Empire of Exiles
The Books of the Usurper series, Book 1
Erin M. Evans
Orbit
Fiction, Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: Ever since the changelings, shapeshifters without souls that could mimic anyone, sowing chaos and destruction, chased the people of the world to the land of Semilla, the many races and nations have struggled to live together, but the steadying hand of the imperial family managed to keep the peace - until the War of the Brothers, when a royal Duke went renegade and nearly succeeded in overthrowing the rightful heir and seizing the crown in a terrible civil war of destructive magic and deepest treachery. It has been twenty-three years since those dark days, and the peace still feels fragile, particularly for those who lived through it. Still, time must move on, and wounds must be healed. After all, those who did not repent their participation in the coup have been imprisoned or executed, and nobody wants to destabilize Semilla again - not when there's literally nowhere else in the world left to go that isn't overrun with changelings.
When apprentice scribe Quill comes to the Archives in the capital city, he thinks he's just on another tedious errand as part of his tedious training for a law career, fetching some old artifacts at the behest of one of his master's well-to-do clients. The Archives, at least, are fascinating, repositories of treasures from every nation that fled behind the salt wall that protects Semilla, much of it still uncatalogued. The archivists themselves are at least as interesting: specialists with magical affinities for select elements or items, but whose powers wax and wane on unpredictable cycles that carry great risks if they spin out of control, up to and including death. When he witnesses a terrible tragedy that evening - a fellow scribe and his one-time best friend apparently murdering someone in cold blood before uttering a cryptic phrase and slitting his own throat - he can think of nowhere else to run for help but the Archives... and finds himself entangled in a dangerous plot with roots in the failed coup and beyond, a plot that wakes old memories in those who have done their best to forget those dark days... and hints that the threat posed by the usurper brother may be far from over.
REVIEW: I'd heard decent things about this one, and it was available on Libby, so I figured I might as well give it a try. If I'm being honest, I nearly gave up on it early on; even for high fantasy, the story is a name stew, people and races and places and more, and I found the characters tough to care about, not helped by some of the choices of the audiobook narrator that turned them into exaggerated caricatures in my mind's eye. But I was low on alternate options, and I figured it would pick up eventually, given the aforementioned decent things I recalled hearing.
It does, eventually pick up... somewhat. Unfortunately, the story throughout is burdened with excessive flashbacks and repetition - telling me something or having a character think a particular thing, then telling me again (almost word for word) later, often in the same scene... then, just in case I wasn't paying attention before, often telling me the same information or have the same character think the same things yet again - that kept bogging down my interest. The narration also leans far too hard into setting the mood with vocal variations, low urgent murmurs or brash over-the-top accents or singsong trills or sharp snarking or marble-mouthed mumbles or (my personal least favorite) breathless and gulping tremulous quavers for one particularly spineless person who spends far, far too much time fretting and hemming and hawing and cowering and otherwise consuming page time avoiding agency and action. It was the vocal equivalent of an encyclopedia of "said-bookisms" jackhammered into my ears, the delivery distracting from the dialog and story. The plot and cast of characters both get too convoluted for their own good, with a subplot involving the magical "affinities" of the archive workers that starts to feel less like an interesting quirk of the world and more like an author being a bit too on-the-nose and in the reader's face about addressing Important Issues about mental health spirals and cycles with magic as a thin lampshade. (Not to downgrade the importance of representation and addressing those things, mind you, but when it feels less like an organic element of plot or character and more like one of those after-school specials or "very special episodes" of a TV show, it gets a bit irritating, like using someone's important issue for a ratings bump.) This, too, often drifts into time-eating repetition of minimal plot or character progress. Eventually, things trundle and bump along toward revelations and unmasking of culprits - all mired by yet more flashbacks and hesitations and repetition, most of which the reader already knows and the rest adding little to justify its word count - and the expected dangling threads and threats to set up the longer series arc.
Some of the late revelations and twists were indeed intriguing, though by then I'd given up on connecting to the characters, some of whom I wanted to smack or shake or otherwise shove to get them out of their own heads and doing something already. I also saw potential in the magic systems and cultures, and wish I hadn't been too distracted by the irritating narration and characters so I could've enjoyed them more. I found myself thinking I might've been more absorbed if I'd consumed it in written form, all of which helped pull the rating back up to three and a half stars. While I have read (and listened to) worse, this is another series that can go on without me.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Starfire: A Red Peace (Spencer Ellsworth) - My Review
Mistborn: The Final Empire (Brandon Sanderson) - My Review
The Bone Shard Daughter (Andrea Stewart) - My Review
Friday, September 8, 2023
Wednesday, September 6, 2023
The Lesser Dead (Christopher Buehlman)
The Lesser Dead
Christopher Buehlman
Berkley
Fiction, Horror
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: 1978 New York City is a happening place, with night clubs and disco and a lively underground - not to mention the vampires. Since being turned as a spoiled brat of a 14-year-old some decades earlier, vampire Joey Peacock has had a fine time, prowling bars and dance floors and keeping up on modern sitcoms (even though his closest vampire friend, bookish philosopher Cvetko, insists television will rot his brain). So long as he takes care not to "peel" (kill) too many mortals or endanger his peers or their leader, the fiery Irishwoman Margaret, afterlife is good. Since nothing short of immolation, decapitation, or a stake through the heart will kill him permanently, Joey figures he has essentially forever to party... until the night on the subway when he sees an unsettling pair of little children - children who appear to be stalking and hypnotizing mortals, just like vampires. But what kind of monster turns young children - and are these newcomers friends of the local vampire community or the deadliest of foes?
REVIEW: As in his other books (the ones I've read, at least), Buehlman does not pull punches or spare lives (or bloodshed) in spinning a solid horror tale, this one set firmly in the late-70's Big Apple - perfect hunting grounds for the undead, especially the undead who have a taste for disco and rock music and cheesy television. Buehlman's vampires are not the "nice" ones popularized in modern romance crossovers, drawing instead on their original, darker, predatory roots; though they are capable of friendship and love in limited ways, they're far more interested in personal short-term pleasures and slaking their hunger, where dominating human wills and drinking blood is at least as erotically satisfying as sex. For all that he's unapologetic about his life, Joey is just as happy hypnotizing victims into "donations" of blood without resorting to draining them dry; indeed, it's considered bad form to kill too many victims, if more because of the potential headache of police involvement/investigation than about anything like moral constraints about murder in general. He's not an old enough vampire to have the weight of ages and downsides to his new condition truly hit home, like those vampires who succumb to "night fever" and eventually commit suicide by sunshine, but he's old enough to recognize the children as something potentially destabilizing to what passes for the vampire neighborhood... something hinting at an enemy more evil than his own brand of vampire, even though such distinctions - even a "good" vampire can at best be described as "not quite as monstrous as theoretically possible" - can seem like splitting an already-fine hair. The true threat becomes all too apparent as the story unfolds, leaving Joey on the run and running out of places to hide and people to turn to. Things take increasingly dark turns, some of which comes across as grinding in the gore, before an ending that feels a bit less revelatory and a bit more like an author getting a touch too clever for his own good; one too many whiplashes kept it from rising above four stars (and came close to knocking it down to three and a half). On the other hand, Buehlman again succeeds in capturing a time and a place and complex characters, which helped buoy the book against an ending that felt like it was trying too hard for the Shock And Awe factor.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Those Across the River (Christopher Buehlman) - My Review
The Book Eaters (Sunyi Dean) - My Review
Certain Dark Things (Silvia Moreno-Garcia) - My Review
Christopher Buehlman
Berkley
Fiction, Horror
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: 1978 New York City is a happening place, with night clubs and disco and a lively underground - not to mention the vampires. Since being turned as a spoiled brat of a 14-year-old some decades earlier, vampire Joey Peacock has had a fine time, prowling bars and dance floors and keeping up on modern sitcoms (even though his closest vampire friend, bookish philosopher Cvetko, insists television will rot his brain). So long as he takes care not to "peel" (kill) too many mortals or endanger his peers or their leader, the fiery Irishwoman Margaret, afterlife is good. Since nothing short of immolation, decapitation, or a stake through the heart will kill him permanently, Joey figures he has essentially forever to party... until the night on the subway when he sees an unsettling pair of little children - children who appear to be stalking and hypnotizing mortals, just like vampires. But what kind of monster turns young children - and are these newcomers friends of the local vampire community or the deadliest of foes?
REVIEW: As in his other books (the ones I've read, at least), Buehlman does not pull punches or spare lives (or bloodshed) in spinning a solid horror tale, this one set firmly in the late-70's Big Apple - perfect hunting grounds for the undead, especially the undead who have a taste for disco and rock music and cheesy television. Buehlman's vampires are not the "nice" ones popularized in modern romance crossovers, drawing instead on their original, darker, predatory roots; though they are capable of friendship and love in limited ways, they're far more interested in personal short-term pleasures and slaking their hunger, where dominating human wills and drinking blood is at least as erotically satisfying as sex. For all that he's unapologetic about his life, Joey is just as happy hypnotizing victims into "donations" of blood without resorting to draining them dry; indeed, it's considered bad form to kill too many victims, if more because of the potential headache of police involvement/investigation than about anything like moral constraints about murder in general. He's not an old enough vampire to have the weight of ages and downsides to his new condition truly hit home, like those vampires who succumb to "night fever" and eventually commit suicide by sunshine, but he's old enough to recognize the children as something potentially destabilizing to what passes for the vampire neighborhood... something hinting at an enemy more evil than his own brand of vampire, even though such distinctions - even a "good" vampire can at best be described as "not quite as monstrous as theoretically possible" - can seem like splitting an already-fine hair. The true threat becomes all too apparent as the story unfolds, leaving Joey on the run and running out of places to hide and people to turn to. Things take increasingly dark turns, some of which comes across as grinding in the gore, before an ending that feels a bit less revelatory and a bit more like an author getting a touch too clever for his own good; one too many whiplashes kept it from rising above four stars (and came close to knocking it down to three and a half). On the other hand, Buehlman again succeeds in capturing a time and a place and complex characters, which helped buoy the book against an ending that felt like it was trying too hard for the Shock And Awe factor.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Those Across the River (Christopher Buehlman) - My Review
The Book Eaters (Sunyi Dean) - My Review
Certain Dark Things (Silvia Moreno-Garcia) - My Review
Saturday, September 2, 2023
The Giver (Lois Lowry)
The Giver
The Giver quartet, Book 1
Lois Lowry
Houghton Mifflin
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Jonas lives in a perfect community, with a perfect family unit of a mother, a father, and a younger sister, who offer support and help him process his daily emotions every evening. He attends school, follows the rules, is polite and courteous, and accepts his punishments for mistakes as a good citizen should. This December, he and his yearmates will enter their twelfth year and receive their job assignments, what they will do for the rest of their working days until it's time to enter the house of the olds and eventually be released to somewhere even better, somewhere none have ever returned from. But at the assembly, something extraordinary happens: instead of a regular job, the Elders Council has selected Jonas to become the new Receiver of Memories. It is the greatest of honors... and, he soon learns, the greatest of burdens. Because there is much more to this perfect community than Jonas ever imagined, and what he learns will change everything he thought he knew - and destroy every shred of happiness he thought he had ever felt.
REVIEW: This is a classic young adult dystopian tale, written before the glut of tales that made the genre a bit played-out for a while. Aiming for atmosphere and message over plausibility and using Jonas's blindered point of view to present the world, Lowry creates a seeming utopia in its community of well-behaved people, each knowing their place and constantly reminded of rules (and corrected for errors or transgressions, first with lashes from a rod and then to more serious corrections), but who have been stripped of vital elements of their humanity over the generations in the process. Jonas doesn't even notice the lack, and takes for granted the necessity of sharing dreams with his family (who are not his birth parents; birthing mothers are actually considered among the lowest of the community, and babies are raised in a central nursery for their first year before being assigned to couples) and whatever emotions he happened to feel every evening. When he confesses to strange new feelings, he's relieved that there's a simple daily pill to make them go away. Even the words the people speak are nitpicked and micromanaged and ultimately rendered close to meaningless with obsessive precision, stripped of all nuance and depth. Jonas doesn't even mind how his every move is monitored, his every word listened to, because that's just how the Community helps keep everyone safe and productive and (what he thinks of as) happy. Neither does he question the concept of "release", or why nobody who is "released" is ever seen in the Community again.
It is only when Jonas begins training to become the Receiver of Memories that he realizes that the way things are is not the way they have always been. From the moment the first collective memories of the lost past flow into him, Jonas begins to wake to the world as it truly is around him, seeing it truly for the first time; even the ability to perceive color has been stripped from the citizens, a somewhat heavy-handed metaphor for how their lives have been deprived of meaning and beauty in the process of creating a "safe" and conflict-free existence, where no unpleasant sensation or idea is allowed to linger longer than it takes to pop a pill. Naturally, his new knowledge begins separating him from his friends - or the kids he thought were his friends - and family - or the people he considers his family. As he learns what happened to the last apprentice to the Giver, he despairs, even as he becomes more determined to do something to change things, leading to a drastic action that may save or doom everyone in general and Jonas in particular.
As mentioned, there are some distinct plausibility issues with the worldbuilding, especially toward the end. Just how memories are stripped and gathered (and later shared) by the Receiver of Memory is vague, as is how people have been literally blinded to color (without making them completely colorblind; Jonas's ability to perceive color proves there are still both rods and cones in human eyes, or at least some human eyes). Likewise, some elements of the ending really don't make a ton of sense if you think too hard about them. I also raised an eyebrow a bit at the notion that, in this world, light-eyed people might have some inherent advantage over the dark-eyed majority; anomalously, Jonas and the Giver (and the previous apprentice) have blue eyes, as does a struggling infant who becomes a plot point. They all seem to share special gifts that allow for potential enlightenment, while the rest are just mindless sheep incapable of being roused from their complacent stupor, things that may not even be truly human anymore.
Despite those flaws, the book still has a decent emotional weight to it, conveying Jonas's growing confusion and horror over just what the community has allowed itself to become, what it has willingly sacrificed, in pursuit of an ultimately hollow paradise, driven home by a darkly ambiguous ending.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Marrow Thieves (Cherie Dimaline) - My Review
Among the Hidden (Margaret Peterson Haddix) - My Review
A Wrinkle in Time (Madeline L'Engle) - My Review
The Giver quartet, Book 1
Lois Lowry
Houghton Mifflin
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Jonas lives in a perfect community, with a perfect family unit of a mother, a father, and a younger sister, who offer support and help him process his daily emotions every evening. He attends school, follows the rules, is polite and courteous, and accepts his punishments for mistakes as a good citizen should. This December, he and his yearmates will enter their twelfth year and receive their job assignments, what they will do for the rest of their working days until it's time to enter the house of the olds and eventually be released to somewhere even better, somewhere none have ever returned from. But at the assembly, something extraordinary happens: instead of a regular job, the Elders Council has selected Jonas to become the new Receiver of Memories. It is the greatest of honors... and, he soon learns, the greatest of burdens. Because there is much more to this perfect community than Jonas ever imagined, and what he learns will change everything he thought he knew - and destroy every shred of happiness he thought he had ever felt.
REVIEW: This is a classic young adult dystopian tale, written before the glut of tales that made the genre a bit played-out for a while. Aiming for atmosphere and message over plausibility and using Jonas's blindered point of view to present the world, Lowry creates a seeming utopia in its community of well-behaved people, each knowing their place and constantly reminded of rules (and corrected for errors or transgressions, first with lashes from a rod and then to more serious corrections), but who have been stripped of vital elements of their humanity over the generations in the process. Jonas doesn't even notice the lack, and takes for granted the necessity of sharing dreams with his family (who are not his birth parents; birthing mothers are actually considered among the lowest of the community, and babies are raised in a central nursery for their first year before being assigned to couples) and whatever emotions he happened to feel every evening. When he confesses to strange new feelings, he's relieved that there's a simple daily pill to make them go away. Even the words the people speak are nitpicked and micromanaged and ultimately rendered close to meaningless with obsessive precision, stripped of all nuance and depth. Jonas doesn't even mind how his every move is monitored, his every word listened to, because that's just how the Community helps keep everyone safe and productive and (what he thinks of as) happy. Neither does he question the concept of "release", or why nobody who is "released" is ever seen in the Community again.
It is only when Jonas begins training to become the Receiver of Memories that he realizes that the way things are is not the way they have always been. From the moment the first collective memories of the lost past flow into him, Jonas begins to wake to the world as it truly is around him, seeing it truly for the first time; even the ability to perceive color has been stripped from the citizens, a somewhat heavy-handed metaphor for how their lives have been deprived of meaning and beauty in the process of creating a "safe" and conflict-free existence, where no unpleasant sensation or idea is allowed to linger longer than it takes to pop a pill. Naturally, his new knowledge begins separating him from his friends - or the kids he thought were his friends - and family - or the people he considers his family. As he learns what happened to the last apprentice to the Giver, he despairs, even as he becomes more determined to do something to change things, leading to a drastic action that may save or doom everyone in general and Jonas in particular.
As mentioned, there are some distinct plausibility issues with the worldbuilding, especially toward the end. Just how memories are stripped and gathered (and later shared) by the Receiver of Memory is vague, as is how people have been literally blinded to color (without making them completely colorblind; Jonas's ability to perceive color proves there are still both rods and cones in human eyes, or at least some human eyes). Likewise, some elements of the ending really don't make a ton of sense if you think too hard about them. I also raised an eyebrow a bit at the notion that, in this world, light-eyed people might have some inherent advantage over the dark-eyed majority; anomalously, Jonas and the Giver (and the previous apprentice) have blue eyes, as does a struggling infant who becomes a plot point. They all seem to share special gifts that allow for potential enlightenment, while the rest are just mindless sheep incapable of being roused from their complacent stupor, things that may not even be truly human anymore.
Despite those flaws, the book still has a decent emotional weight to it, conveying Jonas's growing confusion and horror over just what the community has allowed itself to become, what it has willingly sacrificed, in pursuit of an ultimately hollow paradise, driven home by a darkly ambiguous ending.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Marrow Thieves (Cherie Dimaline) - My Review
Among the Hidden (Margaret Peterson Haddix) - My Review
A Wrinkle in Time (Madeline L'Engle) - My Review
The Third Man (Graham Greene)
The Third Man
Graham Greene
Penguin Books
Fiction, Mystery
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Before war came calling, Vienna was a beautiful and cultured city, but now it's a shadow of its former self, shattered by bombings and controlled by a mishmash of nations with increasingly fractious relations. It's the sort of place where crime is almost a way of life... and an all-too-common cause of death.
Rollo Martins, writer of pulp Westerns under a pen name, comes to Vienna hoping to meet his old school friend Harry Lime - and barely learns of the man's death in time to make it to the funeral. When a local cop tells him that Lime was suspected of racketeering, Martins refuses believe it. He knew Harry like he knew few people; sure, the man was forever coming up with clever schemes, but criminal activity - especially on the level the authorities are implying - was surely a step too far. But as Martins starts looking for evidence to clear his late friend's name, he becomes convinced that the car crash that ended Lime's life was no accident. And if the police are too busy suspecting the man of dark deeds to investigate, then it's up to Rollo Martins to find the truth... and that's the sort of thing that can get an outsider killed in a city like Vienna.
REVIEW: A classic noir mystery (and film; apparently, Greene wrote the book with the intent of adapting it into the screenplay, which he did, even though the book itself wasn't released until 1950 and the movie came out in 1949), The Third Man starts with a simple enough setup and develops into a story of intrigue permeated by gray morality and characters with inherently flawed souls.
Rollo Martins starts out convinced of one simple truth, that he knows his friend better than even the local authorities and they've got the wrong idea about everything. The lead detective is wrong, but not, unfortunately, in the way Martins hopes. Martins himself is not quite the man he might have hoped to be, driven home by a case of mistaken identity that plays into the story later on, but he just can't bring himself to believe that the stories of Lime's shady dealings are true. Even when it becomes clear that not only was he murdered but that he was, indeed, mixed up in something unsavory, Martins keeps telling himself that there must be someone else behind it all, someone pulling his friend's strings and making him a victim instead of a perpetrator. Thus he begins to dig what may well be his own grave, encountering numerous friends and acquaintances of the late Lime, few of whom have anything like clean hands. Even Lime's girlfriend, Anna Schmidt, an actress living in town under false papers, isn't an innocent heart; she knew full well what the man was capable of, but still loved him. After all, who in a city as broken and traumatized as Vienna can possibly be a pure soul? Despite everything he learns, Martins just can't stop digging, trying to find an angel under mountains of corruption and sin, but there are no angels in Vienna, just flawed humans and human monsters, with a blurred line between the two.
The plot ratchets up nicely with each new revelation and each fresh blow to Martins's rosy memory of the Lime he knew, adding more bodies to the count and more threats to the amateur detective. Outside of a noir plot, the revelation at the end might feel a bit contrived, as might the climax, but it works in the setting and with the characters and mood. Naturally, there's some aging, and there's a bit at the very end that doesn't quite ring true, but overall it holds up decently. (And I really should get around to seeing the movie one of these days...)
You Might Also Enjoy:
And Then There Were None (Agatha Christie) - My Review
0.44 (H. A. DeRosso) - My Review
Graham Greene
Penguin Books
Fiction, Mystery
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Before war came calling, Vienna was a beautiful and cultured city, but now it's a shadow of its former self, shattered by bombings and controlled by a mishmash of nations with increasingly fractious relations. It's the sort of place where crime is almost a way of life... and an all-too-common cause of death.
Rollo Martins, writer of pulp Westerns under a pen name, comes to Vienna hoping to meet his old school friend Harry Lime - and barely learns of the man's death in time to make it to the funeral. When a local cop tells him that Lime was suspected of racketeering, Martins refuses believe it. He knew Harry like he knew few people; sure, the man was forever coming up with clever schemes, but criminal activity - especially on the level the authorities are implying - was surely a step too far. But as Martins starts looking for evidence to clear his late friend's name, he becomes convinced that the car crash that ended Lime's life was no accident. And if the police are too busy suspecting the man of dark deeds to investigate, then it's up to Rollo Martins to find the truth... and that's the sort of thing that can get an outsider killed in a city like Vienna.
REVIEW: A classic noir mystery (and film; apparently, Greene wrote the book with the intent of adapting it into the screenplay, which he did, even though the book itself wasn't released until 1950 and the movie came out in 1949), The Third Man starts with a simple enough setup and develops into a story of intrigue permeated by gray morality and characters with inherently flawed souls.
Rollo Martins starts out convinced of one simple truth, that he knows his friend better than even the local authorities and they've got the wrong idea about everything. The lead detective is wrong, but not, unfortunately, in the way Martins hopes. Martins himself is not quite the man he might have hoped to be, driven home by a case of mistaken identity that plays into the story later on, but he just can't bring himself to believe that the stories of Lime's shady dealings are true. Even when it becomes clear that not only was he murdered but that he was, indeed, mixed up in something unsavory, Martins keeps telling himself that there must be someone else behind it all, someone pulling his friend's strings and making him a victim instead of a perpetrator. Thus he begins to dig what may well be his own grave, encountering numerous friends and acquaintances of the late Lime, few of whom have anything like clean hands. Even Lime's girlfriend, Anna Schmidt, an actress living in town under false papers, isn't an innocent heart; she knew full well what the man was capable of, but still loved him. After all, who in a city as broken and traumatized as Vienna can possibly be a pure soul? Despite everything he learns, Martins just can't stop digging, trying to find an angel under mountains of corruption and sin, but there are no angels in Vienna, just flawed humans and human monsters, with a blurred line between the two.
The plot ratchets up nicely with each new revelation and each fresh blow to Martins's rosy memory of the Lime he knew, adding more bodies to the count and more threats to the amateur detective. Outside of a noir plot, the revelation at the end might feel a bit contrived, as might the climax, but it works in the setting and with the characters and mood. Naturally, there's some aging, and there's a bit at the very end that doesn't quite ring true, but overall it holds up decently. (And I really should get around to seeing the movie one of these days...)
You Might Also Enjoy:
And Then There Were None (Agatha Christie) - My Review
0.44 (H. A. DeRosso) - My Review
Friday, September 1, 2023
(Delayed) August Site Update
Delayed by this week being full of distractions, obstacles, and various time-sucking inconveniences, August's thirteen reviews have finally been archived on the main Brightdreamer Books site.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
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