Sea Legs (Jules Bakes)

Sea Legs

Jules Bakes, illustrations by Niki Smith
Scholastic
Fiction, MG General Fiction/Graphic Novel
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION:

Living aboard a boat would be a dream come true for most kids, but sometimes Janey gets tired of being adrift her whole life. Once in a while they drop anchor in an American port long enough for Mom and Dad to earn money, and she gets to go to school and make friends, but soon enough the red sails on the Merimaid rise and it's off across the sea again. Janey's determined to keep in touch with Rae, the best and closest friend she's ever made, but phone calls are expensive and letters sporadic and hard to mail. Then, at dock in the Bahamas, Janey meets teenager Astrid. Like Janey, Astrid lives aboard a boat, but otherwise they're nothing alike, challenging Janey to rethink her own life and her place in the world.

REVIEW:

This was an impulse borrow via the library and the Hoopla app to change up genres a bit; it's been a while since I read a graphic novel, especially one not in the fantasy/sci-fi genres, and I was looking for sea-related ideas for a personal project. Inspired by the author's own childhood aboard a boat built by her parents, Sea Legs is a coming-of-age tale as young Janey learns to navigate the difficult waters of an unusual childhood and different ways people can be friends. She loves her parents, and there are many wonderful things about life aboard the Merimaid - starlight, flying fish, colorful new places and amazing new foods - but sometimes it's tough when all she wants is friends she can see every day and a teacher who isn't her own mother.
Astrid is almost everything Janey is not: confident to the point of arrogance, cynical, (apparently) fearless, and independent to a fault. Their friendship is more a matter of proximity and a dearth of other minors on the docks than anything else; most other boat-dwellers are adults. Sometimes Janey resents Astrid's dismissive attitude and how she treats the younger girl like she's silly or stupid, but she also wants to be like Astrid... not seeing (at least not at first) how all the qualities she admires are the result of a harder life than Janey can imagine. The fact that Astrid keeps coming back to hang out with Janey speaks to something Astrid needs in a friend, too, but can't say out loud, not even to herself. Even as they form a fragile, fractious, and unlikely bond, however, the shifting seasons and tides threaten to destroy everything. The seas are never still, and neither is a life lived on the water, but sometimes you can find something to carry with you when you go.
The story moves decently. The art is bright and full of tropical colors and exotic locales, bringing to life a bygone childhood and the wonders (and hardships) of growing up on a boat. I enjoyed it.

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A Mouthful of Dust (Nghi Vo)

A Mouthful of Dust

The Singing Hills Cycle, Book 6
Nghi Vo
Tordotcom
Fiction, Fantasy
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION:

The cleric Chih and their neixin - talking hoopoe - companion Almost Brilliant have come to Baolin to record stories of the famine demon that devastated the region almost twenty years ago. Though now it's a thriving town known for its sweet leopard melons and succulent pork dishes, in those days the people were reduced to eating mud and dust and even each other, and the scars linger... as do the unquiet ghosts, tied to secrets that some people don't want in the Singing Hills archives.

REVIEW:

The Singing Hills novellas are a nice break between longer works, bite-sized tales one can finish in a single sitting yet not too simplistic or shallow to enjoy. They can also be read in most any order, mostly connected by Chih and Almost Brilliant, reminiscent of older TV shows that were more episodic adventures and less massive mytharcs to unravel, with only a few passing references to prior adventures. Here, the cleric and their bird companion have been tasked with recording tales of the region, mostly about the famine demon (in this world, there is indeed a demon at the heart of famine, a monstrous thing ever hungry for anything it has not consumed before) but also about anything else they happen upon, being curious by nature. This, naturally, does not sit well with those in power who still have shameful secrets about their actions in the face of terrible times... but hunger is a monster, whether or not a physical actual demon is involved, and when it comes to survival people can be amazed - and revolted - by what they find themselves capable of. Not for the first time, the Singing Hills abbey duo get on the wrong side of a powerful person, both because of their vocation and because of Chih's tendency to tug on loose threads in tales to see where they lead, and are mostly witnesses as a tale that started long before their arrival comes at last to its conclusion. It made for a quick and satisfying meal.

You Might Also Enjoy:

The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water (Zen Cho) - My Review
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The Empress of Salt and Fortune (Nghi Vo) - My Review

May Site Update

The month's reviews - all three of them - have been archived and updated on the main Brightdreamer Books site.

Enjoy!

(Incidentally, I may try changing my blog review template in the coming month, just in case things look weird if/when I next post a review. I really should be using headings and such, so I'm going to try that. There's no way I can retrofit old reviews at this point, though.)

Chronicles of Whetherwhy: The Age of Enchantment (Anna James)

Chronicles of Whetherwhy: The Age of Enchantment
The Chronicles of Whetherwhy series, Book 1
Anna James
Flamingo Books
Fiction, MG Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: On the island of Whetherwhy, everyone has a little magic, each influenced by the four seasons, from the creation of spring through the learning and revelation of summer, transitions and transformations of fall, and destruction and endings of winter. But only a few are enchanters, with power rooted in all four seasons. Enchanters can weave powerful spells from the threads of Whetherwhy's magic, even creating lifelike "Tangle" creatures of pure magic, and must learn to control their gifts properly lest things go terribly awry. Some even rise as far as the queen's personal retinue! That is why, at age thirteen, all children are tested to reveal their particular season of magic, and enchanters are whisked off to Thistledown Academy in the capital of Stormgrove.
Juniper Quinn wants none of that. She loves reading about adventures in books, but doesn't think she has it in her to do great things... so only her twin brother, Rafferty, knows that she has enchanter magic. She'd much rather stay in their small town of Honeyvale with their bookbinder family than go off to a big city like Stormgrove, away from everyone she knows and loves - and besides, everyone seems to think enchanters are arrogant snobs looking down on the rest of Whetherwhy. But there's no tricking the testers, so - like it or not - she's soon on her way to Thistledown. Here, she learns it's not so bad being an enchanter. She might even get to enjoy it... but from the start there are secrets and dangers afoot, starting with an attack on the way to the academy itself that robs her of her magic.
Rafferty, meanwhile, has never lived apart from his sister. But when she's taken away, he realizes that he wants to see the wider world himself, and what better place to start than Stormgrove? He applies to various printers and gets accepted as an apprentice in a bindery not far from Thistledown. What a great way to start an adventurous life, and how surprised Juniper will be to find her twin brother right next door in the big city! But being away from his family for the first time exposes him to a different Whetherwhy than he knew, a place where enchanters are distrusted, inequality is rampant, and secret societies seek to level the playing field. Soon, he begins to wonder which side he's on - and if he can still trust his own twin sister, now that she's a Thistledown student on the other side of the academy walls.

REVIEW: I mostly got this because the second book in the series intrigued me; I liked the concept of the "Tangles", magical constructs with lives of their own (with their dark counterpart "Knots"), and it looked light and whimsical. But at some point it simply did not deliver on its best promises, staying in the shallow end of a concept that kept teasing at deeper and more interesting waters.
It starts out as just what it promised on the cover, a fun and somewhat whimsical fantasy adventure, and if it isn't exactly original, it has that worn-in-shoes comfortable familiarity of tropes done decently. Juniper and Rafferty Quinn are decent enough characters for the story and world they inhabit, twins who share everything except their magic; while Rafferty is a strong spring mage, using his creative gifts to embroider beautiful designs for the family's bookbinder business, Juniper struggles to hide the enchantment powers that she knows will separate her from her loved ones and thrust her into a life she doesn't feel ready to live. It doesn't help that their own father makes a comment about enchanters being stuck-up snobs (before he knows about her gifts), and others in Honeyvale agree with him. But when her powers are revealed, everyone comes together in support and doesn't say a bad word about enchanter magic again, so that little plot point fizzles out... the first of many hints at greater conflicts and prejudices that gets lip service but little to no actual page presence or follow-through. The reader is told more than once that enchanters are an elite class of people, viewed as considering themselves better than the average Whetherwhy citizen with their smaller magics... but we barely ever see people in Whetherwhy actively using their magic anyway, and we never see enchanters actually treating people bad (or people being treated poorly as a direct result of enchanters existing). The classism that exists is a little clunky and is the sort that seems like it would exist even without magic at all, tied to wealth more than magic itself, enchanters being so rare that you just don't get whole families of them; Juniper has two classmates from wealthy families, neither of whom built their wealth solely on enchanters, one of them being a spoiled snob and the other embracing Thistledown's efforts to teach students to do most everything without magic or even servants, including gardening and mending and cleaning. How are students from this system coming out as the uppity snobs that everyone complains about (save the few who started out that way)... or why is everyone so jealous of powers we only really see used in moments of danger? There's talk of increasing numbers of "Knots" (malevolent free-roaming magical constructs that are the result of misfired spells or other magical accidents), but they seem too rare and random to really account for the resentment that drives so much of one half of the plot.
Anyway, while Juniper is dealing with the academy and the theft of her magic, Rafferty sets out on his own big adventure, and soon finds himself pulled into a dark conspiracy of anti-enchanter agitators. At first, they seem not so bad: surely they're just studying magic and enchantment on their own, and if there really is a way to share powers so those with less get a little more, is that so terrible? Maybe he can be close to his sister again... but he also starts to listen to the wrong voices and takes her prolonged silence in response to his letters the wrong way, thinking she's becoming elitist like everyone seems to think all enchanters become as they develop their magic. He has a fellow apprentice, Jessy, and both are pulled into the secret Papercut Society via an exceptional plot convenience that only crops up once Rafferty is in town... which is odd, as Jessy has been an orphan for much longer than he's been there and the coincidence that drags them in involves the deaths of her parents. It's like she was sitting there twiddling her thumbs waiting for a main character to show up and kickstart her adventure. In fact, too much of the plot starts to feel like people and events were sitting around waiting for the Quinn twins to come along in order to start moving. I understand there's going to be some level of plot convenience in many stories, but it started feeling like a bit of a stretch, even for a title aimed at younger readers.
The ending leaves a few questions dangling for future volumes, but by then I was no longer interested; it was all too shallow and glossy and neat, a smothering hug of an overprotective storyteller bound and determined not to let anything too perilous reach little ears. There's even a dragon for quite literally no reason that needed a dragon. I am an absolute sucker for dragons, but when even I just shrugged my shoulders after its brief appearance - after the characters made a point of being amazed that one even existed when they've been gone so long that even Whetherwhy, the isle of magic, considers them mere myths, only for everyone to dismiss it the moment it was out of sight, no attempt to follow up with the person who apparently captured or smuggled it into the city, no questions, no lingering hint of it as an ongoing threat, no nothing, like young toddlers whose concept of object permanence is not yet fully formed - that's a waste of a dragon.
By the end, I found the story just plain lacked the sparkle and punch to even keep it at a four-star Good rating. Characters never really surprise or change much, plot points are telegraphed with the subtlety of a jackhammer, and it wraps up too neatly (yet not neatly at all given all the unacknowledged issues and questions that should be dealt with but aren't). There's real potential and some nice descriptions of the magic and world, but James just bubble-wrapped it too much, shying away from any of the truly dark and interesting bits that would've kept me satisfied and reading onward.

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The Butcher's Masquerade (Matt Dinniman)

The Butcher's Masquerade
The Dungeon Crawler Carl series, Book 5
Matt Dinniman
Ace
Fiction, Fantasy/Humor/Sci-Fi
***** (Great)

DESCRIPTION: Since the start of the dungeons, Carl and the other crawlers have not only been prey for various "mobs" and NPCs, but subject to the whims of the game sponsors and other outside influences. But before, those outsiders could not directly interfere or enter the dungeons (save as embodied in other forms).
On the sixth floor, everything changes.
The Hunting Grounds see the crawlers subject not just to increasingly-deadly monsters and quests, but to hunters from the greater galaxy, come to collect bounties or simply trophies and bragging rights, as well as valuable loot for the upcoming ninth floor faction wars. It all culminates in the Butcher's Masquerade, a grand party - complete with pet show and talent competition - to close out the level... and, not incidentally, pick off the top crawlers to shake things up for future floors. Carl and Donut already have made enemies among the political elite, even as they've gained countless followers and fans. This puts a target on their heads, and the hunters are eager to take a shot.
But Carl, Donut, and their other allies are not the same people they were when they wandered down that first stairwell from the devastated surface of Earth. If the hunters think the crawlers are going to die easily, then they haven't been paying attention.
This book contains the fifth installment of "Backstage at the Pineapple Cabaret," an ongoing bonus story set elsewhere in the dungeons.

REVIEW: Many series either plateau or drop off by the fifth book. Once again, Dinniman astounds.
Carl, Donut, and the others are not at all the same people they were at the start of the series, not always in good ways. Carl remains determined to resist all efforts to break him, but he and his morals have been distinctly bent by the needs of survival, even as his rage at the dungeon masters grows ever greater. He's taking bigger risks, and they sometimes blow up in his face, or the faces of the people he talked into trusting him. In the previous floor, he and Donut stopped being mere victims of the dungeon and started fighting back (though, of course, they're still stuck playing the "game" even as they plot acts of sabotage and rebellion). Here, with the faces of actual enemies before him in a setting where he has power - unlike the moments before when they've been transported to talk shows and other settings for grotesque interviews or game shows - he finally has a chance to unleash some of the rage that's been building within him from the start... but the game masters, of course, have ways of retaliating.
Donut, too, is not the cat she once was, and anyone who dismisses her soon learns that, long before they were bred for cat shows and companionship, cats were natural hunters. But her mind is no longer that of a pure animal, and she's feeling the stress, shock, and trauma every bit as much as Carl, even as she struggles to articulate it. Her increasingly human intelligence is also shown in how she remembers her life before the dungeons, which comes to the forefront when they encounter a face from their past. The dungeon throws an extra low blow at her when it brings in her old beau Gravy Boat, a.k.a. "Ferdinand," the neighbor's orange tom, now enhanced, brainwashed and turned into an NPC familiar of the floor's ultimate boss.
Carl and Donut know full well the twisted truth behind NPCs, how even those with familiar faces are no longer, and never will be again, the people they once were, but that doesn't make it easier to see one's family members, lovers, or even fallen crawlers "return"... which is, of course, quite intentional. The games have always had many layers - entertainment, blood sport, political commentary, and more - but first and foremost they are designed to inflict as much physical and psychological damage on the involuntary "crawlers" before their deaths as possible. It's thrown into surreal perspective when Carl is forcibly recruited to appear (holographically) at CrawlCon, a convention for fans of the dungeon crawler season. While Donut revels in her fan base, Carl cannot help feeling repulsed by the packed rooms full of people who are, in their own ways, cheering for the torture and death of everyone on his planet, despite all the cosplay and fan art professing their affection... and, of course, it's one more trap set up by the creators, another way to both psychologically mess with him and create more enemies and complications that will haunt him and his allies further into the dungeon, especially concerning the mantids.
The floor itself, the Hunting Grounds, changes up the formula again. The addition of the hunters adds a fresh wrinkle on top of the new monsters and quests and the backstories. Carl also has to reckon with the bargain he made with the elite Signet and the production company behind her show (that she is blissfully unaware of, being an NPC)... but the show is not the safety net he'd hoped, and may be a greater danger than an asset. There's also the goddess-possessed decapitated sex doll head from the previous floor, Samantha, who is becoming more of a character, if one driven by her own agenda and with unreliable motives. And the other crawlers have their own stories and fates, particularly the enhanced goat Prepotente and his former shepherd Miriam Dom. Donut and the goat have a particular bond, being the only enhanced animal crawlers, but Prepotente gets a particularly unpleasant shock that changes him in ways nobody anticipated, and which Donut can't help him with. Needless to say, the crawler cast thins significantly even before the Butcher's Masquerade finale, which provides a truly gory and spectacular ending to a brutal level, complete with a dinosaur dance line.
Meanwhile, the fifth chapter of the bonus story introduces another new character and angle on the ongoing arc of the NPCs building their revenge dungeon on the eighteenth floor, not all of whom believe in the promise of paradise beyond the games. But even here, the AI and game masters revel in cruelty and torment, yanking hope away even when that hope was barely a glimmer in the darkness.
I kicked this back up to a full five stars because of the plot twists and developments that ramped up the stakes even higher than before, and some truly heartbreaking moments and lines amid some bright spots and hilarity. There is still a bit of name sprawl and political tangle to navigate, but nothing I couldn't read around or past and pick up the gist. I might take a short break to read a novella before the sixth installment, which is a whopper of a book (north of 800 pages), but I'm looking forward to where things go from here.

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