Book Review: Children of Fire by Drew Karpyshyn

I had high hopes for this book; the premise sounded really cool and interesting. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to finish it. Something about it just didn't keep my interest, and I got frustrated by the huge leaps in chronological time with no transitions to tell the reader that a) we're skipping five or so years; or b) what happened during those five or so years. I constantly felt off-balance and scrambling to find my bearings and figure out which character or group of characters we were following and when.

Perhaps once the narrative gets to the point where the children meet up (as I'm assuming they will) and the main action of the story begins, things will settle down, but I'm not in a mental place right now to give the book that kind of time. I may come back and try again later, but for now this is going on my DNF shelf.

Book Review: Dead Ever After by Charlaine Harris

The final chapter of Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse novels has arrived, and with it Sookie's choice of partner, presumably for life. But before she can settle down, she has to deal with a whole lot of people who want to kill her. . . .

I don't think this book was nearly as bad as people keep screaming saying it is. But my issues aren't with the actual events and more with the writing, which is unfortunately sloppy. Instead of the usual first-person exclusively that we get in Sookie books, this one also includes third-person, which is a bit jarring. On the other hand, there's so much going on that I don't see how we could have followed the plot if all we knew was what Sookie knew. Also, a lot of stuff would have come from even further out in left field than it did.

The pacing is . . . unfortunate. There are places where three days might be summarized when we've been going along at a moment-by-moment clip. The ending was the worst for it; lots of telling, lots of summary, not a lot of interesting writing that made me care about the choice Sookie makes at the end.

On that note, I don't mind the choice Sookie makes at the end. I won't go too into it, but I'll just say that while I would have loved to see her end up with someone else--or, hell, alone; the girl don't need a man--I don't resent her choice the way a lot of people seem to.

So while my stars are pretty low for this book, it's not because I'm angry at Harris for not taking Sookie in the direction I wanted, but because it looks too much like she just wanted to be done and threw this book together. (It looks a lot like the papers my students turn in when they waited until the night before to write them.)

2/5 stars

Amazon and Goodreads

It's no secret to anyone who uses Goodreads that Amazon recently bought the website.  The owners are very excited about it, but users are responding less than favorably.  The biggest concerns seem to be over privacy, the review system, and Kindle.

Users have expressed worry that Goodreads will become a book pusher for Amazon, that any ebook format that isn't Kindle won't be supported on the site, and that Kindle users will be favored over Kobo, Sony, or Nook users. As a Nook user, I frequently feel marginalized anyway, since lots of places are pretty Kindle-centric (I have a whole rant about how Barnes & Noble really needs to get their shit together when it comes to technology, but I'll spare you for now). Also, people really liked that Goodreads was independent, not linked to any business. After this takeover, there won't be any more independent book-shelving social media sites; Shelfari is fully owned by Amazon, and Amazon owns 40% of LibraryThing (not to mention that neither of those are as user friendly as Goodreads).

Privacy is also an issue, as it frequently is when websites start talking to each other. What information will Amazon be able to get through a user's Goodreads profile? What if your Goodreads account is linked to your Facebook account? Will they be able to get all of that information too? Will there be an option to de-link your Amazon account from your Goodreads account? Or post two different reviews to the two different sites for the same book? Just how invasive is Amazon going to be?

Then there's the review system.  While trolling and screaming fights do break out in the Goodreads comment threads, there's the freedom for that to happen and the users generally take care of it.  Amazon has a pretty bad track record when it comes to user-generated content, from claiming ownership of the reviews to deleting reviews out of hand with no explanation. People are deeply concerned that a big chunk of the purpose of Goodreads--to review books--will be heavily censored.

I'm primarily concerned with the trend of monopolization of the Internet--so many things are being taken over by Facebook, Google, and Amazon that, like Wal-Mart, you can't not be involved with them somehow. They're absorbing or killing smaller sites and even physical businesses, and their business practices and treatment of their users (not customers; we're not their customers, most of the time) can sometimes border on criminal.

I'll wait to see what happens with Goodreads, but it seems that I'm part of a rather large crowd poised on the edge of the deck, ready to abandon ship if things become unbearable.

Book Review: The Silvered by Tanya Huff

A prophecy, a megalomaniacal emperor, and a mage who never learned the rules of magic. Shape-shifting wolves who the emperor has declared abominations and seeks to eliminate--except for the few he keeps to breed more mages. Five captive mages who will stop at nothing to escape and take the captive, insane wolves with them. And one imperial captain who believes that the wolves are people, not abominations.

The Silvered got off to a slightly shaky start--or maybe I got off to a shaky start in reading it--because it begins in the middle of a battle, and we're left to figure out who these people are, why they're fighting, and why we should care entirely on our own. But as soon as those things are established, the momentum gets going and doesn't let up until the end of the book. A blend of her usual fantasy with elements of her military sci-fi, The Silvered is a deep, well-written novel.

As usual, Huff has created a deeply detailed world, characters you can get invested in, and an incredibly serious situation peppered with much-needed humor. And like any good fantasy novelist, she explores social issues relevant to today--what it means to be human. Who decides the humanity or personhood of others. Why politics can allow insane people to run a country. What happens when someone's too traumatized to reenter society after their ordeal. What makes a family, and how these families get made. The consequences of ultimate power.

With a few exceptions, Huff's craft develops further with each novel and her awareness of societal issues and questions runs as a current through her books, making everything she writes not only a joy to read but an exercise in philosophy and sociology as well.

5/5 stars

Book Review: Bloodspell by Amalie Howard

I could not finish this book. The plotting was choppy and gaps in the narrative were filled with telling rather than showing. The prose was at least violet, if not outright purple. And the relationship was typical of YA these days--insta-love, overwrought, etc. I was disappointed because the premise seemed so promising (and how pretty is that cover?!) and I was really interested in it based on the description, but it didn't live up to my expectations.

2/5 stars

Book Review: Black Swan Rising by Lee Carroll

In the midst of the recession, Garet James is knee-deep in money troubles not of her own making. The art industry is dying, even in New York, and Garet is struggling to make ends meet. But when she wanders into an esoteric antiques shop and accidentally picks up a job--opening a silver box that's been soldered shut--she falls into a world of magic and learns that she's much more than just an artist.

This book started out really well.  There's a bad guy! And he's going to unleash the demons Despair and Discord out of the silver box, Pandora-style! And we only have four days to stop him!



But then things start to slide. We learn that Garet is part of a much larger, further-reaching history than she knows, and that she's meant to defend the world. But before she can do that, she has to learn how to use her power. Which involves visiting elementals of all four elements and learning to use their power herself. But Oberon (yes, Oberon) is only going to take her to see one of them a day. And somewhere in there, she has time to boink a sexy vampire, sleep for awhile, visit her father in the hospital, watch a movie (almost twice), deal with trauma from her friends, and generally act like the world isn't ending in four days.

Oh, and then she learns that the demons are already lose and they have to find that silver box and close it in order to banish them. So while all of Garet's personal stuff is going on, the city of New York is in utter chaos. Well, more than usual.

Don't get me wrong; the premise was really interesting. I'd have been okay with almost everything that happened in the novel if they hadn't been occurring under the threat of annihilation--in four days--that everyone acted like wasn't impending.  I think the impending doom was supposed to make everything feel more tense, but I couldn't help comparing Garet to Buffy and the way Buffy and the Scoobies would act when they had four days to save the world--not sleeping. Eating junk food. Arguing. Looking up everything under creation. Otherwise actively working to deal with the threat. And sometimes having sex, fine. But the idea that one girl has to stand between the world and evil as some sort of bulwark and she was supposed to have been trained but wasn't and now she has to catch up really quick--that was interesting. It didn't really need a timer on it--or at least not a timer that nobody was paying attention to.

 There was some weirdness going on with the climactic battle at the end, too, but by that point I just wanted to be done reading this book so I could move on to something else.

2/5 stars

Book Review: The Iron King by Michael Druon

This is the first book in a series tracking the causes of the Hundred Years War through the generations leading up to it. George RR Martin lauds the series, calling it one of the inspirations for A Song of Ice and Fire. The reasons for this inspiration are clear even in the first book; sexual scandals, politics, a nation in debt, no good heir to the throne--France is in real trouble. Druon digs into history and brings it alive through characters who would be footnotes in the history books (if they appeared at all) as well as psychological explorations of the major players in history.

However, the novel is often difficult to read, likely due to translation issues. The style is very no-nonsense; it goes this way in a determined fashion that says history stops for no man, not even a king, and will stomp its way into the inevitable war. This volume was relatively short (relative compared to A Game of Thrones anyway), and so getting through the style and dense prose was hard but not impossible.

The reissued paperback edition of The Iron King will be available in April 2013.

3/5 stars

Book Review: A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan

Disclaimer: Tor Books provided a free electronic ARC of this novel for review purposes.

Lady Trent, one of the world's leading "natural historians" who studies dragons, writes an unabashed and bluntly straightforward account of a few of the incidents that made her the scientist she is today.  Since her world closely resembles England's Regency/Victorian era(s), her accomplishments were not easy to come by, as girls and women were not encouraged to engage in science or any higher-level thinking at all. But Isabella Camherst, Lady Trent, has the moxie and intelligence necessary to navigate this male-dominated world in order to learn about the creatures she finds so breathtakingly beautiful.

This wasn't quite what I expected from reading the flap copy and other people's reviews of it.  I expected a full account of Isabella's life; we get some incidents from her childhood, a few from her adolescence, and then one major one from her adulthood.  A chapter or so in, I realized that the page count wasn't nearly high enough to provide as extensive a look at Isabella's life as I expected.  That's not entirely the author's fault, of course, and I do hope there are sequels to this.  Also, other reviewers were saying that the novel was written in the style of Jane Austen and was a bit dry and hard to read, so I expected dense Victorian prose such as I found in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.  That wasn't the case; while Victorian phrasing and attitudes were rampant, the overall writing style was very modern with only a few nods to the Victorian, likely to keep the novel from being too inaccessible. Despite not being set on Earth, there are several nods to Victorian culture, specifically in the Gothic romances; Isabella mentions a few authors and titles in passing that are easily recognizable analogues for authors such as Anne Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory Lewis.  For anyone who's familiar with these novels or the artistic culture of the Regency and Victorian eras, these little nods are delightful Easter eggs to giggle over.

As a heroine, Isabella is delightful.  Smart, funny, honest about her own flaws, and not above using men's assumptions about the intellectual capacity of women to get what she wants.  The narration switches nearly seamlessly from the older Isabella's contemplation of what made her who she is today (and how she's old and will say whatever she damn pleases, thank you) to the immediate storytelling necessary to relate her adventures without huge chunks of exposition with no dialogue.  I imagined her older-woman narrative voice as Dame Maggie Smith and was all the more entertained for it.

I did find the ending just a touch tedious (hence the four stars instead of five); there's so much buildup and so much drama and then at the last big reveal I was like, "that's it? That's what all of this has been about?"  Granted, it was the petty scheming of a petty man, but after everything else that happened, it just seemed so . . . petty.  The final decision regarding their discoveries and the potential scientific and technological repercussions was written very well; it's a difficult decision, but the kind scientists often find themselves faced with, and I appreciated that the characters struggled with it.

A Natural History of Dragons will be available on Feb. 4.

4/5 stars (a note on my rating system)

Book Review: Hollow Earth by John and Carole E. Barrowman

I'm not giving this book any stars partly because I didn't finish it and partly because I'm not sure what I think of it.

I really wanted to like Hollow Earth, mostly because I'm a huge Barrowman fan and I think it's awesome that he's also contributing to literature, especially for children. Also, the concept was really interesting--people born with the ability to adjust reality with their art, other people who can help them control these abilities, and yet more people who want to lock the abilities down period--and I really wanted to learn more about these people and their world and how the medieval flashbacks tied into everything.

But something went wrong. Possibly several somethings. I plowed through the first few chapters, where the writing was choppy and kind of clunky but the action really moved. The next few chapters went pretty well even though I was frustrated by the boy's attitude. And then the kids just got insufferable. They got bored and they're unfortunately extremely bright--and Matt's got a chip on his shoulder--so they manage to slip their guardians and create some mayhem (completely unintentionally), all because they want to have fun and not be controlled, despite everything their mother, grandfather, and various other adults have told them about their abilities and the dangers inherent in them.

Maybe the issue was the pacing; at roughly 400 pages, this is a huge book for its grade. The Barrowmans spend a lot of time developing the characters rather than moving the plot along, which can be fine if you're interested in the characters, but mostly I wanted to punch Matt in the face.

When I realized that I wasn't looking forward to picking the book up, that I was actually bored by the very thought of it, headed toward dreading the last 200 pages, I decided that this book just wasn't for me. I can, however, see how it would be right for other people, hence the no stars; it's not a bad book, necessarily, just not something I enjoy.

Book Review: The Holders by Julianna Scott

Disclaimer: Angry Robot provided a free digital ARC of this book for review purposes.

 Becca's little brother, Ryland, is different. He hears voices sometimes. Most people think he's crazy, and Becca constantly has to protect him from being locked up or medicated. When representatives of an Irish school tell Becca that Ryland isn't crazy, just special, and they want to help, she's obviously skeptical. But she agrees to let Ryland travel to Ireland on one condition--she goes with them. What follows changes her entire life and everything she thought she knew about herself, her family, and the world.

Comparisons of this book to X-Men abound, and they're not far off, though the Holders' powers are balanced by a weakness that they usually manage to offset with a talisman of some kind. However, that doesn't mean that the book is a complete knock-off of X-Men at all; personally I found the characters in The Holders to be much more relateable than most comic book characters. I struggled with how many stars to give this book because on the one hand, it's well-paced and kept me reading, but on the other hand it's fairly predictable and contains several YA cliches. The characters were well-developed and believable, and though the first half of the novel is mostly character development, the real plot kicks in just before the character development starts to get too much. There's a fairly major plot twist midway through the novel that I figured out pretty much immediately when the setup for it was introduced, though it doesn't seem that Scott was really trying to hide it from us.

The romance, while sweet, bugged me in that Becca seemed aware that she was living the YA trope of insta-love and trying to refuse to give in to it, but failed miserably. Granted, later there was a mystical reason why she failed, and the relationship did develop through friendship before it got really serious, but her thinking on the matter and refusal to be a teenage girl stereotype seemed very much like the author trying to assure the reader that this wasn't going to be like every other YA romance. At least there wasn't a triangle. Those complaints aside, I enjoyed the book and will most likely read the next one when it's available.

The Holders will be available March 2013.

3.5/5 stars