HRWT book review

Dog days / John Levitt

2012-02-01T18:19:00.000-08:00

This is basic urban fantasy, with familiars. Excuse me; they're called ifrits. Is anybody fooled? They're familiars, and the dog is cute, the relationship between wizard and familiar is handled well, and there's nothing earth-shaking in this book. The most notable thing about this novel is that there's nothing wrong with it (c.f. Phoenix rising). Sometimes, all you want is a nice book to read, and an author who can give you that is worth collecting.

Phoenix rising (Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences novel ; v. 1) / Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris

2012-01-15T07:00:00.000-08:00

If you enjoy the sort of extended word-substitution puzzle Pat Conroy writes, this is the novel for you. While the plot is clever and the characters interesting, the actual prose is heavy going. They may not go as far as using a verb as an adjective (they do, however, use a noun as a verb), but the almost Germanic word order and the random selection of prepositions seem designed for obfuscation. Compared to sentences like "This was also necessary in order to make certain alongside charges of treason to the Crown those survivors in league with the Phoenix Society were held accountable for the deaths of [their victims]," minor issues of word usage pale to insignificance. Calling a prescription an apothecary, a badge a moniker (a word I do not associate with the Victorian era, but since I have no access to the OED these days I can't check up on it), a motto a mantra, and a watch a fob are merely loose cobbles in a street with far more serious repair issues. It's a pity, because with fewer pretensions and a great deal more editing, this could have been a very good book.

Confessions of a demon / S.L. Wright

2012-01-01T21:23:00.000-08:00

At the heart of this tale of power-mongering is an interesting group of (theoretical) immortals who survive by feeding off emotion and life energy. The system of patronage and creation is rather similar to the usual vampire structure and it is possible that this book started out as yet another of those. Demons don't have to worry about daylight, however, nor, under normal circumstances, about getting bloodstains out of their clothes. They can even be beneficial: while some like to "drink" anger or pain, others like to "drink" relief or even ecstasy. For this one it was easiest to come up with a scorecard to track its finer points:

+1 for not making it a vampire novel, although there are enough similarities between the popular image of vampires and Wright's demons to make me think the novel may have started out that way

-1/2 each for 1) the implication that the Dark Ages involved the whole world, and 2) the universal naive acceptance by all the demons, even the one with the human background and the one who lived through the Burning Times, that humans confronted with a proven miracle would all rush to join the religion that produced it (rather than, for instance, breaking out the torches and screaming "Satanism!")

-1 for making the demon pour over the newspaper (that particular misspelling always gives me the most distracting mental image)

+1 for the correct plural, passersby

Oh, and don't let the cover art fool you; she doesn't actually seem very Goth, and spends a significant portion of the story in a flowered skirt.

Death most definite / Trent Jamieson

2011-12-15T21:28:00.000-08:00

I don't usually like stories written in the present tense -- in fact, I would never have bought this one if I'd noticed it. However, it's not quite as bad when it's also in the first person -- makes it seem less like a dream tale and more like the narrator just isn't very articulate. So, like, I have this book and I think, well, I might as well read it, right? I can at least give it my traditional 40-page chance before I chuck it in the resale pile, you know? It turned out to be pretty clever, one of the few novels dealing with life, death, and afterlife I've found that doesn't stick with the conventional Western/Abrahamic paradigm of heaven, hell, and the rest of the duotheistic trappings. The main character works for one of 13 regional Deaths as a collector of souls and guards against "stirrers" who want to take over the living world by animating the recently dead. He's got a sweet deal... until someone starts killing off his coworkers. The writing itself could be better, but the story's good enough to cover for it.

Captain Alatriste / Arturo Pérez-Reverte

2011-12-01T17:22:00.000-08:00

This novel is more character-centered than I usually enjoy, but it is surprisingly readable for a book with the plot of a short story padded by a chaotic (but doubtless historically informative) chronology and a great deal of quotation from Literature. There is something about this book that reminds me of Lazarillo de Tormes, although that may only be that it is written from the point of view of the young servant/protege of a man with more honor than cash. Add a splash of Scott and Barnett's Point of dreams (for the artistic setting, especially the play) and the frustration of interviewing an historic old man now rather wandering in his wits and you'll get the idea. I found it in the mystery section, but it is in fact pure political adventure - the only mystery is how Sr. Pérez-R. kept me reading through all the back-tracking to old battles, forward-tracking to later political failures, and rampant literary name-dropping. It's one of those rare books that you keep reading, mildly interested, while you wait for the action to start, until you're suddenly at the end.

Chick and the dead / Casey Daniels

2011-11-15T17:20:00.000-08:00

This is a cute book. Of course, there's a fine line between good-cute and bad-cute, but since I finished it in a day I think it must be mostly good-cute. Fans of Evanovich's Stephanie Plum or Braun's Cat Who who also like fantasy will enjoy Daniels' Pepper Martin, a woman whose unusual cemetery job got even unusual-er when she began seeing ghosts. Not just any ghosts, mind you: these ghosts want her help. This is actually the second book of the series, so when a second ghost shows up just as she's gotten rid of the first one, it's not surprising that Pepper thinks this ghost was also murdered and wants the killer found. This time, however, it's all about a stolen manuscript and a Gone with the Wind analogue, and how to prove authorship when one claimant has been dead for fifty years. With all those ghosts running around, it's amazing how light the book stays; the rather frivolous heroine helps.

Thief of time / Terry Pratchett

2011-11-01T18:47:00.000-07:00

The Glass Clock of Bad Schüschein is being rebuilt, and the world will come to an end next Wednesday at 1:00. Lu-Tze the Sweeper and his new apprentice team up with Death's granddaughter Susan against the Auditors to do something about it, secure in the thought that "there is generally a last chocolate hidden in all those empty wrappers." Need I say more?

Curse of Chalion / Lois McMaster Bujold

2011-10-15T23:43:00.000-07:00

The ruling house of Chalion has been cursed, and it will take three deaths to remove it. The catch is, they all have to be died by the same man. While the humble and desperate triumph, Bujold presents us with a truly elegant (in the scientific sense) theology. It not only supplies a god specifically for everything that doesn't fit anywhere else, but also explains why miracles from a loving diety aren't more common. This is one of the small group of books I rely on whenever I need a good, satisfying book that no bad mood can spoil.

Blood engines / T. A. Pratt

2011-10-01T18:32:00.000-07:00

Class this one somewhere between Jim Butcher and Kim Harrison. Marla Mason -- less guilt-wracked than Butcher's Dresden and more solitary than Harrison's Morgan -- arrives in San Francisco in search of an old friend and an Artifact of power. Her quest involves her in a fight against a classic madman who is plotting to destroy the world, of course, and brings her into conflict with a number of interesting characters. While this is apparently the first book in the series, the characters have a lot of history together and it reads like a sequel, which I found a little distracting at times, but forgivable in an otherwise solid urban fantasy.

Night watch / Terry Pratchett

2011-09-18T21:15:00.000-07:00

OK, we all know I'm a follower of the author-deity Pratchett; Night watch is more of the same fun, with His Grace, Duke Samuel Vimes, chasing a serial killer around, a little time travel, the Men in Saffron, cute little phrases like "His movements could be called catlike, except that he did not stop to spray urine up against things," the usual fight for truth, justice, freedom, reasonably priced love, and a hard-boiled egg (Ave! Bossa nova, similis bossa seneca!) and a very... memorable song.

It's one thing to get the Frito Bandido song stuck in your head. This is a whole new level of annoying, because not only has it been running through my head off and on for a freakin' month, it has no tune!

All the little angels rise up, rise up, all the little angels rise up high!
How do they rise up, rise up, rise up, how do they rise up, rise up high?
They rise heads up! heads up! heads up! They rise heads up high!

White sky, black ice : a Nathan Active mystery / Stan Jones

2011-09-15T23:38:00.000-07:00

There are quite a few Hillerman copycats out there, each with its own take and each with its partial success, but in many ways this is the closest I've seen. Jones' Nathan Active is no Navajo and no shaman -- he isn't even a true insider in the small community he polices -- yet somehow he manages to remind the reader of Jim Chee. As a mystery, this novel is unexceptional, yet it flows well and the reader is carried along without effort. If you read mysteries for an intellectual puzzle, this is probably not your book; if you enjoy visiting remote places by reading, give this one a try.

Blood and Iron / Elizabeth Bear (Promethean age #1)

2011-09-01T18:53:00.000-07:00

Another return to the Arthurian saga, but this time the legend is only source and inspiration and for once doesn't provide the whole plot line. That should have been refreshing. The writing is almost poetic, the concepts interesting, the whole thing pervaded with a dreamy sense that robs the reader of any connection to the characters. I got through about a quarter of it, but that was mostly just trying to figure out why I didn't care what happened next. There is a war between humans and various otherworldly powers, but nobody seems to feel anything but old sorrow -- no urgency to reach the place or person they are hurrying toward, no anger at old betrayals or betrayers, no desire to win the contest. I suspect the author has more than a name in common with Greg Bear, whose work also fails to engage me.

God's war / Kameron Hurley

2011-08-01T18:58:00.000-07:00

This is an slightly strange story of people fighting today's fight in a world locked in endless conflict over that old question: What Does God Really Want? In another setting, this would be cyberpunk, but the war has devastated the environment to the point that bugs are food, fuel, and much of technology. Now the ultimate weapon, the secret to ending the war, is in sight. In most novels, the team of mercenaries that sets out to prevent its full discovery would be the bad guys, not a band of desperate, luckless, worn out people grasping at a last chance. The stakes would simply be life or death, not treason or a victory too terrible to contemplate. And the potential lovers would find, in the end, each other, not resignation. This is not, in fact, the sort of story I usually enjoy, but somehow I did.

Bridge of birds / Barry Hughart

2011-07-01T22:48:00.000-07:00

Mr. Hughart only wrote three books about Master Li Kao and Number Ten Ox, which can only be viewed as one of the many sorrows of the modern, mortal world. Hughart mixes Bramah's Kai Lung (but without the nested complexities that make it so hard to read) with Doyle's Dr. Watson to produce a theological fantasy worthy of shelving with Pratchett or Holt. Number Ten Ox, the powerful, uneducated peasant assistant, is neither slow nor all that uneducated and makes a perfect foil and observer of the ancient scholar with a slight flaw in his character -- or as some might say, the old rogue and charlatan. In this first volume, Number Ten Ox approaches Master Li to learn how a plague can learn to count, since only children of a certain age in his village have fallen ill. The quest for the cure will lead them to set right an ancient injustice as well as solving a couple of incidental mysteries and a traditional riddle.

Demons of the ocean / Justin Somper (Vampirates #1)

2011-06-15T20:09:00.000-07:00

A possible next fad for the Twilight crowd -- a cute story if you can shut down your higher reasoning functions and ignore any historical information you may have picked up. You must swallow the idea of a Pirate Academy without choking, and never ask why a civilization that can still produce a battery-powered (or perhaps just self-winding) diver's watch is reduced to sail power for its shipping. OK, so this is decidedly a YA novel, if not actually juvenile, but I'm afraid I still gagged on the pirates using broadswords to cut up the enemies' rigging although they have at least one cannon -- perhaps they have no balls? They certainly don't seem to have any pistols, although the use of the ship's gun for signalling indicates that they do have powder. O'Brian fans will need to get out the heavy-duty disbelief suspenders for this one. I have to admit, though, that the image of a pirate crew voting on whether to attack a ship that is out of their designated area, making the raid illegal (according to the Pirate Federation's regulations, that is) and then settling down in front of a blackboard to be briefed on the strategy of the raid did nearly make me fall out of my chair laughing.

And wouldn't it be cool if one of these romantic fantasies had an intelligent heroine, or at least one that pays attention? This ain't it either.

Cryoburn / Lois McMaster Bujold

2011-06-01T20:22:00.000-07:00

Imperial Auditor Lord Miles Vorkosigan investigates on a planet so obsessed with avoiding death that it has fallen under the control of companies who freeze and store people until a cure is found... for disease, for old age, for death itself. It's the usual tangle of political, social, and economic cross-purposes that Bujold is so good at spinning, with Miles' clone-brother Lord Mark in the role of deus ex machina.

Magic to the bone / Devon Monk

2011-05-15T20:49:00.000-07:00

File this one between Hamilton's Kiss of shadows and Butcher's Dresden files. An interesting premise but a bit too far toward the romance end of the spectrum for my taste, and I had few other quibbles. In this alternative Portland, magic has become the latest utility, like electricity, and of course various factions vie for control of its distribution and control. The "science" of magic works well and makes sense, while the downside of using magic makes the system more believable. I had a little trouble swallowing the instant attraction between Allie and Zayvion -- possibly because I could see nothing attractive about a loiterer in a ratty coat and too much eau de Pine-sol. I had my doubts over a murderer being able to inherit from the victim, but maybe that could be worked out a la Sayers. The biggest choking point was Portland being cold and rainy while eastern Oregon was having high summer. I've been to Portland in high summer, and it's hot and muggy.

Oh, and the whole time this was in my "To read" pile, I kept reading the author's name as "Demon Monk." Dyslexia can be fun!

Hammerfall / C. J. Cherryh

2011-05-01T20:46:00.000-07:00

The madmen's voices urge them all to hurry east in visions of disaster and eastward-leaning vertigos. But what if the madmen aren't mad? What if the voices aren't demons? Cherryh takes cyberpunk into the far future and lets it loose in the desert of a threatened planet. If you've read other Cherryh novels, it won't surprise you to learn that the threat is no bomb, no plague, no vast space-mounted energy weapon. I just love it when she sets space-faring races to throwing rocks at each other.

Dragons of the Cuyahoga / S. Andrew Swann

2011-04-15T18:43:00.000-07:00

It all starts with the sudden death of a dragon, or as Swann puts it: "Fifteen tons of dragon slam into a gravel mine on the western shore of the Cuyahoga River within sight of downtown Cleveland." Kinda gets the reader's attention, but what we've really got here is a nice little murder mystery. Well, there's a magic portal and a bunch of elven refugees mixed in, too.

I admit, I'm a sucker for stories in which the non-humans really aren't human. Swann's elves and dragons not only have different goals than the humans that surround them, they have different values, emotions, social structures, and thought processes. They're similar enough to tempt a human into thinking they're the same; which is a fatal error.

Hunt at the well of eternity / James Reasoner

2011-04-01T15:17:00.000-07:00

Although there is no significant teenage character, this book has the feel of a YA novel. The language is a little simple, the sentences short, and the author has a distracting tendency to interrupt the action with over-detailed descriptions of the scenery, as though he doesn't trust the reader to form the correct mental image without help. If you can ignore that, however, it's is a decent light read in the Indiana Jones tradition (in fact, there is an entire scene that obviously exists only so Hunt can utter a throw-away line to connect himself with that tradition). There is a little less archaeology and a little more James Bond here, but it works if you let it. I particularly approve of the female characters who refuse to sit passively and be rescued, even if it does put them in danger of becoming flat stereotypes with little individual personality.

Plum spooky / Janet Evanovich

2011-03-15T05:22:00.000-07:00

Most of the Stephanie Plum novels are in the Romancing the stone tradition. In Plum Spooky Evanovich flirts with fantasy by tossing in an X-files refugee named Diesel and ramps up the slapstick with a hyper-intelligent monkey. We also find out, in true soap-opera style, why Lula and Tank broke up -- or perhaps I should say, how Tank escaped his engagement to Lula. This is the perfect novel for sick-day reading: light, brainless, and fun. It did leave me a little puzzled over the scene in Ten big ones in which Lula claims -- although not believably -- to have a cat, but if you want strict precision in all the details you should be reading Hambly or Cherryh.

Travelling with the dead / Barbara Hambly

2011-03-01T17:03:00.000-08:00

The first time I read this book, I was greatly disappointed, but only because I had expected so much of it. Its predecessor, Those who hunt the night, is such a beautiful tale that it leaves Travelling with the dead feeling like an unnecessary epilogue, something written to appease fans. Rereading it without such high hopes, I found myself more forgiving, and more able to enjoy the mad chase across Europe, with further musings on the vampire state, for its own sake. Vampires playing spy, spies courting vampires, and what I can only think of as a uniquely vampiric version of impotence, at least give us an epilogue worth reading.

Mistral's kiss / Laurell K. Hamilton

2011-02-01T16:52:00.000-08:00

In the most pornographic Merry Gentry novel yet, Hamilton offers us tidbits of pagan theology but precious little in the way of plot. After a tediously extended series of sex scenes and story-so-far conversations, we finally learn that Merry may be too nice to restore the Unseelie Court to what it was. Not that that will stop her from trying, nor from making enemies in the process.

As a side note, I "read" this as an audiobook, and Laural Merlington's variable pronunciation of several names continues to drive me nuts. "Mistral" is a notable example, wobbling among "Mist-rah-el," "Mist-ree-all," and "Mist-ray-all" without ever reaching any two-syllable version.

Those who hunt the night / Barbara Hambly

2011-01-18T21:38:00.001-08:00

I have chosen a great favorite of mine to start this blog. It seems only right.

Fans of both steampunk and vampire novels will probably like Those who hunt the night, although neither group will find it quite what they're used to. The setting is a very historic 1920s Oxford and London, the vampires logically constructed yet neither clockwork monsters nor -- quite -- human. Among the issues addressed: if a vampire's victims become vampires, why is the world not overrun?; why would a vampire that was formerly a civilized human choose the risk and barbarity of hunting humans if he/she could survive on the blood of animals?; how long can anything pretend to be normal in a rapidly changing society?; and what happens when that limit is reached?