The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
Blackstone Publishing
Fiction, Horror/Literary Fiction
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: Dorian Gray is the very vision of innocent, aristocratic youth, the perfect muse to the London artist Basil Hallward - and the perfect potential protégé of the decadent Lord Henry, who visits Basil's studio during one of Dorian's sessions. When the lord's offhand comments about the fleeting nature of youth and beauty strike a chord with young Dorian, the man impulsively vows that he'd sell his very soul to remain forever as young and handsome and untouched by sin and time as his painted image. Little do any of them suspect that Dorian's wish has been granted. As Dorian falls further under Henry's corrupting influence, pushing himself to experience fully every impulse, every sensation, every desire and whim and darkness a human can aspire to, he retains the visage of purity and innocence... but the painting begins to change...
REVIEW: Once more, I attempt to experience a work of classic literature, and once more I encounter mixed results. The iconic tale of a young man who finds a way to (temporarily) cheat damnation and avoid consequences for his actions remains interesting and compelling, but once again Wilde drifts and meanders and circles around the story as often as he tells it.
From the start, there is something special about the titular portrait, as the artist Basil laments to his friend Lord Henry that Dorian Gray has become a muse, an ideal, and that consequently Basil has put "too much" of himself into the work. Almost from the moment Henry sets eyes on the young Dorian, though, the lord is determined to corrupt the innocence and beauty he sees there, not out of any particular malice or master plan but more as an experiment by a man bored of his own idle richness (and perhaps a touch of unacknowledged jealousy and resentment, his own days of youth and innocence having long since passed by). Dorian, having been sheltered much of his young life, is too easy a prey to resist, taking Henry's cynical, hedonistic, and often self-contradictory orations as gospel truth and inspiration to live his own life as fully and sensually and extremely as he can manage. He does not set out immediately to taste-test the seven deadly sins, but finds his way there soon enough, galvanized by an ill-advised crush on a low-end actress that takes a tragic turn. It is after this incident that he first notices the change in the painting, first realizes that his impulsive vow of long ago has somehow come true... and first comprehends that the painting might serve as either a guide to keep him on the moral path or a "get out of jail free" card that will allow him to indulge every impulse without consequence. The artist Basil and Lord Henry are the angel and demon on his shoulders respectively, though it's clear from that first day in Basil's studio which voice will ultimately win out over Dorian's conscience. There are a few moments where Dorian is presented with options and a chance to turn around, but he remains too convinced that he'll never have to pay the ever-mounting bill of his ever-more-depraved lifestyle, until a final and fateful reckoning.
As in other Wilde works I've read, the tale is heavily embroidered and padded with long side-trips and scenes that ultimately go nowhere but are full of rich sensory details and/or clever high-brow banter. Much of Dorian's descent is less explicitly stated and more implied and hinted at, with dark rumors and reputations gathering like storm clouds over him despite his eternal good looks and charm, the increasing toll of broken lives in his wake. I am glad I finally got around to this one, and I did enjoy the memorable imagery at several points, though once more I found myself wishing it had encountered a somewhat less timid editor at some point.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) - My Review
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson) - My Review
Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories (Oscar Wilde) - My Review
Friday, March 7, 2025
Counterweight (Djuna)
Counterweight
Djuna, translated by Anton Hur
Pantheon
Fiction, Mystery/Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: For centuries, humanity dreamed of a future in space, but it wasn't until the construction of the world's first and only space elevator by Korean conglomerate LK that the dream became a reality. The recent death of LK's president can't help but send tremors through the company and many individuals within it. Mac in particular, a man with a shady (and manufactured) history, feels his position as head of External Affairs grow more precarious with the man's passing; he only got the job because he saved the late president's life many years ago, and the new leadership is quite likely to see him as a loose end to tidy up once they secure their positions. Fortunately, he's still needed for the time being, when an investigation into anti-LK terrorist activity turns up the name Choi Gangwu. The man is the very definition of a nobody, but a look at his activities raises some red flags, leading Mac into a labyrinthine plot that might bring down LK and, with it, the starfaring future its technology is creating.
REVIEW: The cover and description promised a surreal, noir sci-fi novella. It does, in its favor, deliver on the surreality, the noir aesthetic, and the sci-fi. Unfortunately, what it does not deliver along with those elements is a coherent plot or a single character worth caring at all about.
From the start, the reader is immersed in a techno-dystopian future where humans are often augmented with brain implant "Worms" that feed them information and can even control actions, and where AI is mere decades (if that) away from rendering our species effectively obsolete. Investigating a terrorist plot by the Patusan Liberation Front - a group that deeply resents how the residents of the Indonesian island of Patusa have been displaced and reduced to little more than rubbish at the feet of LK's great elevator and associated city - Mac stumbles across the connection to Choi Gangwu, an unassuming man from an unassuming background whose chief interests appear to be butterflies and the space elevator... himself an unwitting pawn of a greater scheme linked to the late company president, a scheme that has just been set into motion. This is a world where history, facts, and reality itself seem malleable, liable to be overlaid and overwritten as easily as computer code, where everything takes on a certain fever-dream aspect and logic often follows inscrutable rules. Characters are just names thrown at the reader as often as not, the key players too remote and larger than life, tied up in a plot where nothing really seems to matter because the big stuff is all moving at a level so far beyond narrator Mac's level of experience and control that they might as well be the dance of the galaxies through the universe. The blurb promised an exciting race up the space elevator to a secret hidden in the counterweight at the other end of the tether, but that doesn't even happen until the final third or fourth of the novel, and isn't nearly as much a part of the plot as it was hyped to be. By the end, I still was wondering why any of it happened, whether Mac's involvement really was necessary (and why the author chose him as the character to view the tale through), and why exactly I was supposed to care about anything that went on. I give it marks for originality and aesthetic, but this one was just too far out of my wheelhouse for me to begin to appreciate.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Titanium Noir (Nick Harkaway) - My Review
The Darwin Elevator (Jason M. Hough) - My Review
Altered Carbon (Richard K. Morgan) - My Review
Djuna, translated by Anton Hur
Pantheon
Fiction, Mystery/Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: For centuries, humanity dreamed of a future in space, but it wasn't until the construction of the world's first and only space elevator by Korean conglomerate LK that the dream became a reality. The recent death of LK's president can't help but send tremors through the company and many individuals within it. Mac in particular, a man with a shady (and manufactured) history, feels his position as head of External Affairs grow more precarious with the man's passing; he only got the job because he saved the late president's life many years ago, and the new leadership is quite likely to see him as a loose end to tidy up once they secure their positions. Fortunately, he's still needed for the time being, when an investigation into anti-LK terrorist activity turns up the name Choi Gangwu. The man is the very definition of a nobody, but a look at his activities raises some red flags, leading Mac into a labyrinthine plot that might bring down LK and, with it, the starfaring future its technology is creating.
REVIEW: The cover and description promised a surreal, noir sci-fi novella. It does, in its favor, deliver on the surreality, the noir aesthetic, and the sci-fi. Unfortunately, what it does not deliver along with those elements is a coherent plot or a single character worth caring at all about.
From the start, the reader is immersed in a techno-dystopian future where humans are often augmented with brain implant "Worms" that feed them information and can even control actions, and where AI is mere decades (if that) away from rendering our species effectively obsolete. Investigating a terrorist plot by the Patusan Liberation Front - a group that deeply resents how the residents of the Indonesian island of Patusa have been displaced and reduced to little more than rubbish at the feet of LK's great elevator and associated city - Mac stumbles across the connection to Choi Gangwu, an unassuming man from an unassuming background whose chief interests appear to be butterflies and the space elevator... himself an unwitting pawn of a greater scheme linked to the late company president, a scheme that has just been set into motion. This is a world where history, facts, and reality itself seem malleable, liable to be overlaid and overwritten as easily as computer code, where everything takes on a certain fever-dream aspect and logic often follows inscrutable rules. Characters are just names thrown at the reader as often as not, the key players too remote and larger than life, tied up in a plot where nothing really seems to matter because the big stuff is all moving at a level so far beyond narrator Mac's level of experience and control that they might as well be the dance of the galaxies through the universe. The blurb promised an exciting race up the space elevator to a secret hidden in the counterweight at the other end of the tether, but that doesn't even happen until the final third or fourth of the novel, and isn't nearly as much a part of the plot as it was hyped to be. By the end, I still was wondering why any of it happened, whether Mac's involvement really was necessary (and why the author chose him as the character to view the tale through), and why exactly I was supposed to care about anything that went on. I give it marks for originality and aesthetic, but this one was just too far out of my wheelhouse for me to begin to appreciate.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Titanium Noir (Nick Harkaway) - My Review
The Darwin Elevator (Jason M. Hough) - My Review
Altered Carbon (Richard K. Morgan) - My Review
Thursday, March 6, 2025
A Breath of Mischief (MarcyKate Connolly)
A Breath of Mischief
MarcyKate Connolly
Sourcebooks
Fiction, MG? Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: A windling child, the blue-haired girl Aria was raised in a floating castle by the Wind itself. She loves watching the world drift by beneath her, listening to the visiting birds and dragons and other flying beasts, playing with her best friend Gwyn the gryphling, reading books in the castle's great library (for the Wind loves to snatch up books and scrolls and other odds and ends in their travels to bring back to their daughter), and being lulled to sleep every night by the Wind's special, secret lullaby they sing just for her.
One morning, she wakes up to find the castle has drifted to earth, and the Wind is nowhere to be found. Worse, she seems to have lost her magical gifts from the Wind that let her float and drift like a dandelion puff, and the air all around is still and heavy, without so much as a breath of breeze. Aria and Gwyn search, and discover that an alchemist named Worton has the Wind trapped in a great and strange magical machine; he refuses to let her parent go unless the windling brings him three magical artifacts from across the land. She isn't sure she trusts him, but she misses the Wind terribly, and the longer the Wind is away, the more the land itself suffers. Can she solve the riddle and find the items... and, if she does, is she helping free the Wind or enabling something far more terrible?
REVIEW: The cover image looked fun, and the title promised mischief and light adventure. But something about that promise never quite came through, even though A Breath of Mischief has some fun images and ideas.
Aria is an "otherling" chosen by the Wind, an embodiment of the element of moving air. Just what is an "otherling"? The story seems vague on what they are and where they come from, save that they aren't human and don't particularly trust people. I guessed them to be some sort of faerie-like being, but the reader only ever meets a handful, each the adopted "child" of an elemental force who, like her, have been given particular gifts and responsibilities. This thin worldbuilding persists throughout, the sense that ideas, while nice and shiny to look at in the moment, don't always make sense and weren't always thought through and don't necessarily connect in a meaningful or consistent fashion. While many in the target age might not notice, I've read enough middle-grade (and even children's, which this skews toward) fantasy where the worlds felt far more solid to notice that thinness here. In any event, the tale drifts a bit like a seed puff on the breeze before getting to the grounding of the castle and the disappearance of the Wind. Along the way, Aria has her first encounter with another otherling, the waterling boy Bay - the first time she's even considered that other elements might have their own children like herself, and her first real notion that the Wind isn't the only elemental master that's particularly important in the world. She eventually finds her way to a dilapidated keep/mad scientist lair and the alchemist Worton, who tricks her and Gwyn into agreeing to a quest for three suspiciously elemental-based objects. Even for a young and somewhat sheltered protagonist, Aria's choice here is rather hard to swallow, as is her blindness about what Worton is really asking of her - especially when she starts seeing more signs that something's terribly amiss as she and her gryphling best friend pursue the objects. The quest itself is only part of the tale that follows, as Aria and Gwyn deal with several obstacles and a few setbacks, and later a mistake that costs everyone dearly... but this being a tale written for the younger end of the target audience, it's hardly a spoiler that things do work out by the end.
As a read-aloud or read-along with a youngster, A Breath of Mischief might be a decent enough tale. Just don't expect too much from it.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Granted (John David Anderson) - My Review
Endling #1: The Last (Katherine Applegate) - My Review
The Stone Girl's Story (Sarah Beth Durst) - My Review
MarcyKate Connolly
Sourcebooks
Fiction, MG? Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: A windling child, the blue-haired girl Aria was raised in a floating castle by the Wind itself. She loves watching the world drift by beneath her, listening to the visiting birds and dragons and other flying beasts, playing with her best friend Gwyn the gryphling, reading books in the castle's great library (for the Wind loves to snatch up books and scrolls and other odds and ends in their travels to bring back to their daughter), and being lulled to sleep every night by the Wind's special, secret lullaby they sing just for her.
One morning, she wakes up to find the castle has drifted to earth, and the Wind is nowhere to be found. Worse, she seems to have lost her magical gifts from the Wind that let her float and drift like a dandelion puff, and the air all around is still and heavy, without so much as a breath of breeze. Aria and Gwyn search, and discover that an alchemist named Worton has the Wind trapped in a great and strange magical machine; he refuses to let her parent go unless the windling brings him three magical artifacts from across the land. She isn't sure she trusts him, but she misses the Wind terribly, and the longer the Wind is away, the more the land itself suffers. Can she solve the riddle and find the items... and, if she does, is she helping free the Wind or enabling something far more terrible?
REVIEW: The cover image looked fun, and the title promised mischief and light adventure. But something about that promise never quite came through, even though A Breath of Mischief has some fun images and ideas.
Aria is an "otherling" chosen by the Wind, an embodiment of the element of moving air. Just what is an "otherling"? The story seems vague on what they are and where they come from, save that they aren't human and don't particularly trust people. I guessed them to be some sort of faerie-like being, but the reader only ever meets a handful, each the adopted "child" of an elemental force who, like her, have been given particular gifts and responsibilities. This thin worldbuilding persists throughout, the sense that ideas, while nice and shiny to look at in the moment, don't always make sense and weren't always thought through and don't necessarily connect in a meaningful or consistent fashion. While many in the target age might not notice, I've read enough middle-grade (and even children's, which this skews toward) fantasy where the worlds felt far more solid to notice that thinness here. In any event, the tale drifts a bit like a seed puff on the breeze before getting to the grounding of the castle and the disappearance of the Wind. Along the way, Aria has her first encounter with another otherling, the waterling boy Bay - the first time she's even considered that other elements might have their own children like herself, and her first real notion that the Wind isn't the only elemental master that's particularly important in the world. She eventually finds her way to a dilapidated keep/mad scientist lair and the alchemist Worton, who tricks her and Gwyn into agreeing to a quest for three suspiciously elemental-based objects. Even for a young and somewhat sheltered protagonist, Aria's choice here is rather hard to swallow, as is her blindness about what Worton is really asking of her - especially when she starts seeing more signs that something's terribly amiss as she and her gryphling best friend pursue the objects. The quest itself is only part of the tale that follows, as Aria and Gwyn deal with several obstacles and a few setbacks, and later a mistake that costs everyone dearly... but this being a tale written for the younger end of the target audience, it's hardly a spoiler that things do work out by the end.
As a read-aloud or read-along with a youngster, A Breath of Mischief might be a decent enough tale. Just don't expect too much from it.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Granted (John David Anderson) - My Review
Endling #1: The Last (Katherine Applegate) - My Review
The Stone Girl's Story (Sarah Beth Durst) - My Review
Wednesday, March 5, 2025
The Husbands (Holly Gramazio)
The Husbands
Holly Gramazio
Doubleday
Fiction, General Fiction/Humor
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: It was late, and Lauren was more than a little tipsy, when she returned home from her friend Elena's bachelorette party to find her husband Michael waiting for her... only Lauren doesn't have a husband, and she's never seen Michael before in her life. But, then, the colors and decor of her London home appear to have changed, and there are pictures on the wall and texts on her phone she doesn't remember, all of which confirm that she is indeed married to this stranger, and has been for some time. She even apparently has a different job, working at some hardware and garden store instead of the local council, with no memory of what exactly she does there. The next day, Michael goes up into the attic to change a light bulb - and a different man comes down, also claiming to be her husband, with yet more changes all around her to accommodate this new, impossible relationship. Lauren never really thought about long-term relationships, or much about her future at all, but now, thanks to some mysterious power in her attic, finds herself living a succession of could-have-been lives with could-have-been spouses, some better matches than others, only lacking the memories of what led the could-have-been hers to make their choices. Can she ever get back to her old, single life, the one she alone remembers? If she can't, can she ever decide which of these men, which of these lives, are her destiny?
REVIEW: Part alternate-reality jaunt, part exploration of relationships and the societal myth/expectation of "soul mates", part the story of a woman forced to examine a life lived too long in neutral, The Husbands has an interesting concept, but doesn't always seem certain what its main character is doing with it.
Lauren starts out not particularly wanting much of anything from life, coasting along in a so-so job with a decent circle of friends, watching from the sidelines as they pursue goals and experience life changes while she hasn't substantially moved ahead in anything but years. She's never wanted a family (a conviction that does not change) and never really felt interested in finding a spouse, so she's as confused as she is frightened to find a stranger in her home who claims to be a husband... and an attic that seems insistent on supplying her with new spouses, along with new lives in which she chose them - some of which are poor choices, including a few potential emotional abusers, at least one clearly picked for the money, and more than one run with an ex which never ends well no matter how many alternate-Laurens apparently thought differently. What triggered this? There's no explanation, but the fact that it all began after her best friend's bachelorette party may hint at some metaphysical manifestation of a subconscious desire for a life partner, or at least some definitive direction or change. In any event, once she figures out what's going on, and that her world shifts with each new husband (time itself does not reset), she starts treating the succession of men almost as disposable home decor or rental cars, trying out lives with them for a few days or weeks before sending them back to the attic from whence they came. She's no more serious about choosing a mate or a future than she was before the strangeness started, dabbling in this or that alternate life without really learning or growing, let alone considering how the circle of people around her are also shifting (albeit unknowingly) into new configurations, not always for the better. When she finally finds one she thinks she might stay with, the American-born Carter, she's heartbroken when he ventures up into the attic himself and disappears... only to discover that Carter still exists in her new life, though he's back in America and they never met. Eventually, she finds an Australian-born man named Bohai coming down the attic stairs... a man who also seems to be skipping through alternate worlds, finding different mates waiting for him. The two quickly realize they're not romantically compatible, but are both relieved to have someone to share notes with, someone they can count on to remember each other even when both skip through new lives. Meeting him makes her start taking the matter a little more seriously, but she still has trouble figuring out what she wants to do, what future she wants to grab before it slips through her fingers via fate or her own indecision. Is there ever a true soul mate waiting to be found, a perfect life that's about to drop out of the sky (or attic) to land at her feet, or does Lauren finally have to take the reins and some responsibility, make some decisions and set some goals, and stop letting her life just happen to her? Is there even some great life lesson to be learned, or is this just a weird glitch in the multiverse that just happens to some people? By the end, there's still a lot of ambiguity, and Lauren may or may not have learned much from her experience.
There's some humor in the story, and some exploration of what it means to make choices and live one's life with intention rather than simply waiting for it to happen. The men often being interchangeable objects is a nice twist on the way women are too often seen as window dressing or commodities in marriages, something to acquire to bolster status or serve a purpose rather than being a human being. There is also some needed deconstruction of the idea of "soul mates" and "the one and only forever", and even the idea of marriage itself as a necessary milestone in life; many of the men who come down from the attic could be perfectly suitable partners for life, and at some point some Lauren obviously considered them all a potential "one and only forever", only no life offers perfect bliss without drawbacks, no relationship immune from trouble either before or after the attic switchover. (She is dismayed to find that she's cheating in more than one alternate life, and also that she apparently did not see or chose to ignore serious moral or even legal failings with her picks.) Lauren, unfortunately, just isn't always an interesting or even necessarily likable character to follow through the multiverse, often frustratingly resistant to seeing the obvious, and long stretches of the tale don't seem to go anywhere. That, plus an ending that felt less punchy or decisive than it should have been, ended up holding the story down in the ratings.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Recursion (Blake Crouch) - My Review
Oona Out of Order (Margarita Montimore) - My Review
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (V. E. Schwab) - My Review
Holly Gramazio
Doubleday
Fiction, General Fiction/Humor
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: It was late, and Lauren was more than a little tipsy, when she returned home from her friend Elena's bachelorette party to find her husband Michael waiting for her... only Lauren doesn't have a husband, and she's never seen Michael before in her life. But, then, the colors and decor of her London home appear to have changed, and there are pictures on the wall and texts on her phone she doesn't remember, all of which confirm that she is indeed married to this stranger, and has been for some time. She even apparently has a different job, working at some hardware and garden store instead of the local council, with no memory of what exactly she does there. The next day, Michael goes up into the attic to change a light bulb - and a different man comes down, also claiming to be her husband, with yet more changes all around her to accommodate this new, impossible relationship. Lauren never really thought about long-term relationships, or much about her future at all, but now, thanks to some mysterious power in her attic, finds herself living a succession of could-have-been lives with could-have-been spouses, some better matches than others, only lacking the memories of what led the could-have-been hers to make their choices. Can she ever get back to her old, single life, the one she alone remembers? If she can't, can she ever decide which of these men, which of these lives, are her destiny?
REVIEW: Part alternate-reality jaunt, part exploration of relationships and the societal myth/expectation of "soul mates", part the story of a woman forced to examine a life lived too long in neutral, The Husbands has an interesting concept, but doesn't always seem certain what its main character is doing with it.
Lauren starts out not particularly wanting much of anything from life, coasting along in a so-so job with a decent circle of friends, watching from the sidelines as they pursue goals and experience life changes while she hasn't substantially moved ahead in anything but years. She's never wanted a family (a conviction that does not change) and never really felt interested in finding a spouse, so she's as confused as she is frightened to find a stranger in her home who claims to be a husband... and an attic that seems insistent on supplying her with new spouses, along with new lives in which she chose them - some of which are poor choices, including a few potential emotional abusers, at least one clearly picked for the money, and more than one run with an ex which never ends well no matter how many alternate-Laurens apparently thought differently. What triggered this? There's no explanation, but the fact that it all began after her best friend's bachelorette party may hint at some metaphysical manifestation of a subconscious desire for a life partner, or at least some definitive direction or change. In any event, once she figures out what's going on, and that her world shifts with each new husband (time itself does not reset), she starts treating the succession of men almost as disposable home decor or rental cars, trying out lives with them for a few days or weeks before sending them back to the attic from whence they came. She's no more serious about choosing a mate or a future than she was before the strangeness started, dabbling in this or that alternate life without really learning or growing, let alone considering how the circle of people around her are also shifting (albeit unknowingly) into new configurations, not always for the better. When she finally finds one she thinks she might stay with, the American-born Carter, she's heartbroken when he ventures up into the attic himself and disappears... only to discover that Carter still exists in her new life, though he's back in America and they never met. Eventually, she finds an Australian-born man named Bohai coming down the attic stairs... a man who also seems to be skipping through alternate worlds, finding different mates waiting for him. The two quickly realize they're not romantically compatible, but are both relieved to have someone to share notes with, someone they can count on to remember each other even when both skip through new lives. Meeting him makes her start taking the matter a little more seriously, but she still has trouble figuring out what she wants to do, what future she wants to grab before it slips through her fingers via fate or her own indecision. Is there ever a true soul mate waiting to be found, a perfect life that's about to drop out of the sky (or attic) to land at her feet, or does Lauren finally have to take the reins and some responsibility, make some decisions and set some goals, and stop letting her life just happen to her? Is there even some great life lesson to be learned, or is this just a weird glitch in the multiverse that just happens to some people? By the end, there's still a lot of ambiguity, and Lauren may or may not have learned much from her experience.
There's some humor in the story, and some exploration of what it means to make choices and live one's life with intention rather than simply waiting for it to happen. The men often being interchangeable objects is a nice twist on the way women are too often seen as window dressing or commodities in marriages, something to acquire to bolster status or serve a purpose rather than being a human being. There is also some needed deconstruction of the idea of "soul mates" and "the one and only forever", and even the idea of marriage itself as a necessary milestone in life; many of the men who come down from the attic could be perfectly suitable partners for life, and at some point some Lauren obviously considered them all a potential "one and only forever", only no life offers perfect bliss without drawbacks, no relationship immune from trouble either before or after the attic switchover. (She is dismayed to find that she's cheating in more than one alternate life, and also that she apparently did not see or chose to ignore serious moral or even legal failings with her picks.) Lauren, unfortunately, just isn't always an interesting or even necessarily likable character to follow through the multiverse, often frustratingly resistant to seeing the obvious, and long stretches of the tale don't seem to go anywhere. That, plus an ending that felt less punchy or decisive than it should have been, ended up holding the story down in the ratings.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Recursion (Blake Crouch) - My Review
Oona Out of Order (Margarita Montimore) - My Review
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (V. E. Schwab) - My Review
Friday, February 28, 2025
February Site Update
The shortest month of the year, and I'm already more than done with 2025... In any event, the month's reviews have been archived and cross-linked over on the main Brightdreamer Books site.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Ghostdrift (Suzanne Palmer)
Ghostdrift
The Finder Chronicles, Book 4
Suzanne Palmer
DAW
Fiction, Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: Fergus Ferguson, a man with a knack for finding lost things, has spent the past few years in glorious anonymity, serving tea by the seaside of a nondescript world... and he couldn't be more bored. Granted, life had gotten a little too hectic for a while, what with dealing with impossible alien implants and having a bounty on his head from the powerful Alliance (not to mention numerous other organizations), but there are only so many cups of bitter tea (a metaphor for life, naturally) one can brew for tourists before monotony sets in. In a way, he was glad to see an old friend turn up at last - until that friend hands him (and his pet cat, Mister Feefs) over to the notorious pirate Bas Belos of the Sidewinder.
Instead of cashing him in for the bounty, Belos has another task in mind. Some years ago, his twin sister and fellow pirate captain Bel and her ship, the Rattler, went missing in a remote stretch of dead space known as the Barrens, while being chased by Alliance cruisers. If she'd been captured, there would have been chatter, and if she'd been destroyed, there would have been debris, but the Rattler and her pursuers just... disappeared. Ever since, Bas has searched for answers and come up with nothing. Posing as "Vetch", a new member of the Sidewinder's crew, Fergus is to turn his prodigal finding talents toward discovering what happened to Bel - and whom the pirates should take their vengeance upon. If he succeeds, he'll be rewarded with one of the pallai: rare, mysterious, self-aware alien AI devices Fergus has been tracking down across the galaxy. If he fails... well, Bas Belos's reputation is not that of a forgiving man.
Little does Fergus suspect just what lies ahead - a mystery far older and deeper than one missing pirate ship, one that will take him far into unknown reaches of space and pit him against new enemies.
REVIEW: The fourth and final installment of Fergus Ferguson's galactic adventures delivers another space romp full of wonder, danger, new allies and enemies, and more deep mysteries of the galaxy, with a little humor thrown in now and again lest the whole become too weighty.
With little lag time, the tale kicks off early, with few reminders along the way of Fergus's previous adventures (and their fallout). Once more, he finds himself caught up in yet another adventure - and, once more, it's not particularly against his will. He enjoys the challenge, and is never kept down or discouraged for long before a certain innate optimism and curiosity drives him to get back up and take another run at whatever problem lies before him. The crew of the Sidewinder is hardly the most disreputable group of people he's had to work with, though his arrival is not without a little friction, particularly with the suspicious intelligence officer Marsh. Soon enough, Fergus is on the trail across the Barrens, a stretch of space with a suspiciously large number of dead worlds and stars that's long been a haven for illicit activities... and which holds a number of secrets, including one that lands Fergus and the Sidewinder in much greater danger than any of them anticipated. Along the way, he is again visited by the inhuman "agent" of the highly advanced aliens who gave Fergus his peculiar new "organ", which lets him sense electrical fields and even release controlled charges; the fact that the aliens are once more taking an interest in his activities is a near-certain sign that there's a much bigger problem for Fergus to unravel, and a much bigger threat. It builds up nicely to a suitably wild climax, and a conclusion that leaves the door open for more installments. I've enjoyed this series greatly, a nice balance of old-school space adventure and sense of wonder with refreshingly updated characters and writing.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Cold Between (Elizabeth Bonesteel) - My Review
Finder (Suzanne Palmer) - My Review
The Android's Dream (John Scalzi) - My Review
The Finder Chronicles, Book 4
Suzanne Palmer
DAW
Fiction, Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: Fergus Ferguson, a man with a knack for finding lost things, has spent the past few years in glorious anonymity, serving tea by the seaside of a nondescript world... and he couldn't be more bored. Granted, life had gotten a little too hectic for a while, what with dealing with impossible alien implants and having a bounty on his head from the powerful Alliance (not to mention numerous other organizations), but there are only so many cups of bitter tea (a metaphor for life, naturally) one can brew for tourists before monotony sets in. In a way, he was glad to see an old friend turn up at last - until that friend hands him (and his pet cat, Mister Feefs) over to the notorious pirate Bas Belos of the Sidewinder.
Instead of cashing him in for the bounty, Belos has another task in mind. Some years ago, his twin sister and fellow pirate captain Bel and her ship, the Rattler, went missing in a remote stretch of dead space known as the Barrens, while being chased by Alliance cruisers. If she'd been captured, there would have been chatter, and if she'd been destroyed, there would have been debris, but the Rattler and her pursuers just... disappeared. Ever since, Bas has searched for answers and come up with nothing. Posing as "Vetch", a new member of the Sidewinder's crew, Fergus is to turn his prodigal finding talents toward discovering what happened to Bel - and whom the pirates should take their vengeance upon. If he succeeds, he'll be rewarded with one of the pallai: rare, mysterious, self-aware alien AI devices Fergus has been tracking down across the galaxy. If he fails... well, Bas Belos's reputation is not that of a forgiving man.
Little does Fergus suspect just what lies ahead - a mystery far older and deeper than one missing pirate ship, one that will take him far into unknown reaches of space and pit him against new enemies.
REVIEW: The fourth and final installment of Fergus Ferguson's galactic adventures delivers another space romp full of wonder, danger, new allies and enemies, and more deep mysteries of the galaxy, with a little humor thrown in now and again lest the whole become too weighty.
With little lag time, the tale kicks off early, with few reminders along the way of Fergus's previous adventures (and their fallout). Once more, he finds himself caught up in yet another adventure - and, once more, it's not particularly against his will. He enjoys the challenge, and is never kept down or discouraged for long before a certain innate optimism and curiosity drives him to get back up and take another run at whatever problem lies before him. The crew of the Sidewinder is hardly the most disreputable group of people he's had to work with, though his arrival is not without a little friction, particularly with the suspicious intelligence officer Marsh. Soon enough, Fergus is on the trail across the Barrens, a stretch of space with a suspiciously large number of dead worlds and stars that's long been a haven for illicit activities... and which holds a number of secrets, including one that lands Fergus and the Sidewinder in much greater danger than any of them anticipated. Along the way, he is again visited by the inhuman "agent" of the highly advanced aliens who gave Fergus his peculiar new "organ", which lets him sense electrical fields and even release controlled charges; the fact that the aliens are once more taking an interest in his activities is a near-certain sign that there's a much bigger problem for Fergus to unravel, and a much bigger threat. It builds up nicely to a suitably wild climax, and a conclusion that leaves the door open for more installments. I've enjoyed this series greatly, a nice balance of old-school space adventure and sense of wonder with refreshingly updated characters and writing.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Cold Between (Elizabeth Bonesteel) - My Review
Finder (Suzanne Palmer) - My Review
The Android's Dream (John Scalzi) - My Review
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
The Scorpion Rules (Erin Bow)
The Scorpion Rules
The Prisoners of Peace series, Book 1
Erin Bow
Simon and Schuster
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: When climate collapse and incessant global wars threatened humanity's extinction four centuries ago, the desperate United Nations tasked the AI Talis - once a human mind, uploaded and upgraded - with finding a solution. None expected it to simply take over, but it did, seeing no other viable fix to humanity's seemingly-inherent self-destructive habits. After gaining control of suborbital weapons arrays and getting the attention of the world's leaders (blowing up a few cities to make its point), it laid down new rules for civilization and for future conflicts. In addition to limits on allowable lethal weapons and other factors, everyone who aspires to lead in any capacity must now leave a Child of Peace, one of their own offspring, in the AI's care, in isolated preceptures scattered around the world. Each is a hostage to their parents' good behavior; to declare war is to see their own children killed. It may not stop war - nothing could stop all war - but it does limit the scope and duration, and ensures that every leader has as much skin in the game as the foot soldiers they send into battle.
Greta, Duchess of Halifax and Crown Princess of the Pan Polar Confederacy, has been a Child of Peace at Precepture Four for most of her life. Though she has friends of a sort among her fellow hostages, and she feels some affection toward the Abbot, the aging AI in charge of the facility, it is by no means a pleasant existence, forever under the eye of robotic guardians that monitor nearly every word. Still, nobody can argue with the results of Talis's edicts, a planet slowly recovering from overexploitation and a population that no longer threatens to blast itself out of existence every other week. Then a new boy arrives, Elian, the grandson of the leader of Cumberland, an upstart new nation on her country's border. Unlike the other Children of Peace, he was not raised in the halls of power, not conditioned to understand his potential role, never believing he'd ever be important enough to be a hostage. His rebellious personality brings out the worst sides of their captors as they struggle to break him and keep him in line. Watching him rage against the system wakes something in Greta and the others, opening their eyes to the injustices of the system... an awakening that might have come too late. For with a new, hostile general on the field, war seems inevitable, meaning both her and Elian's lives will soon be forfeit.
REVIEW: The premise looked intriguing, a world in which AI was not actively destroying the world (which it currently is; even disregarding all other problematic aspects, the environmental costs alone... but I digress) but attempting to save us and our planet from ourselves, using the old practice of royal hostages in an attempt to enforce peace. And The Scorpion Rules did indeed start out interesting, an outwardly-peaceful utopia that was only achieved through invasive surveillance and social engineering to the point of being closer to a dystopia. Somewhere along the way, though, that promise petered out, washed away by a whiny and helpless main character, a dragging plot, and a tendency to wallow in pain and torment long beyond effectiveness.
From her first scenes, Greta prides herself on her ability to remain calm and self-controlled in the face of her essentially dystopian surroundings, where Swan Riders can swoop in at a moment's notice and pluck a classmate from the room for immediate termination. A student of Marcus Aurelius and stoicism, she embraces her role as a princess and a Child of Peace, believing that her compliance truly is essential to ensure her nation's safety and that being a good cog helps the whole machine of Talis's plan protect the world. (There's a running attempt at humor with a "holy text" of Utterances by the AI overlord, which are mostly geeky lines that sound too much like modern immature self-important techbros for me to really find them amusing, given the real-world damage being wrought by certain techbros.) She only has a little over a year left before she ages out of her role, and it seems reasonable that she'll survive until then, until Elian arrives - the first Child of Peace she has ever seen to be brought into the precepture in chains, and the first to openly defy their robotic masters, even when it earns him pain and eventual torture. She knows, of course, that the otherwise kindly Abbot and the other AI "teachers" use torment to punish rule infractions, but it never hit so close to home as when she watches their efforts to grind down the outspoken boy. He even goes so far as to attempt escape across the Saskatchewan prairies, despite knowing how such an effort could backfire on his nation and his loved ones. At some point, his stubbornness crosses a line from caged animal defiance into outright stupidity... just as Greta's stoic embracing of her role and refusal to see what's right in front of her eyes made me question her ostensible intelligence. Somehow, though, she's considered the leader of her classmates, even though her roommate Da-Xia, heiress to a Himalayan throne where rulers are considered divine, displays much stronger leadership skills, regal bearing, and defiance at multiple points, and isn't as willfully blind to obvious things. Tensions ratchet up as war encroaches on Greta's and Elian's nations, punctuated by a bold move by Cumberland that demonstrates how humans have a way of eventually circumventing even rules intended for self-preservation. At some point round about the halfway point or just past, though, the plot starts to lose steam as a near-divine intervention arrives, at which point things drag and start devolving to indulge in what approaches torture porn, emotional and physical, in ways that don't advance the story at all. Greta does more unintelligent things, Elian does some boneheaded stuff too, a weird plot obsession with horny ungulates unfolds, some late-game spiritualism seeps in through the cracks, and eventually the story ends in a weird grayish area that's not quite a satisfactory resting point or conclusion but isn't a cliffhanger either.
There are a few points in its favor; this isn't a book where the dystopia is magically fixed by the ending, for one thing, and even if it's hard to see real world leaders hesitating to declare a war even if it means the death of a family member (especially given how often wars are pushed by people just to the side of the official power structure, the ones who make the money off the spoils), it's an interesting idea. There's also some ambiguity involved, as Talis may be using an oversized sledgehammer but did not start off with bad intentions, and still believes that saving the world - which it did inarguably do, at least initially - is worth "small" sacrifices like a few well-born children and the odd major city. The story just became muddled in the telling, not at all helped by a main character who spent too much time whining and ignoring things and not enough doing main character things like solving problems or taking action or just plain not being a passive tool of an oppressive system.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins) - My Review
Run Program (Scott Meyer) - My Review
Steelheart (Brandon Sanderson) - My Review
The Prisoners of Peace series, Book 1
Erin Bow
Simon and Schuster
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: When climate collapse and incessant global wars threatened humanity's extinction four centuries ago, the desperate United Nations tasked the AI Talis - once a human mind, uploaded and upgraded - with finding a solution. None expected it to simply take over, but it did, seeing no other viable fix to humanity's seemingly-inherent self-destructive habits. After gaining control of suborbital weapons arrays and getting the attention of the world's leaders (blowing up a few cities to make its point), it laid down new rules for civilization and for future conflicts. In addition to limits on allowable lethal weapons and other factors, everyone who aspires to lead in any capacity must now leave a Child of Peace, one of their own offspring, in the AI's care, in isolated preceptures scattered around the world. Each is a hostage to their parents' good behavior; to declare war is to see their own children killed. It may not stop war - nothing could stop all war - but it does limit the scope and duration, and ensures that every leader has as much skin in the game as the foot soldiers they send into battle.
Greta, Duchess of Halifax and Crown Princess of the Pan Polar Confederacy, has been a Child of Peace at Precepture Four for most of her life. Though she has friends of a sort among her fellow hostages, and she feels some affection toward the Abbot, the aging AI in charge of the facility, it is by no means a pleasant existence, forever under the eye of robotic guardians that monitor nearly every word. Still, nobody can argue with the results of Talis's edicts, a planet slowly recovering from overexploitation and a population that no longer threatens to blast itself out of existence every other week. Then a new boy arrives, Elian, the grandson of the leader of Cumberland, an upstart new nation on her country's border. Unlike the other Children of Peace, he was not raised in the halls of power, not conditioned to understand his potential role, never believing he'd ever be important enough to be a hostage. His rebellious personality brings out the worst sides of their captors as they struggle to break him and keep him in line. Watching him rage against the system wakes something in Greta and the others, opening their eyes to the injustices of the system... an awakening that might have come too late. For with a new, hostile general on the field, war seems inevitable, meaning both her and Elian's lives will soon be forfeit.
REVIEW: The premise looked intriguing, a world in which AI was not actively destroying the world (which it currently is; even disregarding all other problematic aspects, the environmental costs alone... but I digress) but attempting to save us and our planet from ourselves, using the old practice of royal hostages in an attempt to enforce peace. And The Scorpion Rules did indeed start out interesting, an outwardly-peaceful utopia that was only achieved through invasive surveillance and social engineering to the point of being closer to a dystopia. Somewhere along the way, though, that promise petered out, washed away by a whiny and helpless main character, a dragging plot, and a tendency to wallow in pain and torment long beyond effectiveness.
From her first scenes, Greta prides herself on her ability to remain calm and self-controlled in the face of her essentially dystopian surroundings, where Swan Riders can swoop in at a moment's notice and pluck a classmate from the room for immediate termination. A student of Marcus Aurelius and stoicism, she embraces her role as a princess and a Child of Peace, believing that her compliance truly is essential to ensure her nation's safety and that being a good cog helps the whole machine of Talis's plan protect the world. (There's a running attempt at humor with a "holy text" of Utterances by the AI overlord, which are mostly geeky lines that sound too much like modern immature self-important techbros for me to really find them amusing, given the real-world damage being wrought by certain techbros.) She only has a little over a year left before she ages out of her role, and it seems reasonable that she'll survive until then, until Elian arrives - the first Child of Peace she has ever seen to be brought into the precepture in chains, and the first to openly defy their robotic masters, even when it earns him pain and eventual torture. She knows, of course, that the otherwise kindly Abbot and the other AI "teachers" use torment to punish rule infractions, but it never hit so close to home as when she watches their efforts to grind down the outspoken boy. He even goes so far as to attempt escape across the Saskatchewan prairies, despite knowing how such an effort could backfire on his nation and his loved ones. At some point, his stubbornness crosses a line from caged animal defiance into outright stupidity... just as Greta's stoic embracing of her role and refusal to see what's right in front of her eyes made me question her ostensible intelligence. Somehow, though, she's considered the leader of her classmates, even though her roommate Da-Xia, heiress to a Himalayan throne where rulers are considered divine, displays much stronger leadership skills, regal bearing, and defiance at multiple points, and isn't as willfully blind to obvious things. Tensions ratchet up as war encroaches on Greta's and Elian's nations, punctuated by a bold move by Cumberland that demonstrates how humans have a way of eventually circumventing even rules intended for self-preservation. At some point round about the halfway point or just past, though, the plot starts to lose steam as a near-divine intervention arrives, at which point things drag and start devolving to indulge in what approaches torture porn, emotional and physical, in ways that don't advance the story at all. Greta does more unintelligent things, Elian does some boneheaded stuff too, a weird plot obsession with horny ungulates unfolds, some late-game spiritualism seeps in through the cracks, and eventually the story ends in a weird grayish area that's not quite a satisfactory resting point or conclusion but isn't a cliffhanger either.
There are a few points in its favor; this isn't a book where the dystopia is magically fixed by the ending, for one thing, and even if it's hard to see real world leaders hesitating to declare a war even if it means the death of a family member (especially given how often wars are pushed by people just to the side of the official power structure, the ones who make the money off the spoils), it's an interesting idea. There's also some ambiguity involved, as Talis may be using an oversized sledgehammer but did not start off with bad intentions, and still believes that saving the world - which it did inarguably do, at least initially - is worth "small" sacrifices like a few well-born children and the odd major city. The story just became muddled in the telling, not at all helped by a main character who spent too much time whining and ignoring things and not enough doing main character things like solving problems or taking action or just plain not being a passive tool of an oppressive system.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins) - My Review
Run Program (Scott Meyer) - My Review
Steelheart (Brandon Sanderson) - My Review
Tuesday, February 25, 2025
Ember and the Ice Dragons (Heather Fawcett)
Ember and the Ice Dragons
Heather Fawcett
Storytide
Fiction, MG Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: In a Victorian London that never was, the Stormancer Lionel St. George - a powerful, if not always perfect, Magician at Chesterfield University - is raising a most unusual daughter... a girl who is not a girl at all. Twelve years ago, he was chasing a magical storm through the high Welsh mountains when he found the bodies of two fire dragons, possibly the last of their kind in the wild, which had been slaughtered for their powerful fireglass scales. With them was a newborn baby dragon still clinging to life, and Lionel, unable to leave the thing to die or, worse, slaughter it, used his imperfect magics to wrap a concealment around the foundling, making her appear as a baby human girl (except for the wings; he had to use invisibility to hide those). But now that she's growing up, Ember's innate fire magic is leaking out of her disguise with spontaneous, uncontrolled eruptions of flame. Even in an university full of Magicians, fire has a way of being noticed. Until Lionel can work out how to fix the problem, he has little choice but to send her away - all the way to Antarctica, where his estranged Scientist sister Myra studies the wildlife of the icy land. Ember doesn't want to go, but she knows she has no choice if she wants to avoid being found out.
Whatever she expected to find in Antarctica, she didn't expect to find dragons.
Aunt Myra, it turns out, isn't just studying penguins; she and her fellow scientists are working to save the last surviving wild dragons in the world, magnificent pale creatures known as ice dragons, from the annual Winterglass Hunt. Every year, nobles and bounty hunters take down as many beasts as they can for their invaluable winterglass scales, and every year the population is plummeting, until soon they might go the way of the fire dragons. Ember may not have been able to save her parents, but she's not about to let a pack of ignorant brutes destroy what may be her last living kin - even if it risks exposing her secret to the world.
REVIEW: The fact that this title lingered so long in my "Currently Reading" list should not at all be construed as a reflection on the story itself; it was more about everything else in my life (and the world in general) going wrong. Ember and the Ice Dragons itself is an enjoyable middle-grade fantasy adventure, with dragons and magic (and a little science) and a heroine who could probably carry another book or two if she got the chance.
Having been in human form since her earliest days, Ember has no recollection of what it means to be a real, dragon-shaped dragon, for all that she still is not entirely human: she cannot tell a lie, for one thing, plus there are some times when human psychology just confuses her. Still, she loves her "father" Lionel dearly, and he loves her, which makes it that much harder when she has to go away for both of their safety; the spells he worked to conceal her are in a blurry legal area at the very least, and his position as a university professor is already precarious enough with his other occasional mishaps, not to mention being on the wrong side of university politics more often than not. In Antarctica, she's on her own for the first time - Aunt Myra, though aware of who and what Ember is, is not a motherly type, and isn't quite sure how to deal with the sudden imposition - and also among "peers", or at least human children of her own age. She struggles to relate, finding herself on the wrong end of a pair of bullies (and the wrong end of the first teacher who isn't Lionel she's ever had to deal with; the idea that she's expected to study the same things in the same way as everyone else, to do homework, is irritating and confusing), complicated by her continued worries about more spontaneous combustions. The discovery that there are ice dragons on the continent brings an unexpected thrill of joy; they may not be fire dragons, but they are still dragons. Almost immediately, though, that hope turns to fear and rage when she meets the arrogant young Prince Gideon and his father, both of whom are active proponents of dragon hunting and bristle at how Queen Victoria has limited the dragon hunts and may even eventually side with the Scientists and end the practice altogether. Gideon's reasons for becoming a dragon hunter are a little more complicated than Ember first realizes, though; the friction between power and politics and conservation is not always as clean and easy as Ember first thinks. There are also secrets in the Antarctic wilderness that neither the Scientists nor the hunters don't fully understand, secrets that could endanger everyone. When Ember sets out to sabotage the hunt - with some help from two human friends - she runs straight into those secrets, and almost pays with her life. Still, for all that she stumbles at times, she does learn along the way.
While the plot moves fairly well, there are a few thin patches. The alternate history Fawcett builds feels scattershot and thin if you look too hard, and a few characters felt like they were left halfway through their own stories by the end, with certain elements weirdly forgotten or petering out after much foreshadowing and development. (I suspect that there was a planned sequel at the very least, if not a full series.) Other than that, it's a decent story that has both humor and wonder, not without a few perilous and darker moments, and I enjoyed the main character and, of course, the dragons.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Dragon With a Chocolate Heart (Stephanie Burgiss) - My Review
Dragon's Keep (Janet Lee Carey) - My Review
A Darkening of Dragons (S. A. Patrick) - My Review
Heather Fawcett
Storytide
Fiction, MG Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: In a Victorian London that never was, the Stormancer Lionel St. George - a powerful, if not always perfect, Magician at Chesterfield University - is raising a most unusual daughter... a girl who is not a girl at all. Twelve years ago, he was chasing a magical storm through the high Welsh mountains when he found the bodies of two fire dragons, possibly the last of their kind in the wild, which had been slaughtered for their powerful fireglass scales. With them was a newborn baby dragon still clinging to life, and Lionel, unable to leave the thing to die or, worse, slaughter it, used his imperfect magics to wrap a concealment around the foundling, making her appear as a baby human girl (except for the wings; he had to use invisibility to hide those). But now that she's growing up, Ember's innate fire magic is leaking out of her disguise with spontaneous, uncontrolled eruptions of flame. Even in an university full of Magicians, fire has a way of being noticed. Until Lionel can work out how to fix the problem, he has little choice but to send her away - all the way to Antarctica, where his estranged Scientist sister Myra studies the wildlife of the icy land. Ember doesn't want to go, but she knows she has no choice if she wants to avoid being found out.
Whatever she expected to find in Antarctica, she didn't expect to find dragons.
Aunt Myra, it turns out, isn't just studying penguins; she and her fellow scientists are working to save the last surviving wild dragons in the world, magnificent pale creatures known as ice dragons, from the annual Winterglass Hunt. Every year, nobles and bounty hunters take down as many beasts as they can for their invaluable winterglass scales, and every year the population is plummeting, until soon they might go the way of the fire dragons. Ember may not have been able to save her parents, but she's not about to let a pack of ignorant brutes destroy what may be her last living kin - even if it risks exposing her secret to the world.
REVIEW: The fact that this title lingered so long in my "Currently Reading" list should not at all be construed as a reflection on the story itself; it was more about everything else in my life (and the world in general) going wrong. Ember and the Ice Dragons itself is an enjoyable middle-grade fantasy adventure, with dragons and magic (and a little science) and a heroine who could probably carry another book or two if she got the chance.
Having been in human form since her earliest days, Ember has no recollection of what it means to be a real, dragon-shaped dragon, for all that she still is not entirely human: she cannot tell a lie, for one thing, plus there are some times when human psychology just confuses her. Still, she loves her "father" Lionel dearly, and he loves her, which makes it that much harder when she has to go away for both of their safety; the spells he worked to conceal her are in a blurry legal area at the very least, and his position as a university professor is already precarious enough with his other occasional mishaps, not to mention being on the wrong side of university politics more often than not. In Antarctica, she's on her own for the first time - Aunt Myra, though aware of who and what Ember is, is not a motherly type, and isn't quite sure how to deal with the sudden imposition - and also among "peers", or at least human children of her own age. She struggles to relate, finding herself on the wrong end of a pair of bullies (and the wrong end of the first teacher who isn't Lionel she's ever had to deal with; the idea that she's expected to study the same things in the same way as everyone else, to do homework, is irritating and confusing), complicated by her continued worries about more spontaneous combustions. The discovery that there are ice dragons on the continent brings an unexpected thrill of joy; they may not be fire dragons, but they are still dragons. Almost immediately, though, that hope turns to fear and rage when she meets the arrogant young Prince Gideon and his father, both of whom are active proponents of dragon hunting and bristle at how Queen Victoria has limited the dragon hunts and may even eventually side with the Scientists and end the practice altogether. Gideon's reasons for becoming a dragon hunter are a little more complicated than Ember first realizes, though; the friction between power and politics and conservation is not always as clean and easy as Ember first thinks. There are also secrets in the Antarctic wilderness that neither the Scientists nor the hunters don't fully understand, secrets that could endanger everyone. When Ember sets out to sabotage the hunt - with some help from two human friends - she runs straight into those secrets, and almost pays with her life. Still, for all that she stumbles at times, she does learn along the way.
While the plot moves fairly well, there are a few thin patches. The alternate history Fawcett builds feels scattershot and thin if you look too hard, and a few characters felt like they were left halfway through their own stories by the end, with certain elements weirdly forgotten or petering out after much foreshadowing and development. (I suspect that there was a planned sequel at the very least, if not a full series.) Other than that, it's a decent story that has both humor and wonder, not without a few perilous and darker moments, and I enjoyed the main character and, of course, the dragons.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Dragon With a Chocolate Heart (Stephanie Burgiss) - My Review
Dragon's Keep (Janet Lee Carey) - My Review
A Darkening of Dragons (S. A. Patrick) - My Review
Friday, February 21, 2025
The Tusks of Extinction (Ray Nayler)
The Tusks of Extinction
Ray Nayler
MacMillan
Fiction, Sci-Fi
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Dr. Damira Khismatullina dedicated her life to studying and saving elephants - only to be murdered for her efforts. One hundred years after her death, a recorded version of her consciousness is resurrected by a team of desperate Russian scientists. Though wild elephants have been extinct for decades, cloning efforts have resurrected woolly mammoths, part of a greater effort to restore lost megafauna-shaped habitats and mitigate climate change... but just recreating genetics does not restore the habits, the experience, the many parts of an animal's "culture" that died out. The new creatures may look like mammoths, but don't know how to behave like mammoths, and Damira is the only mind recorded in the Russian archives who might stand a chance of teaching them - if her thoughts were uploaded into the brain of a mammoth matriarch.
Using her experience with elephants and her extensive studies, Damira shows her new herd how to survive and thrive in the Siberian tundra... but when poachers inevitably arrive, and the Russian government begins selling exclusive permits to hunt in the preserve as a way to recoup their massive investment in the project, will she be able to save her new family from going the way of their ancestors?
REVIEW: The relatively recent megafaunal extinction in the wake of the last Ice Age had lasting effects on habitats around the world, effects we are still learning about. Rewilding the Arctic with lost beasts is one proposed method of mitigating climate change, and has apparently already seen some promising efforts in regions where it has been attempted with extant animals like bison - but, of course, until one can resurrect some of the true giants of the lost mammoth steppes, one really can't begin to get the full impact or full benefits. Woolly mammoths in particular are one of the great "near misses" of history; isolated populations were still around when the Egyptian pyramids were being built. This book examines the problems of species revival, not just for the species itself but for the main drivers of the current "sixth extinction" sweeping the globe: humans.
Despite coming from urban Russia, Damira has had a fascination with elephants since childhood, devoting herself to elephant conservation and ultimately giving up her life trying to stop the unstoppable tide of human greed, short-sightedness, and raw thirst for destruction (all enabled by humanity's seemingly infinite capacity for apathy about things they cannot directly experience, the ability to rationalize away the ultimately untenable costs of modern society). Given a second chance at life, she embraces her role as matriarch of the first mammoth herd to walk the earth in thousands of years. Much as she learned about elephants from her life and studies, being a mammoth is an entirely new and fascinating experience, her new brain allowing her to relive and re-examine memories in a way her human brain could never imagine. Many years into her new role, when she finds the telltale traces of a poacher kill, she is not about to stand by idly, using her new mammoth brain and old human mind to tackle the problem in a most decisive way. Meanwhile, Svyatoslav, the son of a bounty hunter, joins his father on the first-ever attempt at poaching mammoth ivory, showing just how people get pulled into that world, the desperation and greed and self-delusion that turns them into disposable tools of the greedy, grasping elite. Much as he hates it, he cannot see a way out, until an unexpected opportunity arises. A third storyline follows the married couple Vladimir and Anthony, the first to buy a license to hunt a woolly mammoth. Vladimir, son of expatriate Russians, struggles to feel a connection to the country he only heard about from his embittered family, even as he struggles to reconcile the wealthy man he loved for many years with the dark side that emerges on the hunt. The three storylines inevitably intersect, and that intersection inevitably involves violence and tragedy, while confronting thorny issues of whether or not humans will ever be able to coexist with other species on this world, whether greed is an inevitable and unstoppable force that will ultimately be the doom of everything.
The story came close to losing a mark for repetition and meandering, as well as a few parts that felt forced for convenience (such as a prolonged and remarkably plot-relevant conversation "overheard" via drone by one character, an "as-you-know-Bob" explanation of things that almost had me rolling my eyes at how unnatural it felt to have two people randomly discussing the exact things the listener needed to know about to enable the next part of their tale at the exact right time). It also could not help but be depressing on some level, when the extinction of elephants (and too many other species) looks all too inevitable because there's just plain too much money and power behind the forces enabling butchery and destruction and not enough considering the long-term survival consequences. Beyond that, this is a powerful and unique story that lingers in the memory.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Ghosts of Evolution (Connie Barlow) - My Review
The Only Harmless Great Thing (Brooke Bolander) - My Review
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Dennis E. Taylor) - My Review
Ray Nayler
MacMillan
Fiction, Sci-Fi
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Dr. Damira Khismatullina dedicated her life to studying and saving elephants - only to be murdered for her efforts. One hundred years after her death, a recorded version of her consciousness is resurrected by a team of desperate Russian scientists. Though wild elephants have been extinct for decades, cloning efforts have resurrected woolly mammoths, part of a greater effort to restore lost megafauna-shaped habitats and mitigate climate change... but just recreating genetics does not restore the habits, the experience, the many parts of an animal's "culture" that died out. The new creatures may look like mammoths, but don't know how to behave like mammoths, and Damira is the only mind recorded in the Russian archives who might stand a chance of teaching them - if her thoughts were uploaded into the brain of a mammoth matriarch.
Using her experience with elephants and her extensive studies, Damira shows her new herd how to survive and thrive in the Siberian tundra... but when poachers inevitably arrive, and the Russian government begins selling exclusive permits to hunt in the preserve as a way to recoup their massive investment in the project, will she be able to save her new family from going the way of their ancestors?
REVIEW: The relatively recent megafaunal extinction in the wake of the last Ice Age had lasting effects on habitats around the world, effects we are still learning about. Rewilding the Arctic with lost beasts is one proposed method of mitigating climate change, and has apparently already seen some promising efforts in regions where it has been attempted with extant animals like bison - but, of course, until one can resurrect some of the true giants of the lost mammoth steppes, one really can't begin to get the full impact or full benefits. Woolly mammoths in particular are one of the great "near misses" of history; isolated populations were still around when the Egyptian pyramids were being built. This book examines the problems of species revival, not just for the species itself but for the main drivers of the current "sixth extinction" sweeping the globe: humans.
Despite coming from urban Russia, Damira has had a fascination with elephants since childhood, devoting herself to elephant conservation and ultimately giving up her life trying to stop the unstoppable tide of human greed, short-sightedness, and raw thirst for destruction (all enabled by humanity's seemingly infinite capacity for apathy about things they cannot directly experience, the ability to rationalize away the ultimately untenable costs of modern society). Given a second chance at life, she embraces her role as matriarch of the first mammoth herd to walk the earth in thousands of years. Much as she learned about elephants from her life and studies, being a mammoth is an entirely new and fascinating experience, her new brain allowing her to relive and re-examine memories in a way her human brain could never imagine. Many years into her new role, when she finds the telltale traces of a poacher kill, she is not about to stand by idly, using her new mammoth brain and old human mind to tackle the problem in a most decisive way. Meanwhile, Svyatoslav, the son of a bounty hunter, joins his father on the first-ever attempt at poaching mammoth ivory, showing just how people get pulled into that world, the desperation and greed and self-delusion that turns them into disposable tools of the greedy, grasping elite. Much as he hates it, he cannot see a way out, until an unexpected opportunity arises. A third storyline follows the married couple Vladimir and Anthony, the first to buy a license to hunt a woolly mammoth. Vladimir, son of expatriate Russians, struggles to feel a connection to the country he only heard about from his embittered family, even as he struggles to reconcile the wealthy man he loved for many years with the dark side that emerges on the hunt. The three storylines inevitably intersect, and that intersection inevitably involves violence and tragedy, while confronting thorny issues of whether or not humans will ever be able to coexist with other species on this world, whether greed is an inevitable and unstoppable force that will ultimately be the doom of everything.
The story came close to losing a mark for repetition and meandering, as well as a few parts that felt forced for convenience (such as a prolonged and remarkably plot-relevant conversation "overheard" via drone by one character, an "as-you-know-Bob" explanation of things that almost had me rolling my eyes at how unnatural it felt to have two people randomly discussing the exact things the listener needed to know about to enable the next part of their tale at the exact right time). It also could not help but be depressing on some level, when the extinction of elephants (and too many other species) looks all too inevitable because there's just plain too much money and power behind the forces enabling butchery and destruction and not enough considering the long-term survival consequences. Beyond that, this is a powerful and unique story that lingers in the memory.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Ghosts of Evolution (Connie Barlow) - My Review
The Only Harmless Great Thing (Brooke Bolander) - My Review
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Dennis E. Taylor) - My Review
The Element of Fire (Martha Wells)
The Element of Fire
The Ile-Rien series, Book 1
Martha Wells
Tantor
Fiction, Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: It has been many years since the peace of the kingdom of Ile-Rien was tested, but when Urbaine Grandier - a dark mage convicted of heresy by the realm's fanatical neighboring nation Bisran, said to have been driven insane by their inquisitors - abducts a sorcerer from the college of magical sciences, the first spark flies of what might explode into a cataclysm. Worse, the exiled princess Kade, half-fae sister of King Roland, has turned up again at the royal castle for her own inscrutable reasons. With the crown already resting precariously enough on Roland's brow, the weak-willed young man having fallen under the influence of a conniving cousin, and tensions between him and the aging Dowager Queen Ravenna high, it falls to Captain Thomas Boniface of the Queen's Guard to track down Grandier, deal with Kade, and prevent the collapse of the monarchy... little suspecting the greater threat hanging over everyone, a treachery that makes mere war with Bisran seem insignificant.
REVIEW: I had another epic fantasy itch, and this audiobook was available via Libby, so it seemed worth a try. The Element of Fire offers magic, treachery, wonder, darkness, and a touch of swashbuckling action... in short, about everything I wanted in an epic fantasy, even if it lacked some of the depth and grander scale I've come to associate with the best of the subgenre.
Starting with Thomas's dangerous mission to retrieve the abducted sorcerer Durell from Grandier's clutches, it immerses the reader in a world thick with magic and intrigue. The names and politics can be a bit heavy, particularly early on, but it mostly sorts itself out as the tale unfolds. Thomas's position at the court is precarious; as captain of Ravenna's guard (and one-time lover; especially among nobility, Ile-Rien has a somewhat casual attitude toward extramarital affairs and sex in general), there's friction with King Roland's retinue and the followers of Danzil, the cousin who got his hooks into the immature regent long ago and holds him almost completely in thrall. He's reaching an age where such courtly politicking is more exhausting than thrilling, the meager and transitory rewards hardly worth the costs, but he still feels loyal enough to Ravenna and the overall stability of Ile-Rien to remain; without Ravenna's manipulations and people like Thomas, the nation would be in utter shambles. Thomas isn't always the most intelligent of investigators, with a blunder or two obvious enough even I was gritting my teeth at them, but he manages to come through when it counts. Kade, meanwhile, has returned in a belated attempt to confront the past: she and her half-brother were terrorized by an abusive father. Despite herself, she ends up pulled into Thomas's efforts to root out Grandier and stop the dark plot the foreign mage has set in motion... a plot that involves the Unseelie court of dark fae, making the matter personal to Kade; her fae mother was of the Seelie court, recently a victim of Unseelie treachery, and for all that Kade and her mother were not particularly close, she cannot let them get away with that. Thomas and Kade make a more or less decent duo, confronting escalating threats as events quickly spiral out of control, and the story generally clips along at a decent pace. There were a few elements that felt subtly unsatisfactory by the end - this was one of Wells's earliest published works, which may explain some unevenness, how certain elements felt awkwardly spliced in, and some worldbuilding "rules" felt vague - but I found it an entertaining enough tale to overlook the odd bump.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Traitor's Blade (Sebastien de Castell) - My Review
Blue Moon Rising (Simon R. Green) - My Review
The Cloud Roads (Martha Wells) - My Review
The Ile-Rien series, Book 1
Martha Wells
Tantor
Fiction, Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: It has been many years since the peace of the kingdom of Ile-Rien was tested, but when Urbaine Grandier - a dark mage convicted of heresy by the realm's fanatical neighboring nation Bisran, said to have been driven insane by their inquisitors - abducts a sorcerer from the college of magical sciences, the first spark flies of what might explode into a cataclysm. Worse, the exiled princess Kade, half-fae sister of King Roland, has turned up again at the royal castle for her own inscrutable reasons. With the crown already resting precariously enough on Roland's brow, the weak-willed young man having fallen under the influence of a conniving cousin, and tensions between him and the aging Dowager Queen Ravenna high, it falls to Captain Thomas Boniface of the Queen's Guard to track down Grandier, deal with Kade, and prevent the collapse of the monarchy... little suspecting the greater threat hanging over everyone, a treachery that makes mere war with Bisran seem insignificant.
REVIEW: I had another epic fantasy itch, and this audiobook was available via Libby, so it seemed worth a try. The Element of Fire offers magic, treachery, wonder, darkness, and a touch of swashbuckling action... in short, about everything I wanted in an epic fantasy, even if it lacked some of the depth and grander scale I've come to associate with the best of the subgenre.
Starting with Thomas's dangerous mission to retrieve the abducted sorcerer Durell from Grandier's clutches, it immerses the reader in a world thick with magic and intrigue. The names and politics can be a bit heavy, particularly early on, but it mostly sorts itself out as the tale unfolds. Thomas's position at the court is precarious; as captain of Ravenna's guard (and one-time lover; especially among nobility, Ile-Rien has a somewhat casual attitude toward extramarital affairs and sex in general), there's friction with King Roland's retinue and the followers of Danzil, the cousin who got his hooks into the immature regent long ago and holds him almost completely in thrall. He's reaching an age where such courtly politicking is more exhausting than thrilling, the meager and transitory rewards hardly worth the costs, but he still feels loyal enough to Ravenna and the overall stability of Ile-Rien to remain; without Ravenna's manipulations and people like Thomas, the nation would be in utter shambles. Thomas isn't always the most intelligent of investigators, with a blunder or two obvious enough even I was gritting my teeth at them, but he manages to come through when it counts. Kade, meanwhile, has returned in a belated attempt to confront the past: she and her half-brother were terrorized by an abusive father. Despite herself, she ends up pulled into Thomas's efforts to root out Grandier and stop the dark plot the foreign mage has set in motion... a plot that involves the Unseelie court of dark fae, making the matter personal to Kade; her fae mother was of the Seelie court, recently a victim of Unseelie treachery, and for all that Kade and her mother were not particularly close, she cannot let them get away with that. Thomas and Kade make a more or less decent duo, confronting escalating threats as events quickly spiral out of control, and the story generally clips along at a decent pace. There were a few elements that felt subtly unsatisfactory by the end - this was one of Wells's earliest published works, which may explain some unevenness, how certain elements felt awkwardly spliced in, and some worldbuilding "rules" felt vague - but I found it an entertaining enough tale to overlook the odd bump.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Traitor's Blade (Sebastien de Castell) - My Review
Blue Moon Rising (Simon R. Green) - My Review
The Cloud Roads (Martha Wells) - My Review
Wednesday, February 19, 2025
All Blood Runs Red (Phil Keith with Tom Clavin)
All Blood Runs Red: The Legendary Life of Eugene Bullard - Boxer, Pilot, Soldier, Spy
Phil Keith with Tom Clavin
Hanover Square Press
Nonfiction, Biography
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Born in the late 19th century to a former slave father and Native American mother, Eugene Bullard's parents considered him the "lucky" child as the seventh of their family... but being a half-Black boy in Jim Crow Georgia was about as far from lucky as one could get. From an early age, Eugene was determined to escape the rampant, violent racism that he saw all around him, determined to reach the shores of France, where his father told him true equality was possible. Despite only having a second-grade education, the boy ran off as soon as he could manage - little imagining what he'd accomplish in the coming decades, from becoming one of the first Black fighter pilots in the Great War to rubbing shoulders with celebrities in his own jazz bar to spying on Nazis and more.
REVIEW: Eugene Bullard's life reads like an adventure novel, a tale of a boy coming from almost nothing to achieve more than his dreams, for all that many tried to deny him recognition and rewards. It is sadly telling that little of what he accomplished could have happened in the country of his birth, America, where racial animosities and prejudices remain sadly entrenched to this very day, well over a hundred years after his childhood. (In 2025, we're seeing just how shallow Jim Crow's grave really is, unfortunately... But I digress.)
Switching between distant overviews and closer, detailed moments of Bullard's incredible life, the authors paint a portrait of a man who was far from flawless, but principled and determined and unwilling to let the world grind him down. That portrait has some vague spots and blurred edges; between war damage and poor records, there are parts of his story that are just plain impossible to bring into focus, as his own story - recorded in a never-published autobiography - sometimes contradicts what can be determined as actual events. Other parts, though, have been corroborated, such as his impressive war record and long and varied careers, and these are more than enough to make his relative obscurity in modern America a disgrace (and further proof that, even nearly a century later, this country still has trouble grappling with accomplished non-white people and the virulent systemic racism that too often forms a backdrop to their deeds; even now, stories like this are being banned and erased by a regime that makes no secret of catering to white supremacy and alternate-facts history). Not that France was entirely free of problems, either, but it was only in France that a man like Eugene Bullard could flourish as he did for as long as he did, when he did. Proven parts of his story involve acquaintances and friendships with a galaxy of stars of his day, from war heroes to boxing legends to artists and authors to the many prominent entertainers who, like Bullard, found a warmer welcome in France than in America because of who they were. His well-earned loyalty to his adopted country landed him on the front lines in not one war, but two, with the medals and scars to show for it, as well as lifelong friendships that wound up being pivotal in his later years. The telling can be a bit dry and uneven at times, prone to tangents on other remarkable figures of the day, and there are some frustrating gaps that are simply impossible to fill in, people and events lost to time, though it managed to keep my interest even in the slower bits.
Stories like this can be, by turns, inspiring, depressing, and haunting. Inspiring, as they depict a life lived fully in the face of great adversity. Depressing, as such lives inevitably cast one's one rather pitiful existence into that much harsher a glare. Haunting, as such stories as Eugene Bullard's should have been guiding lights and stepping stones to a better and brighter future for our country and world, one where old prejudices and society-warping hatreds are outgrown at last and left in history's dustbin, but instead we find ourselves in a present that looks all too much like the world in which he struggled and fought to be seen as even a human, let alone a truly remarkable man, with nothing but fading ghosts of what could have - what should have - been.
You Might Also Enjoy:
West With the Night (Beryl Markham) - My Review
Born a Crime (Trevor Noah) - My Review
The Black Count (Tom Reiss) - My Review
Phil Keith with Tom Clavin
Hanover Square Press
Nonfiction, Biography
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Born in the late 19th century to a former slave father and Native American mother, Eugene Bullard's parents considered him the "lucky" child as the seventh of their family... but being a half-Black boy in Jim Crow Georgia was about as far from lucky as one could get. From an early age, Eugene was determined to escape the rampant, violent racism that he saw all around him, determined to reach the shores of France, where his father told him true equality was possible. Despite only having a second-grade education, the boy ran off as soon as he could manage - little imagining what he'd accomplish in the coming decades, from becoming one of the first Black fighter pilots in the Great War to rubbing shoulders with celebrities in his own jazz bar to spying on Nazis and more.
REVIEW: Eugene Bullard's life reads like an adventure novel, a tale of a boy coming from almost nothing to achieve more than his dreams, for all that many tried to deny him recognition and rewards. It is sadly telling that little of what he accomplished could have happened in the country of his birth, America, where racial animosities and prejudices remain sadly entrenched to this very day, well over a hundred years after his childhood. (In 2025, we're seeing just how shallow Jim Crow's grave really is, unfortunately... But I digress.)
Switching between distant overviews and closer, detailed moments of Bullard's incredible life, the authors paint a portrait of a man who was far from flawless, but principled and determined and unwilling to let the world grind him down. That portrait has some vague spots and blurred edges; between war damage and poor records, there are parts of his story that are just plain impossible to bring into focus, as his own story - recorded in a never-published autobiography - sometimes contradicts what can be determined as actual events. Other parts, though, have been corroborated, such as his impressive war record and long and varied careers, and these are more than enough to make his relative obscurity in modern America a disgrace (and further proof that, even nearly a century later, this country still has trouble grappling with accomplished non-white people and the virulent systemic racism that too often forms a backdrop to their deeds; even now, stories like this are being banned and erased by a regime that makes no secret of catering to white supremacy and alternate-facts history). Not that France was entirely free of problems, either, but it was only in France that a man like Eugene Bullard could flourish as he did for as long as he did, when he did. Proven parts of his story involve acquaintances and friendships with a galaxy of stars of his day, from war heroes to boxing legends to artists and authors to the many prominent entertainers who, like Bullard, found a warmer welcome in France than in America because of who they were. His well-earned loyalty to his adopted country landed him on the front lines in not one war, but two, with the medals and scars to show for it, as well as lifelong friendships that wound up being pivotal in his later years. The telling can be a bit dry and uneven at times, prone to tangents on other remarkable figures of the day, and there are some frustrating gaps that are simply impossible to fill in, people and events lost to time, though it managed to keep my interest even in the slower bits.
Stories like this can be, by turns, inspiring, depressing, and haunting. Inspiring, as they depict a life lived fully in the face of great adversity. Depressing, as such lives inevitably cast one's one rather pitiful existence into that much harsher a glare. Haunting, as such stories as Eugene Bullard's should have been guiding lights and stepping stones to a better and brighter future for our country and world, one where old prejudices and society-warping hatreds are outgrown at last and left in history's dustbin, but instead we find ourselves in a present that looks all too much like the world in which he struggled and fought to be seen as even a human, let alone a truly remarkable man, with nothing but fading ghosts of what could have - what should have - been.
You Might Also Enjoy:
West With the Night (Beryl Markham) - My Review
Born a Crime (Trevor Noah) - My Review
The Black Count (Tom Reiss) - My Review
Friday, February 14, 2025
Amid the Crowd of Stars (Stephen Leigh)
Amid the Crowd of Stars
Stephen Leigh
Dreamscape
Fiction, Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: Many generations ago, humans traveled to the stars in search of new homes... only to be abandoned after a disaster befell Earth. Several colonies died without support from the homeworld, but some, such as the outpost on the tidally-locked planet Lupus orbiting the red dwarf star Canis, endured. Now, as the vessel Odysseus arrives to re-establish contact, some of the Lupusians dream of traveling back to Earth - but, after so long in an alien biosphere, carrying a host of adaptations and exotic bacteria and viruses, will that ever be possible? Are they even still human anymore? Or has their time on the alien world changed them in ways nobody anticipated?
Terran researcher Ichiko came to Lupus to study the cultures that have developed on the world, where the people have reverted to a largely pre-industrial way of life and split into two distinct populations, the mainlanders and the islanders. Those on the mainland look down on the islanders and their strange ways, marked by the colorful native "plosh" fungus and their unusual relationship with the great beasts of the oceans, even going to war to keep mainlanders from hunting the animals. Ichiko's professional fascination with the Lupusians becomes more personal when she meets the islander Saorise, who longs to visit old Earth and defies her clan's reticent ways. But the bond between them is soon tested, as tensions between Terrans and Lupusians increase amid a string of odd happenings and misunderstandings, all pointing toward a great secret of the planet that may endanger everything, and everyone - even the Terrans aboard the Odysseus.
REVIEW: Amid the Crowd of Stars has the feel of older, idea-driven science fiction, which can be both a strength and a weakness.
The concepts explored are interesting enough, at least at the start. A combination of time, local biosphere, and radiation from the planet's sun have worked subtle transformations on the "Lupusians", to the point where there is a very real question as to whether they constitute a new species. This is heightened by the literal barriers that are placed between Terran and Lupusian, a necessity due to potentially deadly local pathogens that could threaten the starfarers (and Earth, if any made it home) and the fact that there's no guarantee that the Terrans don't carry any germs that could wipe out the Lupusians after so long isolated from Earth microbes. The world itself - a tidally-locked planet with a narrow habitable zone between perpetual light and shadow - is not exactly unique in science fiction, but has produced an interesting culture, in this case with strong roots in Irish traditions as the majority of original colonists hailed from that region. The islanders have assimilated much further into the world's life cycle than even the mainlanders, sharing a unique bond with the native biome (no spoiler if you guess whether any species in that biome counts as sentient)... a bond that is already threatened as younger generations seek better opportunities among the mainland clans, and is only further endangered when the Terrans arrive and threaten to upend the entire planet's culture in one fell swoop. The Terrans, meanwhile, treat the locals as technologically superior cultures have traditionally treated those who are less reliant on gadgetry to live their lives. Never mind that the colony's ancestors were as advanced as the crew, and that they managed to survive and even thrive where many abandoned planets perished, to the crew they're just dismissed as ignorant "Canines". This point starts feeling a bit forced, to be honest, as if the author were deliberately pointing to the fact that he was flipping an old genre convention on its ear by having a multi-ethnic advanced ship crew looking down on rustic native pale-skinned folk. The biology on Lupus is much more collective than the crew can understand, linked on a microbial or quantum level - which bears a deliberate and obvious similarity to how the Terrans are linked via brain chips and a network of artificial personal assistants, making their dismissal of Lupusians all the more ironic. This parallel becomes rather heavy-handed as the story winds on.
You might notice that I started with the concepts instead of talking about the characters and story. That is because the characters themselves, while they have potential, end up being thin and less impressive than I'd hoped, falling into too-familiar slots and stumbling in too-familiar ways. Ichiko is the starry-eyed anthropologist who ends up identifying more with the native Lupusians (particularly the isolated islanders) than with her own people, and ends up doing some rather questionable things as a result. Similarly, the islander Saorise initially dreams of visiting Earth and escaping what she sees as a trap of a life following in her mother's footsteps as eventual clan leader, a dream that transfers almost seamlessly from the concept of interstellar exploration to the person of Ichiko and which also leads her to some questionable actions. Up on the starship, Ichiko fights against the prejudices of her peers and superiors (plus a one-time lover who becomes an overprotective lunkhead cliche) and an increasingly intrusive artificial assistant (part of a subplot that could've done a lot more with its page count and never quite pays off as well as I'd hoped). On the planet, Saorise must deal with fallout over her increasingly close ties to a mistrusted outsider, which threatens one of the islanders' closest-held secrets. It all blows up in an explosive finale that feels both forced and rushed, and an ending that left me feeling dissatisfied enough to trim the rating.
While there are some nice ideas, and Leigh does a decent job sketching out the Lupusian culture and some of the local animals, by the end it just never lived up to my hopes for it.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The City in the Middle of the Night (Charlie Jane Anders) - My Review
Rocannon's World (Ursula K. Le Guin) - My Review
Elder Race (Adrian Tchaikovsky) - My Review
Stephen Leigh
Dreamscape
Fiction, Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: Many generations ago, humans traveled to the stars in search of new homes... only to be abandoned after a disaster befell Earth. Several colonies died without support from the homeworld, but some, such as the outpost on the tidally-locked planet Lupus orbiting the red dwarf star Canis, endured. Now, as the vessel Odysseus arrives to re-establish contact, some of the Lupusians dream of traveling back to Earth - but, after so long in an alien biosphere, carrying a host of adaptations and exotic bacteria and viruses, will that ever be possible? Are they even still human anymore? Or has their time on the alien world changed them in ways nobody anticipated?
Terran researcher Ichiko came to Lupus to study the cultures that have developed on the world, where the people have reverted to a largely pre-industrial way of life and split into two distinct populations, the mainlanders and the islanders. Those on the mainland look down on the islanders and their strange ways, marked by the colorful native "plosh" fungus and their unusual relationship with the great beasts of the oceans, even going to war to keep mainlanders from hunting the animals. Ichiko's professional fascination with the Lupusians becomes more personal when she meets the islander Saorise, who longs to visit old Earth and defies her clan's reticent ways. But the bond between them is soon tested, as tensions between Terrans and Lupusians increase amid a string of odd happenings and misunderstandings, all pointing toward a great secret of the planet that may endanger everything, and everyone - even the Terrans aboard the Odysseus.
REVIEW: Amid the Crowd of Stars has the feel of older, idea-driven science fiction, which can be both a strength and a weakness.
The concepts explored are interesting enough, at least at the start. A combination of time, local biosphere, and radiation from the planet's sun have worked subtle transformations on the "Lupusians", to the point where there is a very real question as to whether they constitute a new species. This is heightened by the literal barriers that are placed between Terran and Lupusian, a necessity due to potentially deadly local pathogens that could threaten the starfarers (and Earth, if any made it home) and the fact that there's no guarantee that the Terrans don't carry any germs that could wipe out the Lupusians after so long isolated from Earth microbes. The world itself - a tidally-locked planet with a narrow habitable zone between perpetual light and shadow - is not exactly unique in science fiction, but has produced an interesting culture, in this case with strong roots in Irish traditions as the majority of original colonists hailed from that region. The islanders have assimilated much further into the world's life cycle than even the mainlanders, sharing a unique bond with the native biome (no spoiler if you guess whether any species in that biome counts as sentient)... a bond that is already threatened as younger generations seek better opportunities among the mainland clans, and is only further endangered when the Terrans arrive and threaten to upend the entire planet's culture in one fell swoop. The Terrans, meanwhile, treat the locals as technologically superior cultures have traditionally treated those who are less reliant on gadgetry to live their lives. Never mind that the colony's ancestors were as advanced as the crew, and that they managed to survive and even thrive where many abandoned planets perished, to the crew they're just dismissed as ignorant "Canines". This point starts feeling a bit forced, to be honest, as if the author were deliberately pointing to the fact that he was flipping an old genre convention on its ear by having a multi-ethnic advanced ship crew looking down on rustic native pale-skinned folk. The biology on Lupus is much more collective than the crew can understand, linked on a microbial or quantum level - which bears a deliberate and obvious similarity to how the Terrans are linked via brain chips and a network of artificial personal assistants, making their dismissal of Lupusians all the more ironic. This parallel becomes rather heavy-handed as the story winds on.
You might notice that I started with the concepts instead of talking about the characters and story. That is because the characters themselves, while they have potential, end up being thin and less impressive than I'd hoped, falling into too-familiar slots and stumbling in too-familiar ways. Ichiko is the starry-eyed anthropologist who ends up identifying more with the native Lupusians (particularly the isolated islanders) than with her own people, and ends up doing some rather questionable things as a result. Similarly, the islander Saorise initially dreams of visiting Earth and escaping what she sees as a trap of a life following in her mother's footsteps as eventual clan leader, a dream that transfers almost seamlessly from the concept of interstellar exploration to the person of Ichiko and which also leads her to some questionable actions. Up on the starship, Ichiko fights against the prejudices of her peers and superiors (plus a one-time lover who becomes an overprotective lunkhead cliche) and an increasingly intrusive artificial assistant (part of a subplot that could've done a lot more with its page count and never quite pays off as well as I'd hoped). On the planet, Saorise must deal with fallout over her increasingly close ties to a mistrusted outsider, which threatens one of the islanders' closest-held secrets. It all blows up in an explosive finale that feels both forced and rushed, and an ending that left me feeling dissatisfied enough to trim the rating.
While there are some nice ideas, and Leigh does a decent job sketching out the Lupusian culture and some of the local animals, by the end it just never lived up to my hopes for it.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The City in the Middle of the Night (Charlie Jane Anders) - My Review
Rocannon's World (Ursula K. Le Guin) - My Review
Elder Race (Adrian Tchaikovsky) - My Review
Thursday, February 13, 2025
Death Bringer (Derek Landy)
Death Bringer
The Skulduggery Pleasant series, Book 6
Derek Landy
HarperCollins
Fiction, YA Adventure/Fantasy/Horror/Humor/Mystery
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: When the girl Stephanie Edgley - known among the hidden magical community of Dublin as Valkyrie Cain - turned from Elemental magic to Necromancy to help her rescue her mentor and friend Skulduggery Pleasant from an evil dimension of monstrous elder gods, she discovered an unexpected affinity for the dark arts... and inspired hopes in her tutor, Solomon Wreath, that she might become the prophesied Death Bringer. In the most secret and sacred lore of the Necromancers, the Death Bringer is a mage so powerful they can initiate the Passage, which will remake the eternal cycle of life and death and bring a new, harmonious order to the world - whether the world wants it or not. But now Melancholia St. Clair, student of the scheming Necromancer Vandameer Craven, instead appears to have fulfilled that promise. While that lets Valkyrie off the hook of a destiny she did not want, it sets her and Skulduggery once more at odds with the Necromancers as the cult's wildest, darkest dream appears on the verge of coming true, bringing the potential for yet another apocalyptic event. Can the girl and the living skeleton save the world yet again - and will their partnership survive what they discover along the way?
REVIEW: Six books in, and the Skulduggery Pleasant series continues to engage and entertain in a fast-paced, twist-filled installment, with characters who grow and change (not always for the better; magic and world-saving both require sacrifices and secrets that come back to bite people at the worst possible times) and great dialog.
As things begin, Valkyrie is enjoying some family time as "Stephanie" while attending her baby sister Alison's christening. Much as she loves the little girl and her parents, though, inevitably the magical world always comes first - especially when that world has painted a target on her back, though it's quite clear by now that, even if she didn't have active enemies, she'd still default to Valkyrie over Stephanie given half a chance. The mundane world is just too dull for her... as is, unfortunately, her good-guy boyfriend, the teleporter Fletcher. Even knowing the potential depths of her inner dark self - Darquesse, whom more than one seer predicts will destroy the world someday - she can't help craving the excitement and danger of magic. This flaw shapes much of her journey through the book, leading to various unintended consequences for herself and those around her... especially when combined with a bombshell secret from Skulduggery's past. As the threat of the Death Bringer and other challenges arise, Valkyrie and Skulduggery once more find their bond and their powers tested to the utmost and sometimes bested. The action is intense, the violence increasingly brutal (especially violence dealt out by Valkyrie herself; this is not at all the same innocent kid from the first volume, for all that she clearly still has a lot more growing and learning to do), the stakes ratcheting ever-higher on both personal and world-shaping levels, and by the end nothing is left unchanged. Along the way, various series elements get more development, such as the increasing (and somewhat disturbing) independence of Valkyrie's Reflection double, the down-but-not-out remnants of the cult of the Faceless Ones, the continuing exploits of the would-be "killer supreme" and "zombie king" Vaurien Scapegrace and his useless toady Thrasher, and more. Valkyrie also must cope with both her first breakup with her first boyfriend and the ongoing and increasingly-disturbed attentions of the vampire Caelen, who insists they are "destined" for each other. (Her complaints about Caelen's broody, goth brand of "love" nearly had me snickering out loud at work - as did several other witty exchanges. Landy excels at sharp banter that manages not to overstay its welcome in any given scene.) A running subplot about a journalist stumbling onto the truth about the hidden magical community establishes a threat for future installments, which I hope to get to soon.
My only minor complaints are a hint of "series sprawl" - so many characters and subplots that it can take a bit to catch up mentally on who and where and what everyone is and how they fit in - and the final battle feeling just slightly overlong, but those hardly count against the rest of the story, which remains as satisfying as ever.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Library of the Dead (T. D. Huchu) - My Review
Skulduggery Pleasant (Derek Landy) - My Review
Sparrow Hill Road (Seanan McGuire) - My Review
The Skulduggery Pleasant series, Book 6
Derek Landy
HarperCollins
Fiction, YA Adventure/Fantasy/Horror/Humor/Mystery
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: When the girl Stephanie Edgley - known among the hidden magical community of Dublin as Valkyrie Cain - turned from Elemental magic to Necromancy to help her rescue her mentor and friend Skulduggery Pleasant from an evil dimension of monstrous elder gods, she discovered an unexpected affinity for the dark arts... and inspired hopes in her tutor, Solomon Wreath, that she might become the prophesied Death Bringer. In the most secret and sacred lore of the Necromancers, the Death Bringer is a mage so powerful they can initiate the Passage, which will remake the eternal cycle of life and death and bring a new, harmonious order to the world - whether the world wants it or not. But now Melancholia St. Clair, student of the scheming Necromancer Vandameer Craven, instead appears to have fulfilled that promise. While that lets Valkyrie off the hook of a destiny she did not want, it sets her and Skulduggery once more at odds with the Necromancers as the cult's wildest, darkest dream appears on the verge of coming true, bringing the potential for yet another apocalyptic event. Can the girl and the living skeleton save the world yet again - and will their partnership survive what they discover along the way?
REVIEW: Six books in, and the Skulduggery Pleasant series continues to engage and entertain in a fast-paced, twist-filled installment, with characters who grow and change (not always for the better; magic and world-saving both require sacrifices and secrets that come back to bite people at the worst possible times) and great dialog.
As things begin, Valkyrie is enjoying some family time as "Stephanie" while attending her baby sister Alison's christening. Much as she loves the little girl and her parents, though, inevitably the magical world always comes first - especially when that world has painted a target on her back, though it's quite clear by now that, even if she didn't have active enemies, she'd still default to Valkyrie over Stephanie given half a chance. The mundane world is just too dull for her... as is, unfortunately, her good-guy boyfriend, the teleporter Fletcher. Even knowing the potential depths of her inner dark self - Darquesse, whom more than one seer predicts will destroy the world someday - she can't help craving the excitement and danger of magic. This flaw shapes much of her journey through the book, leading to various unintended consequences for herself and those around her... especially when combined with a bombshell secret from Skulduggery's past. As the threat of the Death Bringer and other challenges arise, Valkyrie and Skulduggery once more find their bond and their powers tested to the utmost and sometimes bested. The action is intense, the violence increasingly brutal (especially violence dealt out by Valkyrie herself; this is not at all the same innocent kid from the first volume, for all that she clearly still has a lot more growing and learning to do), the stakes ratcheting ever-higher on both personal and world-shaping levels, and by the end nothing is left unchanged. Along the way, various series elements get more development, such as the increasing (and somewhat disturbing) independence of Valkyrie's Reflection double, the down-but-not-out remnants of the cult of the Faceless Ones, the continuing exploits of the would-be "killer supreme" and "zombie king" Vaurien Scapegrace and his useless toady Thrasher, and more. Valkyrie also must cope with both her first breakup with her first boyfriend and the ongoing and increasingly-disturbed attentions of the vampire Caelen, who insists they are "destined" for each other. (Her complaints about Caelen's broody, goth brand of "love" nearly had me snickering out loud at work - as did several other witty exchanges. Landy excels at sharp banter that manages not to overstay its welcome in any given scene.) A running subplot about a journalist stumbling onto the truth about the hidden magical community establishes a threat for future installments, which I hope to get to soon.
My only minor complaints are a hint of "series sprawl" - so many characters and subplots that it can take a bit to catch up mentally on who and where and what everyone is and how they fit in - and the final battle feeling just slightly overlong, but those hardly count against the rest of the story, which remains as satisfying as ever.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Library of the Dead (T. D. Huchu) - My Review
Skulduggery Pleasant (Derek Landy) - My Review
Sparrow Hill Road (Seanan McGuire) - My Review
Friday, February 7, 2025
The Witchstone (Henry H. Neff)
The Witchstone
Henry H. Neff
Blackstone
Fiction, Fantasy/Humor
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: The demon Laszlo may have an arch-duke of Hell for a father, but never managed to rise above a lowly Grade 3 himself... and that's fine by him. Sure, he may not have some of the fancier powers that come with advancement, but he has better things to do than play politics, things like drinking and spending family money and disporting himself with various consenting adults in various carnal manners. Even when his father arranged a job for him in the Ancient and Infernal Society of Curse Keepers (established 5036 B.C.), he hardly bothers checking in with the mortal family that he's supposed to be keeping an eye on, making sure they endure the full breadth of pain and despair and dashed hopes that come with a curse. But when new management takes over the Society with bold new visions of curse-keeping, suddenly his slacker ways aren't cutting it - and, for once, the mention of his powerful father isn't enough to get him out of a jam. Now, Laszlo has one Hell week - six days (Lord Lucifer never liked Sundays) - to make the Drakefords truly suffer the complete and utter misery of their already miserable curse and the snatching away of any whiff of a hint of hope for freedom, or he'll be boiled down into demonic essence and returned to the primordial ooze... and that's if he's lucky. Hell is, after all, infamous for its inventive means of eternal torture, for mortals and demons alike.
Maggie Drakeford is all too familiar with the Drakeford Curse. Ever since their Puritan ancestor struck down a witch performing unholy rites before the Witchstone - a strange, obsidian spire of ill omen deep in the mountains of upstate New York - every Drakeford has turned into a monster before their fortieth birthday... and not just a metaphoric monster. A tormented, twisted, barely-human thing that often begs for death long before the end, prone to fits of violence and rage. Maggie isn't even 20 years old yet, and already has the first marks of the curse, ending any idle dreams of a future beyond the family's miserable, rustic homestead in their miserable, rustic backwater town. Worse, it's only a matter of time before her precocious kid brother George, better known as "Lump", develops his own marks, too. It's been generations since any tried to break the curse by finishing the spell the slain witch was performing when killed, and none even know how anymore, the information lost over the years. Then a stranger in Gucci shoes turns up one night with a glint in his eye, an infernal case file, and an offer that sounds far too good to be true. He says his name is Laszlo, the demonic Curse Keeper of the line, and he claims that Hell needs to close out their long-running curse inside of a week or there will be dire consequences for all concerned. Thus, he's prepared to bend infernal rules to help them figure out how to break the thing. Maggie is skeptical - the man is, after all, admittedly a demon, and trusting demons almost never ends well in stories - but she doesn't have a choice... and, even if he can't deliver, at least she will have tried to fight back against the curse that has ruined so many lives.
Thus begins a whirlwind dash halfway around the world, gathering the ingredients for a spell that may or may not even work. Not only is the clock ticking against Laszlo and Maggie, but they face a slew of obstacles and challenges, plus betrayals and potential sabotage from the demon's new boss... and the possibility that the Drakeford Curse and the Witchstone are not at all what anyone, human or demon, thought they were in the first place...
REVIEW: With a sarcastic con-man demon and a determined young woman who isn't above blurring some moral lines to get what she needs, author Neff establishes a strong starring duo in The Witchstone, a fast-paced melding of hellish humor and eldritch horror and urban fantasy that may sometimes wobble on its tightrope but manages to keep its footing from start to finish.
From the first pages, Laszlo establishes himself as a scoundrel, more than a touch selfish and spoiled but with enough humanizing flaws (and an amusing enough voice) to keep the reader generally on his side, if mostly in contrast to the demons surrounding him in the Society of Curse-Keepers - and who doesn't tend to root for the slacker underdog against the new boss set on "shaking up" a department that was functioning just fine before they came along? Maggie's chapters, on the other hand, tend to be more serious and grounded, rooted in the generational misery of being a Drakeford and stuck in a tiny spot of a town full of cruel people who, rather than having any pity for the afflicted family, treat them like monsters, only deigning to tolerate their presence when someone dies and they need a traditional "sin eater" (since the Drakefords are clearly already cursed, what's a few more sins to pile upon their souls?). At one time, she'd hoped to at least experience a little freedom before the curse kicked in, but then she saw the patch of red skin and little tentacles on her elbow and knew it was too late already. The arrival of Laszlo on the family's doorstep invites immediate skepticism, but Maggie realizes she has little choice but to trust the demon, even if so she can at least know that she tried to fight back. (It goes without saying that her kid brother Lump also is involved in the journey, managing not to be deadweight most of the time). Laszlo may enjoy "playing" with mortals, but being Maggie's guide and escort through the hidden world of demonic and supernatural beings of the world is the first time in ages he's had to interact with them in any truly meaningful, prolonged manner; despite himself, he grows a little fond of the Drakefords as they face mutual enemies and challenges, even as he plots his own agenda that runs counter to their goals on a fundamental level. Likewise, despite vowing not to lower her guard, Maggie finds herself growing fond of the demon despite his often-obnoxious ways and tendency to flee (or attempt to flee) in the face of danger.
Things clip along nicely for the most part, with action and humor and some body horror, though there are a few wobbles, as mentioned earlier. Neff pushes a little hard on the aspect of the Drakeford Curse that compels victims to reproduce before their monstrous mutations make mating with a human unlikely, to a point that came close to compelling a "DNF" (did not finish). (Risking a spoiler, that is a line that is nudged, but not actually crossed; if it had, this review would not be written, because I do not review DNF titles.) The climactic finale also feels drawn out. The wrap-up and epilogue managed to pull it back from where it nearly lost a half-star on those accounts, though, feeling like Neff intends to set up a series (or at least leave the door open for one). There's certainly enough character chemistry and enough hooks in the world he established to carry at least one more book. The whole put me in mind of some older demon-themed urban fantasies, such as Esther Friesner's Here Be Demons and its sequels, but in a good and updated way, not a dated way. In any event, I found The Witchstone unexpectedly enjoyable and interesting, and I'd certainly look at a second installment if it ever comes along.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Whatever For Hire (R. J. Blain) - My Review
You Slay Me (Katie MacAllister) - My Review
Discount Armageddon (Seanan McGuire) - My Review
Henry H. Neff
Blackstone
Fiction, Fantasy/Humor
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: The demon Laszlo may have an arch-duke of Hell for a father, but never managed to rise above a lowly Grade 3 himself... and that's fine by him. Sure, he may not have some of the fancier powers that come with advancement, but he has better things to do than play politics, things like drinking and spending family money and disporting himself with various consenting adults in various carnal manners. Even when his father arranged a job for him in the Ancient and Infernal Society of Curse Keepers (established 5036 B.C.), he hardly bothers checking in with the mortal family that he's supposed to be keeping an eye on, making sure they endure the full breadth of pain and despair and dashed hopes that come with a curse. But when new management takes over the Society with bold new visions of curse-keeping, suddenly his slacker ways aren't cutting it - and, for once, the mention of his powerful father isn't enough to get him out of a jam. Now, Laszlo has one Hell week - six days (Lord Lucifer never liked Sundays) - to make the Drakefords truly suffer the complete and utter misery of their already miserable curse and the snatching away of any whiff of a hint of hope for freedom, or he'll be boiled down into demonic essence and returned to the primordial ooze... and that's if he's lucky. Hell is, after all, infamous for its inventive means of eternal torture, for mortals and demons alike.
Maggie Drakeford is all too familiar with the Drakeford Curse. Ever since their Puritan ancestor struck down a witch performing unholy rites before the Witchstone - a strange, obsidian spire of ill omen deep in the mountains of upstate New York - every Drakeford has turned into a monster before their fortieth birthday... and not just a metaphoric monster. A tormented, twisted, barely-human thing that often begs for death long before the end, prone to fits of violence and rage. Maggie isn't even 20 years old yet, and already has the first marks of the curse, ending any idle dreams of a future beyond the family's miserable, rustic homestead in their miserable, rustic backwater town. Worse, it's only a matter of time before her precocious kid brother George, better known as "Lump", develops his own marks, too. It's been generations since any tried to break the curse by finishing the spell the slain witch was performing when killed, and none even know how anymore, the information lost over the years. Then a stranger in Gucci shoes turns up one night with a glint in his eye, an infernal case file, and an offer that sounds far too good to be true. He says his name is Laszlo, the demonic Curse Keeper of the line, and he claims that Hell needs to close out their long-running curse inside of a week or there will be dire consequences for all concerned. Thus, he's prepared to bend infernal rules to help them figure out how to break the thing. Maggie is skeptical - the man is, after all, admittedly a demon, and trusting demons almost never ends well in stories - but she doesn't have a choice... and, even if he can't deliver, at least she will have tried to fight back against the curse that has ruined so many lives.
Thus begins a whirlwind dash halfway around the world, gathering the ingredients for a spell that may or may not even work. Not only is the clock ticking against Laszlo and Maggie, but they face a slew of obstacles and challenges, plus betrayals and potential sabotage from the demon's new boss... and the possibility that the Drakeford Curse and the Witchstone are not at all what anyone, human or demon, thought they were in the first place...
REVIEW: With a sarcastic con-man demon and a determined young woman who isn't above blurring some moral lines to get what she needs, author Neff establishes a strong starring duo in The Witchstone, a fast-paced melding of hellish humor and eldritch horror and urban fantasy that may sometimes wobble on its tightrope but manages to keep its footing from start to finish.
From the first pages, Laszlo establishes himself as a scoundrel, more than a touch selfish and spoiled but with enough humanizing flaws (and an amusing enough voice) to keep the reader generally on his side, if mostly in contrast to the demons surrounding him in the Society of Curse-Keepers - and who doesn't tend to root for the slacker underdog against the new boss set on "shaking up" a department that was functioning just fine before they came along? Maggie's chapters, on the other hand, tend to be more serious and grounded, rooted in the generational misery of being a Drakeford and stuck in a tiny spot of a town full of cruel people who, rather than having any pity for the afflicted family, treat them like monsters, only deigning to tolerate their presence when someone dies and they need a traditional "sin eater" (since the Drakefords are clearly already cursed, what's a few more sins to pile upon their souls?). At one time, she'd hoped to at least experience a little freedom before the curse kicked in, but then she saw the patch of red skin and little tentacles on her elbow and knew it was too late already. The arrival of Laszlo on the family's doorstep invites immediate skepticism, but Maggie realizes she has little choice but to trust the demon, even if so she can at least know that she tried to fight back. (It goes without saying that her kid brother Lump also is involved in the journey, managing not to be deadweight most of the time). Laszlo may enjoy "playing" with mortals, but being Maggie's guide and escort through the hidden world of demonic and supernatural beings of the world is the first time in ages he's had to interact with them in any truly meaningful, prolonged manner; despite himself, he grows a little fond of the Drakefords as they face mutual enemies and challenges, even as he plots his own agenda that runs counter to their goals on a fundamental level. Likewise, despite vowing not to lower her guard, Maggie finds herself growing fond of the demon despite his often-obnoxious ways and tendency to flee (or attempt to flee) in the face of danger.
Things clip along nicely for the most part, with action and humor and some body horror, though there are a few wobbles, as mentioned earlier. Neff pushes a little hard on the aspect of the Drakeford Curse that compels victims to reproduce before their monstrous mutations make mating with a human unlikely, to a point that came close to compelling a "DNF" (did not finish). (Risking a spoiler, that is a line that is nudged, but not actually crossed; if it had, this review would not be written, because I do not review DNF titles.) The climactic finale also feels drawn out. The wrap-up and epilogue managed to pull it back from where it nearly lost a half-star on those accounts, though, feeling like Neff intends to set up a series (or at least leave the door open for one). There's certainly enough character chemistry and enough hooks in the world he established to carry at least one more book. The whole put me in mind of some older demon-themed urban fantasies, such as Esther Friesner's Here Be Demons and its sequels, but in a good and updated way, not a dated way. In any event, I found The Witchstone unexpectedly enjoyable and interesting, and I'd certainly look at a second installment if it ever comes along.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Whatever For Hire (R. J. Blain) - My Review
You Slay Me (Katie MacAllister) - My Review
Discount Armageddon (Seanan McGuire) - My Review
Saturday, February 1, 2025
(Delayed) January Site Update
I had low hopes going into 2025, and already those seem impossibly optimistic in hindsight. (Going from "this is going to be terrible" into "do I really even want to bother surviving what's ahead?" territory, here, where there is literally not a thing in my world, my nation, and my life that is not being threatened and/or already irrevocably broken... and anyone offering glib platitudes or vague toxic-positivity admonitions about doing "something" will get a dictionary upside the skull.)
For now, at least, there are still books keeping me going, more or less.
Anyway, January's nine reviews have been archived and cross-linked on the main Brightdreamer Books site.
Enjoy, for the time being at least...
For now, at least, there are still books keeping me going, more or less.
Anyway, January's nine reviews have been archived and cross-linked on the main Brightdreamer Books site.
Enjoy, for the time being at least...
Friday, January 31, 2025
The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise (Dan Gemeinhart)
The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise
The Coyote Sunrise series, Book 1
Dan Gemeinhart
Henry Holt and Co.
Fiction, MG General Fiction
***** (Great)
DESCRIPTION: Once upon a time, the twelve-year-old girl Coyote Sunrise had another name. She lived in a house, not a converted yellow school bus lovingly named Yager. She called her father Dad, not Rodeo. And she had a mother and two sisters, and they all loved each other very, very much.
But that was five years ago, before the car accident that destroyed that peaceful home, that love-filled life. Now, she and "Rodeo" are forever on the move, wandering across the country and back again, and Coyote isn't even allowed to talk about the ones they lost, let alone ask to go back to the Washington town they once called home, not even to visit; she can't even call her own father "Dad", for the painful memories it brings. Normally, the girl is okay with her father's "no-go" rules. She loves him, after all, and there's a lot to enjoy about their rootless life. Then a phone call with her grandmother changes everything.
When Coyote learns that the town is planning to tear up the small park near her old home - the place where her mother and sisters and her buried a time capsule, just days before the crash - she becomes desperate to get back before the bulldozers come. She made a promise, after all, a promise to return and dig up that time capsule with her family, and if she's the only one left to do it, then that makes it all the more imperative that she keep that promise. But to Rodeo, the very thought of a return is paralyzing, among the few things to bring out anger in the otherwise easygoing man. He's spent five years running away from his grief and memories, and isn't about to turn around now. It will take all of Coyote's cunning and cleverness to figure out how to get Yager pointed back toward Washington State... that, and the help of some new friends she and Rodeo pick up along the road.
REVIEW: I'm going to start by admitting that the timing might well have an impact on my rating, here. Almost one week ago, I lost my father, though not under circumstances nearly as unexpected or traumatic as a car crash (he was in his mid-90s and had dementia and other health issues). So perhaps I was primed for a book that tackles the complexities of family, trauma, and grief with such a deft hand and interesting characters, one that treats both adults and children as fully realized people capable of having fully realized emotions and pains and hopes and dreams. Whatever the reason, this story struck some deep, resonant chords, with notes of beauty and humor along the way.
It starts with the girl Coyote displaying her larger-than-life personality and confidence as she befriends strangers at a gas station... but, then, strangers are about the only people she meets. Even though she and Rodeo sometimes give rides to people who need a lift (only after they meet Rodeo's approval and answer the three questions he puts to all would-be riders in a satisfactory manner), their rootless life does not lend itself to friends any more than it lends itself to pausing long enough for their grief to catch up with them... or, at least, catch up to Rodeo. Coyote feels that grief regardless of how high the numbers roll on Yager's odometer, and she starts the book feeling lonely enough to scheme to bring a kitten on board the school bus in defiance of Rodeo's no-pet rule. She needs something, anything, to call a companion, and there's something special about the little gray striped kitten from the moment she sets eyes on him, something that (inevitably) wins over Rodeo and everyone else they meet. That act of defiance, that admission that her father's chosen life isn't answering the girl's needs, is the first open crack in the dam the two have built against their shared pain and trauma, a crack that widens when Coyote talks to her grandmother and learns about the impending destruction of the corner park and, with it, the time capsule. In scheming and racing to save that little metal box, she's essentially racing to save her memories of her family, to be allowed to admit they existed, they lived, they loved - all things that Rodeo has designated "no-go" zones. But none of this implies intentional cruelty on her father's part. He's among the most open, trusting, friendly, and loving people she knows, and their relationship is as close as ever, which makes it all the more complicated for Coyote to wrestle with defying him, with admitting openly what he stubbornly refuses to see: that they both need to remember, need to grieve, need to stop running away. Thus, her need to scheme to get him to drive cross-country without him realizing until it's too late just where they're going. In this, she finds unexpected allies in a collection of passengers they pick up: a jazz musician hoping to reunite with a girlfriend, a mother and son escaping a bad situation who are counting on a relative who promises work in another state, and a girl turned out by parents over her orientation not matching their strict standards. Each of these characters is allowed to be rounded and distinct, with their own goals and fears and personalities. In the boy Salvador, Coyote finds the first true friend she's had since leaving home, a true companion and ally, even if they sometimes clash. Lester becomes almost an uncle, an adult to balance out Rodeo's well-meaning yet sometimes misguided intentions, who understands why she needs to do what she's doing even if her father can't cope with it. And in Val, she gets a surrogate big sister. This found family helps give Coyote the courage she needs even as the inevitable confrontation with Rodeo comes closer, though the road trip itself also has its share of adventures and obstacles, leading everyone to places (metaphoric and literal) that they need to go, even if they didn't realize it when they set out. Throughout are multiple moments of wonder and beauty and wild abandon, conversations full of surprisingly complex emotions and truths. The final parts feel slightly stretched, but by then Coyote had earned those moments, and the tumultuous emotions that come with them. It all comes together in a very satisfying way that manages to avoid excessive treacle and trite sentimentality, never once cheapening the characters or their journeys.
For hitting so many strong emotional notes, for feeling so authentic yet so full of pain and wonder and truth, and for generally being the book I needed when I needed it, The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise earns top marks. It would be nice to live in a world as generally good-hearted as the one Coyote lives in...
You Might Also Enjoy:
The One and Only Ivan (Katherine Applegate) - My Review
Walk Two Moons (Sharon Creech) - My Review
The Tiger Rising (Kate DiCamillo) - My Review
The Coyote Sunrise series, Book 1
Dan Gemeinhart
Henry Holt and Co.
Fiction, MG General Fiction
***** (Great)
DESCRIPTION: Once upon a time, the twelve-year-old girl Coyote Sunrise had another name. She lived in a house, not a converted yellow school bus lovingly named Yager. She called her father Dad, not Rodeo. And she had a mother and two sisters, and they all loved each other very, very much.
But that was five years ago, before the car accident that destroyed that peaceful home, that love-filled life. Now, she and "Rodeo" are forever on the move, wandering across the country and back again, and Coyote isn't even allowed to talk about the ones they lost, let alone ask to go back to the Washington town they once called home, not even to visit; she can't even call her own father "Dad", for the painful memories it brings. Normally, the girl is okay with her father's "no-go" rules. She loves him, after all, and there's a lot to enjoy about their rootless life. Then a phone call with her grandmother changes everything.
When Coyote learns that the town is planning to tear up the small park near her old home - the place where her mother and sisters and her buried a time capsule, just days before the crash - she becomes desperate to get back before the bulldozers come. She made a promise, after all, a promise to return and dig up that time capsule with her family, and if she's the only one left to do it, then that makes it all the more imperative that she keep that promise. But to Rodeo, the very thought of a return is paralyzing, among the few things to bring out anger in the otherwise easygoing man. He's spent five years running away from his grief and memories, and isn't about to turn around now. It will take all of Coyote's cunning and cleverness to figure out how to get Yager pointed back toward Washington State... that, and the help of some new friends she and Rodeo pick up along the road.
REVIEW: I'm going to start by admitting that the timing might well have an impact on my rating, here. Almost one week ago, I lost my father, though not under circumstances nearly as unexpected or traumatic as a car crash (he was in his mid-90s and had dementia and other health issues). So perhaps I was primed for a book that tackles the complexities of family, trauma, and grief with such a deft hand and interesting characters, one that treats both adults and children as fully realized people capable of having fully realized emotions and pains and hopes and dreams. Whatever the reason, this story struck some deep, resonant chords, with notes of beauty and humor along the way.
It starts with the girl Coyote displaying her larger-than-life personality and confidence as she befriends strangers at a gas station... but, then, strangers are about the only people she meets. Even though she and Rodeo sometimes give rides to people who need a lift (only after they meet Rodeo's approval and answer the three questions he puts to all would-be riders in a satisfactory manner), their rootless life does not lend itself to friends any more than it lends itself to pausing long enough for their grief to catch up with them... or, at least, catch up to Rodeo. Coyote feels that grief regardless of how high the numbers roll on Yager's odometer, and she starts the book feeling lonely enough to scheme to bring a kitten on board the school bus in defiance of Rodeo's no-pet rule. She needs something, anything, to call a companion, and there's something special about the little gray striped kitten from the moment she sets eyes on him, something that (inevitably) wins over Rodeo and everyone else they meet. That act of defiance, that admission that her father's chosen life isn't answering the girl's needs, is the first open crack in the dam the two have built against their shared pain and trauma, a crack that widens when Coyote talks to her grandmother and learns about the impending destruction of the corner park and, with it, the time capsule. In scheming and racing to save that little metal box, she's essentially racing to save her memories of her family, to be allowed to admit they existed, they lived, they loved - all things that Rodeo has designated "no-go" zones. But none of this implies intentional cruelty on her father's part. He's among the most open, trusting, friendly, and loving people she knows, and their relationship is as close as ever, which makes it all the more complicated for Coyote to wrestle with defying him, with admitting openly what he stubbornly refuses to see: that they both need to remember, need to grieve, need to stop running away. Thus, her need to scheme to get him to drive cross-country without him realizing until it's too late just where they're going. In this, she finds unexpected allies in a collection of passengers they pick up: a jazz musician hoping to reunite with a girlfriend, a mother and son escaping a bad situation who are counting on a relative who promises work in another state, and a girl turned out by parents over her orientation not matching their strict standards. Each of these characters is allowed to be rounded and distinct, with their own goals and fears and personalities. In the boy Salvador, Coyote finds the first true friend she's had since leaving home, a true companion and ally, even if they sometimes clash. Lester becomes almost an uncle, an adult to balance out Rodeo's well-meaning yet sometimes misguided intentions, who understands why she needs to do what she's doing even if her father can't cope with it. And in Val, she gets a surrogate big sister. This found family helps give Coyote the courage she needs even as the inevitable confrontation with Rodeo comes closer, though the road trip itself also has its share of adventures and obstacles, leading everyone to places (metaphoric and literal) that they need to go, even if they didn't realize it when they set out. Throughout are multiple moments of wonder and beauty and wild abandon, conversations full of surprisingly complex emotions and truths. The final parts feel slightly stretched, but by then Coyote had earned those moments, and the tumultuous emotions that come with them. It all comes together in a very satisfying way that manages to avoid excessive treacle and trite sentimentality, never once cheapening the characters or their journeys.
For hitting so many strong emotional notes, for feeling so authentic yet so full of pain and wonder and truth, and for generally being the book I needed when I needed it, The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise earns top marks. It would be nice to live in a world as generally good-hearted as the one Coyote lives in...
You Might Also Enjoy:
The One and Only Ivan (Katherine Applegate) - My Review
Walk Two Moons (Sharon Creech) - My Review
The Tiger Rising (Kate DiCamillo) - My Review
Thursday, January 30, 2025
Billy Budd (Herman Melville)
Billy Budd
Herman Melville
Dreamscape
Fiction, Literary Fiction
** (Bad)
DESCRIPTION: Young Billy Budd was a perfect sailor, uncommonly handsome and beloved by all who knew him... or nearly all. After being conscripted to a British warship, he inadvertently ends up on the wrong side of John Claggart, the man of arms and de facto enforcer of shipboard law, a one-sided conflict that inevitably must end in tragedy for all parties.
REVIEW: I try to expand my reading horizons on occasion, which includes tackling the odd classic. That said, clawing through the unabridged Moby Dick was one of the most trying reading efforts I've undertaken; despite some interesting parts and characters and some beautiful passages, I am firmly of the opinion that Melville would've benefited from a stern editor. (I'm well aware that this likely marks me as functionally illiterate. If this is an issue... well, it's my book review blog, and there are countless others.) So, given that impression, why did I try his work again? For one thing, this was a short enough work to slot into a slow work day. For another, as mentioned, I found some of Melville's writing intriguing, even if a little went a long, long way. And for a third, my library's Libby app inexplicably listed this as a "fantasy" title, not just a literary fiction title. If there was a fantasy involved in Billy Budd, it was not one that was clear to this reader.
The basic story covers, at rough guess, less than half or even a third of the total narrative, from Billy's conscription, his time aboard the Navy ship, and the tragedy of justice that concludes the affair. The rest, in Melville fashion, weaves around, under, over, and through this rather skeletal framework with asides, backstories, digressions, philosophical diversions, histories, and more. (I looked online, and discovered that Billy Budd was actually an interpretation of an unfinished work by Melville after his death, compiled by his widow and numerous editors from scraps of source material described more than once as "chaotic"... and I am very much not surprised, given how far over the metaphoric map it ranged before eventually, maybe, in a fashion getting back to the actual story it was ostensibly telling the reader.) Billy is described as nothing short of angelic in breeding and countenance (putting me in mind of a "Gary Stu" character, someone so inexplicably perfect and beloved and jealousy-invoking in bad people that he almost has to be an author self-insert), while his enemy is unfortunately "flawed" in countenance and soul, which may be the roots of the envy and resentment that blossoms into a dark scheme to knock young Budd off his pedestal of perfection. Throughout, there are threads of bloodlines and ancestry and class as being determinants of one's innate worth (particularly if those bloodlines involve good white English stock); though a foundling of unknown parentage (perhaps even literally celestial; there's a naïveté behind his oft-described handsome face that almost seems impossible for a flesh-and-blood human working the high seas), it's often noted how everyone just knows he must be of noble bloodlines, while Claggart, though not precisely ugly, always has some mark of an inherently flawed and low-born and perhaps even criminal nature that can never been concealed or expunged. The symbolism's about as subtle as a cannon blast, as the perfect yet tragically innocent Budd fails to comprehend the deceit and conniving of Claggart, unable to understand evil when it's looking him in the face, while Captain Vere finds himself torn between human empathy and immutable maritime laws (laws all the more important and harsh in the wake of recent revolts in the British Navy by ill-treated conscripts). It ends with yet more symbolism (and almost groveling praise for the better-than-this-world Billy Budd), and then three final chapters that do little but muddy the waters surrounding the fallout and legacy of the whole incident, none of which seem profound enough to justify building an entire novel around. At least Moby Dick ends with a cataclysmic tragedy, one that well explains why Ishmael felt compelled to tell others (like the reader) about it...
Long story short, this is another instance where I just could not connect with a piece of classic literature.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle (Avi) - My Review
Moby Dick (Herman Melville) - My Review
The Survivors of the Chancellor (Jules Verne) - My Review
Herman Melville
Dreamscape
Fiction, Literary Fiction
** (Bad)
DESCRIPTION: Young Billy Budd was a perfect sailor, uncommonly handsome and beloved by all who knew him... or nearly all. After being conscripted to a British warship, he inadvertently ends up on the wrong side of John Claggart, the man of arms and de facto enforcer of shipboard law, a one-sided conflict that inevitably must end in tragedy for all parties.
REVIEW: I try to expand my reading horizons on occasion, which includes tackling the odd classic. That said, clawing through the unabridged Moby Dick was one of the most trying reading efforts I've undertaken; despite some interesting parts and characters and some beautiful passages, I am firmly of the opinion that Melville would've benefited from a stern editor. (I'm well aware that this likely marks me as functionally illiterate. If this is an issue... well, it's my book review blog, and there are countless others.) So, given that impression, why did I try his work again? For one thing, this was a short enough work to slot into a slow work day. For another, as mentioned, I found some of Melville's writing intriguing, even if a little went a long, long way. And for a third, my library's Libby app inexplicably listed this as a "fantasy" title, not just a literary fiction title. If there was a fantasy involved in Billy Budd, it was not one that was clear to this reader.
The basic story covers, at rough guess, less than half or even a third of the total narrative, from Billy's conscription, his time aboard the Navy ship, and the tragedy of justice that concludes the affair. The rest, in Melville fashion, weaves around, under, over, and through this rather skeletal framework with asides, backstories, digressions, philosophical diversions, histories, and more. (I looked online, and discovered that Billy Budd was actually an interpretation of an unfinished work by Melville after his death, compiled by his widow and numerous editors from scraps of source material described more than once as "chaotic"... and I am very much not surprised, given how far over the metaphoric map it ranged before eventually, maybe, in a fashion getting back to the actual story it was ostensibly telling the reader.) Billy is described as nothing short of angelic in breeding and countenance (putting me in mind of a "Gary Stu" character, someone so inexplicably perfect and beloved and jealousy-invoking in bad people that he almost has to be an author self-insert), while his enemy is unfortunately "flawed" in countenance and soul, which may be the roots of the envy and resentment that blossoms into a dark scheme to knock young Budd off his pedestal of perfection. Throughout, there are threads of bloodlines and ancestry and class as being determinants of one's innate worth (particularly if those bloodlines involve good white English stock); though a foundling of unknown parentage (perhaps even literally celestial; there's a naïveté behind his oft-described handsome face that almost seems impossible for a flesh-and-blood human working the high seas), it's often noted how everyone just knows he must be of noble bloodlines, while Claggart, though not precisely ugly, always has some mark of an inherently flawed and low-born and perhaps even criminal nature that can never been concealed or expunged. The symbolism's about as subtle as a cannon blast, as the perfect yet tragically innocent Budd fails to comprehend the deceit and conniving of Claggart, unable to understand evil when it's looking him in the face, while Captain Vere finds himself torn between human empathy and immutable maritime laws (laws all the more important and harsh in the wake of recent revolts in the British Navy by ill-treated conscripts). It ends with yet more symbolism (and almost groveling praise for the better-than-this-world Billy Budd), and then three final chapters that do little but muddy the waters surrounding the fallout and legacy of the whole incident, none of which seem profound enough to justify building an entire novel around. At least Moby Dick ends with a cataclysmic tragedy, one that well explains why Ishmael felt compelled to tell others (like the reader) about it...
Long story short, this is another instance where I just could not connect with a piece of classic literature.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle (Avi) - My Review
Moby Dick (Herman Melville) - My Review
The Survivors of the Chancellor (Jules Verne) - My Review
Wednesday, January 29, 2025
Camp Damascus (Chuck Tingle)
Camp Damascus
Chuck Tingle
Tor Nightfire
Fiction, Fantasy/Horror
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Like many people in Neverton, Montana, Rose Darling is a proud, God-fearing disciple of the Kingdom of the Pine church, a once-humble sect that has risen to great renown through its outreach programs and megachurch. Like many of her peers, she has even helped fundraise for their special summer camp, Camp Damascus, a place where misguided youth are led, through the glory and the fear of Christ, to reject foul secular temptations and unnatural lusts and learn to "love right". Their notoriously high success rate has concerned Godly parents from around the world sending their kids and teens to the secluded campground, but just what happens there is never made clear; even those who have been there don't seem to have much to say about it. But asking questions implies an unhealthy curiosity, which is little more than a lack of faith. For all the many questions that Rose has about the world, even she would never think to ask about the miracles performed at Camp Damascus, not when those miracles save so many wayward souls.
The day she sees the stranger at the swimming hole - a ghastly, pale figure that nobody else seems to see - is the day everything changes... especially when, just after her best friend Isaiah tries to kiss her, Rose finds herself coughing up flies onto the family dinner table.
Rose has been having odd feelings for a while, fragments of memories that don't seem to fit with her orderly life and uncomfortable emotions around certain girls in her high school, but she tries to ignore them. Now, as more unexplained and terrifying things start happening around her, she slowly realizes that it's not just part of growing up, or all in her head, or ordinary temptations that plague the faithful. Something far darker and more dangerous is going on in Neverton, and all threads lead to the secrets hidden at Camp Damascus.
REVIEW: I first heard of Chuck Tingle a while ago, but the books he wrote didn't seem like my kind of thing. More recently, he seems to be moving into territory I find more interesting, so I figured this one was worth a shot when I found it available via Libby. Given my middling-to-low expectations going in, I found it surprisingly enjoyable, a dark tale of twisted faith and warped religion and the evil wrought by zealots thinking to forge love and God in their own images.
The sense of foreboding starts early on, as Rose struggles to fit in with her peers at the swimming hole and experiences her first vision of the pale, inhuman stranger in the woods. On the autism spectrum, her difficulty connecting to others is exacerbated by her fundamentalist upbringing; even in a churchgoing town, the children of the Kingdom of the Pines worshipers are a breed apart, complicit in their own isolation by a sense of unspoken moral superiority (though they themselves don't see it that way, just that other kids should embrace the love of Christ and reject corrupting secular influences). For Rose, scripture and the church also help ground her when she finds life or other teens confounding. When she later completely misreads her friend Isaiah's social cues, the reader already has a sense that it's more than just social awkwardness, given her visceral reaction to classmate Martina... but it's shortly thereafter, when she first coughs up a living fly, that both Rose and the reader realize just how terrifying the secrets beneath Neverton truly are - and the unusual reactions of her loving parents further show just how few people the young woman can trust to figure things out.
All along the way, she's told by her community and mentors and her own family to stop investigating, stop poking, stop indulging the sin of curiosity and obsession, but it's not in Rose's nature to let a question go, and once she starts picking at threads she has to follow where they lead, even if that direction runs counter to everything she's been taught to embrace. In the process, she learns just how her beliefs have been turned into blinders, how blind faith can be twisted by those with ulterior motives, and how much of what she was taught runs counter to the truth, even the truth within the very Bible she has essentially memorized. Does that mean her entire faith was misplaced? Not necessarily; she finds that the matter of belief, just like the matter of love, is far more complex and nuanced than she was raised to understand. She finds scant few allies and many enemies, and sometimes stumbles or backslides in her pursuit, but never gives up, especially not once the shape and scope of the evil before her becomes more evident, how many others have been hurt.
There are times when Tingle feels like he's hitting nails a little hard on their heads as he drives in certain points, but the palpable rage underneath the story is entirely justified... and all the more terrifying as one sees parallels in action in the real world, some of them being promoted to the national stage. Other parts seem to revel in gruesome imagery. On the whole, it's a solidly chilling story.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Between Two Fires (Christopher Buehlman) - My Review
We Shall Sing a Song into the Deep (Andrew Kelly Stewart) - My Review
Comfort Me With Apples (Catherynne M. Valente) - My Review
Chuck Tingle
Tor Nightfire
Fiction, Fantasy/Horror
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Like many people in Neverton, Montana, Rose Darling is a proud, God-fearing disciple of the Kingdom of the Pine church, a once-humble sect that has risen to great renown through its outreach programs and megachurch. Like many of her peers, she has even helped fundraise for their special summer camp, Camp Damascus, a place where misguided youth are led, through the glory and the fear of Christ, to reject foul secular temptations and unnatural lusts and learn to "love right". Their notoriously high success rate has concerned Godly parents from around the world sending their kids and teens to the secluded campground, but just what happens there is never made clear; even those who have been there don't seem to have much to say about it. But asking questions implies an unhealthy curiosity, which is little more than a lack of faith. For all the many questions that Rose has about the world, even she would never think to ask about the miracles performed at Camp Damascus, not when those miracles save so many wayward souls.
The day she sees the stranger at the swimming hole - a ghastly, pale figure that nobody else seems to see - is the day everything changes... especially when, just after her best friend Isaiah tries to kiss her, Rose finds herself coughing up flies onto the family dinner table.
Rose has been having odd feelings for a while, fragments of memories that don't seem to fit with her orderly life and uncomfortable emotions around certain girls in her high school, but she tries to ignore them. Now, as more unexplained and terrifying things start happening around her, she slowly realizes that it's not just part of growing up, or all in her head, or ordinary temptations that plague the faithful. Something far darker and more dangerous is going on in Neverton, and all threads lead to the secrets hidden at Camp Damascus.
REVIEW: I first heard of Chuck Tingle a while ago, but the books he wrote didn't seem like my kind of thing. More recently, he seems to be moving into territory I find more interesting, so I figured this one was worth a shot when I found it available via Libby. Given my middling-to-low expectations going in, I found it surprisingly enjoyable, a dark tale of twisted faith and warped religion and the evil wrought by zealots thinking to forge love and God in their own images.
The sense of foreboding starts early on, as Rose struggles to fit in with her peers at the swimming hole and experiences her first vision of the pale, inhuman stranger in the woods. On the autism spectrum, her difficulty connecting to others is exacerbated by her fundamentalist upbringing; even in a churchgoing town, the children of the Kingdom of the Pines worshipers are a breed apart, complicit in their own isolation by a sense of unspoken moral superiority (though they themselves don't see it that way, just that other kids should embrace the love of Christ and reject corrupting secular influences). For Rose, scripture and the church also help ground her when she finds life or other teens confounding. When she later completely misreads her friend Isaiah's social cues, the reader already has a sense that it's more than just social awkwardness, given her visceral reaction to classmate Martina... but it's shortly thereafter, when she first coughs up a living fly, that both Rose and the reader realize just how terrifying the secrets beneath Neverton truly are - and the unusual reactions of her loving parents further show just how few people the young woman can trust to figure things out.
All along the way, she's told by her community and mentors and her own family to stop investigating, stop poking, stop indulging the sin of curiosity and obsession, but it's not in Rose's nature to let a question go, and once she starts picking at threads she has to follow where they lead, even if that direction runs counter to everything she's been taught to embrace. In the process, she learns just how her beliefs have been turned into blinders, how blind faith can be twisted by those with ulterior motives, and how much of what she was taught runs counter to the truth, even the truth within the very Bible she has essentially memorized. Does that mean her entire faith was misplaced? Not necessarily; she finds that the matter of belief, just like the matter of love, is far more complex and nuanced than she was raised to understand. She finds scant few allies and many enemies, and sometimes stumbles or backslides in her pursuit, but never gives up, especially not once the shape and scope of the evil before her becomes more evident, how many others have been hurt.
There are times when Tingle feels like he's hitting nails a little hard on their heads as he drives in certain points, but the palpable rage underneath the story is entirely justified... and all the more terrifying as one sees parallels in action in the real world, some of them being promoted to the national stage. Other parts seem to revel in gruesome imagery. On the whole, it's a solidly chilling story.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Between Two Fires (Christopher Buehlman) - My Review
We Shall Sing a Song into the Deep (Andrew Kelly Stewart) - My Review
Comfort Me With Apples (Catherynne M. Valente) - My Review
Friday, January 17, 2025
The Scourge Between Stars (Ness Brown)
The Scourge Between Stars
Ness Brown
Tor Nightfire
Fiction, Horror/Sci-Fi
**+ (Bad/Okay)
DESCRIPTION: Generations ago, colonists left an exhausted Earth to establish a new home in the Proxima star system... and failed. Now, their descendants are coaxing the worn-out generation ships back to the cradle of humanity, though whether anyone will still be alive when the ships get there is anyone's guess. Food supplies are dwindling, equipment is aging beyond repair, citizens are growing discouraged and mutinous, and periodically they find themselves battered by "engagements", random explosive byproducts of what appears to be an interstellar war on a scale that makes the humans seem like insects. Over the years, communication between the ships in their ragtag flotilla has deteriorated, until the Calypso might as well be traversing the black alone. Perhaps that's why the ship's official captain has gone into hiding in his cabin, leaving his daughter, Jacklyn Albright, the acting commander of a vessel and crew on the edge of collapse.
And things are about to get worse.
When people and supplies start disappearing, Jacklyn at first thinks it might be faulty sensors, or maybe one of the more rebellious factions acting out. When she hears the ominous bangs and thumps in the walls, it might easily be the Calypso's aging conduits. But when she finds the dismembered body, she can't rationalize it any longer. Something very dangerous is aboard the Calypso, something that may not have originated on Earth.. and that "something" has decided humans are its new favorite prey...
REVIEW: A quick glance at the description likely brings to mind a popular sci-fi franchise or two, where an exhausted crew isolated in deep space has to cope with an entity that seems, against biological probability, to have evolved solely to stalk and consume bipedal mammalians from an entirely different star system. Though The Scourge Between Stars tries to dress it up with some interpersonal conflicts and a subplot about a scientist abusing an android with emotions, ultimately it doesn't bring too much new to a very familiar table.
Jacklyn is a middling at best commander, saddled by numerous personal problems and insecurities yet forced into the position because she's the captain's daughter and because, even in an emergency, nobody really puts much effort into actually trying to get the real captain out of his self-imposed exile - not even when an alien monster is known to be picking off people in isolated places. She has a sometimes-girlfriend on the bridge and a crew that's mostly loyal to her, though to be honest characterizations aren't generally that deep or memorable, mostly filling roles in an expected storyline. It takes far too long for Jacklyn to put two and two together and arrive at the obvious four of "something very bad is happening on this ship", and when she does things go as they almost always go in these stories: small groups with guns stalking dark corridors while shadowy things jump out at them (along with the requisite false starts). Some of these incidents do a decent job building tension, but there's a sameness that settles in, and a sense of stretching once the premise is clear. Other subplots - the mutiny, the breakdown of various vital systems on the ship, some personal frictions, and more - become story clutter once the invasion takes center stage, never developed enough to care about or resolve in a satisfactory manner. The climax and resolution feel forced, and the wrap-up feels far too convenient and neat given the state of the ship and crew after the incidents involved. There are also some logic holes and hiccups, and more than one instance where revelations are drawn out too long. I wound up dropping it below a flat Okay rating for a sense of irritation that settled in by the halfway point, and also because the fact that it felt compelled to shoehorn in a sexual abuse subplot involving an intentionally feminized android as a helpless victim really felt manipulative.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Retrograde (Peter Cawdron) - My Review
Beacon 23 (Hugh Howey) - My Review
Nightflyers (George R. R. Martin) - My Review
Ness Brown
Tor Nightfire
Fiction, Horror/Sci-Fi
**+ (Bad/Okay)
DESCRIPTION: Generations ago, colonists left an exhausted Earth to establish a new home in the Proxima star system... and failed. Now, their descendants are coaxing the worn-out generation ships back to the cradle of humanity, though whether anyone will still be alive when the ships get there is anyone's guess. Food supplies are dwindling, equipment is aging beyond repair, citizens are growing discouraged and mutinous, and periodically they find themselves battered by "engagements", random explosive byproducts of what appears to be an interstellar war on a scale that makes the humans seem like insects. Over the years, communication between the ships in their ragtag flotilla has deteriorated, until the Calypso might as well be traversing the black alone. Perhaps that's why the ship's official captain has gone into hiding in his cabin, leaving his daughter, Jacklyn Albright, the acting commander of a vessel and crew on the edge of collapse.
And things are about to get worse.
When people and supplies start disappearing, Jacklyn at first thinks it might be faulty sensors, or maybe one of the more rebellious factions acting out. When she hears the ominous bangs and thumps in the walls, it might easily be the Calypso's aging conduits. But when she finds the dismembered body, she can't rationalize it any longer. Something very dangerous is aboard the Calypso, something that may not have originated on Earth.. and that "something" has decided humans are its new favorite prey...
REVIEW: A quick glance at the description likely brings to mind a popular sci-fi franchise or two, where an exhausted crew isolated in deep space has to cope with an entity that seems, against biological probability, to have evolved solely to stalk and consume bipedal mammalians from an entirely different star system. Though The Scourge Between Stars tries to dress it up with some interpersonal conflicts and a subplot about a scientist abusing an android with emotions, ultimately it doesn't bring too much new to a very familiar table.
Jacklyn is a middling at best commander, saddled by numerous personal problems and insecurities yet forced into the position because she's the captain's daughter and because, even in an emergency, nobody really puts much effort into actually trying to get the real captain out of his self-imposed exile - not even when an alien monster is known to be picking off people in isolated places. She has a sometimes-girlfriend on the bridge and a crew that's mostly loyal to her, though to be honest characterizations aren't generally that deep or memorable, mostly filling roles in an expected storyline. It takes far too long for Jacklyn to put two and two together and arrive at the obvious four of "something very bad is happening on this ship", and when she does things go as they almost always go in these stories: small groups with guns stalking dark corridors while shadowy things jump out at them (along with the requisite false starts). Some of these incidents do a decent job building tension, but there's a sameness that settles in, and a sense of stretching once the premise is clear. Other subplots - the mutiny, the breakdown of various vital systems on the ship, some personal frictions, and more - become story clutter once the invasion takes center stage, never developed enough to care about or resolve in a satisfactory manner. The climax and resolution feel forced, and the wrap-up feels far too convenient and neat given the state of the ship and crew after the incidents involved. There are also some logic holes and hiccups, and more than one instance where revelations are drawn out too long. I wound up dropping it below a flat Okay rating for a sense of irritation that settled in by the halfway point, and also because the fact that it felt compelled to shoehorn in a sexual abuse subplot involving an intentionally feminized android as a helpless victim really felt manipulative.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Retrograde (Peter Cawdron) - My Review
Beacon 23 (Hugh Howey) - My Review
Nightflyers (George R. R. Martin) - My Review
Abeni's Song (P. Djeli Clark)
Abeni's Song
The Abeni's Song series, Book 1
P. Djèlí Clark
Starscape
Fiction, MG Fantasy
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: The twelfth harvest festival of young Abeni's life was supposed to be a great day - her last as a girl in the village, before starting the rites of womanhood. Instead, it became the worst day of her life. First, the wise old woman who lives deep in the forest turned up, the first time anyone could recall her setting foot among the huts, with a dire warning... just before dark clouds gather in the clear sky, and warrior women with flaming eyes and terrible swords attack. Only Abeni and the old woman remain, sole witnesses as the village burns, the adults are taken captive, and a wicked man in a goat horn mask pipes the children away with a terrible, beautiful song.
As deep as her grief runs, Abeni finds an even deeper well of anger and determination to see that the Witch King, he who sent the warriors and the Goat Man and destroyed her people, will pay. But before she can exact vengeance, she has to find her family and friends - and before she can even do that, Abeni discovers that she has much to learn about the world, about people, about the spirits of the land, about the temptations and dangers of magic, and most of all about herself.
REVIEW: I have yet to be disappointed by anything P. Djèlí Clark has written, and this middle-grade fantasy is no exception. Set in a fantastic Africa full of wild beauty and dark dangers and spirits of all shapes and sizes and dispositions, it presents some familiar elements but in pleasantly original ways.
Abeni is a girl eager to grow up and become like her strong, intelligent mother and aunts, even experiencing her first tingles of puppy love for a boy in her village; if she doesn't dream of a bigger future or larger world, it's because everything she needs or wants is right there in her happy forest village, so why would she even imagine another life? The arrival of the old woman, often rumored (in whispers) to be a witch, follows on the heels of a peculiar dream shared by the children of the village, an omen quickly followed by the devastating attack. Abeni tries her best to protect her loved ones, but is too weak, too young, and too overmatched by an enemy she does not understand; whisked away by the old woman (who is, of course, much more than she seems to be, though the term "witch" is scarcely adequate to describe her true nature), she stews in her grief and anger until it becomes a diamond-sharp determination within. But even when her new guardian agrees, finally, to help, Abeni finds she has much to learn and a long way to go, in more than one sense, and even her new mentor cannot protect her from every bump in the road; indeed, all too soon, Abeni finds herself without the protection she came to take for granted, forced to rely on her own incomplete training and some cryptic clues and warnings. She stumbles more than once, and not every obstacle can be easily surmounted, but she learns from her mistakes. In the nature of these sort of stories, she gathers companions in her journey, each with their own personalities, flaws, and strengths, to help her on her way, but she must ultimately earn her own victories. This being the first book in a series, there remain more challenges and adventures ahead before Abeni confronts the ultimate baddie, and she has much more room to grow by the end. It makes for an enjoyable adventure with wonders, perils, and multiple strong women and girls. I'll be watching my library for the next installment.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Children of Blood and Bone (Tomi Adeyemi) - My Review
Raybearer (Jordan Ifueko) - My Review
Akata Witch (Nnedi Okorafor) - My Review
The Abeni's Song series, Book 1
P. Djèlí Clark
Starscape
Fiction, MG Fantasy
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: The twelfth harvest festival of young Abeni's life was supposed to be a great day - her last as a girl in the village, before starting the rites of womanhood. Instead, it became the worst day of her life. First, the wise old woman who lives deep in the forest turned up, the first time anyone could recall her setting foot among the huts, with a dire warning... just before dark clouds gather in the clear sky, and warrior women with flaming eyes and terrible swords attack. Only Abeni and the old woman remain, sole witnesses as the village burns, the adults are taken captive, and a wicked man in a goat horn mask pipes the children away with a terrible, beautiful song.
As deep as her grief runs, Abeni finds an even deeper well of anger and determination to see that the Witch King, he who sent the warriors and the Goat Man and destroyed her people, will pay. But before she can exact vengeance, she has to find her family and friends - and before she can even do that, Abeni discovers that she has much to learn about the world, about people, about the spirits of the land, about the temptations and dangers of magic, and most of all about herself.
REVIEW: I have yet to be disappointed by anything P. Djèlí Clark has written, and this middle-grade fantasy is no exception. Set in a fantastic Africa full of wild beauty and dark dangers and spirits of all shapes and sizes and dispositions, it presents some familiar elements but in pleasantly original ways.
Abeni is a girl eager to grow up and become like her strong, intelligent mother and aunts, even experiencing her first tingles of puppy love for a boy in her village; if she doesn't dream of a bigger future or larger world, it's because everything she needs or wants is right there in her happy forest village, so why would she even imagine another life? The arrival of the old woman, often rumored (in whispers) to be a witch, follows on the heels of a peculiar dream shared by the children of the village, an omen quickly followed by the devastating attack. Abeni tries her best to protect her loved ones, but is too weak, too young, and too overmatched by an enemy she does not understand; whisked away by the old woman (who is, of course, much more than she seems to be, though the term "witch" is scarcely adequate to describe her true nature), she stews in her grief and anger until it becomes a diamond-sharp determination within. But even when her new guardian agrees, finally, to help, Abeni finds she has much to learn and a long way to go, in more than one sense, and even her new mentor cannot protect her from every bump in the road; indeed, all too soon, Abeni finds herself without the protection she came to take for granted, forced to rely on her own incomplete training and some cryptic clues and warnings. She stumbles more than once, and not every obstacle can be easily surmounted, but she learns from her mistakes. In the nature of these sort of stories, she gathers companions in her journey, each with their own personalities, flaws, and strengths, to help her on her way, but she must ultimately earn her own victories. This being the first book in a series, there remain more challenges and adventures ahead before Abeni confronts the ultimate baddie, and she has much more room to grow by the end. It makes for an enjoyable adventure with wonders, perils, and multiple strong women and girls. I'll be watching my library for the next installment.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Children of Blood and Bone (Tomi Adeyemi) - My Review
Raybearer (Jordan Ifueko) - My Review
Akata Witch (Nnedi Okorafor) - My Review
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)