Phil's Rambling Rants
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Below are the 25 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Phil Parker" journal:[<< Previous 25 entries]
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08:36 pm
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Book review: Rogue
Today's book review is Rogue by Rachel Vincent.
This is the second book in the series that started with Stray. It's probably reasonably understandable on its own, but events from the first book are referred to without a lot of explanation and the central characters are ongoing. This episode ends, but it's a major cliffhanger in the overall story arc.
Yes, this is another of these urban fantasy series that there are so many of. This one is about werecats -- people whose alternate form is a 200 lb. black cat, rather than a wolf -- but it's pretty much a werewolf book. The magic and the world seem to be fairly internally consistent and believable by the standards of such things. The werecat society is frustrating but all too believable, and so are the personal relationships and decisions of the main character. This is a very girly book -- we spend a lot of time worrying about clothes, for instance -- but it still held my attention very tightly.
8 out of 10. Your mileage may vary.
( plot summary )
( somewhat spoilery comments )
Tags: book review, fantasy, rachel vincent
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12:30 pm
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Book review: Sword of the Lady
Today's book review is The Sword of the Lady by S. M. Stirling.
This is part of a series. It would probably be hard to understand without reading the immediately previous books, The Sunrise Lands and The Scourge of God.
Most of this book is good rollicking adventure as the ongoing quest proceeds. The battles are very detailed and graphic, and at least to me (being blissfully ignorant of real battles) they seem very believable. I usually have a somewhat limited tolerance for fight scenes, and these go on longer and in more detail than I usually want, but they're well done enough that I'm not chafing. Life in this world is short and all too often nasty, but the heroes manage in spite of it all to be anything but brutish. The very hardness of their lives gives them real purpose, something that's all too lacking in our culture. The interplay of religions forms the philosophical foundation of the world, and it's fascinating, even if it doesn't seem to heading to quite the same conclusions as I would.
The weakest part of the book is the ending. It goes all mystical, in a way that's actually fairly well done, but it's jarring in juxtaposition with gritty realism of the rest of the story. We have only the barest hint of what happened in the material world, and while this does reach a significant milestone, we're left desperately curious about how our heroes actually get out of the mess they're in.
One particular personal pleasure in reading this book is in recognizing so many of the musical references.
8 out of 10.
Tags: book review, fantasy, s m stirling
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01:24 pm
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Book review: Moon Called
Next, I'm going to mention Moon Called by Patricia Briggs.
This is the first book in the Mercy Thompson series. It tells a complete story but leaves plenty of obvious room for the characters to go on and do more.
This is another of the currently burgeoning genre of werewolves, vampires, and such creatures poking around at the edges of our present day society. There's nothing highly original about this world, but it's fairly well handled, using the method of not going into much detail about how the supernatural stuff works. Most of us don't go into a werewolf novel in a very skeptical mood anyway; as long as an author doesn't deliberately rub our noses in something too jarringly bogus, we can go with the flow, and that's just what Briggs does here. Just enough detail about the wider world to support the personal story about the characters we meet, and those characters are compelling. At least, they compel me. I find that a couple of paragraphs introducing a character sympathetically, plus telling me that the character is a werewolf, is enough to leave me ready to take a bullet for that character. Bad things happen to minor characters to advance the plot, and I measure how strongly I'm pulled into the world by just how much pain I feel for them.
I'm still thinking about these characters and their ethical choices after several days and a fair bit of other reading. I don't think it's a perfect book, but it's damn good. 9 out of 10.
( quick plot summary )
ETA: Crap, I meant to say something about the cover (on the 2006 Ace mass market paperback), and I just realized that I'd posted without it. I seldom pay much attention to cover art. Covers often have nothing to do with the book, and I just roll my eyes about it. But the bimbo on the cover of this book has just enough to do with the Mercy in the story that the wrongness is really grating. The text is not porn. The cover is. I don't have anything against porn, but I actually felt just a teeny bit uncomfortable about reading a book with this cover picture in the doctor's office -- because while *I* don't have anything against porn, other people aren't so enlightened. I could go on, but I hope I made my point.
Tags: book review, fantasy, patricia briggs
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11:39 am
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Book review: The Dragon Book
I'm never going to catch up on my book reviews, but I'm going to try to get at least a few of the recent ones. I'll start with The Dragon Book, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, an original anthology of stories about dragons.
Given how hopelessly smitten with large magical quasi-lizards of nearly every description I am, I figured this book must have been written just for me. I'm afraid that I came away disappointed, though. None of the stories were completely uninteresting. Most of them were pretty good. But none of them grabbed me the way I'm grabbed by most of the novels I read that feature dragons. The most memorable thing in the whole book was the pun in the Tad Williams story, which I think makes my personal top 10 list but doesn't crack the top 3. A couple of other lighthearted stories, but nothing else that I remember laughing (or groaning) aloud for. Several stories that touched my heart lightly, but none more than that. A couple that just left me shaking my head going "meh".
6 out of 10.
Tags: anthology, book review, fantasy, gardner dozois, jack dann
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09:58 pm
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Book review: Dragon Bones
I've really lost the thread of writing reviews of the books I read; I'm so many books behind that I wouldn't remember much about most of them if I did try to go back and fill in. But I really should say something about the last one I finished, so rather than trying to make myself write a long piece, I will just say a few words. So:
Today's mini-review is Dragon Bones by Patricia Briggs.
This is a complete story, not just the beginning of a longer work. There is a sequel, so maybe it's the start of a series, but not in a bad way.
Sue WINOLJ has been plugging Patricia Briggs for some time, and I finally got around to picking one of her books up at OVFF. Hey, it has a dragon on the cover, that pretty much guarantees I'll enjoy it, right? Definitely so in this case. A fairly standard fantasy setting, very well handled, with a couple of nicely original bits and characters drawn well enough that they sucked me right in, and kicked me in the guts with a couple of plot twists that completely surprised me and put me through quite the emotional roller coaster. It's not often that I finish a book with that much of a "wow, what a ride!" feeling. I'm not the kind of reader who stops in the middle of the book and tries to guess what will come next, so it's not really that hard to surprise me with a plot. But not this much.
There are some things about the hero and the villain that I realized I didn't really appreciate after I had time to think about them -- traits that I don't like to see linked to good and evil, since I don't believe they are good and evil. This gave just the tiniest bit of tarnish to an otherwise really great read, fast-paced, tight, exciting, and satisfying.
9 out of 10.
Tags: book review, fantasy, patricia briggs
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10:25 pm
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Book review: Rosemary and Rue
Today's book review is Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire.
Damn but I've been waiting a long time to write that sentence. In the interest of full disclosure, I should make it clear (in case anyone who doesn't actually know me reads this) that I've known Seanan for years through filk (though sadly, only casually, because San Francisco is too darn far away and I only see her once in an average year), and that I've been a rather besotted fanboy of her blogging for years. She writes poetry, she writes songs, she writes fan fiction for non-existent TV shows, and she writes dangerously amusing chronicles of her own daily life. She also writes novels, and she is just beginning her career as a professional writer; this is her first published novel, and I really want it to succeed. I can't pretend to be unbiased.
This is the first book in a series. It is a complete episode, no horrible cliffhanger, but it's clear that there's more to come.
There is a fine, fast, violent adventure plot here. There are characters that grab my heart. There's some delightful whimsy and snark. There's some meaningful insight into mortality. But what's really important about this book is the setting and world-building. I've never been to the mundane San Francisco, but McGuire guides me through her fantasy-enhanced version so that it feels wonderfully real. There's a remarkable profusion of faerie lineages, legends, and histories briefly hinted at in ways that make me sure that she really understands how all these pieces go together. Although there are plenty of elements that could be found in books of folk tales or in other contemporary novels, there is a special flavor to this world that is truly compelling. I think the biggest weakness of this book is that, having finished it, I feel that I've just scratched the surface of this world, and I want to explore it in full detail and get answers to lots of questions I wasn't asking at all until I'd finished the book and started thinking about a review.
9 out of 10.
I'm too tired to concentrate on a plot summary; I need to go to bed. Maybe I will actually add one tomorrow.
Tags: book review, fantasy, seanan mcguire
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12:11 am
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Book review: Better Off Undead
Today's book review is Better Off Undead, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Daniel M. Hoyt.
I picked this up on an odd whim at a recent con. Later, I didn't actually remember what had made me so sure that I should get it, but I read a couple of stories. Then I read a couple of novels, and eventually got back to it. Generally good stories; nothing I hated, and no writing bad enough to put me off. I don't like true horror; if it actually grosses me out or scares me, I don't want to read it. But I like stories about people who aren't human. This book manages to have ghosts, zombies, and even a mummy that are engaging, as well as the vampires that I was probably expecting more of when I bought the book. But I don't think any of these stories are going to stay with me very long.
7 out of 10.
Tags: anthology, book review, fantasy
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11:11 pm
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Book review: Dragon Champion
Today's book review is Dragon Champion by E. E. Knight.
This is labeled as "Book One of the Age of Fire". There are three other books in the series that I know of. It starts at the beginning and comes to a reasonable ending place.
I think this book is the definitive proof that I am a hopeless sucker for dragons. I believe I would have found this book terrible if the characters had been presented as humans and the stuff they did modified only the minimum necessary to call them that. But label the protagonist a dragon, with some suitable description to back it up, and I find that I tolerate world building that seems unpolished, a plot that seems like a series of episodes that don't really mesh, and a whole lot of pain and nastiness done to characters I'd just begun to appreciate much more than I really should. I did enjoy reading it, but it's not as tight a package as the Vampire Earth books.
6 out of 10.
( plot summary )
Tags: book review, e e knight, fantasy
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04:53 pm
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Book review: The Enchantment Emporium
Today's book review is The Enchantment Emporium by Tanya Huff.
This book takes place in a brand new world and tells a complete story. There is a lot of sex in this book. Most of it is off screen and we don't spend a whole lot of time on the details, but this is definitely not appropriate for the children of prudish parents.
I come out of this book slightly bemused. It was certainly a good book, the sort of book where I was genuinely disappointed that it was over because I don't want to leave the world. Its characters spend enough time doing realistically stupid human things to be very believable, but manage a lot of the time to be so much more sensible than my culture about their interpersonal relationships that it makes me ache. There was snarky humor, there was action with real tension, there was mystery. But it didn't feel like a Tanya Huff book. Usually, Huff gives us a world that is fairly easy to understand; most of the fun is in watching the characters and the plot. But much of this story is about trying to make sense of what's really going on. It's clear that there are very clear rules; the characters know what's going on. But very little of it is ever actually laid out for the reader; we have to puzzle it out for ourselves. It's entertaining and frustrating at the same time. I almost never re-read books -- I have far more books I want to read than I can get to as it is -- but I have a feeling that I should read this one again just to see how much I missed the first time.
9 out of 10.
Argh. A plot summary will take much more time than I have right now, so I will have to try to get to it later.
Tags: book review, fantasy, tanya huff
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01:00 am
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Book review: Storm from the Shadows
Today's book review is Storm from the Shadows by David Weber.
This is the latest in the Honor Harrington universe, a fairly direct sequel to The Shadow of Saganami, but it would probably be fairly understandable to anyone generally familiar with the universe. It ends in a sadistic multiple cliffhanger (that is, rather than bringing the multiple plot lines together for a conclusion, Weber winds each one up to a dramatically tense moment, and we hit the last page).
This book should serve as a real test of whether you're an addict or not. The overall story arc has clearly jumped the shark. The scope of the main villain's plot is mostly revealed, and it strains credibility badly. Further, the effectiveness of the villain's Machiavellian maneuvering completely shatters believability. Many, many people who have risen to positions of real authority end up doing just what the villain's script says, in a way that makes it clear that it's only happening because it's what the author's script said. The good guys, who are supposed to be smart, start putting the pieces together more because the story says it's time than because it's clear that they should understand now. There are far too many new technological twists for such a well established universe, they seem too pat, and we the readers are just led around by the nose as the author tells us just how the different bits of tech will interact in battles, and the actual details feel like they're being massaged to fit where the story is supposed to go, instead of driving the story there. And then there's the point where the book stops, which as I mentioned in my opening paragraph is about as completely the polar opposite of an ending as anyone could ever manage to write.
However, the metaphysical literary opiates that infuse the series are still present; despite all the above complaints (and the fact that I was warned about the ending before I picked it up), I couldn't keep myself from starting it, I couldn't keep myself from reading it, and only my crummy memory and inability to stay focused on anything will keep me from exploding from frustration as I wait to see how the mess shakes out.
6 out of 10. If you're not already addicted, it's almost certainly too weak to hook you. But if you are already addicted, you know you have to read it anyway. And the next couple, too.
( plot summary )
Tags: book review, david weber, sf
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06:32 pm
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Book review: The Shadow of Saganami
Today's book review is The Shadow of Saganami by David Weber.
This book takes place in the "Honorverse", the world of Honor Harrington, but Lady Harrington only has a cameo appearance. The story itself stands alone fairly well, and the universe would probably make sense without already being familiar.
This book has so much wrong with it that I'd have plenty of meat for a very detailed pan. It's 745 pages, which is certainly a couple hundred too many. A lot of what happens is political, and it's convoluted and contrived. A lot of it is military, and those parts include many passages of excruciating description, explicitly listing details. A number of details at many levels seem to be a bit off. Mostly, the first several chapters just dragged to the point where I remembered that when this book had first come in, I'd set it aside unread, and I was thinking that I should have stuck with my decision at the time.
But somewhere, maybe a third of the way in, Weber's magic kicked in, and I became deeply engrossed in spite of all the flaws. I complained a lot more than in the early Honor books, but I definitely had that feeling of addiction.
If you've never tried Weber, this isn't the best book to start with. (Go find a copy of On Basilisk Station.) If space navy battles aren't your thing, don't bother. But if you're hooked on Honor Harrington and haven't been able to get your fix, this does have the same feel. 7 out of 10.
( plot summary )
Tags: book review, david weber, sf
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11:16 pm
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Book review: In the Courts of the Crimson Kings
First, a confession. I have not posted any book reviews in quite some time. Partly I have been reading fewer novels, but mostly I have just let books awaiting review become part of the general pile of things that I'm not doing. In the hope of partially redeeming myself, I am at least going to review the book I just finished today: In the Courts of the Crimson Kings by S. M. Stirling.
This is a loose sequel to The Sky People -- same universe, but different main characters. Reading The Sky People first is not necessary. (This book does include spoilers for the earlier one, though, so reading in order is somewhat indicated.) It is a complete story in one book.
This is a rip-roaring B-movie adventure story, set in an updated-for-a-new-generation classic Mars of deserts and canals. There's a lot of really nice bits of detail in the world building, moments that just make me go "that's so COOL!" The characters are a little bit larger than life, and a little bit depth-challenged, but sympathetic enough to be engaging, and the hopeless romantic locked up inside me got all mushy over the love story. The plot is a little weak; things are just a little too predictable. And there are a couple of nits I could pick, since they poked into my suspension of disbelief a bit. But some of the images he gives us of what really advanced biotech could be like really activate my sense of wonder.
8 out of 10.
( plot summary )
( nits )
Tags: book review, s m stirling, sf
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05:33 pm
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Book review: Starship: Rebel
I have a truly horrible stack of books I haven't written about here, and I'm going to knock off a couple before I forget them even more completely, starting with Starship: Rebel by Mike Resnick.
This is the fourth in the Starship series. It follows Mutiny and Pirate (both of which seem to have escaped my tagging of my book reviews) and Mercenary. The characters and situation would probably be a little hard to pick up without reading from the beginning.
As the saga of Captain Cole continues, Resnick continues to examine the problems of the decent individual people working for an out of control government. It's more unreal than more seriously military space opera, as Resnick relatively casually offs huge numbers of people, but the real story happens with just a few people ducking and weaving through unintended consequences, trying to figure out what's right, and finding the determination to do it. This is a little more compelling than the earlier books, but also a little more troubling with the large number of deaths that are just background description for the main story. 8 out of 10.
( plot highlights )
Tags: book review, mike resnick, sf
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09:30 am
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Book review: Dragons Wild
The first on my pile of books to review is Dragons Wild by Robert Asprin.
This is the first book in a series. Unfortunately, due to Asprin's untimely death, there is only one more book in the series. This book does a fair job at reaching a stopping point in an ongoing story.
This is a story about how some of the people around us aren't actually human. I enjoy this theme in general, and when the non-humans are called dragons, I'm disposed to enjoy it. Asprin is pretty vague and not completely consistent about the nature of dragons. It's tolerable in a fluffy book, but it's hard to be very original while being so vague. The main thing that's fun about this book is its setting. Most of the book is set in the French Quarter, where Asprin lived for the later part of his life. The Quarter in this book is vividly drawn and fascinating, and has the feel of bring drawn from personal experience. While I suspect that other people who live there see the place a little differently, this book feels like Asprin is telling us about the place he really lived in and loved, with certain characters being dragons to make it a fantasy novel.
This book is fast paced and unpretentious. It's not deeply serious, but it doesn't have the obvious humor of the more familiar Myth series.
Nothing for the ages, but it was fun. 7 out of 10.
( plot highlights )
Tags: book review, fantasy, robert asprin
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12:21 pm
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Book review: By Schism Rent Asunder
The next book review on my pile is By Schism Rent Asunder by David Weber.
This is the direct sequel to Off Armageddon Reef, which you should definitely read first. This volume advances the overall story arc and ends at an only slightly frustrating place.
I could find a lot of reasons to say this is a poor book. The whole world is very contrived to create the setting Weber wanted to play in and call it science fiction, and in this book some new details about the history are revealed that border on deus ex machina. The level of gratuitous detail about the workings of sailing ships, cannon, naval battles, and such is down from the first book but still pretty high. Several major plot points, while emotionally satisfying, are just too pat; things shouldn't work out quite so perfectly except at the end of a fairy tale. It is the measure of Weber's writing that, in spite of being aware of all this, I just couldn't put this book down.
While most of the wider story (beyond the interactions of the individual characters) is pretty whimsical, this book reaches for the profound in its examination of religion. In explaining why the bad guy's version of the world religion is evil, but the good guys really are good guys and really are motivated by genuine faith, it comes pretty close to articulating how I feel about organized religion.
A lot of people will probably argue that this book doesn't deserve to be called great. It does have real weaknesses. But it grabbed me so hard that I can't give it less than a 9 out of 10.
( plot highlights )
Tags: book review, david weber, sf
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11:18 am
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Book review: The Atrocity Archives
I have a stack of backed up book reviews. First on the pile is The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross.
This book comprises a slightly short novel, "The Atrocity Archive", and a novella, "The Concrete Jungle", both previously published. The two episodes connect reasonably well. There is another volume of these stories and I'm not sure how they all fit together, but this volume stands alone well enough.
Stross is a very good world builder, and this book is no exception. The major assumption the world is built on is a very weird one. It posits that the structure of reality is such that simply performing certain kinds of mathematical calculation can actually have meaningful effects which would otherwise be described as magic. Odd as it is, I'd almost be ready to call this science fiction, except that he also includes some other, more traditional magic that doesn't come from the same source and isn't well justified. The mathematical basis of the important magic provides the excuse for enough references to obscure higher mathematics to warm any math geek's heart. The magic is very dark, Lovecraftian stuff; this book could be shelved as horror as well as fantasy. This is juxtaposed against a satirical depiction of bureaucracy run amok; the horror of extradimensional brain eaters is mixed with the horror of accounting for paper clips, so that we're not quite sure if the latter is just comic relief, or if the analogy between the two is really the main point of the book. Against this background, we have plenty of breathless action and things blowing up.
Too far into horror to really be to my taste, but well done for what it is. 7 out of 10.
( plot highlights )
Tags: book review, charles stross, fantasy, horror
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08:58 pm
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Book review: Dragonmaster
Today's book review is Dragonmaster by Chris Bunch.
This appears to be the first book in a series. It ends at a reasonable point for a book in a series, no cliffhanger but some important things unresolved.
I really wanted to like this book. I have a weakness for fluffy fantasy adventures with dragons, which I expected this to be. Unfortunately, even given my bias, I have to say that this book was pretty bad. Things kept happening that just didn't seem to fit in the world; the world itself seems to be vaguely defined so that whatever the plot requires at the moment can be pulled out of it. The dragons themselves are ineffectual in some cases but deadly in others. They're extremely dangerous even to their handlers some of the time but docile enough that their handlers can be completely complacent other times. They have about the intelligence of a horse, except for a couple of places that clearly hint at more, but then the hints aren't followed. Most of the individual scenes are decent, but there are so many places where things just don't fit that it's very hard to stay immersed in the story. I did enjoy it some, but "peasant kid becomes a dragon rider" should be a slam dunk for me.
4 out of 10.
( plot summary )
Tags: book review, chris bunch, fantasy
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01:29 pm
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Book review: The Hidden Family
Today's book review is The Hidden Family by Charles Stross.
This is book two in the Merchant Princes series. It would make considerably less sense without having first read The Family Trade. It also ends somewhat distressingly in the middle of things.
This is fast paced, full of action, and fun, with some interesting speculation, but he did mean things to some characters that diminished my enjoyment. The world remains well constructed and consistent and continues to depend on only a single McGuffin which carries over from the first book. Said McGuffin is fleshed out a little bit, but consistently and fairly. I was on a panel at Capricon this past weekend where it was discussed that people in a different society should actually think and act differently, and it occurred to me that at least in some important ways, Stross is doing this. The story arc is driven by people who are acting in ways that don't seem very reasonable to me, but they are consistent with the way people in those societies act.
7 out of 10.
( plot highlights )
Tags: book review, charles stross, fantasy
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10:39 pm
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Book review: Bitten
Today's book review is Bitten by Kelley Armstrong.
The cover makes this out to be part of a series -- "Women of the Otherworld" -- but it appears to be a complete novel.
This book is definitely a paranormal romance. That is, it is a romance novel with werewolves. I do like werewolves, and while these aren't terribly original, they're somewhat interesting and less ridiculously portrayed than some. However, the standard romance plot, and the bizarre way the heroine behaves to drive that plot, just doesn't appeal to me. It's the sort of a book where you recognize the heroine's Twue Wuv from the first introduction because of the intensity of the heroine's hatred. It's hard to be in full sympathy with a heroine and viewpoint character who bears such a strong grudge against someone who was dishonest with her (in an important way) that it drives her whole character, and yet said heroine is herself dishonest with her live-in boyfriend that she's just about to marry. The supernatural powers of the werewolves seem to be a little bit inconsistent as well, depending on the needs of the plot.
The book did manage to hold onto me hard enough that I read all of it and cared somewhat about the characters. It would probably appeal much more to someone who actually likes romances, but I'm afraid it just wasn't the right book for me. 5 out of 10.
( plot highlights )
Tags: book review, fantasy, kelley armstrong
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09:17 pm
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Book review: The Family Trade
Today's book review is The Family Trade by Charles Stross.
This is the first book in the Merchant Princes series. There are three more out for sure and probably more coming if not already out. It ends in a pretty extreme cliffhanger.
This is an honest speculative story in the sense that it takes a single change in the reality we know, significant but limited in scope, and imagines what people would do with it and where it would lead. It leads to a lot of skulduggery and murdering, though not very much blowing things up, and interpersonal relationships that make the characters reasonably interesting. This isn't as deep as Stross' SF that I've read, but the world-building is still thorough and thoughtful. The story is exciting and engaging. Unfortunately, it doesn't come to an end; we run out of pages just as a couple of important plot twists are revealed.
7 out of 10, lowered for the frustrating ending.
( plot summary )
Tags: book review, charles stross, fantasy
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12:28 pm
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Book review: Dragonstar
Today's book review is Dragonstar by Barbara Hambly.
This is the fourth book in the Dragonsbane series. I read at least the first in this series a long time ago, but I'm fairly sure I never read the one just before this, and despite a section at the beginning summarizing what's gone before, I was rather confused about what was going on. If you seek to read this series, I recommend reading them in order, though finding all of them might be hard. Dragonstar is from 2002 and the others are a fair bit older than that; Dragonsbane I believe is from the early 90s.
This story features a bunch of bad guys, demons who are mainly fighting against each other but using the human world as a battlefield and playground as they go. The book looks at how society can't exist without a basic foundation of trust, as the demons possessing humans leave people not knowing who's really a demon. It also looks at the value of connections with others as some characters who start out only worrying about themselves gradually learn that others are important. The two main characters had a major falling out in the previous book and spend a lot of this one hoping they'll survive and be able to make up. A lot of compelling thematic material, but it didn't come together very well for me, perhaps partly because I spent the first half of the book trying to keep track of who was who. The main protagonist is an exceptionally competent individual, but we keep getting hit over the head with his folksy ordinariness. He speaks in a thick country-bumpkin patois that gets in the way of my appreciating him as a character -- despite being a world-class scholar who seems to be an expert on everything -- and even though we dwell quite a bit on how blind he is without his glasses, he still manages quite a lot of derring-do when he doesn't have them.
Oh, and somebody needs to tell the publisher that they need to choose a cover artist who understands that dragons are supposed to be beautiful.
There's a lot to like in this book, but I spent enough time being confused and frustrated as I read it that it never fully came together for me. 6 out of 10.
( plot summay )
Tags: barbara hambly, book review, fantasy
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09:05 pm
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Book review: Tale of the Thunderbolt
Today's book review is Tale of the Thunderbolt by E. E. Knight.
This is the third book in the ongoing Vampire Earth series. Although it is a self-contained episode, I don't think it explains the background well enough to make complete sense by itself. Start with Way of the Wolf.
This book deals with moral ambiguity -- if you have to do evil things to get to a place where you can do things that you must do, how do you live with yourself? Also, if you have done evil in the past that you've rationalized as being what you had to do to survive, how do you go about rehabilitating yourself? In case you were worried that we're getting too deep into morals, though, it does have a lot of running around and fighting and stuff, and it manages to introduce a vampire stereotype that had previously been missing from the series. A new element is added to the mix that will warm the hearts of mad science fans and seem a bit contrived, even considering the world it's in, to the rest of us. And we have a touching noble sacrifice that seemed to be necessary for the story arc to get back to where we were expecting it to go.
It was fun, but a bit weaker than the previous two. 7 out of 10.
( plot highlights )
Tags: book review, e e knight, fantasy
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09:44 pm
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Book review: Off Armageddon Reef
Tonight's book review is Off Armageddon Reef by David Weber.
This is the first book in a new series, introducing a new world. It ends at a reasonable stopping point in a story that clearly continues.
The starting premise of this book is a rather unpleasant one, and the central character is someone I can't truly believe in. A short book's worth of plot, much of which is inevitable, is stretched into a very long book, in part due to many meticulously described battles. From that, you might expect that I hated the book, but I can't say that; it is clearly written by the same David Weber that brought us the Honor Harrington books, and it's fun to read despite the flaws. It is, however, definitely too long, and not quite as compelling as the Honorverse.
7 out of 10.
( plot highlights )
Tags: book review, david weber, sf
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09:55 pm
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Book review: The Phoenix Endangered
Today's book review is The Phoenix Endangered by Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory.
This is "Book Two of the Enduring Flame", the direct sequel to The Phoenix Unchained, picking up where that left off. It would be a mistake to read this book without first reading Unchained. Unfortunately, it's a bigger mistake to read this one without continuing to the as-yet-unpublished third volume, because it ends in an unbearable cliffhanger.
This book is very much the continuation of the previous volume. It's a fairly interesting world, though definitely cliche, and it continues to be very frustrating how the main characters are supposed to be 17 but are treated and often act as though they're more like 13. I wonder if somewhere in the earlier books in the series, they happened to mention that years are shorter in this world, and I have forgotten it. The most Interesting theme is how people can rationalize doing terrible things and talk themselves into believing that they're good and right.
The story is engaging, but the ending (or should I say, the running out of pages) is extremely frustrating. I'm willing to wait until the next book to see how it all turns out, but to be cut off here without knowing what just happened leaves this reader feeling abused. 6 out of 10.
( plot summary )
Tags: book review, fantasy, james mallory, mercedes lackey
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12:31 pm
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Book review: The Door into Sunset
Today's book review is The Door into Sunset by Diane Duane.
This is the third book in The Tale of the Five. The first, The Door into Fire, was written in 1979. The Door into Shadow was written in 1984. This one in 1992. At the end of this one, it says there's a fourth book coming, The Door into Starlight, but it's still not been written. I had read the first two, but long enough ago that I only had vague memories. If memory serves, they are as good as this one, they'd help in understanding this one a bit (though not totally necessary), and they might actually be easier to get, since they (Fire and Shadow that is) in an omnibus called The Sword and the Dragon in 2002.
This is a world that is so intensely appealing that I find it genuinely painful that I've reached the end of the book. It does have flaws -- from made-up languages that are just too hard to pronounce and get in the way to plot elements that don't seem fair and magic that doesn't seem to be bounded by much. It's not so much about the story itself as about the characters it illuminates and the attitudes of the world. There's one character in particular that I'm really painfully infatuated with, but all the other heroes and their associates are folks I'd really like to know. I wouldn't actually want to live in a world where life in general is that hard, but I wish I could live in a world with these attitudes toward love. We assume there are individuals who harbor jealousy, but the culture that makes a virtue of it seems absent. Multiple marriage is perfectly acceptable, as is sex outside of marriage, and if two people love each other, their genders are no barrier. This world also has a Goddess whose is present but whose influence is limited in a way that is partially explained and makes sense. Rulers actually rule for the benefit of their countries. Their people can know their leaders and trust them. In so many ways, it is what a world should be.
9 out of 10.
( plot summary )
Tags: book review, diane duane, fantasy
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