Category Archives: Fantasy

Temeraire by Naomi Novik

by Rebecca

His Majesty’s Dragon
Naomi Novik
2006

Throne of Jade
Naomi Novik
2006

In honor of Crucible of Gold being released this last Tuesday, I have to go back and review His Majesty’s Dragon and Throne of Jade, the first two book in the Temeraire series.

The books are:
His Majesty’s Dragon
Throne of Jade
Black Powder War
Empire of Ivory
Victory of Eagles
Tongues of Serpents
Crucible of Gold

I have to admit that I’ve actually only read the first two books. However! The reason for that is that I am clearly insane. Despite how I don’t do this for any other series in the world, I can never seem to start the third book without wanting to go back and re-read the series from the beginning. There are so many good scenes and characters and dialog that I can’t resist it. So I go back and read the first two books, at which point I discover that these are really wonderfully dense books in which the plot and action just keeps coming, and so I can’t really read more than two in a row without beginning to feel a bit glutted. But glutted with awesome!

Eventually I’ll have simply memorized the first two, and then I’ll be able to move on to the third and fourth book, I suppose, and I’m very excited about that prospect. But in the mean time, I have to go back and re-read the scene in which Temeraire hatches, and their first air battle, and when Laurence confronts Rankin, and has dinner with Roland, and… and… and…!

Anyway, plot: This is historical fiction based around the Napoleonic War… with dragons. As it turns out, I like historical fiction a lot more when there are dragons inserted. Especially these dragons.

The main character is Captain Will Laurence, formerly of the British Navy. A variety of circumstance, however, lead him to harnessing a young dragon, Temeraire, at which point, he was, perforce, part of the British Aerial Corp. While the war is, of course, a large driving force for the plot, a larger part circles around the differences between the very formal British society that Laurence is accustomed to, the more casual environment of the Aerial Corp, which bridges that of British society and that of the dragons, and the dragon perspective. While Will Laurence and many of the other characters are definitely characters of their time period, the dragons often act as an outside perspective on events and social mores. Dragons, for instance, have their own perspective on sexism and slavery and right and wrong, which isn’t really anachronistic because, well, they’re dragons.

His Majesty’s Dragon and Throne of Jade both really come together because Temeraire is an absolute delight, Laurence is wonderful in his awkward formality and concepts of honor, and they are absolutely devoted to each other, which just makes their differences with and regarding the world around them all the more apparent.

It’s a story about the love of a man for his dragon, and a dragon for his man. Anyway, these are wonderful books and I definitely recommend them.

Fate’s Edge by Ilona Andrews

by Rebecca

Fate’s Edge
Ilona Andrews
2011

As my last hurrah before starting a new semester, I read Fate’s Edge. Of the authors who are currently producing new books, Ilona Andrews is my favorite. However, she has two series and I prefer the other one.

The Edge series has a wonderful premise:  There are two worlds, the Broken (our non-magical world) and the Weird (the magical realm), with the Edge as a thin stretch of land that divides the two realms. The Edge is essentially the gateway between both realms and is largely invisible to both as well. Plus, it’s the poor backwoods residents of either land who actually live there.

In this series, they’re our heroes.

This is an awesome premise!

I like it a lot.

A lot of the plot comes in from the fact that various lands in The Weird have rather tense relationships. It’s kind of Cold War-ish, with spies fighting spies and neither side wanting to really declare outright war unless they have a better chance of winning.

So there’s spies and magic and a long stretch of land that is best known for it’s violently clannish population and smuggling operations.

There is oodles of fun to be had there.

The weakness of the series is in the characters, who come across as fairly cookie-cutter standard romance-novel love-interests. However, each book in this series is slightly better than the one preceding it, and Fate’s Edge is the third book in the series, so it’s characters are the best yet.

One reason for the increasing complexity of the characters is that so far the pattern is that the next male protagonist is introduced as a side character in the preceding book. As a side character can’t be allowed to upstage the main hero of a book, the side characters are given flaws that make them lesser than the hero but also a lot more interesting and realistic. If Audrey and Kaldar, the pairing in this book, had been the main pair in the first book, I would have been a lot happier.

However, since a lot of the characters are introduced in the preceding books, I’m not really sure how well this book can stand on its own. To get a full sense of the world building, you definitely need to read the first two books.

So over all, it’s a good, fun read, and I do recommend it, but you have to choose between reading the first two first two books with their character issues or missing out on some of the awesome world-building.

Touch of Power by Maria V. Snyder

by Rebecca

Touch of Power
Maria Snyder
2011

I read the first few (short) chapters on Amazon, got hooked, checked the book out from the library and read it in an evening. It was a fun light read that was pretty much just what I needed to relax with. It’s one of those books that balances between being a fantasy-adventure novel with a strong romance plot line and being a romance novel with a strong fantasy-adventure plotline.

I believe this is the second fantasy universe for this author, and while the universes have distinct rules of magic and society, the character dynamics in Touch of Power were really similar to those in Poison Study (the first book in the other universe). If you like the one, you’ll probably like the other, (I certainly did) but go in expecting the same type of thing rather than anything spectacularly new or inventive.

The plot is a really common one for romance novels: There are two secretly awesome people – sometimes their awesome is secret from the world, other times their awesome is just secret from each other – who each feel that the other person has wronged them in some way. They then proceed to act either aggressively or passive aggressively at each other in response and things escalate until a final showdown reveals that they have both misunderstood the situation and wronged the other, not in the original perceived acts but in their responses. This can be written at various levels of quality, but when done well it’s a wonderfully self-indulgent bit of character drama. When done poorly, it convinces me that both characters are judgmental idiots. Snyder does one of the better jobs of writing this plot line (although no where near as good as Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice) and manages to largely avoid the pitfall of idiocy.

In this book, Healers with magical healing abilities have been blamed for the great plague that swept the land and thus they are generally killed on sight. Our heroine is a Healer and our hero is a guy who badly needs someone healed and will do whatever it takes to help his friend. Under the circumstances, you can see why they start off with the wrong impression of each other. It was a great deal of fun seeing the characters struggle to work together and waiting to see when the big reveal would happen.

I’ll discuss that  a little more under the spoiler cut, but in general, this is a fun book. I enjoyed it and I recommend it the same way I would recommend a summer blockbuster or a soap opera. It’s not high literature, but I’m rarely in the mood for high literature. It’s fun and relaxing and should be enjoyed as such.

Continue reading →

The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson

by Kinsey

Remember when I complained about All These Things I’ve Done being so unsatisfying, because it was the first book in a planned series and all it did was set it up for interesting things to happen in later books? The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson does NOT have that problem. This is another YA fantasy book with a kick-ass young female protagonist, and another book that is leading off a planned series (The Shades of London), but this one walks the line between providing a complete story and setting up future action perfectly.

Rory is a New Orleans high school student who decides to attend a boarding school in London while her college professor parents are on sabbatical in England. Her school is in London’s East End, in the neighborhood where the Jack the Ripper killings took place and shortly after Rory arrives in town a copycat starts recreating the murders. As if that weren’t creepy enough, Rory begins to get the feeling that something strange is going on and that she can see things her classmates can’t. I’m sure you can all guess that something supernatural is going on and that Rory quickly finds herself at the heart of the mystery.

My favorite thing about this book is Rory’s voice–she’s funny and sarcastic and she sounds modern, like a teenager talking today (or at least, what I think teenagers today sound like). She also has a pretty distinctly Southern voice but doesn’t come off like a hick, which I (as a Southerner) always appreciate. The London stuff was nicely atmospheric and (without giving too much away) the fantasy side of things was sufficiently creepy. I also liked, as you probably guessed, that the book manages to wrap up a major mystery with a thrilling final action scene that provides a great deal of closure. But at the same time, the very last page of the book introduces a new twist that made me so excited about the possibilities of the next book I immediately went to Amazon to see if there was a publication date for book two (there’s not). The Name of the Star feels like the start of something new, while also being a satisfying story all by itself. My only small complaint is that it took a long time for things to get going, and a significant portion of the book is just Rory settling into school and having vaguely odd experiences that she doesn’t pay attention to but that the readers know are significant. As a reader, I like feeling smart enough to pick up on subtle hints but this almost tipped over into Rory seeming dumb, since I had figured things out and was just waiting for her to catch up. Since I read this on my Kindle I can be very precise about how much of the book was just working up to the real action and Rory’s discovery of the true nature of things: 47%, which seems like a lot. However, once things get going they are really going, and I suspect that in the future when folks read a few of the books in close succession the time spent introducing things will be less distracting. Again, minor quibble.

A while back BBCAmerica showed a mystery series called Whitechapel that was essentially this same plot, minus the supernatural element and told from the perspective of the detectives. If you find the Jack the Ripper aspect of the story interesting, you might also enjoy tracking down the TV series.

The Great Night, by Chris Adrian

by Kinsey

Chris Adrian’s The Great Night has been getting fabulous reviews everywhere, including on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, my favorite podcast ever and the thing that makes my commute bearable. The book is billed as a retelling of A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in modern-day San Francisco. I liked the book and would recommend it, but I think anyone interested in reading it should keep two things in mind:

1) It’s more “inspired by” than a retelling. This is not Clueless, where you can find an exact parallel to almost every character and plot point. Yes, there are fairies and it is Midsummer Eve, but from there the plot’s relation to Shakespeare’s play gets hazier. In this version, Titania and Oberon rule the fairy world under a San Francisco park, but their marriage is breaking under the weight of their grief over the death of a human changeling boy they had adopted. Puck is not, well, puck-ish but is (to quote NPR’s PCHH) a Big Bad who is freed from service to the King and Queen and is now out for revenge. Humans are involved, but it’s not two pairs of lovers, it’s three single city residents all on their way to the same party, who get trapped in the park when Puck is freed. And remember the “rude mechanicals,” like Bottom with the donkey’s head? In this story those are the homeless people also trapped in the park during Puck’s rampage.

2) The tone is . . . dark. I know that the play deals with themes that are not all sunshine and roses, including the fickleness of love, our lack of free will, etc. But I’ve always thought of the play as one of Shakepeare’s works that is is easy to watch–everyone lives, it’s funny and pretty and there is usually music and people dressed up in fairy wings. But this is not a happy book, or a playful book, or a light-hearted book. It’s overall theme is one of loss, and how people chose to deal with their losses. Titania and Oberon were suffering from the death of (what they considered) their child, while the human characters are all struggling to figure out how to carry on with their lives after their own tragedies.

But while it wasn’t quite what I was expecting, it is a beautiful book. I don’t particularly like San Francisco (in fairness, I’ve only been there once and it was in June, which is apparently the February of San Francisco), but Adrian’s descriptions make it seem like the city that would have fairies, if any one did. The passages where Titania’s changeling son is dying are both spell-binding and heartbreaking. She’s not a likeable character, but her grief is so real it is painful to read. She and Oberon are forced to take the boy to a human hospital for treatment, and the absurdity of the fairies trying to interact with and understand the human world is striking. I’ve obviously never been in this situation, but I wonder if a hospital–specifically the children’s cancer ward–would seem just as surreal and otherworldly to any parent with critically ill child. When the author is not writing critical beloved books, he’s a pediatric oncologist (don’t we all feel unaccomplished now?) and the parts of the book that talk about medical treatments and hospitals and doctors’ lives have a feeling of authenticity. I also enjoyed how the storylines of the various characters, human and fairy, overlapped in unexpected ways. I don’t want to give anything way, but I found the connections very satisfying.

This is a book that requires some faith–you have to read along and trust that the story and relatonships between the characters will become clear, but it’s one that has stayed with me days after I finished it.

The Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson

by Kinsey

Happy 2012, everyone! My year started off with someone backing into my car on New Year’s Eve and a wave of bitter, bitter cold sweeping over my city, as if even the weather was buckling down and getting back to work. Nonetheless, I had a wonderful holiday and am really excited about what 2012, especially what new books I will read. I plan to do a fair amount of traveling the first part of this year and am actually looking forward to the time in airports and on buses to get some reading done. Nothing like winter travel to ensure that you will have hours and hours to nothing but read and watch your flights get delayed.

To finish up my 2011 books, the best thing I read over the holidays was The Magician King by Lev Grossman, which is the sequel to The Magicians. I raved about how much I loved The Magicians and I liked the follow-up just as much. I don’t want to say anything about the plot of characters, because it could spoil things for people who haven’t read the first one, so let me just say that I thought they were both great, everyone should go read them both, and I am very much looking forward to the planned third book.

The book I can talk about is also great, although in a different way. The Girl of Fire and Thornsis the latest in my winter string of YA books featuring kick-ass female protagonists, and it’s my favorite so far. Elisa is the younger princess of a small country and as the book starts she is being married off to the king of a neighboring land, as part of a treaty that will unite the two nations against an aggressive enemy that is threatening them both. Elisa is smart and understands the political necessity of the marriage, but she is also insecure, overweight, in the shadow of her capable older sister, and overwhelmed at the idea of being queen of a foreign nation. And when she gets to her new home she learns that her husband hasn’t told anyone they’re married, leaving her stuck in the middle of a political mess. To top it all off, Elisa is the one child chosen by God every 100 years to bear the Godstone, a sign that she has been selected to perform a great service, but she has so little faith in herself that she is scared she won’t even recognize the service when she sees it.

From this starting point, the book follows a military and political storyline as the country prepares for war, but the real focus is Elisa’s development as a person and a leader. There is a terrible trope in fiction (both YA and adult) in which the fat girl loses weight and finds herself, and I had a moment of panic early in this book when I thought that was where things might be going. However, Carson does a great job of showing how Elisa doesn’t become an entirely new (thin) person, but uses the skills and intelligence she always had to rise to the occasion and do what needs to be done. Yes, she loses weight along the way (why can’t a character just be fat and awesome for once?) but it’s made clear that this is not the most important change. Elisa’s voice is so clear throughout the story that her progression from scared teenager to capable adult feels like real, believable growth.

I will also say this: The Girl of Fire and Thorns surprised me constantly. As much as I love YA books, they can sometimes be predictable, and there were a few plots twists in this one that I did not expect at all. And while there could be a sequel that continues the story, and I would happily spend more time with Elisa, this is a complete and satisfying book all on it’s own. I’ve still got a pile of YA fantasy waiting for me, but I suspect this one will stay very high on my list.

“Magic Bites” by Ilona Andrews

by Rebecca

Magic Bites
by Ilona Andrews
2007

Since I reviewed Magic Gifts yesterday, I decided I needed to go back and introduce the universe. Magic Bites is the first in a seven-book series, five of which have been published at this point and two of which I am avidly waiting for. While each book has it’s own stand-alone plot, the characters develop across books. There are also four short stories and an upcoming book that are tangential to the main series.

But first, some background:

There have been a huge number of books published recently with:
1. Spunky female protagonist
2. Vampires
3. Werewolves

Off the top of my head, authors who have written these books are:
Patricia Briggs
Stephanie Meyer
Laurel K. Hamilton
Charlaine Harris
Robin McKinely
Ilona Andrews

And whole lot more.

These are, frankly, just the ones that I’ve personally read, and read recently. (Some of these I liked, some of these I didn’t, and I’ll tell you all about it if you ask nicely… or if you refrain from yelling “No!” loudly enough.) There were a lot more whose covers I’ve seen in bookstores and simply couldn’t bear to read because I was positively glutted with spunky female protagonists dealing with vampires and werewolves (SFPDwV&W).

However, I am still going to write a review of Magic Bites recommending this book to all of you other readers out there who are similarly glutted on SFPDwV&W.

It’s fabulous and you should read it.

Ilona Andrews the author, incidentally, is actually made up of a married couple: Ilona Andrews the person and Gordon Andrews her husband. I went to a convention they were at recently and got my copy of Magic Bites signed by Gordon Andrews. He wrote:

This book is terrible. Start with Magic Strikes. It’s the best.
To Rebecca
Gordon and Ilona Andrews
Don’t read this book!

I, on the other hand, am perfectly willing to tell you that despite being half of the author, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about and you should definitely read Magic Bites, and you should read it before reading Magic Strikes (which is the third book in the seven book series.)

Magic Bites is their first published novel and shows some of the uncertainty of a first book, but were it shines is in world building. This book is an introduction to the characters and to the world. The characters are fun and idiosyncratic and the world is magnificent.

It’s urban fantasy, set in Atlanta, Georgia, with magic, but the book explains how and why the magic is there, from an educated layperson’s perspective.

The werewolves aren’t just werewolves, they have an extremely contagious magic-based virus that has both physical and mental symptoms. They have a culture and a reason for that culture.

Vampires, on the other hand, are dead. They are dead and they are bloodthirsty and they will kill you unless piloted by a “Master of the Dead.” The Masters of the Dead have a massive corporate/cult structure of their own.

And our main character, spunky female protagonist that she is, has motivation and history and reason for all of her character strengths and weaknesses.

This book introduces the reader to a world that has vampires and werewolves and a spunky female protagonist and also, unlike pretty much all other others, makes sense.

(In fact, it makes enough sense that I can quibble about little mistakes in the logical structure of the world because there’s enough logic there for there to be mistakes! If you’re at all interested, I would absolutely love to nitpick in the comments section, because this is a book, and the beginning of a series, well worth reading and thinking about and nitpicking.)

“Magic Gifts” by Ilona Andrews

by Rebecca

“Magic Gifts”
by Ilona Andrews
2011

I like Vampire-Werewolf type books. And I have strong opinions regarding which ones are good and which ones… aren’t, but for now, I want to talk about something that one of my favorite authors did for Christmas:

She (actually “they” since Ilona Andrews is a husband-wife duo, but I’m going to go on and refer to her as her) gave her fans a novella. It’s free for download from her website, in pdf, kindle, or epub from her blog.*

The story has Kate Daniels (mercenary fighter and only recently acknowledged consort to Curran) and Curran (Beast Lord) dealing with vampires, attorneys, neo-vikings, and fae. All they wanted was to go on a nice date, but stuff keeps on happening. It’s awesome!

The events happen after the events of the fifth book in the Kate Daniels series and in the background of the sixth book (Gunmetal Magic, which focuses on Andrea Nash, Kate’s best friend and coworker).

As a heads-up, because this is a Christmas present, free to the fans, it was not given a professional lay out or a final professional proof reading, so expect a few typos and layout problems, but the story itself hangs together and the world building is where this author really shines and she shines here, too.

So thank you, Ilona Andrews, for a wonderful Christmas present, and I hope readers here enjoy it, too.

* This was posted late on Christmas Eve 2011, and will be available for two weeks. After that, it will be cleaned up and made available as a short story included at the end of Gunmetal Magic.

Warm Bodies

by Anna

by Isaac Marion

I heard this theory that vampires are popular when the Democrats are in power because the fear is that Democrats are moral degenerates, and zombies are popular when Republicans are in power because the fear is that Republicans are mindless hordes. It’s entertaining, but doesn’t really seem to hold true. The current vampire fad (these things do seem to see-saw) seemed to have started back with Bush in office, and right now I think we are seeing a decline in vampires and an upswing in zombies while Obama is in office.

Anyway, all of this is to say that I think Warm Bodies is very much talking about our current culture (at least in the U.S.), where people feel isolated and disenfranchised (i.e. dead). The zombie protagonist fights against his very nature to attempt to have memories and feelings, and it is poetic, sweet and depressing, all at once.

I like to imagine that the Isaac Marion was out with friends and they were talking about the current romanticism of creatures like werewolves and vampires that used to be fearsome and grotesque. And maybe a friend dared him to write a book romanticizing the truly morbid, zombies, and, by God, Marion won that bet!

It is, however, much more than a love story. Warm Bodies explores life, and what it means to be alive versus dead, regardless of biological conditions of life. Zombies is what lets Marion explore that. Walking dead characters want something more out of their existence, while living characters yearn for non-rising death in the post-apocolyptic land.

I think the author was able to really explore an idea that I’ve been rattling around in my brain for a while (but have been unable to really pin down), which is that our culture seems increasingly fascinated with the idea of an Apocalypse. Now, I have a tendency to assume my thoughts and feelings reflect the thoughts and feelings of our society as a whole, so definitely take that into consideration. It feels like in 1999, when Y2K was imminent, everyone was all abuzz with it, but with real concern and fear for the changes it could inflict.

The current 2012 talk feels a bit more wistful than nervous, like we know not to expect anything, but that we are actually hoping that something will happen. That there is a pervasive and growing idea that there is something wrong with our society, that we are on the wrong track, but that it will take a big upheaval to make a change and we need something badly to trigger this change. That is what Warm Bodies is all about to me.

I will say that the ending doesn’t quite stand up to the rest of the book, though it is still very good. Like a lot of authors who are trying to relate pretty complicated themes in a narrative structure, Marion somewhat wrote himself into a bit of a corner. Even so, I’m still going to go ahead and say it: come-what-may in December, I’m declaring this as my favorite book of 2011.

Oh, one last thing: the book begins with a scenario very similar to the short story that I previously posted about, but veers off into a new direction that was initially disconcerting to me, but of course paid off in the end. It does, however, undo some of the more simple sweetness of the original short story, which made me a little sad.

“Mastiff” by Tamora Pierce

by Rebecca

Mastiff coverMastiff
Tamora Pierce
(2011)

Despite the many other things I should have been doing, I bought and read Tamora Pierce’s latest book as soon as it came out. I loved it, of course.

Given that I loved it, of course, you can see that I might just be a tad biased in my review. I grew up with this universe. I love these books, and I love this author. Her first book (Alanna: The First Adventure) was published in 1983, and since then she’s written 26 other novels, generally broken into quartets, and set in one of two universes.

Both of the universes she writes are magical fantasy: Tortall has knights and wars and a pantheon of gods; Emelan has mages and priests and pirates. Fun!

Each quartet of books stands alone, although there are often brief appearances of the characters from previous quartets for the delight of those readers who have recognize them.  And while the characters develop through their quartets, the plots of each individual book also stand alone for the most part.

Mastiff, her most recent book, is set in Tortall and is the third book in a rare trilogy rather than a quartet. In Terrier, Becca Cooper was in training to be a city guard; in Bloodhound, she was finally an official city guard.

In Mastiff, Becca Cooper is one of the best of the city guards and thus given the hardest tasks. I think that’s why Mastiff struck me as slightly more mature than other of Pierce’s books. While she’s not formulaic, per se—each plot is different and each character is unique—she writes coming-of-age stories, generally of young girls. There are multiple stages of coming of age, and each quartet will follow a character through some of them.

Becca had her coming of age experiences in the first two books and had, in fact, come completely of age. In this, the character development was very much that of an adult in an adult’s world. Good and evil are not necessarily clearly delineated and sometimes even when they are, you wish they weren’t. The book starts with the funeral of Becca’s fiancé whom she had been intending to break up with and is then immediately sent on a mission to stop a traitor to the crown intent on civil war. There’s guilt and betrayal mixed in with adventure and mystery.

There’s also a sense of foreshadowing throughout this entire series. It’s set a hundred years prior to her first book, and for those of us who have read the Alanna series, we can see developing the social changes that Alanna will have to fight against.

I enjoyed the book immensely, I enjoyed the series immensely, and I enjoy this universe immensely. I definitely recommend them all. But if this is an entirely new universe to you, I recommend that you start with the first book in any of the quartets (or trilogy):
Alanna: The first adventure
Wild Mage
First Test
Terrier