July Site Update

The month's reviews have been archived and cross-linked on the Main Brightdreamer Books site.

Enjoy!

The Expanse: Dragon Tooth, Volume 2 (Andy Diggle)

The Expanse: Dragon Tooth, Volume 2
The Expanse: Dragon Tooth series, Issues 5 - 8
Andy Diggle and James S. A. Corey (creators), illustrations by Francesco Pisa
BOOM! Studios
Fiction, Graphic Novel/Media Tie-In/Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: Ten years ago, the crew of the Rocinante took down Sohiro and his crew of Martian defectors - violent loyalists to the rogue Duarte, long vanished beyond the Laconia gate - in a devastating firefight... or so they believe. The agent known as Sohiro and his core crew managed to slip away, still pursuing their ultimate goal of reuniting with their leader and helping bring the rest of humanity and the ring gates to their knees.
As things slowly settle down across settled space, James Holden and his crew have moved on to less dangerous assignments than tracking pirates and "dragon tooth" sleeper agents. Now, they're helping a science team led by Dr. Elvi Okoye, late of Ilus, as she studies the still-mysterious properties of the ring gates themselves. But what should be a fairly routine experiment, placing probes about an active gate, takes a deadly turn when one of the scientists is found murdered.

REVIEW: With another time jump, the Dragon Tooth graphic novels continue their impressive expansion of the Expanse universe, bringing another adventure to the doorstep of the Rocinante. This outing is less about adrenaline-rush space battles (though there are a few bullets and explosions) and more about the science and the murder mystery, as well as the continuing arc about sleeper agents "Sohiro" and "Mayes" as they steadfastly continue their agendas despite no concrete evidence that Duarte even remembers them. Some other threads and character developments from the previous volume are also followed up on here, weaving stories that, along with continued excellence in artwork, still make me feel like I've watched new episodes of a show that remains a favorite of mine and a book series that's in the top tier. I'm looking forward to seeing where this is all going.

You Might Also Enjoy:
The Expanse: Dragon Tooth, Volume 1 (Andy Diggle) - My Review
To Be Taught, If Fortunate (Becky Chambers) - My Review
Ocean/Orbiter Deluxe Edition (Warren Ellis) - My Review

Nettle and Bone (T. Kingfisher)

Nettle and Bone
T. Kingfisher
Tor
Fiction, Fantasy
***** (Great)

DESCRIPTION: In fairy tales, the princess who marries a prince gets a happy ending... but not Marra's sisters. As the third daughter of a minor king and queen, she watched as Mother sent eldest Damia off to marry Prince Vorling of the Northern Kingdom, there to secure peace for their own small nation - only for her to return in a funeral shroud not long after, victim of an unfortunate accident. When Marra's second sister, Kania, is sent to marry Vorling in Damia's place, Marra is packed off to a convent to serve the Lady of Grackles (and be kept safely out of the way, against future political need). But when she visits Kania years later for the birth of her neice, Marra realizes something is very, very wrong in the Northern Kingdom. Damia died of no accident, but was killed by her husband, and Kania will only last until she's delivered the male heir he needs... if that long. And if she fails, Mother will not hesitate to sacrifice Marra for the safety of their realm in yet another doomed marriage to an abusive and murderous man.
Eventually, she comes to one conclusion: the only way to secure the safety of her sister and herself is for Prince Vorling to die.
Thus, Marra sets out in secret from the convent, to find a witch to help her do what she cannot do herself. Her journey will take her to cursed lands and goblin markets, facing impossible challenges and unexpected dangers at every turn. Along the way, she might find the hero she needs - or she might find nothing but her own grave.

REVIEW: It's been a bit since I read a story that earned that elusive full fifth star in the ratings, with that little extra inexplicable click or spark that kicks it over the top. Nettle and Bone managed that feat, somehow packing a full novel's worth of story and character and worldbuilding and depth into fewer than 250 pages.
At the start, Marra is an atypical heroine for a fantasy story, for all that the reader first meets her in a bone pit wiring together dog bones while hiding from cursed cannibals. She's not a slim, beautiful princess, but a bit short and a bit round and a bit plain, plus more than a little sheltered, without the sass or pluck or inherent cleverness that would mark her for great things in other tales. Her relationships are complicated things, especially with her close family, and she struggles sometimes to reconcile how, for instance, a mother who loves her and her sisters can also callously slide them about the political game board, the good of their little kingdom always winning out. Marra tries to tell herself she's exempt from these manipulations, especially during her years of peace and simplicity at the convent; even when the full truth finally settles on her, seeping through naivete and ignorance and willful blindness to cruelties and truth she just does not want to believe, she clings to her own insignificance as an unattractive third daughter as proof against misfortune... but, even if she is safe (which she knows, deep down, she is not), she finds she cannot live with Kania's suffering at Vorling's hand. Nor is it so simple to just strike down Vorling through poison or a hired sword; he and his entire line are protected by birth gifts from a poweful godmother, far stronger than the one that blessed Marra's line (a fairly feeble gift of health, which clearly didn't do Damia much good against Vorling's rage). Thus begins her quest to find a way to circumvent the magic, a journey that brings her to the doorstep of an irascible bone-witch tending a long-forgotten graveyard with a demon-souled chicken as a familiar. Under pressure, Marra finds strength and determination as she's faced with three impossible tasks before the bone-witch will deign to help her, but that's just the beginning of a truly arduous journey. Victories are not easily gained, and even most of the way through she has no idea just how she's going to save Kania without dooming her own kingdom to the wrath of a much larger nation, but she manages to keep going, mostly because she has no other choice. Along the way, she gathers more sidekicks, including Bonedog (the dog made of silver-bound bones, as loyal a mutt as ever lived... or died... or lived again) and a disgraced knight of a distant land. Nobody is flat or obvious, their interactions interesting and sometimes quite fun and lively, nor is anyone beyond mistakes. Around them, an interesting world unfolds, some bits familiar from old fairy tales and others being unique, or at least assembled into something new and intriguing. There are a few sparks of romance, but nothing that comes to dominate the plot, as they all have much bigger issues to cope with. The tale unfolds without many obvious twists, all building to a solid and satisfying climax and resolution.
Despite a little initial wariness about the protagonist Marra, I was won over quickly enough. I can't think of a single quibble worth noting here, so I went ahead and crowned this book with the top rating.

You Might Also Enjoy:
A Spindle Splintered (Alix E. Harrow) - My Review
Thornhedge (T. Kingfisher) - My Review
The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea (Axie Oh) - My Review

Horizon (Scott Westerfield)

Horizon
The Horizon series, Book 1
Scott Westerfield
Scholastic
Fiction, MG Adventure/Horror/Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Boston middle-schoolers Molly, Javi, Anna, and Oliver are excited to travel to Japan to compete in the robot soccer world championships. Yoshi dreads reuniting with his stern father in Tokyo after a falling-out with his American mother. Twins Kira and Akiko are going home from a European boarding school. Caleb has his own reasons for being on the jet.
None of them make it to Japan.
As they are passing through the Arctic circle, something terrible and inexplicable happens to their plane, a bolt of energy that tears through the cockpit and cabin and rips the jetliner apart like so much cardboard in the sky. Only the eight kids are left by the time the battered wreck lands... not on Arctic ice, but in a tropical jungle that's like nothing they've ever heard of. The plants are more red than green, the wildlife's peculiar, and there's a bizarre artifact with strange properties among the wreckage. Where are they? What happened to their plane? And how are these eight kids, few of whom have any practical wilderness survival skills, ever going to get back home?

REVIEW: Yet another impulse borrow from Libby, Horizon promises adventure and danger and strange wonders, and delivers in full.
The core characters are part of a middle-school robotics team, turning their engineer mindsets to the bizarre landscape and its weird wonders and dangers, finding good use for their knowledge of physics, but there are some situations where the scientific method isn't practical. Yoshi's background has a few more practicalities, though it's his love of anime and manga that leads him to step up to the challenge, realizing that the first thing that you do when you find yourself in a strange world is secure your survival basics: food, shelter, and water. Caleb is clearly used to being a leader through physical presence alone, being the oldest and biggest of the survivors/castaways, though while he initially comes across as a "dumb jock" type of limited usefulness, he turns out to have needed skills, as do they all (well, almost all - Oliver, the youngest of the group, doesn't really have a particular talent, though his inclusion in the flight and ensuing disaster give his older robotics teammates something else to feel guilty about, as they're the ones who talked his protective parents into letting him come on the trip). The setup and the setting offer a nice, interesting, and dangerous challenge for the kids, an impossible tropical jungle that may not even be on Earth for all they can initially tell (the mystery of where they are is resolved in this book, though of course a lot more questions remain). Everywhere they turn they find new dangers and new strangeness, all of which sometimes feels like an intentional puzzle or test and sometimes feels like the evolutionary indifference to human survival that makes deep wilderness so inherently dangerous for the unprepared - such as kids who literally fell out of the sky into a jungle with little more than the clothes on their backs. Naturally, despite some friction and different ideas of how to proceed, everyone must come together to survive... and not all of them make it to the end of the book.
From a fairly quick start, the action and intrigue keep up to the very last page... a last page that promotes the associated Horizon app game. (I admit to smirking a bit as the audiobook faithfully read aloud the instructions for downloading and activating the game, including the copying of symbols in a particular sequence as seen on the printed page. C'mon, audiobook producers - did nobody honestly stop and think that maybe you could cut that useless bit out?) I came very close to adding an extra half-star, but there were a few places where Westerfield played coy with information and reveals that barely held it back (though the Good rating obviously means I still enjoyed it, of course). I expect I'll track down the next book in the series at some point, as I'm definitely curious about where things are going.

You Might Also Enjoy:
Alone (Megan E. Freeman) - My Review
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The Last Murder at the End of the World (Stuart Turton)

The Last Murder at the End of the World
Stuart Turton
Sourcebooks Landmark
Fiction, Literary/Mystery/Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: The world ended in an unstoppable mist that spread around the globe, full of glowing insects that devoured every living thing they touched. Now, only one island remains, a former military base turned elite science lab called Blackheath, protected by an energy barrier. A village of one hundred and twenty-two people manages to survive under the guidance of the last scientists, the "Elders", and the omnipresent artificial intelligence known as Abi, which sees into the villagers' thoughts and can even guide their actions or alter memories as needed. It is a peaceful life, without the conflicts and prejudices that so poisoned the old world.
Until the murder.
One morning, the villagers wake to find a fire in their village - and among the bodies is that of Neima, the oldest and most beloved of the Elders. Worse, none can remember what happened, though chaos throughout the village hints that something terrible indeed took place. At first glance, it looks like a tragic accident - but one villager, Emory, has spent her whole life asking questions, and she has questions aplenty about Neima's death. When the villagers learn that the barrier that held back the deadly mist has fallen with the scientist, the quest to find the killer and unravel the truth becomes even more urgent.

REVIEW: Another impulse borrow from Libby, the concept intrigued me, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi with a mystery plot. The execution, however, can waver, and it starts to lose its way toward the end.
Told from the omniscient viewpoint of Abi, the tale starts with a countdown to the potential extinction of the last humans, from those living on the island of Blackheath to the ones in stasis in the old bunkers underground. Despite being on a clock, though, the tale takes its time setting itself up, drifting through various characters as it shows the reader the world of the last living sanctuary on Earth. Just who or what created the deadly mist is never revealed, though there's a strong spiritual/religious vibe underneath things, a suggestion that the mist acted as a punishment against a world lost to madness and sin (and sucks to be any other animal on God's green earth). In the village, Neima has worked hard for over ninety years to create a little utopia for the villagers, who may not be entirely what they appear to be, though the other two scientists seem indifferent at best to the people, each with their own agendas that sometimes clash with Neima's visions. With her death, the island is thrown into chaos even before the villagers realize that the mist is slowly encroaching on their sanctuary.
The most pivotal character, Emory, is a villager who has never really fit in with her peers. Unlike the others, who are happy to follow orders and sacrifice themselves for the good of the many, Emory always asks questions, to the point where she's never found an occupation she can stick with longer than a few months. Even her apprenticeship to Elder Thea, who explores the wilderness beyond the boundaries of the village (boundaries that Abi enforces by literally taking control of the villagers and turning them around if they try to cross without an Elder's permission) for old relics and technology, where her questioning mind might have been put to decent use, ended in disappointment when she wouldn't blindly follow any instruction the Elder gave her and always had to know why. Neima, however, indulges her curiosities, and even lets her read from the handful of surviving fiction books, particularly mysteries (the other villagers have little interest in old-world stories, considering them too violent and "unbelievable" with how people treated each other). Thus, when a detective is finally needed at the end of the world, Emory is there to step up... not without significant resistance, though. It's only Abi's demand that Neima's murder be solved and the culprit named - the artificial intelligence's demand before overriding the scientist's "dead man's switch" that deactivated the barrier upon her death - that allows the village of born-and-bred sheep to tolerate her investigation. Of course, the investigation would not be necessary if Abi were a little more cooperative, but it has its own secret agenda that it alludes to frequently, constantly reminding the reader that it has a Big Plan and everything it's doing (or not doing), no matter how contradictory and how it seems suspiciously like actions meant to draw out a storyline, is in service to that Plan. It gets more than a touch irritating, like the guy sitting next to you as you read a book he's already read, smirking and winking and asking if you've figured out the twist or gotten to "that part - no hints, you'll know it" yet. In any event, Emory's investigation leads to many revelations about the nature of Blackheath, the villagers, and the scientists. It also leads to many meandering tangents and red herrings, several of which seem to emphasize just how superior to modern humanity this last tiny remnant of civilization has become, how all the horrors and tragedy of the mist must've been a fair price to pay for this little flock of holy sheep to find a new Eden. (Early on, Emory's father even carves a statue of the girl reaching for an apple off a tree, because apparently the reader had to be bludgeoned over the head with the Biblical symbolism.) I found myself not really liking the vast majority of the characters after a while, which was the point for a few of them but was probably not intended for so many of them... including Abi.
Anyway, things move along, sometimes at a decent pace with some solid investigation and interesting worldbuilding, sometimes less so as it starts to feel like everyone's running in circles and talking past each other (all with the big extinction clock ticking away in the background, which one would think would spark some slight urgency and compulsion to cooperate in even the most recalcitrant person, but apparently not), all of which feels unnecessarily complicated by Abi pulling everyone's strings (because of course the entity knows full well everything that's happened). The climax of the mystery and the encroachment of the fog coincide to a manufactured degree, and even then revelations are drawn out. The results of at least one of those incidents almost had me rolling my eyes at work. Afterwards, things trundle along toward a foregone conclusion of an epilogue that could've been worse.
The Last Murder at the End of the World has several points in its favor, with some nice ideas and some solid sleuthing (when it lets itself sleuth properly), but it also has some unfortunate word flab and unnecessarily heavy-handed Themes that held it down.

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