Tag: bookses precious

Review copy provided by Tor. Also, Max is someone I know and like from Fourth Street.

I have been waiting impatiently for this book ever since I heard it was about Elayne and Temoc. Basically that’s my review for those who have read the rest of this series: it really is, it’s about Elayne and Temoc and it has BARRICADES go read it BARRICADES I’m not kidding. (Some people will be there for the magically fighting skeletal dragon weapon. But for me, barricades. They are like Mrisnip.)

For those who have not read the rest of the series: this is the chronologically first book, and I think it would be a perfectly good place to start, although the resonances and implications would be quite different than if you started in publication order. (Which you should! They’re in print, they’re good, there’s no reason you shouldn’t read them in publication order. Now is the time! Collect ’em all! But if you get handed Last First Snow, do not hand it back because you haven’t read the others.) This is a world in which the gods were slain not very long ago (forty years as of this volume), a world in which soul stuff is traded on markets and regrown, a world in which magic can allow someone to live indefinitely as an animate skeleton when their body gives out.

This is also a world where people disagree about important things without any of them–even the animate skeleton–being hand-rubbingly evil. People want things that are quite reasonable things to want–safety for their families, safety for their city in a number of ways, preservation of valued things about their community, a relationship with the divine, crazy magic power–in ways that rub up against each other and strike sparks. People want things that do not match. Even people who like each other. Even people who love each other. This is not a book of easy choices, and it is so very much more fun thereby.

The relationship a community has with itself, with the outside, with its lost gods and its living leaders–there’s enough for a dozen books in here, but it never feels overcrowded. Definitely recommended. So very very glad to have this.

Please consider using our affiliate link to buy Last First Snow from Amazon.

Matt Christopher, Ice Magic. So…we have a Little Free Library in our next door neighbors’ yard, and Tim mentioned that it had a hockey fantasy in it. That is my wheelhouse! But, he continued, it was a Matt Christopher book. Well. No harm no foul, I could just take it and put it back when I was done. Lordy. LORDY. I had forgotten how TERRIBLE Matt Christopher books are. They are proof that short books are not necessarily lean, taut prose, because there are random things like the protagonist greeting a squirrel that are completely pointless. The magic plot evaporates on the last page for no reason except that the world must be normal or something. I love hockey fantasy, but…seriously, do not read this book.

Wesley Chu, Time Salvager. Discussed elsewhere.

E.K. Johnston, The Story of Owen, Dragon Slayer of Trondheim. LOVE THIS SO MUCH. It’s the story of a dragon slayer in modern small-town/rural Ontario. The alternate history bits are endearing and lovely. (Buddy Holly! The Red Wings logo! Non-American politician references!) The kids’ relationships with each other are so great and do not descend to love triangles and mean girls and other cliches. I cannot WAIT for the sequel SO GOOD SO GOOD SO GOOD. (Tim wishes to add that this book post is three days late because he had difficulty putting The Story of Owen down long enough to put the links in.)

Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe. You know how I often say of nonfiction that it does what it says on the tin? This does not in any way do what it says on the tin. It is about the North Atlantic and the Baltic at least as much as it is the North Sea, and it includes not one but at least five transformations of Europe. That said, as a book about interesting stuff that happened in the north of Europe, it’s golden, lovely, very much recommended. Somewhat random! But recommended.

Kazuki Sakuraba, Red Girls: The Legend of the Akakuchibas. This has won murder mystery awards in its original Japanese, but to me it is no more a murder mystery than a randomly selected novel with a romantic relationship is a genre romance. Instead it’s a personal account of young women’s culture and cultural change in (non-Tokyo) Japan. I have all sorts of thoughts about the translator’s choices, to the point where I am saving them for another post, but it’s basically Japanese magical realism about the above themes, so it’s not something you’re going to be reading and thinking, “Oh yes, another of these.”

Russell Shorto, Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City. Shorto really doesn’t understand the what happened with the English Parliament in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, and he doesn’t go into the Hansa or Beguines or several other really cool things like that. Also he starts with Amsterdam being knowably Amsterdam, so I am still missing a good source on early Frisians. (WHY WILL NO ONE GIVE ME SOLID FRISIANS WHY.) But it’s still a charming and interesting book, and he gives props to both Spinoza and Jonathan Israel, so good on him.

Dana Simpson, Unicorn on a Roll. Second volume of the series (the first was Phoebe and Her Unicorn), and I liked it better. Partly I think that Simpson has hit a stride, and partly I think it’s expectation management: telling me that something is the next Calvin and Hobbes is the best way to get me to say, “Huh, sez you!”, whereas I knew this was not, it’s its own thing, and it’s a fun and funny own thing to be. (Also my goddaughter Lillian lent me this book because she thought of me and thought I would like it. And because she is SO GROWN-UP OH WOW.)

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Guns of the Dawn. Stand-alone military fantasy novel. A few class-based things made me wince, but for the most part it was worth the leisurely pacing, an enjoyable read throughout–and interesting to see what Tchaikovsky does when he’s not doing a ten-book series.

Jen Williams, The Copper Promise. This book was a very weird mix of grimdark and lighthearted fantasy romp. It was in a very epic fantasy setting, with some gods still around and others dead. It’s more of an “if you like that sort of thing” than an “everyone, everyone! Go read!”, but I still found it quite readable.

Jacqueline Winspear, Birds of a Feather. Second Maisie Dobbs mystery. Lacking the flashback structure of the first, and I think this is all to the best. Gentle 1930s British setting. I’m glad the library has a bunch of these.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

This is a crapsack future full of anti-heroes and Tuckerizations.

So why did I finish it?

Well…uh…it was going really fast, and I wanted to see what happened. I actually really did want to see what happened. And whether the world was going to get less crapsack.

Seriously: this book has already gotten picked up by Hollywood (vague wording because I don’t know the details), and I can honestly say that I can see why. Reading it is incredibly like the experience of watching an action movie. Incredibly like. I see very few details that would even need to be changed to make it filmable–almost everything can just be read from the page and put directly on the screen, assuming sufficient special effects.

Chu walks a great line on the SF exposition in particular, between explanation that is necessary and that which will bog down the pace. The story he’s telling doesn’t depend a lot on the semblance of exact physics. It does depend on humans’ perceptions of that physics, and one of my favorite things about this book is the way that it undermines what the smartest minds of its setting think they have figured out. I also liked the way that time travel was not, as in some books, one future and a ton of past settings, but multiple iterations of future, each with its own problems and mistakes.

This will not be a book for everyone; the grimness of the grim future is awfully grim. But it executes quite well on what it’s aiming at, well enough that I stuck with it even though it’s not my usual sort of thing.

Please consider using our affiliate link to buy Time Salvager from Amazon.

Carlos Bueno, Lauren Ipsum. The problem with working in a very small sub-genre is that you get compared to the greater works in that sub-genre quite directly. In this case, Lauren Ipsum is doing computery versions of the things The Phantom Tollbooth and Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Alice in Wonderland did. That’s…pretty heady company. Sadly, I don’t think Lauren Ipsum lives up to it. It was mildly entertaining as an adult already familiar with a lot of the electronics and computer and math jokes in the text, but I’m pretty sure it would be boring, incomprehensible, or both if you didn’t already know the stuff. So…possibly for adult computer nerds feeling juvenile.

Julie Dillon, Imagined Realms Volume 2. Lovely images from the Kickstarter. Glad to have a chance to support Julie’s art.

Amanda Downum, Dreams of Shreds and Tatters. This is darker, both in terms of fantasy tropes and in terms of real-world referents, than I generally prefer my fiction, but I knew that going in since I critiqued it ages ago. It’s vivid without wallowing, fast-paced without being shallow…and I can’t take credit for any of that! Artists and literally reality-warping drugs and old friendships strained and rewrought. Good stuff.

John B. Duncan, The Origins of the Choson Dynasty. I suspect that this author needs a refresher course in the difference between an appendix and a chapter. I mean, the tables about what surnames of people from what locations had which bureaucratic positions were admirable. But: appendix. Really only recommended if you’re passionate about medieval Korea (inasmuch as “medieval” can apply to non-Europe locations).

Pat Murphy, The City, Not Long After. Reread. I had forgotten quite what a hot mess this book is. It’s trying to do things with the necessity of art in/after crisis, but it has a very narrow view of art as performed by full-time artists, and it’s completely uninformed/incoherent about warfare. The sentence that I went around marveling about was one in which the general’s troops–ad hoc troops conquering a post-apocalyptic very-near-future Northern California–were used to organized traditional warfare. Guh what? The farmers and scavengers they were trampling were forming ranks and marching? No. No they were not. Guerilla warfare is not something invented by artists to be elegant, it’s something invented by desperate people–usually poor people–in desperate circumstances. Also: northern California: irrigation. Water and sewer. Potable water is not optional. The only way this book really works is if it’s read as a stylized and garbled origin story from later, and even then it doesn’t work well.

Alistair Reynolds, Slow Bullets. Novella about soldiers on a spaceship and disasters therewith. Entirely readable but not one of his more outstanding works. Also fairly dark.

Jonathan Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. Too much boyfriend Jesuit, not enough roller derby China. Still interesting and worth reading, but so far this is my least favorite of his books because of the preponderance of European stuffs, which I feel is not Spence’s strength.

Genevieve Valentine, Persona. This is a near-future sponsorship diplomacy thriller done right. Very fast read. Enjoyed very much and would recommend, especially if you have high tolerance for thriller pacing.

Jo Walton, The Philosopher Kings. Discussed elsewhere.

G. Willow Wilson, Ms. Marvel: No Normal. Very much an introductory story for this superhero, but I had a good time with it despite it being substantially beginning without much in the way of middle or end. That’s the nature of the beast. Kamala Khan is good fun.

Review copy provided by Tor Books. Also, the author is a personal friend, and I read this previously in manuscript form–you’ll notice me in the acknowledgments. So that’s full disclosure for you.

This is a sequel that will fill in the backstory for you rather well in terms of practical details you might have forgotten since you read The Just City. In terms of emotional weight, I’d still recommend reading The Just City first, and it’s a bit difficult to figure out how to talk about The Philosopher Kings without at least some Just City spoilers.

Okay, so: most of the book is what’s gone on since the end of The Just City. One of the POVs (Maia) does exactly what she does in the first one: filling in the gaps between the “then” and the “now” of the rest of the book, telling the pieces of story that fit thematically and need to be given to the reader for context and yet are much more interesting as 1/6 book slightly out of order than they would be if it was all in a lump at the front. The Children of The Just City are now middle-aged with their children (The Young Ones) finding their places as golds, silvers, bronzes, or irons of their city–or more properly cities–doing their own thinking about justice, vengeance, consent, theology, and excellence.

One of my favorite parts of this book is the characters running into the rest of the world and having it be something of a shock, after all these years, that there are people who are not in any way attempting to recreate Plato’s Republic. It has come to seem utterly, indisputably normal to them. And…I think we can all come up with aspects of our unique lives that feel totally normal until we compare them with the outside world and remember. It’s done really well, the shock of the new coming from an unexpected direction and yet feeling entirely in-character.

And I love Arete. The new POV character for this book is fifteen, not even thought of when the titular Just City was founded, and her assumptions and worldview are so perfectly rendered. She is striving so hard and is still figuring out what, exactly, she’s striving for. My other new favorite is Neleus, fully human in a family where all of his siblings are part-god. The family dynamic there is just perfect, and it’s not something we see in fantasy much, although we should, because it logically fits.

I’ve been pleased that so many people have seen the first book as something to start a dialog, because that’s so very thematically appropriate, and I hope it’ll happen here too. Meanwhile since this is such an early review, I don’t want to do too much of it myself and spoil major elements that I’d like people to enjoy discovering as I did.

Please consider using our link to buy The Philosopher Kings from Amazon.

Balak, Sanlaville, and Vives, Last Man: The Royal Cup. Discussed elsewhere.

Blue Balliett, Chasing Vermeer. This is a children’s book with mysteries, puzzles, codes, and capers. I didn’t fall in love with it the way I did The Westing Game all those years ago, or even in strong like with it the way I did The Mysterious Benedict Society more recently, but it’s still a fun and worthwhile read, and I’m going to look for more of Blue Balliett’s stuff.

Colin Cotterill, Six and a Half Deadly Sins. The latest Dr. Siri book. It is a terrible, terrible pun, and there are a few places where Cotterill seems to feel that he is engaging in clever deception, and I…was less impressed. Also the very ending made me harumph a bit. But if you like the Dr. Siri books, this is another one, and worth reading if you enjoy them. Probably better to start earlier in the series, though.

Douglas Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era. If ever there was an argument for an introductory note, it was this book. Egerton quoted a lot of primary sources for the period, which tend to be white. And which tend to phoneticize African-American dialect in ways that I feel are distancing and patronizing. Among other things, the question of whose dialect is pronounced “as the standard spelling” is one that somehow never gets resolved in favor of people phoneticizing people with my accent–and yet I have a very distinct regional accent. Which I guarantee is not the same as the white Southern planters of the time who were presenting their own words as the unmarked state. And yet…if you’re quoting somebody, you quote what they said. That’s what quoting means. So you can’t really say that Plantation Owner So-and-So said that an African-American freedman said, “I’m going to see that day!”, because that may have been what the freedman said, but it is not what the plantation owner said he said. Sigh. So: author’s note sorely, sorely needed. Other than that, I felt that Egerton got caught up in which 19th century personalities he really enjoyed and felt people should know about…regardless of whether they were really relevant to the Reconstruction. Robert Gould Shaw, for example, died in 1863; nor was he such an extensive thinker that he could be said to be a major influence on policy for the Reconstruction. He was definitely an important Civil War-era American, but…this book was about the Reconstruction. So the lengthy digression about Shaw seemed like not the best use of space, not the best organization. Nor was he the only such figure.

Dan Jurafsky, The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu. Light, entertaining, not earth-shaking if you’ve read/thought about this before. Fast read, some good tidbits.

Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman. I really like Lepore’s work in general, but in this case I felt she missed an opportunity to actually talk about Wonder Woman and possibly female superheroes in general in much more depth. She was more concerned with the family life of Wonder Woman’s creator, sometimes exoticizing it weirdly even in the places it was utterly usual.

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven. In some ways I’m sorry I saw the play “Mr. Burns” before reading this book, because almost everything it’s doing was done better in “Mr. Burns,” which did some other things as well. The prose is quite readable, and although the worldbuilding has some points of nonsense in service to creating the emotional situation Mandel wants to write about, there are fewer of those than in the average post-apocalyptic book, and the emotional situation is then actually well-portrayed. There’s a lot of pre-apocalypse, basically our world stuff about the characters, how they got to that point, which is fine, readable, but in such a short novel it means that she’s not actually doing very much that’s interesting with the motivations for the traveling theater and its players, nor with how that group evolves. Which absence is particularly striking when you’ve just seen “Mr. Burns.” The thing is…”Mr. Burns” is a high bar to clear. It made me weep in more than one spot. Station Eleven was a book I read through to the end, but while it took “survival is insufficient” as a tagline, it didn’t really go anywhere interesting with that tagline. And this is one of the places where good worldbuilding actually would have helped: a sense of how the characters ate, just literally how they ate–just to take one example–might have helped with the sense of what they were giving up to get past mere survival, and how.

Cherie Priest, I Am Princess X. A YA thriller about girls who write comics. Incredibly fast read, generally a good time. Pretty standard plot, but mixing in the elements of the comic made it stand out in a fun way.

Marguerite Reed, Archangel. Science fiction with varying levels of engineered humans interacting with each other (and with alien fauna, hurray!) with varying levels of trust and hostility. Fun read with a strong love story component–for me the love story is not a strong plus or minus, but I know some of you find it to be a strong positive, so I thought I’d say. There is also a really well-drawn depiction of a toddler/parent relationship.

Charles Slack, Liberty’s First Crisis: Adams, Jefferson, and the Misfits Who Saved Free Speech. About the Sedition Act, and about the newspaper writers, printers, and owners who had to deal with it. Not very long, not very much on Adams and Jefferson, but at least moderately interesting. Definitely worth reading if you have an interest in the early parts of the American experiment. At times I roll my eyes when historians seem to be acting like historical people didn’t have a grasp on some particular principle when it turns out modern people aren’t so great at it either. In this case, “free speech includes people whose speech you dislike” was the bit that was hard “back then,” sigh.

Jonathan Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. I’m really glad this is not the first Spence I’ve read, because it is “too much Jesuit, not enough China,” and it’s nice to know that that’s not generally a problem he has. Some of the stuff about how the missionaries decided to present Christianity in a Chinese context is pretty interesting, but I generally prefer his other books.

Arthur Tourtellot, Life’s Picture History of World War II. Grandpa’s. This is from 1950, so the image reproduction standard is very low, and the standard for what kinds of racism are allowed in the text are also quite low. The Japanese are more often referred to by their most common English-language slur than by their full nationality. This is very much a book where the war is still fresh for the people compiling it, in more ways than one.

Ursula Vernon, Castle Hangnail. A romp through wicked witchery, turning things into dragons, and the capabilities of hypochondriac goldfish.

Dan Wells, The Devil’s Only Friend. Discussed elsewhere.

Patricia C. Wrede and Pamela Dean, Points of Departure. Disclosure: I read this in manuscript because Pat is in my writing group. It’s a set of stories that fit very well together, most of which were originally published in the Liavek collections back in the day. You don’t have to have read any of them for these stories to work well and make sense, though–the collection is a lovely introduction to Liavek, and to these two writers’ work. Highly recommended.

Review copy provided by First Second Books.

The first volume of this series came out earlier this year, and I reviewed it. I basically described it as Tintin Goes to a Tournament, Manga Style, and as an installation rather than a complete story.

The second volume is like that but with wayyyy more gratuitous sexism. So…if that’s what you’re looking for…here it is? I am not really interested in further volumes, after this one. Left a bad taste in my mouth.

This is apparently not my week for reviews and the awkwardness of the boilerplate text at the end of reviews. So, in case it was unclear, I do not recommend this book. If, however, simplistic storyline plus loads of gratuitous sexism is your thing, or if you’re looking to do research on this type of graphic novel….

Please consider using our link to buy The Royal Cup from Amazon.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

Teen sociopath and demon-killer John Wayne Cleaver is back. Now–more sociopathic and more demon-killing! Um.

In the first trilogy, John was firmly embedded in his loving family. Wells seemed to wibble considerably about whether John was actually a sociopath or just an Isolated Boy Who Needs Wuv. This latest entry in the series leaves both of those grounding elements behind and instead gives us an FBI-sponsored team of (of course) misfits hunting demons and the inner thoughts John is stifling about hurting dogs and starting fires. His “rules” are only mostly in place, but this seems to be a source of angst rather than genuine concern.

The FBI-sponsored team is a combination of terminally bland and thoroughly unlikeable–and getting them through John’s first-person viewpoint does not help. The only person John likes at all for most of this book is someone who was damaged to the point of non-functionality in the previous series, so most of his interactions with people are in the charming land where sociopathy and teen disaffection meet.

The demons–the Gifted, the Cursed, the Withered, whatever–proliferate in this book, and while Wells makes some effort to differentiate them personally, this is only mildly successful. The initial trilogy had its problems, but it felt reasonably complete. Trying to go on with John Wayne Cleaver past that arc is really not working for me.

This is where boilerplate gets awkward, but hey: if you’re still thinking of buying this book….

Please consider using our Amazon link to buy The Devil’s Only Friend.

Taner Akcam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. Akcam is a Turkish historian who is confronting the Armenian genocide head-on, and from what I can tell he is fairly rare in that. He is doing it in a fairly dry way, examining all sorts of documentation and refuting opposition arguments piece by piece, so if you wanted to know what it was like to be Armenian in this period, this is not the book for you. But that kind of argument can be extremely important to have in meticulous detail.

Jack Berry, West African Folktales. Collected from various sources with more attention to folklore as a field of study than as storytelling, so there’s somewhat repetitive variation. However, sometimes that’s useful to see what’s essential in the culture you’re reading about as compared to your own home culture.

John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century. A giant doorstop of a book, focusing on various men and women who influenced popular and high culture in England in the 18th century. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, go for it, but it was not transcendent enough to recommend more broadly.

Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower. Reread. Vivid post-apocalyptic fiction. Shorter and left more open than I remembered, so I’m glad there’s a sequel, but utterly engrossing while I was reading it.

C.J. Cherryh, Inheritor. Reread. Jase Graham whines and throws fits. Too many HOOMANS. I am deeply glad to know that there is better stuff coming in this series (AND FEWER HOOMANS), because Bren and Jase grating on each other is realistic and well-done and ANNOYING.

Diane Duane, A Wizard Abroad. Reread. My least-favorite of the Young Wizards books due to a fairly genericized Ireland and an equally generic-feeling smoochy subplot. Again: I’m glad to know there is better yet to come.

Melissa Grey, The Girl at Midnight. Discussed elsewhere.

Gwyneth Jones, Bold as Love. Reread. The thing I like about this book is that its heart is about people taking care of each other. Some of the stuff they do to take care of each other is not at all my mode, but for me that’s what makes the whole thing worthwhile. Not just the central triumvirate, but also the side characters, the way people are and aren’t there for each other in serious crises. It adds to the small-scale bits of futurism I like so well. Despite the horrific abuse early on in the book, despite the awful things some people do to each other and the compromises they make, the warmth of this just made me happy all over again.