It’s been a while since I read a Mercy Thompson book and I
was a little out of touch when I picked up Smoke Bitten, which is already a twelfth
in the series. But that didn’t matter at all. Briggs has a very reader friendly
writing style and I was soon brought up to speed about what had happened and
who was who, and had no trouble following the story.
This book is slightly smaller in scale than some of the
previous ones when it comes to the size and lethalness of the enemy and attack
on Mercy and her werewolf pack. Not that a killer who can turn into a smoke is
easy to face. To add tension, a portal to Underhill opens to Mercy’s backyard,
a rouge pack threatens Mercy’s, and Adam is suffering from a magical problem he’s
not willing to discuss with Mercy, creating tension between them.
The story opens with an emotional punch, followed by a deceptively
slow unfolding of the main plot. Little things happen here and there, and all
of a sudden it’s time for the final confrontation. Everything works out to
satisfaction in the end, and Mercy learns new things about herself and Adam.
All in all, a good addition to the series.
I received a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an
honest review.
Tower of Mud and Straw is a short fantasy novel (or a long
short story) that tells an interesting and complex story in the limited space it’s
given. I received a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Shea Ashcroft is a disgraced politician who is
ordered to the provinces to oversee a construction of a gigantic tower. Feeling
sorry for himself, he decides to make sure it’s built fast so that he can
return to the queen victorious. But this dream soon crumbles. Dangerous alien
technology is being used for building the tower, and he has no choice but to
remove it, halting the project. Humans are furious, but aliens rejoice: they
tell a story of a similar tower that caused a portal to open and destroy their
world. But Shea is a bit wishy-washy person and easy to persuade. A promise of a
high position in court makes him return the alien technology to start the construction
again—only to discover that the aliens were right. There is a portal forming.
Now the choice becomes between destroying the tower and his future, or letting
the portal destroy everything.
Alongside the main story there is another of Shea’s sister
Lena who has died because of the alien technology, which dictates much of Shea’s
decisions. He meets another Lena, an alien woman opposing the tower and they
fall in love—or at least he does. His decision to continue building the tower
seals Lena’s fate, and Shea is left with the realisation that he has failed two
women he has loved. So how to atone?
The ending is fairly self-evident after a certain point;
there’s only one way it can go for the tower. Shea’s fate, however, could’ve
gone either way. The choice suits a short story better than it would’ve suited
a long novel, though I kind of wished there would have been another way out for Shea.
This was an excellent story that could easily have been a longer
novel too; the world is rich and the politics that are only hinted at here are
complex. The writing style was sparse, a little too sparse at times; it
could’ve used some fleshing out in places, especially when it came to
describing sequences of events. But that, too, suited the short form just fine.
All in all, a great one evening’s read.
A Conventicle of Magpies is the first book in the Bloodskill
duology by L.M.R. Clarke. It’s set in an industrial town of Stamchester in a unique
world with factories, early automobiles, and even some telephones, but also
magic called bloodskill that is available for all. The world is referred to as
Victorian in the book description, but it’s not steampunk/gaslight punk—or very
Victorian in general. Edwardian, maybe, if one absolutely has to utilise period
descriptions from our world. I received a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Stamchester is a hotspot of political tension. It has
belonged to one set of people conquered by the Avanish, who have then brought in a
different set of people, the Saosuíasei, to live there as cheap labour while
they plunder the original country of the Saosuíasei. For some reason that isn’t
given a very good explanation for, other than prejudice, the Avanish have now
decided to empty Stamchester of the Saosuíasei, with violence if necessary.
Rook is a young Saosuíasei woman living in the slums where
her people have been banished. She belongs to a gang of women led by Mama
Magpie who steal to protect the Saosuíasei women. When the Avanish begin to move
against the Saosuíasei, the women team up with another gang, Jaguars, to try
to save their people.
The book took a while to get going, or decide what the story
it wanted to tell was. Rook has a lot going on in her life. She has lost an
older sister and father, and has to take care of her ten siblings practically
alone. A serial killer haunts the slums, emptying the victims of blood to use
it in blood magic—a storyline that never really moved the plot and seemed
superfluous despite the importance of blood to all magic users. A childhood
friend has chosen to side with the enemy, much to the sorrow of Rook and her
adoptive sister Kestrel, another gang member. It isn’t until the gangs unite
against the Avanish that the story finds a direction that holds until the end.
Rook is an interesting character who always tries to do the
right thing despite the enormous pressure she is constantly under from every
direction. She’s good with bloodskill and stealing, but not overly superior.
She comes across as a bit aloof though, and apart from Kestrel, she doesn’t
really connect with any of the side characters. And neither does the reader.
Side characters were the main weakness of the story. There
were simply too many of them, and the focus never stayed in them long enough
for the reader to form an attachment. At the beginning of the book there were
one set of people with Rook, in the middle there was another, and then again a new
set, none of which were properly introduced to the reader. They simply appear, do
their part in that section of the plot, and then disappear.
The character most ill served by this was Kestrel, Rook’s
stalwart companion and the main side character. She was clearly meant to give
the book LBQT+ status, but she turned out to be a mere token. She’s a biological
male presenting as a woman, but her main concern seemed to be her looks, and
her only role was to save Rook from scrapes. I found it especially
disappointing that she was pushed aside when the plot required infiltration to
a women’s prison. The excuse was that she would have to strip, but that didn’t even
happen to the women who eventually participated, publicly anyway.
It’s an author’s job to put their characters in difficult
situations, and then extradite them whilst staying true to their
characteristics, not push them aside when they become incovenient for the story. There would’ve been plenty of ways to include Kestrel, but she
wasn’t. So, instead of being inclusive, the message here is that she isn’t good
enough as she is to have agency or a proper role, even as a side character in a make-believe
world. I hope this is done better in the next book.
The book ends when the war with the Avanish finally begins.
I find it difficult to imagine how the Saosuíasei will save the day against
the far superior enemy who have almost destroyed them already. But, despite the
issues I had with this book, I’m definitely going to find out how the story
ends.
A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher
This is the fourth book by T. Kingfisher that I’ve read—pretty
much back to back—and the first one meant for younger readers. T. Kingfisher is
a penname for Ursula Vernon, who mostly writes children’s books, but according
to her afterword, A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking was deemed too dark for
her audience by all publishers who had shown interest in it, so she published
it under her adult penname.
Mona is a fourteen-year-old baker who works at her aunt’s
bakery, happily making bread and muffins. She’s also a minor wizard with
affinity to baking—and only to that. She can persuade her dough to have the
desired density or the bread not to burn in the oven. And she can animate
gingerbread men to amuse her customers. She’s also responsible for the world’s
angriest sour bread starter, Bob. It eats rats.
Everything is perfect, until the day Mona finds a dead girl
on the floor of the bakery. Someone is killing all minor mages in their town. It’s
followed by a fearmongering campaign against them, and a call for all mages to
register. Angered by this, Mona decides to demand that the leader of her town
do something about it, and gets pulled into dangerous political plotting. Soon
she finds herself as the only mage left in town and it’s up to her to defend it
with magic. And since it’s bread she knows, it’s bread she uses.
I found this an excellent book. Mona was a great character,
resourceful and determined, and she grew a great deal during the course of the
book. The story was intriguing and stakes were high enough to keep an adult’s
interest. Descriptions of Mona’s magic were fun, and the side characters were
great; special mention goes to the gingerbread man who was brilliant. I’m absolutely
sure that I would’ve loved this book when I was twelve too. Yes, there were
dead bodies and evil adults, but so there were in many other books too that I
read at that age. Magic is always intriguing, especially when it’s used as
imaginatively as it is here, and a child rising to save the day when adults can’t
is always appealing. I would definitely recommend this to middle grade readers.
Battle Ground is already seventeenth book in the Dresden
Files UF series about Harry Dresden, the only professional wizard in Chicago. There was a long gap between books fifteen and sixteen, which
ended with an epic two-part story consisting of Peace Talks and this one.
Battle Ground is a good book, but exhausting. Sooo
exhausting. It starts right where the previous book ended, at the same scene,
on the eve of a great battle against an ancient goddess. From there it’s
basically nonstop war, with the enemy getting bigger and more brutal, forcing Harry
to become bigger and more brutal too, which isn’t always good for him. Once
the action starts, there are barely any breathers for the reader to rest for a
minute or two. I had to put the book aside several times just to be able to go
on. There are some sad moments—it is a battle, after all—the biggest taking
place surprisingly early in the book, but the narrative doesn’t really pause
for them either, to let the reader mourn. The war takes precedence.
I’m not entirely sure it was a good idea to split into two
books what could have been one with more brutal editing. Peace Talks especially
was full of filler scenes that could’ve been cut, and the epic battle in Battle
Ground could’ve been shorter. What turned out to be the main story arc between
the two—Thomas’s fate and the new baddie—was completely lost in unnecessary
noise, and only became visible as an afterthought in the last chapter, where we
learned in one sentence why Thomas had attacked the goblin king in the first place. I’d given Peace Talks four stars originally—most likely because I was so happy there was a new Dresden Files book—but after reading both, I don’t think it deserves more than three stars either.
I’m also not happy with how Murphy was treated in these two books. It was as if
the author didn’t know what to do with her now that she and Harry were
romantically involved. Physically broken, she was made a bit too dependent on
him, and that wasn’t good for her, which she rightly railed against—and was
punished for. And I do mean punished, in the meanest and most unnecessary way
possible, robbing her off all glory and agency.
Going in, I was sure this would be the last book in the
series. But once the dust had settled and Harry had had a chance to take a
stock of his life, it turned out there’s more to him yet. The ending put him
firmly in a new place in life—the table was definitely cleared for it—though
not entirely to his liking. I was ready to give up the series that was
once my absolute favourite, but I think I’ll hang on to see how Harry will wriggle
his way out of that.
The edition I read had a short story at the end. It was a sweet
Christmas story, and nicely cleansing after the book itself. Left me feeling
much better.
I recently discovered T. Kingfisher’s (Ursula Vernon) adult
fantasy and became an instant fan. I started with Paladin’s Grace, an
excellent fantasy romance, and proceeded to read the Clockataur War duology that
began with Clockwork Boys and concluded in The Wonder Engine.
The two books are perhaps best reviewed together, as they
form one story and are told in very uneven parts, with the latter book being
perhaps three times as long as the first. They’re set in the same world as Paladin’s Grace, a fairly generic pre-industrial land of city-states with their
own rulers and constant wars. Gods are aplenty and they’re very hands-on and
real for their paladins, but there are also mechanical inventions and non-human
creatures.
Anuket City has declared a war to the Capital, and this time
they’re attacking with monstrous clockwork engines that are indestructible. An
army of them is marching over the mountains and it’s only a matter of time
before they reach the Dowager’s city. After exhausting all options, the ruler
sends out a team of criminals. There’s Slate, a forger who’s fled Anuket City a
few years earlier after angering the local crime lord. Brennan is an assassin
and Slate’s former lover. And Caliban is a former paladin for Dreaming God who
was possessed by a demon he was supposed to slay and butchered a bunch of nuns.
They’re joined by Learned Edmund, a scholar in search of a colleague who went
to study the Clockwork Boys and disappeared. They form a very uneven group, but during the
journey to the Anuket City, they become a team—of sorts. The first book ends
when they reach the city, rather abruptly.
The second book finds the group trying to learn where the
Clockwork Boys come from and how to destroy them. The first half of the book is
a tad slow, but it picks up pace at half-point, when the crime lord Slate had
betrayed finds her. From there it’s constant action until the mission is
completed.
I really liked these books, despite the unevenness and
slowness. The characters grew and changed a lot during their mission and I came
to like all of them. Even Learned Edmund who seemed insufferable at first turned
out to be a compassionate young man with keen eye to smaller creatures among
them. There was a love story too, between Slate and Caliban, but it was
secondary to the mission, and I liked how the mission and the events of the
final battle affected it. The ending made me wish there were more books in the series
about the adventures of Slate and Caliban, but I’ll settle with follow-up books
to Paladin’s Grace.
M.A. Carrick is a pseudonym for authors Marie Brennan and
Alyc Helms, and The Mask of Mirrors is their first book together. It’s high
fantasy set in a world with magic, and it starts the Rook and Rose series. I received a free review copy
from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
The book is written by two anthropologists and it shows.
Tremendous work has gone to creating a world with hundreds of details ranging
from directions (earthwise/sunwise) and times of day (sun hours and earth
hours) to rules of card games and duels. The various peoples living in the city
of Nadežra
have their unique cultures with different clothing, deities and even funeral
habits, from nobility to street gangs. None of it is explained to the reader;
there are no info dumps and the reader is left to learn everything as they go.
Mostly it works well—much of it is intuitive and none of it is vital for
following the story—but there was so much of it that it was exhausting at
times. There is a map and a glossary, but they’re not very easy to use in an
ebook.
Nadežra is a city ruled by conquerors, and the peace between
the ruling (white) people and the (Romani-type) tribes whose holy town is
occupied, is tenuous at best. No one is happy with the situation, and there are
elements on both sides that have decided to do something about it—at the same
time.
In the middle of this arrives Ren with her sister Tess.
They are former street urchins who have escaped from their cruel gang lord
several years earlier, and have now returned to Nadežra with a bold plan to
infiltrate a noble family and get rich. It’s a long con based on Ren’s skills
at pretence and lying and her knowledge about the family she’s about to dupe.
Things start very well and Ren makes a splash in the
society. But in order to maintain her con, she is drawn into the affairs of nobility
and crime lords alike. The only way out is forward and Ren isn’t about to give up.
Not even when she realises that the entire city is at risk and she might be the
person to destroy it.
The book is divided into four parts. The first two are
mostly a set-up for the latter two, and they are very slow to read. There’s a
lot going on, but no plot to follow. The narrative doesn’t carry the reader
forward, and it’s difficult to figure out what is important to pay attention
to. The chapters don’t have an action-sequence pattern, and often when a
chapter ends with a call to action, nothing comes of it, or the action happens
where the reader cannot see, making them feel let down. This applies to all the
point of view characters. They show up at random intervals to do something that
seems random, or their chapters exist only to introduce the character. Tess,
for example, doesn’t have a plot-influencing role, but she has her own chapters.
This changes after the half point. The latter two parts have
a coherent plot that sweeps the reader with it and doesn’t let go. Ren
discovers several schemes to destroy the city, and instead of working on her
con, she finds herself trying to save Nadežra. The reader is kept guessing to
the end if and how she might be able to do it.
This is a book that relies very much on Ren’s character. She’s
a survivor who is willing to do pretty much anything to keep herself and Tess
safe. Her morals are questionable from the start, but she changes along the way.
The con becomes less important after she comes to like the people she’s trying
to dupe, and saving the town becomes a priority over the con—though she’s also
doing it to save herself.
There are several other characters too, none of which are
easy to get a hang of. Are they good or bad, love-interests or backstabbers, and
will they play any role in the final? Some people that we spend a lot of time with
in the first half disappear completely, making them a waste of reader’s time,
and we never get to know the baddies. But the characters with their POV
chapters are all interesting, with secrets that aren’t revealed in this first
book—but at least we learn the biggest one, the identity of the Rook. I would’ve
been really annoyed if I’d had to wait for that any longer than I did.
All in all, this was a very mixed reading experience. I was
ready to give up several times during the first half, as the story didn’t seem
to go anywhere. But then I read the latter half in two days. And I’m glad I
persevered, as the pay-off was satisfying, and there were a couple of interesting twists saved for the last. It just didn’t need the almost
seven hundred pages to get there. Ren ends up in a new place in life and it’ll
be interesting to read where she’ll take her con from here.
The Invisible Library series by Genevieve Cogman has advanced to its seventh
book. It’s been an interesting series so far, with slightly uneven quality when
it comes to the plots; some are really convoluted, some more simple. The Dark Archive sits somewhere in the middle, with a fairly straightforward plot and
multiple adversaries.
The series is set in a universe where there are several
parallel earths in various stages of development, with similarities to ‘ours’ in
those eras, but with some differences too, like a world where Nazis weren’t
defeated, for example. The world where the main characters spend most of their time is Victorian with airship travel and other steampunk elements,
but there are highly advanced far future societies as well, and everything in
between. The parallel worlds fall on spectrum from highly orderly to high
chaos, with dragons ruling over the first and the fae the latter. Humans are
found in all worlds, but they don’t have much say in how they are governed by
the more powerful forces.
In the middle of everything is the Library that exists between
worlds, connecting them through libraries. Its job is to maintain some sort of
balance between order and chaos. This it does by collecting books from each
world to the Library that anchors them. Librarians are more thieves and spies
than anything else, and none more so than the main character Irene.
There are, of course, forces that try to push the worlds off
balance, and Irene, with the help of her dragon apprentice—current love
interest—Kai, and recurring cast of characters, has the thankless job of
thwarting them. In this seventh book, two former foes that she has believed
dead return. As always, it’s much down to Irene’s ingenuity to make sure
everyone survives, even if it means that the enemy lives to try again.
These books are very much plot-driven, and issues like
romance are secondary; heavy on action and light on emotions. The romance
between Irene and Kai comes across as an afterthought, and after several books
it still doesn’t feel believable. Partly this is because the two are very
different, partly because the reader never sees them in normal situations where
they might have time for their romance. But at least Kai has a proper role in
this one. There’s a new character too, Irene’s fae apprentice Catherine who
seems like a good addition.
Once again, Irene’s world is badly shaken with information
concerning her real parent—though this reader at least had suspected it already.
And the book ends with an introduction of an entirely new force working behind
the scenes. Time will tell whether they are for or against the Library. I, for
one, will definitely continue with the series to find out.
It’s a new year and that means a new Goodreads Reading
Challenge. I’ve set myself a reading goal there several years in a row, and I find
it a fun way to keep track of what I’ve read and maybe challenge myself a
little too. Last year I made a personal reading record of ninety-five books (or
eighty-five, if you only count those I finished). This year I pledged to read
eighty books, though that may change later.
Every year, I make a list too, of books that I want to read. It’s
a guideline more than a mandatory programme; last year I only read ten
books from it. But I’ve noticed that it’s easier to keep up with everything I
want to read if I’ve listed every book I already own and haven’t read yet, the
books on my wish list and the upcoming publications by my favourite authors.
This year’s list contains a whopping hundred and fifty
books, mostly because I did so poorly with it last year that several books moved
over. It has four sections: books from the old list, new books, books from
NetGalley, and books I chance to read outside it—obviously currently empty.
There are fifty-two books from the old list. Some of them
didn’t seem so interesting anymore, so I pruned it down to those I already own
or definitely want to read. That brought it down to twenty books. These include
The Burning God by R.F. Kuang, which was published in November and I got for a
Christmas present and didn’t have time to read last year, and Crush the King by
Jennifer Estep that I reserved from the local library, but haven’t got yet.
The list of new books filled with everything I bought last
year and didn’t have time to read. There are several by Lindsay Buroker, for
example, as many of her boxed sets were free or discounted—and
she’s published a lot. But there are also many upcoming books from my favourite
authors; two from J.R. Ward and three from Nalini Singh. All in all, the list
has seventy-nine books, so if I manage to read them all, that’s my reading
challenge pretty much covered.
And then there’s the NetGalley section. I’ve already been
approved to read twenty-two books, and that’s only until May. A couple of
really interesting books there, like Victories Greater than Death by Charlie
Jane Anders, which will come out in April; A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady
Martine, the follow-up to A Memory Called Empire, which will be published in
March; The Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers, coming out in February,
and The Russian Cage by Charlaine Harris that will be published in February
too.
All in all, a full and interesting list. And there’s still
room for surprises, so bring them on. Last year ended with one such surprise,
as I picked Paladin’s Grace by T. Kingfisher, a really great fantasy romance,
and instantly proceeded to read her Clockwork Boys, which is the first book I’ve
finished this year. I’ve already started it’s follow up, The Wonder Engine. So
the reading year is on to a good start. Follow this blog to find out how it
proceeds.
