Tag: book reviews

Review – Broken Homes

Posted March 6, 2015 by in Reviews / 4 Comments

Cover of Broken Homes by Ben AaronovitchBroken Homes, Ben Aaronovitch
Review from July 30th, 2013

I think I need a support group to talk about this book. Or at least, the end of this book. If you like your books to kick you in the teeth real hard, go ahead and read this one.

At this point, I’ve stopped comparing these books to the Dresden Files because apparently I care a lot more about them and the characters involved than I ever did about Harry Dresden and crew. I’m still a bit disappointed there aren’t more major female characters, but I’m very definitely emotionally invested.

This would’ve been really amazing if it had all connected up. I mean, all the events are connected with one or the other overarching plot or subplot, but it feels a little bit episodic at times. The last half is pretty much unputdownable: I worry I’m already forgetting the first half in the wake of the gut punch that is the second.

One thing I really appreciate about these books is that it’s very much rooted in actual policing. Yes, it’s policing with the involvement of magic and supernatural creatures, but you still have the support network of a policeman — including superior officers to a) answer to and b) drag you out of trouble. On which note, Nightingale’s big scene was amazing. But you don’t have a freelance detective or a guy who can be a loose cannon (e.g. Ian Rankin’s Rebus). You’ve got your average police officer, with much to learn.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – The Errant Prince

Posted March 5, 2015 by in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of The Errant Prince by Sasha L. MillerThe Errant Prince, Sasha L. Miller
Received to review via Netgalley

The Errant Prince is a fantasy novella, with an LGBT romance at the heart. It’s set in the kind of world that I love in fantasy, where we haven’t automatically copied over the things we’re bigoted about. Even the fact that Myron is trans doesn’t get as much attention as it might in our world, and as we would assume it would’ve done in medieval-esque societies. It’s also awesome that the issues in this story are not to do with the sexuality or gender of the characters.

It’s also nice that this is a romance story in which there aren’t Terrible Misunderstandings. There’s one, but it doesn’t really count, because they actually communicate about it and sort themselves out before it escalates.

The fantasy aspect isn’t just backdrop, either. There’s some worldbuilding, though I’d welcome more; there’s a lot of information on magic and how it works; there’s a fair idea of the politics and society surrounding the story. It’s not as immersive as I like my secondary worlds to be, but it isn’t two dimensional. Overall, it’s a sweet and enjoyable story — and wonder of wonders, there’s no sex shoehorned in, despite the delicate balance of tension between the two main characters.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – The Gabriel Hounds

Posted March 4, 2015 by in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of The Gabriel Hounds by Mary StewartThe Gabriel Hounds, Mary Stewart

Mary Stewart’s romance/suspense/mystery type novels have been my go-to comfort reading for a while. Unfortunately, now I’ve finished them all and I’m back to the beginning. I mostly grabbed this from my community library to demonstrate that we should totally keep Mary Stewart on the shelves because people want to read ’em, but I’m pretty sure this was the first of her books I read (other than The Crystal Cave), so it makes sense to start over with it!

I think I appreciated it more, this time. I wasn’t sure what to expect from it before, and I was still in a fairly snobby stage about anything with romance in it, but now I’m happy to sink into Stewart’s romances and enjoy the atmosphere, the way she establishes a sense of place. The landscape is as much a part of this as anything else: dusty, hot, romanticised.

I still stick by the judgement that it’s basically Famous Five for adults, in terms of the mystery. Replace drugs with treasure and you’ve got Five on Treasure Island, basically, apart from the fact that then George marries one of her cousins at the end. There are a couple of reasons why the cousin relationship is creepier than normal here: they were brought up practically as siblings, called “the Twins” by their family; their fathers are identical twins. So in terms of DNA, they’re half-siblings, pretty much, bar any epigenetic modifications. I know that maybe it wouldn’t have been viewed that way then, but it still skeeves me out a little.

Still, for drama and adventure and a glorious atmosphere, plus the fact that at least Charles and Christy don’t have a weird power imbalance to their relationship, I have to give this a higher rating than I did before. The other bad point is, of course, the treatment of one of the only other “on-screen” female characters, Halide: a bigger stereotype of the scheming simple Arab servant, I’m not sure you could have. So not 5/5, even if I do really appreciate some aspects.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – The House on Parchment Street

Posted March 2, 2015 by in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of The House on Parchment Street by Patricia McKillipThe House on Parchment Street, Patricia McKillip

This book isn’t really quite what you’d expect if you know McKillip’s other work; it’s for a younger audience, and it feels like a different sort of story altogether. It’s more like… Famous Five, with ghosts; it’s not the total magic of The Forgotten Beasts of Eld or Winter Rose. It’s fairly specifically placed in time and space, and it has a lot of concrete, real-world detail.

The writing is still absorbing, the characters well portrayed, but the magic is really what I read McKillip’s work for, and this wasn’t at all like that. It’s also, as I said, rather younger; the kids are very frustratingly kids. Realistically, but yeesh. Puberty is not so interesting when you’re out on the other side of it.

I’m fairly lukewarm about it, in the end; it was fun enough to read, but it’s not by any measure a favourite and I wouldn’t have minded having to skip it.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – The Castle of Crossed Destinies

Posted March 1, 2015 by in Reviews / 8 Comments

Cover of The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo CalvinoThe Castle of Crossed Destinies, Italo Calvino

I don’t know why I keep trying; it’s quite obvious that while there are aspects of Calvino’s writing that I love, even coming blurred through the translations, his structures, styles, plots, characters (or lack thereof) really get on my nerves. The idea is fine, but then telling a whole series of stories via someone guessing at what other people mean by laying out certain patterns of tarot cards… gets wearing.

It’s nice at first to keep your mind on the cards, the symbolism, the way the story happens… And then, for me, it loses its novelty. Maybe it’d have worked as a short story, but the more tortuous it got, the more irritated I got.

Rating 2/5

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Review – Ludo and the Star Horse

Posted February 28, 2015 by in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of Ludo and the Star Horse by Mary StewartLudo and the Star Horse, Mary Stewart

Took me a while to get hold of this, as I don’t think it’s currently in print. I wasn’t expecting much of it, since I knew it’s a children’s story, but I do love Mary Stewart’s work, and this morning I was feeling moderately dreadful, so something comforting sounded like the perfect plan. And this was just right: a little bit like Seaward, but with more the maturity level of The Dark is Rising; a little bit Narnia, but sans Christian allegory.

It’s a quest story, relatively simply: it goes through the zodiac, to catch up with the sun, to allow Ludo’s old horse Renti to join the horses of the sun now that he’s old and lame and beyond working any more. Ludo isn’t the sharpest tool in the box, in the sense that… well, to borrow the imagery from the book itself: he’s still an unshaped piece of wood, a little rough, not the best quality. But inside that, there’s a shape just waiting to be carved out, one full of life. He’s a plain sort of boy, with no special talent, but that doesn’t mean he’s not worthy, or that he won’t grow up into someone perfectly capable, maybe even very gifted.

Since it’s a Mary Stewart book, I wasn’t surprised at all by the very firm sense of place in the opening chapters in Bavaria. I liked that she didn’t just pick a kid from the English countryside, and that he really was just a plain ordinary boy with some potential, the same potential as anyone else.

It’s not deep, but it is charming; a fairy tale quest through the zodiac and, perhaps, home again.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Whispers Under Ground

Posted February 27, 2015 by in Reviews / 6 Comments

Cover of Whispers Under Ground by Ben AaronovitchWhispers Under Ground, Ben Aaronovitch
Review from July 18th, 2013

My previous hangups haven’t really been dispersed yet, but I am starting to think that Peter Grant is several cuts above Harry Dresden on the misogyny-sorry-I-mean-chivalry front. It’s starting to feel like he’s a genuinely nice guy who is sometimes a bit of an ass in the way he expresses himself, as people do.

Anyway, these books are definitely easy reads, and I like a lot of the background — the Folly, Molly, Nightingale’s long career — and the accumulated emotional stuff from previous books (i.e. Lesley and her mask — which I seem to have been under the impression was spelt “Leslie” in previous books, I’m not sure why). I really liked that Lesley’s still considered sexually attractive by various characters, and that she’s definitely a strong character in her own right, not a love interest or tragic past mistake.

I’m not sure how coherent I found this, though. I found so many places where the spelling was off, or the grammar just didn’t make sense (i.e. wasn’t something anyone would say, let alone write), but now when I sit back I’m not so sure about the plot, either. It felt like there was a fair amount of packaging.

I can understand why people like this series so much — and it is growing on me, too.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Authority

Posted February 26, 2015 by in Reviews / 3 Comments

Cover of Authority by Jeff VanderMeerAuthority, Jeff VanderMeer

Coming after Annihilation, this book seems to make so much more sense, to be begin with. There are still aspects of mystery, confusion, and not just around Area X — there’s missing time, people who haven’t even been to Area X seeming contaminated by it, etc, etc. But the horror is muffled, the adventure is muffled, and instead it becomes more of a spy story, a sci-fi story. Still a mystery story, but a different kind of drive to the narrative.

Don’t kid yourself for a moment that’s actually going to work out by giving you answers. There are some answers, but they ask questions of your own. VanderMeer carefully avoids really ever explaining what is causing what is happening; I can only hope that we get some more on that in Acceptance. It’s driving me a little nuts not to have even a working theory, because I don’t even trust the evidence.

Still, if you’ve read Annihilation, you know what you’re signing up for fairly well. It’s still really weird. It’s still intriguing. It will still make you yelp “what the hell!?” at your ereader screen/the page of the book. Or the audio, if there’s an audio version. (I’m trying to imagine the right narrator for it. The right casting could really add to the creepiness.)

With most books, I’d adjust the rating down from what I gave the previous book, but since I think the three are working together to build the atmosphere, the mystery, and it’s unlikely anything will be irrelevant, I’ll leave it at a sort of overall rating of 4/5, with just a note that I didn’t like it as much as the first book.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

Posted February 25, 2015 by in Reviews / 2 Comments

Cover of Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore by Robin SloanMr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan

You’d think this book would be one about sheer love of books, being set in a bookstore. Like, say, The Collected Works of A.J. Fikry, which has a similar setting (persnickety little bookshop) but a vastly more personal plot. Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookshop is much more of a paean to technology: the wonders of ereaders, ebooks, writing code, visualising stuff using simulations, and most of all, Google. You can kinda tell why people accuse this book of being a shill for Google: almost every chapter mentions it; the Google characters are so cool and quirky; Google is run in such an interesting way, is in such a cool building, etc, etc.

Then again, the characterisation of the main Google character isn’t exactly appealing. She’s a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and when things don’t go her way, she blames the main character for it. You’re half the reason he even went through with trying to decode this massive conspiracy, girl; it’s you that decided to commit resources, you that insisted the end would be worth it. I really wasn’t impressed with her. A lot of it seemed to be trying too hard: Mr Penumbra, for example, is too much of a twinkly old man.

It’s fun enough, but I didn’t take it very seriously or get very absorbed in it. I’ve read plenty of conspiracy stories of this sort, and though in a way it doesn’t take itself too seriously on that front, I just wasn’t caught up by it. I did sort of anticipate the ultimate solution, if not how to come to that solution.

I found it particularly funny that I was reading this book on a Kobo when I got to the bit where it disses Kobos.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – The Kiwi's Egg

Posted February 24, 2015 by in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of The Kiwi's Egg by David QuammenThe Kiwi’s Egg, David Quammen

Having thoroughly enjoyed several of Quammen’s other books, I’m a bit sad that I didn’t really feel enthusiastic about this one — especially because I do have a great interest in Darwin, the early theories of evolution and the reaction to them in society. I mean, we’re still seeing that reaction now: I know people who don’t believe in evolution forming new species; I know people who are not convinced by the proofs we have; and various people somewhere in between. And this is an idea that’s in our general consciousness, unlike — for example — electron shells.

But the long descriptions of the incubation of Darwin’s idea are, well, long. And often totally speculative, alas. We have so many records of Darwin, but of course they don’t necessarily answer the questions we really want answered. All in all, this just… didn’t captivate me as I would’ve liked, despite reminding me that by all accounts I think I quite like Darwin as a person as well as a scientist.

Rating: 2/5

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