Tag: fiction

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Review

“The Alchemist”

Paolo Bacigalupi

A sequel to The Executioness, and one that answered some of the questions I wondered about in that one! (If it seems convenient that I read them in this order, it’s because I read the jacket and decided to start with The Executioness so that I could end on the, presumably, happier note of someone figuring this out.)

Because of course bramble, even magical bramble, can’t be the end state. It’s too complex; entropy always wins in the end. And here, someone figured out the proper way to burn it so that it truly dies.

Unfortunately for me, that happened far too early in the story for it to be a happy ending just like that. Looking at how many pages you have left is a great way to stress yourself out about a book.1 Still, figuring out just what would go wrong, and how the protagonist would get out of it, made this one more of a fun read than the first. Check it out.2

As a fun follow-on, after I went to post this review: I have, in fact, read this before, and even posted a review here! It’s been long enough that I had no memory of that, so I’m posting a new one as well. I suppose you can compare Past Grey’s thoughts, if you’d like.

  1. I’ve got another one I’m working on that I’ve had to take a break from for a month or so, because everything is going great for the protagonist… and I’m just barely halfway through. Something is about to go horribly wrong. ↩
  2. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
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Review

“The Executioness”

Tobias S. Buckell

This is one of those stories where the worldbuilding is executed incredibly well, and it leaves me with so many interesting questions. The short version: magic exists! But using it generates bramble—a plant that you apparently can’t kill, and whose thorns, in a very fairy tale fashion, make you fall asleep. I, of course, immediately start wondering about the sort of ecosystem this implies—because, given something like that, surely something has evolved a way to eat it, right?1

The story itself is… not fun, really, but an interesting read, at least. Worth giving it a go, as it was a pretty quick one.2

  1. Or, also a fun concept, maybe not yet! Which does imply that the combination of magic and bramble is, on an evolutionary timescale, pretty recent. And that puts me back into my common thought “how can I explain this magic system as actually being some kind of advanced technology from right before the sci-fi civilization collapsed back to these dark ages?” ↩
  2. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
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Review

“First Test”

Tamora Pierce; graphic novel adaptation by Devin Grayson and Becca Farrow

I somehow missed that this was going to be a thing until the day before it was released. It took me something like ten seconds between finding out it was up for preorder and actually putting in the preorder; I consider it a testament to my willpower that I made it days after it was delivered before I finally let it jump the queue and be my next thing to read.

Keladry of Mindelan is my comfort reading. The visual treatment here brought me so much joy; it’s quicker to read than the original novel is, and I suspect I’m going to wind up rereading it quite often as a result. Sitting down to reread the Protector of the Small quartet is an investment, it’s what I’m doing with my reading time for a while. This, I can get through in something like an hour.

There’s a couple places where I could feel the edits, but for the most part, everything felt natural; sure, the story was abridged some, but all of it made sense.1

Two thoughts on this visual treatment, specific to that: my immediate thought upon seeing Neal was “he looks like Sokka!” and I sorta held on to that feeling throughout.2

And, even more so in this visual treatment where the words stand alone more, one of my favorite quotes jumped out at me. I was glad it made it in:

The short sword is the sword of law. Without it, we are only animals. The long sword is the sword of duty. It is the terrible sword, the killing sword.

It should surprise precisely nobody that I’m going to recommend this book. I grabbed the paperback—I think I already knew that this was going to be an oft-reread comfort book for me, and wanted the comfortable feel of a paperback to match that. Please, vote with your wallet; get them to do the rest of the series, too.3 I really want to see a baby griffin. And, weirdly, one of the killing machines.

  1. Well, okay, the fact that the Gift was shown (only twice) and was the same vague sparkles each time instead of being the color of each person’s magic, that bugged me a bit. ↩
  2. Hakuin Seastone also sorta reminded me of Zuko, although I think he’s a bit more Live Action TV Series Zuko than Animated Series Zuko. ↩
  3. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Prodigals”

Alan Dean Foster

This was a fun little romp of a book. It starts as a first contact scenario, a nice hectic experience for everyone involved as the various contacted governments scramble to pull together contact teams. And then it promptly goes off the rails for them, as nobody’s expectations about what First Contact will actually look like have anything to do with what happens.1

There’s some fun twists and turns in the book, and I quite enjoyed it. Towards the end it went a little funny, but I think… reasonably stuck the landing. Check it out.2

  1. And I am, frankly, delighted that the book managed to come up with a coherent reason for why this first contact was completely nonsensical in a way that most First Contact stories completely fail at. They’re from space. Do you know how much stuff there is out there? Why would an advanced race bother landing on a planet to mine for resources? ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Embers”

Vathara

I really enjoy the genre of “alternate history” — the idea of taking one moment in time and twisting it so that something went differently, and then rolling everything forward to see how much variation we’d get, it’s just so very fun. It’s the concept of the Butterfly Effect, applied.

Embers feels like… not the opposite, but the inverse of that, somehow. It’s taking the way things are and attempting to roll history back to see what some of the big moments were that created this state of affairs. And it gets to ask some really interesting questions as it does so.

Take as a given that, 100 years before Avatar: the Last Airbender really kicks into action, the Fire Nation committed genocide. They killed every last air nomad save, importantly, one. The show tends to paint this as a single event, a single day in which all four air temples were targeted in a coordinated attack, Sozin’s comet making an overwhelming strike possible, but do pay attention to the fact that they aren’t the “air nation”, they are the air nomads. They wouldn’t all have been in the temples; there would’ve been many nomads out being nomadic, and the Fire Nation had to hunt them down too.

This is, obviously, horrible. Genocide is one of the definitive evils, and the Fire Nation did it more effectively than any historical genocide has managed.1 But remember one part of those historical genocides: they weren’t immediate. Hitler didn’t wake up one morning and declare by executive fiat that it was time to kill every Jewish person on the planet… he, and others, spent years building up hatred against them.2 Painting them as the villains, as sub-human, as an insidious evil that was out to destroy the world. One evil dictator does not a genocide make. Humans are, at their base level, not that easily controlled. World War II was full of tales of people who did their little bit to help, who saved one or two people.

And now, ask yourself: how, exactly, did the Fire Lord convince his people that the Air Nomads had to die? How did he make them hate the Air Nomads, so much that every soldier sent into an air temple was willing to fight and die to eradicate an entire people?

Embers is a fascinating read, that goes deep into these sorts of questions. What are the cultural differences between the nations? How was one Avatar expected to solve all the problems of the world, given how dang big a place the world is? How can you put the world back in order after a century of oppressive genocide… without letting the vengeful Earth Kingdom and Water Tribes turn around and start slaughtering their way through the Fire Nation? All sorts of fun questions. With fun bonuses in the form of the end-of-chapter notes, where Vathara goes through and explains some of their thinking in what’s going on, the historical concepts driving it, all that sort of stuff.3 I highly recommend it, and it is, delightfully, free to read.

  1. Although, that concept is something that Vathara argues against, as well, over the course of the story. ↩
  2. Frankly, “years” is an understatement; antisemitism has centuries, millenia at this point, of history. Look up the history of pogroms. ↩
  3. The use of the chapter-end-notes in transformative works is such an interesting piece of meta-material in this form of writing. It’s almost like the footnotes of David Foster Wallace or Terry Pratchett, but can set aside the fourth wall entirely and speak directly to individual readers, if they were there and commenting as the piece was being written. Someone get a sociologist over here to look into this. ↩
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Review

“Year of the Griffin”

Diana Wynne Jones

This is one of those books that I’ve read over and over, and picking it up again feels like coming home. It may well be the first of Jones’ works I read; I know that I read it before I did Dark Lord of Derkholm, despite it being the sequel.1 I think this may even predate Terry Pratchett in my reading history. Which is to say, I’ve been reading this book since well before I was in college myself. This was, I think, the first time I’ve read it since college, though, and it sure felt strange to be reading it from the other side of that divide. Two different kinds of nostalgia, all at once.

That’s really what the book is: freshman year at Wizard College. The overall setting is precisely as much a hodgepodge of Vague Fantasy Novel Setting as it was in Dark Lord, and the focus on this one little part of it does nothing to change that. It does make a delightful expansion of the concept, though, as well as that very British lampooning of higher education.

This has that categorical Jones book thing where at the beginning I don’t feel particularly invested, and there’s no individual moment where it really latches on… but suddenly I look up, and I’m 2/3 of the way through the entire thing, and desperately want to finish it at the cost of whatever other obligations I may have had for the day. She was really a master of that sort of slow build.

I think that’s particularly effective in this book, as it has a whole lot of different threads going on. It’s an ensemble piece; there isn’t one protagonist, there’s the whole handful of theme, and each of them has a full-fledged story of their own. You could draw out a Hero’s Journey chart or something for each individual character, and it’d work just as well—but the way they all interleave together, and support one another, is really what makes it. It’s a book about friendship, and growing up. Hell, it is a key plot point that they have a group therapy session at one point; that is, quite possibly, the high point of the conflict in the book. It’s not an action-adventure, it’s not particularly a romance, it’s… college.

I adore this book. You might want to start with Dark Lord of Derkholm, as it provides more context, but I can confidently state that you can do just as well the other way around. Give it a go.2

  1. And oh, would you look at that, I also haven’t done a review here of Dark Lord of Derkholm, so that’s something I may have to do sometime, as it’s also a wonderful read. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Doctor Alien”

Rajnar Vajra

I’m really starting to like this ‘small, episodic’ format—it makes it easy to get into things quickly, and also provides clear points at which you can notice that you have once again stayed up too late reading and need to go to bed so you can function tomorrow.

This sorta reminded me of reading, like, an old Sherlock Holmes thing. Or, maybe, Elementary, rather than classic Sherlock Holmes, because of that episodic (and modernized!) vibe. Each one has a nice amount of mystery going on, that feeling that you’re racing the protagonist to figure out what’s really going on. And done in that very satisfying way, too; in the first story, I figured out Patient #1 almost immediately, and felt quite happy when my suspicion was eventually confirmed.1

The introductory material felt a bit overly-congratulatory, but I found myself agreeing with it eventually. Vajra did a really great job of creating interesting aliens—not only is there a very impressive amount of variety in the physical appearances of the aliens, but there’s also some fun cultural differences on display as well. That latter aspect feels like it’s a rich vein for exploring that hasn’t been nearly thoroughly explored enough, but the former, this may be one of the best explorations of this “aliens can be weird” thing I’ve ever seen.2 The aliens are, truly, weird; even with the visual descriptions, there’s a couple that my brain just gave up on trying to visualize, and I wound up as that parable about blind men arguing about what an elephant is.

The third story did a great job of tying things together, and felt like a reasonable close to the series. There’s definitely room for more, if desired, but in these three pieces we’ve got a complete arc, and I was quite satisfied with the ending. Plus, it just had a great sense of cosmic wonder to it, which is a great note to end on. Hopeful science fiction! This is what I want to read.

Overall, I really enjoyed this; it’s a fairly quick read, and manages to hold onto that ”god bless you, old sci fi, you had such high hopes for us”3 kind of vibe while also, like, knowing that cell phones exist. Striking a great balance. Give it a read.4

  1. Spoiler:“She’s a baby!” I muttered to myself, over and over, as I read that one. ↩
  2. The other contender I can think of is Robert L. Forward’s Rocheworld series — between the flouwen and the icerugs, he’s got some really interesting alien lifeforms as well. ↩
  3. Screenshot of a tumblr post by user “ghost drama” that reads “i love old science fiction because it’s all like “IT’S THE DISTANT YEAR TWO THOUSAND AND THREE AND MAN IS EXPLORING THE DEEP CORNERS OF THE UNIVERSE” like god bless you old sci-fi you had such high hopes for us"↩
  4. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Ocean of Storms”

Christopher Mari, Jeremy K. Brown

Picked at random out of my library of science fiction ebooks, and came up with a good one! The general vibe I have of this book is that, while it could use one more pass from a good editor, it’s got solid bones; the plot tracks fairly well, and feels engaging all the way through, and I was delighted to find that I couldn’t predict the ending ahead of time.

My notes to the authors, should they ever read them:

  • There’s a little of “as you know, Bob” at times—the explanation of the difference between a fission and fusion reactor felt a bit silly, given that it was happening on the moon. By the time you’re there, you’ve probably picked up enough background knowledge about science in general to get the concept.
  • Not every story needs a romance arc!1 The first time around I actually, for the benefit of nobody but myself, pantomimed gagging. It felt forced, and also highlighted how thoroughly male-dominated the cast is.2
  • The pacing feels a bit odd towards the end—about 50 pages from the end, I started wondering if this was going to end on a cliffhanger to set up the next book.3

Editing notes aside, however, I really enjoyed it! I should come up with some kind of pseudo-award to give out to books that successfully trick me into staying up late reading; this would be a winner. And really, what higher praise can I give? Give it a read.4

  1. Well, if you’re writing a romance novel, maybe it does — although, come to think of it, a romance novel without a love story does sound like a pretty interesting exploration of genre. ↩
  2. The president being a woman is a nice touch, but a) I can’t recall her actually having a name other than “the President”, and b) I don’t think she ever talks to another woman, so, there goes the Bechdel test. ↩
  3. Spoiler: It didn’t, the book actually tied things together reasonably well; while it feels like there’s still room for more, it’s less “second movie” and more “spin-off TV series” territory. ↩
  4. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Quantum”

Patricia Cornwell

This was a slow burn of a book; I nearly gave up on it multiple times at the beginning, but I wound up totally caught up in it, and very glad I’d stuck through. The writing style takes a lot of getting used to—it feels very stream-of-consciousness, but in a specifically neuroatypical way. Neuroatypical, and very stressed out, which fits very well with the actual events in the book. Especially given, as I realized something like 230 pages in, the entire contents of the book, a whole lot of events, took place in a single day. I, too, would be feeling fragmented and jittery if my day started with a morning presentation to an audience that included a surprise four-star general and ended after midnight with being part of Mission Control for a particularly dangerous spacewalk!

There’s also the core aspect of crime thriller to the book, and I also found that quite engaging once it actually started up. This book has my favorite bit of foreshadowing I’ve seen in quite a while, and I spent a large amount of my reading time repeating that one line to myself, waiting for the protagonist to figure it out. Because, like I said, she’s having a very long day; I am comfortably at home, doing some leisurely reading, but she is cramming two weeks’ worth of events into one 30-hour day. It makes sense that she’d miss it.1 It was so very satisfying to see that one line come back to help things click together.

My only complaint with this book is that it feels like it ended too early. There’s a sequel, of course, which I suspect I’m going to pick up at some point, but the amount of threads remaining doesn’t feel quite right for that. I don’t feel enough closure at the end of this book for it to be complete, but I also don’t feel enough open questions that I think there’s room for an entire second book. It’s the “cliffhanger at the end of the season” thing, really, it feels contrived to get you to come back next time. The story itself doesn’t want another book, it just wants another 100 pages.

Still, that’s not a terrible complaint to have, and I did very much enjoy the read. The setting is cool, the use of flashbacks—and, eventually, flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks—is a really interesting way to develop the backstory, and all the characters feel like real people with real problems. It was a good read, check it out.2

  1. Here’s the spoiler: the line is “playing musical cars today, ma’am?” It registers as a throwaway line from a background character who is particularly an asshole, and so with all that context it, again, makes perfect sense that the protagonist misses it. But oh, the payoff… ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Sweet Dreams are Made of Teeth”

Richard Roberts

I have to admit, right here at the beginning, that I didn’t finish this book. Which is generally grounds for disqualification from my writing a review, because I can’t exactly have a fully formed opinion based on an unfinished book!1 I’m making an exception this time, though, both because of the quality of the writing and because the reason I didn’t finish it.

Let’s start with the latter: this book is creepy. Read the title; that alone should’ve warned you going in. It’s a book about nightmares. And I… am not at all a horror person. My sister tried to convince me to watch The Haunting of Hill House on the grounds that “it’s not scary, it’s sweet!” and she was absolutely wrong. The first couple episodes now permanently occupy space in my brain, lurking there to pop back up and make sure I can’t sleep. My brain’s repository of nightmare fodder is already much fuller than I’d like it to be, and will gladly expand to make room for more; I do not want to give it that opportunity.

But the former, oh, the former. I really wanted to read this whole book. I mentioned earlier that it’s about nightmares; what really made it shine, in the amount of creepy that I made it through before I had to give up, was how, exactly, it’s about nightmares.

Each of the characters we meet early on is a specific nightmare. They have names, but they’re shorthand, because these are conceptual characters. The protagonist goes by Fang, but really what he is is running and running, and it’s right behind you, all you can see is a glimpse of teeth, and you keep running but you can never get away. We meet him hanging out with his friend Jeff — a little boy, well-dressed, blond hair, sitting quietly eating, and everything seems fine but then you get up close and see what he’s eating, and what his teeth look like. There’s a love interest, of course, and frankly I didn’t make it far enough to know if she’s got a name, but what she is is a long hallway in a decrepit house. eyes open in the walls when you aren’t looking, but they hide when you try to catch them staring. you walk past dozens of rooms but never find an exit. sometimes, in the hall, you see statues; people, frozen in the act of trying to escape the walls. you’re never sure if there in the same place or if they’ve moved, changed positions. in the distance, faint sobbing. if you walk far enough, you find her—a girl in a dusty dress, weeping quietly into her hands. she doesn’t look up when you enter the room, doesn’t seem to hear you at all. if you get close, you can see she has no eyes.

It’s a book about nightmares, about what they’re thinking when you’re caught up in a nightmare, about what they do in their spare time. And it all has that dreamlike quality to it, that sense that you can turn a corner and find yourself somewhere completely different. That things don’t have to make logical sense, they just have to be able to string together enough of a story that you don’t realize you’re asleep.

That’s what really captivated me about the book, and what kept me trying to fight through my natural distaste for horror. I wish I could’ve finished it, and at some point I may come back to chip away at it some more, but for now I had to give up. But if you, unlike me, can tolerate being creeped out—or, god help you, enjoy it—then I absolutely recommend it. I really have no idea where the plot was going, or what happens next, but I did like the setting and the way the characters were described. It was interesting. Give it a go.2

  1. Or, at least, not one that I think is worth sharing; “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” applies to book reviews, too. ↩
  2. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
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Review

“Atomic Robo”

Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener, Lee Black, Ronda Pattison, Nick Filardi, Anthony Clark, Jeff Powell

Atomic Robo is one of my favorite comics, one I’ve been reading long enough that I wish I had some way of figuring out exactly how long I have been reading it. It’s getting a review now, however, as I recently did an all-the-way-through reread.1

Here’s the concept of the comic: Nikolai Tesla built a nuclear-powered, fully sentient robot. He’s creatively named Atomic Robo Tesla, and generally goes by Atomic Robo, or just Robo to his friends. Being a bulletproof, super-strong robot, he gets into some adventures! Being an ageless machine, those adventures occur across a wide range of time. Being a world where it’s possible for Nikolai Tesla to build a nuclear-powered, fully sentient robot, those adventures involve a whole lot of pulp science fiction—there’s an entire comic early on where Robo spends a few hours fighting giant insects while having a discussion via radio about why giant insects are impossible.

Basically, it’s some of the most fun science fiction I read, and I absolutely love it. There’s some really interesting storylines, and there’s also some really funny storylines. Just about everything that Dr. Dinosaur shows up in absolutely hilarious—everything else in this world feels like it’s following some rules, though different ones than our world, but Dr. Dinosaur is just running around inside his own personal reality distortion field. And he shows up precisely often enough to maintain the hilarity of how well he plays off of Robo.

So, hey, if you’re at all interested in any of this, go read the comic. The nice thing about webcomics is that it’s all free online! And, honestly, I really recommend starting from the beginning—it makes the most sense that way, and while there’s some early references to stuff that shows up again later, it’s more little hints that make it better on reread.2

  1. Well, in April; these reviews aren’t exactly timely. (Which I usually avoid admitting to, but in this case, the specific things going on in the comic at the time were what set me off rereading from the beginning, I wanted to remember what was being called back to. ↩
  2. Seriously, I had a moment on this most recent reread where I realized that something really early on had been foreshadowing of a storyline that happened, in publishing time of the comic, something like a decade later. Their ‘about’ page says “Everything that happens will fit into the larger setting; everything that happens will happen for a reason” and they mean it. ↩
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Review

The Family Cooper

Tamora Pierce

I generally follow a rule of “only post a review the first time I read a book,” and while that seems like a reasonable policy to stick to, I do occasionally feel the desire to break from it. In this case, it’s a little bit that I feel silly not acknowledging that I’ve just finished reading 9 books, but mostly that I want to heap praise upon Tamora Pierce, who is one of my absolute favorite authors.

This time, what I read through was all the books that, to a greater or lesser degree, focus on a member of the Cooper family. Following the in-universe chronological order, this was the Beka Cooper trilogy, the Song of the Lioness quartet, and the Trickster’s duology. It is, I’ve realized, an interesting way to read through them. My thoughts, though, are definitely in light of not having this be my first read through.

These three collections of books are a really wonderful way to get acquainted with the Tortall universe. Alanna is the place it all started, the grand fantasy telling a big story about big events. Alanna herself, the Lioness, is a hero known well beyond Tortall’s borders; from Aly’s eyes, we see that even in Rajmuat, an ocean away, people still know of the Lioness. She’s the heroine, moving in the innermost circles of power.

Beka, on the other hand, starts among the lowest of the low. She was born in the slums, the Lower City of Corus, and is desperately uncomfortable around those sorts of powerful people. It’s very nearly the opposite perspective on this universe. Alanna takes her nobility for granted; Beka knows the biggest change she can make is in the lives of a handful of people.

Aly fills out the middle, in a way. She was born into the nobility, daughter of the Lioness, but her heart lies in espionage. She’s a spy, and she winds up enmeshed in a popular uprising. Her work will change the world in a way more akin to Alanna’s than Beka’s, but she won’t be in the history books as the protagonist. Her job is to be invisible, to effect change without being the center of attention. And as she walks between those two worlds, she shows us the spaces between.

I absolutely love a well-built universe like this. You can tell that the Lioness quartet was the first written, because it’s the most compact, the least filled-out of the universe, but each additional series in that world added more. By now, it feels massive, vibrant, and alive. It feels like what the Marvel movies can never quite accomplish; the protagonists of each previous series are present in a way that cinematic universes never manage outside of the anchoring ensemble pieces. There’s no hand-waving of why the hero of the previous one doesn’t show up to help this time—they’ve always got their own lives visible in the new series.1

I love these books, and Tamora Pierce is great. That’s gonna be the end of every review I write of her work; these are comfort-reading for me. I’ll be halfway through a reread of one of her books and only then realize what I’m doing, and that’s how I tell I’m more stressed than I thought. Seriously, go read anything she wrote.2 It’s all excellent.

  1. Two examples, to compare: Aly can’t call Numair Salmalín, introduced in the Wild Mage quartet, for help, because he’s busy juggling his duties in the Scanran War (the center of the Protector of the Small quartet) and trying to help his wife through her pregnancy.

    Captain America can’t call Iron Man to help during the events of The Winter Soldier because… he can’t remember his phone number? The real answer is “because they didn’t want to pay for Robert Downey Junior and the Iron Man VFX,” but there’s no in-universe reason given in a satisfying way. ↩

  2. These are Bookshop affiliate links – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Bluebeard”

Kurt Vonnegut

There’s a lot of this that feels like a parody, but if it’s a parody, I don’t know of what. Of art that tries to take itself too seriously? Of humanity that tries to take itself too seriously? That feels more like it.

It took me a while to get into this. The only other Vonnegut I’ve read was Cat’s Cradle which, I have to admit, I hated. Turns out that someone who spends a disproportionate amount of time worrying about existential threats doesn’t enjoy fiction that adds a new one.

Once I got started, though, I was mostly good; I’d call this book “barely fictional,” in that the setting is absolutely historically accurate, the only real liberty taken with actual history being the introduction of a couple new characters into the abstract impressionist movement, and done in such a way that doesn’t have much of an impact. I did, for a while, fall out of the book again—there’s a section near the middle where the protagonist’s trust is betrayed in a way that I found painful to even contemplate. Which, hey, makes this an effective piece of art!

In light of that, I feel honestly a little annoyed with how well the end of the book delivers. I was so prepared to be unhappy with the end of the book, but no, it was great. I guess there’s a reason Vonnegut is one of The Greats, or whatever.

So hey, check it out.1 I really have no idea what else to put as the call to action here; things in this ‘literary’ genre always tend to hit me that way.

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Tales from the Loop”

Simon Stålenhag

Two coffee-table-book reviews in a row!

This was a fascinating read; I wasn’t really sure what to expect going in, and it turned out to be a really lovely work of science fiction. In short, this is a coffee table book from a different timeline, one where WWII research invented some kind of magnetic chicanery that lets battleships fly. It’s all centered around a small town in Sweden, something of a company town for the largest particle accelerator ever built.

And I really love that concept. It’s not a science fiction novel, it’s not particularly interested in telling the big story. It’s a coffee table book, an art series by someone who grew up in a place, telling their own story and explaining their paintings. It just happens that the place they grew up was at the center of a lot of weird stuff.

Stålenenhag’s art style works really well for this; something about it feels like concept art that comes out of film and video game studios. That air of mystery, of cinematic effect, and the fact that it’s not a fully fleshed-out story about every last aspect of these things makes it so much more interesting. There’s a lot more room for you to come up with your own explanations.

I almost wish the cover was subtler; it’d be fun to make a version of this that’d blend in, and watch people flip through it and slowly realize “hang on…”

This is a fun read, full of beautiful paintings. Check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Flash Fire”

TJ Klune

I mentioned in my review of the first book that opening with a salvo of self-insert fanfic is a powerful way to begin a book, and apparently the author agreed, because this one opens with a full-on broadside. And out of that cringe frying pan, and into the awkward fire of a teenager being caught, mid-makeout-session, by his dad. Oof.

Nick, the protagonist, remains categorically the best take on a teenager I’ve ever read. No other superhero media captures quite the degree of astonishingly bad decision-making provided by the average 16-year-old boy. Peter Parker has his one dramatic character moment early in every reboot, and then after that he’s a mature adult? I’m gonna need a story arc explaining that along with the walking on the ceiling, the spider bite also magically fixed the mess of hormones that is Being A Teen, because I refuse to believe how stupid he isn’t most of the time. Nick, though? Nick is an ongoing disaster, and it’s hilarious. I had to put the book down just to laugh, multiple times.

It helps that he’s got a good support network, because just about every character that’s there is wonderful. His friends are just as hilarious, the parents—and, good lord, I’m suddenly feeling my age as I write this—are very relatable as they roast their kids for the aforementioned very bad decision-making skills, and there’s a few new characters that show up partway through that make it just that much more fun.

I picked this up within a week of finishing the last one, which I highly recommended, and I’m gonna highly recommend this one too. My biggest complaint is that it’s the second of three books, and the story arc has a distinctive Empire Strikes Back feel of “oh, this isn’t getting wrapped up well by the end of the book, is it” throughout. But then, I picked up the third book at the same time I was grabbing the second, so it turns out I’m pretty well-prepared for that.1

I loved this book as much as I did the first one. Obviously, start with the first book, but, y’know, go ahead and grab the second too.2

  1. That isn’t the only parallel to cinema that’s present in the meta-level; the book also has a post-credits sting that hit me like a truck, in the same way that some of the Marvel end-credits scenes just locked me in for watching the next one in the franchise. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩