The first month of reviews has been archived and cross-linked over on the main Brightdreamer Books site.
Enjoy!
Wednesday, January 31, 2024
Sunday, January 28, 2024
Under the Smokestrewn Sky (A. Deborah Baker)
Under the Smokestrewn Sky
The Up-and-Under series, Book 4
A. Deborah Baker
Tordotcom
Fiction, MG Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: When Avery and Zib climbed over the wall that shouldn't have been there into the forest that couldn't exist, they were strangers. Now, after traveling the bizarre realms of the Up-and-Under along the fickle Improbable Road in search of the Impossible City and the way home, they have become friends. Together with the one-time Crow Girl (now the near-stranger Soleil since she reclaimed her name), the drowned girl Niamh, and Jack the boy made of a flock of jackdaws, they have at last arrived at the fiery realm of the Queen of Wands: the missing queen who should be in the City, but has vanished without a trace, leaving a dangerous power vacuum that the other realms might go to war to fill. For all the hardships and dangers they've endured, Avery and Zib are still together, and now they're surely almost to the end of their strange adventures and peculiar trials. Wild-hearted Zib will miss the place and their new friends, while Avery cannot wait to get back to a world where people don't become flocks of birds and roads stay just where you left them when you turn away, but both are looking forward to going home to the families that surely miss them. All they have to do is figure out where the Queen went and get her back to her tower in the City before war comes. Considering what they've been through to get this far, it should almost be easy. But the Up-and-Under, much like the real world, does not always play fair or offer happy endings. Just because they've come this far is no guarantee that they will succeed, and just because the two children arrived together is no guarantee that they'll depart the same way - or at all.
REVIEW: The conclusion to the four-part Up-and-Under series, a spinoff of/tie-in to author Seanan McGuire's horror-tinged alchemical fantasy Middlegame (once a standalone, now a series) wraps up the story of Avery and Zib's adventures, as well as those of their traveling companions. As in previous entries, the Up-and-Under is both reminiscent of classic portal fantasy worlds like Oz or Wonderland and a dark reflection of those worlds. Even the kindest characters they meet almost invariably have hidden agendas and shadows just beneath the surface, and the world itself contains levels of threat and menace that are never long forgotten. Every place they've visited, every King and Queen and Page they've encountered, has great power and great capacity to harm as well as help. When they do prove helpful, it's almost always because doing so helps themselves in some manner. Avery and Zib, naturally, have had to learn to work together despite their differences, each changed by their journeys... Zib more than Avery, as the girl openly embraces the slantwise logic of the Up-and-Under. As before, there are strong elements of alchemy and elemental symbolism, such as that found in Tarot decks, throughout (part of the tie-in features; in the world of Middlegame, "Baker" was actually a practicing dark alchemist who loaded her popular children's stories with occult subtexts and hidden codes), as well as marvelous descriptions and turns of phrase that evoke the spirit of old, beloved tales. With so many adventures and backstories and characters with conflicting motivations from the previous three books, this final stretch of the journey can feel tangled, especially if it's been a while since one has read the previous three adventures, and a few elements didn't feel like they paid off like they should have. The very ending felt abrupt, as though the story weren't quite over yet and rushed to wrap up, while the "author" afterword tied it all back into Middlegame's universe.
Overall, I enjoyed this outing, demonstrating yet again the many talents of prolific author Seanan McGuire.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Over the Woodward Wall (A. Deborah Baker) - My Review
The Divide (Guy Gavriel Kay) - My Review
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (Catherynne M. Valente) - My Review
The Up-and-Under series, Book 4
A. Deborah Baker
Tordotcom
Fiction, MG Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: When Avery and Zib climbed over the wall that shouldn't have been there into the forest that couldn't exist, they were strangers. Now, after traveling the bizarre realms of the Up-and-Under along the fickle Improbable Road in search of the Impossible City and the way home, they have become friends. Together with the one-time Crow Girl (now the near-stranger Soleil since she reclaimed her name), the drowned girl Niamh, and Jack the boy made of a flock of jackdaws, they have at last arrived at the fiery realm of the Queen of Wands: the missing queen who should be in the City, but has vanished without a trace, leaving a dangerous power vacuum that the other realms might go to war to fill. For all the hardships and dangers they've endured, Avery and Zib are still together, and now they're surely almost to the end of their strange adventures and peculiar trials. Wild-hearted Zib will miss the place and their new friends, while Avery cannot wait to get back to a world where people don't become flocks of birds and roads stay just where you left them when you turn away, but both are looking forward to going home to the families that surely miss them. All they have to do is figure out where the Queen went and get her back to her tower in the City before war comes. Considering what they've been through to get this far, it should almost be easy. But the Up-and-Under, much like the real world, does not always play fair or offer happy endings. Just because they've come this far is no guarantee that they will succeed, and just because the two children arrived together is no guarantee that they'll depart the same way - or at all.
REVIEW: The conclusion to the four-part Up-and-Under series, a spinoff of/tie-in to author Seanan McGuire's horror-tinged alchemical fantasy Middlegame (once a standalone, now a series) wraps up the story of Avery and Zib's adventures, as well as those of their traveling companions. As in previous entries, the Up-and-Under is both reminiscent of classic portal fantasy worlds like Oz or Wonderland and a dark reflection of those worlds. Even the kindest characters they meet almost invariably have hidden agendas and shadows just beneath the surface, and the world itself contains levels of threat and menace that are never long forgotten. Every place they've visited, every King and Queen and Page they've encountered, has great power and great capacity to harm as well as help. When they do prove helpful, it's almost always because doing so helps themselves in some manner. Avery and Zib, naturally, have had to learn to work together despite their differences, each changed by their journeys... Zib more than Avery, as the girl openly embraces the slantwise logic of the Up-and-Under. As before, there are strong elements of alchemy and elemental symbolism, such as that found in Tarot decks, throughout (part of the tie-in features; in the world of Middlegame, "Baker" was actually a practicing dark alchemist who loaded her popular children's stories with occult subtexts and hidden codes), as well as marvelous descriptions and turns of phrase that evoke the spirit of old, beloved tales. With so many adventures and backstories and characters with conflicting motivations from the previous three books, this final stretch of the journey can feel tangled, especially if it's been a while since one has read the previous three adventures, and a few elements didn't feel like they paid off like they should have. The very ending felt abrupt, as though the story weren't quite over yet and rushed to wrap up, while the "author" afterword tied it all back into Middlegame's universe.
Overall, I enjoyed this outing, demonstrating yet again the many talents of prolific author Seanan McGuire.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Over the Woodward Wall (A. Deborah Baker) - My Review
The Divide (Guy Gavriel Kay) - My Review
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (Catherynne M. Valente) - My Review
Saturday, January 27, 2024
A History of What Comes Next (Silvain Neuvel)
A History of What Comes Next
The Take Them to the Stars series, Book 1
Silvain Neuvel
Tordotcom
Fiction, Historical Fiction/Sci-Fi/Thriller
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: Always run, never fight. Preserve the knowledge. Survive at all costs. Take them to the stars.
For three thousand years, an unbroken line of mothers and daughters, each identical to the previous generation, have worked in the shadows to expand and guide human civilization, prodding them onto the path that will - they hope - take the species to the moon and beyond before an unnamed evil comes to the planet. They drift like ghosts through history, changing names and roles any time they risk exposure, amassing hidden reserves of wealth and contacts and secret records for their descendants. But the Kibsu, as they call themselves, have lost much along the way, including just who or what they are, where they came from, and what "evil" they are meant to be defending against, not to mention the origin and purpose of the peculiar necklace that is all that remains of the original generation known as One. They do know, however, that there is an "evil" already on this world: the Trackers, ruthless beings as inhumanly powerful and gifted as themselves, who have been chasing the Kibsu since the beginning.
In 1945, the 99 - mother Sarah, teenaged daughter Mia - are closer than they've ever been to achieving their goal: World War II saw a massive acceleration in propulsion technology, and the same rockets designed to launch warheads could send people to other worlds. But to keep things moving forward beyond the end of the war will take new pressures and new politics. For the first time, Mia is being entrusted to push forward the Kibsu cause; Sarah managed to pull some of her many hidden strings to get the young woman sent into Germany as an OSS agent as the war winds down, to recruit rocket scientist Wernher von Braun to the American side before Russian troops reach his research facility (and before the Nazis decide that the best way to keep the man's expertise from enemy hands is a bullet to the head). Sarah hopes to spark a rivalry between Russia and America as they carve up and claim Germany's expertise, a rivalry that will lead to bigger and better rockets and, eventually, space travel. It's a dangerous mission, but one that will prove pivotal to the rest of Mia's life, not to mention the future of the Kibsu generations and their sworn mission... even as it may finally draw the stalking Trackers to their doorstep.
REVIEW: A History of What Comes Next is rooted firmly in real-world history, particularly the 1940s and 1950s that formed the foundation of modern space exploration... foundations inextricably linked to atrocities of warfare. This highlights one of the themes of the book, how humans (and Kibsu) have such great capacities for miracles and atrocities, good and evil, within them, the two often mashed up until it's difficult to definitively strip out one from the other; more than once, witnessing firsthand the horrific things people do to each other, what can be waved away or excused or rationalized by those who may not actively participate in terrible things but don't (or can't) stand up against them, Mia questions whether humans are worth saving at all. When she gets her first tastes of her inhuman Kibsu abilities, and how easily she can eliminate threats (physically, if not psychologically), she starts to wonder just how different she and her mother are from the Trackers, who are mostly known to them through the unspeakably mutilated corpses they leave in their wake whenever they get close to the Kibsu. Mia starts pushing back against her mother's rules, and though friction between mother and daughter isn't unknown in the generations, Mia's challenge to the status quo takes it to new levels, and has lasting ramifications for mother, daughter, and those humans around them (who remain ignorant of their inhuman nature, but are very much a part of their lives nonetheless, for all that Sarah keeps advising her daughter to keep emotionally distant). It makes Sarah rethink her own life and how she's pursued her goals, and whether the example set by her mother and grandmother and back through the line is the only possible way for the Kibsu to be. But some lessons of past generations are worth preserving... such as fear of the Trackers, who sometimes seem as nebulous as any bogeyman but are all too real. The reader gets a few chapters from their point of view, shining new light on the Kibsu's origins; unlike the Kibsu, the all-male generations of Trackers remember their origins and purpose, though that memory doesn't make them any less dangerous or psychotic. Meanwhile, Sarah and Mia see more than their share of human danger and madness as they navigate postwar Germany, Russia, and America. Some chapters flash back to previous generations of Kibsu through the ages, showing how they moved through the world and its myriad cultures (and prejudices and blind spots) while pursuing their mission and preserving their lineage, which add new weight to how Mia and Sarah are both echoing and changing those ageless dynamics.
Toward the end, I felt the story started stumbling, and even for the first book of an apparent trilogy there are a few too many loose or forgotten threads for the ending to feel truly satisfying, enough to affect the rating. Those issues aside, this was an unexpectedly interesting melding of history, thriller, and imaginative science fiction, centered around the complicated relationship of a mother and daughter at the heart of world-changing events. (The audiobook afterword by the author, on the real-world inspirations, was also interesting.)
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Lives of Tao (Wesley Chu) - My Review
The Book Eaters (Sunyi Dean) - My Review
The Calculating Stars (Mary Robinette Kowal) - My Review
The Take Them to the Stars series, Book 1
Silvain Neuvel
Tordotcom
Fiction, Historical Fiction/Sci-Fi/Thriller
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: Always run, never fight. Preserve the knowledge. Survive at all costs. Take them to the stars.
For three thousand years, an unbroken line of mothers and daughters, each identical to the previous generation, have worked in the shadows to expand and guide human civilization, prodding them onto the path that will - they hope - take the species to the moon and beyond before an unnamed evil comes to the planet. They drift like ghosts through history, changing names and roles any time they risk exposure, amassing hidden reserves of wealth and contacts and secret records for their descendants. But the Kibsu, as they call themselves, have lost much along the way, including just who or what they are, where they came from, and what "evil" they are meant to be defending against, not to mention the origin and purpose of the peculiar necklace that is all that remains of the original generation known as One. They do know, however, that there is an "evil" already on this world: the Trackers, ruthless beings as inhumanly powerful and gifted as themselves, who have been chasing the Kibsu since the beginning.
In 1945, the 99 - mother Sarah, teenaged daughter Mia - are closer than they've ever been to achieving their goal: World War II saw a massive acceleration in propulsion technology, and the same rockets designed to launch warheads could send people to other worlds. But to keep things moving forward beyond the end of the war will take new pressures and new politics. For the first time, Mia is being entrusted to push forward the Kibsu cause; Sarah managed to pull some of her many hidden strings to get the young woman sent into Germany as an OSS agent as the war winds down, to recruit rocket scientist Wernher von Braun to the American side before Russian troops reach his research facility (and before the Nazis decide that the best way to keep the man's expertise from enemy hands is a bullet to the head). Sarah hopes to spark a rivalry between Russia and America as they carve up and claim Germany's expertise, a rivalry that will lead to bigger and better rockets and, eventually, space travel. It's a dangerous mission, but one that will prove pivotal to the rest of Mia's life, not to mention the future of the Kibsu generations and their sworn mission... even as it may finally draw the stalking Trackers to their doorstep.
REVIEW: A History of What Comes Next is rooted firmly in real-world history, particularly the 1940s and 1950s that formed the foundation of modern space exploration... foundations inextricably linked to atrocities of warfare. This highlights one of the themes of the book, how humans (and Kibsu) have such great capacities for miracles and atrocities, good and evil, within them, the two often mashed up until it's difficult to definitively strip out one from the other; more than once, witnessing firsthand the horrific things people do to each other, what can be waved away or excused or rationalized by those who may not actively participate in terrible things but don't (or can't) stand up against them, Mia questions whether humans are worth saving at all. When she gets her first tastes of her inhuman Kibsu abilities, and how easily she can eliminate threats (physically, if not psychologically), she starts to wonder just how different she and her mother are from the Trackers, who are mostly known to them through the unspeakably mutilated corpses they leave in their wake whenever they get close to the Kibsu. Mia starts pushing back against her mother's rules, and though friction between mother and daughter isn't unknown in the generations, Mia's challenge to the status quo takes it to new levels, and has lasting ramifications for mother, daughter, and those humans around them (who remain ignorant of their inhuman nature, but are very much a part of their lives nonetheless, for all that Sarah keeps advising her daughter to keep emotionally distant). It makes Sarah rethink her own life and how she's pursued her goals, and whether the example set by her mother and grandmother and back through the line is the only possible way for the Kibsu to be. But some lessons of past generations are worth preserving... such as fear of the Trackers, who sometimes seem as nebulous as any bogeyman but are all too real. The reader gets a few chapters from their point of view, shining new light on the Kibsu's origins; unlike the Kibsu, the all-male generations of Trackers remember their origins and purpose, though that memory doesn't make them any less dangerous or psychotic. Meanwhile, Sarah and Mia see more than their share of human danger and madness as they navigate postwar Germany, Russia, and America. Some chapters flash back to previous generations of Kibsu through the ages, showing how they moved through the world and its myriad cultures (and prejudices and blind spots) while pursuing their mission and preserving their lineage, which add new weight to how Mia and Sarah are both echoing and changing those ageless dynamics.
Toward the end, I felt the story started stumbling, and even for the first book of an apparent trilogy there are a few too many loose or forgotten threads for the ending to feel truly satisfying, enough to affect the rating. Those issues aside, this was an unexpectedly interesting melding of history, thriller, and imaginative science fiction, centered around the complicated relationship of a mother and daughter at the heart of world-changing events. (The audiobook afterword by the author, on the real-world inspirations, was also interesting.)
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Lives of Tao (Wesley Chu) - My Review
The Book Eaters (Sunyi Dean) - My Review
The Calculating Stars (Mary Robinette Kowal) - My Review
Thursday, January 25, 2024
Across the Desert (Dusti Bowling)
Across the Desert
Dusti Bowling
Little, Brown Books
Fiction, MG Adventure
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: Two years ago, Jolene's life may not have been perfect, but it was worlds better than the one she's living now. The car crash completely upended her life - but not in the way one might expect. It was when her mother came home from the hospital with a prescription for pain pills... a prescription that became an oxycodone addiction, though Jolene doesn't want to use that word. Now Mom spends most of her time in bed and hardly seems to notice her own daughter, barely managing a grocery run now and again. One of Jolene's few escapes is in the library, and she was there, using the computer to watch her favorite livestream - "Addie Earhart", a girl just about her age who flies an ultralight solo all around the Arizona desert having adventures - that disaster strikes again. Addie's ultralight goes down in the middle of nowhere... and only Jolene was watching, to know that she's in trouble at all.
Jolene tries to get help. She calls the police, she goes to the fire station, she even tries talking to her mother. Nobody believes the half-hysterical twelve-year-old girl, and since it was a livestream there's no record of it online, just a dead channel. But Jolene isn't going to give up on Addie. She's been watching regularly for quite some time, and has even hand-drawn a map of her flights, so she's pretty sure she knows about where the ultralight went down. It's only eighty miles away, and she knows her mother won't even miss her before she gets home. It'll be an adventure, just like the women she's read about, who traveled across the country and around the world all on their own. But there's a big difference between reading about adventures and having one herself, especially when she's a city girl through and through trekking out into the desert for the first time in her life...
REVIEW: Across the Desert starts with a girl already in distress and and puts her through the physical and psychological wringer, celebrating resilience and tenacity even as it shines a spotlight on how terrible it is that she has to be in this situation to begin with: if addiction were easier to treat without so many barriers and hoops to jump through (many of which just can't be jumped through without lots of money and/or lots of luck), if people just plain listened when other people (especially children) cried for help and didn't dismiss them at a glance, Jolene never would've been in the situation she's in, and even though she learns some positive things and discovers her own strengths, the story does not pretend that it's a great thing that she had to go through this at all. One of the first thing she learned after the accident and her mother developed her pill dependency was how impossible it is for anyone to get help, and how she can't trust anyone because they just won't listen to her. Her mother's dependency naturally has knock-on effects for her daughter, especially in school, where her tattered and too-small clothes and other markers of poverty make her a target for mockery and bullying. One of her few outlets is drawing maps, which is why she has a detailed map at hand of the Arizona desert while she watches Addie's livestream. She's about the only regular viewer, and has a semi-regular online correspondence with the girl who seems to embody all the bravery of the adventuresses in history she loves reading about... which makes her the only person who knows something is wrong when Addie ends up livestreaming her own ultralight crash. Even the librarian doesn't believe her, convinced the girl is mistaken, more upset that the library filters let a child see something disturbing than with listening to what she's actually saying. With no better results when she calls authorities or tries to talk to her mother, city girl Jolene decides it's up to her to rescue her internet friend in the wilderness - a job she can't possibly do alone, but which clearly needs doing, and which nobody seems willing to help her with. Even from the start, though, there's more to her decision than just helping Addie, a turning point in her life that's been coming ever since the car crash and her mom's pills sent her own world tumbling out of control. It's a half-step away from actually running away from home, and about as far from simply not caring if she comes back from the desert at all.
Despite her conviction that nobody will help her, Jolene ends up finding a few allies along the way. Most notable is the 17-year-old girl Marty, whom she meets at the Greyhound station and who ends up becoming both protector and friend, though much of the journey still rests on Jolene's successes (and failures). Without Marty, she wouldn't even have gotten on the bus as an unaccompanied minor. Still, Jolene has trouble trusting Marty, especially when the older girl tries to talk her out of her dangerous (and admittedly ill-thought-out and -prepared-for) plan, but soon enough proves her worth and loyalty. Along the way, Jolene does a lot of growing up in a hurry, setting out alone for the first time in her life and learning that the rest of the world doesn't work at all like downtown Phoenix, where gas stations are always open and there's always an outlet to charge a cell phone (and a signal). Much as she tries to draw lessons and comfort from historical lady adventurers and groundbreakers, Jolene is also still a child, an untested city girl, and one burdened by unprocessed traumas (which she describes as the "car crash feeling" that often threatens to overwhelm her, reminding her of those horrible, infinite seconds between realizing their car was going to be hit - and there was nothing she could do about it - and the impact that essentially destroyed her world). Through it all, she manages to find reserves of strength and courage she never realized she had, and perhaps some possibilities for a future she had stopped believing she would ever reach, or even deserved. Most of all, though, she finally learns - and believes - that she is not as alone as she thought, and that sometimes there really are people who care. It all builds up to a harrowing climax in the desert, where Jolene and Marty are put to the ultimate test of how far they've both come.
After this moment, though, there's still more story to tell, as that climax served almost more to prepare Jolene for the ultimate trial of confronting the biggest challenge in her life. I thought this tail end went on just a trifle too long, almost enough to rob the tale of the extra half-star, but ultimately gave it the benefit of the doubt. It was never just a story of one girl finding the spirit of adventure and her own inner strengths, after all, but the tale of a hurt and broken girl who had slipped through society's gaping cracks and had stopped even trying to climb out, who finally discovers reasons to begin fighting back and claiming a future for herself. It does not pull many punches as it deals with the traumas endured by the families of addicts, and how, while society often gives lip service to caring and pretends that there's always a helping hand for those who reach for it, it mostly just seems to ignore the ones most hurt, especially the poor and the young ones, leaving them to fend for themselves.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Crenshaw (Katherine Applegate) - My Review
The Canyon's Edge (Dusti Bowling) - My Review
Hatchet (Gary Paulsen) - My Review
Dusti Bowling
Little, Brown Books
Fiction, MG Adventure
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: Two years ago, Jolene's life may not have been perfect, but it was worlds better than the one she's living now. The car crash completely upended her life - but not in the way one might expect. It was when her mother came home from the hospital with a prescription for pain pills... a prescription that became an oxycodone addiction, though Jolene doesn't want to use that word. Now Mom spends most of her time in bed and hardly seems to notice her own daughter, barely managing a grocery run now and again. One of Jolene's few escapes is in the library, and she was there, using the computer to watch her favorite livestream - "Addie Earhart", a girl just about her age who flies an ultralight solo all around the Arizona desert having adventures - that disaster strikes again. Addie's ultralight goes down in the middle of nowhere... and only Jolene was watching, to know that she's in trouble at all.
Jolene tries to get help. She calls the police, she goes to the fire station, she even tries talking to her mother. Nobody believes the half-hysterical twelve-year-old girl, and since it was a livestream there's no record of it online, just a dead channel. But Jolene isn't going to give up on Addie. She's been watching regularly for quite some time, and has even hand-drawn a map of her flights, so she's pretty sure she knows about where the ultralight went down. It's only eighty miles away, and she knows her mother won't even miss her before she gets home. It'll be an adventure, just like the women she's read about, who traveled across the country and around the world all on their own. But there's a big difference between reading about adventures and having one herself, especially when she's a city girl through and through trekking out into the desert for the first time in her life...
REVIEW: Across the Desert starts with a girl already in distress and and puts her through the physical and psychological wringer, celebrating resilience and tenacity even as it shines a spotlight on how terrible it is that she has to be in this situation to begin with: if addiction were easier to treat without so many barriers and hoops to jump through (many of which just can't be jumped through without lots of money and/or lots of luck), if people just plain listened when other people (especially children) cried for help and didn't dismiss them at a glance, Jolene never would've been in the situation she's in, and even though she learns some positive things and discovers her own strengths, the story does not pretend that it's a great thing that she had to go through this at all. One of the first thing she learned after the accident and her mother developed her pill dependency was how impossible it is for anyone to get help, and how she can't trust anyone because they just won't listen to her. Her mother's dependency naturally has knock-on effects for her daughter, especially in school, where her tattered and too-small clothes and other markers of poverty make her a target for mockery and bullying. One of her few outlets is drawing maps, which is why she has a detailed map at hand of the Arizona desert while she watches Addie's livestream. She's about the only regular viewer, and has a semi-regular online correspondence with the girl who seems to embody all the bravery of the adventuresses in history she loves reading about... which makes her the only person who knows something is wrong when Addie ends up livestreaming her own ultralight crash. Even the librarian doesn't believe her, convinced the girl is mistaken, more upset that the library filters let a child see something disturbing than with listening to what she's actually saying. With no better results when she calls authorities or tries to talk to her mother, city girl Jolene decides it's up to her to rescue her internet friend in the wilderness - a job she can't possibly do alone, but which clearly needs doing, and which nobody seems willing to help her with. Even from the start, though, there's more to her decision than just helping Addie, a turning point in her life that's been coming ever since the car crash and her mom's pills sent her own world tumbling out of control. It's a half-step away from actually running away from home, and about as far from simply not caring if she comes back from the desert at all.
Despite her conviction that nobody will help her, Jolene ends up finding a few allies along the way. Most notable is the 17-year-old girl Marty, whom she meets at the Greyhound station and who ends up becoming both protector and friend, though much of the journey still rests on Jolene's successes (and failures). Without Marty, she wouldn't even have gotten on the bus as an unaccompanied minor. Still, Jolene has trouble trusting Marty, especially when the older girl tries to talk her out of her dangerous (and admittedly ill-thought-out and -prepared-for) plan, but soon enough proves her worth and loyalty. Along the way, Jolene does a lot of growing up in a hurry, setting out alone for the first time in her life and learning that the rest of the world doesn't work at all like downtown Phoenix, where gas stations are always open and there's always an outlet to charge a cell phone (and a signal). Much as she tries to draw lessons and comfort from historical lady adventurers and groundbreakers, Jolene is also still a child, an untested city girl, and one burdened by unprocessed traumas (which she describes as the "car crash feeling" that often threatens to overwhelm her, reminding her of those horrible, infinite seconds between realizing their car was going to be hit - and there was nothing she could do about it - and the impact that essentially destroyed her world). Through it all, she manages to find reserves of strength and courage she never realized she had, and perhaps some possibilities for a future she had stopped believing she would ever reach, or even deserved. Most of all, though, she finally learns - and believes - that she is not as alone as she thought, and that sometimes there really are people who care. It all builds up to a harrowing climax in the desert, where Jolene and Marty are put to the ultimate test of how far they've both come.
After this moment, though, there's still more story to tell, as that climax served almost more to prepare Jolene for the ultimate trial of confronting the biggest challenge in her life. I thought this tail end went on just a trifle too long, almost enough to rob the tale of the extra half-star, but ultimately gave it the benefit of the doubt. It was never just a story of one girl finding the spirit of adventure and her own inner strengths, after all, but the tale of a hurt and broken girl who had slipped through society's gaping cracks and had stopped even trying to climb out, who finally discovers reasons to begin fighting back and claiming a future for herself. It does not pull many punches as it deals with the traumas endured by the families of addicts, and how, while society often gives lip service to caring and pretends that there's always a helping hand for those who reach for it, it mostly just seems to ignore the ones most hurt, especially the poor and the young ones, leaving them to fend for themselves.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Crenshaw (Katherine Applegate) - My Review
The Canyon's Edge (Dusti Bowling) - My Review
Hatchet (Gary Paulsen) - My Review
Mammoths at the Gates (Nghi Vo)
Mammoths at the Gates
The Singing Hills Cycle, Book 4
Nghi Vo
Tordotcom
Fiction, Fantasy
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: After three years wandering the land and collecting numerous stories (while finding themselves pulled into more than one tale along the way), Cleric Chih finally returns to Singing Hills Abbey. They're looking forward to some rest, catching up with old friends while entering the stories from their travels into the abbey's extensive archives, and seeing their talking hoopoe companion Almost Brilliant and her hatchling. But what they find instead is something very, very wrong. The abbey is nearly deserted, and a contingent of soldiers stands outside the gates, along with two royal war mammoths. Worse, Chih learns that their beloved mentor, elderly Cleric Thien, has passed away... and that, it seems, is why the soldiers and their very irate leaders are there. Before joining the abbey, Thien was a prominent member of the powerful Coh clan of Northern Bell Pass. Now, Thien's relatives demand the body be returned, to be buried in the family graveyard as the man and husband and father they were before taking vows - and even though Singing Hills is supposed to be sacrosanct, the fact that they brought war mammoths means they appear willing to use force if necessary to get what they feel they deserve.
REVIEW: This is a welcome new entry in the interesting world of Singing Hills and the sometimes-too-eventful life of adventurous Cleric Chih. Though it, like the other novellas, can technically stand alone, it feels more connected to the previous stories, following up on Almost Brilliant's "maternity" leave to raise an egg and mentioning prior excursions. Also like the previous installments, there are definite themes being explored. In this case, matter of grief, identity, and transformations are dealt with, particularly how one person invariably becomes another and another onward throughout their lives. It also shares themes with other Singing Hills stories, particularly about stories, who owns them, and how retellings and biases often turn tales into something quite other than the truths that inspire them. Which story is the truth of Thien: the man who was an influential advocate and head of a prominent clan, the inspiring abbey cleric who helped raised new generations of story collectors, or both, or neither? Now that they have passed, stories are all that are left to the world of them, and the decision of whose take precedence could destroy everything. Cleric Chih, naturally, becomes part of the struggle that Thien's death has precipitated, balancing their own grief and the griefs of those who knew them both before and during the elder's time at the abbey. Thien's hoopoe companion, Myriad Virtues, is almost literally crippled by her grief, to a degree even the abbey's other hoopoes find disturbing; Vo delves a little more into the talking birds with this storyline, the living memory keepers of the clerics and Singing Hills, who are people but also not human. In the absence of most of the clerics (called away to another urgent project), Chih's childhood friend is temporary leader of those who remained behind... and, like everyone else (like Chih themself), they have changed over the years, and moreso with the mantle of even temporary power. Chih's well-intentioned efforts to defuse the growing conflict may only make things worse for everyone, and fracture relationships that have lasted for years. The resolution is a slight stretch, though it fits the world of Singing Hills and the characters (especially if one has followed along through the previous novellas, and understands the magical nature of the setting), involving some necessary sacrifice and loss, as well as moments of wonder and beauty. I'm still enjoying the world and the characters, and look forward to more visits to Singing Hills Abbey and its world.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon (Grace Lin) - My Review
The Empress of Salt and Fortune (Nghi Vo) - My Review
The Jewel and Her Lapidary (Fran Wilde) - My Review
The Singing Hills Cycle, Book 4
Nghi Vo
Tordotcom
Fiction, Fantasy
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: After three years wandering the land and collecting numerous stories (while finding themselves pulled into more than one tale along the way), Cleric Chih finally returns to Singing Hills Abbey. They're looking forward to some rest, catching up with old friends while entering the stories from their travels into the abbey's extensive archives, and seeing their talking hoopoe companion Almost Brilliant and her hatchling. But what they find instead is something very, very wrong. The abbey is nearly deserted, and a contingent of soldiers stands outside the gates, along with two royal war mammoths. Worse, Chih learns that their beloved mentor, elderly Cleric Thien, has passed away... and that, it seems, is why the soldiers and their very irate leaders are there. Before joining the abbey, Thien was a prominent member of the powerful Coh clan of Northern Bell Pass. Now, Thien's relatives demand the body be returned, to be buried in the family graveyard as the man and husband and father they were before taking vows - and even though Singing Hills is supposed to be sacrosanct, the fact that they brought war mammoths means they appear willing to use force if necessary to get what they feel they deserve.
REVIEW: This is a welcome new entry in the interesting world of Singing Hills and the sometimes-too-eventful life of adventurous Cleric Chih. Though it, like the other novellas, can technically stand alone, it feels more connected to the previous stories, following up on Almost Brilliant's "maternity" leave to raise an egg and mentioning prior excursions. Also like the previous installments, there are definite themes being explored. In this case, matter of grief, identity, and transformations are dealt with, particularly how one person invariably becomes another and another onward throughout their lives. It also shares themes with other Singing Hills stories, particularly about stories, who owns them, and how retellings and biases often turn tales into something quite other than the truths that inspire them. Which story is the truth of Thien: the man who was an influential advocate and head of a prominent clan, the inspiring abbey cleric who helped raised new generations of story collectors, or both, or neither? Now that they have passed, stories are all that are left to the world of them, and the decision of whose take precedence could destroy everything. Cleric Chih, naturally, becomes part of the struggle that Thien's death has precipitated, balancing their own grief and the griefs of those who knew them both before and during the elder's time at the abbey. Thien's hoopoe companion, Myriad Virtues, is almost literally crippled by her grief, to a degree even the abbey's other hoopoes find disturbing; Vo delves a little more into the talking birds with this storyline, the living memory keepers of the clerics and Singing Hills, who are people but also not human. In the absence of most of the clerics (called away to another urgent project), Chih's childhood friend is temporary leader of those who remained behind... and, like everyone else (like Chih themself), they have changed over the years, and moreso with the mantle of even temporary power. Chih's well-intentioned efforts to defuse the growing conflict may only make things worse for everyone, and fracture relationships that have lasted for years. The resolution is a slight stretch, though it fits the world of Singing Hills and the characters (especially if one has followed along through the previous novellas, and understands the magical nature of the setting), involving some necessary sacrifice and loss, as well as moments of wonder and beauty. I'm still enjoying the world and the characters, and look forward to more visits to Singing Hills Abbey and its world.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon (Grace Lin) - My Review
The Empress of Salt and Fortune (Nghi Vo) - My Review
The Jewel and Her Lapidary (Fran Wilde) - My Review
Wednesday, January 24, 2024
Fire Truck vs. Dragon (Chris Barton)
Fire Truck vs. Dragon
Chris Barton, illustrations by Shanda McCloskey
Little, Brown Books
Fiction, CH Fantasy/Humor/Picture Book
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Dragon and Fire Truck are the best of friends, and have all sorts of fun together. So what happens when two kids decide they'd rather see a fight than have a party?
REVIEW: This sequel to Shark vs. Train again juxtaposes two unlikely contestants in a battle for supremacy... or, at least, that's what the kids keep hoping happens. Instead, Dragon and Fire Truck get along great - but they're nothing if not crowd pleasers, so they give rivalry a go, with amusing consequences. It's a fun, quick read that manages not to retread the original story.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Shark vs. Train (Chris Barton) - My Review
The Legend of Rock Paper Scissors (Drew Daywalt) - My Review
Dragons Love Tacos (Adam Rubin) - My Review
Chris Barton, illustrations by Shanda McCloskey
Little, Brown Books
Fiction, CH Fantasy/Humor/Picture Book
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Dragon and Fire Truck are the best of friends, and have all sorts of fun together. So what happens when two kids decide they'd rather see a fight than have a party?
REVIEW: This sequel to Shark vs. Train again juxtaposes two unlikely contestants in a battle for supremacy... or, at least, that's what the kids keep hoping happens. Instead, Dragon and Fire Truck get along great - but they're nothing if not crowd pleasers, so they give rivalry a go, with amusing consequences. It's a fun, quick read that manages not to retread the original story.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Shark vs. Train (Chris Barton) - My Review
The Legend of Rock Paper Scissors (Drew Daywalt) - My Review
Dragons Love Tacos (Adam Rubin) - My Review
Friday, January 19, 2024
The View from the Cheap Seats (Neil Gaiman)
The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction
Neil Gaiman
Harper Audio
Nonfiction, Essays/Media Reference/Memoirs
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: This collection of Neil Gaiman's writings covers a variety of topics, from the state of comic books and graphic novels as art and literary forms through reflections on his life and career to interviews, book forewords and afterwords, and more.
REVIEW: Though I find Gaiman's fiction a bit hit-and-miss, I can always appreciate what he's doing and how he's doing it, and one can't help but stand in awe of a career like his. Much like his fiction, these articles and essays and reflections can be a little hit-and-miss. Some loses context by being, well, out of context: material meant for inclusion in album liner notes can't help feeling a little lost without the album backing it up, and some of the minutiae of industry talk (especially the comic book industry) is lost on someone who only occasionally delves into graphic novels. (One of the coldest shoulders I ever got in a retail store was in a comic book shop, and so many of the popular titles seem to gatekeep themselves by being part of decades-long intertwined arcs and histories and traditions and so forth anyway in ways that can discourage newcomers from even trying to start - I'm lookin' at you, too, Sandman - so I never really felt welcome in that crowd. Yes, I'm officially too much of a social misfit to read comic books. But I digress...) Still, even when discussing stuff I wasn't familiar with, Gaiman manages to be interesting. Plus he's still one of the better audiobook narrators out there; I never have to crank my earbuds up to pain-inducing volumes just to understand what he's saying. The tone of the articles varies, some being lighter and some darker, some fairly focused and others ranging further afield, some short and some long, but few outstayed their welcome. All in all, it made for interesting listening.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Salmon of Doubt (Douglas Adams) - My Review
Never Say You Can't Survive (Charlie Jane Anders) - My Review
Fragile Things (Neil Gaiman) - My Review
Neil Gaiman
Harper Audio
Nonfiction, Essays/Media Reference/Memoirs
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: This collection of Neil Gaiman's writings covers a variety of topics, from the state of comic books and graphic novels as art and literary forms through reflections on his life and career to interviews, book forewords and afterwords, and more.
REVIEW: Though I find Gaiman's fiction a bit hit-and-miss, I can always appreciate what he's doing and how he's doing it, and one can't help but stand in awe of a career like his. Much like his fiction, these articles and essays and reflections can be a little hit-and-miss. Some loses context by being, well, out of context: material meant for inclusion in album liner notes can't help feeling a little lost without the album backing it up, and some of the minutiae of industry talk (especially the comic book industry) is lost on someone who only occasionally delves into graphic novels. (One of the coldest shoulders I ever got in a retail store was in a comic book shop, and so many of the popular titles seem to gatekeep themselves by being part of decades-long intertwined arcs and histories and traditions and so forth anyway in ways that can discourage newcomers from even trying to start - I'm lookin' at you, too, Sandman - so I never really felt welcome in that crowd. Yes, I'm officially too much of a social misfit to read comic books. But I digress...) Still, even when discussing stuff I wasn't familiar with, Gaiman manages to be interesting. Plus he's still one of the better audiobook narrators out there; I never have to crank my earbuds up to pain-inducing volumes just to understand what he's saying. The tone of the articles varies, some being lighter and some darker, some fairly focused and others ranging further afield, some short and some long, but few outstayed their welcome. All in all, it made for interesting listening.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Salmon of Doubt (Douglas Adams) - My Review
Never Say You Can't Survive (Charlie Jane Anders) - My Review
Fragile Things (Neil Gaiman) - My Review
Wednesday, January 17, 2024
Spider Woman's Daughter (Anne Hillerman)
Spider Woman's Daughter: A Leaphorn, Chee and Manuelito Novel
The Leaphorn and Chee series, Book 19
Anne Hillerman
Harper
Fiction, Mystery
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: It was a morning meeting like countless others, as members of the Navajo Nation police force met at a local eatery to discuss cases with retired legend turned private investigator Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn. Then a stranger in the parking lot pulled out a gun, and Leaphorn is on the ground, a bullet hole in his head, barely clinging to life.
As the sole eyewitness, Officer Bernadette Manuelito wants nothing more than to find the culprit, but the captain - following protocol - suspends her from the case as being too close to the matter. But she can't just sit on her hands; Leaphorn has meant too much to her and her husband, Sergeant Jim Chee. When Chee is assigned to take the lead on the investigation, Bernie can't help doing some investigating of her own. Though a man with a career as long and storied as Leaphorn's doesn't lack for potential enemies, nobody can fathom what motive could possibly be sufficient for such a cold-blooded daylight hit. The clock is ticking, both on the case and on Leaphorn's life, as husband and wife face a puzzle even the great investigator himself might not have been able to solve.
REVIEW: Though my local library listed this as Book One of a series, it's technically the nineteenth entry in the Leaphorn and Chee stories created by author Anne Hillerman's father, Tony Hillerman, which I haven't read any of yet. However, this has a strong vibe of a torch being passed to a next generation, so it seems to work as a solid entry point without alienating newcomers; though there are obviously references to previous adventures and prior relationships, the story does a decent job grounding the reader in what's relevant to the current tale. The end result is an exciting mystery set firmly in the American Southwest and its unique blend of cultures.
From the start, both Chee and Manuelito see themselves as mere shadows of their friend and mentor Leaphorn, a larger-than-life figure in their lives and in the Navajo tribal police force. They've always been able to count on him to help with their own work, a steadfast source of support and insights to crack the toughest cases. Even after he technically retired, Leaphorn is a fixture of the officers' lives and jobs; they all know they can turn to him for anything. Seeing such a legend lying on the pavement in a puddle of his own blood, shot in the face in broad daylight not fifty feet from a host of police officers he himself practically trained, sends shockwaves through the ranks and across the reservation. As determined as Chee and Manuelito are to find justice, both secretly fear that, without Leaphorn, they're never going to succeed, especially not with the feds sniffing around (there are mixed jurisdictional issues on tribal lands, especially with a case like this). While Jim Chee goes through official channels to explore possible suspects and motives, Manuelito must take a step to the side to do the same, often ending up in places she knows she probably shouldn't be if she's supposed to be on leave and not officially pursuing anything. She does try to set it all aside, dealing with an aging mother and a younger sister going through a tumultuous phase, but keeps finding herself pulled back, by her own nagging sense of guilt that she could've done something if only she'd been faster out the restaurant door if nothing else. Her own investigation takes her to different places and people than her husband's, but neither are so stubborn or stupid that they refuse to help the other one out, or compare notes in the interest of the biggest case to land in their laps in ages - not to mention the first they must unravel without Leaphorn's watchful eye. Both encounter a host of colorful characters, on and off the rez, set against a desert backdrop that almost becomes its own character. It's a place that's both modern and timeless, where even computers and cell towers can't compete with the sheer vast, remote scale of the land. The investigations take several twists and turns and suffer some serious setbacks, all as Joe Leaphorn fades further and further from this world. It eventually comes together in an exciting confrontation and unmasking of the true culprit, followed by a brief wrap-up that, naturally, leaves the leads ready for the next book/case to unfold.
While I mostly enjoyed the tale and its interesting blend of characters and cultures and procedural investigation, there were a few loose threads and characters that seemed forgotten about by the end. I also thought the confrontation with the culprit ventured a little too far into the "monologuing villain" trope. I might end up following a few more stories in this series, though I doubt I'm committed enough to backtrack through eighteen previous volumes.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Track of the Cat (Nevada Barr) - My Review
Firekeeper's Daughter (Angeline Boulley) - My Review
Trail of Lightning (Rebecca Roanhorse) - My Review
The Leaphorn and Chee series, Book 19
Anne Hillerman
Harper
Fiction, Mystery
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: It was a morning meeting like countless others, as members of the Navajo Nation police force met at a local eatery to discuss cases with retired legend turned private investigator Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn. Then a stranger in the parking lot pulled out a gun, and Leaphorn is on the ground, a bullet hole in his head, barely clinging to life.
As the sole eyewitness, Officer Bernadette Manuelito wants nothing more than to find the culprit, but the captain - following protocol - suspends her from the case as being too close to the matter. But she can't just sit on her hands; Leaphorn has meant too much to her and her husband, Sergeant Jim Chee. When Chee is assigned to take the lead on the investigation, Bernie can't help doing some investigating of her own. Though a man with a career as long and storied as Leaphorn's doesn't lack for potential enemies, nobody can fathom what motive could possibly be sufficient for such a cold-blooded daylight hit. The clock is ticking, both on the case and on Leaphorn's life, as husband and wife face a puzzle even the great investigator himself might not have been able to solve.
REVIEW: Though my local library listed this as Book One of a series, it's technically the nineteenth entry in the Leaphorn and Chee stories created by author Anne Hillerman's father, Tony Hillerman, which I haven't read any of yet. However, this has a strong vibe of a torch being passed to a next generation, so it seems to work as a solid entry point without alienating newcomers; though there are obviously references to previous adventures and prior relationships, the story does a decent job grounding the reader in what's relevant to the current tale. The end result is an exciting mystery set firmly in the American Southwest and its unique blend of cultures.
From the start, both Chee and Manuelito see themselves as mere shadows of their friend and mentor Leaphorn, a larger-than-life figure in their lives and in the Navajo tribal police force. They've always been able to count on him to help with their own work, a steadfast source of support and insights to crack the toughest cases. Even after he technically retired, Leaphorn is a fixture of the officers' lives and jobs; they all know they can turn to him for anything. Seeing such a legend lying on the pavement in a puddle of his own blood, shot in the face in broad daylight not fifty feet from a host of police officers he himself practically trained, sends shockwaves through the ranks and across the reservation. As determined as Chee and Manuelito are to find justice, both secretly fear that, without Leaphorn, they're never going to succeed, especially not with the feds sniffing around (there are mixed jurisdictional issues on tribal lands, especially with a case like this). While Jim Chee goes through official channels to explore possible suspects and motives, Manuelito must take a step to the side to do the same, often ending up in places she knows she probably shouldn't be if she's supposed to be on leave and not officially pursuing anything. She does try to set it all aside, dealing with an aging mother and a younger sister going through a tumultuous phase, but keeps finding herself pulled back, by her own nagging sense of guilt that she could've done something if only she'd been faster out the restaurant door if nothing else. Her own investigation takes her to different places and people than her husband's, but neither are so stubborn or stupid that they refuse to help the other one out, or compare notes in the interest of the biggest case to land in their laps in ages - not to mention the first they must unravel without Leaphorn's watchful eye. Both encounter a host of colorful characters, on and off the rez, set against a desert backdrop that almost becomes its own character. It's a place that's both modern and timeless, where even computers and cell towers can't compete with the sheer vast, remote scale of the land. The investigations take several twists and turns and suffer some serious setbacks, all as Joe Leaphorn fades further and further from this world. It eventually comes together in an exciting confrontation and unmasking of the true culprit, followed by a brief wrap-up that, naturally, leaves the leads ready for the next book/case to unfold.
While I mostly enjoyed the tale and its interesting blend of characters and cultures and procedural investigation, there were a few loose threads and characters that seemed forgotten about by the end. I also thought the confrontation with the culprit ventured a little too far into the "monologuing villain" trope. I might end up following a few more stories in this series, though I doubt I'm committed enough to backtrack through eighteen previous volumes.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Track of the Cat (Nevada Barr) - My Review
Firekeeper's Daughter (Angeline Boulley) - My Review
Trail of Lightning (Rebecca Roanhorse) - My Review
Friday, January 12, 2024
Song of Silver, Flame Like Night (Amelie Wen Zhao)
Song of Silver, Flame Like Night
The Song of the Last Kingdom series, Book 1
Amelie Wen Zhao
HarperVoyager
Fiction, YA Fantasy
**+ (Bad/Okay)
DESCRIPTION: Twelve cycles ago, Lan watched in horror as foreign invaders, the Elantians, struck down her mother in cold blood with their metal-fueled magic. With her dying breaths, the woman left a strange sigil on her young daughter's arm, a mark only she could see: a character in no Hin language she has ever seen, enclosed in a circle. Since then, mere survival in a conquered land has taken most of her time and energy, but she still struggles to understand her mother's last gift, a message she's sure must hold some special meaning. But it's not until the night she meets the strange young man at the teahouse where she works (if "work" is the proper term for what's essentially slavery) that she begins to figure out the truth: that the mark is tied to ancient tales of powerful practitioners who once flourished in the land, and that, by bestowing it, Lan's mother left her with both a great gift and a terrible burden.
Zen arrived in the city to meet a contact for the underground resistance against the pale invaders, only to find the old man dead... and find traces of a very unusual power lingering in the air. He tracks it to a teahouse, and to a young woman who seems to have no idea who or what she truly is: a potentially powerful practitioner, capable of channeling natural qi energy into magic. But right on the heels of this discovery comes the arrival of the most dangerous foreign magician in the land, the ice-eyed Alloy of unimaginable strength and cruelty. The man seems strangely intent on hunting down Lan, but Lan has no idea why - except for the fact that she knows him as the one who tore her mother's heart from her chest. By rescuing Lan from the Alloy, Zen risks the secrets of the resistance and the hidden school where he learned his practitioner skills... and also risks exposing his most shameful secrets, ones that could destroy everything.
REVIEW: At the outset, this had all the earmarks of a solid story: a plucky young woman, a magical secret, a conquered empire steeped in history and lore inspired by China, a mysterious stranger with more mysterious powers... and, yes, there was a cool dragon on the cover, so sue me, I like dragons and was in the mood for a dragon story. Much like that dragon on the cover, though, those earmarks became misleading disappointments. The fact that there is no dragon for the majority of the tale is the least of these.
Things start promisingly, with the history of the empire and the four "demon gods" - vastly powerful beings of pure yin energy, which can work great miracles and victories but always at a great price, often involving the corruption of whoever thinks to wield them - and the coming of the pale-skinned foreign invaders and their metal-based magic that puts an effective end to that long history almost overnight. Lan is rebellious at heart, but as an essential slave of a city teahouse (for the foreigners may stamp down on the local culture with iron boots, but they love the aesthetics and trappings, like clipping the wings of a captured exotic bird for display in the parlor), her opportunities to strike back at the people who killed her mother twelve cycles/years ago are limited, especially when she can't make out her mother's cryptic final message in the mark left on her wrist. That was twelve cycles ago that her mother was murdered before her eyes, and still Lan doesn't understand why. Did I mention it happened twelve cycles ago? See, it had been a sentence since I said it, so you probably needed a reminder... If you're getting tired of the repetition here, try getting that kind of repetition in a book-length story, for almost every single plot and character point, start to finish. I had to wonder if the story was originally serialized, that the author thought the readers needed the constant reminders to catch them back up on the story so far. As it was, it stopped being helpful very early on, and by the halfway mark I was almost literally rolling my eyes and grinding my teeth every time the story looped back to remind me, yet again, that Lan's mother was murdered twelve cycles ago, and how, and by whom.
Between the bouts of repetition, there's a decent amount of action, but at some point I found it hard to care about Lan or Zen... or nearly anyone else. None of them ever become more than paper-thin caricatures fulfilling very obvious plot roles, more often than not tripping themselves up with angst (and getting lost in their own recollections - cue yet another repetition of information the reader already knew). The Elantians are even shallower, despite the potentially interesting magic system that defies all local understanding of how power is supposed to work (something that no Hin practitioner, apparently, is even trying to learn or dissect, even if that might seem like the kind of thing that a rebellion group would probably want very much to understand about their enemy; instead, they're more caught up in policing their own handful of surviving practitioner disciples by old rules handed down by admittedly paranoid rulers who had already decimated qi lore long before invaders showed up to finish the job), and the Alloy who murdered Lan's mother (remember, Lan's mother, who was murdered twelve cycles ago?) struts and monologues and preens and sneers and only lacks the Snidely Whiplash mustache to twirl and a railroad track to which to tie helpless damsels (though maybe that turns up in the sequel). So... what, the Hin people have a rich, diverse, sometimes contentious history stretching back thousands of cycles, while the Elantians just fell out of the sky as a monolithic entity with no emotion or motivation beyond basest greed and cultural superiority? Why even hint at their alchemy and their metal magic and their angel-heavy symbolism without following through on any of it? They're not even really people, just things, stomping and shouting and stealing and destroying, things whose only apparent weakness is not knowing about qi. (And, yeah, I get that white people haven't exactly trod with delicate steps around the world, but part of what makes a conquering culture dangerous isn't just the stomping and shouting and stealing; it's how their cultures have taught them to rationalize their own terrible and destructive actions, how they work to spread that culture to those they've conquered until the victims start parroting the same ideas. This book offers some aesthetic trappings of foreign culture, but no real sense of that culture itself, or how it's poisoning its latest acquisition. There's a lot more about how previous turnovers in Hin power have poisoned Hin histories and folklore than how the Elantians have done the same.) In any event, stuff happens, characters angst and waver and make sacrifices and mistakes, Zen's hair keeps falling over his eyes like a cut-rate anime character, and it finally ends by promising a sequel.
I wanted a dragon story. I got a pair of angsty cliches who wouldn't stop telling me things I already knew ad nauseam, in a world that felt shortchanged by them and their story. Despite some solid ideas and interesting descriptions and a few decent action sequences, I don't think I'll bother with the next installment, even if the dragon might actually be in that one.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Jade City (Fonda Lee) - My Review
She Who Became the Sun (Shelley Parker-Chan) - My Review
The Tiger's Daughter (K. Arsenault Rivera) - My Review
The Song of the Last Kingdom series, Book 1
Amelie Wen Zhao
HarperVoyager
Fiction, YA Fantasy
**+ (Bad/Okay)
DESCRIPTION: Twelve cycles ago, Lan watched in horror as foreign invaders, the Elantians, struck down her mother in cold blood with their metal-fueled magic. With her dying breaths, the woman left a strange sigil on her young daughter's arm, a mark only she could see: a character in no Hin language she has ever seen, enclosed in a circle. Since then, mere survival in a conquered land has taken most of her time and energy, but she still struggles to understand her mother's last gift, a message she's sure must hold some special meaning. But it's not until the night she meets the strange young man at the teahouse where she works (if "work" is the proper term for what's essentially slavery) that she begins to figure out the truth: that the mark is tied to ancient tales of powerful practitioners who once flourished in the land, and that, by bestowing it, Lan's mother left her with both a great gift and a terrible burden.
Zen arrived in the city to meet a contact for the underground resistance against the pale invaders, only to find the old man dead... and find traces of a very unusual power lingering in the air. He tracks it to a teahouse, and to a young woman who seems to have no idea who or what she truly is: a potentially powerful practitioner, capable of channeling natural qi energy into magic. But right on the heels of this discovery comes the arrival of the most dangerous foreign magician in the land, the ice-eyed Alloy of unimaginable strength and cruelty. The man seems strangely intent on hunting down Lan, but Lan has no idea why - except for the fact that she knows him as the one who tore her mother's heart from her chest. By rescuing Lan from the Alloy, Zen risks the secrets of the resistance and the hidden school where he learned his practitioner skills... and also risks exposing his most shameful secrets, ones that could destroy everything.
REVIEW: At the outset, this had all the earmarks of a solid story: a plucky young woman, a magical secret, a conquered empire steeped in history and lore inspired by China, a mysterious stranger with more mysterious powers... and, yes, there was a cool dragon on the cover, so sue me, I like dragons and was in the mood for a dragon story. Much like that dragon on the cover, though, those earmarks became misleading disappointments. The fact that there is no dragon for the majority of the tale is the least of these.
Things start promisingly, with the history of the empire and the four "demon gods" - vastly powerful beings of pure yin energy, which can work great miracles and victories but always at a great price, often involving the corruption of whoever thinks to wield them - and the coming of the pale-skinned foreign invaders and their metal-based magic that puts an effective end to that long history almost overnight. Lan is rebellious at heart, but as an essential slave of a city teahouse (for the foreigners may stamp down on the local culture with iron boots, but they love the aesthetics and trappings, like clipping the wings of a captured exotic bird for display in the parlor), her opportunities to strike back at the people who killed her mother twelve cycles/years ago are limited, especially when she can't make out her mother's cryptic final message in the mark left on her wrist. That was twelve cycles ago that her mother was murdered before her eyes, and still Lan doesn't understand why. Did I mention it happened twelve cycles ago? See, it had been a sentence since I said it, so you probably needed a reminder... If you're getting tired of the repetition here, try getting that kind of repetition in a book-length story, for almost every single plot and character point, start to finish. I had to wonder if the story was originally serialized, that the author thought the readers needed the constant reminders to catch them back up on the story so far. As it was, it stopped being helpful very early on, and by the halfway mark I was almost literally rolling my eyes and grinding my teeth every time the story looped back to remind me, yet again, that Lan's mother was murdered twelve cycles ago, and how, and by whom.
Between the bouts of repetition, there's a decent amount of action, but at some point I found it hard to care about Lan or Zen... or nearly anyone else. None of them ever become more than paper-thin caricatures fulfilling very obvious plot roles, more often than not tripping themselves up with angst (and getting lost in their own recollections - cue yet another repetition of information the reader already knew). The Elantians are even shallower, despite the potentially interesting magic system that defies all local understanding of how power is supposed to work (something that no Hin practitioner, apparently, is even trying to learn or dissect, even if that might seem like the kind of thing that a rebellion group would probably want very much to understand about their enemy; instead, they're more caught up in policing their own handful of surviving practitioner disciples by old rules handed down by admittedly paranoid rulers who had already decimated qi lore long before invaders showed up to finish the job), and the Alloy who murdered Lan's mother (remember, Lan's mother, who was murdered twelve cycles ago?) struts and monologues and preens and sneers and only lacks the Snidely Whiplash mustache to twirl and a railroad track to which to tie helpless damsels (though maybe that turns up in the sequel). So... what, the Hin people have a rich, diverse, sometimes contentious history stretching back thousands of cycles, while the Elantians just fell out of the sky as a monolithic entity with no emotion or motivation beyond basest greed and cultural superiority? Why even hint at their alchemy and their metal magic and their angel-heavy symbolism without following through on any of it? They're not even really people, just things, stomping and shouting and stealing and destroying, things whose only apparent weakness is not knowing about qi. (And, yeah, I get that white people haven't exactly trod with delicate steps around the world, but part of what makes a conquering culture dangerous isn't just the stomping and shouting and stealing; it's how their cultures have taught them to rationalize their own terrible and destructive actions, how they work to spread that culture to those they've conquered until the victims start parroting the same ideas. This book offers some aesthetic trappings of foreign culture, but no real sense of that culture itself, or how it's poisoning its latest acquisition. There's a lot more about how previous turnovers in Hin power have poisoned Hin histories and folklore than how the Elantians have done the same.) In any event, stuff happens, characters angst and waver and make sacrifices and mistakes, Zen's hair keeps falling over his eyes like a cut-rate anime character, and it finally ends by promising a sequel.
I wanted a dragon story. I got a pair of angsty cliches who wouldn't stop telling me things I already knew ad nauseam, in a world that felt shortchanged by them and their story. Despite some solid ideas and interesting descriptions and a few decent action sequences, I don't think I'll bother with the next installment, even if the dragon might actually be in that one.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Jade City (Fonda Lee) - My Review
She Who Became the Sun (Shelley Parker-Chan) - My Review
The Tiger's Daughter (K. Arsenault Rivera) - My Review
Wednesday, January 10, 2024
Whatever for Hire (R. J. Blain)
Whatever for Hire: A Magical Romantic Comedy (with a body count)
The Magical Romantic Comedy (with a body count) series, Book 5
R. J. Blain
Pen and Page Publishing
Fiction, Fantasy/Humor/Romance
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Sometimes, cat shifter/sphinx Kanika wonders if naming her one-woman mercenary business Whatever for Hire was a mistake. Sure, she gets calls about bounty hunting and private investigations and various "gray areas of the law" jobs, but she also ends up rescuing cats from trees for a measly fifty bucks. Still, money's money, and she needs money, seeing as how she likes luxuries like a meal now and again. But when things go wrong, a muttered oath brings none other than the Devil himself to make an appearance... and, not for the first time in her too-interesting life, she finds herself on the wrong end of a diabolical bargain.
If it hadn't been for that bargain, she never would've taken the next job that came up: someone wanting a relative/business rival abducted and kept out of the way for a few months. And thus she never would've ended up in the company of Malcolm Findlay Stewart, the world's sexiest firefighter (who also makes a habit of rescuing kittens and puppies from blazes) and the man who tempts her to shatter her personal moral codes about getting involved with clients or targets and bury the pieces in an unmarked grave. She would've listened to the warning voice in the back of her head that told her there was a whole lot more going on than a simple family feud... something important enough to draw the attention of the Lord of Hell himself.
REVIEW: Yet another random audiobook selection via Libby and my library, I picked it because it looked like it could be fun... or, admittedly, it could be terrible. Comedy, after all, can be a very hard target to hit, and when it goes wrong, it often goes very wrong. I mostly grabbed it as filler; I like having multiple options downloaded. But the first audiobook selection of the workday disappointed me, so I queued up this one - and was off on what turned out to be an exciting ride, full of nice twists, snappy dialog, decent characters, and - yes - some nice sizzle (even if the sex scenes are strictly fade-to-black), along with healthy doses of humor, all built on a surprisingly solid story arc that kept me interested from start to finish.
Kanika's a graduate of the school of hard knocks, which can give her a chip on her shoulder but also makes her rather good at survival and improvising plans on the fly, talents that come in handy for an independent mercenary. She was forced to run away from her only relative in America after the woman tried to sell her off to the highest bidder - and that was before she hit adolescence and her magical nature was revealed, though as shifters go she's hardly a prodigy; as often as she ends up as her "true" self, the Egyptian sphinx, she ends up as the image of Bastet, Cleopatra, or an anthro "sex kitten" woman in a miniskirt and stiletto heels. This being a world in which magic's return is just another part of daily modern life, her ability isn't exactly unusual; many people manifest some form or another of magic these days, and some statistics even put the number of true, undiluted H. sapiens on a path to possible extinction unless the magic goes to sleep again in a few decades. Like any cat, she's got more than her share of pride, as well as a curious streak that can (and does) land her in all sorts of trouble. Add this to a colorful past that's more alluded to than spelled out, one where she's on a casual first-name basis with Lucifer, and Kanika's story is guaranteed to be wild. Her relationship with Malcolm starts out rocky, to say the least - abduction isn't exactly the cornerstone of a healthy relationship, something Kanika ruefully reminds herself of more than once - but they come to respect and rely on each other quickly when it becomes clear that they have mutual enemies. They're both also grown-up enough to understand concepts like consent (and delayed gratification; even when it's clear the attraction is mutual, they're both capable of putting off physical intimacy until they aren't in immediate danger). As the pair navigate an ever-growing list of problems, Kanika also has to deal with periodic check-ins by the Devil, plus a few other immortals who insist on complicating her life, part of ulterior motives that become clear later on.
There are a few threads left dangling by the end, subplots that may get tied up in other installments (I'm pretty sure all the series titles are standalones, but there may be crossover storylines or characters). The main bits, though, wrap up in a fairly satisfactory manner. Ultimately, Whatever for Hire delivers everything its title and blurb promised me, a nice little snack of a tale.
You Might Also Enjoy:
An American Werewolf in Hoboken (Dakota Cassidy) - My Review
You Slay Me (Katie MacAlister) - My Review
Discount Armageddon (Seanan McGuire) - My Review
The Magical Romantic Comedy (with a body count) series, Book 5
R. J. Blain
Pen and Page Publishing
Fiction, Fantasy/Humor/Romance
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Sometimes, cat shifter/sphinx Kanika wonders if naming her one-woman mercenary business Whatever for Hire was a mistake. Sure, she gets calls about bounty hunting and private investigations and various "gray areas of the law" jobs, but she also ends up rescuing cats from trees for a measly fifty bucks. Still, money's money, and she needs money, seeing as how she likes luxuries like a meal now and again. But when things go wrong, a muttered oath brings none other than the Devil himself to make an appearance... and, not for the first time in her too-interesting life, she finds herself on the wrong end of a diabolical bargain.
If it hadn't been for that bargain, she never would've taken the next job that came up: someone wanting a relative/business rival abducted and kept out of the way for a few months. And thus she never would've ended up in the company of Malcolm Findlay Stewart, the world's sexiest firefighter (who also makes a habit of rescuing kittens and puppies from blazes) and the man who tempts her to shatter her personal moral codes about getting involved with clients or targets and bury the pieces in an unmarked grave. She would've listened to the warning voice in the back of her head that told her there was a whole lot more going on than a simple family feud... something important enough to draw the attention of the Lord of Hell himself.
REVIEW: Yet another random audiobook selection via Libby and my library, I picked it because it looked like it could be fun... or, admittedly, it could be terrible. Comedy, after all, can be a very hard target to hit, and when it goes wrong, it often goes very wrong. I mostly grabbed it as filler; I like having multiple options downloaded. But the first audiobook selection of the workday disappointed me, so I queued up this one - and was off on what turned out to be an exciting ride, full of nice twists, snappy dialog, decent characters, and - yes - some nice sizzle (even if the sex scenes are strictly fade-to-black), along with healthy doses of humor, all built on a surprisingly solid story arc that kept me interested from start to finish.
Kanika's a graduate of the school of hard knocks, which can give her a chip on her shoulder but also makes her rather good at survival and improvising plans on the fly, talents that come in handy for an independent mercenary. She was forced to run away from her only relative in America after the woman tried to sell her off to the highest bidder - and that was before she hit adolescence and her magical nature was revealed, though as shifters go she's hardly a prodigy; as often as she ends up as her "true" self, the Egyptian sphinx, she ends up as the image of Bastet, Cleopatra, or an anthro "sex kitten" woman in a miniskirt and stiletto heels. This being a world in which magic's return is just another part of daily modern life, her ability isn't exactly unusual; many people manifest some form or another of magic these days, and some statistics even put the number of true, undiluted H. sapiens on a path to possible extinction unless the magic goes to sleep again in a few decades. Like any cat, she's got more than her share of pride, as well as a curious streak that can (and does) land her in all sorts of trouble. Add this to a colorful past that's more alluded to than spelled out, one where she's on a casual first-name basis with Lucifer, and Kanika's story is guaranteed to be wild. Her relationship with Malcolm starts out rocky, to say the least - abduction isn't exactly the cornerstone of a healthy relationship, something Kanika ruefully reminds herself of more than once - but they come to respect and rely on each other quickly when it becomes clear that they have mutual enemies. They're both also grown-up enough to understand concepts like consent (and delayed gratification; even when it's clear the attraction is mutual, they're both capable of putting off physical intimacy until they aren't in immediate danger). As the pair navigate an ever-growing list of problems, Kanika also has to deal with periodic check-ins by the Devil, plus a few other immortals who insist on complicating her life, part of ulterior motives that become clear later on.
There are a few threads left dangling by the end, subplots that may get tied up in other installments (I'm pretty sure all the series titles are standalones, but there may be crossover storylines or characters). The main bits, though, wrap up in a fairly satisfactory manner. Ultimately, Whatever for Hire delivers everything its title and blurb promised me, a nice little snack of a tale.
You Might Also Enjoy:
An American Werewolf in Hoboken (Dakota Cassidy) - My Review
You Slay Me (Katie MacAlister) - My Review
Discount Armageddon (Seanan McGuire) - My Review
Tuesday, January 9, 2024
The Clone Assassin (Steven L. Kent)
The Clone Assassin
A Clone Republic novel, Book 9
Steven L. Kent
Ace
Fiction, Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: The past few centuries have been full of political turmoil across the galaxy, as humanity's spread across the stars creates opportunities and problems - even before hostile encounters with alien life destroy most of the colony worlds. The clones that were created to serve as perfect soldiers rebelled, overthrowing the Unified Authority of natural-born people and ruling Earth as the Enlisted Man's Empire, defending the last stronghold of the species against future threats. But the empire's enemies are about to strike back: three simultaneous strikes signal the start of new hostilities that could end the clones' reign - and possibly spell the end of the clones themselves.
Wayson Harris has seen more than enough action and death to last a lifetime. The last of the elite Liberator class of clones, he was instrumental in numerous campaigns that retook Earth for the empire, making many natural-born enemies in the process. On his way to a summit with refugees from the Mars colonies, a team of assassins strikes: clone assassins. As war and chaos threaten everything the empire has gained, Harris and a handful of close colleagues and friends try to figure out how their natural-born enemies managed to regroup in the shadows, what their ultimate strategy is, and how to survive what's coming next.
REVIEW: In the interest of full disclosure, I was given this book by the author. (In the interest of further disclosure, I'm reasonably certain he does not know I review everything I read on my blog, which isn't exactly a hub of literary activity.) So, while the cover told me that The Clone Assassin was part of a larger series, it wasn't until I looked it up online that I realized just how far into that series this book was... which may well explain some of the trouble I had in reading it. Aside from a brief overall timeline at the start of the book, tracking from roughly the start of the 21st century to the 26th, I had no background in the milieu, let alone the specific characters or their histories. This often left me feeling like I'd tuned in halfway through an episode of a long-running series, knowing I was missing almost all of the nuance and many of the explanations for the questions that arose along the way.
From early on, I realized that this was not the style of science fiction I would've normally picked up. It hearkens back to the old-school genre masters like Niven and Asimov who could posit galaxy-spanning empires and godlike achievements for humanity, but couldn't seem to envision women as having anything to contribute to society other than being wives or girlfriends (or "working girls" or honey pots); I had honestly started to wonder if cloning tech arose because women were either extremely rare or outright extinct until the first females are named about sixty pages in. I also wondered why, given the exacting level of control that could be asserted over all aspects of the cloning process (their brains can be rewired with apparent precision, even after production), the makers would bother giving clones - created as military troops, to follow orders and plot tactics - a sex drive, or a gender at all. I expect this is one of those things that's explained in earlier Clone Republic novels. As it is, being attracted to women turns out to be a liability for Wayson Harris; he's stepping out on his (theoretical) main squeeze with a local girl in Mazatlan when the assassins decide to pick a fight. As Harris's friends (one of whom is named Watson, which scanned irritatingly similarly to "Wayson") search for him, the leaders of the empire scramble to defend themselves against a disturbingly organized rebellion from the natural-born United Authority. Plots and counter-plots unfold, things explode, and a small ocean of blood, clone and natural-born, spills in the ensuing pages, with occasional breaks for banter and dialog and tactics discussions. Mostly, this is a story of war and fighting and unbridled destruction. Hotel rooms get destroyed. Buildings get destroyed. War machines get destroyed. City blocks get destroyed. And, of course, people get destroyed, physically and psychologically (though mostly physically). To be honest, neither the empire nor the authority seem interested in anything like creating or building, just destroying whatever the other one has, cruelty and bloodlust as ways of life, and the future be damned. Which, I suppose, is an entirely too plausible future for humanity at this point, but I digress...
On the character level, as mentioned, I knew I was missing most of the backstory and the previous relationships, so I had trouble feeling connected or caring overmuch about the personal stakes. If I can't connect in some way with the characters going through the story, I often have trouble connecting with the story itself. Of course, this is more a "guys blow things up" book than a "character undergoes transformative arc" book. Harris faces the long shadows of traumas in his past, even as he struggles to think of what a future beyond fighting would look like; he has a girlfriend, but admittedly doesn't feel any particular attachment to any living woman, so even if he weren't a sterile clone, family life is out. The other characters are mostly there to do the aforementioned blowing things up, and not all of them make to the end... which leaves several things unresolved for the next novel.
So, where does that leave me, as the reader? It leaves me feeling, again, like I'd watched part of a late-season episode of a show I wasn't familiar with. There were many exciting parts, some intriguing bits, and lots of big-set action pieces, but it ultimately wasn't my cup of cocoa, and I don't expect that I'll try to track down the pilot episode any time soon.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Terminal List (Jack Carr) - My Review
Starfire: A Red Peace (Spencer Ellsworth) - My Review
Ringworld (Larry Niven) - My Review
A Clone Republic novel, Book 9
Steven L. Kent
Ace
Fiction, Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: The past few centuries have been full of political turmoil across the galaxy, as humanity's spread across the stars creates opportunities and problems - even before hostile encounters with alien life destroy most of the colony worlds. The clones that were created to serve as perfect soldiers rebelled, overthrowing the Unified Authority of natural-born people and ruling Earth as the Enlisted Man's Empire, defending the last stronghold of the species against future threats. But the empire's enemies are about to strike back: three simultaneous strikes signal the start of new hostilities that could end the clones' reign - and possibly spell the end of the clones themselves.
Wayson Harris has seen more than enough action and death to last a lifetime. The last of the elite Liberator class of clones, he was instrumental in numerous campaigns that retook Earth for the empire, making many natural-born enemies in the process. On his way to a summit with refugees from the Mars colonies, a team of assassins strikes: clone assassins. As war and chaos threaten everything the empire has gained, Harris and a handful of close colleagues and friends try to figure out how their natural-born enemies managed to regroup in the shadows, what their ultimate strategy is, and how to survive what's coming next.
REVIEW: In the interest of full disclosure, I was given this book by the author. (In the interest of further disclosure, I'm reasonably certain he does not know I review everything I read on my blog, which isn't exactly a hub of literary activity.) So, while the cover told me that The Clone Assassin was part of a larger series, it wasn't until I looked it up online that I realized just how far into that series this book was... which may well explain some of the trouble I had in reading it. Aside from a brief overall timeline at the start of the book, tracking from roughly the start of the 21st century to the 26th, I had no background in the milieu, let alone the specific characters or their histories. This often left me feeling like I'd tuned in halfway through an episode of a long-running series, knowing I was missing almost all of the nuance and many of the explanations for the questions that arose along the way.
From early on, I realized that this was not the style of science fiction I would've normally picked up. It hearkens back to the old-school genre masters like Niven and Asimov who could posit galaxy-spanning empires and godlike achievements for humanity, but couldn't seem to envision women as having anything to contribute to society other than being wives or girlfriends (or "working girls" or honey pots); I had honestly started to wonder if cloning tech arose because women were either extremely rare or outright extinct until the first females are named about sixty pages in. I also wondered why, given the exacting level of control that could be asserted over all aspects of the cloning process (their brains can be rewired with apparent precision, even after production), the makers would bother giving clones - created as military troops, to follow orders and plot tactics - a sex drive, or a gender at all. I expect this is one of those things that's explained in earlier Clone Republic novels. As it is, being attracted to women turns out to be a liability for Wayson Harris; he's stepping out on his (theoretical) main squeeze with a local girl in Mazatlan when the assassins decide to pick a fight. As Harris's friends (one of whom is named Watson, which scanned irritatingly similarly to "Wayson") search for him, the leaders of the empire scramble to defend themselves against a disturbingly organized rebellion from the natural-born United Authority. Plots and counter-plots unfold, things explode, and a small ocean of blood, clone and natural-born, spills in the ensuing pages, with occasional breaks for banter and dialog and tactics discussions. Mostly, this is a story of war and fighting and unbridled destruction. Hotel rooms get destroyed. Buildings get destroyed. War machines get destroyed. City blocks get destroyed. And, of course, people get destroyed, physically and psychologically (though mostly physically). To be honest, neither the empire nor the authority seem interested in anything like creating or building, just destroying whatever the other one has, cruelty and bloodlust as ways of life, and the future be damned. Which, I suppose, is an entirely too plausible future for humanity at this point, but I digress...
On the character level, as mentioned, I knew I was missing most of the backstory and the previous relationships, so I had trouble feeling connected or caring overmuch about the personal stakes. If I can't connect in some way with the characters going through the story, I often have trouble connecting with the story itself. Of course, this is more a "guys blow things up" book than a "character undergoes transformative arc" book. Harris faces the long shadows of traumas in his past, even as he struggles to think of what a future beyond fighting would look like; he has a girlfriend, but admittedly doesn't feel any particular attachment to any living woman, so even if he weren't a sterile clone, family life is out. The other characters are mostly there to do the aforementioned blowing things up, and not all of them make to the end... which leaves several things unresolved for the next novel.
So, where does that leave me, as the reader? It leaves me feeling, again, like I'd watched part of a late-season episode of a show I wasn't familiar with. There were many exciting parts, some intriguing bits, and lots of big-set action pieces, but it ultimately wasn't my cup of cocoa, and I don't expect that I'll try to track down the pilot episode any time soon.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Terminal List (Jack Carr) - My Review
Starfire: A Red Peace (Spencer Ellsworth) - My Review
Ringworld (Larry Niven) - My Review
Friday, January 5, 2024
Thinking 101 (Woo-kyoung Ahn)
Thinking 101: How to Reason Better to Live Better
Woo-kyoung Ahn
Flatiron
Nonfiction, Psychology
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: You know you need to get your holiday shopping done... but somehow it doesn't happen until the last minute. You cheer when your team's star player makes the winning goal, but gloss over the teamwork, successes, and failure that made that one moment so apparently pivotal to victory. You're talking with your partner and suddenly realize that you're not only not on the same page, but hardly even in the same book. You consider yourself an above-average driver... just like the majority of people, which can't possibly be true. What's going on, here?
What's going on is your brain reacting in predictable ways to various situations, using tools that can be useful in some situations - and were useful in our evolution - but which can also work against us, sometimes to terrible results; it's one thing, after all, to be convinced that your lucky socks are why your sports team made it to the championships, but it's quite another to let unconscious biases and assumptions endanger livelihoods and lives, as cultural and racial and political intolerances can do when left unchecked to gain too much societal traction, or what happens when conspiracy theories botch pandemic responses. Learn about those pitfalls and mental traps, how to recognize them at work, and how to best work around them for better thinking and decision-making skills.
REVIEW: This is not the first book I've read addressing the flaws inherent in the human thought processes, the brain being an organ that evolved to facilitate survival rather than perpetuate pure logic, but it's a pretty good one. Ahn cites and explains various studies and anecdotes to make her points, and emphasizes that education alone isn't enough to short-circuit the mental short-circuts in the works. Indeed, sometimes being more educated just gives people more ways to "outthink" or debunk information that doesn't fit their personal beliefs or biases. Still, awareness is an important first step in recognizing when our thinking has become imbalanced and our decisions are compromised, especially when that imbalance and compromise causes harm. Once one is aware, there are tools and tips to help course-correct. Even though this is based off Ahn's popular college course, the language is accessible even to undereducated folk like myself. It's interesting and enjoyable.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Predictably Irrational (Dan Ariely) - My Review
Other Minds (Peter Godfrey-Smith) - My Review
You Are Not So Smart (David McRaney) - My Review
Woo-kyoung Ahn
Flatiron
Nonfiction, Psychology
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: You know you need to get your holiday shopping done... but somehow it doesn't happen until the last minute. You cheer when your team's star player makes the winning goal, but gloss over the teamwork, successes, and failure that made that one moment so apparently pivotal to victory. You're talking with your partner and suddenly realize that you're not only not on the same page, but hardly even in the same book. You consider yourself an above-average driver... just like the majority of people, which can't possibly be true. What's going on, here?
What's going on is your brain reacting in predictable ways to various situations, using tools that can be useful in some situations - and were useful in our evolution - but which can also work against us, sometimes to terrible results; it's one thing, after all, to be convinced that your lucky socks are why your sports team made it to the championships, but it's quite another to let unconscious biases and assumptions endanger livelihoods and lives, as cultural and racial and political intolerances can do when left unchecked to gain too much societal traction, or what happens when conspiracy theories botch pandemic responses. Learn about those pitfalls and mental traps, how to recognize them at work, and how to best work around them for better thinking and decision-making skills.
REVIEW: This is not the first book I've read addressing the flaws inherent in the human thought processes, the brain being an organ that evolved to facilitate survival rather than perpetuate pure logic, but it's a pretty good one. Ahn cites and explains various studies and anecdotes to make her points, and emphasizes that education alone isn't enough to short-circuit the mental short-circuts in the works. Indeed, sometimes being more educated just gives people more ways to "outthink" or debunk information that doesn't fit their personal beliefs or biases. Still, awareness is an important first step in recognizing when our thinking has become imbalanced and our decisions are compromised, especially when that imbalance and compromise causes harm. Once one is aware, there are tools and tips to help course-correct. Even though this is based off Ahn's popular college course, the language is accessible even to undereducated folk like myself. It's interesting and enjoyable.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Predictably Irrational (Dan Ariely) - My Review
Other Minds (Peter Godfrey-Smith) - My Review
You Are Not So Smart (David McRaney) - My Review
Wednesday, January 3, 2024
The Last Days of the Dinosaurs (Riley Black)
The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World
Riley Black
St. Martin's Press
Nonfiction, Dinosaurs/Science
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: Death came for the dinosaurs on an otherwise ordinary day approximately 66 million years ago, a seven-mile-wide rock plunging through the atmosphere at unthinkable speeds, unleashing unimaginable devastation. There are many places it might have struck where the devastation would've been less complete, but luck was not with the Earth that day. Massive quakes, volcanoes, a global ash blanket and years-long winter, poisoned air, acid rain... In the hours, days, months, and years to follow, the fallout would continue to resonate around the world. Of those who survived the initial impact, many would succumb afterward... but from those who survived would come a rebirth, new species proliferating, eventually leading to a particular species of upright-walking mammal who would look back upon that lost world in wonder. Using science and speculation, author Riley Black recreates snapshots of those days of devastation and renewal.
REVIEW: Many people look back upon the Age of Dinosaurs with both awe and regret. Awe at the sheer scale and diversity and strange nature of the extinct animals that once walked our Earth, even as glimpsed through the fragmentary fossil record from millions of years in the future. Regret that, barring time travel, we will never actually meet the former "rulers" of the world. But people tend to forget, or simply gloss over, that just because they were the dominant and most noticeable life forms, the dinosaurs were never alone; there were plants, insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and more sharing that world... and they, too, were impacted by the asteroid impact that would utterly transform life on Earth in its wake. Black emphasizes this interconnected nature of life in ways that several books seem to overlook as she recreates moments around the world, moving from the hours just before the strike to the immediate and longer-term aftermath. This approach paints vivid pictures, if sometimes quite bleak ones, of what the survivors endured, as well as how much sheer evolutionary happenstance played into what species lived and which perished. The sheer scale of devastation utterly boggles the imagination, but what's almost harder to wrap one's mind around is how anything at all survived... and not only survived, but eventually flourished. It is no exaggeration to say that we owe our current world, and our very existence, to that wayward space rock, which destroyed so much but also created conditions for a new world to rise from the ashes, if one forever marked by the tragedy. As we barrel into a new age of mass extinctions and rapidly shifting climate (nowhere near as immediately catastrophic as that asteroid, but just as potentially fatal to our species and numerous others), it offers some hope that, even out of all this devastation, something beautiful might eventually arise... even if no human eye is there to witness its flowering.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Ghosts of Evolution (Connie Barlow) - My Review
Dinosaurs Rediscovered (Michael J. Benton) - My Review
Tyrannosaur Canyon (Douglas Preston) - My Review
Riley Black
St. Martin's Press
Nonfiction, Dinosaurs/Science
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: Death came for the dinosaurs on an otherwise ordinary day approximately 66 million years ago, a seven-mile-wide rock plunging through the atmosphere at unthinkable speeds, unleashing unimaginable devastation. There are many places it might have struck where the devastation would've been less complete, but luck was not with the Earth that day. Massive quakes, volcanoes, a global ash blanket and years-long winter, poisoned air, acid rain... In the hours, days, months, and years to follow, the fallout would continue to resonate around the world. Of those who survived the initial impact, many would succumb afterward... but from those who survived would come a rebirth, new species proliferating, eventually leading to a particular species of upright-walking mammal who would look back upon that lost world in wonder. Using science and speculation, author Riley Black recreates snapshots of those days of devastation and renewal.
REVIEW: Many people look back upon the Age of Dinosaurs with both awe and regret. Awe at the sheer scale and diversity and strange nature of the extinct animals that once walked our Earth, even as glimpsed through the fragmentary fossil record from millions of years in the future. Regret that, barring time travel, we will never actually meet the former "rulers" of the world. But people tend to forget, or simply gloss over, that just because they were the dominant and most noticeable life forms, the dinosaurs were never alone; there were plants, insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and more sharing that world... and they, too, were impacted by the asteroid impact that would utterly transform life on Earth in its wake. Black emphasizes this interconnected nature of life in ways that several books seem to overlook as she recreates moments around the world, moving from the hours just before the strike to the immediate and longer-term aftermath. This approach paints vivid pictures, if sometimes quite bleak ones, of what the survivors endured, as well as how much sheer evolutionary happenstance played into what species lived and which perished. The sheer scale of devastation utterly boggles the imagination, but what's almost harder to wrap one's mind around is how anything at all survived... and not only survived, but eventually flourished. It is no exaggeration to say that we owe our current world, and our very existence, to that wayward space rock, which destroyed so much but also created conditions for a new world to rise from the ashes, if one forever marked by the tragedy. As we barrel into a new age of mass extinctions and rapidly shifting climate (nowhere near as immediately catastrophic as that asteroid, but just as potentially fatal to our species and numerous others), it offers some hope that, even out of all this devastation, something beautiful might eventually arise... even if no human eye is there to witness its flowering.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Ghosts of Evolution (Connie Barlow) - My Review
Dinosaurs Rediscovered (Michael J. Benton) - My Review
Tyrannosaur Canyon (Douglas Preston) - My Review
Hello, Universe (Erin Entrada Kelly)
Hello, Universe
Erin Entrada Kelly
Greenwillow Books
Fiction, CH General Fiction
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: Shy Virgil Salinas is used to feeling like a misfit, even in his own family; aside from his beloved grandmother, nobody else seems to understand him, teasing him for not being boisterous or outspoken or athletic. He can't even say he's an excellent student to compensate, because he struggles with his multiplication tables - something the class bully Chet never lets him forget (though Virgil's hardly the only target for that brute). But his biggest failure by far, the one that haunts him and shadows his days even as summer break starts, is the fact that he couldn't even screw up his courage to say one word - not one! - to Valencia Somerset. His life couldn't possibly get any worse... until it does, and he ends up stuck in the bottom of an old well, his cell phone broken, and nobody even knowing he's missing.
Kaori Tanaka inherited the second sight, but doesn't know from where; maybe it was one of her past lives, because it sure wasn't her straight-laced parents. She's trying to start a side hustle counseling other kids about their problems, but so far Virgil is her only client. When he comes to her for help, she tells him to gather five unique stones so she can do a reading. (What kind of reading, she doesn't know; it usually just comes to her in the moment.) But when he doesn't return, she gets another feeling... a feeling that something is very, very wrong.
Valencia Somerset doesn't have friends anymore, but she's happy that way - at least, that's what she tells herself. Being deaf hasn't hindered her education, but it seems many kids find it too much work to remember how to talk to her, or that even hearing aids don't mean she can always understand every word, especially in noisy places. But she has her nature journal and the small patch of woods near her home, the name of a deaf saint she read about once (so she has someone, at least, to talk to, even if her family isn't religious), and even a stray dog, Sacred, she's taken to feeding without her mother's knowledge. But when a persistent nightmare keeps her awake for several nights in a row, she gets desperate enough to call a number she found on a business card at the supermarket - the number of a self-proclaimed psychic who only deals with kids like her: Kaori Tanaka.
In one fateful afternoon, these lives will come together, and everyone will be changed.
REVIEW: The premise is interesting, and the characters feel authentic, all wading through that nebulous age when a grown-up future is looking more plausible (despite how frustratingly obtuse so many adults seem to be) yet where magical thinking is still very much alive and well. The story itself isn't bad, but I kept expecting an extra kick, an extra spark, something to make it a little more; it always felt like that spark was just a little ways away. Even by the end, that spark hadn't quite struck.
In rotating chapters, the kids each tell their sides of the story. Virgil feels like an utter failure; but for his grandmother and her stories (and his pet guinea pig Gulliver - though he just learned that guinea pigs are social animals, so he feels like he's even failed his beloved pet by not having a friend for it), he'd have nothing at all. His mother and father and perfect twin brothers all call him "Turtle", because he's still hiding in his shell... as if his preference for silence is one more thing wrong with him. The fact that he couldn't even talk to the one girl he felt like he could befriend, Valencia, only cements his certainty that he's doomed to a life of loneliness. The only kid he feels he can talk freely to is Kaori, who honestly does try to help, even if some of her "second sight" insights are nebulous at best. As for Kaori, she is firmly convinced she's somehow different and special, a throwback to some older time, though most of her insights would probably be called "cold reading" in an adult psychic, following reactions and cues from the client to get closer to what they need (or want) to hear (not that she's intentionally deceptive; cold reading can often be subconscious, and can still lead to real insight). Whether or not she really has talents is left ambiguous, as there certainly seems to be slightly more than coincidence going on. Valencia has long ago come to terms with her deafness, but understandably still gets frustrated at times by people; even her own mother can't quite seem to figure out how to deal with a deaf child, often erring on the side of overprotectiveness. She doesn't set out to make any friends, telling herself she's fine with her own company (and the company of her private saint, part of an indistinct yearning for spiritual answers that her secular family hasn't noticed or addressed), but finds herself pulled in when Kaori's worries about Virgil spill over into their meeting. There are also a couple chapters about the bully Chet, though they mostly serve to offer minor explanations about how he came by his behavior (as usual, handed down from family); he was rather underused, honestly, and didn't really undergo much of a transformation or change to justify his page time. Virgil, in the bottom of the well, undergoes a personal ordeal and epiphany reminiscent of his grandmother's folk tales from the Philippenes, while the others change in smaller yet equally significant ways (save Chet).
As mentioned before, the plot is decent enough, and wraps up well, though with some few things unanswered or unresolved. I just kept thinking that it was building to something just a little more than expected, something truly special. It was this subtle feeling of dissatisfaction, plus a sense that the changes weren't quite finished (or, in Chet's case, hardly even started), that led me to shave a half-star off the rating.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Canyon's Edge (Dusti Bowling) - My Review
Alone (Megan E. Freeman) - My Review
The Girl in the Well is Me (Karen Rivers) - My Review
Erin Entrada Kelly
Greenwillow Books
Fiction, CH General Fiction
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: Shy Virgil Salinas is used to feeling like a misfit, even in his own family; aside from his beloved grandmother, nobody else seems to understand him, teasing him for not being boisterous or outspoken or athletic. He can't even say he's an excellent student to compensate, because he struggles with his multiplication tables - something the class bully Chet never lets him forget (though Virgil's hardly the only target for that brute). But his biggest failure by far, the one that haunts him and shadows his days even as summer break starts, is the fact that he couldn't even screw up his courage to say one word - not one! - to Valencia Somerset. His life couldn't possibly get any worse... until it does, and he ends up stuck in the bottom of an old well, his cell phone broken, and nobody even knowing he's missing.
Kaori Tanaka inherited the second sight, but doesn't know from where; maybe it was one of her past lives, because it sure wasn't her straight-laced parents. She's trying to start a side hustle counseling other kids about their problems, but so far Virgil is her only client. When he comes to her for help, she tells him to gather five unique stones so she can do a reading. (What kind of reading, she doesn't know; it usually just comes to her in the moment.) But when he doesn't return, she gets another feeling... a feeling that something is very, very wrong.
Valencia Somerset doesn't have friends anymore, but she's happy that way - at least, that's what she tells herself. Being deaf hasn't hindered her education, but it seems many kids find it too much work to remember how to talk to her, or that even hearing aids don't mean she can always understand every word, especially in noisy places. But she has her nature journal and the small patch of woods near her home, the name of a deaf saint she read about once (so she has someone, at least, to talk to, even if her family isn't religious), and even a stray dog, Sacred, she's taken to feeding without her mother's knowledge. But when a persistent nightmare keeps her awake for several nights in a row, she gets desperate enough to call a number she found on a business card at the supermarket - the number of a self-proclaimed psychic who only deals with kids like her: Kaori Tanaka.
In one fateful afternoon, these lives will come together, and everyone will be changed.
REVIEW: The premise is interesting, and the characters feel authentic, all wading through that nebulous age when a grown-up future is looking more plausible (despite how frustratingly obtuse so many adults seem to be) yet where magical thinking is still very much alive and well. The story itself isn't bad, but I kept expecting an extra kick, an extra spark, something to make it a little more; it always felt like that spark was just a little ways away. Even by the end, that spark hadn't quite struck.
In rotating chapters, the kids each tell their sides of the story. Virgil feels like an utter failure; but for his grandmother and her stories (and his pet guinea pig Gulliver - though he just learned that guinea pigs are social animals, so he feels like he's even failed his beloved pet by not having a friend for it), he'd have nothing at all. His mother and father and perfect twin brothers all call him "Turtle", because he's still hiding in his shell... as if his preference for silence is one more thing wrong with him. The fact that he couldn't even talk to the one girl he felt like he could befriend, Valencia, only cements his certainty that he's doomed to a life of loneliness. The only kid he feels he can talk freely to is Kaori, who honestly does try to help, even if some of her "second sight" insights are nebulous at best. As for Kaori, she is firmly convinced she's somehow different and special, a throwback to some older time, though most of her insights would probably be called "cold reading" in an adult psychic, following reactions and cues from the client to get closer to what they need (or want) to hear (not that she's intentionally deceptive; cold reading can often be subconscious, and can still lead to real insight). Whether or not she really has talents is left ambiguous, as there certainly seems to be slightly more than coincidence going on. Valencia has long ago come to terms with her deafness, but understandably still gets frustrated at times by people; even her own mother can't quite seem to figure out how to deal with a deaf child, often erring on the side of overprotectiveness. She doesn't set out to make any friends, telling herself she's fine with her own company (and the company of her private saint, part of an indistinct yearning for spiritual answers that her secular family hasn't noticed or addressed), but finds herself pulled in when Kaori's worries about Virgil spill over into their meeting. There are also a couple chapters about the bully Chet, though they mostly serve to offer minor explanations about how he came by his behavior (as usual, handed down from family); he was rather underused, honestly, and didn't really undergo much of a transformation or change to justify his page time. Virgil, in the bottom of the well, undergoes a personal ordeal and epiphany reminiscent of his grandmother's folk tales from the Philippenes, while the others change in smaller yet equally significant ways (save Chet).
As mentioned before, the plot is decent enough, and wraps up well, though with some few things unanswered or unresolved. I just kept thinking that it was building to something just a little more than expected, something truly special. It was this subtle feeling of dissatisfaction, plus a sense that the changes weren't quite finished (or, in Chet's case, hardly even started), that led me to shave a half-star off the rating.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Canyon's Edge (Dusti Bowling) - My Review
Alone (Megan E. Freeman) - My Review
The Girl in the Well is Me (Karen Rivers) - My Review
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