Category Archives: Words

City of Dragons

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I’ll start off by saying for the record that there will be spoilers for earlier books in here. Couldn’t be helped. So if you’re just here to know whether I like Robin Hobb’s third Rain Wilds book so you can decide via my oh so timely intervention whether you ought to read it for yourself, the answer is I do.

As of Dragon Haven, all of the stunted, deformed dragons were successfully relocated. Also, the nice bird keepers really like each other, the musical elderling is having a rough time, the regular dragons remain completely self-absorbed, and that one guy from Bingtown who is a total dick is still a total dick. Thusly opens the second half of the series.

City of Dragons is about two things, more or less. The first thing it is about is exploring Kelsingra. Why do the dragons ancestrally remember this city so fondly? Does the fact that Fitz came here once have any bearing on the plot? Too bad none of them can fly and get here, due to the implausible geography of a vastly wide river that is also constantly in flood, innit? (It’s to a lesser extent also about Thymara’s continued inability to come to grips with her sexuality. She’s still less annoying than Katniss, to be clear.)

The second thing it’s about is the plot’s slow but inexorable progression towards… comeuppance? consequence? confluence? simple climax? Honestly, given the characters involved, I think all of these things apply. In short and with no important specifics, there are a lot of characters heading to Kelsingra. Tarman the liveship barge with supplies, for example, or Hest the trader’s son with perceived privilege.[1] And I think that of the many characters headed in that direction, very few of them have the slightest idea what they’re sailing into. And I think it’s going to be pretty explosive. (Mostly figuratively.)

Of course, this kind of thing can be problematic, cf some of The Wheel of Time. So knowing the next book is the last one helps a lot towards not being extremely disappointed by a book that is more than half “moving pieces around the board”, as does my confidence that this is again the first half of a long book instead of actually two books, even if (happily!) the ending is a lot less abrupt than the first time it happened.

[1] For reasons that make no sense if you have somehow read the previous books but not this one, his scenes were among my favorites.

Roll for Initiative

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Third[1] entry in the ongoing annual series of books what I read to my son over several weeks: Roll for Initiative. It’s a big standard coming of age story in which the girl who has never in her life done anything for herself has to come to grips with the idea of doing everything for herself, and just maybe solving everyone else’s problems around her at the same time, all as part of the middle school growth and maturity experience. I doubt there’s a former middle schooler reading this who hasn’t had exactly the same lived experience as Riley.

The twist is, this book is told through the lens of her wanting to play Dungeons and Dragons and not having anyone to play with now that her brother has gone off to college. Until she meets some girls on the bus that she never had to ride before now, and they form a little group, and before you know it, poof, everyone’s life is fixed. Even the people who we didn’t know had anything they needed fixed at the beginning of the book.

Thanks D&D!

No but seriously, I wanted to read him a book where the characters liked role-playing games, since he himself is currently in a kid RPG. He liked it, and I did not hate it, and that’s mostly what I’m looking for out of stories to read at bedtime, so, hooray.

[1] I read another, longer, book to him right before this, and have a niggling feeling I did not review it. This seems problematic. …no, wait, it was the library one and I totally did. Whew. …messes up the count a bit, though, doesn’t it?

Wake Me after the Apocalypse

Some books have hooks that just get me, or maybe Amazon is good at advertising. Whatever. Anyway, this book‘s hook is that Joanna the protagonist wakes up from cryosleep after 200 years only to find that there’s been a cave-in, and she alone has survived out of her group of a thousand people. The backstory, doled out in alternating chapters, is that a comet was about to hit the earth, but with enough warning that lots of bunkers of 1,000 people each were set up throughout America to allow humanity to survive the darkness and the desolation, via centuries of sleep thanks to recently successful cryonics technology.

I mean, Joanna’s personal backstory is also doled out through those alternating chapters, but that’s the gist of it. Cryosleep to avoid disaster, wake up to completely different disaster. So… obviously she’s going to meet other survivors. For one thing, there’s no reason to believe all the bunkers were destroyed just because hers was. But, insofar as this is the first book in a series, I was looking for less exposition and relationships and stuff, more raw survival and maybe mystery solving.[1]

What I got was… about half a book of those alternating backstory chapters, enough to get me well and truly tired of them. Then, just as the book I was looking for got started, the back 40% of it was instead chock full of people again, already. Ugh. It’s not that the story Rivet wrote was bad, it just was not at all what I wanted. Put a different way [that overstates the case of what this book actually is], I’d like to read these YA books and have them be less about Team Jacob versus Team Edward and more about Team Bella.

Anyway, if the second book is available at the Kindle lending library, I’ll borrow it eventually as I did this one. If it is not, I’m pretty sure I will neither buy nor download it. So… yeah.

[1] After all, just because the scientists believed it would be an extinction level event doesn’t mean it definitely would be. 99.999% death rate, we’d still bounce back[2].
[2] …well, maybe not bounce.

The Forbidden Library

I randomly found a Django Wexler book in the kid section of the library, which was a bit of a surprise. Turns out he wrote a YA series ten years ago, and since my son has a heck of an attention span for books, I took a chance. At usually a chapter a night, it took close to a month including one auto-renewal, but then again how fast do I read to myself?[1]

Important ingredients for a young adult fantasy series are a) an orphan b) who was orphaned deliberately by an external force who will later drive the plot, and also c) the orphan later discovers an unanticipated talent for a magical world that they previously had no awareness of. Also, if you’re a girl orphan, probably d) you’ll meet someone your age in similar but not necessarily identical circumstances, who you most likely cannot trust, and yet you really want to. I’d say I’m not sure why this is less common with boy orphans, but the truth is, I’m pretty sure of why.

Alice Creighton is an intelligent 12 year old girl living her best life (good at school, science, math, all of that) in Manhattan (I think) with her father at the height of the Great Depression (which does not really affect anyone in the story, they’re all rich here especially by the standards of the day), up until she learns fairies are real. A week later, her father is lost at sea and his estates are sold off to pay his debts, and she is the ward of her uncle Geryon, a man she had not previously known existed but who seems to be doing even better financially than her father had been (debts notwithstanding), what with his massive estate outside, I don’t know, Philadelphia maybe?[2]

There’s only one rule: don’t go into Geryon’s personal library at the edge of the forest without permission. But when you’re surrounded by vague maids who do only what they’re told and literal-mindedly at that, and then just kind of wind down waiting for their next instruction, and with talking cats and evil wasp fairies and distant uncles who have no real interest in you, and above all when you are the protagonist of a YA novel who has been given one rule to follow, plus also you like to read?

Well, I think we all know where this is going. (In case you do not: it’s going into The Forbidden Library.)

[1] It’s the comics, is what it is. Well, and the parenting. The storytimes, just for example, most of which are regarding books that are unreviewable, such as Geronimo Stilton and Dragon Masters. And the Three Investigators, which I should have continued to review, but failed. (I’m not sure what happened there.)
[2] If you’re wondering why I don’t know where anything happened, it’s because the cities are mentioned like once each at the beginning of the book and then never matter again. If everything happens at your massive country estate, who cares what state it’s in? Or nation, honestly.

Fairest Vol. 3: The Return of the Maharaja

I don’t even know the last time I read a Fables-adjacent book, nor what it was[1]. And I’m not even sure how many books are left. I think not many? I should probably zerg rush the ending, but that would make it still months away. Just not years.

In any event, this book was way way off in the periphery of the series. The land of Indus (think The Jungle Book) is no longer threatened by that one woodcutter’s evil empire, since it doesn’t really exist anymore. But all the villages and palaces and suchlike have been basically emptied of able-bodied men who went off to lose the war, leaving only the elderly, the infirm, the very young, the harems[2], and of course the [other] women.

Which brings us to the main character, Nalayani, protector of her village from roving packs of dhole, which are wolf-adjacent animals from the Indian subcontinent. (I had heard of them before, but not with any commonality.) Anyway, she must now quest to the new maharaja I mentioned to ask for help with the problem, only to find herself embroiled in a civil war and with a pretty unlikely ally, at least if you remember previous events in the series, which I must admit I did not very well.

I have no idea if I should know who Nalayani is as a fabled character? I definitely do not, which did not negatively impact my enjoyment of the story, and anyway there were other characters I did recognize. If the series wasn’t nearly over, I’d think big things were afoot in the main sequence as a result of this one. As it is… maybe this was a happy ending?

[1] I mean, now that I’ve searched it and linked it, I maybe know. But I did not before.
[2] If you happen to live in the maharaja’s palace, at least, and this I suppose explains the presence of the new maharaja, Shah Ah Ming.

Blind Fury

As I probably mentioned the last time I read one of these, I bought a bunch of really cheap books, including really cheap series of books, on my Kindle over the past year and change. A fact about books that come in 6 to 8 volumes for $2-3 is that they’re likely, especially in the apocalyptic fiction subgenre, to be the kind of propulsive book that expects and nearly demands that you read the whole thing in about seventeen minutes without pausing for breath.

This unfortunately does not interact well with me using them as a “well, you only have your phone with you, this is your safety net” book and taking a good eight months to read one of them. What’s worse is, they’re really all just one long book, and the division markers are pretty arbitrary. Cliffhanger, maybe, but there’s no apparent thematic or character arc rationale for the splits between books. Of course, if I’d waited to read the whole thing before writing a review, that probably would have been a worse choice? Hard to know.

Anyway, Blind Fury starts out with the world (or at least Denmark’s slice of it) not quite collapsed and depopulated, but certainly on its way. The main tensions of the story are a) keeping the pregnant lady alive, while b) pushing the immune characters closer together so they can band up to [insert future plot here] but also c) dodging the shadowy and probably evil government agents who want to dissect them to save the world. As if that weren’t enough, there’s also a Renfield[1] who is either in contact with the precipitating force that put the crack in the sky that turns people into blind rage zombies, or is schizophrenic, or most likely both.

Yay, apocalypse!

[1] You know, the crazy dude who serves the bad guy(s)

Dust

I have officially finished a series of books! That doesn’t happen much, mainly because of how I don’t read enough, but for other reasons too. In any case, noteworthy!

This time, it was the third book of the Silo series, Dust. And, you know what? It is definitely a conclusion to a story, with satisfying logical, logistical, and even emotional beats. But… it was also kind of overstuffed. I’m going to use an example from the story that is pretty much a spoiler, but if I disguise it by not naming any names or concrete details, I think it should mostly fly.

So, a bunch of people are escaping doom, like let’s say 1% of the people in the doomed location escape to somewhere else. Due to happenstance, some of them are religious nuts. So the first thing the religious nuts do is go all Handmaid’s Tale and forcibly select women for the men to marry (also forcibly), even women who qualify as underage, or wildly underage. And then someone shows up with a shotgun to resolve the situation. And it’s pretty realistic, both the horrific human behavior of people unhampered by rules and the part where those same people can be easily cowed under the correct circumstances. So it’s not that I disputed the realism of the vignette. But I dispute the utility of throwing in that kind of complication so late into a series that is about to end, and I paradoxically also dispute making it so easy to resolve, if you were going to monkeywrench it into the story like that in the first place.

This did not ruin the book for me, but… it kind of felt like someone trying to write their way out of a corner and stalling for time, and then not having an editor to correctly excise those bits once the corner had been escaped. But that’s the important part. The corner was escaped, and the story ended on a satisfying note, with a clear indication that there’s a lot more story left, even if it will never be (and should never be) written. Is this how all stories should end? Nah, lots of times “and they lived happily ever after” or “and he surveyed the lands he had destroyed with no small satisfaction” is the way to go. But I like stories that can pull off the “lived in, living world that you can imagine what’s next however you like” endings quite a lot.

This Is How You Lose the Time War

Supposing you were on one side or the other of a war being fought throughout the whole of time, with realities popping into existence and being ruthlessly erased, each side trying to bend reality to their preferred outcome for humanity. And supposing you were a time spy… agent… enforcer… thing, tasked with carrying out those small missions that turn into large effects, pushing things in your direction and away from your opponent’s. And supposing further that a different agent, not on your side, had made themselves known to you, by talent and results, and you likewise had made yourself known to them.

And supposing they decided to start a correspondence. This, I think, is how you might lose the time war.

They’re calling it a novella, which probably has a precise publishing definition, but it seems to me more like a short book. It’s romantic and eloquent and thrilling, and honestly it’s only the third of those that falls a little flat for me. I wish I had a better understanding of, well, the time war itself. But doing that would have made for a much longer book that would have ultimately outweighed the eloquence and romance of the central relationship. So I get it. But I wish I could, I don’t know, have the authors’ knowledge of all the underlying backstory just downloaded into my brain, as I think following along better could only have enriched the experience.

Still and all, recommended. I can understand how it won a Hugo, five years ago.[1]

[1] Don’t let that number fool you; this is probably one of the most recent science fiction books I’ve read in ages. Go, um, me.

Amazing Tales: A Game for Children Who Love Adventures Revised Edition

Fastest I’ve read a book in about forever, but also it’s short. Honestly, I was surprised by quite how fast I managed it all the same, since Amazing Tales is a role-playing game sourcebook. See, I had this idea to play D&D with the kids, and then Mary had the idea that maybe we start with something a little lower key and kid-focused, and this is what she found.

And I have to say, it fits the bill. Honestly, it’s pretty clever. First, you pick a genre, which is to say The Deep Dark Woods (animal/fairy fantasy), Magical Kingdoms Long Ago (generic fantasy), The Pirate Seas (swashbuckling, but also probably fantasy) and Among the Stars (sci-fi, obvs). But also it would be pretty easy to take what you wanted from the former two settings and include them in the latter two settings. Or for that matter to make them space pirates.

Then your kid makes a character, which is to say, something that fits the setting. Is it a pirate captain? A robo-dinosaur with jetpack legs? A fairy who is also a princess? Then they get four skills that they’re good at, like Being Brave, Doing Science, Marksmanship, etc, and one of them they’re best at, second best, third best, and last best, and each skill gets a descending die, from d12 to d6. Then, anytime they want to do something that seems hard, they pick a skill, say what they’re doing, and roll. 3 or higher succeeds! And you either tell them how they succeeded and what next, or how things got worse and now what will they do?

It’s a kid game, obviously nothing irrevocably bad happens, but I suppose it could get hairy now and then, and mostly you’re trying to tell a story with them about how things went great. RPG 101, or so? I suppose someday soon I’ll find out how it goes.

Never Flinch

Stephen King keeps writing murder mystery novels, possibly because he likes the genre but I think mostly because he likes his mystery solver character Holly Gibney. Never Flinch actually has two such mysteries. In the first one, there’s a serial killer who is targeting random people but naming them as proxies for the jury pool of a man who was innocent, but sent to jail and then murdered there. In the second one, one of those religious nuts that likes to blow up abortion clinics is hunting a lady who is going around the country encouraging people to vote for better state representatives to expand abortion access on a state by state basis.

As I know I’ve said before, King with an axe to grind is simply not as good of an author as King with his imagination flowing freely. I agree with all of his politics, and I nevertheless continue to wish they would not infect his books. It’s just too… apparent. Takes me out of the narrative, it does. And in this case, it’s half the plot. So, y’know. There’s that.

All the same, one of the things at which he excels is weaving disparate pieces of a narrative toward each other like three freight trains that seem to be on different tracks but it turns out they’re all headed for the same place, and if you think only two trains can crash into each other because of the way that train tracks work, well, that’s sort of my point, innit? So that’s the part of the story that was great. (And also, I share his enjoyment of his character.)

The only remaining downside of this book is that, the pieces of the plot woven together, the crescendo reached… the weaving was great, you see, but the crescendo was… fine. It was fine. It was not great. All in all, it was a mid book, which still means I followed it breathlessly and wanted to know how it turned out the whole time, because you see it was a mid book on a Stephen King scale. And I do love me some King. Ask anyone.

But I can also be honest with myself in the aftermath of that aforementioned trainwreck.