Tag: book reviews

Review – Nimona

Posted July 8, 2015 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Nimona, Noelle Stevenson

Oh, man, I loved Nimona. I sort of expected I would: I love Noelle’s art, and of course now I realise she did the art for Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl cover, too. It just seems so cute and lively, and it perfectly fits the tone of the story. From the first few pages, you’d expect it to be silly all the way through (“I’m a shaaark!”), but it actually delivers a meaningful and touching storyline. And yeah, it’s a bit tropey, but I’m pretty sure that’s intentional; playing with the roles of hero and villain, their relationship with each other (I’ve been shipping rivals since Seifer and Squall, so… yeah), playing with issues of right and wrong and government and so on.

Ballister and Ambrosius: so married.

Despite the silliness, the serious parts also worked, and I think they were hinted at from very early in the comic. And despite and because of the silliness, I really got to love the characters: Blackheart’s surprising tenderness towards Nimona; Nimona’s protectiveness of him; Goldenloin’s refusal to actually hurt Ballister or, really, Nimona.

It’s goofy and fun and you should totally pick it up, especially if you’re a fan of Lumberjanes.

Rating: 5/5

Tags: book reviews, books, comics, Noelle Stevenson

Review – A Darker Shade of Magic

Posted July 7, 2015 by Nicky in Reviews / 6 Comments

A Darker Shade of Magic, V.E. Schwab

I’ve been meaning to read this book since it first came out — I even had a preview a while before it came out, and was really excited. And then I got distracted and didn’t get round to it for ages and ages. Still, I took it on my flights from Belgium to Canada, and I’d finished it before long at all; it was a quicker read than I was even expecting.

It was less serious/epic than I was expecting, actually. There’s an element of just swash-buckling fun about it — Lila Bard wants to be a pirate captain, Kell’s a prince, etc. I was surprised by how simple it was, in a way; I’d been expecting something on a grander scale. Which… is there, but it’s resolved in a single book, so it doesn’t seem that serious. I’m wondering what the next book is actually going to bring.

In terms of world-building, it’s pretty cool; I guess more is going to come of Black London, and we haven’t seen the last of that issue just because Kell managed to get rid of the artefact from it. And Lila and Kell aren’t done, and I hope Rhy isn’t done either — I wanted to know more about him. (Though the name throws me; Rhys would be the Welsh name, which I kept expecting when I saw it.) I’m looking forward to the next book, but maybe this was a bit too hyped up.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, SF/F

Review – Ancillary Sword

Posted July 6, 2015 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie

I didn’t like this as much as the first book, I think. It has a completely different focus to the first book, a much more domestic one, and I was expecting something different the whole time. The focus is much more on society in the Radch, rather than the issues of identity that were at work in the first book with Breq’s separation from the Justice of Toren, and the Anaander Mianaai issue. It’s an exploration of more of the world than we saw in the first book, and I really liked that once I got into it.

It’s great seeing Breq back in the world of the Radch, a world that she is perfectly suited for, a world she knows exactly how to operate in. And it’s great seeing her begin to work against Anaander Mianaai and the way the Radch works, in a way that’s still consistent with the values of that world.

I really want Ancillary Mercy now. I’m not sure how I see the whole thing wrapping up, given the fact that this book didn’t really advance the larger plot much. I suppose the books can’t wrap up the civil war Breq’s stirring up, not so simply. We’ve got a small scale going on, especially with this book, and the civil war is going to be on a massive scale.

I guess we’ll have to see!

Rating: 4/5

Tags: Ann Leckie, book reviews, books, SF/F

Review – Daughter of Necessity

Posted July 5, 2015 by Nicky in Reviews / 7 Comments

Daughter of Necessity, Marie Brennan

I don’t normally review short stories and such, but this one caught my eye and I love the cover, so why not? It’s available to read online, for free, here; it’s not a long read, not even really a retelling, but a glimpse behind the scenes. A clever take on a piece of mythology we often take at face value. It answers one simple question.

Why does Penelope weave and unpick a funeral shroud for her husband to delay the suitors?

She’s a clever woman, and this puts her in an active role, taking a hand in her own fate and even her husband and son’s fate. The passive woman of the Homeric epic steps aside to reveal a woman who takes her own fate into her hands.

It helps that the writing is lovely. I can’t pick out a single line or passage: it’s mostly simple, with some of the imagery and phrasing from translations of Homeric verse, maybe a bit of Ovid. It hits just the right note. I do kind of want more, just because I really like the way Brennan interprets the story.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, Marie Brennan, short stories

Review – Ancillary Justice

Posted July 4, 2015 by Nicky in Reviews / 3 Comments

Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie

I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel about this one. It swept the awards for the year it came out, and many of my friends adored it, but the first time I tried to read it I bounced off, and my partner wasn’t a huge fan. Fortunately, I did really like it; enough that I’m in a hurry to read Ancillary Sword, at least. I’m not sure if it’s a five star read — that might have to await a reread — but it is definitely a solid four star.

It did take me at least 50 pages to really get into it, maybe even more like 100. There’s a lot to take in, with the language stuff and the world-building. The world-building is awesome, and I’d be a hypocrite to dislike the language stuff here when it’s as consistent as Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor, and less obtrusive/central — so that’s not a complaint, just an observation: it took some getting used to. It also took some time for me to get to grips with the characters, particularly the main character. Breq isn’t, in her own eyes, a person, merely a fragment of an AI, so she minimises her own account of her personality, and that makes it awkward.

Still, the details of the world and Breq’s place within it build up, and the plot comes together really well. Unexpectedly, I found myself interested in Seivarden, really really hoping that Lieutenant Awn made it okay, feeling weird about the Lord of the Radch, etc. The feelings part, the emotional engagement, snuck up on me. But it came, and left me hungry for more of the world, to know what happens to Breq, to Seivarden, to the Radch.

Good thing I have Ancillary Sword right here.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: Ann Leckie, book reviews, books, SF/F

Review – Song for a Dark Queen

Posted July 3, 2015 by Nicky in Reviews / 7 Comments

Song for a Dark Queen, Rosemary Sutcliff
Review from 10th November, 2011

I found, in a corner of my university library I’d never seen before, a couple of Rosemary Sutcliff’s books I hadn’t read. This was one of them — the story of Boudicca, as told by her harper, interspersed with extracts from the letters of a Roman soldier to his mother. I think this is maybe the most female-centric of Sutcliff’s books that I can think of, and yet it’s told in the voice of a man, so there’s that. As with all Sutcliff’s books, it was readable and well-paced, and well-researched: there’s a poetry to it, too. The end made me choke up a little, even.

I don’t know why I didn’t like it more. I think there was just something eroticised about Boudicca’s war-making, something discomforting — which is appropriate, in a way, for a dark queen… But why does her power come most when she’s eroticised and her children violated?

In that sense, too, I found it more violent than most of Sutcliff’s work — more adult, I guess. There’s references to rape, seemingly on both sides, and there’s a lot of blood and guts.

I rarely give advice to parents in my reviews, but this time I feel it’s warranted. I wouldn’t go so far as to say prevent your children from reading it, but I do think you should read this one first and assess whether your child would be alright with reading it. It discomforts me, as an adult woman; as a child, I don’t know whether the references would have gone over my head or not, but I think I would have caught the horror of it anyway.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Flashback Friday, Rosemary Sutcliff

Review – After the Golden Age

Posted July 2, 2015 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

After the Golden Age, Carrie Vaughn

It’s been a while since I read this the first time, so I felt I should revisit it before I read the second book, even though I gather that follows the next generation. I was right that I needed to do that: a lot goes on that I’d forgotten the details of. I think this was the first superhero novel I read, possibly before I got into comics; it’s made me eager to read as many other superhero novels as I could, though so far I’ve just got to the point of collecting them all up, not actually reading them yet…

Anyway, this is a fun story; actually, it’s not exactly a superhero story in the traditional sense, because while the main character is the daughter of superheroes, she doesn’t have any powers of her own, unless you count being a kickass accountant. I guess on a second read you can see that it’s a little bit predictable, that the characters are not all developed… it’s a little bit tropey: I can see that same parental relationship problem as there is in Perry Moore’s Hero, for example. It’s a fairly predictable problem to have if your parents are really famous, let alone if they have superpowers. Worse if you don’t have superpowers.

I did like, though, that there was a certain ambivalence about Warren. He’s a hero, sure, and he’s learned to control things. And his daughter is important to him. But then he’s also thinking mad things like dropping his daughter off a roof to see if her power is flight, and nearly attacking her because she doesn’t go his way… And then again, on the flip side of that, he’s doing his best to rein himself in and reconcile. And they don’t quite reconcile, it’s not quite that easy, but they make some moves in that direction. Celia herself is a little ambivalent: she feels like she could flip and go with the supervillains, she has spent time with her father’s main adversary primarily to split from her parents and rile him up.

The relationship with Arthur Mentis could be problematic, but they kind of deal with the fact that he knew her as a child, and the story definitely deals with the way his mindreading affects the relationship.

All in all, it’s still really enjoyable, at least to my mind, and I’m looking forward to fiiiinally reading the sequel.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Carrie Vaughn, SF/F

Review – The City

Posted July 1, 2015 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

The City, Stella Gemmell

I hoped to love this, because I have enjoyed the late David Gemmell’s work (some of it more, some less), but this just went too slow for me. I don’t necessarily mind a slow build, but this was a trope salad: it felt like typical epic fantasy, and the prose didn’t elevate it above that. Sure, the prose and setting were decent, and some aspects of the setting were really well described — the darkness, claustrophobia and caution endemic among the sewer people, for example. But it was lacking… something. A spark, some originality, characters to love; any one of those things would have rescued it, for me.

So, at around 20% of the way, I confess I stopped reading. If you’re looking for epic fantasy, this might still be your thing; maybe if I was in the mood for something comfortingly traditional, it would’ve gone down okay. But I’ve got Raymond E. Feist and David Eddings and, indeed, David Gemmell, for traditional fantasy. I wanted something fresh, and The City wasn’t it. I didn’t expect Stella Gemmell to burst any major boundaries, but this story felt like it could be set in part of Feist or Eddings’ worlds, rather than a new fantasy world dreamed up entire.

Rating: 1/5

Tags: book reviews, books, SF/F

Review – The Girl at Midnight

Posted June 30, 2015 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Girl at Midnight, Melissa Grey

Hm. I got 150 pages into this and stopped to take stock, and found too many correlations between this and Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke & Bone to keep reading without looking up some other reviews to see if I was the only one. And… I’m not. And the reviews indicated more points of similarity, and not just with Taylor’s work, but also with Cassandra Clare’s. So I took a deep breath and started reading again, but sceptically, which was probably enough to harm the book right there without the surfacing of other similarities.

Let’s look at them, shall we? The doorways. The Ala and her likeness to Brimstone. The two races locked in battle, without a clear cause or end. The warlord (Thiago/Altair). Animal aspects (though this time for both races). Love surviving reincarnation. A Romeo and Juliet set-up. The two main characters wanting peace. Even the tone of it, the desire to conjure magic in mundane human spaces, it all seemed so familiar.

I wanted to like this, I really did. I had it on a list of anticipated books, and I even bought a copy, despite having originally got a review copy. It’s like, jeez. You start a story in a library, you wax poetic about books, and then you betray me like this? I like to believe that the author didn’t intend for all these similarities to be here, but they were, particularly as I’m just about to read the final book of Laini Taylor’s trilogy, and the story so far is fresh in my mind. I feel played by this book.

It’s not badly written, and for that, two stars. It’s just… not the breath of fresh air it was hyped to be.

Rating: 2/5

Tags: book reviews, books, SF/F

Review – Ring of Bright Water

Posted June 29, 2015 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Ring of Bright Water, Gavin Maxwell

I wanted to read this after having a go at Miriam Darlington’s Otter Country, which in many ways revolved around this book and the landscape described by Gavin Maxwell. He got much closer to the animals than Darlington, so perhaps it’s not surprising that his account is more interesting and vital. Otters were, not quite pets, but definitely companions for him, in a way that Darlington had no opportunity to understand.

Maxwell takes such a delight in the landscape and the antics of the creatures within it, both the wild ones and those he tamed or half-tamed, that it’s impossible not to enjoy this, for me. He wasn’t ashamed of his love for the animals, and sometimes that just shines through so clearly.

It’s not some adventure story, not such a battle of wills as, for instance, H is for Hawk chronicles. Mostly, it’s worth reading for that delight in nature, described with love and attention to detail. If you’re not interested in autobiography and nature writing, it’s probably not for you.

Rating: 5/5

Tags: book reviews, books, non-fiction