Tag: fantasy

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Review

A Soul for Trouble

This book just didn’t quite know what genre it wanted to be. It was almost a romance novel, but the fantasy setting and storyline was a bit too well-developed for that. But it’s also not quite a fantasy novel, because there was a good bit more romance than you get from that. But hey, pushing the boundaries of genres is what makes things fun, so I’m not really complaining.1
So, down to the normal business of my book reviews: trying to explain the plot without actually spoiling anything important. The titular character, Trouble (her real name is Arden, but as literally everyone in the book will tell you, ‘Trouble’ is more accurate) is a Main Character. Not precisely the term she’d use for herself, but she’s a blonde-haired blue-eyed orphan girl living in a town of brown-haired brown-eyed Generic Background Characters. Then a crazy old guy shows up, followed by a Tall Dark and Handsome stranger. With a pet wolf. Trouble establishes herself as a Strong Independent Woman as well as a Nice Person, and gives the crazy old dude some food, since he’s just stumbled into the inn where she works and all. Part of a brief conversation later, he’s killed, and his dying breath is the titular Soul.
At which point I’ll turn down my sarcasm a bit, because it actually got interesting after that. The Soul isn’t the old guy’s soul – it’s the incorporeal Loku, a character best described as “I’m aware that Loki is in the public domain, but Disney owns Marvel now so I don’t want to risk a lawsuit.”2 He’s the local god of chaos, and about a “we refer to them as the Ancients” ago, he tried to end the world. The mages of the neighboring country3 worked with the rest of the gods to stop that, with the end result that Loku’s body was destroyed and his soul became an immortal people-possessing… green cloud? Dev, the Tall Dark and Handsome guy – actually an elf, we find out – from earlier was supposed to be protecting Crazy Old Guy, and is the capital-P Protector. Or is it Guardian? Whichever.
Of course, all this explaining doesn’t happen for a while – what actually happens after Old Guy gets a cursed dagger to the back is a rather cinematic fight scene – Trouble collapses, Dev grabs her, and then suddenly there’s zombies everywhere. At which point Dev, being entirely reasonable, burns the building down4 and runs the hell away. Because, y’know, fighting a necromancer is hard enough when you’re not carrying a collapsed pretty girl.
From there, it’s a fun little romp across this fantasy kingdom, spending more time on the character relationships than it does on the fighting. Which was kinda cool, actually – like I said, blending genres can be a good thing. I mean, yes, the amount of unresolved sexual tension in the book is ridiculous, and there’s a few scenes where I was like “either write the sex scene you clearly want to write or gracefully allude to it having already happened, this is getting ridiculous.” But language-wise there’s nothing that would shock, like, the average high-schooler.5
So yeah, pretty good book! As of my writing this, I think it’s free on Amazon, so go for it.

  1. Well, I’m complaining a little bit, but if I ever stop complaining you can reasonably assume that I’ve died. ↩
  2. Hey, I said I’d turn the sarcasm down a bit, not that I’d turn it off. ↩
  3. The one that isn’t stupid and weird about magic. ↩
  4. Technically, I think the wolf did it – he’s a Fire Wolf, with the ability to… burst into flames. And the super-imaginative name of “Cinder.” Dev, you are a 300-year-old elfin mage-knight. How are you still so unimaginative. ↩
  5. Don’t show any of it to a middle-schooler, though, if only because the sound of their scandalized giggling will make you want to punch something. ↩
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Review

The Vampire of Northanger

I almost didn’t wind up reviewing this one. Which, as per my weird set of rules about writing reviews, is a way of saying I almost didn’t wind up finishing this book.
I’d actually started writing a sort of review in my head, because Bryce Anderson is an author that I quite like – he wrote The Improbable Rise of Singularity Girl, a book which I loved, and we’re actually mutual followers on Twitter. So, at about 10% of the way through the book,1 when I was almost to the point of giving up on it, I was quite sad. “I wanted to like this book,” the post explaining my failure to read it would’ve begun.2 At that point, I had nothing really wrong with the book – it just wasn’t the sort of thing I enjoy reading. I was kept there by two things, foremost of which was the introduction to the book. Again, normally I don’t read introductions, but as I started to skim past it a few things caught my eye, and I read a random paragraph of the introduction, realized it wasn’t the sort of introduction I’m normally wary of, and went back to read the whole thing. It’s a hilarious piece of work: the ‘description of the writer’ bit makes mention of the fact that the introduction was written by someone who is paid “a handsome living” by the endowment of a chair at school that no longer exists. “As a public service, he can often be found on the current grounds of the former school, laying traps for feral students and attempting to educate whomever is ensnared. He assures us the process is entirely humane.”
The second thing keeping me there was, again, loyalty to a writer who I know to have proved themselves admirably in the past.

Fortunately for me, I didn’t have to write that “I have failed at reading this book” post, because the book picked up quite well from there – it was a bit of a long, slow start, but then, I enjoy everything Diana Wynne Jones has written, and her books have a plot diagram that looks like a wide sawtooth: a long, slow build to a beautiful crescendo, which takes place ten pages from the end of a 400-page book.
The Vampire of Northanger had a rather similar structure, I could say, and did the same sort of thing once past that initial 10% “I can barely go on” mark: I found myself unable to put down this book which I’d been barely able to hold up before. The exact turning point, I can demark quite easily: the introduction of Emily. He’s a lovely character, a dog made into a bit of an incompetent hellhound, and it was at this point that I realized the book wasn’t going to be just a Jane Austen novel with the backdrop slightly changed.3
And from there, the book was off. I’ve a phrase stuck in my head, which was planted there when a friend asked what I was reading, then set upon looking for reviews: “a delightful, violent romp through supernatural England.” That’s pretty accurate, if I do say so myself, and I wish I’d thought of it first, but alas.
(Here, I’ll point out how visibly my writing style has been impacted by spending so much time reading a book in the more Victorian style; the voice in my head is speaking with a rather snooty Oxford accent at the moment, and I can hear it sniff with disdain every time I try to use a modern colloquialism. Hopefully this fades soon.)

So, my final opinion on the book: a slow start, which I’ll ask the reader to power through, after which you discover a lovely adventure novel, with a good bit of mockery coming from the narrator, mostly directed at the kind-to-the-point-of-naïve4 protagonist. The other characters are delightful, once they get into the stride of the story, and perhaps my favorite bit of the whole thing was in the very end of the book when the protagonist finally figured out the blindingly obvious secret and basically sat down and said “well, I’m dumb.”
Seriously, it was quite a good book. Go have a read.

  1. Thank you Kindle, for telling me precisely how much of a book I’ve read ↩
  2. Like I said, normally I don’t acknowledge books that failed to hold my interest long enough for me to read them, but I felt I at least owed that much to Mr. Anderson. ↩
  3. To my readers who enjoy the writings of Jane Austen: I don’t mean to insult her, I’ve just come to terms with the fact that the style of her writings are not the sort of thing I enjoy. There are, I’m sure, a good amount of people who would love to read “a Jane Austen novel with the backdrop slightly changed.” This is not quite the book for you. ↩
  4. Yes, I’m aware that ‘naive’ and ‘naïve’ are just alternate spellings for the same word: nonetheless, I think the second looks better, and I just enjoy having excuses to type an umlaut, okay? ↩
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Review

Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 57

Not exactly a book, but still part of my read-everything-on-my-Kindle project. For this one, I’ll only be talking about the various works of fiction that were published in the magazine – I wouldn’t even know how to go about reviewing the bits of nonfiction, interviews and whatnot, that’re included in the magazine.
Since it’s a series of short stories, I’ll break it up into pieces.

And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead

All sorts of bad language included in this one, but a rather enjoyable read. Reminded me of Neuromancer with the cyberpunk aspect of the whole thing, as well as the overall sense of grittiness.

Buffalo

This one didn’t strike me as science fiction. At all. With H.G. Wells present in it, I was hoping for something along the lines of Warehouse 13.1 What I got was something that felt like it should’ve been part of the nonfiction section, filed under ‘depressing.’

Red Planet

Pretty good, and reminded me of the WWW trilogy by Robert J. Sawyer, though from the other side – the WWW books are pervaded by a sense of wonder at what’s possible, and a distinctive dint of the ‘blind people are broken’ ideology that pervades society on some level or another, whereas “Red Planet” focused on the benefits of being blind and why someone might choose to stay that way. Interesting.

Veil of Ignorance

Confusing and a bit hard to follow, but that was done on purpose. Definitely an interesting read, and done in something that reminded me of a space opera way, where the actual sci-fi aspects of things are glossed over entirely, accepted as normal.

Cerile and the Journeyer2

A sad little story, but an enjoyable one. Not a whole lot to say about it.

Things You Can Buy for a Penny

This one was interesting to read just because of the way that it was built in layers – pieces of story hiding behind one another. I quite enjoyed the overall aesthetic of it, a sort of folk tale with a light brush of horror, and definitely that genie-you-got-what-you-wished-for plot twist to each of the little pieces.

In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns

This was the novella included in the magazine, and I loved it. Futuristic murder-mystery aside, the setting for the whole story was a truly wonderful bit of speculative fiction. They took the current global warming crisis and ran with it, expanding biotechnology and the ever-spreading Internet of Things while highlighting the growing cost of traveling long distance and the energy scarcity that we’re creating for ourselves.
For being such a short story, there was certainly a lot of material in this one.
My final opinion is “this novella made the entire magazine worth the purchase.” If there had been nothing else of value in there,3 In the House of Aryaman would’ve made it entirely worth it.

  1. I wasn’t hoping for anything as awesome as Helena Wells, of course, but she’s rather hard to beat. ↩
  2. If you’re following along in the magazine, you’ll have noticed that I just skipped a couple things. You’d be right – I don’t write reviews of things I don’t finish reading, and I wasn’t able to make it through those two bits of fantasy. ↩
  3. And this was not the case, several of them were worthwhile reads, as I’ve mentioned above. ↩
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Review

War of the Fae, Book 1: The Changelings

I think this one was a ‘free on Amazon’ book that I picked up, and let me tell you, as a marketing effort, that worked. The book ends on a one-sentence plot-twist that acts as an incredibly effective cliffhanger, so props to the author for that.
As to the content, it’s a general fit in the young-adult-fantasy-adventure genre: kid runs away from home (though, admittedly, the reasoning for that is more ‘young adult’ than ‘young adult,’ a slight change that helped to hold my interest), gets involved in a weird situation, finds out magic is real, yadda yadda saves the day. There’s a bit of a ‘hunger games’ vibe to the weird situation, and the ‘magic’ bits are more hinted-at than outright-confirmed for a while.1
The book gets bonus points for a female protagonist, and since I’m now staring at the end-of-book about the author page and just now finding out that the author is a female2 it makes sense how well she was able to portray the female mind. As a dude, I am eternally doomed to be unable to understand the inner workings of the other gender, and I’ve come to terms with that.
On the other hand, it gets docked a few points for two issues: first, the occasional Mary Sue moments with the protagonist – there are three main male supporting characters, and between the three of them at least two are very clearly in love with her.3 More points were docked for the fact that the closest the book has to LGBTQ representation is comparing the motions of a vampire, actively killing someone, to “a gay teacher [the protagonist] had in tenth grade.” Look, I get that every Disney villain ever has been a hodgepodge of stereotypically-gay traits,4 but I’m still going to be disappointed when anyone else gives in to the trope.
Other than that, the only issue I had was a single recurring spelling error,5 and overall I enjoyed the book. It’s easily worth what I paid for it, and the fact that that was ‘nothing’ is how I’m going to justify buying the next book in the series.

  1. Although, being a total mythology-and-legends nerd I picked up on it earlier than the average reader could really be expected to. I have a mental filter for these sorts of things, so it doesn’t interfere with my enjoyment of a book too much. ↩
  2. I think the ‘read every book on my Kindle’ thing I’m doing is going by author-alphabetical order, but I’m not actually looking at the names, so… ↩
  3. I’m not docking many points for that, though, because she’s the only girl in the group for most of the story, and I have a low opinion of the average man. ↩
  4. Hades, anyone? ↩
  5. ‘Break’: to separate. ‘Brake’: to stop. I don’t think the word ‘break’ is used anywhere in the book, but ‘brake’ shows up multiple times, and it’s spelled wrong each time. C’mon. ↩