Finna
The LitenVerse series, Book 1
Nino Cipri
Tordotcom
Fiction, Humor/Sci-Fi
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: If retail work is Hell, then the Swedish-based home furnishing store LitenVärld is its own circle of that Hell. It's bad enough dealing with the disorienting, mazelike floor plan composed of a series of bizarre themed rooms, but now Ava has to cope with a bad breakup involving another employee, Jules. She even shuffled her schedule to avoid being there at the same time as them, even though the odds of the two crossing paths in the cavernous place were minimal. Then Derek calls out sick one dismal February day, so Ava has to slog in to work - and, of course, who does she run into almost first thing in the door but Jules. Just one day, she tells herself. She can get through just this one day in the same building as her ex. What could go wrong?
When a distraught customer tells the manager that her grandmother has vanished, Ava doesn't find it too alarming. Hell, she's an employee and even she gets turned around in this place. But when she goes to look where the woman was last spotted, she finds two things: Jules, and a weird room that definitely was not on the floor plan this morning... a room just beyond a weird glowing purple ring.
According to the manager and a poorly-dubbed training video, this is "just" a wormhole; the poor old woman must've wandered through into one of countless parallel dimensions with their own parallel LitenVärlds, some less hospitable than others. There used to be an entire team dedicated to wormhole retrieval, but cost cutting measures left the store with just a handheld "finna" device to track the wayward traveler, to be carried through the portal by whichever employees draw the short straw - inevitably, Ava and Jules.
REVIEW: I have been inside an IKEA (which "LitenVärld" is quite clearly inspired by) only once in my life, but that was more than enough: a strange, cramped maze of stuff, funneling customers from points A to Z without deviation or delay, disgorging the masses at the food court/checkout like spitting products off the end of an entirely impersonal assembly line. As dehumanizing and disorienting as that shopping experience was, I can only imagine how it feels to employees... and if an extra dimension or a thousand were tacked on, that would be a punishment worthy of anything Dante dreamed up.
Cipri takes the hellscape that is modern retail employment and crosses it with the multiverse, which adds a whole new chapter of canned responses to the managerial handbook and a whole new tier of instructional videos to be shown to hapless employees. In LitenVärld, the opening of a wormhole in the middle of the store is just an unfortunate side-effect of their innovative layouts, and one more onerous duty for management to drop onto underpaid and undertrained employees - incentivized not by bonuses or overtime (perish the thought), but with gift cards to a cheap restaurant... because, by management's logic, what low-wage worker wouldn't risk their lives for a discounted bowl of pasta? Ava already didn't want to be at work to begin with, still nursing a days-old breakup. Jules loathes every minute of every day they have to spend in the horrid place; the chance to explore the multiverse appeals strongly to the wanderlust they've nursed since childhood but have so rarely been able to afford to indulge. The two are forced to cooperate as they step through the purple ring and into their first other dimension, guided by the fickle "finna" that points the way but utterly fails to warn them of the many dangers they encounter in the worlds they're compelled to cross (because of course it can't be as simple as finding the old woman in the first place they go... or, rather, it both is and isn't, in the way of multiverses, and I can't get into more detail without some spoilers). Along the way, Ava and Jules must both re-evaluate their relationship, which was not so much a matter of one of them being right and the other wrong but of two flawed people whose broken edges wound up cutting each other rather than aligning. Even if they were ill-fated as lovers, could they possibly still be friends? Sometimes it takes fleeing from the dangers of a monster-filled dimension to rediscover what truly matters in life, and who matters in it.
With a certain dark humor and a sense of wonder about the possibilities of the multiverse, as well as some horror overtones now and again, Finna manages to be short enough to not overplay its premise or its characters, though even then I could find Ava trying as a main character now and again. I'm not sure I feel any need to read onward in the series, as this is a likely a gimmick with a limited shelf life.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Warehouse (Rob Hart) - My Review
Lost in the Moment and Found (Seanan McGuire) - My Review
Time Travel Dinosaur (Matt Youngmark) - My Review
Friday, November 1, 2024
Thursday, October 31, 2024
Gunpowder Moon (David Pedreira)
Gunpowder Moon
David Pedreira
HarperVoyager
Fiction, Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: The Moon smells like gunpowder, a cordite stink noted by everyone from the first astronauts to the miners of the late twenty-first century, but no weapon has ever been fired there. Until now...
When veteran Caden Dechert took a job to the Moon, he hoped he could finally leave the worst of Earth behind. Even a massive climate collapse that nearly dropped civilization back to the Dark Ages for a few decades couldn't break humanity's war addiction, and Dechert is beyond tired of killing for whatever cause top brass cooks up. So far, space has been subject of a tenuous peace, even as commercial ventures race to harvest water and raw materials (particularly helium-3, the fuel that may take humans to the stars) and spacefaring nations stake their claims everywhere from the Moon to Jupiter. Sure, there's been some saber-rattling and diplomatic one-upmanship, particularly between America and China, but nobody would be foolish enough to start anything on the lunar surface. Up here, the rule is help whoever needs helping, because death is too close at hand for everyone. Nationalism and violence are old Earth habits, best left behind.
Then Dechert and the crew of the American mining base Sea of Serenity 1 discover acts of sabotage on remote equipment... and one of their own dies after someone plants a bomb on their vehicle.
The obvious suspect is their nearest lunar neighbor, the Chinese base New Beijing 2. But even as the military and the mining administrators ramp up the rhetoric and start stockpiling weapons for the first-ever offworld armed conflict, Dechert just can't bring himself to believe it. He knows the commander of New Beijing 2. It just doesn't make sense that the Chinese would provoke a conflict like this when they have at least as much to lose as the Americans, and the logistics stretch credulity to the breaking point. With everyone else eager to spill blood, Dechert races against the clock to figure out who really killed his crewmate, and why they seem so eager to get more people killed.
REVIEW: Gunpowder Moon has an interesting concept and setting, and a decent enough main character in the war-weary veteran-turned-mining-base-commander Dechert. At some point, though, I found myself left behind by the story and characters, lost in a sea of flashbacks and tactics and a testosterone-heavy cast.
From the beginning, the innate strangeness of lunar existence is clearly established, along with the Moon's inherent hostility (or indifference indistinguishable from hostility) to Earth life. This is not a place humans will ever really belong, not when jagged grains of regolith perpetually defy the best filtration and threaten machinery and life support, temperatures flux between deep freeze and lethally hot, solar radiation makes prolonged surface exposure deadly, gravity and distances are deceptive, and more threats await even the experienced astronaut. Nor are extraplanetary bases technological utopias; sent by penny-pinching private conglomerates and cash-strapped desperate nations still clawing their way back to their former glory after global disasters, everything that doesn't directly increase productivity and profit margins is neglected, regardless of how it might endanger the lives of those working there. Crews tend to be eccentric and tightly-knit groups, a byproduct of close quarters living in an inherently dangerous environment (like life in a war zone or on an oil rig, only exponentially more isolated), and if you can't trust the guy (or, very rarely, girl) in the bunk next to yours, you can't trust anyone. Or, at least, that's how it used to be, before the sabotage comes to light and the Moon experiences its first homicide.
Dechert left active military service when he could no longer take the killing and the losses among his comrades and subordinates; they always start feeling like family to him, and somehow they always die while he survives. His lunar job was supposed to be a way to get away from all that, yet he nevertheless finds himself thinking of the little crew of Sea of Serenity 1 as yet another family... so when one of them is killed - not in a combat situation where death is part of the ambient risks, but on the Moon, the one place humans have yet to sully with violence - he can't help but take it personally. Even from the start, he knows something doesn't sound right about the official party line, that it was all China's fault. But how is he supposed to find the truth when his every message is monitored by both the military and the mining corporation, and will anyone even listen once it becomes clear how many people were champing at the bit to declare a lunar war? Given his own experiences, which are related through numerous flashbacks, one would think Dechert would be a little less credulous that the wheels of war could be so easily stopped by the efforts of one man, though at least part of that is his own sheer desperation to end the insanity that has ruined his life and so many others. Even as he digs for answers, the base is taken over by soldiers and things quickly spin out of control.
It's clear that Pedreira did quite a bit of research to get the physics and the tactics right... and here is where the story started to lose me, as the technical details and tactics grow into long, sometimes confusing slogs and occasional name soup. Peripheral characters often feel like too-familiar military sci-fi tropes (particularly the lone woman on Dechert's crew, Lane, who is never overtly ogled or romanced by him yet somehow still feels objectified). The pacing, between those slogs, is pretty brisk, and it builds to a reasonably satisfactory conclusion, though the wrap-up after the fact becomes another slog, driving home its themes about war seeming to be an innate and inextricable trait of the human species with the subtlety of a meteor. I've read worse stories, but once more this ultimately just isn't my cup of cocoa.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Calculating Stars (Mary Robinette Kowal) - My Review
Saturn Run (John Sandford and Ctien) - My Review
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Dennis E. Taylor) - My Review
David Pedreira
HarperVoyager
Fiction, Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: The Moon smells like gunpowder, a cordite stink noted by everyone from the first astronauts to the miners of the late twenty-first century, but no weapon has ever been fired there. Until now...
When veteran Caden Dechert took a job to the Moon, he hoped he could finally leave the worst of Earth behind. Even a massive climate collapse that nearly dropped civilization back to the Dark Ages for a few decades couldn't break humanity's war addiction, and Dechert is beyond tired of killing for whatever cause top brass cooks up. So far, space has been subject of a tenuous peace, even as commercial ventures race to harvest water and raw materials (particularly helium-3, the fuel that may take humans to the stars) and spacefaring nations stake their claims everywhere from the Moon to Jupiter. Sure, there's been some saber-rattling and diplomatic one-upmanship, particularly between America and China, but nobody would be foolish enough to start anything on the lunar surface. Up here, the rule is help whoever needs helping, because death is too close at hand for everyone. Nationalism and violence are old Earth habits, best left behind.
Then Dechert and the crew of the American mining base Sea of Serenity 1 discover acts of sabotage on remote equipment... and one of their own dies after someone plants a bomb on their vehicle.
The obvious suspect is their nearest lunar neighbor, the Chinese base New Beijing 2. But even as the military and the mining administrators ramp up the rhetoric and start stockpiling weapons for the first-ever offworld armed conflict, Dechert just can't bring himself to believe it. He knows the commander of New Beijing 2. It just doesn't make sense that the Chinese would provoke a conflict like this when they have at least as much to lose as the Americans, and the logistics stretch credulity to the breaking point. With everyone else eager to spill blood, Dechert races against the clock to figure out who really killed his crewmate, and why they seem so eager to get more people killed.
REVIEW: Gunpowder Moon has an interesting concept and setting, and a decent enough main character in the war-weary veteran-turned-mining-base-commander Dechert. At some point, though, I found myself left behind by the story and characters, lost in a sea of flashbacks and tactics and a testosterone-heavy cast.
From the beginning, the innate strangeness of lunar existence is clearly established, along with the Moon's inherent hostility (or indifference indistinguishable from hostility) to Earth life. This is not a place humans will ever really belong, not when jagged grains of regolith perpetually defy the best filtration and threaten machinery and life support, temperatures flux between deep freeze and lethally hot, solar radiation makes prolonged surface exposure deadly, gravity and distances are deceptive, and more threats await even the experienced astronaut. Nor are extraplanetary bases technological utopias; sent by penny-pinching private conglomerates and cash-strapped desperate nations still clawing their way back to their former glory after global disasters, everything that doesn't directly increase productivity and profit margins is neglected, regardless of how it might endanger the lives of those working there. Crews tend to be eccentric and tightly-knit groups, a byproduct of close quarters living in an inherently dangerous environment (like life in a war zone or on an oil rig, only exponentially more isolated), and if you can't trust the guy (or, very rarely, girl) in the bunk next to yours, you can't trust anyone. Or, at least, that's how it used to be, before the sabotage comes to light and the Moon experiences its first homicide.
Dechert left active military service when he could no longer take the killing and the losses among his comrades and subordinates; they always start feeling like family to him, and somehow they always die while he survives. His lunar job was supposed to be a way to get away from all that, yet he nevertheless finds himself thinking of the little crew of Sea of Serenity 1 as yet another family... so when one of them is killed - not in a combat situation where death is part of the ambient risks, but on the Moon, the one place humans have yet to sully with violence - he can't help but take it personally. Even from the start, he knows something doesn't sound right about the official party line, that it was all China's fault. But how is he supposed to find the truth when his every message is monitored by both the military and the mining corporation, and will anyone even listen once it becomes clear how many people were champing at the bit to declare a lunar war? Given his own experiences, which are related through numerous flashbacks, one would think Dechert would be a little less credulous that the wheels of war could be so easily stopped by the efforts of one man, though at least part of that is his own sheer desperation to end the insanity that has ruined his life and so many others. Even as he digs for answers, the base is taken over by soldiers and things quickly spin out of control.
It's clear that Pedreira did quite a bit of research to get the physics and the tactics right... and here is where the story started to lose me, as the technical details and tactics grow into long, sometimes confusing slogs and occasional name soup. Peripheral characters often feel like too-familiar military sci-fi tropes (particularly the lone woman on Dechert's crew, Lane, who is never overtly ogled or romanced by him yet somehow still feels objectified). The pacing, between those slogs, is pretty brisk, and it builds to a reasonably satisfactory conclusion, though the wrap-up after the fact becomes another slog, driving home its themes about war seeming to be an innate and inextricable trait of the human species with the subtlety of a meteor. I've read worse stories, but once more this ultimately just isn't my cup of cocoa.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Calculating Stars (Mary Robinette Kowal) - My Review
Saturn Run (John Sandford and Ctien) - My Review
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Dennis E. Taylor) - My Review
Good Girls Don't Die (Christina Henry)
Good Girls Don't Die
Christina Henry
Berkley
Fiction, Thriller
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: Celia has no memory of her life before she found herself standing in a suburban kitchen, with a young girl (a daughter?) demanding lunch and a husband on his way to work. Nothing about her home, her family, or her job - owner of a small-town family Italian restaurant - rings a bell, either, but whenever she tries too hard to remember, she gets a splitting headache. There's also something very strange about the town and the people, almost like they're reciting lines from a cozy mystery story rather than talking as normal people talk. When she finds the body of an irascible neighbor in the dumpster and the local police consider her a prime suspect, her amnesia becomes the least of her worries...
Allie's twenty-first birthday was supposed to be spent at the beach with her best friends Cam and Madison - until Brad, Cam's controlling boyfriend, invited himself and his friend Steve (also Madison's beau) along and unilaterally changed their destination to a remote cabin deep in the woods. It's just like something out of the slasher movies Allie loves to watch... until strange noises in the middle of the night make the slasher comparison all too real...
Maggie doesn't remember what happened after she fell asleep last night, but she wakes up dressed in a strange, numbered uniform with nine other similarly-disoriented women. A uniformed man informs them that they each have had a loved one abducted - Maggie is shown a brief video of her own terrified daughter as proof - and that, if they fail to complete a maze and series of challenges in time, those loved ones will be executed. Refusal to participate brings swift and lethal repercussions. She always used to think she'd be a solid survivor in the young adult dystopian tales she reads, but soon learn that words on a page are a far cry from living the nightmare...
Three women, three impossible situations, three story genres seemingly sprung to life around them - and, unbeknownst to any of them, one common enemy who means to see none of them walk away.
REVIEW: I've previous read and quite enjoyed another story by Christina Henry (The Girl in Red, an apocalypse-tinged riff on "Little Red Riding Hood"), and was looking for a seasonally appropriate read, so when this popped up on Libby I figured it was worth a shot. While the premise is interesting, it all gets drug down in the ratings by an ending that lingers too long and hammers home its point too hard, long past effectiveness.
Starting with Celia, the book tells each woman's story as their ordinary lives quickly dissolve into scenarios straight from a horror movie. The situations and protagonists are different enough to avoid straight-up repetition, though it's clear early on that there are similarities throughout. Even as they realize how things don't quite add up, a slow accumulation of details and discrepancies that seem more like staging than reality, they have no choice but to live through the terrible things happening to and around them even as they try to put the bigger puzzle pieces together. While none of them turn out to be the superstar heroines of their favored genres they imagined they'd become, they all find ways to step up to the plate and match wits with their apparent captors. Hints of what's really going on come from between-chapter snippets of online chat rooms and conversations between genre fans, conversations that are intruded upon by toxic trolls and take ugly turns.
On their own, the three tales almost work like a themed short story collection. Maybe Good Girls Don't Die would've been better served by being just that, leaving more mystery over how they each ended up in their surreal, borderline preternaturally nightmarish situations. But, skirting spoiler territory, what happens after they figure out the gist of what's going on and the three threads come together becomes an overlong slog, reducing their common enemy/enemies to caricature levels that sell short the central themes of misogyny and toxic masculinity turning the lives of girls and women into everyday horror tales, too often turning us against each other. (I would've thought the baddies were too over-the-top, but recent current events and political campaigns unfortunately show how many people apparently embrace that level of extreme, violent contempt for anyone without a particular set of genitalia.) Given what they had to go through to get to that point in the story, the things they had to do and who they had to become, that final bit should not have taken nearly so long to drag out to the conclusion. As a reader, I more than got Henry's point long, long before the book ended.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Beauty Queens (Libba Bray) - My Review
The Girl in Red (Christina Henry) - My Review
Comfort Me With Apples (Catherynne M. Valente) - My Review
Christina Henry
Berkley
Fiction, Thriller
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: Celia has no memory of her life before she found herself standing in a suburban kitchen, with a young girl (a daughter?) demanding lunch and a husband on his way to work. Nothing about her home, her family, or her job - owner of a small-town family Italian restaurant - rings a bell, either, but whenever she tries too hard to remember, she gets a splitting headache. There's also something very strange about the town and the people, almost like they're reciting lines from a cozy mystery story rather than talking as normal people talk. When she finds the body of an irascible neighbor in the dumpster and the local police consider her a prime suspect, her amnesia becomes the least of her worries...
Allie's twenty-first birthday was supposed to be spent at the beach with her best friends Cam and Madison - until Brad, Cam's controlling boyfriend, invited himself and his friend Steve (also Madison's beau) along and unilaterally changed their destination to a remote cabin deep in the woods. It's just like something out of the slasher movies Allie loves to watch... until strange noises in the middle of the night make the slasher comparison all too real...
Maggie doesn't remember what happened after she fell asleep last night, but she wakes up dressed in a strange, numbered uniform with nine other similarly-disoriented women. A uniformed man informs them that they each have had a loved one abducted - Maggie is shown a brief video of her own terrified daughter as proof - and that, if they fail to complete a maze and series of challenges in time, those loved ones will be executed. Refusal to participate brings swift and lethal repercussions. She always used to think she'd be a solid survivor in the young adult dystopian tales she reads, but soon learn that words on a page are a far cry from living the nightmare...
Three women, three impossible situations, three story genres seemingly sprung to life around them - and, unbeknownst to any of them, one common enemy who means to see none of them walk away.
REVIEW: I've previous read and quite enjoyed another story by Christina Henry (The Girl in Red, an apocalypse-tinged riff on "Little Red Riding Hood"), and was looking for a seasonally appropriate read, so when this popped up on Libby I figured it was worth a shot. While the premise is interesting, it all gets drug down in the ratings by an ending that lingers too long and hammers home its point too hard, long past effectiveness.
Starting with Celia, the book tells each woman's story as their ordinary lives quickly dissolve into scenarios straight from a horror movie. The situations and protagonists are different enough to avoid straight-up repetition, though it's clear early on that there are similarities throughout. Even as they realize how things don't quite add up, a slow accumulation of details and discrepancies that seem more like staging than reality, they have no choice but to live through the terrible things happening to and around them even as they try to put the bigger puzzle pieces together. While none of them turn out to be the superstar heroines of their favored genres they imagined they'd become, they all find ways to step up to the plate and match wits with their apparent captors. Hints of what's really going on come from between-chapter snippets of online chat rooms and conversations between genre fans, conversations that are intruded upon by toxic trolls and take ugly turns.
On their own, the three tales almost work like a themed short story collection. Maybe Good Girls Don't Die would've been better served by being just that, leaving more mystery over how they each ended up in their surreal, borderline preternaturally nightmarish situations. But, skirting spoiler territory, what happens after they figure out the gist of what's going on and the three threads come together becomes an overlong slog, reducing their common enemy/enemies to caricature levels that sell short the central themes of misogyny and toxic masculinity turning the lives of girls and women into everyday horror tales, too often turning us against each other. (I would've thought the baddies were too over-the-top, but recent current events and political campaigns unfortunately show how many people apparently embrace that level of extreme, violent contempt for anyone without a particular set of genitalia.) Given what they had to go through to get to that point in the story, the things they had to do and who they had to become, that final bit should not have taken nearly so long to drag out to the conclusion. As a reader, I more than got Henry's point long, long before the book ended.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Beauty Queens (Libba Bray) - My Review
The Girl in Red (Christina Henry) - My Review
Comfort Me With Apples (Catherynne M. Valente) - My Review
October Site Update
Happy Halloween! The main Brightdreamer Books site has been updated with the month's new reviews.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Friday, October 25, 2024
Apocalypse Kings (Derek Landy)
Apocalypse Kings
The Skulduggery Pleasant series, Book 5.6
Derek Landy
HarperCollins
Fiction, YA? Adventure/Fantasy/Horror/Humor/Mystery
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Adedayo thought he'd been cursed when objects started flying off shelves around him. It wasn't until his Nigerian grandmother came to stay with his family in Dublin that he learned about the hidden community of sorcerers and adepts and other bearers of magic, a family trait that skipped his mother but apparently manifested in him. Unfortunately, she spoke little English and he knew almost no Yoruban, and she passed away before teaching him more than a few small tricks - but she left him a strange wooden box and a cryptic phrase he struggles to understand. Inside the box are three powerful gods, trapped since the wars against the Faceless Ones... and when Adedayo inadvertently unleashes them, something terrible is bound to happen.
Fortunately, the next day at school, he meets a peculiar new girl: Valkyrie Cain, another mage. Along with her partner Skulduggery Pleasant - a literal walking skeleton - she has come to track down the so-called Apocalypse Kings before they can enact their eons-old plan. They have reason to believe that the gods are currently hiding somewhere in his school... but their efforts to blend in as they search are hardly seamless. The two investigators may need a little help with this job, but what can an untrained sorcerer who can barely summon a spark do against a trio of vengeance-minded deities?
REVIEW: This novella feels like an oddball in the series, and it is, written later as a (near) standalone project for World Book Day. This may explain why it feels a little neither-here-nor-there; it ostensibly takes place after the fifth book (which I just read via audiobook earlier this very week), but Valkyrie and Skulduggery don't quite "feel" like the characters I just left. Of course, this is written from an outsider's perspective - not just outside the core duo, but outside the Dublin magical community - but even given Adedayo's ignorance of the quite terrible and pivotal horrors that just elapsed in Dublin's magical community (though one might think he would've noticed the citywide lockdown, even if he didn't know the truth), this story just doesn't seem to fit where the chronology claims it fits.
Disregarding some wobbly continuity with the larger whole, the story has a more or less similar aesthetic, humor melding with horror. Some deliberate tweaks of school story cliches add to the humor, such as when the obligatory "meet the cliques" lunchroom talk reveals that nobody's really that shallow as to identify themselves solely by one aspect of their personalities. Adedayo himself is technically 15, but reads a bit younger, possibly because he's such a neophyte to magic and also because he's still very confused and unsettled about his own life, not sure what he even wants to do now, let alone in the future; he's in debate club because he was told he needs an extracurricular for future college applications, but he hates arguing and always loses. When Valkyrie arrives after the gods escape, he's relieved that there's someone older and more experienced to take charge. Granted, she's only a year older, but she acts almost adult in her confidence, not too surprising given what she's been through. Skulduggery, meanwhile, tries to go undercover as a schoolteacher, complicated by the fact that it's been ages - almost literally - since he had to interact with "mortals", and he's not even used to wearing a (false) flesh-and-blood face. When things inevitably go wrong, Adedayo ends up being the one who has to step up. Things wrap up pretty well by the end.
I came close to shaving a half-star for that "this doesn't quite fit" sense, which made me feel a bit more like I was reading rather good but noncanon fanfic than an official series entry, but wound up giving it the benefit of the doubt.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Playing With Fire (Derek Landy) - My Review
Once There Was (Kiyash Monsef) - My Review
Akata Witch (Nnedi Okorafor) - My Review
The Skulduggery Pleasant series, Book 5.6
Derek Landy
HarperCollins
Fiction, YA? Adventure/Fantasy/Horror/Humor/Mystery
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Adedayo thought he'd been cursed when objects started flying off shelves around him. It wasn't until his Nigerian grandmother came to stay with his family in Dublin that he learned about the hidden community of sorcerers and adepts and other bearers of magic, a family trait that skipped his mother but apparently manifested in him. Unfortunately, she spoke little English and he knew almost no Yoruban, and she passed away before teaching him more than a few small tricks - but she left him a strange wooden box and a cryptic phrase he struggles to understand. Inside the box are three powerful gods, trapped since the wars against the Faceless Ones... and when Adedayo inadvertently unleashes them, something terrible is bound to happen.
Fortunately, the next day at school, he meets a peculiar new girl: Valkyrie Cain, another mage. Along with her partner Skulduggery Pleasant - a literal walking skeleton - she has come to track down the so-called Apocalypse Kings before they can enact their eons-old plan. They have reason to believe that the gods are currently hiding somewhere in his school... but their efforts to blend in as they search are hardly seamless. The two investigators may need a little help with this job, but what can an untrained sorcerer who can barely summon a spark do against a trio of vengeance-minded deities?
REVIEW: This novella feels like an oddball in the series, and it is, written later as a (near) standalone project for World Book Day. This may explain why it feels a little neither-here-nor-there; it ostensibly takes place after the fifth book (which I just read via audiobook earlier this very week), but Valkyrie and Skulduggery don't quite "feel" like the characters I just left. Of course, this is written from an outsider's perspective - not just outside the core duo, but outside the Dublin magical community - but even given Adedayo's ignorance of the quite terrible and pivotal horrors that just elapsed in Dublin's magical community (though one might think he would've noticed the citywide lockdown, even if he didn't know the truth), this story just doesn't seem to fit where the chronology claims it fits.
Disregarding some wobbly continuity with the larger whole, the story has a more or less similar aesthetic, humor melding with horror. Some deliberate tweaks of school story cliches add to the humor, such as when the obligatory "meet the cliques" lunchroom talk reveals that nobody's really that shallow as to identify themselves solely by one aspect of their personalities. Adedayo himself is technically 15, but reads a bit younger, possibly because he's such a neophyte to magic and also because he's still very confused and unsettled about his own life, not sure what he even wants to do now, let alone in the future; he's in debate club because he was told he needs an extracurricular for future college applications, but he hates arguing and always loses. When Valkyrie arrives after the gods escape, he's relieved that there's someone older and more experienced to take charge. Granted, she's only a year older, but she acts almost adult in her confidence, not too surprising given what she's been through. Skulduggery, meanwhile, tries to go undercover as a schoolteacher, complicated by the fact that it's been ages - almost literally - since he had to interact with "mortals", and he's not even used to wearing a (false) flesh-and-blood face. When things inevitably go wrong, Adedayo ends up being the one who has to step up. Things wrap up pretty well by the end.
I came close to shaving a half-star for that "this doesn't quite fit" sense, which made me feel a bit more like I was reading rather good but noncanon fanfic than an official series entry, but wound up giving it the benefit of the doubt.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Playing With Fire (Derek Landy) - My Review
Once There Was (Kiyash Monsef) - My Review
Akata Witch (Nnedi Okorafor) - My Review
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