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Book Reviews, Books, Science Fiction

Book Review: Planetfall by Emma Newman

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Planetfall is a brilliant portrait of a character and a community both in crises and a meditation on the ways in which the community and the individual are intertwined. It’s a gorgeously realized sci-fi mystery about a secret that festers in the heart of a seeming utopia and threatens to destroy it all.

Renata Ghali followed her dearest friend, Lee Suh-Mi, across the stars to a new planet in search of God, but what they found when they arrived on their new planet was, well, inconclusive. When Suh-Mi disappears, Renata and the rest of their colony have to figure out how to go on without her. Over twenty years later, Suh-Mi’s grandson shows up and starts uncovering the truth that Renata has helped to hide all this time.

Much of the praise I’ve seen for Planetfall has been for its narrator, and I can’t help but concur. Ren is a fascinating character with an unconventional point of view that makes hers a unique perspective to read a story from. She’s an older woman (a youthful seventy or so, in fact), a woman of color, queer, and significantly mentally ill, though the revelation of that last fact sort of creeps up on you as you read her story. The first person present tense narrative provides a nice sense of immediacy and immersion, which becomes increasingly important as the story moves along and Renata’s mental state deteriorates. Over the course of the novel, Ren becomes increasingly anxious and paranoid, then frantic as secrets start to be uncovered. It’s not always an easy thing to read, but it is absolutely riveting.

I only wish that there had been more actual science in Planetfall, although I think that’s more a sign that I’ve been in a mood for harder sci-fi recently than it is a sign that Emma Newman fails the reader in any particular way. Indeed, there are all kinds of interesting ideas on display here, from printing technology to sustainable living and social engineering. This book straddles the worlds of harder sci-fi and more human-focused sci-fi and does both justice, but I would have loved more explanation of how things worked, especially the space travel portion of the colony’s journey, which I felt was very glossed over. Realistically, it doesn’t matter and isn’t really pertinent to the story being told, which is likely why there’s not more detail about the ship and the journey, but I kind of love that stuff.

Finally, I would also have liked to see some of the themes surrounding religion and spirituality in an age of scientific and technological wonders be a little more fully developed. There are all kinds of ideas touched upon regarding the existence of God, the possible ultimate fruitlessness of humanity’s search for God, and even the ways in which faith makes people vulnerable—both to their own bad ideas and to exploitation in service of other people’s bad ideas. Ren is a great protagonist for asking questions and making observations about these things, as she’s a skeptic herself and her disconnectedness from her community makes her often a shrewd observer of people. However, her observations are thoroughly colored by her significant mental illness, making them increasingly unreliable over the course of the book even as more of Ren’s and the colony’s history is revealed, and the rather abrupt ending of the story is somewhat unsatisfying.

All in all, though, Planetfall is a great book. It’s got a lovely, almost meditative pace to it, and it’s an incredible character study of its narrator. As someone who also suffers from depression and anxiety, with a tendency towards reclusiveness, I found Ren incredibly relatable, and I can definitely see this being a book that I will return to in the future.

Book Reviews, Books, Fantasy, Novella

Book Review: A Song for No Man’s Land by Andy Remic

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A Song for No Man’s Land is a dull, depressing slog of a novella that never seems to figure out what it wants to say. For all of its short length, it seems to drag on interminably before finally sputtering to a stop right when things seemed to almost start to get interesting. It is the first book in a series of at least three, so perhaps that can be forgiven, but I’m not sure I care enough about Robert Jones to want to come back for more.

The story alternates fairly rhythmically between Robert’s time as a soldier during World War I and his childhood in rural Wales, but neither setting is particularly compelling. Robert’s time in the war is characterized by pretty run-of-the-mill WWI imagery and tropes while the flashbacks to his youth are mostly concerned with introducing the story’s mystical elements. However, the use of Scandinavian mythology (the hulder) seems out of place in a story about a Welshman as well as in a story about WWI. I’m not averse to the idea of forest spirits being upset or angry at the destruction of war (that would be very Princess Mononoke), but it seems an odd choice to co-opt the forest spirits of a neutral country where there was no actual fighting during the war. Alternatively, the forest spirits could be a reference to some similar German creatures, but that still doesn’t explain what they would be doing hanging around in Wales while Robert Jones was a kid.

The other characters introduced never manage to come truly alive, though Bainbridge comes closest. Instead, they’re all simply passing through, and they don’t even seem to have much impact on Robert, much less on the reader. Even Robert’s supposed friend, George, appears abruptly in the final quarter of the book only to come to a senselessly tragic end that left me wondering why he was introduced at all. The only women mentioned are either decidedly subservient figures (mothers, a sister, a nurse) who exist only to coo over or fuck the men in the story—well, mostly just Robert—or they are the demonically horrific Skogsrå that has apparently been menacing Robert Jones since he was a little boy.

The horror elements of A Song for No Man’s Land are sadly underdeveloped. The abovementioned appropriated mythology is made regrettably generic, and the monsters themselves are left largely to the reader’s imagination. I believe that Andy Remic was trying to rely on building a horrific atmosphere and crafting a feeling of terror through language, but his workmanlike prose is just not up to the task. Furthermore, the decision to replace vulgarities with “______” is described in an introductory note as a hat tip to the time of the book’s setting, but it comes off as coy, distracting, and frankly confusing as it’s often not clear what the censored term ought to be. This choice might have made sense if the overall tone of the writing was made to feel antiquated, but in a book that is otherwise modern in its style it just feels like an on the nose anachronism.

One of the reasons I read all of Tor.com’s novellas is because doing so encourages me to read outside my comfort zone and try new things that I wouldn’t normally pick up. Often, this has paid off big time; it’s been nice to discover several new authors to follow, and it’s interesting to read stuff that isn’t my usual cup of tea. Unfortunately, this time it just didn’t work out that way. A Song for No Man’s Land might be a great story for the right reader, but I just couldn’t like it.

Book Reviews, Books, Graphic Novels

Book Review: Bitch Planet, Volume 1, Extraordinary Machine

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I can’t believe I waited so long to read this comic. Like, I’m truly appalled at myself, and now that I’ve read the first five issues, I can’t even remember why I hadn’t been that interested. Bitch Planet is a gorgeously drawn, tightly plotted feminist masterpiece that should be required reading for women everywhere. It’s also brutal and heartwrenching and more than a little uncomfortably close to the truth of many women’s experiences.

The first issue is a shocking bait and switch that sets up the rest of the story, which deals with a group of women judged “non-compliant” and sent to an off-world “Auxiliary Compliance Outpost” colloquially referred to as Bitch Planet. It’s exactly as terrible as it sounds like, and women are imprisoned there for any number of offenses from “wanton obesity” to being a bad mother to murder. It’s as if The Handmaid’s Tale had a comic book baby with a prison exploitation film; as in Margaret Atwood’s classic, the most terrifying part of Bitch Planet is how familiar it feels.

The standout issue of the first arc is definitely #3, which is the first of several issues planned to deal with the story of a single character. This one is about Penny Rolle, and it’s equal parts chilling—with lines like “…see yourself through the fathers’ eyes” and “How long since you prioritized how others see you?”—and empowering. It’s an incredible story of oppression, abuse, and dehumanization—and how a woman can survive those things with her identity and spirit intact. It also does more than any other issue so far to frame non-compliance as active resistance—to be non-compliant is to be victimized by a system that despises women, but it is also a sign of resilience and can be a source of pride.

The only problem that I have with this collection of the first five issues is that it doesn’t include the original comics’ wonderful supplementary materials. Each issue contains essays that complement and expand upon the issue’s themes, and those are further supplemented by letters and, increasingly, photos of folks’ rad NC tattoos. While the comics certainly speak for themselves and can be read and enjoyed just fine without the extra materials, the essays in particular add valuable context and depth to each issue that isn’t made up for by just tacking on a short study guide at the end of the collection. It might be hard to get your hands on the print issues, but digital issues are cheap.

Book Reviews, Books, Fantasy, Science Fiction

Book Review: All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

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All the Birds in the Sky, on its surface, is a story about two weirdos who come of age and fall in love during an apocalypse. It’s a story infused with magic, from the first time we see Patricia talk to a bird, and it’s a story about bad timing, from the moment Laurence makes his first two-second time machine. It’s a comedy of errors about the end of the world, and it’s one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever read. I’m only a little disappointed to have read it so early in the year. I feel about All the Birds in the Sky the way I felt about N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season (which this novel is absolutely nothing like) last year; I just know, deep down, that nothing else I read in 2016 is going to top it.

In Patricia and Laurence, Charlie Jane Anders has created a pair of compelling and dynamic protagonists who are in perfect balance with each other. Patricia learns at an early age that she’s a witch, and Laurence is doing advanced tinkering in first grade. By the time they are in middle school, they’re both decidedly outcast by their peers and bond over that shared status even though they are otherwise nearly polar opposites. However, Anders avoids stereotypes and simplistic characterization in her depiction of her leads. Laurence and Patricia are both grandly archetypal and intensely real, and their story is at once epic and deeply personal.

Anders also peoples the world that Patricia and Laurence live in with a diverse cast of characters, from their two very different but equally dysfunctional families to their mentors to their adult friend groups who turn out to have more in common than not. There are talking birds, an AI, a tree spirit, and even a time traveling assassin/guidance counselor who ends up being one of the funniest characters in the book. While, on one level, all of these secondary and tertiary characters are arrayed like chess pieces, again Anders avoids drawing the battle lines too clearly, creating an interesting, nuanced dramatis personae.

The story meanders between fantasy and science fiction towards a climax that combines the best of both to excellent effect. The plotting and pacing are consistently good, and the tropes Anders utilizes are well chosen and smartly combined. When she chooses to subvert the reader’s expectations, it’s done in a way that is obviously very clever but never veering into twee territory. All the Birds invites the reader to play along when other less deft works might simply toy with the reader’s emotions. There’s plenty in this book that is unexpected, but there’s enough of the familiar to make it feel like an old friend that you’ll want to visit again and again.

It’s a strange book to review because I don’t want to give too much away, but also because I’ve never read anything quite like it. All the Birds reminds me most of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens, albeit vaguely, and it objectively has very little in common with that book outside of the fact that it also deals with an apocalyptic event and was quite funny. The truth is that All the Birds in the Sky is a wonderfully unique and fabulously original novel that isn’t really quite like anything except itself.

Book Reviews, Books, Fantasy, Novella

Book Review: The Seventh Bride by T. Kingfisher

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The Seventh Bride is, loosely, a retelling of “Bluebeard,” which is a nice change from the more common fairy tale retellings that populate most shelves. I don’t see “Bluebeard” pop up that often in the vast sea of princess stories that seem to get almost obligatorily reimagined on a perennial basis, so right out of the gate I was predisposed to love this story because it was so obviously a fresh perspective. It turns out to be much more than just a simple retelling of an old tale, however. The Seventh Bride is a beautiful, clever, funny story about power, abuse, revenge, and—above all—the ties of shared experiences that bind women together and the vital importance of women loving and supporting each other.

Rhea is the fifteen-year-old daughter of a miller in a small town, and while she always did expect to be married someday, she didn’t expect to find herself engaged so young and rather against her will to the wealthy (and sinister) Lord Crevan. Although Rhea’s parents are good, loving people who want their daughter to be happy, there’s very little they can do to prevent the marriage. The marriage to the much older, more powerful, and creepy man isn’t ideal, but peasants don’t say no to lords. When Rhea goes to live at Crevan’s house before the actual wedding takes place, however, she finds out that things are much worse than she thought they were. Not only has Crevan been married before, but his previous wives aren’t dead. Well, mostly.

Perhaps what I love best about Rhea is that she’s such a refreshingly ordinary girl. This is characteristic of much of T. Kingfisher’s (Ursula Vernon in disguise) work, and so far I have never not been delighted by the total lack of exceptionalism among her heroines. It’s not that her girls and women don’t have any exceptional qualities; Rhea, for example, is exceptionally tenacious, brave, kind, and principled. It’s just that there’s nothing about a T. Kingfisher heroine that is ever framed as “not like other girls.” I feel like this shouldn’t be noteworthy, but “not like other girls” is sadly too often the shorthand authors use in order to create “strong female characters” so I’m always happy—especially in work about and for teenage girls—to see girl characters who are allowed to exist without being shown as constantly in competition with other girls and women.

Instead of just one exceptional girl, Ursula Vernon creates a whole cast of diverse and compelling women who, ultimately, have to work together in order to defeat the man who has harmed them all and fight back against a system that gives them little recourse to address the injustices they’ve been subjected to. It’s a powerfully feminist message that resonates with a deep and abiding truth that many women will relate to and all girls need to hear. At the same time, it’s a story that isn’t preachy and never gets bogged down in messaging. Rather, it’s a fast-paced tale that utilizes some familiar fairytale tropes and subverts others, all while taking place in a well-drawn and richly detailed fantasy world that is steeped in whimsy but never overly precious.

With The Seventh Bride, Vernon continues to prove herself as a consistent producer of marvelously enchanting fairy tale stories. She knows her genre and audience well enough to perfectly walk the line between comfortingly familiar and delightfully fresh and subversive.

Book Reviews, Books, Fantasy, Novella

Book Review: Bryony and Roses by T. Kingfisher

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As is often the case with  popular fairy tales, there’s very little new story to be wrung out of “Beauty and the Beast” these days, so I was a little skeptical of Bryony and Roses. Even after reading T. Kingfisher’s (a pen name of Ursula Vernon) Toad Words and Other Stories, which is full of superb fairy tale reimaginings, I was unsure if there was anything she could do to freshen up such an old and well-worn story path. An opening note that admitted an enormous debt to Robin McKinley, whose Rose Daughter is perhaps the definitive feminist “Beauty and the Beast,” was frankly more concerning than reassuring. I ought not have worried so much. Just like in her earlier fairy tale work, Vernon-as-Kingfisher does an incredible job of exploring and revitalizing ancient material, infusing it with a bright, modern, thoroughly feminist (and unequivocally delightful) sensibility.

Bryony and Roses is clearly heavily influenced by Rose Daughter. Let’s get that out of the way, first. However, it’s been nearly twenty years since the release of that book, almost forty years since McKinley’s first “Beauty and the Beast” retelling, Beauty, and close to twenty-five years since the release of Disney’s animated version. There’s also been any number of other retellings of the story, with perhaps a handful of significant new versions in any given year. While Bryony and Roses shares some ideas and motifs with Rose Daughter, it also owes a considerable amount to other versions of the story, if in no other way than that it’s very obvious that Ursula Vernon went into writing this tale with a long list of things not to do and a few tropes that she specifically seems to have set out to upend.

**Spoilers Ahead** Continue reading Book Review: Bryony and Roses by T. Kingfisher →

Book Reviews, Books, Fantasy

Book Review – Monstrous Little Voices: New Tales from Shakespeare’s Fantasy World

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Monstrous Little Voices is a collection of five short novellas that take place within a fantasy world based upon the works of William Shakespeare, and it’s about 80% brilliant, which is pretty good for an anthology. There’s something of an overarching storyline connecting the stories, in addition to common themes and motifs, and this is nicely executed without making the stories feel totally linear or requiring them to be read in order. At the same time, each one also stands alone quite well.

Foz Meadows kicks things off with “Coral Bones,” a deliberate and thoughtful meditation on the ways in which we learn and perform gender roles. Through the examination of the character of Miranda and Miranda’s life after her marriage and “rescue,” Meadows explores questions about where gender comes from, how it’s imposed upon people, and what are some of the consequences—both personal and social—for failing to adequately conform to strict gender roles. She imagines essentially three worlds: the island where Miranda grew up unconstrained by social expectations, though being also groomed by her father, Prospero, to perform femininity; the world of the court of Naples, where Miranda lives after her marriage to Ferdinand, in which her performance of femininity is no longer optional and the qualities that made her different and attractive to Ferdinand on the island are now unnecessary and unwanted; and the fairy world, into which Miranda flees to escape her unhappy marriage after suffering a miscarriage, and in which gender is fluid and sexuality is flexible. It’s a clever story, and Meadows makes superb use of the Shakespearean elements in order to both pay tribute to and interrogate the Bard’s work.

“The Course of True Love” by Katherine Heartfield takes place, in the world of the book, some twenty years after “Coral Bones,” and it’s an altogether different sort of story—a fairly straightforward romance—that also plays with its source material in interesting ways. Heartfield tells the story of the witch Pomona, who is a friend of Sycorax and devotee of Hecate, and her encounter with an imprisoned fairy ambassador. Of all the stories in Monstrous Little Voices, this one may be the most in the spirit of Shakespeare, filled as it is with fairies, witches, mistaken identities, gender swaps, and humorous banter. What I liked best about it, however, is that it’s a romance where an old woman gets to be the main heroine. Like the previous tale, it’s overtly feminist, but with a significantly lighter and less complicated feminist message than “Coral Bones.”

Emma Newman’s “The Unkindest Cut” may be my favorite story in the collection, and it’s definitely the one about which I most wonder what happens next. Lucia de Medici is a girl with a destiny—to enter into a marriage that will end a war before it even begins—and she’ll do anything to ensure that it comes to pass. It’s an enormous amount of character development and growth squeezed into a relatively short number of pages, and it’s fascinating to watch Lucia change over the course of the story’s events. This girl who begins as somewhat shallow and seemingly marriage-obsessed turns out to be clever, resourceful, and downright ruthless in pursuit of her goals. The ending of the story is somewhat heavily telegraphed, and the ultimate solution to Lucia’s central problem is obvious before it’s even revealed, but it’s so great and the punchline of the story is delivered with such panache that I can barely even think of this as a drawback.

Adrian Tchaikovsky contributes “Even in the Cannon’s Mouth,” which is the story in the collection that is most like an actual play, with at rise descriptions and stage directions being used to provide a theatrical tone and break up the story into distinct scenes. It’s a tactic that I think is used to mixed success here, and I honestly found myself just being overwhelmed by the number of characters and disoriented by the swift and often sudden changes in the narrative. It’s a wild ride, for sure, and there are some interesting interpretations of Shakespeare’s characters—especially Helena—but the actual events of the story are sometimes difficult to follow. I was very glad to be taking notes, but not everyone likes to treat their leisure-reading like homework. Fortunately, everything comes more or less into focus by the end of the story so that there is a mostly satisfying ending, but “Even in the Cannon’s Mouth” is noticeably less substantive than all three of the previous stories. It’s not a bad tale, but it has far less to say than any of the others.

The final story in Monstrous Little Voices is “On the Twelfth Night” by Jonathan Barnes, and it comes somewhat out of left field. It starts off promisingly, albeit very differently than any of the rest of the stories in the collection, being told in second person from the point of view of Shakespeare’s wife, Anne. Then, though, things get weird, and the story barrels towards an ending that I found profoundly disappointing, mostly because it was so completely disconnected from the rest of the collection in tone and subject matter. I might have liked “On the Twelfth Night” in a different context, but here it just feels out of place and so completely unpredicated by the rest of the stories that it’s both baffling and irritating. It’s the highest concept of the book’s tales, but in this case that only means that it has the biggest opportunity to fail with its audience.

All in all, though, Monstrous Little Voices is something special, and this is a great year for reading Shakespeare, being the four hundredth anniversary of his death. With the introduction and afterword, I’d say that it’s definitely worth it to buy the full book, but each story is also being sold separately as an ebook if you prefer to read them that way. At the very least, the first three stories are essential reading, but the whole thing together is worth checking out.

(I received a copy of this title from the publisher via Netgalley.)

Book Reviews, Books, Fantasy, Young Adult

Book Review: Truthwitch by Susan Dennard

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Whew! Truthwitch is an absolutely exhausting, if exhilarating, read. There’s an enormous amount of stuff going on in this book, and I kind of loved it, but the problem with doing lots of things in a novel is that it’s only seldom that they’re all done well. Like many other ambitious and complex works, especially those intended for a YA audience, Truthwitch is a bit of a mixed bag.

The biggest problem with Truthwitch is that, while a ton of stuff happens, nothing is resolved and not all of the things that happen seem to belong in the same story with each other. Some parts feel almost entirely disconnected from the rest, while other parts are both too obviously connected with each other and made to feel much more mysterious than they actually are.

The book opens with main characters Safiya and Iseult in the middle of a “heist,” though it’s never particularly clear what they’re up to, how they planned to get away with it, or why this was how Susan Dennard decided to start the story. It could be intended to establish the girls’ “normal” state of affairs, but it’s made very clear later on that this was something that they did infrequently, as both of them have legit positions in the city they live in that would prevent them from really engaging in a life of crime—not to mention the ways their choices are constricted by their social positions. It’s a strange opening that—even more so in hindsight—feels like the beginning of a very different book than what we’re actually given.

Once you get past the unfortunately confusing and unnecessarily cold open, though, Truthwitch is a fast-paced, enjoyable read. It’s still somewhat scattered at times, with a couple of lengthy diversions into subplots that I’m sure will come to fruition later in the series, but the majority of the book is forward motion. By the final quarter, it veritably hurtles towards a conclusion that is equal parts devastating (in a good way), aggravating, and altogether too neat after the chaotic middle section of the book. This is highlighted by having a final chapter dedicated to wrapping up each character’s story in a few paragraphs to prepare the reader for the next book. This seems to be a common trend in YA series, and I hate it. It’s just too much like handholding, and it puts me in mind of the stilted, at-least-half-redundant fashion in which eighth graders write conclusions to essays.

The other major issue I have with this book is a world-building complaint. While the Witchlands is a big, beautiful, complex fantasy world, the details of its magic system can be frustratingly opaque at times. It’s a great idea, and I loved all the different types of magic, but there are several concepts that are woefully underdeveloped and a couple that are just plain ill-conceived. The worst offenses on this score are Safi and Iseult’s powers, which are both poorly defined and not utilized very smartly in the narrative.

Iseult’s magic as a Threadwitch seems useful, but it’s obvious early on that her abilities are non-normative. It’s also just not really that clear what exactly Threadwitch’s do. Although Iseult’s mother seems to have an important place in their Nomatsi community, it’s never actually explained what her role is or how the Threadwitch magic works. Instead, there’s a lot of sort of mystical explanations that seem at odds with the utilitarian descriptions we get when Iseult actually uses her powers.

Meanwhile, Safi’s magic as a Truthwitch is supposedly extremely rare and ridiculously powerful, but there’s nothing in the narrative to confirm that this is truly the case. Again, there are some descriptions of her using her magic that make is seem extremely useful, but it doesn’t seem to affect Safi’s day to day life that much. Especially when it’s revealed—and relatively early in the book—that Safi’s witchery may not be as accurate or powerful as everyone seems to think, I was left feeling that there’s a good deal of much ado about nothing going on. Indeed, Safi’s magic seems redundant and second-rate when Wordwitches exist; certainly, it doesn’t seem to be powerful enough to be worth starting a world war over, though that is exactly what is happening by the end of the book.

That said, the way that Dennard describes and utilizes the magic of the book’s secondary characters is really well-done. Wordwitches, Glamourwitches, and Windwitches drift in and out of the narrative doing really interesting stuff with their magics, which are shown rather than told about. The Bloodwitch, Aeduan, has his abilities described wonderfully—much more what I would expect of a very rare and powerful magic—and again we are shown how his magic works and the way it fits into the story Dennard is telling. I expect that Safi and Iseult’s magics will play a much larger role in future books, but there’s a coyness to the way they’re used in Truthwitch that I found highly unpleasant, largely because of the way in which it contrasts with the much better fashion in which Dennard shows us literally everyone else’s magic.

The greatest strength of Truthwitch, on the other hand, is its focus on exploring friendship and the families that people choose as opposed to those we’re born into. Safi and Iseult’s relationship is the strongest one in the novel, and no matter what else happens to the two girls, they prioritize their love for each other over nearly everything else. With so many other YA books having a heavier focus on romance, it’s delightfully refreshing to read something where everything revolves around the friendship and love between two young women. At the same time, both Safi and Iseult are distinct individuals with concerns, plans, hopes, and dreams of their own. Though their destinies may be intertwined, they are never subsumed in each other, and their personalities are complementary rather than particularly similar to each other.

That’s not to say that there isn’t any romance, of course, and I found myself rather enjoying Merik and Safi’s hate-to-love journey, though it’s not covering any new ground in the genre. It’s pedestrian, but in a way that is comfortingly familiar. It also helps that it’s not given so much page time that it distracts from other things. Additionally, Merik’s friendship with Kullen is well-portrayed as a parallel to Safi’s friendship with Iseult, so there’s much more than just a romantic subplot going on. Speaking of romance, though, I’m much more interested in whatever is going on between Iseult and Aeduan. Yeah, he’s a terrifying Bloodwitch who is hunting the girls across the world to probably kill them, but there are some sparks there (#iamtrash).

All in all, Truthwitch is a solidly entertaining read and a strong start to an interesting new series. It’s very reminiscent of Sarah J. Maas’s Throne of Glass series, and I’m loving this kind of sword and sorcery trend in YA fiction. While Truthwitch isn’t perfect, none of its flaws are fatal ones, and all are forgivable. I can’t wait to see what happens in the Witchlands next.

Book Reviews, Books, Fantasy, Novella

Book Review: The Drowning Eyes by Emily Foster

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I expected to love The Drowning Eyes, but I’m sad to say I only liked it. The gorgeous cover art and the book’s description had me very excited about it, but it just wasn’t quite what I expected.

In spite of the way the book description reads, The Drowning Eyes is told almost entirely from Tazir’s point of view. I had expected it to be more equally split between Tazir and Shina, so this was a disappointment. Worse, Shina’s viewpoint was utilized suboptimally in addition to simply being underused; while it did offer a point of view through which the reader is given some extra information, mostly about Shina herself, there’s just not enough of it, and Tazir’s stronger personality is much more interesting and entertaining to read. Instead of being a good complement to Tazir’s sections, Shina’s brief POV scenes ended up being a somewhat irritating distraction from the real meat of the story.

I also thought there would be more swashbuckling adventure. Disappointingly, there was basically none. This was largely made up for by Shina’s actually really fascinating weather magic and the accompanying sort of religious order that she’s part of, but still. I feel like I was promised pirates, and all I received was the rather mysterious Dragon Ships, which are never really explained very well and aren’t actually that big a threat to the characters over the course of the journey described in the book. This also has the effect of making it feel throughout the book as if we’re being told over and over again how high the stakes are without it being backed up by any action that the reader is privy to.

It’s a problem, particularly when the personal stakes are plenty high enough to carry the story all on its own. Shina’s trauma could have been handled better and given a little more page space, and I would have loved to see more interaction with Shina and Tazir regarding Shina’s decision to give up her eyes. I love the whole idea of this practice, personally; all the best magic systems have heavy costs for power, and this is one that deserves to be explored more than it was. Tazir in general is a fascinating example of a type of female character that doesn’t usually get to exist—a somewhat grizzled, world-weary, and slightly misanthropic sea captain. I would read a dozen books about her adventures is Emily Foster would just write them. The supporting characters of Kodin and Chaqal are somewhere between underdeveloped and superfluous—especially Kodin—but this is something that, again, could be helped by just a couple more pages dedicated to each of them.

Where things really fell apart for me in this book was the abrupt ending to Shina’s quest and the disorienting shift five years into the future. Frankly, I just don’t care for it, and I would rather have seen Shina’s search for the idol wrapped up a little more neatly. The break between Chaqal and Tazir and then the one between Tazir and Kodin could have still been handled similarly, but closer to the events that actually precipitated these changes in the characters’ relationships. I suppose there’s something to be said for capturing the messiness of human relationships or something, but I would rather read a story that shows things happening instead of reminisces on them years after the fact.

Even with my criticisms of it taken into account, The Drowning Eyes is a wildly enjoyable novella. It’s full of a lot of things that I love in fantasy, and I sincerely hope that it’s part of some larger fantasy setting that we’re only just being introduced to. Probably the biggest issue I have with this novella is that it feels very much as if it’s only a part of something much larger, and I feel frustrated at not having that something larger in my hands to read right now.

Book Reviews, Books, Fantasy, Novella

Book Review: Lustlocked by Matt Wallace

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I received a free advance copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley.

Lustlocked is the second in Matt Wallace’s Sin du Jour series, which began with the riotously funny Envy of Angels late last year. When I read the earlier volume, it was as part of my ongoing project of reading all of Tor.com’s new novellas, but I didn’t expect to like it much. Instead I found it quite enjoyable—smart and fast and a thoroughly fun read. I couldn’t wait for Lustlocked, and I was not disappointed.

It picks up more or less right where Envy of Angels ended, with Lena and Darren still kind of reeling from their experiences during their first days on the job at Sin du Jour and now faced with the decision of whether or not to sign on to the company on a more permanent basis. Of course they do, or there’d be very little story left to tell, and they (and we) quickly learn that there’s never a boring day at this catering outfit. The first job after Lena and Darren sign their contracts is a huge formal wedding for goblin royalty, which quickly gets out of hand when the bride complains that her in-laws aren’t always as nice to her as they could be and resident witch Boosha decides to do something about it.

Where Envy felt a little disjointed and too busy, with the fish-out-of-water story of Lena and Darren seeming almost incidental to the various other, more interesting storylines happening around it, Lustlocked finds a much better balance. There’s still an awful lot going on, including a sort of prologue that still seems somewhat out of place and disconnected from the main plot, which concerns a goblin wedding, but Lustlocked never feels overstuffed the way its predecessor sometimes did. Aside from the prologue, things flow along at a respectable and pleasantly methodical pace.

Where this second installment of the (hopefully open-ended and long-running) series really shines, though, is in continuing to bring to life its world and characters. Every new revelation about the mythology Matt Wallace is creating for this series is a new delight, and between Lustlocked itself and the bonus short story at the end (which was an excellent surprise) there was a ton of character background and development. I loved the sequence where Lena and Darren are being given a tour of the building, where I was glad to meet a couple of new characters. Wallace’s descriptions of food are delectably creative and full of vivid sensory descriptions, while his knowledge of the restaurant/catering/food business is definitely up to the task of making Sin du Jour feel like a real and lived-in place.

My only real criticism of the series so far is that I’m not quite sure what exactly Darren is there for. He didn’t make much of an impression on me in Envy, and he wasn’t much more present in Lustlocked. While Lena is really coming into her own as a character, Darren just kind of… exists. In a series as jam-packed with characters as this one, especially when being told in novella-length pieces, I kind of feel like every character really needs to exist for a specific reason. Lena is his roommate, and even she doesn’t seem to like or think about Darren very much at all, so he sadly ends up feeling superfluous.

In a bittersweet-in-hindsight turn of events, I read Lustlocked the day that David Bowie died, which feels a little like destiny, as it’s heavily implied in the book that David Bowie is/was an actual goblin king. I think this book might always be a little special to me because of that, as it’s a lovely tribute to the man, and one that I especially like because it is such pure, unadulterated fun. Of course David Bowie could be actual goblin royalty—IRL headcanon accepted.