits a (block-headed) young apprentice and subsequently teaches them next to nothing about the actual powers and responsibilities of the job before foisting the whole thing onto their green shoulders. What is learned... it just doesn't click. The powers of the mystical Book are too broad, with no real cost to the caster or the Universe. (The Book's origins - presumably dropped from Heaven itself into Man's world, even though Man is so incompetent and greedy that it falls to cats to keep it safe from their clutches - just had me rolling my eyes.) Meanwhile, a glaring Message writes itself across the pages in 10-story neon letters, about how literacy is Good, censorship and book-burning are Bad, and with the power of reading comes the responsibility of properly cultivating the ideas sparked by books. Its light almost - but not quite - blinded me to other errors in plotting and consistency. I even discovered what had to be an author's note about what was supposed to happen in the next scene, a clear indication that this book never received the editing or proofreading it needed before being presented to the general public.
I like cats. I like reading. I like magic. But this book... this book, I did not like.

A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens)

2011-12-01T21:07:00.001-08:00

A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens
Public Domain Books
Fiction, Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: In all of England, no man is as cold-hearted and miserly as Ebenezer Scrooge. Cynical, friendless, abusive of his good-hearted clerk, he broods on his fortunes like a latter-day dragon. Not even the bells of Christmas can soften his heart of ice... until the night he receives an unwelcome visit from an old business partner - a man who died seven years ago. Bob Marley was cut of the same selfish, greedy cloth as Scrooge - and, it seems, the latter may share the former's eternal torment in the afterlife. Ebenezer's only chance at salvation lies with three ghostly visitors, who seek to teach him the errors of his ways and the true meaning of Christmas.

REVIEW: Not a holiday season passes without half a hundred remakes, homages, and other blatant knock-offs of Dickens's original tale, so I figured I ought to try reading the original. Though somewhat wordy (as one might expect of an author for whom verbosity was money), it holds up reasonably well today. No real reason is given for Scrooge's youthful turn from generosity to selfishness - and, given how many decades of his life he has dedicated to cultivating such miserly tendencies, he reverts to a feeling and caring human being a little too easily. Since it's basically a dressed-up fable, though, I don't suppose I ought to be too critical. (Fable or not, Tiny Tim makes a tooth-rottingly saccharine plot device.) While a little sappy for my personal tastes, I can certainly see why this tale remains a holiday classic.

The Second Jungle Book (Rudyard Kipling)

2011-11-30T17:00:00.001-08:00

The Second Jungle Book
(Sequel to The Jungle Book)
Rudyard Kipling
Public Domain Books
Fiction, YA? Fantasy/General Fiction
**+ (Bad/Okay)

DESCRIPTION: After Mowgli defeated the tiger Shere-Khan and fled the cruel and superstitious Man-village, he thought he could return to his old life, as a child of the Seeonee wolf pack, hunt-brother of the panther Bagheera, and pupil of the bear Baloo. But the mark of Man is upon him, a poison in his blood, and even as he rises to Master of the Jungle, his birthright calls to him. Mowgli's further adventures are interspersed with tales of Jungle lore and other short stories.

REVIEW: To be honest, a good half a star was lost to the Public Domain version I found online; inexplicably, it cut out some of Kipling's work, most notably the songs and Jungle law, with unhelpful bracketed summaries of the prose I'd hoped to read left in their stead. Unfortunately, the other two stars were lost honestly. While lush with intricate descriptions and imaginative lore, the stories themselves drag and meander, mostly so Kipling could cram in yet more descriptions and lore. I also found Mowgli to be a clueless, selfish little twerp more often than not; why Bagheera, Kaa, and the rest put up with him for so long without gutting him, I cannot fathom. Once again, Kipling's works display a strange duality of nature, being both a literate love song for the wonders of the wilderness and a not-so-subtle praise of the English domination and destruction of said wilderness. In his time, perhaps, the two somehow melded into a unified vision, but from my 21st-century American standpoint I can't see how. In any event, this sequel hardly seems necessary.

A Study in Scarlet (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

2011-11-29T18:37:00.001-08:00

A Study in Scarlet
(A Sherlock Holmes novel, Book 1)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Public Domain Books
Fiction, Mystery
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: In the late 1800's, the war veteran Dr. Watson returns from service in Afghanistan, weak from illness and injury in the field of battle. To stretch his limited pension enough to remain in London, he must find a roommate... but his friends are few and far between in this city. Via an old acquaintance, he meets up with a stranger who faces a similar monetary problem. Sherlock Holmes is the most confounding puzzle of a man Watson has ever encountered. A keen student of criminal sciences, he nevertheless confesses ignorance (or rather apathy) about such simple subjects as basic astronomy and popular literature. Moody, reclusive, with odd acquaintances who call at odd hours, Holmes baffles the doctor more with every passing day, never even confessing how it is he makes his modest living. Soon enough, Watson finds out that Holmes fancies himself a "consulting detective," as he is drawn on the great man's coat-tails into the investigation of a most remarkable murder.

REVIEW: The debut of one of history's most famous characters, and certainly its most famous detective, starts off strong, if often wordy in the way of most 19th-century fiction (at least, in my experience.) Holmes is an enigmatic genius, whose thought processes can only be relayed through the more approachable, more human mind of Dr. Watson, who is less a sidekick than a fawning stenographer to record the man's exploits and praise his analytical brilliance. This sort of lopsided relationship may have been typical for the era, when subservience to ones betters (by rank, prosperity, or intellect) was standard social practice, but grates subtly on modern sensibilities; I fully understand, and personally prefer, the more even relationship between Holmes and Watson in more recent interpretations. The mystery itself is practically resolved in the detective's mind from the moment he walks into the crime scene; the rest of us must wait patiently through a long flashback to the early days of Mormon settlement in Utah before we begin to figure out the characters and the motives behind the murders. I nearly trimmed it a half-star for deliberately drawing things out, and a few leaps of Holmsian logic that seemed just a bit too wide for even his intellect to clear. All in all, given that I've had spotty luck with the classics, I was pleasantly surprised, if not fully enamored, with this story.

November Site Update, Reviews Archived

2011-11-29T10:52:00.001-08:00

I've archived and cross-linked the previous 22 books at Brightdreamer Books, and rotated the site's Random Recommendations page.

(With Project Animorph finally completed, future updates won't be nearly so immense...)

Enjoy!

The Beginning (K. A. Applegate)

2011-11-26T23:09:00.001-08:00

The Beginning
(The Animorphs series, Book 54)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Once, they were five human children and one Andalite warrior-cadet, hidden warriors fighting to save Earth from an invisible, parasitic threat. Fighting the foul Abomination, the sole Andalite-Controller in the galaxy. Fighting the animal minds of their own morphed bodies. Fighting their own inexperience, their own doubts and fears.
Three years later, the secrecy is gone. The Yeerk war is over.
And, in the final, terrible battle, six became five.
Now, after years of fighting, of fear, of making soul-scarring decisions no sentient, feeling being should be forced to make, the surviving Animorphs find themselves thrust into the international - and interplanetary - spotlight. Hailed as heroes, mobbed by fans, courted by politicians, and targeted by terrorists, Jake and his companions face their greatest challenge ever: the beginning of the rest of their lives. It should be a time of relief, of joy, of hope. But the old scars linger, as do the old warrior instincts. For not all of the Yeerks surrendered at the end of the war... and so long as the rebel Blade ship remains free, interplanetary peace may be just a temporary illusion.

REVIEW: I remember the hammer-blow to the gut I felt the first time I read The Beginning. Realistically, Applegate could've ended the story of the Animorphs with one or two more chapters at the end of Book 53. Most authors would have. Instead, she chose a more challenging, more honest route, giving readers a look at the lives faced by war veterans and other survivors. Jake and his friends each became nothlits in their own ways, morphed into soldiers by the necessities of war only to find - at the end - that they had overstayed the limit, and could no longer demorph into the innocent children they used to be. It takes the concept of the series to a whole different level, and provides a more realistic portrayal of after-the-victory life than most books dare. The ending... well, Applegate caught a lot of flak from fans. I admit, I wasn't too keen on it the first time, myself. But, in rereading the books, I don't think she could've done justice to the characters or the series had she let things lie where most people would have, in the happy honeymoon glow of war's end. Jake and his friends had been too deeply changed, too deeply wounded in heart and mind, for such a happy-taffy send-off. (Even the little page-corner morphs - a feature of the books, where you flip the pages to see them morph - give the Animorphs a proper send-off, with the profiles of the characters fading to nothing.)
In the afterword, Applegate explains why she ended it how she did. She explains that it was time to walk away from the Animorphs world. There's enough meat left on the bones, enough lingering loose strings, that she could easily revisit the universe in the future... but I don't expect she ever will. She told the story she wanted to tell. And, on the whole, she did it brilliantly.
In the end, I was left with a few regrets. I regret the unnecessary extensions and filler books, not to mention the uneven quality of the ghostwriters, that kept the story from advancing as smoothly as it should have. I regret not being able to spend more time getting to know the newer Animorphs and other allies from the final phase of the war. I regret never knowing the answers to some of the nagging stray threads left over from earlier adventures. But mostly I regret that I'll probably never read its like again... not even from K. A. Applegate (whose Everworld series ended on a strong note, but whose Remnants series petered out disappointingly.) For five years, the Animorphs series provided me (and my father and mother, both of whom swiped my books as soon as I finished) with a monthly fix of action, adventure, and the occasional burst of humor. I always knew they were treasures, but not until I reread them did I realize just what rare jewels they truly were.
So, Applegate, if you're reading this, I offer a belated and heart-felt "thank you." (And a profound wish that you are, somehow, overseeing the "updates"... it would be a shame if the magic was lost for future generations.)

The Answer (K. A. Applegate)

2011-11-26T20:51:00.001-08:00

The Answer
(The Animorphs series, Book 53)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***** (Great)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Three years.
Three years, since Jake and his friends took the shortcut through the old construction site. Three years since the dying Prince Elfangor told them of the secret Yeerk invasion. Three years since five human children and one Andalite warrior-cadet joined forces to defend the world, using all the power of the animal kingdom.
Now, the secrecy is over. The Yeerk pool under the city lies in ruins, but Visser One has only stepped up his campaign of open warfare. To feed his people with vital Kandrona rays, he has landed the massive Pool ship. This is it: the heart of the invasion force. A battleship to dwarf the strength of the Visser's own Blade ship.
It's a target too big, too tempting, for Jake and his companions to resist... but impossible for them to take.
Or so they thought.
While disrupting construction of a new Earth-based Yeerk pool, Jake discovers a secret group of rebels within the Yeerk ranks, in the most unlikely of places. The Taxxons, giant cannibalistic centipedes, want out of their lopsided alliance with the Yeerks. If the Animorphs will help them, the Taxxons claim they can deliver the keys to the Pool ship.
Jake has a target. He has a plan - a ruthless, terrible plan, a plan that the old Jake, that thirteen-year-old boy standing in the construction site, could never have believed himself capable of devising, let alone executing. It might end up with one or more of his friends dead. It might get every resistance fighter on Earth - the newest Animorphs, the free Hork-Bajir, the parents of his friends, the last of the Yeerk-free military, everyone - killed.
But it's the last - the only - chance for victory. And Jake isn't about to let it slip through his fingers.
No matter what the cost...

REVIEW: And so, at last, it comes to end-game. Though there is one more book in the series, the actual final battle begins - and mostly plays out - in these pages. The levity of the earlier Animorphs books has almost entirely dissipated; these are no longer kids, but war-weary soldiers who finally see the end in sight. Jake has transformed from a reluctant leader beset by inner doubts to a ruthless general capable of issuing orders that are tantamount to suicide... orders that may twist in his gut, but which he issues nonetheless. By this point, he knows his allies and his enemies inside and out, placing them with all the care and deliberation of a chess master setting his opponent up for the ultimate checkmate. It is the sort of character transformation one rarely sees even in grown-up fiction, let alone middle-grade series. The month-long wait for the conclusion in Book 54 was excruciating... a wait, fortunately, I don't have to replicate now.

The Sacrifice (K. A. Applegate)

2011-11-25T21:12:00.001-08:00

The Sacrifice
(The Animorphs series, Book 52)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, younger brother of the hero Prince Elfangor, has lived and fought with the Animorphs since they rescued him from the wreckage of the Andalite Dome ship. He has come to respect humans, even - occasionally - admire them. He has stood beside "Prince Jake," against every law and custom of the Andalite people, who hold themselves above and apart from even their allies. Like Elfangor before him, Ax thought he might live and die for Earth, his human comrades-in-arms at his side.
But, as the face of the war has changed, his friends have changed with it... in ways that confuse and frighten him.
Once a unified group, now the pressures of the Yeerk war turn them against each other. Even Jake can't seem to hold the Earth resistance together. In desperation, Ax has taken to covertly contacting his Andalite superiors. They have a strong leadership, and a firm plan for Earth... a plan that essentially uses humans as bait to lure Yeerks to their doom, when the fleet annihilates every living thing from the planet's surface. The sacrifice of one backwards, divided, antagonistic species to save the galaxy from the Yeerk threat.
Now, Jake and his friends have learned that the Yeerks have tapped into the city's subway system, mass-infesting hordes of new hosts every day. They mean to destroy the new tunnels... and the Yeerk pool. A devastating attack that could break Visser One's stranglehold on the planet - and doom the Andalite High Command's plans.
Stand with his prince, or obey his people? Help the Animorphs destroy untold numbers of Yeerks, or sabotage their efforts and doom Earth? Wherever he looks, Ax finds only bad choices, and no answers.

REVIEW: Once more, Aximili must look himself in the eye and decide where he stands... only this time, the stakes are higher and the choices nowhere near as clear-cut as they used to be. His friends are not the same people he once swore to stand beside, and the war is no longer a covert cat-and-mouse game in the shadows. Learning of Cassie's terrible choice in The Ultimate (Book 50), the choice that gave Andalite morphing technology to the Yeerks, only makes things that much harder... especially when he hears her reasons, reasons that are either childishly naive or bravely forward-thinking. The Animorphs begin pulling themselves back together for the final two books, with a fatalistic sense of impending resolution. One way or another, this war will end soon, and in these final books the Animorphs are, in their own ways, making peace with who they are and what they've become.
On an unrelated note, the editing on some of these later books is downright sloppy, with thought-speech brackets and spoken-speech quotation marks terribly intermixed. I hope they take the time to clear that up when they finally get around to "updating" them... which, at the rate Scholastic is going, should coincide with the completion of the first manned trip to Mars.

Librarian: Little Boy Lost (Eric Hobbs)

2011-11-23T21:48:00.001-08:00

Librarian: Little Boy Lost
(The Librarian series, Book 1)
Eric Hobbs
Amazon Digital Services
Fiction, YA Fantasy
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: The school trip to the historic Astoria library - a building so ancient that nobody knew just when it had been built - started on a bad note for Wesley when Randy, the class bully, stole his extra-credit essay... the one he was going to enter in the contest hosted by the old librarian. All his life, Wesley's been picked on and bullied by Randy and his cronies, only finding escape in books. Worse, he knows that the town has reversed the building's historical status, preparing to raze the block. Just to rub salt in the wounds of the day, Randy wins the essay contest... with Wesley's stolen paper. Everything's going wrong - with the city, with his life.
Why can't he just disappear into a storybook... forever?
Inside this old building, that wish isn't as outlandish as it sounds. Wesley and his best friend Taylor discover a strange boy hiding in the aisles... a boy who claims he stepped out of Neverland. Many secrets hide in the Astoria library, many worlds waiting to be explored. But every world, for all its wonders, contains great dangers - dangers that pull Wesley and Taylor into an adventure worthy of a storybook, fleeing a man so evil only the real world could have created him.
(A Kindle exclusive title.)

REVIEW: I wanted to like this book. Built on a decent - if not entirely original - premise, I can't say nothing happened. Unfortunately, it leans on stock characters and simplified situations, with an awkward writing style that kept throwing me out of the story. ("Little did they suspect..." and "If only they'd seen..." paragraphs, as chapter enders, read like amateur attempts to build tension.) Several moments had me rolling my eyes, with people acting stupidly or deliberately ignoring things because the author needed them to at the time. Eventually, Wesley learns a lesson, delivered with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to his skull... but not before setting in motion events that lead to the book's cliffhanger, to be resolved (presumably) in Book 2. In the end, there just isn't much originality here, in the characters or the plot execution, despite occasional glimmers of promise. I've definitely read worse, and it was a free download for Kindle, so I probably shouldn't be too picky.
(I also have to say that I lost a little respect for the author when I read, on his Amazon page, how he backed down and redacted some mild cursing after a few complaints. They're middle-schoolers. Middle-schoolers are known to swear... especially in situations as traumatic as those experienced by Wesley and his companions. Do kids this age still need their world bubble-wrapped and whitewashed? But I digress...)

The Absolute (K. A. Applegate)

2011-11-23T20:00:00.001-08:00

The Absolute
(The Animorphs series, Book 51)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
**** (Good)
Absolute (Animorphs)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Marco and Tobias were monitoring suspicious troop movements near town, a possible indication of Yeerks manipulating the National Guard, when they ran into trouble: a squadron of peregrine falcons and golden eagles.
Their worst fears realized.
Since Jake's brother Tom escaped with Prince Elfangor's blue cube, the Animorphs are no longer the only morph-capable fighters in this war. Worse, with Visser One's operatives controlling some, if not all, of the guard units, he has military-grade Earth-based firepower and combat-trained human-Controllers at his beck and call. The invasion's about to go public.
Which means the Animorphs have to do the same.
While Jake and the others distract the Yeerk-controlled National Guard, Marco, Tobias, and Ax head to the state capitol. Their plan? Warn the governor about the Yeerks before they can slip a slug into her brain. Only she has the authority to call in more guards, or send for help from the Pentagon... too far away from the Yeerk pool for Visser One to have reached. If nothing else, it's time the general public knew what was going on - before the Dracon beams of Yeerk Bug fighters start carving up the city streets in broad daylight. Of course, they have to dodge Controllers - in morph and out of it - to reach her, but with only three members, they should have no problem with stealth.
The operative word, unfortunately, being "should"...

REVIEW: A high-action thrill ride, this book creates an interesting dynamic by splitting the core group. Without Jake to lead them, Marco and the others can't turn to anyone else to make decisions for them. Fortunately, they're veterans in this war by now; the Animorphs of even twenty books ago wouldn't have been able to function as smoothly on their own. In the governor, the Animorphs may at last have found a grown-up who can handle the news of alien invaders - if they can keep her alive and uninfested long enough to do them any good. With only three books left in the series, both Animorphs and Yeerks prepare themselves for the upcoming final showdown, the ultimate battle for the fate of the Earth.
Incidentally, it's long been apparent, but these later books' titles really must be the result of some sort of random word generator... there's no reason for this one, of all the books, to be called the "absolute" anything.
And on another note, I cannot believe how high the prices are for these later Animorphs installments... check your local library for a much more economical option, unless you're planning to collect them all.

The Ultimate (K. A. Applegate)

2011-11-22T13:58:00.001-08:00

The Ultimate
(The Animorphs series, Book 50)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Life in the Hork-Bajir refugee camp is stressful enough. Add in too-close quarters, parents who still cannot accept the real and imminent danger of the Yeerks, the knowledge that, however much they drill and practice, they simply cannot survive a direct assault, and the fact that Jake's family - mother, father, and brother - are all Controllers... well, it's hardly a wonder that the Animorphs are falling apart. Cassie watches helplessly as Jake's fire dwindles to a cold, empty pit of apathy. She no longer knows him, this boy she used to consider more than a friend. He needs help.
He needs more troops. More Animorphs. Because, even though the experiment with David turned out to be a disaster, the original six can no longer fight this war alone.
The trouble is finding people who will, unlike their parents (or most adults, in their experience), accept the dangers and the responsibilities of morphing... and who are guaranteed not to already have an alien slug in their brains. Cassie knows just where to recruit, from a population that the Yeerks - and the humans - dismiss without a second thought. The hospital beds of sick and disabled children.
But, even as she tells Jake and the others her plan, she has to wonder: is Jake the only one losing touch with their humanity, or has her soul become just as calloused and empty as his?

REVIEW: This is just the sort of plot development that should've come earlier in the series. But, then, these last books feel like a wind sprint through all the stuff Applegate meant to do, but kept putting off to crank out filler plots. Jake comes closer to cracking than ever before, the loss of his whole family driven home by day after day of watching Marco, Cassie, Rachel, and even the orphaned Tobias with their safe-and-sound parents. Cassie wants to believe she's still the same person she used to be before the war, but watching her parents react to her new self drives home her own transformation into someone she doesn't particularly like, but cannot seem to break away from. In the end, Cassie risks everything once she held dear for redemption... even, possibly, her love for Jake. Returning to the internal conflicts and moral dilemmas that were always the strength of the series, The Ultimate demonstrates that the spark is still alive, even fifty-odd books later.

My Sparkling Misfortune (Laura Lond and Alla Alekseyeva)

2011-11-21T21:23:00.001-08:00

My Sparkling Misfortune
(The Lakeland Knight series, Volume 1)
Laura Lond and Alla Alekseyeva
Amazon Digital Services
Fiction, YA Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: No man would ever accuse Lord Arkus of heroism - at least, none who live to tell the tale. Clever, devious, greedy, and ruthless, Arkus has made a reputation as one of the leading villains in the land, bane of prince and knight and goodly folk of all stripes. But even among villains exists a certain code of honor - which is why, when Prince Kellemar (normally the heroic type) proposed a temporary pooling of resources to deal with a shared threat, Arkus took him at his word. Unfortunately, while villains may have honor, heroic princes evidently do not. The deal was a trap, one that nearly cost Arkus his life. Barely escaping, losing his castle and his most trusted minions, he schemes vengeance in exile... but he cannot do evil alone. He needs a supernatural servant. And he knows just where - and how - to ensare one. But Arkus makes a vital mistake: the spirit he traps isn't evil. It's a sparkling, notorious companion of heroes and do-gooders. And it seems to suffer from the delusion that a hero's heart hides beneath his villainous skin.
It's going to be a long and painful road to vengeance. Or redemption. Whichever Arkus reaches first... assuming the sparkling hasn't driven him crazy before he gets there.

REVIEW: As one might expect, this is a lighthearted tale, a fun play on fantasy convention. The world isn't especially deep or distinctive, and the characters aren't startlingly original, but both do their job and held my interest for the length of the book. It reads fast and has some fun moments; but for the ending, which turns into a cliffhanger, it would've rated four stars. Unfortunately, I felt a bit cheated by the lack of resolution. This isn't so much an independent volume, as advertised, but the first half of a larger book. I also felt parts of the story were a little thin; I never really got a sense of Arkus as a villain, so his gradual transformation wasn't as unexpected as I thought the authors intended it to be. Overall, though, it's not a bad story, and I wouldn't rule out reading the second Lakeland Knight book. (Especially if it ever becomes available for free...)

The Diversion (K. A. Applegate)

2011-11-21T16:52:00.001-08:00

The Diversion
(The Animorphs series, Book 49)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Since becoming Animorphs, joining the fight against the unseen Yeerk enemy, Tobias and his friends fought not only for the Earth, but for the safety of their families. Even Jake, whose older brother Tom is a high-ranked human-Controller, would do anything to protect them. For a long time, it was merely a hypothetical threat; Visser One remained convinced that the "bandits" harrying the invasion were trained Andalite warriors.
Now, he's figured out the truth.
As the Animorphs scramble to figure out how much the Yeerks know, and how to save their families (if it's not already too late), Tobias makes a startling discovery: his mother, who abandoned him when he was little more than a baby, is still alive. She lives just a few blocks from where the human boy Tobias cried himself to sleep at night in his uncaring uncle's house, inventing story after story about why she'd left, and when she'd come back for him.
How much will Tobias risk to meet her? How much is her life - the life of a woman who was barely a mother to him, who never even bothered walking down the block to see him - worth? And why can't Tobias seem to leave her behind as easily as she left him?

REVIEW: After Marco revealed his secret to his father in The Revelation (Book 45), this story - the endangerment of the Animorphs' families, the decision whether or not to sacrifice their own flesh and blood to the Yeerks - was inevitable. Tobias would normally be an outsider in such a decision; even when he was human, his "family" was little more than a roof over his head and (sometimes) a meal on the table at night. Bringing his long-lost mother Loren, last seen as a kid in The Andalite Chronicles, felt a bit like a stretch in the logic department, but it gave Tobias (and the readers) a sense of closure on her story. The reunion is bittersweet, as Tobias finally learns just why she walked out on him, but if he thought he'd have a TV-movie reconciliation that erased all the scars of his past, he's sadly mistaken... especially when the Yeerks are still gunning for him and his friends, and are no longer afraid of the consequences of public displays of force. The tension continues to ratchet up on the way to the finale.
On a side note, the original cover's morph shows a serious misunderstanding of how a hawk would morph into a dog... a further sign that the series is nearing the end of its active shelf life.

The Return (K. A. Applegate)

2011-11-20T15:49:00.001-08:00

The Return
(The Animorphs series, Book 48)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: For weeks now, Rachel has been plagued by nightmares. Anyone in her shoes - given the ability to morph animals, thrown onto the front lines of a war against parasitic alien invaders, constantly in fear of discovery by her enemies - would be insane not to have bad dreams, but Rachel's are worse than normal. In them, her dark side, the bloodthirsty beast in her own heart, takes over, threatening her friends and comrades even as she thrills in its amoral power. But they're just dreams... or are they?
Rachel finds herself trapped in a multi-layered nightmare, too real to be a dream yet too impossible to be reality. At the center of it lurks the evil red eye of Crakak... and a white rat named David. The seventh Animorph whom they trapped in rat morph when he went rogue. Crayak offers Rachel's dark side a chance to emerge, to flourish. It has the strength to destroy Visser One. It has the power to save Earth. And all it will cost is one life: the life of Jake, the leader of the Animorphs.
If Rachel accepts the Crayak's gift, she will become the most powerful being in this sector of the galaxy. If she rejects it, she'll end up with David: trapped as a rat. Forever.

REVIEW: This book, following through on Crayak's earlier attempt to seduce Rachel to his side of the conflict, stumbles by trying too hard. It wants to be Rachel's equivalent of Tobias's torture at the hands of the mad Yeerk Taylor in The Illusion (Book 33), crossed with a follow-through on the fate of David and some temptation-of-evil for good measure. Any one of those, alone, might have made a stronger story, but mashed together it just becomes too surreal. The whole book has a nightmarish overtone, as Crayak bends and warps reality on a whim to ensare Rachel in his plans. Given the series finale, there's more than a little character foreshadowing here, as she confronts the reality of her near-addiction to the danger of warfare; even if the Yeerks left tomorrow, she'll never be able to pretend she's an ordinary girl again, that she'll be happy just shopping at The Gap or chilling in front of the TV. It's been a theme with her character since the beginning, and the degree to which it's come to dominate her life shows just how severely the war has affected her. David, in his return, does less than I might have expected - and, frankly, of all the characters the Animorphs have encountered, all the tantalizing loose threads from previous adventures, I wouldn't have picked him as the one to revisit. Still, given that it reads more like a head-trip than an active progression of the mytharc, the book does its job.

The First Dragoneer (M. R. Mathias)

2011-11-19T20:53:00.001-08:00

The First Dragoneer
(Prequel to The Dragoneers Saga)
M. R. Mathias
Amazon Digital Services
Fiction, YA Fantasy
**+ (Bad/Okay)

DESCRIPTION: The mountains of the Teeth, on the edge of civilized human lands, teem with dangers... but, in pastoral Prominence Valley, life marches to the slow, monotonous beat of the seasons. As a farmer's third son, seventeen-year-old March must go forth into the world to make his own fortune. His best friend Bren, sole male child of his horse-breeder family, can only look forward to a long, dull life in the valley of his ancestors. But the day of their parting is weeks away. For now, they can enjoy one last hunting trip together. And, as it's their last, they want it to be a hunt to remember!
Little do the boys know just how memorable their hunt will be. What starts as a boyish dare - to venture beyond the ridge of the Teeth, beyond the kingdom's boundaries and patrols - will end in tragedy... with one life hanging in the balance, and one changed in ways no Prominence Valley boy could imagine.
(A Kindle exclusive title.)

REVIEW: O, the siren call of freebie downloads... This novella, a prequel to a series, tempted me with decent reviews and the promise of dragons. Sadly, it's not so much a stand-alone novel as an extended teaser, an incomplete enticement to the saga of the dragoneers. The clunky narrative, rolling back and forth between the boys without warning, would have benefited from the attentions of a good editor... or at least a halfway decent proofreader. After heel-dragging and meandering, it finally picks up a little momentum... only to end with an illogical, out-of-the-blue leap onto the back of the series premise, without even trying to resolve the threads of its own story. A good half of the download proved to be a preview of the first full-length Dragoneers book. Having been disappointed by the story (and characters, and writing style) of The First Dragoneer, I didn't even bother trying.

Write Good or Die (Scott Nicholson, editor)

2011-11-19T13:30:00.001-08:00

Write Good or Die
Scott Nicholson, editor
Haunted Computer Books
Nonfiction, Writing
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: A prolific published author, Scott Nicholson compiles articles from several writers, discussing everything from finishing a manuscript through proper submission etiquette, self-promotion myths, today's rapidly-changing publishing world, and more.
(A Kindle exclusive title.)

REVIEW: While I admit I've never read any books by Nicholson (or the other contributors), I still recognized the ring of truth and experience in their words. With many short articles on many subjects, it lent itself well to my current schedule. (Between National Novel Writing Month writing blitzes and holiday projects, I don't have the time to sit down to a long story.) A good chunk of articles devote themselves to aftercare, tackling problems of getting a publisher's (or agent's) attention, suggestions for finding a reviewer, how e-books are changing the face of the industry (for the better, on the whole), and how to promote yourself without compromising writing time or the bottom line. After the "about the authors" afterword are several teasers for contributors' novels, more than one of which intrigued me. (It also acted as an object lesson highlighting points made in the book itself, about the benefits of cross-promotion.) A few minor formatting issues aside, it's a good and inspiring collection for any modern writer (or would-be writer.)
It was also a free Kindle download. Free always helps... though, in this case, the content was good enough that I wouldn't have minded paying.

The Resistance (K. A. Applegate)

2011-11-15T20:06:00.001-08:00

The Resistance
(The Animorphs series, Book 47)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

NOTE: In honor of the recent re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Everything's falling apart. Visser Three is now Visser One. The secret invasion moves toward open warfare. The Andalite relief ships aren't coming, now or - most likely - ever. Already Marco and his family are officially "dead," hiding with the free Hork-Bajir in the mountains beyond the national forest. How much longer before Rachel has to join them? Or Cassie? Jake, leader of the Animorphs, doesn't know how much more he can stand, how much longer he can hold out against impossible odds.
While cleaning out the basement for his mother, Jake finds an old family heirloom: the uniform and diary of Lieutenant Isaiah Fitzhenry, Civil War soldier. The tale of Fitzhenry's battle, a battle with too few troops and unreliable orders and an undefeated Rebel general whose forces vastly outnumber and outgun his own, eerily mimics Jake's fight... especially when Cassie calls with grim news. One of the free Hork-Bajir has been captured and re-infested. With a guide to lead them, the Yeerk troops are heading straight toward the hidden valley sanctuary. It's a death trap, with no way out - but the Hork-Bajir refuse to flee. And Jake has no choice but to lead them in a fight that cannot be won.

REVIEW: Drawn in shades of blood red, hopeless white, and black smears of despair and foreshadowing, The Resistance brings the battle to the sheltered Hork-Bajir. Like the previous book, innocent bystanders find themselves in the line of fire, forced by cruel circumstance to take up arms against an enemy they didn't know existed and fight - or die - in a war they do not understand. The alternate-chapter cuts to Isaiah Fitzhenry's diary, describing his doomed efforts to protect a town from Rebel soldiers, drove home parallels about racism (or speciesism), freedom, and the dark reality of war with concussive force. Further hints are dropped that, during the "holding pattern" stories, plenty has been happening that the readers were left unaware of - for instance, Jake and his friends finally learned how to morph clothing other than Spandex. It makes me wish that the publishing schedule hadn't been so brutal, so Applegate herself could've had more time to develop those stories (or at least more time to properly oversee the efforts of the ghostwriters.)

The Deception (K. A. Applegate)

2011-11-15T17:34:00.001-08:00

The Deception
(The Animorphs series, Book 46)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Since coming to Earth on board the doomed Andalite Dome ship with his war-hero brother, Aximili has changed in many ways. Once an untested aristh, a warrior-cadet, he has now fought more Yeerks than many Andalite adults. Once convinced of the moral and technological superiority of his species, he has been humbled - and disappointed - many times. But, still, he clung to the hope that the Andalites would come to liberate Earth from the Yeerk threat, that he and his friends were merely fighting to delay Visser Three's forces.
Now he knows better.
Almost overnight, the tone of the invasion has shifted. What once was a stealth mission moves toward all-out war, now that Visser Three has been officially promoted to the rank of Visser One. His first act is brilliant, ruthless, and bold: trigger a third World War, and let humans exhaust their weapons and resources exterminating each other until no possible resistance can be mounted.
The Animorphs, of course, hurry to thwart the Visser's plans... but they're used to guerrilla warfare and infiltration, quick strikes against the enemy, melting into the shadows before the violence and death toll rises too high. Ax and his companions thought they were blooded warriors already - but, now, they're about to get their first taste of real, open, no-holds-barred war. And they'll learn that, when it comes to war, they have a lot to learn: about the enemy, and about themselves.

REVIEW: This book, which picks up literally where the last one left off, danged near lost itself a half-star. The change in tone, the higher body count and blood cost, has been so abrupt that it almost reads like an entirely different series. It didn't help that a fair chunk of this book relied on in-depth knowledge of the armaments and infrastructure of a modern Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, which Jake and his friends spew out in long strings of technobabble. If nothing else, the character evolution is thrown into sharp relief at the Animorphs' first taste of all-out war - at least, their first taste on Earth, in their own timeline, in a battle that they cannot sidestep or back away from because it's not their fight. Ax especially learns just how far he's willing to go to save humans and defeat the Yeerk scheme; like Elfangor before him, Ax has been seduced by the primitive, contradictory natives of Earth (though not in so literal a sense as his big brother,) but even he is surprised at just what he'll sacrifice in the name of victory. Bloody, violent, fast-paced, and dark, The Deception continues what Book 45 started, a mad race to the ultimate confrontation between Animorph and Yeerk.

The Revelation (K. A. Applegate)

2011-11-14T19:36:00.001-08:00

The Revelation
(The Animorphs series, Book 45)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: From the first, the Animorphs have struggled to keep their families - most of them probably innocent, at least one a human-Controller - from learning of their abilities, let alone the fight against the Yeerks. To do so would put all of them in danger. If need be, they know they'll probably have to sacrifice loved ones for the sake of the cause. Marco, of all the Animorphs, should know this: his mother, long thought drowned, lives as the enslaved host of Visser One. Even when his father fell in love again and remarried, he kept his mouth shut, kept living the lie that his real mother was dead. The greater good prevailed.
But then his father came home from work one evening, babbling about a revolutionary breakthrough at the engineering firm where he works: the discovery of a brand-new layer of existence. Zero-space.
The nondimension where extruded mass goes during small morphs... and where alien spaceships travel interstellar distances in days rather than centuries. Marco and his friends know more about Zero-space than any other free humans... until now.
So far, the Yeerks have maintained their cloak of secrecy, lacking the strength and firepower to take on human military forces in the open. But if a human blundered onto their Zero-space transmissions, the hiding would be over. The only way to stop Earth from learning of their invasion is to infiltrate the project. Make Controllers out of the engineers involved.
Including Marco's father.
He's already lost his mother to Visser One. Can he stand by, like a good soldier, and let Dad be taken by the enemy? Or will he do something very brave, very stupid, and very, very dangerous, for him and the rest of his friends... like finally reveal his secret identity to the only family he has left?

REVIEW: After maintaining a holding pattern for longer than was strictly necessary, the series kicks into gear again in the countdown to the finale, a mere nine books out. Compressing events that could've unfolded more naturally over two or three books into one makes for a bit of a rushed story, unfortunately. There isn't time for the full emotional impact of the mytharc-changing events to be properly established or explored. As the title implies (and the preview blurbs explicitly reveal), Marco's father becomes the first of the Animorphs' relatives to learn of their secret identities - a revelation he takes remarkably well, all things considered. That alone could've made up the core of a good book, but Applegate shoehorns in three or four more major alterations. By the end, the final ultimatum has been sounded, the final deadline placed before the Yeerks take the invasion out of the shadows. It should've been a far more profound moment, but instead it was lost in the general rush. A little disappointing, but not enough to put me off reading on - then or now.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson)

2011-11-12T21:45:00.001-08:00

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
Public Domain Books
Fiction, Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Few gentlemen in 19th-century London are as decent and upright as Dr. Henry Jekyll... which is why his lawyer friend, Mr. Utterson, is perplexed by the man's associated with an unsavory fellow known as Hyde. He's even named the despicable, ill-reputed beast as an heir in his will! Convinced Jekyll is a victim of blackmail, Utterson digs deeper - only to uncover a truth so terrible he can scarcely believe it.

REVIEW: Like many older books, some allowances need to be made for an archaic writing style. Unfortunately, as a modern reader, I find that such allowances don't do much to excuse the general tedium of stories like this. A long, slow build to a foregone conclusion runs headlong into a long, slow reflection by the doomed Dr. Jekyll as he recounts the thought processes and experiments behind his greatest triumph and failure... a recounting full of gaps and self-pitying sidetracks. Compared to some other classic sci-fi/fantasy tales, though, this story positively flies along. Stevenson also has some nice descriptive passages and a few characters that, while sketchily drawn, nonetheless stand out distinctly in the memory. (Not all of them, unfortunately...) I'm glad I finally got around to reading it, but I doubt I'll bother reading it again.

The Unexpected (K. A. Applegate)

2011-11-04T22:48:00.000-07:00

The Unexpected
(The Animorphs series, Book 44)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
**+ (Bad/Okay)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: When Cassie and her friends got wind of alien wreckage discovered by the government, they knew they had to act fast. The Yeerks would do anything to keep any evidence of their technology from ending up in official hands, which means that the Animorphs must ensure that it does just that. Powerful as the invasion has grown, it's still not strong enough to withstand the forces of national defenses should the feds be alerted. During the mission, Cassie becomes separated from the others. One firefight later, and she finds herself in the cargo hold of a jumbo jet... with Yeerk Bug fighters hot on her trail.
By the skin of her teeth and the speed of her morph, she manages to escape, to find herself in the middle of a vast red desert: the Australian Outback. It's not the kind of place the Yeerks would be interested in - unless, of course, they thought an Andalite was hiding there. All alone, in a strange land, Cassie fights for her survival on the slim hope of returning home.

REVIEW: This might've squeaked by with an Okay rating, but it was just too unoriginal to pull it off. The story feels like a "field trip" filler episode of a sagging TV show, when they move the cast and crew to an exotic location in a misguided attempt to boost ratings. Being seen by a native boy who helps her fight back comes straight out of The Extreme (Book 25), when a Native American helps the team find a polar bear to morph. Also like that book, the natives take people turning into animals in stride due to their cultural heritage, mostly because the book doesn't want to have to deal with the ramifications of outsiders learning about the Animorphs. Aside from meeting an Aboriginal boy and visiting Oz, this book serves no purpose in the mytharc. Cassie's character doesn't grow, the Yeerks are neither helped nor hindered by the sidetrack, and the whole adventure amounts to a delaying tactic before the next book, which begins the build-up to the series finale in Book 54. It's not a bad story, per se, but Applegate is capable of so much better... and gratuitous padding like this just cheapens the series. (The book also missed a bet: Australia is home to animals with some of the deadliest poisons on Earth, a worthy addition to the morphing arsenal. The only native Australian Cassie does morph is a red kangaroo, which she could've found at the zoo back home.)

The Test (K. A. Applegate)

2011-11-02T23:32:00.000-07:00

The Test
(The Animorphs series, Book 43)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***** (Great)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Of all the Animorphs, Tobias has made the most sacrifices. On their first mission to the Yeerk pool, he gave up his humanity when he became a nothlit, trapped in hawk morph. Regaining his morphing ability through the interference of the Ellimist, Tobias had a chance to return to human - to stay a human forever, to be with Rachel as a normal boy - but chose to remain in the fight as an Animorph. When they needed someone to destroy the Yeerks' Anti-Morphing Ray, Tobias volunteered to be the test subject... and endured unimaginable torture at the hands of Taylor, the sadistically insane sub-visser in charge of the project. That was when he nearly gave up his own sanity, and the horror, the weakness of being entirely in Taylor's control, still haunts him.
Tobias had thought Taylor dead; she displeased Visser Three, after all, and few who fail him once last long enough to do so again. But then, after being injured by an eagle attack and sent to an animal hospital, there she was. His captor. His torturer. His bane. Instead of killing him, however, she lets him go - after telling him that she wants the help of his friends. Many Yeerks, she claims, are unhappy with how the Vissers and the Council have botched their empire's expansion. She wants to destroy Visser Three and spark a revolution that will resonate across the galaxy. Taylor has a plan that is every bit as heartless as she is, devastatingly simple. A victory in one blow.
Tobias is torn. On the one hand, the chance to cause trouble for the invasion is too good to pass up, even if it means partnering with such an unsavory, unstable person. On the other, he alone knows just how evil Taylor truly is at heart... and how hard it is to break free of her clutches.

REVIEW: How many middle-grade books explore the ramifications of torture and post-traumatic stress? Not many. Applegate writes a brilliant follow-up to Tobias's darkest adventure, pitting the tortured against the torturer on an ever-shifting playing field. He struggles to reconcile his lingering sense of helplessness and weakness, his shame at having been broken, with the the greater needs of the war and his friends - and, by overcompensating, nearly destroys everything he's ever fought for. The Animorphs find their ethics tested and twisted to the utmost, as they weigh the costs of victory at any price against their own humanity. The war has changed them all, leaving scars that will never heal. They aren't children anymore, but soldiers in the truest sense of the word. A fine return to form after the inane meanderings of Book 42.

The Journey (K. A. Applegate)

2011-11-01T22:07:00.000-07:00

The Journey
(The Animorphs series, Book 42)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
**+ (Bad/Okay)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting reviews of the individual Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Another mission, another victory... but, as Rachel and her friends demorph after the battle, something goes wrong. They're spotted - and photographed. Yeerk or innocent bystander, it doesn't matter. They need that film, before Visser Three finds out that the "Andalite bandits" are just human kids. But their plans to snatch the camera are disrupted by the return of an old enemy.
The Helmacrons, pint-sized problems with gargantuan egos, agreed never to return to Earth if they were allowed to recharge their ship on the "morphing energy" from Elfangor's blue cube. Unfortunately, bargains made with lesser species mean nothing to them. They've returned - and this time, they've taken a hostage. Before anyone can stop them, a team of Helmacrons has marched up Marco's nose. Once inside him, they pose a serious problem: their Dracon beams could do some real damage, especially if they get as far as his heart. The Animorphs put their camera mission on hold to free their friend, using the shrink ray of the Helmacron ship... only something goes wrong. The shrink ray works too well, reducing them to cellular size. The Helmacrons sabotaged their own technology, knowing the Animorphs would use it to follow them. Now they're too small to harm even the tiny Helmacrons, and the clock is ticking both on the missing camera and on Marco's life.
But the Helmacrons made one mistake: they made Rachel mad.

REVIEW: I believe this represents the nadir of the Animorphs series. The Helmacrons, irritating in their first adventure, are even more annoying in their return. The whole concept feels pitched at a lower level than the rest of the books, with its focus on snot and phlegm and Magic School Bus-like tour of the body. With a plot this shallow and villains this silly, there's no room for depth, let alone interest. The writing style doesn't even read like Applegate. Like the first Helmacron encounter (in Book 24, The Suspicion), this adventure wraps up with a quick non-conclusion. A clear case of series padding, or author burnout.

Rip Haywire and the Curse of Tangaroa! (Dan Thompson)

2011-11-01T20:03:00.001-07:00

Rip Haywire and the Curse of Tangaroa!
(A Rip Haywire graphic novel)
Dan Thompson
IDW Publishing
Fiction, YA? Graphic Novel/Humor
***** (Great)

DESCRIPTION: Rip Haywire spent his childhood like most kids, or so he thought. After all, what did the other boys do all day if they weren't helping their mother take out bad guys and infiltrate top-secret bases? But, even for him, one youthful mission stood out from the rest: a journey to a lost temple to recover a mysterious artifact known as a "ghost compass." The evil Longbeard escaped, but Rip never forgot the compass.
Now grown, Rip is a soldier of fortune, laughing in the face of death and feasting on fortified danger around the world. Once more, he finds himself on the trail of the ghost compass, which is tied to an ancient pirate curse... and an unimaginable trove of lost wealth. With his cowardly canine compatriot TNT, and his double-agent bombshell girlfriend Cobra, Rip sets out to save the day, save his mother, and dish out extra helpings of two-fisted justice, Haywire style.

REVIEW: Rip Haywire, a hilarious parody of classic action/adventure heroics, makes his graphic novel debut in a story that's bigger, longer, and - if possible - even funnier than the daily strips. Hardly a page went by that didn't almost have me laughing out loud. The timeline appears to be independent of the main comic strip, but that's to be expected. The characters are still just as funny, with occasional side-trip stories that added to the overall hilarity. The humor, much like that of the daily strips, skews a little toward the grown-up end of the spectrum, not crude but certainly requiring a taste for parody. I keep hoping Dan Thompson will put out a comic collection, but in the meantime this makes a more-than-acceptable substitute. I only hope more graphic novels are in the works. After a long stretch of unimpressive reads, I needed a laugh like this...

Back to Before (K. A. Applegate)

2011-11-01T19:55:00.000-07:00

Back to Before
(The Animorphs series, Megamorphs 4)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Another battle done. Another night over. Jake crawls away from devastation, from pain, from blood - the enemy's blood and his own. At home, he tries to forget, but can't. How did this burden fall upon his shoulders? How can he go on like this? If only he'd never walked home through the construction site... had never met Prince Elfangor in his dying moments... had never heard of morphing or the Yeerks.
Thanks to the Drode, meddling assistant to the evil Crayak, and a bargain with the (sometimes) benevolent Ellimist, Jake's wish is granted. He and his friends took the long way home from the mall. But that doesn't mean that their lives are safe. After all, just because you don't know you have enemies doesn't mean they aren't out get you...

REVIEW: This book answers the question that fans (and fanfic writers) were asking themselves since the start of the series: could Jake and his friends have resisted the Yeerks even if they'd missed their fateful meeting with Elfangor, and never acquired the power to morph? The characters drift off in their own directions, but somehow keep finding themselves coming to the same conclusion: something very, very strange is going on in their hometown. Jake grows suspicious of the Sharing after his brother Tom pushes him too hard to join. Tobias, on the other hand, becomes their perfect victim, a troubled and bullied boy who finally thinks he's found a place where he belongs. Marco and Rachel spot Marco's dead mother, while Cassie fights a persistent feeling that something is terribly wrong with time itself. Perhaps the most profound difference is Ax; forced to escape the wreckage of the Dome ship alone, he attempts to expose and destroy the Yeerks entirely on his own, a lost alien on a primitive, hostile world. With action, paranoia, and a grim sense of fatality, this might've earned a solid Great rating, but for two things. First off, it is, ultimately, a redundant timeline, a classic sci-fi cop-out. Secondly, it strikes a very similar note to The Familiar (where Jake experiences a simulated future Earth under Yeerk rule), which was released at the same time. Ordinarily, two negatives like that would've dropped it a full star in the ratings, but, as I've mentioned before, I've been on a mediocre-to-bad reading streak lately. It was also nice to see the series pick back up after some less-impressive installments. Overall it's perhaps the darkest and most powerful of the four Megamorphs titles.

Gregor the Overlander (Suzanne Collins)

2011-10-30T17:59:00.000-07:00

Gregor the Overlander
(The Underland Chronicles, Book 1)
Suzanne Collins
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Fiction
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Two years, seven months, and thirteen days ago, Gregor's father disappeared without a trace. In New York City, people vanish all the time, for all sorts of reasons. Some of them fall in with the wrong crowd, or simply don't want to be found. Gregor knows that's not the case. His dad would never leave him, his sisters, his mother, or his grandmother. Sure, they weren't exactly living in a Park Avenue penthouse, but he loved Gregor, and Gregor loved him. As soon as Dad comes home, he'll...
But Gregor won't let himself think about that, won't let himself think of hope or happiness, for fear of jinxing his father's return. In the meantime, all he can do is help out as best he can around the house. With Grandma's senility, Mom struggling to stretch one income over so many mouths to feed, and his two-year-old sister Boots' constant need for supervision and diaper changes, there's more than enough to do to keep his mind occupied. Even doing laundry is a blessing. At least, until Boots worked loose the latch on the grate in the laundry room. As Gregor races to keep her out of the walls, the two fall in... and down.
Suddenly, Gregor and Boots find themselves in a strange, dark world, where giant cockroaches, spiders, rats, and more live in an uneasy truce with humans and bats. The people of the Underland have many prophecies left by their long-lost progenitor - prophecies that may concern Gregor himself. Gregor only wants to return home, where his mother must be frantic... until he learns that he isn't the first human to tumble into the Underland. The last "Overlander" to survive the plunge came through precisely two years, seven months, and thirteen days ago.
Gregor's father. Still alive.

REVIEW: Gregor the Overlander mixes some nicely original "otherland" twists with a strangely bland story. The title character tends to think in obvious blocks of text (annoyingly set off in quote marks), holding the reader's hand as though not trusting them to follow the tale through its darker stretches. As with many "otherland" tales, Gregor's New York City street smarts and ability to comprehend slang terminology gives him an edge on the Underlanders, though they prove quite adept at surviving in their own harsh world, with a matter-of-fact survival instinct that perpetually eludes him. Gregor's adventures in the Underland start out fairly benign, as he is protected from the brutality of Underland survival by having the good fortune to travel with people who do the hard work for him. The fact that he's named in a prophecy only heightens his security. Even when death and destruction come crashing down upon him, I felt oddly detached from the action, with only an occasional emotional connection breaking through. I can't say precisely why; maybe it was the writing style, or the way Gregor tended to explain his thoughts and emotions instead of feeling them. Boots, his traveling companion, actually has a purpose on the journey, though I do rather wish Collins had aged her a few years: I've never been particularly fond of pushy toddlers. (I'm also not entirely sure that Boots wasn't the reason for my sense of detachment - Gregor spends so much energy protecting her from the hard edges of the Underland that his own experiences seemed equally bubble-wrapped for most of the story.) The author gets marks, however, for using a tantrum as a sonic weapon, perhaps the most unique use of a two-year-old I've ever encountered. Collins also establishes different morality codes for the different species of Underland; one of Gregor's great struggles is how he must come to accept that not everyone here thinks like a human, nor can they be expected to do so. Almost despite itself, Gregor's quest builds to a violent climax, though most of the violence occurs offscreen and is only witnessed in its aftermath. The very end teases of more adventures to come for Gregor and Boots.
In the end, while the book had its moments, I couldn't find the energy or interest to push it to a solid Good rating. I don't expect I'll follow the rest of this series.

The Familiar (K. A. Applegate)

2011-10-30T10:24:00.000-07:00

The Familiar
(The Animorphs series, Book 41)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the Animorphs series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: After yet another loss to the Yeerks, the stresses of battle nearly tear the Animorphs apart. Marco nearly got himself killed when Rachel refused the order to retreat. Cassie feels the deaths of the Hork-Bajir-Controllers she took out, innocent creatures enslaved by their Yeerk masters, crushing her soul. Tobias and Ax have their own personal problems, drawing them apart from the group. And Jake... Jake can hardly find the energy to care anymore.
He stumbles home, nearly running into his Yeerk-controlled brother Tom, before crashing in bed. How can he go on like this? His own friends, his warriors, at each others' throats, the Yeerk invasion marching on with nary a stumble for all their efforts, knowing that the Andalite warships that they'd been counting on for relief may not show up for years (if at all)... the war might as well already be over.
Jake wakes up the next morning to find himself in a strange room, wearing strange clothes, in a body that is strange... but familiar. It's his own body, aged maybe ten years. He looks out the window to see the New York City skyline - only radically altered. Yeerk Bug fighters and Andalite warships swoop over the gloomy city streets - but as allies, not enemies.
Is this a dream? Is this the work of the Crayak or the Ellimist? Has Jake finally gone insane? Or did the Yeerks win the galactic war?

REVIEW: The "dream" episode is almost invariably a sign that the writers of a given franchise are running out of ideas... or killing time before sweeps. This book seems to fall in a similar category. The nightmare world Jake wakes into is too riddled with inconsistencies for even him to fully believe, yet he has little choice but to endure it; pain, even in a dream, is still pain, and he's not willing to bet his life that none of it is real. There's enough weirdness and action, and enough personal torment on the part of Jake (who blames himself for this "future" and the fates of his friends and family), to keep turning pages. Still, it's hard to feel much urgency over what is clearly an unreal situation. It ends with what amounts to a cop-out... one with absolutely no follow-through in the rest of the series. That pointless conclusion lopped off the half-star over Okay that it almost earned.

October Site Update (#2), Reviews Archived

2011-10-29T15:42:00.000-07:00

With November and the holidays about to swallow me whole, I figured I might as well post an update now.

The previous 38 reviews have been archived and cross-linked on the main website. (I don't expect I'll manage anything near that many reviews in the coming months... as I said, I have holiday projects that need starting. I'm also hoping for my third successful NaNoWriMo in November. Wish me luck...)

Enjoy!

The Other (K. A. Applegate)

2011-10-29T00:08:00.000-07:00

The Other
(The Animorphs series, Book 40)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Marco doesn't get many evenings home by himself, what with being part of the Animorphs and defending the planet from alien parasites and all. After his father remarried, he had even fewer nights alone. But, for once, the Yeerks are quiet and the Animorphs are off-duty. At least, until Marco's channel-surfing thumb leads him to an amateur video on national TV: an unidentified shape in the woods, little more than a four-footed blur. A blue blur.
An Andalite. But not Aximili, or Visser Three.
Investigating, Marco and his friends discover that Ax wasn't the only survivor of the Dome ship that was destroyed over Earth. Two more warriors survived... more or less. One of the pair, Mertil, lost part of his tail - a shameful deformity in Andalite culture. The other, the giant Gafinilan, seems to be Mertil's protector, but there's something very odd about his behavior that sets off Marco's inner alarms. Maybe it's the way he refuses to join in the fight against the Yeerks. Maybe it's his peculiar mood swings. Or maybe it has something to do with why, ever since that video, there's been no trace of Mertil...

REVIEW: Another book in the past-midpoint drift... Since we just had a visit from Andalites two installments ago, it seems a bit soon to play the "More Andalites on Earth" card again. It's also a bit odd that only now, so long after the crash, does anyone seem to notice that Elfangor's ship wasn't the only one to enter Earth's atmosphere intact. But that's as maybe... Some of the paranoia and veiled intentions of previous books returns here, as Marco struggles to figure out Gafinilan's angle: is he a coward, a Yeerk traitor, or something else? The handicap prejudice of the Andalites, as embodied in Ax's categoric dismissal of Mertil, feels more like a political-correctness statement than a natural development. Like the previous book, The Other may not approach the complexity and interest level of the peak of the series, but it nevertheless entertains.

The Hidden (K. A. Applegate)

2011-10-27T22:07:00.001-07:00

The Hidden
(The Animorphs series, Book 39)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: The puny Helmacrons left months ago, leaving behind nothing but the wreckage of one of their toy-sized spaceships. Unfortunately, Helmacron technology can detect morphing energy... and, somehow, the Yeerks managed to repair the sensors on their ship. The strongest source of morphing energy on Earth is Elfangor's blue box, the Andalite device that transfers morphing capabilities. And Visser Three will stop at nothing to get his hands on it.
As Cassie and her friends begin a deadly game of hide and seek, the unthinkable happens. An animal - an African Cape buffalo bull - somehow triggers the blue box's powers - and unthinkingly acquires a human morph. Cassie knows it cannot be allowed to live. At best, it's an abomination. At worst, it's a liability; if the Yeerks caught it and infested it, it would reveal the identity of the Animorphs, whom it has seen as both bull and man. But she can't reconcile herself to the bull's destruction, especially as its sometimes-human brain begins learning with unexpected speed. On the loose in the woods, the unnatural mutant seems to think the Animorphs are its herd... and, to a buffalo, a herd is to be defended at all costs. Even against Taxxons, Hork-Bajir, and the ultimate Abomination, Visser Three himself.

REVIEW: Yet another bend-till-it-breaks warping of Animorphs canon forms the backbone of the subplot; the idea of an animal accidentally triggering the blue cube seems on par with an animal accidentally bumping against a computer and coding a website. The general idea of outrunning a morph-seeker hearkens back to the first Megamorphs book, as well. Still, it's not all bad. Cassie wonders whether human DNA can make a subsentient animal into something more, even as she knows that the necessities of war, and not philosophical puzzles or ethics, will determine the bull's fate. I might have considered dropping this a half-star for general lack of originality, but I just read a far more atrocious YA book (Witch & Wizard, by James Patterson); by comparison, I danged near bumped this one clear up to Great. (Check the time stamp on this review versus Patterson's review... yes, I needed a dose of Applegate to counteract that one.)
On a vaguely related note, my copy - with the original "morphing" cover cutout to an internal illustration - demonstrates that this stretch of the series just wasn't getting the oversight it needed. The cutout cuts right through the front-cover "hype" excerpt, leaving word fragments to either side.

Witch & Wizard (James Patterson and Gabrielle Charbonnet)

2011-10-27T20:47:00.000-07:00

Witch & Wizard
(The Witch & Wizard series, Book 1)
James Patterson and Gabrielle Charbonnet
Little, Brown and Company
Fiction, YA Fantasy
** (Bad)

DESCRIPTION: For decades, the power of the New Order had been growing, but as high schoolers the siblings Whit and Wisty Allgood didn't pay much attention. Politics is for grown-ups and debate club dweebs, not a football star like Whit or a habitual truant like Wisty. Then one morning they woke to hear the sound of boots marching past their suburban home... followed by a commando team breaking down their door. Suddenly hauled away by New Order forces, accused of witchcraft (of which they know nothing) and sentenced to death, Whit and Wisty finally realize that politics does indeed affect them. As harsh as the New Order is on ordinary freedoms, banning books and music and imagination, the all-powerful One Who Is The One seems to have a personal vendetta against the Allgood teens. But why? It's not like they're really a wizard and a witch, with some sort of weird mystical power that could threaten his plan to dominate the world... are they?

REVIEW: I know it's probably not fair, but I cannot help comparing James Patterson to K. A. "Animorph" Applegate. Patterson writes mostly adult thrillers. Applegate writes for kids and young adults. Patterson's a household name. Applegate... very popular, but not quite that big. Patterson pitches this book at the upper age bracket of the Young Adult spectrum, while Applegate generally hits midgrade and younger. Yet, even at its weakest, the Animorphs series runs rings around this book.
Setting aside the grave mistake of naming his protagonists almost identically ("Whit" and Wisty" scan very similarly, and their narrative voices are the same), there are so many problems here I hardly know where to begin. Let's try the beginning, shall we? The book starts with a dramatic public execution in progress before cutting to the backstory of how the Allgoods found themselves before a stadium full of spectators, about to be dropped to their doom by The One Who Is The One. (Brilliantly original name, there... but, then, it fits the one-dimensional villain like a glove. Or rather a mitten - a glove would imply complexity of design. But I digress...) Unfortunately - and this risks a spoiler, but frankly I don't care - this book never catches up to the execution. It just leaves the reader hanging on a "to be continued..." cliffhanger. But, I'd lost faith in the thing long before then. Tissue-thin caricatures of characters, little to no logic to the world's magic, less logic behind the whole New Order, pathetic alternate-world versions of real-world books and bands (The Walking Heads? The Pitcher in the Wheat? Really?), zero plot depth, all written in a tooth-grindingly immature voice... oh, but why go on?
Did Patterson seriously think that teens were this stupid? Was he writing some sort of deadpan parody of teen magial realism series? Are all of his best-selling thrillers this lousy, or does the blame lie on his co-author? Contrast any character or situation in this book with the Animorphs, where middle-schoolers confront death, destruction, paranoia, loss of self, the politics of war, battle trauma, torture, and even the possibility of killing their own family members for the greater good of Earth's liberation, and it's easy to see which author respects their readers, and which is just looking for a quick buck on a popular genre.

The Arrival (K. A. Applegate)

2011-10-26T17:02:00.000-07:00

The Arrival
(The Animorphs series, Book 38)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Ever since Aximili's brother Prince Elfangor gave five human children the power to morph, they pinned their hopes on the eventual arrival of more Andalites. As much as the Animorphs have harrassed the Yeerks, as much of a thorn in the side as they've been to Visser Three, they simply could not win the war to liberate Earth from the invading alien parasites. While rescuing an ally Chee from human-Controllers, Ax suddenly finds himself side-by-side with a female aristh. Andalites - here at last! His hearts rejoice! But Estrid and her companions have their own agenda... and Ax has learned the hard way that his own people can be as cruel and amoral as the Yeerks. Just what has brought this ship to Earth - and why are they taking such pains not to reveal their mission to Ax?

REVIEW: As usual, Ax's story tends to be weaker than the other Animorphs' books. He spends less time wrestling with his loyalty to humans and more time watching his fellow Andalites with a mistrustful eye... a fact that surprises even him. The female Estrid momentarily blurs his thoughts - he is, after all, an adolescent Andalite - but fails to keep him from figuring out the visitors' true mission. The book almost lost half a star towards the end, revealing that key information was deliberately left out of the narrative. In the end, while the Andalite relief fleets are no nearer to Earth, the Animorphs - and Ax - nevertheless prove themselves more than capable of soldiering on. If it wasn't the best in the series, well, I've slogged through worse.

The Weakness (K. A. Applegate)

2011-10-25T21:55:00.000-07:00

The Weakness
(The Animorphs series, Book 37)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: With Jake out of town, the Animorphs figured they'd lay low for a few days. But Tobias has stumbled onto Visser Three's new feeding grounds - the place where he's most vulnerable. Ever since the Animorphs' last strike, the Visser has been very careful to change meadows every few days, so they don't have time to wait for their leader. In cheetah morph, under Rachel's leadership, they go in - and find themselves stymied by a new enemy.
The Councilor has come to monitor Visser Three's progress, and his host body, a Garatron, functions at such a speed he makes cheetahs look like tree sloths. Thwarted, Rachel comes up with a new plan: hammer the Yeerks now, while the Visser's under the microscope, and maybe throw the entire Earth invasion into chaos. After all, Yeerk politics have helped the Animorphs before. But last time, they were under Jake's leadership. Rachel's more direct style could be a change for the better - or the worse. And, considering how many close calls they've had, worse could all too easily be deadly.

REVIEW: Rising back toward their old form like a bald eagle riding a thermal, The Weakness brings back some of the internal struggles - both within the group and within the narrator - that are a trademark of the series. Rachel tries to be as strong a leader as Jake, but her personality doesn't cope as well with the planning and the pressure. Through poor luck and hubris, she nearly dooms them all... but no leader gets to walk away from their own messes, no matter how impossible they look. This one doesn't push the credulity envelope quite as bad as the previous few books, though parts of the story feel like arguments Rachel had with herself (literally, sometimes) in The Separation. Still, a fairly satisfying installment on the whole.

The Mutation (K. A. Applegate)

2011-10-25T20:17:00.000-07:00

The Mutation
(The Animorphs series, Book 36)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
**** (Good))

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting reviews of the individual Animorph books.

DESCRIPTION: Ever since losing the Pemalite ship to the "Andalite bandits" (and the interference of Crayak's pet, the devious Drode), Visser Three has become obsessed with recovering it... and, not incidentally, restoring his damaged reputation with the Yeerk High Council. Just how far will he go? Late at night, Jake receives a phone call from a shaken Cassie. The free Hork-Bajir have brought one of their own to her in hopes that she can heal him... and fix the horrible, bungled aquatic mutations the Visser grafted onto his body.
The Chee confirm that Visser Three is planning a deep-sea expedition to locate the Pemalite ship, using a brand-new craft known as the Sea Blade. Jake and the Animorphs race to stop him... only to find themselves facing an even greater danger. For down beneath the ocean lurks a secret nearly as old as human civilization, a lost world scavenging the detritus of humanity's oceanic explorations. The Animorphs would just as soon abandon the Yeerk craft and its crew to these strangers... until they're caught, too.

REVIEW: A marked improvement from the last book, it still has a touch of "gimmick" spray-painted across the plot. (Does everyone need an Atlantis storyline?) The undersea civilization may be a bit of a stretch, but Applegate manages to put an original stamp on a threadbare plot device. The idea of being forced to cooperate with one's enemy to escape a more imminent threat is also old, but the alliance doesn't dominate nearly as much of the book as the cover blurb implies. Not their greatest adventure ever, but a fun and action-packed outing nevertheless... and a hopeful sign that the series hadn't yet jumped the shark.
On another unrelated note, the next phase of the Animorphs Transformers line of toys is advertised in the back of my copy. The action figure of Visser Three looks especially sad...

Writing Tools (Roy Peter Clark)

2011-10-25T16:34:00.000-07:00

Writing Tools
Roy Peter Clark
Little, Brown and Company
Nonfiction, Writing
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: Everyone knows how to read, but only the gifted few can write. Plucking a golden idea from the aether, they work their literary alchemy to transform it into written words, via publisher or newspaper or Web site. It's not a skill, but a talent, the gift of the muse bestowed upon the lucky.
Or not.
Without knowing how it's done, writing can seem like a conjuring trick, but in reality it's like any other skill. With the right tools and some experience, anyone can build their own book. Published journalist and author Roy Peter Clark gathers years of academic and practical experience, condensing them into 50 "tools" to help writers do what they really want to do: write.

REVIEW: The key to success is self-discipline, at least according to the little key chain I got in ninth grade. The key to self-discipline, I would say, is learning how to do what you want to do, then actually doing it; without knowing how, it's all too easy to let procrastination rob you of whatever self-discipline you may have. With his "toolbox," Clark offers a sound method for creating a story, be it a work of fiction or an informative newspaper article. The process itself remains much the same no matter what genre one wishes to pursue. The tools needn't all be applied to every single project, but by having them on hand, they make getting stuck that much less likely. They can also help figure out where one is spending too much time and effort, and where one isn't spending nearly enough of either. Each "tool" gets its own short section, with a series of exercises and questions at the end to drive home the point. A useful and practical guide, which I expect will be well-thumbed-through in years to come.

The Proposal (K. A. Applegate)

2011-10-24T23:58:00.000-07:00

The Proposal
(The Animorphs series, Book 35)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: As far as the rest of the world is concerned, Marco's mother died two years ago, drowned in a boating accident. But Marco and the Animorphs know better - enslaved by the Yeerk known as Visser One, she had merely completed her assignment, turning over direct control of the invasion to the Andalite-Controller Visser Three. Since then, he has met his mother in the field of combat, has seen her fall... but no body was ever found, meaning his mother still lives, a slave to an alien parasite.
But Marco's father still thinks she's dead. And that's become a problem, now that he's dating again. Not just casual dating, either; this is serious. Too serious for Marco.
The Animorphs have just learned that William Roger Tennant, a popular self-help guru, is actually a human-Controller, who plans to use his upcoming prime time network debut to lure millions of innocents to The Sharing, the Yeerk front organization. Discrediting his golden-boy image is the only way to stop the plot - but Marco's having trouble with his morphs. The stress of his home life causes him to warp into impossible hybrid beasts. If he can't get himself under control, it won't be Tennant who will be exposed. It'll be Marco and the Animorphs.

REVIEW: A rough redressing of Rachel's DNA allergy from Book 12, the story sputters along on fumes from previous adventures, throwing in some half-hearted efforts at levity with Marco's morph of Euclid, his would-be-stepmother's annoying toy poodle. Granted, I could believe Marco would have some issues dealing with his father's plans for remarriage, but I'd already seen this general story arc in The Reaction, which played more convincingly. Little originality and minimal new developments make it a largely forgettable installment... save the way it ends on a cliffhanger, segueing into the return of Marco's mom/Visser One in Visser (reviewed on my website here.)

The Prophecy (K. A. Applegate)

2011-10-24T17:31:00.000-07:00

The Prophecy
(The Animorphs series, Book 34)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting reviews of the individual Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: When Cassie saw the free Hork-Bajir Jara Hamee lurking outside her barn, she knew there was trouble. Summoning the rest of the team, she heads to the hidden valley of the free Hork-Bajir, where a strange alien awaits him. Quafijinivon claims to be the last of the Arn, the highly intelligent race that created the Hork-Bajir... and whose apathy about that race's fate led to his own kind's extermination when the Yeerks and Andalites turned the planet into a war zone. He wants to use the DNA of the free Hork-Bajir to repopulate their home world and form a new resistance - but to do that, the cloned colonists will need weapons. The Andalite-turned-Hork-Bajir Aldrea was supposed to have stolen a large cache of weaponry just before she and her mate, Dak Hamee, were killed, but never relayed that information to anyone else. But all is not lost: the Arn has her "essence," her stored personality and memories, which needs only a host body to waken. If anyone could locate the cache, it would be Aldrea. But she has been dead for many years... when the mission is done, will she readily relinquish her host, or will she fight for this second life as hard as she did when she truly lived?

REVIEW: Mostly an excuse to follow up on The Hork-Bajir Chronicles (reviewed on my website here), the logic and premise - not to mention certain aspects of the mission's execution - twist Animorphs canon to the point of breaking. (If you haven't read the Hork-Bajir Chronicles and attempt this book, you'll definitely be thrown for a loop.) Aldrea works through some identity issues, learning to respect the "inferior" humans (and even come to terms with her Andalite origins), but beyond that the secondary layers that make so many Animorphs books so good just weren't there. Still, it's not as weak as Book 33, and the Animorphs kick some serious Yeerk hindquarters.

The Illusion (K. A. Applegate)

2011-10-24T00:11:00.000-07:00

The Illusion
(The Animorphs series, Book 33)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Tobias was once an ordinary boy... or so he thought. Then he became trapped in the body of a red-tailed hawk, a predator whose mind became part of his own. Later, he regained the ability to morph: a hawk who could walk as a boy again, but only for two hours at a time. And then he learned that his real father, a man he had never known, was no man at all, but the Andalite Elfangor - who had, for the sake of love, become a nothlit, voluntarily trapping himself in a human body until the Ellimist sent him back to his homeworld.
Boy? Hawk? Animorph? Andalite? Who is Tobias? Even he doesn't know anymore...
The Animorphs set out to destroy the Yeerk's newest weapon: the Anti-Morphing Ray, which - if it works - will force them to demorph in mid-combat. Revealing their human bodies, their true identities. But Jake has a plan to convince the Yeerks that their newest toy is so much scrap metal. See, they can't force an Andalite to demorph if their true body is an animal... a hawk. Tobias knows the plan could be fatal, but for all the confusion about who he is, he knows what he is. A warrior. And no warrior, especially not the son of Prince Elfangor, would hesitate to die for the sake of the greater good.

REVIEW: On the story front, this book felt a bit weak... but, then, the Animorphs series isn't just about fighting aliens and freeing Earth. It's about the characters, about how they grow and change under the strains of war. As a character portrait, exploring perhaps the most complex of the Animorphs, The Illusion succeeds brilliantly. (I suspect this is also the book that launched a thousand fanfics - the sometimes-strained relationship between Rachel and Tobias, which seems even more angst-ridden and doomed than that of Romeo and Juliet, comes to the forefront here, with Rachel showing a rare, tender side of herself that only Tobias gets to see.) It also continues Applegate's trend of showing different faces of the Yeerk enemy, in this case an embittered, voluntary human host who personally handles Tobias's interrogation/torture. The Anti-Morphing Ray itself proves a non-event, but the book really wasn't about it, anyway. After the disappointment of the previous installment, I enjoyed a return to depth here.

Frankenstein (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly)

2011-10-23T15:02:00.001-07:00

Frankenstein
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly
Public Domain Books
Fiction, Sci-Fi
**+ (Bad/Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Upon the icy Northern ocean, an English expedition finds a half-mad gentleman among the ice floes. His name is Victor Frankenstein, and the tale he tells of his youthful ambitions, his ultimate triumph over the very source of life, and subsequent torments at the hands of his own diabolical, unnatural creation, will haunt his listeners to the end of their days.

REVIEW: This is a tale of misery and torment. Oh, what miseries Victor suffers... He scarce could stand, for the weight of them must surely crush his legs. Fever madnesses burn his brain, a thousand torments preclude his joys. Page upon page, chapter upon chapter, the sorrows and sins unwind in stiflingly dense prose. He grinds his teeth and tears his hair and faints in fits of unfathomable guilt like a third-rate actor chewing the scenery. The tale of man attempting godhood, of the responsibilities of the creator to his creation, of genius gone astray and love transmuted to bitter hatred, fairly drowns in the sea of tears wept by the doctor. At some point, such paroxysms of utter misery stop being gloomy atmosphere and become smothering smog... but, then, without them this would've been a short story instead of a full-blown novel. The idea may be classic, but the execution nearly had me tearing my hair out like the good doctor - sadly, for entirely different reasons.

The Separation (K. A. Applegate)

2011-10-23T13:53:00.000-07:00

The Separation
(The Animorphs series, Book 32)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Rachel knows she shouldn't use morphing for personal reasons, especially not on a field trip. But the earring that fell into the tide pool was a special gift from her father. Besides, nobody would see her, and it's not like the starfish has a brain that's going to give her trouble. In and out in a couple of minutes, then back to the rest of the class.
Then came the little kid. The one with the sharp little shovel... a shovel just the right size to slice a small starfish in two.
Most animals would've died, but starfish have amazing regenerative powers. When it's time to demorph, suddenly there are two Rachels. But they are hardly identical. One is the soul of compassion, full of fear, while the other embodies the terrible, bloodthirsty rage that lurks deep within her mind. It turns out two aren't always better than one - especially when one of those two wants to kill first and think later and the other is too paralyzed by her own fears to stop her darker half.

REVIEW: I came close to lopping another half-star off the rating, here. One of the weakest books in the series, it takes the "evil twin" chestnut and does precisely nothing original with it... except have the Rachels act so entirely out of character that they danged near blow the Animorphs' cover more times than a starfish has legs. The concept grew stale quickly, the narrated thoughts of both Rachels being too extreme to engender much interest. The solution comes more or less out of nowhere, for the purpose of setting everything right before the next book. About the only mytharc progression is the introduction of the experimental Anti-Morphing Ray, which comes into play in the next installment. Not a stellar book, but at least it reads quickly... a virtue I've come to admire, having struggled through some very tiresome and densely-written tales of late.

The Conspiracy (K. A. Applegate)

2011-10-22T21:42:00.001-07:00

The Conspiracy
(The Animorphs series, Book 31)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***** (Great)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Jake leads a dangerous life. He's the unofficial leader of the Animorphs, pitting himself and his closest friends against Yeerks most nights of the week. At home, he lives under the same roof as a human-Controller. His beloved older brother, Tom, may walk and talk and act like he used to, but an alien slug in his brain is really calling the shots. For the most part, Tom ignores Jake and lives his own life, as older teen brothers are wont to do. So, while Jake still must be on his guard, he's never felt directly threatened under his own roof.
Until now.
His beloved great-grandfather has just died, tossing the family into upheaval. Their parents are taking Jake and Tom out to his cabin for the wake and funeral - a trip of four days at the least. Only the Yeerk in Tom's head needs access to Kandrona rays from the Yeerk pool every three days. Suddenly, there's a new battle line in the Yeerk war... a line straight through the center of Jake's house. A line between Tom and Jake... and Jake's father. Jake doesn't know what Tom's Yeerk means to do, but he knows one thing: he won't let the aliens take his father. No matter what the cost.

REVIEW: This book forms a perfect mirror with Book 30. When Marco had to deal with potentially killing his own mother in The Reunion, Jake kept telling him he was too close to the situation to make the call. Now, the leader of the Animorphs finds his own family turned into sacrificial pieces on the game board... and when his best friend, Marco, tries to tell him (from personal experience) that it's not a battle he's equipped to deal with, Jake doesn't take it well, to say the least. In this book, it becomes abundantly clear how the war is changing the Animorphs team... not for the better. These are not the same five children who wandered through an abandoned construction site at the start of the series. Jake finds himself doing things he never thought himself capable of - and ordering others, his friends and allies, to do things nobody should have to do. On its own, this book might've rated four or four and a half stars, but taken with the book before it, it forms a dark, bleak profile of two lives and one friendship irrevocably changed by the horrors of combat. These insights are truly what lifted the Animorphs series above the average young adult action serial.

Peter Pan (James M. Barrie)

2011-10-22T17:29:00.000-07:00

Peter Pan
James M. Barrie
Project Gutenberg - Public Domain Books
Fiction, YA Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Wendy, John, and Michael Darling knew of Peter Pan long before they saw him. A wisp of dream, a half-forgotten cradle song about a boy who refused to grow up... but those were just stories. The boy who flew through the nursery window, leaving his shadow behind for Mrs. Darling to find, is real. Try as their parents and faithful nanny, the dog Nana, might, Peter won't stay away. Soon, he convinces the Darling children to fly away with him to Neverland, a world forged of adventure and imagination. Pirates and fairies and mermaids and more... every day in Neverland brings a new story to tell. But soon Wendy starts to wonder when - or even if - Peter will let them return home.

REVIEW: This was a free e-book download from Project Gutenberg, which claims to be "created in the United States of America from a comparison of various editions determined by age to be in the Public Domain in the United States." Whatever that means... In any event, I'm acting under the presumption that this is a faithful rendition of the original text. Considering the age, the overall story holds up decently, even if some glaring stereotypes (girls doing nothing but darning socks and wanting babies, "redskin" savages, etc.) and archaic language date it. Peter comes across as far less of a benevolent playmate than an oddly inhuman captor, an immature demigod who proves as much a danger as a protector of the Darlings and the Lost Boys. As sad as it seems to know that children must grow up, Peter himself seems even sadder, forever denied the love of a family by his own nature. His story isn't the only disturbing subtext beneath Neverland; Barrie recognizes the dark side of childhood and imagination at several points. The story moves fairly well, though the characters tend to the exaggerated and goofy, even the pirate crew of Captain Hook. I almost gave this a solid Good rating, if only because the other books I'm currently reading (save the Animorphs reread) have tended toward the dull and dismal. In the end, though, the goofiness and the annoying intrusions of the narrator kept it down.

The Reunion (K. A. Applegate)

2011-10-22T00:50:00.000-07:00

The Reunion
(The Animorphs series, Book 30)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+(Good/Great)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Marco meant to go to school that morning. He really did. But, plagued by persistent nightmares of his mother - last seen in a flooding underwater Yeerk facility, with the alien slug Visser One still wrapped tightly around her brain - he just couldn't face another mindless morning of classes, so he took the bus into town. That's when he saw her: his mother, Visser One, back on Earth but in disguise. The disaster off Royan Island cost her her rank, and made her a marked Yeerk - but if she's returned to the territory of her rival, Visser Three, she must have a plan for redemption. Infighting Vissers make a perfect opportunity for the Animorphs to disrupt the Yeerk invasion... and maybe, just maybe, give Marco a chance to save his mom in the chaos.
If they play their cards right, the Animorphs could end them both: Visser Three and Visser One, the leaders of the invasion. It's an opportunity they can't afford to pass up, but one fraught with dangers... and with no room to spare for sentimentality or impossible dreams of rescue. What will Marco sacrifice in the name of victory - and can he be trusted to make that sacrifice, with so much at stake?

REVIEW: On the heels of the war- and death-heavy Megamorphs 3 comes one of the darkest stories the Animorphs have yet told. Marco is torn between heart and head, between his own growing ruthlessness and the frantic dreams of a loving son forced to watch his mother's ongoing captivity in wretched silence. He keeps telling himself that he knows exactly what he's doing, that his sentimentality won't interfere with his judgement, but even immersing himself in an ice-cold mindset can't stop the white-hot pain of his predicament from burning him up inside. His family tragedy at the hands of the Yeerks always made the war more personal for him than the other Animorphs, even more personal than it is for Jake (whose brother, Tom, was the first blood-relative Controller the fledgling Animorphs discovered.) It only lost half a star because the opening feels weak and forced.

Elfangor's Secret (K. A. Applegate)

2011-10-20T18:02:00.000-07:00

Elfangor's Secret
(The Animorphs series, Megamorphs 3)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Many years ago, a lost and war-weary young Andalite warrior came to Earth... and stayed. Prince Elfangor brought the Time Matrix, the most powerful piece of technology known in the galaxy, and buried it in an empty field, before morphing to human to live with the one person he truly loved. At least, until the Ellimist intervened, sending Elfangor back to the battle zone. But the Time Matrix remained - and, just before his death at the hands of Visser Three, Elfangor almost retrieved it.
Almost...
Now, Supreme Leader Jake rallies his friends - Marco, Cassie, Melissa, and Tobias - and an upstart alien to defend the Empire from the Yeerk invasion... a matter only slightly more pressing than Cassie's disturbingly rebellious remarks and his own nation's wars against the Primitives of South America. But - no. Something's wrong with time. Terribly wrong. The Yeerk known as Visser Four - smarting from the loss on Leera, a loss caused by the interference of the Animorphs - has located the Time Matrix, using it to manipulate history so that the Yeerks will have a much easier time conquering Earth. For once, the Ellimist and Crayak agree that Visser Four must be stopped... but the Crayak demands a price for giving the Animorphs a chance to set the timeline right. A life must be paid. Against the millions who will die in altered wars throughout history, a negligible cost, but that life will be one of their own.
The Animorphs have never hesitated before. They cannot afford to hesitate now, not when the alternative is to grow up in a slave-based society with a set of morals so twisted they can scarcely contemplate them. Even if one of them may not return from their journey through time...

REVIEW: I came close to clipping this another half-star. The set-up feels rushed; no explanation is given for how Visser Four, alone of all the Yeerks - with access to all that superior Yeerk technology - tracked down the Time Matrix and worked out how to use it, though it's implied that the Crayak himself might have been involved, only to regret it. Once that bump is over, the rest of the story moves quickly, twisting down dark paths through puzzles that strain not only the temporal but the moral fibers of the Animorphs to their utmost. "Right" and "wrong," "good guys" and "bad guys," all labels quickly lose their meaning as battles are lost that should be won, lives that should burn long are snuffed out, and flags that should fly are never sewn to begin with. Thrust into the heart of war after war, the blood toll and body count can't help but be high, and Applegate - as usual - doesn't pull punches. War is Hell, no matter what the reason, the era, or the timeline.
At the end of my copy, as in the previous book, is an ad for the short-lived line of Animorphs transforming action figures. Toy technology just cannot adequately combine a human figure with an animal without making both look very, very screwy...

The Sickness (K. A. Applegate)

2011-10-18T20:36:00.000-07:00

The Sickness
(The Animorphs series, Book 29)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***** (Great)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Cassie and her friends just wanted one ordinary night, a night when they could be regular kids at a school dance. Then Ax, in human morph, grows strangely delirious... the onset of an Andalite glandular illness that might be lethal. In the middle of hustling the erratically-demorphing alien from the school gym, Cassie is confronted by a mild-mannered teacher who seems strangely knowledgeable about her extracurricular alien-fighting activities. Mr. Tidwell and his Yeerk companion are part of the fledgling peace movement, comprised of Yeerks who don't want to be forced upon involuntary hosts, who want to find a better way than continual galactic war. He brings grim news: Aftran, the Yeerk who founded the movement after an eventful meeting with Cassie, has been captured, and Visser Three plans to interrogate her personally. Everything - the peace movement, the Animorphs, the fate of the Earth itself - rests on freeing Aftran from the Yeerk pool. A daunting challenge, even for the Animorphs at full strength. But Ax's disease is catching. One by one, the Animorphs fall ill... leaving Cassie on her own, with a dying Andalite and an impossible mission.

REVIEW: An excellent follow-through on Book 19 once more pits Cassie against herself. Making the choice to let Aftran (and her human host, young Karen) live was one thing: surviving the consequences, including this worst-case scenario, is quite another. In some ways, she's revealed to be the strongest of the Animorphs, sticking to her convictions even when they fly in the face of practical, hard-learned battle instinct. (In light of the series finale, this strength shines even brighter.) The side-story with Ax and the others falling ill adds a nice, if slightly plot-convenient, sense of urgency. And, once more, Erek the Chee comes into play, though for once he's not the reason for their current predicament. Coming as it does in the middle of an overall downgrade in quality, this book serves as a nice reminder of why I became hooked to begin with.
On an unrelated note, the ad campaign for K. A. Applegate's Everworld series (reviewed on my website here) begins here. They were pitched at a distinctly older audience than the Animorphs books; I suspect that Scholastic realized by now that a fair chunk of the readership was over the target age.
And on yet another unrelated note, this book marks the halfway point of Project Animorph; 29 books down, 29 to go...

Imagine a Day (Sarah L. Thomson)

2011-10-18T17:51:00.001-07:00

Imagine a Day
Sarah L. Thompson
Athenium
Fiction, YA Picture Book
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: A treehouse large as a manor... a library of doorways to other worlds... The illusionary paintings of Rob Gonsalves feature in a second book of short verse.

REVIEW: Much like Imagine a Night (reviewed on my website here), the paintings boggle the eye and inspire the heart. The verses by Thomson, while fun, are largely incidental. Once in a while, Gonsalves's people appear distorted, but otherwise it's yet another feast for the imagination.

The Experiment (K. A. Applegate)

2011-10-16T22:39:00.000-07:00

The Experiment
(The Animorphs series, Book 28)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Aximili has learned much about humans since becoming stranded on Earth, but much about their behavior and culture still confuses him. Even with the help of the wonderfully educational device known as a television, he cannot figure out how one species can be so contradictory, yet still dominate their world. Now, he's about to experience first-hand how hypocritical and brutal humans can be. The Yeerks have acquired an animal-testing facility and a meat-packing plant. Put them together, and it's hardly likely that Visser Three is simply going into the fast-food business. To investigate, Ax and the Animorphs must infiltrate the lab... and witness the horror that is a modern slaughterhouse.

REVIEW: I've said before that Ax's books tend to be weaker than the rest. This is a decent example. Despite his superior intelligence, he remains baffled at simple human concepts, though his commentary on our species makes for more than a few chuckles. This book takes on the subjects of animal testing and modern meat production, but with little of Applegate's usual depth. Add to that the fact that the entire mission is something of a shaggy-dog adventure, and this book settles nicely into the murk of the mid-series slump.
Incidentally, my copy contains "bonus" bookmarks, featuring the cover illustration: Aximili morphing to bovine form. If Ax were to ask just what the purpose was of reproducing such an unremarkable image, when many more dynamic pictures have graced the covers of Animorphs books, I have to admit I wouldn't be able to defend my species very effectively.

The Exposed (K. A. Applegate)

2011-10-15T23:27:00.000-07:00

The Exposed
(The Animorphs series, Book 27)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Becoming an Animorph meant sacrificing normality, risking life and limb in a fight against nearly-impossible odds, knowing that talking to anyone - a cop, a friend, even her own mother or father - about what she did would land her in a loony bin or - worse - in the Yeerk pool, with an alien slug wrapped around her brain. But, terrible as war is, Rachel still feels a thrill of excitement when she rips into an enemy with the claws of a grizzly bear, or tramples them under an elephant's feet. Sometimes, she's so into the battle that she scares her fellow Animorphs.
She scares herself, too.
Much as Rachel tries to fight it, something deep within her longs for blood and danger. But even that part of her quails at the latest challenge. Something has gone wrong with their allies, the Chee. The holograms that enable the alien androids to pass as human are on the blink, as is their ability to move. Soon, they'll be immobile and utterly exposed... and if the Yeerks got their hands on the advanced Pemalite technology within the Chee, there would be no stopping them, on Earth or elsewhere in the galaxy. But the Pemalite ship that regulates the Chee lies hidden three miles beneath the ocean, down where the water pressure would destroy every animal in the Animorphs' DNA arsenal. And one thing that Rachel has always feared is crushing, smothering darkness...

REVIEW: Had this not come right on the heels of the previous book, it probably would've earned an extra half-star. The series returns to its strong suits, as Rachel wrestles with her changing life and the black monster within. But they just worked with Erek the Chee in the previous installment; that, plus another plot twist (which might constitute a spoiler, so I won't go into specifics here) feel like too much of a similar note struck too close together. That problem aside, it's a fairly good entry in a series that, more often than not, rose well above average.

The Attack (K. A. Applegate)

2011-10-14T21:54:00.000-07:00

The Attack
(The Animorphs series, Book 26)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)

NOTE: In honor of the recent re-release, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Jake and his friends thought they had enough on their plates, fighting the Yeerk invasions and the devious Visser Three. Then, the Ellimist returned. Capable of folding space and time on a whim, his seemingly omnipotent powers bound by rules no human mind can comprehend, he has helped in the past... but never as expected. Now, they learn that the Ellimist has an enemy, the entity known as the Crayak. The entire war with the Yeerks, it seems, is but a small skirmish in the eons-long, galaxy-wide conflict between two forces so powerful that open conflict would tear the space-time continuum itself apart. Thus, their habit of fighting through proxies: whole species, like the Yeerks, or even individuals, like the Animorphs. The Ellimist needs seven champions to fight against soldiers of the Crayak, to determine the fate of an entire alien species light-centuries removed from Earth. On his side will stand the five human Animorphs, Aximili the Andalite, and Erek the Chee. The Crayak sends seven members of a species whose names the Animorphs already know, the species that slaughtered the Chee's creators: the Howlers. Winning will hurt the Crayak, and (it is implied) the Yeerks. Lose, and the Animorphs will never have existed...

REVIEW: This brings the series back up to (nearly) its top level. Jake finds himself risking his life and the lives of his friends for aliens who utterly repulse him, fighting an enemy that has never lost a battle in thousands upon thousands of years, and all on the vague promise of the Ellimist that a victory will, somehow, help weaken, if not defeat, the Yeerks. He also must deal with Erek, whose programming prevents him from harming even the murderous Howlers, and Ax, whose momentary breakdown in bravery leads to reckless behavior. Jake resents being treated like a piece on the Ellimist's and Crayak's gameboard, but all he can hope to do is avoid becoming a sacrificial pawn. A small yet glaring error - confusing falcon talons for fingers during a morph - hints that this might be a ghostwriter's work, but it's far closer to Applegate's standard than the last two installments. Still, it's nice to see the series back in fighting shape, so to speak... and I've had a run of bad luck with my other reading, as you can tell from the ratings here.
On an unrelated note, my first-run version of this book features a large cover sticker proclaiming the "new" timeslot of the Animorphs TV series. I remember it airing all of two times at the advertised time; I gave up chasing it around Nickelodeon's schedule after that.

The Frog Princess (E. D. Baker)

2011-10-13T21:17:00.000-07:00

The Frog Princess
(The Tales of the Frog Princess series, Book 1)
E. D. Baker
Bloomsbury
Fiction, YA Fantasy
**+ (Bad/Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Princess Esmerelda's life is nothing but a disappointment. She comes from a line of witches, but can't cast a spell without horrific consequences. She's of royal blood, yet laughs like a donkey and trips over her own feet. Her own mother can scarcely look at her without a sneer of disdain... but that doesn't stop her from using Emma to buy a politically advantageous engagement to a neighboring kingdom. The princess flees to the swamp, the only place where she feels free to be herself - but this time, she meets a talking frog. Eadric claims he used to be a prince, and only needs her kiss to restore his humanity, but Emma knows enough to be skeptical; after all, with magic leaking out of the castle, any animal might start talking, and just because a person's been hit with a frog spell doesn't mean they wore a crown. But he's persistent, and she finally gives in... only something goes terribly wrong. Instead of turning Eadric into a prince, the kiss turned Emma into a frog! The two set off on a dangerous quest to find the witch who cursed Eadric, while Emma gets a crash-course in amphibious survival.
And she still doesn't know if he's really a prince or not...

REVIEW: To be perfectly honest, if the premise of a later book in the series hadn't intrigued me, I probably wouldn't have tried this one. But I hate coming in partway through a series, so I gave it a try. The story sounds superficial and trite, but I've read many Young Adult books that rise above seemingly-simple stories. Sadly, this isn't one of them. Characters bend and twist their personalities to fit the scene, having to tell the reader what they're feeling instead of being able to show it through consistent actions. Everyone tends to be pleasant when approached in the right manner, except for a few not-nice people who are suitably punished for being unkind to the heroes. The world and the magic system are paper-thin and about as deep. Conflicts and resolutions, much like personality traits and half the conversations, pop up out of thin air, and tend to the obvious - not unlike Baker's shallow stabs at humor. If I were a young girl just starting to read longer books without pictures, I might have liked it, but this book holds absolutely nothing to interest anyone else. I actually thought about dropping this to a solid Bad, but it's just too simple of a story to care that much about it.

The Extreme (K. A. Applegate)

2011-10-13T17:46:00.000-07:00

The Extreme
(The Animorphs series, Book 25)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Marco thought his week was going bad when he totally blew a date with Marian, one of the cutest girls in school. (But, really, a Beethoven concert? How was he supposed to stay awake?) Then Erek the Chee turned up with news that makes things even worse: the Yeerks are working on a way to remote-beam Kandrona rays via satellite relays. If they can pull it off, then their greatest weakness - the need to leave their hosts every three days to visit the underground Yeerk pool - will be history. The Animorphs have to crash that party... only Erek doesn't know where it is, or what defenses the Yeerks have waiting for them. All they know is that it's somewhere remote... very remote, where alien ships won't be noticed.
Which explains how the Animorphs find themselves on the ice-blasted shores of the Arctic Ocean. It doesn't explain how they're supposed to survive, when the weather alone is nearly as deadly as their alien enemies...

REVIEW: Not quite as silly and pointless as Book 24, it nevertheless continues an aimless coast in the series. Like the previous book, it's more about the "wow" gimmick - in this case, the "field trip" to the Arctic Circle - than about character growth, or even the fight against the Yeerks. I've heard rumors that ghostwriters were responsible for a good chunk of the series, especially this middle stretch; that might explain the autopilot overtones, but it's not really an excuse, as I'm sure there are decent ghostwriters out there who could've managed to pep up even a canned plot like this one. Still, it's not outright embarrassing, even if there's a slight continuity hiccup.
On an unrelated note, this book features an ad for the late, lamented Watchers series by Peter Lerangis (reviewed on my website here), which was axed by Scholastic after six books and never had a chance to develop as it should have. There's a certain irony in its appearance in a book that's essentially series-padding.

King Solomon's Mines (H. Rider Haggard)

2011-10-12T21:54:00.000-07:00

King Solomon's Mines
H. Rider Haggard
Public Domain Books
Fiction, Adventure
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Allan Quartermain, an aging English-born elephant hunter in the wilds of colonial Africa, faces danger on a daily basis, yet somehow has managed to outlive most every other white hunter on the continent. During a trip to his home in Durban, he meets a pair of countrymen on a quest to the legendary mines of King Solomon, rumored to lie in an unexplored mountain range beyond a lethal desert. None who have sought the mines ever returned alive, and only madmen's ravings speak of the dangerous route. With the promise of diamonds and wealth unimaginable - tempting prizes for a man nearing his twilight years, with a son to support no less - Quartermain joins the expedition, a journey that will prove more perilous than any maddened bull elephant, hunting lion, or bloodthirsty native.

REVIEW: One of the classic adventure stories, it remains a readable tale even today, with plenty of adventure amid exotic locales and warring natives. The Victorian attitude - with the White Man entitled to ownership of the world and its bounty, and all other races "knowing their place" beneath British rule - shines through loud and clear, but this was the mindset to which Haggard and his audience were no doubt accustomed. (I cannot help thinking, reading this book, just how shocking it must have been to them when the native peoples of the world rose up in anger against British rule; they would probably have understood their own dogs rising up better than the notion of non-white bipeds possessing feelings and intellects on par with their own. They also would've been flabbergasted at the idea of Earth's endless bounty teetering on the edge of oblivion... but, then, I'm a modern human and I can scarcely comprehend what my species has done to its only known habitat in the Universe.) Looking past the dated attitudes, Haggard crafts a story so filled with dangers and treacheries and ancient wonders that it comes close to parodying itself. The story isn't without a certain sense of humor, though, so perhaps Haggard knew exactly what he was doing. Even the manner in which Quartermain and his fellow Englishmen dupe the natives of the lost valley into thinking them visitors from the Stars has a tongue-in-cheek air... or maybe that's just a modern mind reading into a scenario that has become a chestnut by now. It's been said that Allan Quartermain was one of the chief inspirations for the character of Indiana Jones, and I can certainly see hints of Jones here; Quartermain makes no pretense to bravery for bravery's sake, yet somehow keeps ending up in dire predicaments where cowardice would be lethal. All told, I can see why this is still considered a classic adventure tale, and if it isn't quite my cup of cocoa, I'm still glad that I finally read it.

Larklight (Philip Reeve)

2011-10-11T18:48:00.000-07:00

Larklight
Philip Reeve
Bloomsbury
Fiction, YA Fantasy
**+ (Bad/Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Ever since Sir Isaac Newton's remarkable discoveries, the British Empire has dominated the spaceways with its monopoly on aethership travel, with Her Majesty's Realm extending from its Earthly holdings to the moons of Jupiter. Even in the great, dark reaches of space, however, the orbital manor house of Larklight is a quaint backwater, the sort of out-of-the-way place where nothing ever happens. Here, Art and Myrtle Mumby live with their father, a grief-stricken man who buries himself in studies of icthyoform animals that swim in the aether of space. Myrtle yearns to visit London, to learn to be a proper lady, while Art secretly longs for the kinds of adventures he reads about.
Then, one morning, Art woke to find the house blanketed in spiderwebs, with a bloated arachnid calling itself Mr Webster knocking on Larklight's door. With their father captured, Art and Myrtle escape, but their adventures are only just beginning. Before they're through, the Mumby children will have survived the horrors of the lunar Potter Moth, endured captivity among space pirates, visited the deserts of Mars and the storms of Jupiter, and peered into the mysteries of the Cosmos while fighting enemies older than the Earth itself.
And all without a decent spot of tea...

REVIEW: I read glowing reviews on Amazon, and the premise looked intriguing. The first chapter establishes a marvelously inventive universe, with Victorian ideas of the nature of space (as a life-filled "aether" between the stars) and such. Ink illustrations by David Wyatt add a certain old-school charm. Unfortunately, in Chapter 2, invention began giving way to silliness, and I started growing weary of the protagonists. Art and Myrtle epitomize the principles of the Victorian Englishman and -woman, stuffed to the gills with pompous superiority and little but disdain for any class, nation, race, or species other than their own. Throughout their many adventures, they remain firmly mired in their British mindset, with only the smallest hint of softening in their stiff upper lips and ramrod spines - not even when aliens save their worthless little tails time and again. I understand that Reeves was writing a parody of Victorian adventure tales, that the over-the-top Britishness of Art and Myrtle (and other characters) played into that. It didn't make it any easier to suffer through the story with them. Meanwhile, the plot quickly devolves into bluster and noise, full of silly details and even more silly alien life-forms that dance and caper across the pages with the simple lines and levity of a cartoon. Nobody good (or even neutral) actually dies, for all the danger and gunfire; in a universe where taking a stroll in outer space won't kill you, I suppose not much will. This pulled the teeth from the tension, not to mention its attempts to build a sympathetic past for its persecuted pirate crew.
In the end, while I can appreciate the wild imagination and the attempts at humor, Larklight overstays its welcome with unsympathetic characters and a plot that simply won't let the good guys fail.

The Suspicion (K. A. Applegate)

2011-10-10T23:17:00.000-07:00

The Suspicion
(The Animorphs series, Book 24)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: When Cassie saw the tiny spaceship stuck to the old water pump, she didn't know what to think of it. The pump was where she'd hidden the Andalite blue box, but surely nobody could know it was there - and a ship the size of a child's toy could hardly be a threat, anyway. But the Helmacrons, petty-minded beings bent on galactic conquest, have a few tricks up their little sleeves. For one thing, their ships can detect the "transformational energy" of a person in morph. For another, their shrink rays pack quite a whallop. Cassie, Marco, and Tobias learn that the hard way. But being reduced to the size of an insect doesn't excuse one from stopping alien invaders, be they parasitic Yeerks or pint-sized Helmacrons.

REVIEW: Here, the series hits what can properly be termed a "lull." This book reads like a filler episode, full of superficial silliness and Mexican standoffs and half-funny jokes. Cassie's usually the introspective one, searching for the moral options, but here she's just another Animorph, caught up in a goofy misadventure that doesn't advance the mytharc or the characters in any significant fashion. While nothing outright embarrassing happens here, nothing particularly great does, either.

The Pretender (K. A. Applegate)

2011-10-09T21:48:00.000-07:00

The Pretender
(The Animorphs series, Book 23)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: When Tobias became trapped in a red-tailed hawk morph, nobody seemed to notice. His father dead, his mother vanished, Tobias had been bounced back and forth between indifferent relatives who hardly cared about him when he was around. That's part of the reason why, when the Ellimist restored his ability to morph, Tobias remained a hawk; even though he could morph to his old body, regaining his humanity at the cost of his wings, he had nowhere to go, nobody who wanted him.
Now someone's been asking about him at school. Some woman named Aria claims to be his cousin, and a lawyer says he has documents pertaining to Tobias's real father... who may not be the man he thought he was. This comes just as his life in the wild takes a turn for the worse, with a rival red-tail encroaching on his meadow and prey growing scarce. Tobias loves his wings, and doesn't want to sacrifice his ability to morph, to help fight the Yeerks, but somewhere deep inside his human self he yearns for a family he never had. Risk death and starvation as a hawk, or risk his heart as a human - which will Tobias choose?

REVIEW: This book seems to mostly be an excuse to relate information to Tobias that readers learned in The Andalite Chronicles, concerning his unusual parentage. It starts a downslope in the series, with some elements feeling forced: his sudden, crippling empathy for his prey, for instance, reads like a plot device, not a natural outgrowth of the character. Still, Tobias has always been a tragic character, the first casualty of the Yeerk war, so seeing him forced to suffer again isn't entirely unexpected. On the whole, it's fun enough, but not quite at the level of the previous books. (Then again, the David trilogy's a hard act to follow.)

Goliath (Scott Westerfield)

2011-10-09T12:36:00.000-07:00

Goliath
(The Leviathan trilogy, Book 3)
Scott Westerfield
Simon Pulse
Fiction, YA Fantasy
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: During their weeks together on the living airship Leviathan, weeks that have seen everything from Clanker airship attacks to the culmination of a revolution in the neutral Ottoman Empire, Midshipman "Dylan" Sharp and Prince Aleksander have grown into fast friends and allies. Deryn still must hide her gender, for fear of losing her place in the British air service, but the secret grows harder to keep in close quarters, with her own heart complicating the matter. Fortunately, there's plenty to distract them. They've just been ordered to a remote patch of Siberia to retrieve a scientist: none other than Nikola Tesla, the Clanker inventor who famously switched sides to the Darwinist nations. The man claims to have invented a weapon so powerful that its mere existence can end war forever - and, as he's found in the middle of a vast swath of blast-flattened trees, the seemingly-mad claim bears grim weight. Alek, with his Clanker belief in machinery and his conviction that he can somehow end the global war, embraces the possibility, but others - including Deryn, the Darwinist scientist Dr. Barlowe, and even Alek's chief advisor Count Volger - grow suspicious of Tesla's increasingly grandiose claims and insistence on mass publicity. As the Leviathan heads to New York City, where the Goliath tower stands, Deryn and Alek find themselves surrounded by conflicting secrets, hidden dangers, and unlikely allies. Can the Goliath truly end all war, or is the cost of placing so much power in one man's hands simply too great?

REVIEW: In the trilogy's final chapter, Goliath brings the airship Leviathan across the Pacific to the fractured realm of America, where the rise of Clanker and Darwinist ideals, not to mention the lingering loyalties of its immigrant populace, have perpetuated Civil War schisms. Westerfield continues populating his alternate Earth with wonders both living and mechanical, creating a world that could easily stand up to more volumes, regardless of their connection to the first World War. Many more real-life figures appear, including the famed newsman William Randolf Hearst, the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa (who, as in real life, actually struck a movie deal with Hearst to help fund his revolution), the gutsy reporter Adela Rogers, and more. An epilogue at the end explains the real-world influences, which proved a more interesting history lesson than twelve years of public education ever provided. In the middle of the vast sweep of events, Deryn's secret comes out, leaving Alek to ponder whether he will stay true to his title or repeat his assassinated father's mistake of choosing his heart over his duty. Once more, between the high-flying imagination, the quick pace, and the wonderfully detailed illustrations by Keith Thompson, Goliath hearkens back to the best of old-school adventure tales. It lost a star to occasional wandering, and the subplot about Deryn's secret coming out felt a little off, with just a few too many people working it out to make its exclusion from the grapevine plausible. Overall, it's a fine conclusion to a memorable series.

The Solution (K. A. Applegate)

2011-10-07T23:48:00.000-07:00

The Solution
(The Animorphs series, Book 22)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***** (Great)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: They thought they were doing the right thing. They thought they were giving a scared, lost boy a chance to fight back. They took a leap of faith... and were betrayed. David, the newest Animorph, turned on the very hands that tried to help him. Now, with Tobias gone and Jake bleeding to death after a run-in with David's lion morph, Rachel snaps. She's already lost her normal life to the Yeerk war. If this snot-nosed, arrogant punk thinks he can take away her friends, her comrades-in-arms... he'll pay in blood. But there's one problem with her plans for vengeance. Visser Three, with powerful alien technology and hordes of Controllers at his disposal, has spent months hunting for the Animorphs without success. How are five kids going to stop someone with their own power to morph - someone who, unlike them, isn't afraid to kill?

REVIEW: The David trilogy wraps up with Rachel's tale. Even as the hate boils up inside her, she finds herself standing back and seeing just what the war has done to her, the girl whose greatest thrill in life used to be a perfect gymnastics routine or a weekend sale at The Gap... and what the war has done to her friends. None of them are the people they used to be, and it's unlikely they'll ever go back to their old selves. A subplot about a critically-injured relative throws these changes into stark relief, as the cousins Jake and Rachel find themselves surrounded by "normal" people reacting to tragedy in a normal way. In light of the series finale, there's some very strong foreshadowing here of the lives that await them when the battle's done. Despite her own horror at the thoughts she's capable of, Rachel has to make peace with herself. With David, however, no peace or compromise is possible. I've always considered the David trilogy to be the highlight of the series, and rereading it hasn't diminished my opinion.
After this book, in the original run, came The Hork-Bajir Chronicles (reviewed on my website here); again, while it's not necessary to do so, I'd strongly suggest reading the books in the order of their original release, for continuity reasons.

The Invisible Man (H. G. Wells)

2011-10-07T20:48:00.001-07:00

The Invisible Man
H. G. Wells
Public Domain Books
Fiction, Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: A strange figure, bundled head to toe, arrives in a small English inn, quickly creating a stir with his blunt, antisocial manners and peculiar scientific instruments, with which he sequesters himself day and night while flying into untold rages. Is he a vivisectionist, a victim of some horrendous accident, or something more sinister? Much as the local tongues wag, none can guess the horrible truth, the terrible and tragic tale concealed by glove and hat-brim and bandages... the truth of a man felled by his own greatest triumph.

REVIEW: Yes, it was free on Kindle... many classics appear to be, which is rather convenient for those of us who skirted such staples in our misspent youth. (Not that I regret a moment spent buried in my Choose-Your-Own-Adventure collection, mind you...)
Where was I?
Oh, yes - I was implying the existence of a review rather than outright giving one. It may seem a cheap padding device to boost word count, but evidently it was a legitimate writing style for H. G. Wells; the book would've been half as long (if not shorter) had it focused on actual events, and not irrelevent sidetracks. A great many people, places, and things receive ample paragraphs of description, while the main plot mostly stagnates until close to the halfway point. I might not have minded so much, except so many of those peripheral people were caricatures along the lines of the Keystone Kops, ignorant yokels with slapstick sensibilities whose antics only needed a little goofy incidental music to transform into cartoons. Even after the Invisible Man is revealed to be invisible, the story scarcely develops enough momentum to clear the ground, though by the end it picks up to a satisfyingly brisk pace. Between copious clumps of padding, a tragic tale of a failed genius turned mad by the achievment of his heart's desire can be glimpsed. Unfortunately, those glimpses came too late to salvage this one in the ratings. It was just too much slogging and too little actual story. To be frank, I only justified an Okay rating out of deference to the age of the book, and thus the unfamiliar cultural mindset of the man who wrote it.

The Threat (K. A. Applegate)

2011-10-07T17:08:00.000-07:00

The Threat
(The Animorphs series, Book 21)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***** (Great)

NOTE: In honor of the recent re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Six have become seven. Adding David to the team, giving him the ability to morph, was as much an act of desperation as a leap of faith. With the Yeerks threatening to infest the heads of six major world nations at a nearby international summit, they need all the help they can get... and, with his parents taken and Visser Three hunting him down for the blue Andalite box, David had nowhere else to go. If only Jake could be sure it was the right thing to do...
David may be an Animorph now, but he's still an enigma. A not entirely welcome enigma, either. He second-guesses orders, acts on his own, and even uses morphs to break the law when left to his own devices. Jake even gets the uneasy feeling that David thinks he ought to be the new leader of the team. Maybe it's just the impossible stress he's been under. Maybe it's just a phase. Maybe it's Jake's imagination. Or maybe David will be the greatest mistake the Animorphs have ever made...

REVIEW: Jake takes up the tale of David in the middle book of the trilogy, as the newest Animorph shows his ugly true colors. His job as leader of the team has never been easy, but dealing with a traitor in their ranks - a traitor who wouldn't even be among them had he not been willing to give David a chance - twists in his gut like no decision he has made to date. And, of course, their goal of stopping the Yeerks from infesting major world leaders only gets harder by the minute. It all sets up a humdinger of a finale in Book 22.

The Chestnut King (N. D. Wilson)

2011-10-06T18:08:00.001-07:00

The Chestnut King
(The 100 Cupboards trilogy, Book 3)
N. D. Wilson
Yearling
Fiction, YA Fantasy
**+ (Bad/Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Henry York Maccabee, reunitied with his family in one of the magical realms beyond the cupboard doors, survived his second confrontation with the deathless witch Nimiane... but at a cost. A drop of her blood touched his cheek, leaving a spreading scar of death that threatens to consume his sanity, and his life. His dandelion magic fights the growing chill, but the bond remains, a gray thread by which Nimiane's foul fingerling slaves can track him across any world, through any cupboard door. His father Mordecai and uncle Caleb travel to the dead realm of Endor, formerly Nimiane's prison, to search for a cure - hopefully tied to a way to end the immortal witch's life - but time is against them. When the ships of the distant Emperor attack his family's home, capturing his relatives as bait for the missing Mordecai, Henry realizes that he's sick of running away. He was the one who inadvertently freed Nimiane from Endor. He is the one who draws danger to his friends and family. So he is the one who must bear his dandelion fire into the darkness and end her evil... even if it ends his own life.

REVIEW: N. D. Wilson weaves a magical tale full of poetic beauty, ancient lore, and grand destinies. Unfortunately, he weaves it into a knot so tangled it took me most of the book to work my way back into the universe, full of obscure references and actions dependent on an inpenetrable internal logic that made most of the dangers and their solutions burst forth seemingly from the blue. The dialog, much like the overall narrative, didn't help by crafting itself almost exclusively in metaphor. At about the halfway point, I was ready to kill for someone to just spit out what they wanted to say, without dancing about in Shakespearean obfuscation. Most of the bloated cast never did pull their own weight, and female characters see their roles degenerate into mere objects that sentimentalize, feel vulnerable, need protection, and - if they're feeling particulary bold - cheer on the boys doing the real work. Richard, whose presence dropped from an intrigue into a disappointing puzzle in Book 2, proves about as useless as the girls this time out, never coming through or pulling weight or having any real purpose except to tag along behind Henry like a forgotten footnote stuck to the author's shoe. Having foundered along in the sinking ship, I was finally rewarded with an ending... but then came an epilogue so pointless that it drug the whole book down another half-star. (Yes, I was feeling that irked.)
I think I would've rated this book higher had I read it closer to the other two volumes, or had it included a recap - either a summary of the first two books, or in-story refreshers to help remind me who was who and doing what in which corner of the world - to reorient me. As it was, despite the undeniable beauty of Wilson's prose, I just could not immerse myself to enjoy this book properly. (And he never does explain why so many names are recycled...)

The Discovery (K. A. Applegate)

2011-10-05T20:37:00.000-07:00

The Discovery
(The Animorphs series, Book 20)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Since becoming an Animorph, school has become the less-stressful part of Marco's life... or, rather, the place where stress comes from ordinary things, like pop quizzes and girls and lunchroom bullies, instead of alien parasites and watching his own body melt and distort into animal form. But then he sees a new kid on campus with something very, very strange in his backpack. Strange, yet all too familiar. It's the blue cube that Prince Elfangor used to create the Animorphs, transferring the Andalite morphing technology to five human kids. They had thought that it was destroyed when the Yeerk Dracon beams reduced the dead prince's spaceship to molecular dust. Apparently not.
Then Erek the Chee brings grim news: a top-secret world summit meeting is coming to the area, placing six world leaders within the Yeerk's grasp. Only one of them's already a Controller... but Erek doesn't know who. Just one more helping of stress atop Marco's already-overfull plate.
As the Animorphs race to secure the blue cube before their mission to the summit meeting, the boy David - oblivious to what he's found - posts an ad online offering the "strange box" he found for sale. With the Yeerks closing in, the Animorphs have two choices: steal the box and abandon the boy to his fate, or use its power as Elfangor did to add David to the team. With time running out and the biggest mission they've ever faced closing in on them, they have to choose quickly...

REVIEW: This begins the David trilogy, one of the great moments of the series as a whole. The first book struggles a bit under the extra load of establishing a new character and setting up a large-scale mission. It also ends on a cliffhanger. The Animorphs' early read off David is mixed, to say the least: he's a loner who keeps a cobra for a pet and doesn't respond well to authority, but beneath it all he seems to be just as scared and lost as any of them were that first fateful night in the construction site. While Marco can sympathize with his position, somewhere deep down he senses the trouble that's to come... but, considering his own early issues with being an Animorph, he doesn't feel right voicing those misgivings, especially when the others seem almost relieved to have an extra pair of morph-capable hands available going into their most dangerous mission to date. If he'd stuck to his guns, perhaps things would've gone differently... but that's for Book 21.
As a closing note, this book starts the advertizing blitz for the short-lived Animorphs TV series on Nickelodeon (from 1998.) While it featured impressive CGI morphing effects, it short-changed the aliens - even the plot-pivotal Andalites - and the scripts dumbed down and glossed over the best parts of the books.(Nickelodeon also kept bumping the air times without notice or reason; I finally gave up trying to chase it.) I still keep expecting a reboot, if not a film franchise... preferably all-animated. The guts for a good show are right there on the page, if someone could manage it.

The Weatherly Guide to Drawing Animals (Joe Weatherly)

2011-10-04T22:08:00.000-07:00

The Weatherly Guide to Drawing Animals
Joe Weatherly
Joe Weatherly, publisher
Nonfiction, Art
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: Emphasizing gesture, motion, and rhythm, noted artist Joe Weatherly presents a guide to drawing animals.

REVIEW: I've seen this one recommended often, so I figured I'd give it a try. An inspiring, easy-to-follow book, it stresses the life and motion of the drawing over strict technical detail, focusing on overall forms, proportion, and general flow to give the finished work a lively dynamic. After a general overview of his approach, he highlights many animals directly, including nice sections on felines and canines, plus a variety of other animals from around the world. Unlike Jack Hamm's book on the subject, images outweigh text heavily. The writing could've used a keener-eyed editor; I saw a few irritating errors, including at least one misused word. Other than that, for a self-published book, it's very professional. Like all art books, this alone won't transform you into a great artist, but it offers a great deal of information for anyone who wants to learn.

The Departure (K. A. Applegate)

2011-10-04T14:13:00.000-07:00

The Departure
(The Animorphs series, Book 19)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Cassie has always been the heart of the Animorphs, the moral compass that kept them from straying over the line from defenders of freedom to cold-blooded killers. But she no longer knows where that line is. Once a well of compassion, she has lost herself in the pitiless minds of predators. Once a pacifist, she has followed her friends into ruthless battle. Once a lover of Nature's harmony, she has seen the constant struggle for survival that is the animal world. Everything seems to be going gray and dead inside. Cassie cannot seem to care about anything anymore. She doesn't want to - she can't - live like this.
So she walks away. From the battle. From her friends. From the fight against the Yeerks.
But walking away doesn't undo the changes that months of battle have wrought. The emptiness stays with her. Even her hopes of burying herself in work at the family wildlife clinic are dashed when she learns that their corporate sponsor has pulled funding. Then she finds herself lost in the wilderness... lost, but not alone. With her is the young girl Karen - a girl who knows more than she should about Cassie, about war, about the Yeerks and the Andalites. Karen is a human-Controller. She knows who - and what - Cassie is. And Cassie finds her wavering convictions put to their ultimate test.

REVIEW: Having seen the mighy Andalite image tarnished so severely in Book 18, and how peacable Cassie lost herself so completely in the mind of a Tyrannosaurs Rex in Megamorphs 2, this culminates a character transformation that epitomizes the series' strongest suit: its willingness to address the gray areas that other series (young adult and grown-up alike) often gloss over. Not every Andalite is Prince Elfangor, but not every Yeerk is Visser Three... and even in the midst of all-out war, there can be a time and a place - even a need - to recognize that the enemy may not always be who (or what) they appear to be. This book is less about the fighting and more about the complex issues of the Yeerk war. It loses a half-star for a bit of a logic hiccup at the end, and the fact that the escaped leopard subplot wasn't strictly necessary; a mountain lion or other native predator would've filled its role nicely. Overall, a beautiful tale.

In the Time of the Dinosaurs (K. A. Applegate)

2011-10-03T21:44:00.001-07:00

In the Time of the Dinosaurs
(The Animorphs series, Megamorphs 2)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: The Animorphs never should've been there. It was a human crisis - a downed nuclear submarine - with no ties to the Yeerk invasion. But it's hard to have a power like morphing and not use it to help when needed. How were they supposed to know that one of the warheads had been damaged? How could they have anticipated it exploding... and how could they have predicted what would happen when they were hit by the shockwave?
They couldn't have known. Never in a million years... or, to be more precise, sixty-five million years.
Some combination of the nuclear blast and being in morph opened what the Andalites call a Sario Rip: a hole in time. The Animorphs find themselves stranded in the late Cretaceous Age, facing some of the most dangerous predators ever to walk the Earth. But they aren't the only strangers to this prehistoric land... and Tyrannosaurus Rex may be the least of their worries.

REVIEW: It's a little hard to read this without thinking about how much has changed about dinosaur theory since this book was written. Everything from the appearance of dinosaurs to the ultimate cause of extinction has been turned on its head in the past few years. It's also notably unlikely that, given the spotty nature of fossil records and the fact that we know next to nothing about the external appearances of most dinosaurs, the Animorphs consistently encounter creatures they can readily identify on sight from childhood toys, library books, and movies. Those troubles aside, this volume feels slightly less contrived than the first Megamorphs, even if dinos are a blatant marketing tactic. It maintains the character dynamics, conflicts, and action level that the series is known for. And, marketing tactic or not, dinosaurs are cool... cool enough to rate a solid Good, despite some plausibility issues.

The Devious Book for Cats: A Parody (Fluffy and Bonkers)

2011-10-03T12:00:00.001-07:00

The Devious Book for Cats: A Parody
Fluffy & Bonkers (with Joe Garden, Janet Ginsberg, Chris Pauls, Anita Serwacki, and Scott Sherman)
Villard
Fiction, Humor
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: In modern times, it's all too easy to lose touch with one's own inner catness. We take our meals and our people for granted. We fail to appreciate the many moods of a nap. We hardly even stare anymore. When's the last time we played a proper game of shelf swat, anyway? Fluffy and Bonkers offer a guidebook for reclaiming our birthright, the profoundly simple joys of being Nature's perfect creation: a cat.

REVIEW: This parody succeeds by never overstaying its welcome, offering many short articles instead of a few long, drawn-out ones. From the horror stories of the Suck Monster and the Crazy Cat Lady to the rules of Shelf Swat, from basic gift giving to the history of the felinism movement, "Fluffy" and "Bonkers" tell all. The authors, known collectively as "Action 5," are professional comedy writers, contributing to The Onion (among other things); the professionalism shows, as they manage to find plenty of humorous topics and delivery methods. (I've read more than enough half-baked attempts that keep harping on the same not-funny premise to appreciate that.) They also strike a nice balance on the tone, acknowledging the independent feline nature without belittling pet owners or indoor cat-keeping. A fun, lighthearted book that any cat-lover should be able to appreciate.

The Decision (K. A. Applegate)

2011-10-02T13:54:00.000-07:00

The Decision
(The Animorphs series, Book 18)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Aximili's been stranded on Earth for months, but though he has a fight and a purpose, he doesn't have a home. Even among his friends, the Animorphs, he is an outsider, an alien, on a world where he doesn't belong. But he must force himself to accept the truth: until the Yeerks are gone, or until another Andalite warship comes, he'll never be among his own people. Or so he thinks.
While in mosquito morph, Ax and the Animorphs find themselves suddenly in Zero-Space, the nondimension where extra mass goes during small morphs... and where faster-than-light travel is possible. They've been caught in the wake of an Andalite warship, a million-to-one odds accident. Taken aboard by the surprised crew, Ax is thrilled to be back among his own species. But the ship is on its way to Leeran, to fight the Yeerks. It cannot detour to Earth to return the human Animorphs. And something is about to go very wrong with his own homecoming... something that makes Aximili decide once and for all who his people truly are.

REVIEW: Ax's books tend to be weaker than the rest. This one earned extra marks for moving the battle beyond Earth, a reminder that, even as the Animorphs fight Visser Three, an entire galaxy is at war, pitting species against species and Controller against free being. That war, as Ax learns the hard way, isn't going well for the Andalites, in no small part due to his people's ongoing refusal to work closely with its alien allies... not to mention a growing number of traitors in their own ranks. In his previous book (The Alien), Ax claimed to put his faith in "Prince" Jake above the Andalite superiors whom he temporarily contacted, but coming face-to-face with his own kind puts that loyalty to the test. On top of his inner struggles, he and the Animorphs find themselves pitched headlong into a war on alien soil - a real, open war, with carnage on a level that their guerrilla strikes against the secret Yeerk invasion on Earth have never reached. A high-action romp across Z-space, continuing a good streak in the series.

October Site Update, Reviews Archived

2011-10-02T11:06:00.001-07:00

I know I just updated in mid-September, but I figured I had more than enough new reviews to justify another one now.

The previous 17 reviews have been archived and cross-linked on the main Brightdreamer Books website. I also rotated the site's Random Recommendations.

Enjoy!

The Underground (K. A. Applegate)

2011-10-01T17:14:00.000-07:00

The Underground
(The Animorphs series, Book 17)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)

NOTE: In honor of the recent re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: When the Animorphs saw the man leaping from the high-rise, they thought he was just depressed, or insane. Nevertheless, they managed to help save his life. But when Rachel's lawyer mother gets hired by his family to formalize his commitment to an asylum, she hears that his delusions involve an alien that lives in his brain... a Yeerk.
It turns out that their enemies have a new weakness - they can become addicted to instant maple-and-ginger oatmeal. Only the addiction drives them insane, even as it eliminates their need to leave their host to feed on Kandrona rays at the Yeerk pool every three days. If someone were to sneak some oatmeal into the food supplies at the pool, it would seriously cripple the invasion... but at a high cost to the hosts, who would be left with a gibbering slug wrapped around their brains for the rest of their lives. It would also mean another trip to the underground Yeerk pool, a place so terrifying that Rachel still has nightmares about it. But what kind of warrior would she be if she gave in to her own fear?

REVIEW: Once again, the Animorphs find themselves entangled in the thorny, shifting moralities of war, a foe every bit as devious and daunting as the fight against the Yeerks themselves. Rachel's ruthlessness clashes with her friends' reservations about exploiting their enemy's weakness, a ruthlessness fueled in part by her own attempts to overcome fear by pretending she doesn't feel it. How far will she really go to ensure victory, or to save her friends? Rachel has to find out the hard way here, in her equivalent of Jake's crisis in the previous book.

The Warning (K. A. Applegate)

2011-09-30T17:26:00.001-07:00

The Warning
(The Animorphs series, Book 16)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***** (Great)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Ever since their fateful encouner with Prince Elfangor in the abandoned construction site, when they learned of the Yeerk invasion, Jake and his friends bore the terrible truth alone. Who could they turn to, when anybody might have an alien parasite wrapped around their brains? Who could they trust except each other? Who else would ever believe that the Earth was under attack?
Now, they've found something they never expected: proof that someone else knows about the Yeerks, on a website dedicated to exposing the invasion.
Jake doesn't know whether to be relieved or terrified. While he can't help suspecting a trap, part of him longs for someone else to turn to, someone else to take the reins of Earth's pitiful resistance. But first they have to find the person behind the website, and determine if they're friend or foe.

REVIEW: Never short on action, this book returns to the emotional resonance and internal conflicts that raise the series above the average sci-fi serial. Jake makes some serious mistakes, both in battle tactics and in handling his own crew, as he's forced to quash his own reluctance beneath the mantle of leadership. A new foe is introduced, and though less ultimately comes of this enemy than one might expect, it still adds a new dimension to the battle. Having read the whole series, I can see some foreshadowing of events to come here. (I also see more evidence of how fast technology's progressed; Marco's 56k dial-up modem was considered top-of-the-line when this book originally appeared in 1998.)

A Princess of Mars (Edgar Rice Burroughs)

2011-09-29T23:41:00.000-07:00

A Princess of Mars
(The Barsoom/John Carter of Mars series, Book 1)
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Public Domain Books
Fiction, Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: When the Confederate States of America fell at the end of the Civil War, Captain John Carter of Virginia was one of the many soldiers left with little means and no vocation. Unsure of what to do, he headed to Arizona to try his luck at prospecting... but instead found himself at the beginning of a journey he cannot explain. While fleeing Apache attackers, he finds himself lost in a strange cave, where he is detached from his physical body and transported to the red planet Mars. Here, he must learn to survive amid strange beasts and hostile natives on the surface of a dying world.

REVIEW: Yes, another free-for-Kindle download, admittedly inspired by previews for the upcoming movie adaptation of the franchise. Like many older sci-fi stories (such as Jules Verne's works), it's more about the bizarre, otherworldly settings and situations than about any semblance of plot or character coherence. Also like many older stories, the white civilized hero has little to no trouble making a place for himself among the ignorant savages, generously imparting the wisdom of his superior culture upon them for good measure. Never mind that conditions on Mars are so totally unlike Earth that our ways may not be the most effective means of survival. Never mind that these are aliens, with an alien brain attuned to an alien mindset, even if the "higher" Martians are essentially egg-laying humans. (And never mind that our supposedly civilized protagonist deals out death on a dime when it suits his purposes.) John Carter's the hero, unquestionably and unequivocally, and hero status trumps all else. There is, of course, a love interest, the titular Princess of Mars, who seems to exist primarily to inspire Boris Vajello paintings: the nude, sexy girl constantly threatened by hulking monsters in a vaguely erotic fashion. (Again, why a six-limbed giant green alien would be physically attracted to a puny red-skinned woman is never questioned; human females are evidently a universally lusted-after object.) The dialog, like the action, tends to the grandiose and overblown. Once you get through the cardboard characters and stereotypes, though, Burroughs presents a highly imaginative alien world, full of intriguing mysteries and pseudoscientific marvels... enough to earn it the extra half-star in the ratings. (Well, that and I tend to cut older stories a little bit of slack; you can't really fault Burroughs for being a product of his time, after all.) I don't expect I'll read much further in the series, though; all the mind's-eye candy in the world can't entirely overcome the thin characters and generally tedious plot.

The Escape (K. A. Applegate)

2011-09-28T17:00:00.000-07:00

The Escape
(The Animorphs series, Book 15)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: When Erek approached the Animorphs with news of a secret underwater Yeerk project, it should've been just another mission. But Visser One has returned to Earth to oversee it - Visser One, the Yeerk infesting the brain of Marco's mother, a fact he's witheld from everyone except Jake. He insists he's fine, but inside Marco is falling apart. Part of him knows that his mother is as good as gone, that once the Yeerks enslave a host it's until death, while another part fantasizes about saving her from the prison of her own brain. If ever the Animorphs go into battle against her...
But this is just an investigation, a quick peek to figure out what the Yeerks are up to. With luck, Marco won't even see his mother. But since when has luck been on his side?

REVIEW: Another "holding pattern" book, mostly notable for introducing a new alien species (the Leeran, who will figure into at least one later book) and sending Marco through the wringer again over his mother's predicament and his own inability to help her. While little enough new ground was covered, the action kept things clicking along... and, heck, as a pseudowriter I can understand the desire to draw out a character's suffering for maximum dramatic effect (not to mention page count.)

The Unknown (K. A. Applegate)

2011-09-27T16:39:00.000-07:00

The Unknown
(The Animorphs series, Book 14)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Cassie may be part of the Animorphs, secretly fighting the hidden Yeerk invasion with the Andalite power to morph animals, but she also has other responsibilities, namely helping her father run the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in the family barn. When Crazy Helen, an eccentric woman in the remote Dry Lands, calls about a sick horse, Cassie and her father - and Rachel, who happened to be visiting - drive out to help, finding a staggering and snake-bitten horse barely able to stand up. But, just as it collapses, the girls see something very disturbing: a large slug crawling from the horse's ear. A Yeerk.
The other Animorphs don't really believe them. Why would a Yeerk make a Controller out of a horse? It just doesn't make sense. Even the blast that destroyed the horse's body could've been old army munitions, and not the Dracon beams Cassie and Rachel swore they heard. But in the middle of the Dry Lands is the top-secret military base Zone 91, where fringe elements claim that the government's been keeping alien technology hidden for decades. Of course, only people like Crazy Helen believe the rumors; there's nothing alien about the operations at Zone 91... or is there?

REVIEW: The series has settled into a nice pattern by now, with bursts of action and humor amid incremental progress in the overall war. Not so profound or serious as some of the best books, it nevertheless entertains. As a former X-Phile, I especially enjoyed the Animorphs' thinly-veiled take on that favorite target of conspiracy theorists, Area 51. It earned an extra half-star for the real secret hidden at the base, one that would've made for an absolutely priceless "moment" for Agents Mulder and Scully.

Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)

2011-09-27T00:43:00.000-07:00

Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson
Public Domain Books
Fiction, YA Adventure
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Young Jim Hawkins never anticipated a life of adventure, content to live and work with his parents at the quiet Admiral Benbow inn... but when the surly old sea dog came to stay, trouble soon found him. When the man breathes his last, he leaves behind a sea chest, a curious map, and a dark collection of murderous enemies. Jim soon finds himself swept far away from the family inn, as part of an ill-fated expedition to Treasure Island searching for pirate treasure.

REVIEW: As I've mentioned previously, I keep meaning to expand my reading horizons beyond fantasy and the occasional sci-fi. It was also free on Kindle, so now seemed as good a time as any to catch up on yet another classic I never got around to reading in my youth. It proved reasonably interesting, full of danger and adventure... and if characterization tended to stereotype and Jim proved uncommonly lucky in his perpetual ability to win against all odds (or at least fail in beneficial ways), well, it is ultimately a sailor's tale, and nobody exaggerates a tale quite like a salty sailor. The pirate slang and sea jargon grew thick at times, and the elder-day writing style made for occasionally slow going, but overall it kept me reading. Not a bad story, and certainly worth the price. (I've read worse "classics," I can tell you that much.)

The Change (K. A Applegate)

2011-09-26T15:10:00.000-07:00

The Change
(The Animorphs series, Book 13)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Tobias has come to terms with his new life... mostly. Trapped in the body of a red-tailed hawk, he finds himself living in two worlds. In one, he is an Animorph like his friends, helping to fight the invading Yeerks, a human boy who happens to have wings and feathers and laser-sharp vision. In the other, however, he's a hunter, a bird of prey who feeds on mice and sleeps in a tree. In neither world does he feel entirely comfortable; a hawk's life is a hard one for the once-gentle boy he used to be, and he doesn't consider himself much of an Animorph anymore since he's stuck forever in an animal body. But he has no choice in the matter. It's not like he can ever be human again.
While spying on Controllers, Tobias suddenly finds himself watching the impossible: a pair of Hork-Bajir, free of Yeerk infestation, escaping into the woods. They are the only free members of their species in the galaxy, and the Yeerks are pulling out all the stops to recapture the refugees. Forces greater than he can understand seem to want Tobias to help the pair. If he succeeds, those forces might grant the wish he's been too afraid to voice, the wish that he thought had died when he passed the fateful two-hour limit in hawk morph: the wish to be human once more.

REVIEW: Another plot-pivotal episode in the series, it maintains the action-heavy pace while allowing for the occasional introspective break. Tobias has to admit that he hasn't reconciled himself to his strange new life as fully as he thought he had... just as he has to admit that, even if he regains his human form, he can never be the boy he used to be. By the end, a few new wrinkles have been added to the mytharc.
After this book, in the original release, came The Andalite Chronicles (reviewed on my website here - and, yes, I know I have the insertion point wrong... I'll fix it when I update next), the first of four extra books that delve into the backstory of the Animorphs universe. While not necessary, I'd recommend reading them in the order in which they were originally released; some elements in the Chronicles books constitute spoilers - or might not make sense - if you haven't "caught up" to where the series stood at the time of publication (or if you jump over them altogether.)

Why Cats Paint (Heather Busch and Burton Silver)

2011-09-25T10:06:00.000-07:00

Why Cats Paint
Heather Busch and Burton Silver
Ten Speed Press
Fiction, Art/Humor
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: The notion that humans alone are capable of producing works of art has been challenged in recent years by elephants, primates... and now cats. As far back as Ancient Egypt, the ability of felines to create for creativity's sake has been recognized. Today, works by modern cat masters sell for five figures or more. The authors examine the history of cat painting and provide profiles of numerous feline artists at work today, in fields ranging from portraiture to abstraction, with numerous photographs of their works.

REVIEW: When this book, a deadpan parody of the art world, was first released, some sources actually believed it was real. Busch and Silver nail the too-serious tone of modern art, taking the smallest marks and most vague connections to ridiculously high-concept extremes. It also, unfortunately, grows just as tedious at several points, perpetually driving home the joke of the book long after the point has been made. It still prompts a few chuckles. (I also don't even want to know how long it took to clean the cats in some of the photographs...)

The Reaction (K. A. Applegate)

2011-09-23T13:02:00.000-07:00

The Reaction
(The Animorphs series, Book 12)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

NOTE: In honor of the recent re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Rachel's never been one to hesitate when something needs doing. When she's on a class trip to The Gardens and sees the young boy fall into the crocodile exhibit, she jumps right in to save him. But when she acquires a crocodile's DNA as part of her impromptu rescue plan, something doesn't feel right. Nevertheless, she manages to make it out without being spotted, so even though Jake's angry, it's no big deal.
The Animorphs have just learned that the popular teen actor Jeremy Jason McCole is being recruited to promote The Sharing, the civic organization that's a front for the Yeerks. Rachel and Cassie, like most every girl between the ages of ten and twenty in the country, know from personal experience just how much influence he has - if he says jump, millions of potential hosts won't bother asking how high before throwing themselves into a Yeerk pool. As luck would have it, McCole's coming to town to kick off the promotion... but even as the Animorphs plan to crash the party, Rachel finds herself morphing out of control. The Andalite technology that gives her the power to morph seems to be going haywire - and the very ability that lets her fight just might get the entire group killed.

REVIEW: Applegate sure knows her target audience, the power of celebrity crushes, and fandom in general: PR tactics like this would've handed Earth to the Yeerks on a silver platter. The story itself just doesn't hold together as well as previous books, unfortunately, drifting close to goofiness at the climax. I almost wonder if this wasn't the effort of an early ghostwriter. But it's still readable.

The Forgotten (K. A. Applegate)

2011-09-22T20:09:00.000-07:00

The Forgotten
(The Animorphs series, Book 11)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)

NOTE: In honor of the recent re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Since that first night, back in the abandoned construction site, Jake has been the unofficial leader of the Animorphs team. It wasn't something he ever asked for, or even wanted, but somehow everyone looked to him for answers, for decisions, for battle plans. So now he's the head of the only morph-capable humans on Earth, the only ones who know of the Yeerk invasion. Even the young Andalite warrior-cadet Ax looks to him for decisions. Why can't they see that he's not a leader, that he's just as scared and insecure as any middle-school-aged boy faced with impossible choices? It's enough to drive a boy crazy... and maybe it has.
All day, Jake has been having hallucinations. Strange, hyper-realistic hallucinations of a green world full of danger and death. Then Tobias relays a message: something's happened downtown that has the high-level Controllers in a frenzy to cover it up. Guards, machine guns... whatever's gone wrong, it's something big. Something that could really hurt the Yeerks. Do the Animorphs go in to investigate, or do they stay back? Everyone's waiting on Jake's word - but how is Jake supposed to be a leader when he can't even keep hold of his sanity?

REVIEW: Applegate flirts with trouble by bringing in the sci-fi chestnut of time travel, but manages to skirt the line... admittedly by using high-level action and the dangerous wonders of the Amazon as distractions. But I was willing to let myself be distracted. Though the serial format of the series (mostly) ensures major characters passage through a given adventure, they do so by the skins of their teeth, with enough problems and setbacks and doubts along the way to still make for an exciting read. While not quite the triumph that The Android was, The Forgotten's still a strong chapter in a remarkable series.

The Android (K. A. Applegate)

2011-09-21T18:02:00.000-07:00

The Android
(The Animorphs series, Book 10)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***** (Great)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Marco used to be the most reluctant of the Animorphs... that is, until the Yeerks gave him a very good reason to fight. His mother, supposedly drowned in a boating accident, is the host of Visser One, instigator of the invasion that is now under the command of Visser Three. He knows he may never get his mom back, but he also knows that the Yeerks will pay for what they've done to his family... even if it costs him his own life.
While in morph, Marco discovers something very strange about an old friend, Erek - a friend who is now handing out flyers for the Yeerk front organization The Sharing. As he and the Animorphs investigate, they discover a secret older than the pyramids... and face a choice that could change the course of the war.

REVIEW: Human drama, difficult choices, new morphs, new secrets, danger, plenty of action, and a nice dose of humor... The Android represents the Animorphs series at its finest. Wisecracking Marco deals with some very heavy problems, especially when the Yeerks make a play for his father. Applegate introduces the Chee, the alien android race living in hiding on Earth, who are not only an intriguing addition to the Animorphs universe but prove very useful in later installments. The whole combination just clicks here. The only real drawback is the spider morph on the cover, but I'm not (quite) arachnophobic enough to let that affect the rating.

You're Finally Here! (Mélanie Watt)

2011-09-21T15:28:00.000-07:00

You're Finally Here!
Mélanie Watt
Hyperion
Fiction, YA Picture Book
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: A picture book bunny has been waiting and waiting for a reader to come along. Now that you've picked up his book, he just might never let you leave!

REVIEW: We had some down time at work today, and this happened to be at the top of the bin. A nice, silly little read that dares the reader to walk away. The illustrations are simple but expressive, and the story itself is fun. That's about all I asked of it at the time.

The Secret (K. A. Applegate)

2011-09-20T12:14:00.001-07:00

The Secret
(The Animorphs series, Book 9)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: The Animorphs hurt the Yeerks bad when they destroyed the Earth-based Kandrona - a vital source of nutrients for the parasitic alien slugs in their native state - but the war isn't over yet. Visser Three still thinks he's fighting Andalite bandits, and he knows Andalites need a place to feed and hide while in their native form. A place like the national forest... where Aximili, the only Andalite of the group, lives. Under the guise of a logging company, the Yeerks mean to hunt down the bandits or destroy their sanctuary trying.
As the Animorphs scramble to stop the plan, Cassie finds herself facing a crisis. For years, she's been an animal lover, a defender of the environment. Being up close and personal with the world as seen through animal eyes has given her a whole new perspective in Mother Nature, where the primary rule of survival isn't love thy neighbor. It's kill or be killed.

REVIEW: Once more, the series turns its eye on the natural world as a source of conflict, rather than just the alien invaders. Cassie has to come to terms with the harsh reality of Nature and her place as both human being and soldier. Applegate doesn't foist off easy answers on her, because there are none. In some ways, this is the tale of a girl growing up, forced to leave behind the simple ideals of childhood as she discovers just how complicated the world really is. One of the stronger books thus far, in part because it doesn't shy away from thorny morality issues.

The Alien (K. A. Applegate)

2011-09-19T20:56:00.000-07:00

The Alien
(The Animorphs series, Book 8)
K. A. Applegate
Scholastic
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

NOTE: In honor of the re-release of the series, I'm finally posting individual reviews of the Animorphs books.

DESCRIPTION: Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill should never have been on the Andalite Dome ship that came to Earth. As an underaged aristh, a warrior-cadet, he had no place among the full-fledged warriors and princes of his people. But with Prince Elfangor, the great hero, as his older brother, certain exceptions tended to be made. Even then, nobody expected an exceptionally fierce battle... just as nobody expected the Blade ship the Yeerks had hidden on the Earth's moon, the ship that turned the tide against the Andalites. Only when he was rescued from the wreckage on the ocean floor by four humans did he learn the full devastation of the battle... that he was the last free Andalite alive on Earth, that his brother had been killed by the foul Andalite-Controller Visser Three.
And that, in his last moments, the hero Prince Elfangor had broken the greatest law of the Andalite race by giving five human children the technology to morph.
As days turn to weeks, Aximili joins the Animorphs in thier battle against the Yeerk invasion, but he is not one of them. He can never be one of them, never be a true and full companion to these primitive aliens. To share information about his people and their technology would only further compound Elfangor's crime. Besides, as trusting as the Animorphs are now, how could they continue to be his friends if they were to learn the reason for the very law Elfangor broke - the secret shame of the Andalites that drives them to hunt the Yeerks across the galaxy?

REVIEW: Ax the alien finally gets his book-length debut, telling the story from his point of view. As with his chapters in the first Megamorphs book, his narrative leans a bit heavily on Earth-based terminology. The humor of Ax's near-complete inability to function in human morph also grows a bit stale; I understand that he's still a kid, but he's also supposed to be reasonably intelligent. Those issues aside, Ax finally has to confront his conflicting loyalties and decide which master - which world - he ultimately serves. He has an understandably difficult time with this, worsened when he discovers a means of communicating with his homeworld. Overall, while not a stellar installment in the franchise, it's still reasonably entertaining, and Applegate manages to explain some cultural and physical anomolies of the Andalite people.
I also have to say that the original artistic interpretation of the Andalite here doesn't quite match the descriptions given in the book.

Magician: Apprentice (Raymond E. Feist)

2011-09-19T13:39:00.000-07:00

Magician: Apprentice
(The Riftwar Saga, Book 1)
Raymond E. Feist
Bantam Spectra
Fiction, Fantasy
**+ (Bad/Okay)

DESCRIPTION: The orphan Pug and Tomas, the cook's son, have been as brothers since their earliest memories. At the rustic court of Crydee, on the western frontier fringes of the Kingdom, they fought and ran and played as boys do, each dreaming of a future filled with glory as each holds a private affection for Princess Carline, daughter of the Duke - an affection shared by most every other castle boy, including their friend Squire Roland. But now their childhood comes to an end, as they stand before the Craftmasters who will decide their futures. Tomas is taken under the wing of the castle Swordmaster, to become a soldier in the Duke's garrison. Pug finds himself with a more unusual master, the magician Kulgan. The old man has never taken an apprentice before, and Pug is determined to live up to the man's trust... but, while the book learning comes easy enough, the practice continually eludes him. The boy has talent - even Father Tully, the castle priest, can determine that - but his magic resists the usual paths of expression.
When a strange shipwreck washes onto the rocks near the castle, thoughts of elusive magic and would-be glory are swept away. The lone survivor dies days afterwards, but not before revealing a terrible truth: the ship traveled from another world, a world already gaining a foothold in Midkemia. They do not come in peace, but under a banner of war - and their strange magicks are far superior to those wielded by Kulgan and other native mages. Even as the Duke calls upon allies among the dwarves and elves, the alien Tsurani strike.
Pug, Tomas, and Roland used to dream of becoming brave heroes. Now, each is set upon a path far greater, and more dangerous, than any they dreamt of, a path that leads through foreign intrigue, intra-Kingdom political squabbles, mountain deeps, elven glades... possibly beyond the doors of Death itself.

REVIEW: I often wonder if there are other worlds intermingling with our own, if the Earth experienced by other people is perhaps an entirely different planet than the one I inhabit. This book would be a prime example. It's considered a fantasy classic, even appearing on the recent NPR list of top 100 fantasy and sci-fi novels of all time. After reading it, I can only conclude that there is another book of the same name by the same author that earned these accolades.
The story starts slow, poking and meandering through Pug's young life in the carefree wilds of Crydee. Along the way, we meet a number of fantasy chestnuts posing as characters, including the Friendly Forest Ranger, the Good Duke, the Beautiful Princess (who, despite being introduced as a kindly person with a smile for all, treats Pug worse than a dog until he saves her life from a pair of stereotypical trolls), and more. Later, we encounter elves of unearthly beauty who live in treetop homes amid uncanny magicks, steadfast dwarves of the mountain mines, primitive bands of raiding goblins, a band of dark beings who - shock of shocks - are bad-blood cousins of the elves... I think you get the idea. Not an original idea on the page, save the notion of otherworldly travel, and even the Tsurani become more of a racial stereotype than an intriguing presence. Pug himself becomes something of a cliche, the Orphan Hero who elicits unnatural behavior in those around him, in order that he might find himself at the center of attention. At one point, an elven prince arrives to consult with the Duke about the Tsurani threat - a very big deal, as elves have never left their forest fastness to treat with men in living memory. This most honored and ancient of beings, however, happily makes a side-trip to talk to Pug, not only about his unusual magic but about his girl troubles! Enemies from another world invading the land, and the elf prince smilingly listens to an orphan boy whine about a girl... a girl who, quite frankly, comes across as such a selfish, game-playing twit, gleefully pitting two friends against each other for the dubious prize of her heart, that I couldn't give a rat's tail about which way she'd cast her regal affections.
Meanwhile, the plot wends its way along, hitting stereotype after stereotype. Months and years pass in the blink of an eye, while short trips draw themselves out painfully. There's a battle here and there to keep things interesting, and a death count consisting almost entirely of "red shirts." (To borrow from the classic Star Trek, the nameless hordes of red-shirted extras were always the first to fall in any given conflict.) The story doesn't so much end as run out of pages; nothing comes to any sort of conclusion, nor does it end on a cliffhanger. It was as if Feist just decided to stop writing.
What was I missing? What, in this collection of illogical characters and stale chestnuts, made this one of the top 100 speculative fiction books of all time? This was even the author's preferred edition, wherein Feist, with fifteen years and several other successful titles under his belt, went back to revise his first published work. To be fair, the saga as a whole earned the honors, but having read this, who would pick up a second book? Why return to the bitter well hoping for sweet water? I've done that one too many times, myself, and wound up with a second choking cup too often to waste more time and money here. The only possible explanation is that which I first surmised: I must be living in a separate dimension from the rest of humankind. In your world, wherever it may be, perhaps this is a sterling example of fine fantasy fiction, but not on my side of the rift.