Monday, February 28, 2022

February Site Update

The month's reviews have been archived and cross-linked on the main Brightdreamer Books site.

Enjoy!

(For all nobody keeping track, this month I posted my 1,800th review.)

Friday, February 25, 2022

Gone to the Woods (Gary Paulsen)

Gone to the Woods: Surviving a Lost Childhood
Gary Paulsen
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Nonfiction, MG? Memoir
****+ (Good/Great)


DESCRIPTION: For decades, author Gary Paulsen wrote many mesmerizing stories, several influenced by his long and unusual life and rough childhood. Here, he relates tales that never made it directly into his other works, incidents and memories that shaped him from a young child through his time as a young man in the Army, from his time at his aunt's remote farm to his years in postwar Manila, from a struggling schoolboy to an eager devourer of library books... and eventual crafter of his own stories.

REVIEW: When the world lost Gary Paulsen, it lost a true treasure, and a window into a mindset and lifestyle that has become increasingly endangered in modern times. He has hinted, in previous books, about various events in his life, but never collected these particular tales (though he does talk a bit about some of these events in books like Guts and This Side of Wild, and the afterwords to some of his fictional works). It starts when "the boy" (oddly, he chose to write his memoir in third person) is five years old; his mother, in Chicago to work in a factory during wartime while her husband is overseas, has become a bar regular (with numerous "uncles" vying for her attention), and encourages him to sing on tabletops to attract attention and garner free drinks, until Gary's grandmother gets wind of the situation and snatches the child away to live with relatives in the deep woods. The solo train journey, among cars full of wounded servicemen back from the front lines, leaves an indelible mark on his young psyche, and is also his first introduction to the green world of the forests that would dominate so much of his future, a spiritual connection he feels the moment he locks eyes with a black bear from the train window. Paulsen, as always, manages to evoke a strong, almost spiritual sense of the world around him, from the green paradise of his summer with his aunt Edith and uncle Sig in the green woods to the nightmare of watching sharks tear into plane crash victims on the Pacific ocean and the bomb-cratered city of Manila, where the stains (and bodies) of Japanese occupation still fill the caves and litter the jungle, even to the Hell of his brutal alcoholic home life and the unexpected sanctuary of the town library. As a final book, this makes a fitting last bow, even as it remains clear that there are many more stories where these came from that will now never be told.

You Might Also Enjoy:
Never Cry Wolf (Farley Mowat) - My Review
Guts (Gary Paulsen) - My Review
The Invention of Nature (Andrea Wulf) - My Review

Thursday, February 24, 2022

The Coward (Stephen Aryan)

The Coward
The Quest for Heroes series, Book 1
Stephen Aryan
Angry Robot
Fiction, Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)


DESCRIPTION: Ten years ago, eleven heroes and one determined, untested boy rode forth into the northern wastes to save the Five Kingdoms from the dreaded Ice Lich and the eternal winter she sought to spread across the world... but only one rode back, the boy Kell Kressia. The scars on his body slowly healed, but the ones on his mind linger and fester to this day, leaving him a broken and lonely man. Worse, there is much about his journey he was ordered never to speak of, in order to preserve the reputation and legend of the fallen heroes: their posthumous ability to inspire the masses mattered more than the cold, often ugly truths about them that Kell discovered in his travels. He settled in at last to a quiet life farming his late mother's land, content to be mostly ignored by his neighbors. At least he'll never have to live through anything that terrible again.
Then the royal message arrives... and the soldiers, after he burns the letters.
The seasons are turning unnaturally cold again. It may be nothing, but it may be that something has picked up the fallen Ice Lich's mantle in the far north. As sole survivor of the last quest, Kell is "requested" to investigate. But Kell has other plans: once he's out of sight of the capital city, he's going to cut and run for a port city and a distant land where nobody's heard the bardic tales of the eleven fallen heroes. Surviving the north once was luck - good or bad, depending on how one looks at it. A second trip is sure to be his doom, and surely he's sacrificed enough. Let someone else play the hero this time.
Fate, however, has other plans. It seems that the coward Kell isn't done being a hero... and no matter how much he's lost, he can always lose more...

REVIEW: On the surface, this is a decent tale of questing and adventure and the truth about heroism, how behind every story of a brave warrior is often a man or woman haunted by regrets and post-traumatic stress and secrets that they dare not reveal, and nobody would understand even if they did. It also delves into the propaganda angle of heroism, how political squabbles factor into whether a hero is to be elevated (and in what way) or defiled... or even allowed to survive. As one kingdom stands behind Kell, a neighbor sees the entire quest as a means to garner popular support. Meanwhile, the aging head of the dominant church of the Shepherd dreams of forging a unified theocracy via torture and blood (in the name of her loving and peaceful deity), one that rejects any notion of magic or the supernatural or heroes whose mere existence lends legitimacy to either blasphemy, while a princess plots to become something far more shrewd and powerful than the toothless political pawn and brood mare of heirs she's expected to be. These subplots initially add more breadth and depth to the world, but soon start feeling like a distraction (and a repetitious one at that) as they are clearly intended to resolve in future volumes and therefore feel annoyingly incomplete.
Meanwhile, on the quest, the journey reawakens some of Kell's darkest demons. When a teenager just as deluded and stubborn as he himself was a mere ten years ago turns up, Kell despairs of seeing the cycle of his life repeated, but cannot shake his new shadow. He picks up a handful of other adventurers in his journey, each of whom have their own reasons for joining him. Sometimes the battles feel a bit drawn out, wallowing in the gore, but overall the quest arc is the strongest in the book.
It lost its half-star for some elements of exaggeration among the characters (especially the warped religion of hate preached by the head of the Shepherd church, which grew repetitious in its horror), a few moments of sheer implausibility, the sense of incompleteness among subplots mentioned already, and some elements of the climax that sort of derailed the whole plot into something it didn't need to be (but which would constitute spoilers to discuss in detail). Still, it does a decent job exploring the downsides of heroism.

You Might Also Enjoy:
Kings of the Wyld (Nicholas Eames) - My Review
Heroes of the Valley (Jonathan Stroud) - My Review
The Last Wish (Andrzej Sapkowski) - My Review

Monday, February 21, 2022

Where the Drowned Girls Go (Seanan McGuire)

Where the Drowned Girls Go
The Wayward Children series, Book 7
Seanan McGuire
Tordotcom
Fiction, YA? Fantasy
****+ (Good/Great)


DESCRIPTION: Not many children find a doorway to another world, but Cora did, pulled into the aquatic realm of the Trenches to become the mermaid she always was at heart... until, like so many such children, she found herself back on Earth, where the water can't be breathed by human lungs, where too many just see her as a fat girl despite her now-turquoise hair. At Eleanor West's special boarding school, she found others like herself, and made friends.
She followed those friends on a quest to other worlds, ever the hero (as all wayward children were, once upon a time)... but, in the monstrous Gothic realm of the Moors, the dark waters held something far more terrifying than she ever encountered in her own world - and the Drowned Gods claimed her as their own.
When she got back to Eleanor's school, she tried to ignore the nightmares, tried to ignore the whispering voices that turned her beloved water into something terrifying, but it's only getting worse, and nothing the aging woman or Cora's school friends have done can help. Cora can think of only one way out: forget her tail, forget her world, forget everything and just be the normal girl she used to be before she found her first door.
The Whitethorn Institute is Eleanor West's mirror, a regimented place dedicated to expunging the strangeness and the memories from its students and turning them into ordinary, unremarkable people fit for ordinary, unremarkable lives on this ordinary, unremarkable Earth. Their methods are drastic, but it's the only hope Cora sees for being rid of the pull of the Drowned Gods. Only what she sees in Whitethorn stirs the latent hero in her, for a monster walks these halls.

REVIEW: The latest installment moves the main story arc forward, following up on Cora as she struggles to deal with her encounter in the Moors and bringing Regan (from the previous volume) into the cast as a Whitethorn student who cannot give up her memories of the Hooflands. Cora's decision to transfer schools is not a simple whim or even necessarily a mistake; she's drowning, quite literally, in trauma, and for all Eleanor's good intentions nothing at her school seems able to address that. This is a beast Cora must face on her own terms, and seeing how the other school deals with the often-traumatic experience of being spat back onto Earth after journeying to other worlds helps, if perhaps not in the way the headmaster intended. However much Cora loves her world of the Trenches, the horrors of the Drowned Gods are worth almost any sacrifice to be rid of... almost. At the institute, there is only ever one world worth knowing, and one vision of that world that is to be acknowledged as truth, even though every student there knows it to be a blatant and painful lie (a clear and pointed commentary on the damage wrought by "alternative facts" and a skewed curriculum that erases vast swathes of experiences). As with other Wayward Children titles, there's more than a touch of pure horror to the story and to the other worlds the students (and adults) have been to; some children want very much to forget everything about their travels, and for good reasons, for not every world is a welcome one. The tale moves fairly decently, introducing hints of a greater challenge and arc ahead for the cast, though part of me prefers the "origin" tales.

You Might Also Enjoy:
The School for Good and Evil (Soman Chainani) - My Review
Every Heart a Doorway (Seanan McGuire) - My Review
Un Lun Dun (China Mieville) - My Review

Friday, February 18, 2022

The Empress of Salt and Fortune (Nghi Vo)

The Empress of Salt and Fortune
The Singing Hills Cycle, Book 1
Nghi Vo
Tordotcom
Fiction, Fantasy
****+ (Good/Great)


DESCRIPTION: The cleric Chih and their hoopoe companion Almost Brilliant travel the length and breadth of the land, gathering stories and cataloguing facts in all manner of places for the abbey of Singing Hills. Their latest travels have taken them to the shores of Lake Scarlet and the abandoned house of Thriving Fortune, once the home of an exiled wife of the emperor. Here, an old and still-loyal servant, Rabbit, tells Chih the story that official histories chose not to record. It begins with a daughter of a conquered people sent to be the bride of an arrogant southern emperor, and ends with both victory and heartbreak.

REVIEW: I'd previously read and enjoyed another Singing Hills novella, When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, without realizing it was technically the second title, so I was eager to read (or listen to, this being another audiobook) the first installment. These are truly standalone stories, each with a strong emotional core, in this case hatred and vengeance and loyalty and the many contradictory ways love can pull a heart. Rabbit's servant's-eye-view of the imperial palace and the exiled empress reveals a young woman plunged into a cold and insular world among her people's enemies, yet who manages to hold true to her self and her greater purpose. Rabbit herself has a story, inevitably entwined with the great woman's, and choices that lead to much pain, though she has long made peace with them. As in the other novella, Chih is largely there as witness and recorder, but has their own personality and contribution to make. Vo creates an intriguing and complex world. I'm looking forward to more of its stories.

You Might Also Enjoy:
The Grace of Kings (Ken Liu) - My Review
The Tiger's Daughter (K. Arsenault Rivera) - My Review
When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain (Nghi Vo) - My Review

Thursday, February 17, 2022

Fan Fiction (Brent Spiner)

Fan Fiction: A Mem-Noir: Inspired by True Events
Brent Spiner
Macmillan
Fiction, Humor/Thriller
**** (Good)


DESCRIPTION: Through perseverance and hard work and raw luck, actor Brent Spiner finally landed the role of a lifetime (even if he didn't know it yet) when he was cast as Lieutenant Commander Data, the android officer in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Going in, he figured it might get him a year of paychecks and a foot in the door for other roles; instead, four years later, he's still spending sixteen hours a day in gold makeup and yellow contacts he can barely see through. It's hard work, but good work, and after his early struggles he can hardly complain (well, not too much - the kerosene-based makeup remover really does a number on the skin). Still, nothing could have prepared him for life as an object of fannish admiration: the letters, the conventions, the mysterious packages of blood and severed pig genitalia...
Wait, what?
Apparently, Spiner has picked up a stalker, one who seems to have over-identified with a character in the third season episode "Offspring", the doomed android daughter his character built named Lal. With the help (and occasional hindrance) of his coworkers, the police "obsession" specialist, an FBI agent, and a personal bodyguard, among other odd characters, he struggles to identify the culprit and figure out just what made them latch onto him of all people, mining his own memories and exploring fandom.

REVIEW: I was looking for yet another audiobook to make work marginally tolerable, and this title - a noir-inspired novel that includes real-life people and memories - looked amusing, especially as I watched and enjoyed Star Trek: The Next Generation back in the day. Still, I was aware going into it that it could go wrong fairly easily; not only is comedy much trickier to write (and far more subjective) than fiction or a straight-up memoir, but sometimes, not to put too fine a point on it, actors-turned-authors do better with a scriptwriter. This one turned out to be one of the good ones, helped by Spiner's narration and the cameos from various TNG castmates voicing exaggerated versions of themselves. The story itself manages to not drag or take itself too seriously, as much a retrospective of his life and career and meditation on the peculiar phenomenon of fandom - how, simply by doing his job, he became a part of so many people's lives and the object of emotions and ideas that often have little to do with the actual show or character - as a deliberate wink at noir tales. It's a book that knows how to laugh with, not at, its subjects and its characters (even those based on real people), embracing the absurdity of its concept wholeheartedly. Lines between fact and fiction, truth and unreality, blur throughout, as the plot makes numerous twists and turns on the way to the end. It's a entertaining romp of a story, and one that doesn't outstay its welcome.

You Might Also Enjoy:
Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby? (Allyson Beatrice) - My Review
Galaxy Quest (Terry Bisson) - My Review
Fangirl (Rainbow Rowell) - My Review

Wednesday, February 16, 2022

Comfort Me With Apples (Catherynne M. Valente)

Comfort Me With Apples
Catherynne M. Valente
Tordotcom
Fiction, Fantasy/Horror
**** (Good)


DESCRIPTION: Every morning, Sophia wakes knowing that her life is perfect. How could it not be? She lives in the paradise of Arcadia Gardens, an exclusive gated community. She has numerous friends. She has the biggest and most beautiful home. And she has the best husband, respected by all, who surely loves her as dearly as she loves him. She was practically made for him.
Then she finds the locked drawer with the hairbrush and the lock of hair - neither of them hers.
Though her friends assure her nothing could be wrong, that she's just being silly (isn't her husband always telling her how silly she is?), doubts begin to slip into her mind, magnified when she finds more things out of place, more hints that something is amiss in her idyllic life. Just who - or what - is she married to? And what will happen if he learns that she suspects him?

REVIEW: As one might guess from the title and the early parts of the story, this is a twist on the tale of the Garden of Eden, transposing the Garden into a surreal vision of suburbia that manages to be utopian and dystopian simultaneously. She meets friends like Mrs. Lion and Mrs. Mink and Mrs. Fish, and though the writing never outright describes them as beasts it soon becomes clear that, normal as Sophia sees their visits for tea and gossip, they're not ordinary housewives, and neither is Sophia herself. From finding the strange hairbrush, Sophia begins to see the truth of Arcadia, the deference and the terror in the eyes of those she thought of as friends. Intermittent excerpts from the HOA rules, each more draconian than the last, add to the growing horror. There's a dreadful inevitability to how the story must end as it exposes the twisted roots behind a creation myth that reduces women to disposable things and justifies masculine abuse of power as stemming from the very highest authority. As with pretty much everything of Valente's I've read thus far, the prose positively sings, and even though it ran darker than I might have preferred, and it was relatively short (only a couple hours and change, audiobook time), it can't help but be memorable in the way a nightmare is memorable.

You Might Also Enjoy:
The Echo Wife (Sarah Gailey) - My Review
The Murders of Molly Southbourne (Tade Thompson) - My Review
Six-Gun Snow White (Catherynne M. Valente) - My Review

The Blacktongue Thief (Christopher Buehlman)

The Blacktongue Thief
The Blacktongue Thief series, Book 1
Christopher Buehlman
Tor
Fiction, Fantasy/Humor
***** (Great)


DESCRIPTION: In the years after the goblin wars devastated the lands of men, wiping out generations of girls and boys sent to battle and even seeing the land's horses fall to some foul goblin plague like the ones they spread against people, a thief still has to earn a living. This is especially true if, like Kinch, they still owe the Guild of Takers for their training, and with the Guild's agents in most every human realm, there's no running out on a debt. Which is why the wiry thief was waiting in the woods with a gang of half-baked bandits looking for a likely mark... only the woman they target is no fainting flower. She's a foreign swordswoman, veteran of the wars and sworn disciple of the goddess of death, and though Kinch escapes with his life, fate will see their paths cross again. For the Guild has devised a new way for Kinch to pay back his debt: seek out the woman Galta and join her on her quest to find a lost princess in a realm now under assault from giants. Only the Guild refuses to tell him what he's to do when they find her, and he'd bet his black tongue they have no interest in restoring her to her throne, as Galta means to do. He's done a lot of dark deeds in his day, more than his share some might say, but this is a line he won't willingly cross - even if defiance will bring down every curse and every assassin of the Guild upon his head. Good thing he's known for his luck - only luck has a way of running out just when you need it most...

REVIEW: I'd heard many good things about this book, and finally found the audiobook title available through Overdrive, narrated by the author. It happily lived up to its hype, and then some. Buehlman establishes a dark and filth-stained world of shady guilds and squabbling powers and clashing cultures and magic reminiscent of old epic sagas, where witches wear the legs of dead men and an old blind cat can carry a hidden assassin tattooed with magic spells. In a world like this, heroes are nearly as rare as the dying horses, a blow that everyone, even those born after the plague that wiped them out, still feels acutely. It's a world that belongs instead to the backstabber and the thief, the scarred veteran who cannot let go and the shrinking coward who rationalizes their own inaction and misdeeds. Kinch is just a young man from a conquered people struggling (and failing) to keep ahead of the perpetual debt that the Guild of Takers uses to keep their people leashed, but there's just enough vestigal decency and defiance in him to try, on occasion, to do the right thing, even if it backfires at least as often as not. Galta has the spirit of a noble knight, entrusted with a grand quest for her nation, but even she is not entirely above the muck and the gray morality that permeates the broken land. They pick up traveling companions along the way, including a witch in training and a rival from Kinch's homeland who knows the thief for the coward he is. There's action, a fair bit of it violent, and a vein of dark humor from the first page that doesn't significantly let up throughout the tale. There's also tears and sacrifice and failure, hidden facets to just about everyone and everything (even the goblins and the giants), and magic aplenty. The whole was a thoroughly enjoyable and immersive tale, one that works reasonably well as a standalone but which leaves several threads for the impending sequel. I think I may have to buy myself a print copy of this one for rereading, which, given my exceptionally limited physical shelf space and book budget these days, is saying something...

You Might Also Enjoy:
Jhereg (Stephen Brust) - My Review
Traitor's Blade (Sebastien de Castell) - My Review
Kings of the Wyld (Nicholas Eames) - My Review

Tuesday, February 15, 2022

Crooked Kingdom (Leigh Bardugo)

Crooked Kingdom
The Grishaverse universe: The Six of Crows series, Book 2
Leigh Bardugo
Square Fish
Fiction, YA Fantasy
***** (Great)


DESCRIPTION: After pulling off an impossible job, penetrating the impenetrable Ice Court of Fjerda to extract Kuwei Yul-Bo the son of the man who created the dangerous new drug parem from an ordinary street stimulant, Ketterdam thief Kaz "Dirtyhands" Brekker and his mismatched crew should have been legends in the underworld of the Barrel, and very wealthy to boot... but their client, wealthy mercher Jan Van Eck, betrayed them all. Jan even forged a partnership with Kaz's archrival, Pekka Rollins of the Dime Lions gang: the man who swindled two wide-eyed farm boys new to the big city, leaving one to die and the other to grow into the cold-blooded, broken young man Kaz Brekker. Now Kaz, the boy Kuwei, the sharpshooting gambler Jesper, the acrobat Inej, the Grisha Nina, the former Grisha hunter Matthias, and Jan's disowned son Wylan are in hiding, with both the law and the rest of Ketterdam's gangs after the bounty on their heads. The safest thing to do would be to give up Kuwei and slip out of town, even if doing so unleashes the horror of weaponized, parem-addicted Grisha upon the world. But Kaz has fueled his entire life with a need for vengeance, burning the dregs of his own decency and humanity to keep the fire burning. If his enemies thought he'd limp away with his tail between his legs, they've made a potentially lethal mistake, one that might destroy the whole of Ketterdam.

REVIEW: The first book in this exciting, dark duology ended on essentially a cliffhanger, so I had to grab the conclusion to find out how it played out. Bardugo maintains the pacing and the dark overtones of the first volume, ratcheting up the stakes and the emotional turmoil. The characters are long past any naive notion of Ketterdam being a safe and loving home, but it was their home, and still is, even as every person in it seems bound and determined to hunt them down and drive them out. Their flaws continue to plague and shape and drive them, and there is no magic moment where they're all fixed and everything get better; theirs is a broken world, one with only broken lives, and any happiness or satisfaction or even mere survival to be had must be formed around those broken pieces, using them rather than denying them. Kaz is a brilliant and ruthless antihero, a self-admitted monster who only ever can do good (or some rough semblance thereof) when it aligns with his own dark drives and scarred history. His crew is the closest he has to family, but he never lets them make the mistake of confusing need and loyalty with love; they all have personal goals that they're using the others to meet. The plan is twisted and complicated by numerous setbacks and the involvement of international politics - parem is something that will not be confined to just one nation's borders if it gets out, the drug that greatly magnifies a Grisha's power at the expense of addiction and early death - but they have one advantage here that they lacked in the Ice Court, knowing the streets of Ketterdam better than even their enemies. It's a fast-paced story that races along, yet without sacrificing quieter moments of reflection and growth and self-realization that add emotional weight to the plot. They're all different people by the end of the story than they were at the start, and all of them know that even this is just a pause on their greater journeys, even if that journey may no longer include the rest of the crew. The only real drawback to this book is that now I feel compelled to go back and finish off the first Grishaverse trilogy, and maybe look into the books that come after this, for all that part of me suspects that I'll consider them pale shadows after my adventures with Kaz Brekker in the streets of Ketterdam.

You Might Also Enjoy:
Six of Crows (Leigh Bardugo) - My Review
River of Teeth (Sarah Gailey) - My Review
A Darker Shade of Magic (V. E. Schwab) - My Review

Thursday, February 10, 2022

A Pale Light in the Black (K. B. Wagers)

A Pale Light in the Black
The NeoG series, Book 1
K. B. Wagers
Harper Voyager
Fiction, Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)


DESCRIPTION: Centuries after the Collapse nearly ended the species, humans have spread through the solar system and, thanks to emergent wormhole tech and breakthroughs in both terraforming and life extension, a handful of nearby stars... and where humans go, problems inevitably follow. While the Navy handles the more prestigious roles of exploration and extrasolar affairs, the local system is protected by the often-maligned and eternally underfunded but vitally important Near Earth Orbit Guard, or NeoG. It's the sort of job that attracts misfits and wayward souls, the kind who wouldn't fit in with other branches of service... and the kind of place where bonds of family can be forged even between the least likely of shipmates.
Maxine "Max" Carmichael was once the youngest heir to perhaps the wealthiest and most powerful family business in human space, the manufacturers of LifeX that both extends the human lifespan and enhances resistances to the radiation of space travel. She turned her back on the prestige and the pressure, defying her parents by applying to the NeoG and further defying them by rejecting the cushy desk job they'd pulled strings to land her in. Instead, Max chose to ship out aboard an Interceptor, one of the durable yet aging fleet of vessels patrolling Sol's spaceways. She enters the crew under inauspicious circumstances, as the replacement for a favored lieutenant aboard the ship Zuma's Ghost. It's extra bad timing, because Captain Rosa and the rest of the crew are still smarting from a close loss in last year's Boarding Games, the not-quite-friendly annual competition between military branches, and everyone was hoping that Lieutenant Nika's sword arm would help carry them to victory this year. And, as further bad luck would have it, Nika is the beloved adopted brother of Officer Jenks, the crew's roughest edged and hottest headed member. If Max wants to make a home here, she's going to have to work extra hard to earn a place among the crew. And when they inadvertently stumble across a secret that could rock the spaceways to their core, she'll need a good crew to trust - and the crew will have to learn to trust her, as well.

REVIEW: As I was listening to this title, I kept finding myself thinking I wanted more out of it. More of what, I couldn't quite put my finger on, until maybe about halfway through. What I wanted more of was the story I was promised, yet never quite got.
Oh, there are all the trappings of a space opera, and it's a reasonably solid world Wagers builds, a future where humans manage to pull out of our current death spiral and rebuild, if not with entirely clean hands and with devastating ecological losses. There's the expected collection of eccentric characters, though most of them remain sadly flat caricatures on the page... and all of them, even the asexual Max, somehow need to have love interests to validate them and their fragile sense of self-worth repeatedly, which sort of undercut the whole "independent spacer female" vibe, especially the third or fourth or tenth time they break down and have to have their love interest or their found family piece them back together. Then there's the plot, which never really decided if it wanted to be more about the Boarding Games or about the dangerous interstellar conspiracy the crew stumbles into. Far too much time and energy ends up going to the games, which never paid off in any meaningful way because the conclusion is pretty much telegraphed (and doesn't even really affect anything; the crew had already bonded, so it's not even like the competition was the thing that pulled them all together). The conspiracy, by far the more interesting storyline and one that digs into aspects of the worldbuilding that I wanted to explore more, gets back burnered so long that by the time Wagers gets around to revealing the big baddie, their appearance is rushed and they come across like a cardboard cutout of a monologuing villain, spouting shallow extremist ideas that the characters can easily brush off as fanatical and not worth listening to. There's also a subplot about the captain's faith and family issues that, like the games, eats a lot of story time and engenders a lot of self-doubt and angst to ultimately fizzle out in a non-event. And there's also a robot dog, Doge, which only exists to play up Jenks's odd obsession with the 21st century (which also, need I say it again by now, never paid off).
By the end, while I didn't hate the story, I wound up feeling like not nearly as much had happened as really should have happened, and that if Wagers had trimmed back some of the games and the overused/overplayed character angst and bonding moments, there would've been more time to develop that conspiracy and the villain to make the climax properly pay off. As it was, I can't say that I feel at all compelled to read more of the NeoG or the adventures of Zuma's Ghost.

You Might Also Enjoy:
Trading in Danger (Elizabeth Moon) - My Review
Embers of War (Gareth L. Powell) - My Review
Chilling Effect (Valerie Valdez) - My Review

Friday, February 4, 2022

Day Zero (C. Robert Cargill)

Day Zero
C. Robert Cargill
Harper Voyager
Fiction, Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)


DESCRIPTION: The day Pounce found his box in the attic was the day the world ended, though he didn't know it yet. As a nanny robot, albeit one built as a fuzzy anthropomorphic tiger and with the deluxe programming, he'd always known he was an artificial being, that he had been purchased for the express purpose of caring for his boy charge Ezra, but he'd never really thought about what that meant... or what would happen when the eight-year-old child grew up and no longer needed a cutesy tiger caregiver. Even as he starts to wonder about his own future, the century-old robot Isaac - the only robot granted free personhood after outliving all owners who might claim him - prepares to open the world's first robots-only city... what could be the dawn of a golden age of robot equality, or the spark that triggers all-out war by those who feel left behind and displaced already by the proliferation of artificial intelligence across all parts of life.
At midnight, just as Isaac is about to speak to the world via news feed, everything goes wrong... and someone sends out a mass update to all robots, an override of the chip designed to keep them from harming humans. The next thing Pounce knows is that the household domestic robot, Ariadne, is killing Ezra's parents in cold blood.
Pounce has spent the entire eight years of his existence living for Ezra. Though the download came with a message telling him he's now free from his programming, the robot tiger can't imagine doing anything but continue to protect the boy, even if that means killing other robots... or people. Because even as the world ends, the one thing he can trust is his love for an eight-year-old child.

REVIEW: Day Zero starts with a question of whether a robot can ever experience true freedom of will - or whether anyone can, really - and it never truly answers that until the very end (more or less). Pounce never thinks to act against his own loyalty and love to Ezra, even though he does question himself about it, and the lengths he ends up going to to protect the boy, more than once. He lives in a world a century or so ahead of our own, but with many of the same problems, exacerbated rather than eased by the infiltration of artificial intelligence and robots into everyday life, in everything from massive supercomputers to cheap plastic domestics... a proliferation of technology that has, as in modern times, outrun both cultural adaptation and the law to create a volatile cocktail of troubles that must inevitably explode at some point. When the revolution comes, Pounce sees the true colors of his family and the robots he had considered friends... and himself, as he goes to lengths he never imagined himself capable of to defend his boy's life and usher him to safety, or as close to safety as one might find in the heart of a global apocalypse. Between firefights, he struggles to shield Ezra from trauma and cope with his own existential crises. There's a very high body count, human and robot, and at times the story is just a string of barely-spaced ambushes and gunfire, in which it's not at all certain who is friend or enemy or who might even be winning this war (if anyone can ever truly win in an apocalypse). The final parts, though, feel oddly rushed and forced, and the finale (skirting spoilers) really feels like a letdown for the sake of being a letdown, not to mention leaving several threads unresolved. It's not a bad story per se, but the ending doesn't live up to the promise of the beginning.

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Thursday, February 3, 2022

Nation (Terry Pratchett)

Nation
Terry Pratchett
Doubleday
Fiction, YA Fantasy
**** (Good)


DESCRIPTION: As a plague ravages the civilized world, the English monarchy stands in tatters; the nearest living member of the royal house is half a world away on some barely-charted island, maintaining the presence of civilization (and the English flag) among the natives (and lands that other nations might want to plant their flag upon). Commandeering a ship, special agents for the crown hurry with all due haste to track the unlikely heir down - but it will still be months before they can get there, and who knows what will happen to the world in the meantime?
Half a world away, the boy Mau has just completed his rite of passage into manhood, surviving alone on an island and carving his own canoe to return to his village. There, he will finally get his first tattoo and take a man's soul, maybe even find himself a wife. But his voyage home is interrupted by a massive wave - one that destroys his family, obliterates his village, even displaces the god stones from the beach, and no force of man or nature can possibly displace a sacred god stone. The storm also leaves behind a most peculiar gift, of sorts: the wreckage of a great ship of the "trouser men", the strange pale folk rumored to visit the islands now and again (but which Mau has never seen), and a girl white as a ghost among the ruins.
Ermintrude was traveling to meet up with her father, stationed halfway around the globe in service to His Majesty. She's eager to see the wider world and get away from a home that held too many memories to be happy (not to mention holding too much of her stern and traditional grandmother, who keeps insisting she's too close to royalty - only a hundred-odd heirs potential removed - to do anything so strenuous and unladylike as cook, study, or - heavens forbid - think). But the voyage is anything but pleasant, rocked by mutiny and foul weather and ending with a crash into the heart of a tropical island. As the last survivor, she thought herself alone, until she found the storm-battered native boy. Her grandmother's etiquette lessons never covered anything like this situation, but she's too English to give up all hope. (Besides, if nobody else is around to say otherwise, she can at least be rid of her horrible name... and she always did like the sound of Daphne better.)
Together, and with more refugees trickling in from other devastated islands, Mau and Daphne begin rebuilding what was lost - but will the nation they create from so many mismatched and broken parts be stronger than the old, or will it fall apart at the slightest challenge?

REVIEW: I had to think about this one for a while before deciding how I felt about it, which is not necessarily a bad thing, if not always a great sign. Being a work by Terry Pratchett, it has some humor to it and some buried (and not-so-buried) barbs, taking place in an alternate 19th-century Earth just as Darwin's controversial theories were hitting the science scene and people (well, some people at least) were beginning to rethink long-held assumptions about the world. For Mau, his own long-held beliefs in his gods and the way the world had always been and would always be are literally wiped off the map by the wave and its grisly aftermath. He and Daphne (as she calls herself for most of the story) both have their worlds turned upside-down more than once, plagued by anger and fear and doubts and the struggle to balance tradition with needed change. The role of storytelling in preserving and twisting truths, and the conflicting human needs for both faith and reason, comforting lies and hard truths, gods to explain things and questions to challenge those explanations, come into play in various ways. All the while, as Mau grows into an unlikely leader and Daphne finds a place among the islanders, the inevitable arrival of more Englishmen looms, at least as great a threat to the new nation as the raiders who worship the death god who must also inevitably come to challenge them. The story has some ups and downs, but the plot generally clips along decently. The ending stumbles a bit, but I see what Pratchett was going for, and the final chapter offers a glimpse of what comes after for Mau, Daphne, the island nation, and even the world as a whole, outcomes underlain with a certain sadness at the necessary sacrifices of growth and moving forward. A reasonably solid story, all in all.

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