The Sandman: Act III by Dirk Maggs
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Well-Produced, But the Graphic Novels Are Better Sandman Act III is the third Sandman graphic novels adaptation “dramatized and directed for audio by Dirk Maggs.” It is comprised of the stories found in the graphic novel trade paperbacks Brief Lives (1994) and World’s End (1995), plus a few stand-alones. Episode 1, The Song of Orpheus (1991?), integrates into the Sandman opus the tragic myth of the sublime singer and his newlywed newly dead wife Eurydice, casting Orpheus as the son of Morpheus (Dream) and Calliope. The production provides Orpheus’ song, including lyrics and synthesizer music, but I’d prefer to hear it in my imagination in the graphic novel than in my ears in this audio adaptation. That said, the art in the graphic novel is so coarse and ugly that this may be a case when overall the audio version is aesthetically better. 3 stars In Episode 2, Fear of Falling (1992), a Broadway playwright is about to give up on the production of his play in rehearsal when he dreams that Dream gives him another option for his nightmares. It’s short and fine. 3 stars In Episode 3, The Flowers of Romance (1998), an aging, out of place, sad satyr asks a last boon of Desire. 3 stars Episodes 4-12 comprise the main part of Act III in the story arc of Brief Lives (1994), depicting Dream/Morpheus’ development as the gloomy Endless one quests with his unstable little sister Delirium for their jovial AWOL big brother Destruction (“He abandoned his responsibilities”), accompanied by the strange and sudden deaths of a few immortal humans. As the plot inevitably leads him to a devastating reunion with his son, Dream more than once protests too much that he hasn’t changed. The 5-star graphic novel Brief Lives has strange, beautiful, wonderful art and is an example of the original being better than any audio (or even video) version could be. There are pages with mesmerizing layout, color, and form, like the sequence where Dream enters Delirium’s realm, with collaged photographs superimposed on a painted and crayoned background lacking usual panel frames of reference, and like the giant two-page spread showing the small, faint characters walking outside at night with sublime stars above. There are neat visual touches like Delirium’s changing hairdos and Dream’s increasingly attenuated and elongated form as the tragedy unfolds, and the clever strategy of giving the speech balloons of the different characters distinctive colors and fonts to suit their personalities and moods, such that Delirium’s are a riot of color and scribbled letters, Dream’s black with gothicky white font, Bast’s faux-Egyptian “hieroglyphic,” and so on. This can’t be approximated in an audible or movie format. It is only possible in comics. 4 stars In Episode 13, How They Met Themselves (1999), Dante Gabriel Rosetti, his sick wife, and a young masochistic Algernon Swinburne meet Desire on a train, leading to an exploration of what happens if you meet yourself: True love? Death? It’s a neat short story. 4 stars The last six episodes are the stand-alones from World’s End (1995), framed by a reality storm stranding travelers from various worlds and times in an inn, where some of them tell stories. My favorites are “The Golden Boy,” about Prez Rickard, a small-town clock repairer who becomes the youngest and best president in the history of an alternate America, ever rebuffing the attempts of Boss Smiley to “help” him, and especially “Cerements,” about the Necropolis Latharge and the different customs of different cultures for dealing with dead bodies and some visits to a creepy catacombs. “A Tale of Two Cities,” “Cluracan’s Tale,” and “Hob’s Leviathan” are OK, and “World’s Ends” climaxes in a sublime funeral procession for… 4 stars I thought in rereading the graphic novels while listening to the audio adaptation that Sandman and its world are pretty white. An African American chauffeur called Ruby isn’t treated very well by the story. Dream and most characters are also pretty heterosexual, though Desire—like Wanda, Foxglove, and Hazel from A Game of You in the Act II adaptation—are welcome exceptions or ambiguities. (By the way, the “it” and “its” that refer to Delirium in the graphic novel are changed in the audio adaptation to “they” and “their” etc.) Most every word from the original comics (and graphic novel collections) is retained for the audio adaptation, for which the author-narrator Neil Gaiman reads extra descriptions of things like settings and characters depicted by the art in the original. Like a radio drama, the audio adaptation also adds music and sound effects and a full cast of voice actors, most of whom are excellent, especially James McAvoy (Dream), David Harewood (Destruction), and Justin Vivian Bond (Desire). The adaptation rearranges some of the graphic novel issues (especially the stand-alone ones) to make a more coherent overall story. At times the audio version gets everything just right, as with the terrifying chanting of the Bacchante as they approach Orpheus and the subtle and lovely synth music in the background when in Brief Lives Dream returns to his castle after meeting his son, and the total effect is quite moving. However. There are also times when the music becomes too dramatic. I never appreciated the grandiose synthesizer movie type music starting each episode. Barnabas barking now and then before or after he speaks (English) is distracting (as if we’d forget he is a dog). And Gaiman’s tendency to too often too pregnantly pause when the punctuation or rhythm of the prose doesn’t call for any pausing started wearing on me. Like this: Orpheus (pause) is sitting (pause) on a rock. Night has fallen (pause) over the castle of Dream. Lizzy (pause) leaning on the mantel, gazes (pause) at the picture. As a result, I found myself feeling relieved during the six World’s End episodes when voice actors narrated the framed stories instead of Gaiman. After listening to the first three Sandman adaptations and rereading the graphic novels with them, I believe that the original graphic novels are the ideal medium for Gaiman’s story, that the art, layouts, colors, varied fonts, colored speech balloons, etc. are all more impactful (on this reader) than listening to the sound effects and music and talented voice actors and charismatic Gaiman. View all my reviews
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The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, vol 1 - Sir Richard Francis Burton [modern library classics] by Richard Francis Burton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars An Orgy of Story—a Feast of Fantasy—a Sensual World of High-Stakes Storytelling In Sir Richard F. Burton’s splendid translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1888), clever Shahrazad (who knows countless stories and how to tell them) keeps her head on her shoulders by stringing along her misogynistic Bluebeard of a King husband by starting a compelling story one night so he must let her live the next day so he can hear the end of it the next night, and then starting a new story right after finishing the first, and so on. Many of her stories feature characters who tell stories in which characters tell stories, as when she tells one in which a reeve tells one in which a thumbless man tells one. There’s also poetry recited throughout, quoted from famous Muslim poets riffing on male or female beauty, the vicissitudes of fortune, the perfidy of human nature, and so on. Seemingly everyone can tell an entertaining story or quote an appropriate poem, and often their lives (like Shahrazad’s) depend on it. There are no unreliable narrators or tellers of tall tales: everything anyone says happened really happened, and the more outlandish (“wonderful”) something is, the more it’s believed and appreciated. Just the first volume of ten contains in its thirty-four nights things like the following: Lovesick tailors, clever fishermen, good merchants, miraculous physicians, hunchbacked dwarfs, monocular Kalandars, randy slaves, fickle Caliphs, tyrannical Sultans, treacherous Wazirs, wise Shaykhs, necromantic princesses, ensorcelled princes, calamitous crones, demanding husbands, murderous siblings, envious neighbors, beautiful youths, luminous maidens, troublesome corpses, powerful Ifrits, resentful Jinn, helpful Jinniyah, talking animals, winged horses, flying serpents… And-- Wonder-filled Baghdad, down-to-earth Cairo, blasphemous cities, sumptuous palaces, busy markets, hidden trapdoors, forbidden rooms, unknown islands, giant magnets, couplets in praise of beauty moles (for which Arabic has at least fifty different words!), pomegranate conserve, rose-flavored sherbet, fritters soaked in bees’ honey, and “A bowl of cumin ragout containing chickens’ breasts, fricandoed and flavoured with sugar, pistachios, musk and rose water” (after eating that dish, be sure to wash your hands before making love to your sweetheart)… A-and-- Executions, reprieves, revenges, murders, mutilations, amputations, petrifactions, reversals, reunions, damnations, salvations, transformations, magical combats, shopping sprees, wild carousing, and sex—lotsa sex! In his Introduction, Burton (1821-90) says he’s trying to present as accurate and complete a translation as he can, unlike earlier translators who “castrated” the original. He’s impressively open-minded: “we must remember that grossness and indecency, in fact les turpitudes, are matters of time and place; what is offensive in England is not so in Egypt.” And he seeks to approximate the original “by writing as the Arab would have written in English,” a rich English infused with archaisms and 19th-century slang and everything in between and ranging from the bawdy and earthy to the sublime and spiritual. From this: “Thereupon sat a lady bright of blee, with brow beaming brilliancy, the dream of philosophy, whose eyes were fraught with Babel's gramarye and her eyebrows were arched as for archery; her breath breathed ambergris and perfumery and her lips were sugar to taste and carnelian to see.” To this: “…the first [box] which they brought to him to open was that wherein I was; and, when I felt his hands upon it, my senses failed me and I bepissed myself in my funk, the water running out of the box.” And from this: “Then we sat talking, I and she (and I was drowned in the sea of her love, dazed in the desert of my passion for her), till the merchants opened their shops; when I rose and fetched her all she sought to the tune of five thousand dirhams.” To this: “All this time the Porter was carrying on with them, kissing, toying, biting, handling, groping, fingering; whilst one thrust a dainty morsel in his mouth, and another slapped him; and this cuffed his cheeks, and that threw sweet flowers at him; and he was in the very paradise of pleasure, as though he were sitting in the seventh sphere among the Houris of Heaven.” If Burton is writing a “Plain and Literal Translation,” the original is anything but! Anyway. It is better read as a book than listened to, because 1) there are no unabridged audiobooks of the whole thing, and 2) the unabridged LibriVox reading of Vol. I leaves out Burton’s numerous, detailed, and idiosyncratic notes and is read by different readers of varying quality (most being fine but at least one being excruciatingly monotonous). And Burton’s notes are an interesting treasury of information, from varieties of “tongue kissing” to the Arabic attitude to smallpox. They explain Islamic (Persian/Egyptian/Ottoman) culture (“A large hollow navel is looked upon not only as a beauty, but in children it is held a promise of good growth”), religious references (“The new moon carefully looked for by all Moslems because it begins the Ramazan-feast”), Arabic grammar (“In Arabic the World is female”), Arabic etymologies (“straight stature like the letter I” in a story is annotated, “Arab. ‘Kamat Alfiyyah’ = like the letter Alif, a straight perpendicular stroke deriving from an Egyptian hieroglyph”), and failures in previous translations (“Lane pleasantly remarks, ‘A list of these sweets is given in the original, but I have thought it better to omit the names’ (!) Dozy does not shirk his duty”). The notes reveal Burton’s caustic wit (the note about “the Holy City” reads, “Arab. ‘Al-Kuds’ = holiness. There are few cities which in our day have less claim to this title than Jerusalem; and, curious to say, the ‘Holy Land’ shows Jews, Christians and Moslems all in their worst form”). And his 19th-century biases, (“Debauched women prefer negroes on account of the size of their parts”). His views on “Eastern” and European cultures are mixed, so in one note he’ll criticize “backwards” Eastern methods of hoist-hanging criminals compared to more “civilized” Western drop-hanging and in another opine that decorative Koranic inscriptions on walls are “generally far superior” to “our frescoes.” Although at times I got exhausted by following another narrator’s story inside another narrator’s story, even when the same genre stories are juxtaposed, as with the barber’s tales of his six delusional and hapless brothers, I found pointed variations on a theme. Anyway, the nested fairytale-like stories of the Nights are rich in human nature. I read Vol. I in Tom White’s Kindle version, which inexpensively presents the first two volumes of the full Burton text with all the hyperlinked, easy to navigate notes (though without, alas, illustrations). I need a break from the rich feast of story and poetry but will surely go on to Vol. II and the rest, even if it takes me till the end of my days. View all my reviews
Freddy the Magician by Walter Rollin Brooks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Freddy Does (or Undoes) Magic Freddy is quite the protean pig (poet, detective, newspaper editor, banker, etc.), but when he starts taking magic lessons from Presto, the fired white rabbit of an unpleasant and shady magician called Signor Zingo, who himself has been fired from Boomschmidt's Colossal and Unparalleled Circus after pilfering the petty cash, Freddy realizes there will be some limits to what he can accomplish: “Of course I could never do card tricks; you have to have hands for that and I’ve got trotters. But I bet I could learn some of the others. Maybe I could give performances.” (He is often an optimistic pig, which is one of his charms.) In Freddy the Magician (1947), the fourteenth Freddy the Pig book, then, author Walter R. Brooks demystifies “magic” by humorously anatomizing its trickery, from misdirection and secret pockets and hidden clips and elastic bands to sibling look alike cats and unobtrusive mice. The novel features not one but two climactic magical performances that devolve into duels between rival magicians featuring numerous feats of sleight of hand (or of trotter) and revealing to the audiences the tricks which have been deceiving them. Will Signor Zingo or Professor Frederico get the upper hand/trotter in their feud? Which magician will prove to the people and animals of the fictional New York town of Centerboro and environs that he’s the better mind reader? Will Freddy ever be able to get the unpaying and unwanted Zingo to move out of the town hotel? Why does Zingo want his missing magic hat so badly? In addition to Freddy’s magician’s war with Zingo, the book (like most Freddy novels) features at least one sub-plot: Leo the circus lion has to shave his luxuriant locks and come to terms with his new identity as the Great Bald African Lion, while Jinx the black cat has to deal with his irritatingly boastful sister Minx. In addition to the pleasures of talking animal fantasy as performed by Brooks (it’s a given that animals can talk with each other and or with humans) and of the comical situations he imagines (a fired magician’s rabbit teaching magic to a pig, a lion disguising himself as a pig disguising himself as a boy disguising himself as an Indian, a jail so appealing that released inmates commit crimes to get put back in, a henhouse blown into a tree on the local millionaire’s estate, a department store where the clerks and customers regularly end up deservedly slapping each other, and so on), like most Freddy novels, this one also has plenty of the following virtues: Brooks’ straight-faced, tongue-in-cheek animal facts, like: “Cows are plain and there is nothing they can do about it, but they are very kindhearted animals, and it is a pretty mean man who will deliberately insult a cow,” and “People who don’t know much about pigs are not likely to class them as dangerous animals; but an angry pig is something that no farmer in his senses will tackle barehanded.” Brooks’ humor for adults (as a boy, I read the Freddy books as serious adventures and never laughed at anything in them, but reading them now I regularly smile and chuckle), as when an aggrieved Leo greets Freddy: “Ah, it’s the pig,” said Leo as if speaking to himself. “Come to look his last upon an old comrade. Come to gibe and to sneer, no doubt—to point the finger of scorn and make the dirty crack. Ah, me, the great King of Beasts, to be made a laughingstock for those who, in the days of his greatness, stood in awe before his strength; who, in the words of Shakespeare, ‘smiled at his purr and trembled at his growl!’” “That’s not in Shakespeare,” said Freddy. “I have his Complete-Works-in-One-Volume at home, and there’s nothing like that in it.” Brooks’ quirky wisdom for adults, as when Freddy and Leo the circus lion talk about self-identity and mirrors: “When I see myself, I think I look one way, and then I find out that I look quite different. And it makes me wonder if when I think I look sort of noble I’m not really looking just sort of half-witted. Like when I’m talking to you, now, for instance—I think I look probably worried, but reasonably intelligent. But—do I? I just can’t be sure. Maybe I’m really making idiotic faces at you. You got a mirror handy?” “You, being a lion, I suppose want to look dignified and interesting, with just a little touch of ferocity. I, being a pig, want to look clever and good-humored, with just a dash of romance. Probably neither of us will ever look the way we want to. But if we forget mirrors we may get somewhere close to it. Watching mirrors all the time just makes us look anxious and a little foolish.” Brooks’ flexible and capable style, which ranges from the G-man slang favored by Jinx the black cat to the elevated “poetry” of Freddy when he has some spare time to compose. Brooks’ life lessons for kids, as when Freddy feels sorry for his enemy or accepts the aid of caterpillars and beetles or the narrator opines that “in a fight, or in a contest of any kind, the one who keeps his temper has an advantage that is equal to two shotguns and a small cannon.” Kurt Wiese’s monocrhome illustrations, which are mostly fine, for, in addition to drawing animals more realistically than, say, Disney, he has a knack for choosing the most interesting to see scenes in each chapter. While being an entertaining entry in the series, Freddy the Magician is not perfect. Signor Zingo is too early too clearly a villain (his mustache’s ends turn up like horns!), and with his name is a bit too much of an unsavory non-WASP character. The hotel manager Mr. Groper’s “sesquipedalianism” becomes too much of a good thing: a little “I ain’t mad… Just, as you might say, kind of reduced to the nadir of pessimistic hypochondriasis… the ultimate and nethermost profundity of the abyss” goes a long way. And the story ends too abruptly and incompletely. I recommend readers new to Freddy to start with Freddy the Politician, Freddy the Detective, Freddy and the Poppinjay, or Freddy and the Ignormus, but really any of the books can be read in any order and most of them, like this one, should amuse you. View all my reviews
City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “…it is my responsibility to see it.” “Did the street just change? Just at the corner of his eye? Though it seems impossible, he’s sure it did: for one second, he did not see the tumbledown building fronts and deserted homes, but rather immense, slender skyscrapers of gleaming white and gold.” Robert Jackson Bennett’s fantasy-mystery novel City of Stairs (2014) has an interesting premise: for seventy-five years, this hitherto enslaved India-like culture has been occupying the formerly dominant and expansionist Russian-like Continent (AKA the Holy Lands), turning the tables by killing their gods, a side effect of which being that the “miracles” the gods had performed or enabled vanished, including, for instance, most of the works accomplished by the builder god, such that whole temples and other buildings and infrastructure instantly disappeared, along with whatever people happened to be inside them at the time. Even the climate changed. The former enslaved Saypur have imposed on the Continent draconian World Regulations, such that no one can worship, research, or even refer to the former gods or attempt any divine miracles or even study Continental history. While Saypur is thriving as the dominant world culture, the backwards and demoralized Continent languishes in poverty and disease. Needless to say, both the people of Saypur and the Continentals hate and Otherize each other. The plot develops from the brutal murder of Efrem Pangyui, a Saypur reformer/historian who’d been living in the central Continental city of Bulikov, supposedly to research their culture and history. Sent to investigate his murder is Shara Komayd, ace agent for the Saypur Ministry of Foreign Affairs and great-granddaughter of the legendary man who found a way to kill the Continental divinities. Shara is accompanied by her “secretary,” a giant northern “barbarian” Dreyling (Viking analogue) called Sigurd who seems made for violence, has preternaturally acute hearing, knows no frostbite, and picks hot coals with his bare fingers to light his pipe. Sixteen years ago, Shara committed an infamous breach of protocol (exposing the corruption of a high-level official) and hence has been unable to return home to Saypur, having to stay permanently out in the field on the Continent doing dangerous dirty work with Sigurd, cleaning up divine remnants or supernatural beings left behind by the main gods. Complicating her murder investigation in Bulikov is the Continental rich man Vohannes Votrov (“Vo”) with whom she’d had an intense sexual relationship in their university days. Plenty of fraught unfinished business between them. One of the nice things about the novel is how Bennett gradually (and efficiently) reveals the back-history of characters like Vo, Sigurd, and Shara through mostly well-integrated flashbacks written in past tense (the main plot occurs in present tense). Violent action starts after a few chapters, when Shara and Sigurd attend a fund-raising party at Vo’s mansion, and fanatical attackers make things interesting for the bored Sigurd and for the primed reader. (Vo is the leader of the New Bulikov faction, dedicated to improving the quality of life and economic health of the city and bitter foes of the reactionary Restorationist faction, who want to restore the “glorious” past.) I found the main characters compelling, the narrative world original, the themes relevant, the writing vivid, and the plot unpredictable. I enjoyed reading the book: a fantasy novel where the protagonist is a thirty-five-year-old bespectacled woman spy-historian with a giant, ultra-capable male “secretary” operating in an occupied city, with some resonance for contemporary situations like Israel and Palestine: “Say what you like of a belief, of a party, of a finance system, of a power—all I see is privilege and its consequences. States are not, in my opinion, composed of structures supporting privilege. Rather, they are composed of structures denying it—in other words, deciding who is not invited to the table.” I liked the questioning of whether gods direct their followers or vice versa; the concept of different realities for different gods and their followers; the complex situation whereby the former enslaved state/people are now occupying their former oppressors; the “miracles” and effects of the gods; the relationships between Shara and Sigurd, Vo, and even the scary cynical Vinya (Shara’s aunt and boss); the dialogue (mostly) and descriptions (especially); and Shara’s increasing unease with her career path as patriotic agent of the state and the cold-blooded status quo forced on her and the Continent by the realpolitik of people like her aunt. I like how the history of the cultures and characters are worked in little by little via flashbacks and chapter epigraphs as the story develops. I liked Bennett’s imaginative fantasy writing: “The sun, bright and terrible and blazing. It is not the huge ball of light she is so accustomed to: it is like the sky is a sheet of thin yellow paper, and someone is standing behind it holding an oily, flaming torch.” Despite a couple kvetches (e.g., it shouldn't take Shara longer than me to identify the villain, and despite the title stairs play no big role), I enjoyed the novel a lot and look forward to the second and third ones in the trilogy. View all my reviews
Death's Master by Tanith Lee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars “What hero is greater than Lord Death?” OR “Love is not enough. Nor life. Neither sorcery.” OR “…half-smiling at an unremembered love…” Whereas Tanith Lee’s first Flat Earth series book, Night’s Master (1978), is a composite novel made of linked short stories featuring the relationship between Azhrarn the Prince of Demons and humankind and the world, the second one, Death’s Master (1979) is an epic novel depicting the conflict between Uhlume Lord Death and his “human” servants and their enemies, with interference from his rival Azhrarn. (“There was this between Lords of darkness… a sort of allergic yet loving rivalry, a sort of unliking affection, a scornful unease, xenophobia and family feeling.”) In addition to the enigmatic black-skinned white-haired Uhlume, who can go anywhere anything has died, and the sublime Azhrarn, who hates boredom and likes mortals who do interesting things, the novel features monstrous and compelling characters who are both beyond human and very human: Narasen the proud leopard queen, who prefers women to men, makes a desperate deal with Death, turns indigo, and broods on vengeance; Simmu her strange child who, conceived by his masculine mother’s coupling with a (dead) feminine father, can change gender at will, and who, abandoned in a tomb as a babe and raised by demonesses, fears nothing living (not even cobras) but fears everything dead (even sparrows) and communicates by graceful gestures and uncanny glances; Simmu’s childhood friend Zhirem, who is invulnerable and, perhaps, joyless after having been comprehensively burned at age five in a sublime fire; Death’s witch-servant Lylas, who’s 230-years-old but physically and psychologically fourteen; the beautiful merchant’s daughter Kassafeh, whose real father is an aethereal being and whose strangely changing eyes see through any illusion; the grotesque buffoonish “slit-purse, night prowler, seller of ineffectual potions,” Yolsippa, who is a “shrewd fool” incontinently attracted to any cross-eyed person of either gender. Etc. Tanith Lee sure created augmented, alienated, crooked, and charismatic characters and wove ironic and moving interconnected destinies for them! Despite being monstrous, we care about them as we (in morbid fascination) watch them working towards their tragic destinies, which concern mortality and immortality, love and hate, annihilation and redemption. Despite the many typos in the DAW first edition, like “heaving” instead of “hearing,” this was one of those rare books that I wanted to read more and more quickly, because I was so curious to see what surprising appalling thing the characters would do next, but that I ended up reading more and more slowly to prolong my immersion in it and its world, my pleasure in its prose and irony. To list the pleasures of the novel: 1. Awesome Lines… “To lie with any man is abhorrent to me... To lie with a dead one makes no odds, and may be better.” … Including Neat Conversations (at times reminiscent of Jack Vance) “Sorcery is a strong wine, and you are drunk on it.” “Do not anticipate I shall sober.” 2. Ubiquitous, Delicious, Wicked Irony Almost every page twists with wry lines and ironic flourishes, from small scale descriptions to large scale plot developments. Check, for example, this chapter ending: “And, being a dutiful descendant he bore the skull [mistakenly thinking it’s his father’s] home, and went without food that he might have built for it an expensive tomb just beyond the village. The tomb was the wonder of the district, and pointed out by parents to their children as the deed of a good son. Then, one morning, as chance would have it, the skull of the real father was washed up in the cove below the village. But, not recognizing it and reckoning it unlucky, the fisherfolk threw it down a dry well, and shoveled in dirt to obscure it, avoiding the area thenceforth.” 3. Fertile Fantastic Imagination with Teeth “His eyes, which had seen centuries snuffed out almost in a blink, were impossibilities—two things made of light which was black, two searing flames the shade of unmitigated darkness.” “Lylas the witch had forgotten she was dead. She turned luxuriously in her slumber and stretched out a languid hand to seize the collar of her blue dog. Her hand closed on air. She opened her eyes.” “And she grinned a hag’s grin with his own dead mother's teeth.” “Their eyes might have been made of glass. It was as if without knowing or being troubled by it, they were slowly calcifying, the calcification beginning with the topmost layer of the skin, creeping inward till it reached the organs and the mind.” “The motives of the demons were both complex and simple. What intrigued them, they permitted liberties and rapture. What was fruitless or insolent or unwary, they eradicated. What bored them, they overlooked.” 4. Plenty of Sex (the original DAW cover calls it “an epic novel of adult fantasy”) The sexy scenes often have an Arabian Nights-like earthy humor, but may turn sensually sublime, as Azhrarn demonstrates. And the sex is meaningful. It is a means to magical knowledge and power, as the mage who tries raping Narasen earned his by being penetrated by his master once a day. Or it is a way to work a great change in the world, as Simmu realizes. Or to companionably pass the time in a wasteland, as Simmu and Kassafeh find. And to fundamentally alters a relationship, as Simmu and Zhirem discover. 5. Messed-Up Characters “Narasen was brooding… like venom fermenting in a vat.” “Simmu began to laugh. And as he laughed his eyes were full of the tears of that utter panic-stricken loneliness a man feels who knows he will never be alone again.” “Death is all I ask, and all I may not have.” 6. Exquisite Prose (tight, poetic, witty, awful, beautiful) I reread, savored, typed up, reread, savored, etc. SO many passages, like-- “When she was fourteen, wandering home late from some orgy of an obscure sect over the hills and the hour before dawn, Lylas the witch had met Death. It was at a place where the ground was unloved, a place of thorns, and nearby three men had been hanged. Lylas had been well schooled, and she knew a thing or two more than most. She paused under the creaking gallows when she recognized the ebony Lord in his white clothes, and into her shrewd and youthful brain there came an inspiration. It was an inspiration of the sort to set heart banging, teeth jittering, hands cold and mouth dry. It was of the sort which comes only once, and must be hearkened to and acted on--or let go and ever regretted. Lylas chose not to regret. So she went up to Death and addressed him humbly.” I’m looking forward to Delusion’s Master (1981) View all my reviews
The Return by Walter de la Mare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Standing face to face with the unknown” What a weird story is Walter de la Mare’s The Return (1910)! Stolid English gentleman Arthur Lawford is convalescing from a recent illness when, full of melancholy and ennui he wanders into small, old Witherstone churchyard to read the gravestones there. One stone set apart from the others in the unmarked grave area grabs his attention because it's from the 18th century and belongs to a Huguenot “stranger” called Nicholas Sabathier who took his own life. When he bends down to examine the gravestone and tries to put his fingers into the large crack running down the middle, he's filled with dismay and weariness, feels “the target of cold and hostile scrutiny,” and perhaps loses consciousness. But then he finds himself elatedly trotting home feeling quite healthy after having been so sick. Back in his bedroom, he feels alert like a night creature fearing danger and then looks in the mirror and sees a stranger’s face looking back at him! The novel then minutely details Arthur’s desperate attempts to find out what’s happened to him and to come to terms with it and to convince his wife that he’s himself while trying to avoid being seen by their maid or friends, who, of course, would believe he’s a stranger, etc. Or is he simply suffering from illness and nerves and imagining the change in his face? What should he do? Reading through a big medical book sure doesn’t solve his dilemma. He contemplates suicide. Luckily, he has allies in his horrible predicament, like the family friend old vicar Bethany, who takes it on faith (with the support of some answers to questions that only he and Arthur would know) that it’s Arthur behind the stranger’s mask, and an odd brother and sister who live away from society next to the churchyard and some constantly flowing water and suggest supernatural explanations (after all, as the brother tells Arthur, “It's only the impossible that's credible whatever credible means”). What resonates with Arthur is being told that he’s suffering from a complete transmogrification due to some intrusion or enchantment, that anything outlandish and bizarre is a godsend in this rather stodgy life, and that after all the “ghost” who tried to possess him mostly failed and could only replace his face. In the usual ghost story of possession, a spirit inhabits a victim’s body, but de la Mare imagines the body of a spirit inhabiting a victim’s soul, so to speak. That is, Arthur, despite some possible assaults on his personality and insertions of foreign memories, remains essentially himself, though indeed given his traumatic experience, he does not remain his pre-possession boring, conventional, unimaginative self, who led a “meaningless,” half-dead life. His love for his trusty and trusting fifteen-year-old daughter Alice deepens, but his view of his practical wife Sheila, too concerned with what their community will think and half believing that some sin of Arthur has called this calamity down on him, does not improve. Although it gets a little talky now and then, the novel has lots of great writing-- *numinous descriptions, like “…out of the garden beyond came the voice of some evening bird singing with such an unspeakable ecstasy of grief it seemed it must be perched upon the confines of some other world.” *vivid similes, like “His companion’s face was still smiling around the remembrance of his laughter like ripples after the splash of a stone.” *neat lines on human nature and life, like “Are we the prisoners, the slaves, the inheritors, the creatures or the creators of our bodies? Fallen angels or horrific dust?” But what will practical people like Sheila’s cynical, practical, toadlike friend Danton (who says things like, “Servants must have the same wonderful instinct as dogs and children”) do? Will he really try to have Arthur committed to an asylum so he can’t do any mischief to anyone? Or if he’s looking back more like his original self, will they let the matter drop? Will Sheila and Arthur salvage their relationship? Will he visit the unconventional, cool brother and sister team again? Has he really ejected Sabathier in spirit AND body or only in spirit? Was he ever really possessed by the Frenchman’s face? What DOES it all mean? The novel strongly conveys how contingent are our relationships with other people and our own identities, how deeply based they are upon our faces as people (including ourselves) get used to them over time, and how the scientific/realistic view is unable to deal with certain experiences in life, and how convention and protocol and face etc. are stodgy and stultifying, and how common kindness and love and care and concern may ground us. And how mysterious life is and how magical the world: “It was this mystery, bereft now of all fear, and this beauty together, that made life the endless, changing and yet changeless, thing it was. And yet mystery and loveliness were only really appreciable with one’s legs, as it were, dangling down over into the grave.” American audiobook reader Stefan Rudnicki is his usual professional, deep and rich voiced self here, though he kind of assumes a slight British accent for this British novel about a British gentleman. My favorite book by de la Mare is his sublime (and superficially very different) children’s book The Three Mulla Mulgars (1919), but The Return is strange and absorbing. Readers who like Henry James and Algernon Blackwood should read it. View all my reviews
City of Bones by Martha Wells
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Relics, Arcane Engines, Magic, and a Wasteland City Martha Wells’ City of Bones (1995) is a post-apocalypse steampunk alien contact archeological mystery fantasy featuring lots of action and lots of info dumping. The imagined world is vivid. Fringe Cities are scattered around a desert wasteland left behind by some past calamity, as the Survivors’ descendants try to regain the lost knowledge of the Ancients by studying their relics and trading with each other via caravans sent on dangerous journeys through the desert and its city castoff pirates and poisonous predators. Then there are the krismen, genetically modified by the Ancients to survive in the desert, sun proof, needing scant water, immune to poisons, and possessed of marsupial-esque reproductive pouches (a nice touch that plays a role in the plot). The City of Bones, Charisat, is the capital of the Fringe Cities. The city is eight-tiered, the eighth being the lowest, most impoverished and dangerous, the last stop before expulsion into the wasteland, the first being the highest, home to Patricians (aristocrats), Warders (mage warriors) and the Elector (ruler) and his Heir. The city also houses scholars (studying and teaching in the Academia), fortune tellers (burning bones to see the future), black marketeers (frequenting the Silent Market). The authorities consist of vigils, lictors, and the dread Trade Inspectors (who draconianly punish anyone interfering with trade or using verboten coins). Warder magic consists of things like reading minds or manipulating thoughts or “seeing” in the dark or suddenly appearing or safely landing from high falls. Warders risk going “mad” if they access such powers too frequently or deeply. The story concerns an ex-patriot krismen relic dealer called Khat and his ex-patriot foreign scholar partner Sagai living on the sixth tier, where the smell of sewage is not so bad. Their relics business is limited by the fact that as non-citizens, they must handle trade tokens (representing hours of artisan work) instead of coins. Being an outcast from his krismen Enclave (whose people scorn him for having survived capture by pirates) and shunned in Charisat (whose denizens view krismen as feral and soulless), Khat finds it difficult to trust other people, not unlike Murderbot. Also like Murderbot, Khat often thinks of doing bad things while acting ethically. Khat stays in the city because he likes books and relics and his partner Sagai (the relationship between the younger crismen and the older married scholar is neat). The story begins when Khat is hired to guide a veiled Patrician into the Wasteland to investigate one of the Remnants (structures made by the Ancients and left scattered around the Wasteland for some unknown reason). The page turning plot then involves steamwagons, pirates, Ancient relics (from illustrated tiles and cryptic books to painrods and arcane engines), a young female Warder, a charismatic “mad” Warder, a vengeful gangster, a creepy Heir, betrayal, a race to find two stolen relics, a hint of cross-cultural romance, a little torture, a couple murders, some fights, some Silent Market action, inimical aliens, and a timeless doorway. The climax is mind bending but (to me) disappointing, as Wells is writing a more traditional and less Adrian Tchaikovsky-like intercultural communication and acceptance story. Also, I found the novel a little longer than it needed to be with a few more infodumps (on bone takers, gates between tiers, veils, wind chimneys, the Silent Market, krismen pouches, etc.) than were good for narrative flow. Here’s an example. Khat is trying to get half of his fee before guiding the party into the wasteland, while an asshole party member is trying to avoid paying him, and suddenly in the midst of their interaction, we get this: “In Charisat and most of the other Fringe Cities, citizenship had to be bought, and noncitizens couldn’t own or handle minted coins unless they bought a special license to do so, which was almost as expensive as citizenship itself. And sometimes not worth the trouble, since Trade Inspectors paid special notice to sales made with minted coins. Trade tokens were a holdover from the old days of barter, and worthless without the authority of the merchants or institutions who stamped them. If a city became too crowded and faced a water or grain shortage, it could always declare all trade tokens void, forcing noncitizens to leave or starve in the streets.” The information is important for the story, but it could be delivered more entertainingly or more in the voice/mind of a character. On the plus side, the resolution is restrained, the characters are appealing, and the writing is clean, and there are neat places where (without explanations) we find out things like the people calling fish and ducks depicted on Ancient relic tiles “water creatures” and “water birds,” presumably because water is so scarce that there are no more fish or ducks. And Wells does effectively work in some world information by having Khat tell Elen, a young female Warder who’s forced by her master to work with him, about krismen, or she tell him about Warders. On top of all that, it's a rare self contained stand alone book! The audiobook reader Kyle McCarley is fine, really, but egregiously overdoes the NPC voices and gets a LITTLE too excited for action scenes. Fans of Wells (like me!) would enjoy the book. View all my reviews
Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas
My rating: 3 of 5 stars A Neat Concept and a Needed Subject, but too Much Summary and Febrile and Cliché YA Emotion Trans, gay, Latinx high school student Yadriel Velez lives in East LA with his family in an old, low profile brujx (witch) cemetery, caring for graves and spirits. It has not been easy for Yadriel to come out as trans and gay to his traditional family and community, especially because of their strict brujx (witch) gender divisions, with brujo (male) members sending spirits off to the next world by severing them from their “tethers” (key objects from their lives) before they hang around too long and become “maligno,” and bruja (female) members specializing in healing (and financially supporting their families by applying their secret witch powers to mainstream careers as nurses and doctors and psychologists). Yadriel’s mother accepted his starting to live as a boy at 14, but she died almost a year ago, and his father has been insisting that he cannot become a brujo because he’s a “girl.” Thus, the opening of Aiden Thomas’ Cemetery Boys (2020) has Yadriel performing the ritual to become a brujo by himself—supported by his best buddy-cousin Maritza (a vegan bruja, which means she can’t heal cause she won’t use the required ritual animal blood). Yadriel succeeds, gaining the acceptance of Lady Death, the patron/deity of the brujx, but he also accidentally “summons” the spirit of Julian Diaz, a freshly killed (and “devastatingly handsome”) bad boy from his school. (Thus starts the hot ghost boy and sensitive trans boy romance of the novel.) That Julian was killed at about the same time as Yadriel’s well-liked older brujo cousin Miguel and that no one knows where their bodies are is a big mystery Yadriel and Maritza and Julian set out to solve. Then Yadriel can come out as a new brujo to his family and community, AND they can find out what happened to Miguel and Julian, AND Julian will let Yadriel send his spirit on to the next place. AND they only have two days to do it before Dia de Muertos. That situation is too often referenced and summarized through character dialogue and Yadriel’s thoughts. The novel could’ve been at least 1/5 shorter. I liked learning about brujx culture in a Latinx and transgender context! I liked the Dia de Muertos festival information, preparations, and descriptions. I liked the details on Latinx foods, language, familial relationships, countries of origin, and so on. I liked the few dashes of social criticism about things like the police not caring to look for a missing Latino boy living without parents, or parents of another missing Latino needing an interpreter to tell the police about him while fearing they’ll be deported. I wanted more of that kind of thing. I also really liked the transgender and gay stuff, as some of Yadriel’s experiences are poignant and interesting: he uses uncomfortable chest binders to hide his breasts; he feels great anxiety when using the boys’ restroom at school for the first time; he doesn’t like his high school yearbook photo, because in addition to not being able to afford gender alteration therapy or surgery, his family hasn’t been able to afford to legally change his name from his feminine birth name so that the name under his photo is not his real name. The novel features a few other characters in addition to Yadriel who are non-binary or gay or trans. Actually, given his apparent sensitivity, I expected Yadriel to face more criticism, teasing, and abuse, but people seem rather accepting of his gender and sexual orientation—California in the 2020s? Or maybe he’s too self-conscious and melodramatic? One moment we’ll read, “Yadriel had spent years feeling misunderstood by everyone except for Maritza,” and the next, “Yadriel felt that his uncle was the only one, other than his mom, who really understood him,” and wonder if Yadriel’s feeling too sorry for himself or if Aiden Thomas is trying too hard for reader sympathy. And there is WAY too much overwrought, repetitive, cliché, corny YA writing! Heat floods or blooms in Yadriel’s cheeks (nine times!) or claws up his throat; his skin/face grows hot/red (eleven times!); his heart sinks or hammers or leaps or thrashes; his skin crawls; his stomach plumets to his feet; guilt rips him in half. And creative metaphors aren’t always felicitous: e.g., “Exhaustion plowed into him like a truck.” And the climax and aftermath are way too quick and easy. All that said, there ARE some neat descriptions that feel like LA (e.g., “Hazy pollution and city lights washed everything in an orange glow, even in the middle of the night”) and Latinx culture (e.g., “Classically handsome. He looked just like the stone statues that adorned the alcoves of the church. An Aztec warrior reincarnated”). And some neat moments: “Am I dead?” Yadriel winced and gave a small nod. “Yeah…” Julian stumbled back a step, his body wavering in and out of existence for a moment, like a camera trying to focus. “Oh, Jesus.” He pressed both hands against his face. “My brother is gonna kill me.” And some pointed conversations: “He and his family are from Colombia,” Alexa went on, in a way that suggested a double meaning, but when everyone just stared at her, she added, “You know what they export from Colombia, don’t you?” “Coffee?” Maritza guessed in a bored tone. “Crack,” Alexa answered. “I’m half Colombian on my mom’s side, and none of us are drug dealers,” Letti pointed out. And some sweet romance: “Julian was the most alive person he’d ever met. Even as a spirit, he was bright and full of constantly moving energy. A sun crammed into the body of a boy. Yadriel didn’t want to see him without his light.” And I wanted to keep reading, partly to find out what would happen between Yadriel and Julian. And it IS great that Aiden Thomas wrote this book. I remember wishing that Holly Black had written The Coldest Girl in Coldtown (2013) with a Tana as trans heroine instead of with just Valentina as trans supporting character. I imagine Cemetery Boys gives heart to many non-traditional gender kids, while making traditional gender kids more open minded about difference. View all my reviews
The Trouble with Peace by Joe Abercrombie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “Only the mad could be steady here.” The Trouble with Peace (2020) is another dip into Joe Abercrombie’s grim epic fantasy world, where there are no good heroes or altruistic mages but plenty of hard choices, treachery, and graphic ultra-violence. This second book in the Age of Madness trilogy takes place right after the first one, A Little Hatred (2019), and about twenty-eight years after the events of the First Law trilogy (2006-08). As in his other books, third-person narration rotates among a varied set of flawed point of view characters in different locales and situations, often outside their comfort zones. Newly-crowned ex-party prince King Orso sits the Union throne uncomfortably, aware that he’s hated by both nobles and commoners and that the Breakers and Burners are fomenting rebellion—the Great Change—from among the lower classes. And he’s still feeling dead at having been dumped without explanation by his quondam lover Savine dan Glokta (we know it’s because she learned they were siblings). Must he let it all be handled by his Closed Council (including Savine’s spy master father Arch Lector Glokta and the First of the Magi Bayaz, no Gandalf but a terrifying free-market banker puppet master)? Savine is still snorting up pearl dust and trying to get over having been caught in an uprising in Valbek, when she had to flee a mob at one of her factories, shave her head, live among the poor, and scrounge garbage to survive. Her business interests are suffering, and she’s pregnant with a bastard. Is her only solution to marry Leo dan Brock, the Young Lion, the current hero-darling of the Union? With her connections and his fame, what might they not accomplish? “If the world had to lose so she could win, so be it.” Leo is the new Governor of Angland (the northern land of the Union), but he’s still afflicted by the festering leg wound he received when besting the Great Wolf of the North, Stour Nightfall, in a duel. When Leo visits the capital city of the Union to try to get King Orso to understand Angland’s plight, he’s invited by treasonous nobles from the Open Council to help them “free” King Orso from the corrupt Closed Council. What’s a brave, brainless hero who’d rather lead a cavalry charge than strategize to do? “No corpses, no glory.” Rikke, the daughter of the Dogman, the leader of Uffrith, a Northern protectorate of the Union, is ever more plagued by the fits attendant upon her raging Long Eye gift/curse of prophetic vision, leaving her unable to eat and often unable to distinguish between past, present, and future. Is her only solution to visit a verboten mountain lake to meet an undead witch whose face is stitched together with gold wire? “What use are straight answers in a crooked world?” Jonas Clover is a grizzled Northerner who follows survivor precepts like it’s better to stab a sleeping enemy than fight him in a battle, and it’s better to stand with the winners. Thus, when Stour Nightfall murdered his uncle to become King of the North, Clover stabbed his old friend Wonderful in her back to (appear to) stand with Stour. How can he stick to his policy of avoiding battles when given a troop of Northern fighters to lead onto Union soil? Victorine “Vick” dan Teufel, the loyal spy-pawn of Arch Lector Glokta, arrives at the border crossroads city of Westport to prevent its aldermen from voting to leave the Union to join its bitter enemy Styria. Will she find the right balance of favors, threats, and violence? Will her scrawny right hand boy Tallow ever touch her conscience? Finally, the hulking veteran Gunnar Broad is living in uncomfortable luxury with his beloved wife and daughter while thugging for Savine to improve “labor relations.” (Don’t stand near him when he removes his spectacles!) Will he ever act on his feeling that the workers he intimidates would live and work better with higher pay and safer working conditions? The way Abercrombie manages those point of view characters and their predicaments and sets them on collision courses is page turning, if not enjoyable. It's challenging when point of view characters you like do things you dislike, but it becomes intolerable when they unconvincingly do them for plot contrivance, and it’s worse still when they repeatedly rationalize their behavior, all of which gets irritating with Savine, Leo, Vick, and Broad. Abercrombie similarly mistreats supporting characters like Glokta and especially Leo’s mother Finree. In A Little Hatred, she’s a calm, informed, wise, brave, and effective leader, Governor and General of Angland, controlling Leo’s worst heroic inclinations. Here, she’s suddenly pathetic, blind to what her son’s up to and then pleading and shrieking with him about it when it’s supposedly too late. I didn’t quit on this book because Abercrombie nonetheless made me need to find out what would happen to his characters, and because Rikke and Orso and their friends are so surprising and appealing. And because Abercrombie skewers heroism (“Heroes are defined after all not by what they do or why but by what people think”), mocks war (“farting bugles and bumbling drums”), and shows its horror (utter madness in which only insane people are capable). However, he writes exciting and suspenseful war scenes, so that despite their awful absurdities and graphic violence, we do read them on the edge of our seats. He's NOT writing a truly anti-war war fantasy akin to the likes of Red Badge of Courage or All Quiet on the Western Front, which deny the reader any kind of morbid thrill. I enjoy his wry humor, as in lines like “It occurred to him now, the way the slaughter man occurs to the pig.” I get a kick out of his characters’ cynical wisdom, like “Hoping for a thing often seems to be the best way to bring the opposite.” And he writes biting banter, like: “Being your father is the only thing I’m proud of.” (Glokta) “And you’re not even my father.” (Savine) “That should tell you about everything else I’ve done.” (Glokta) And Leo’s homosexuality and homophobia are a potentially neat development. I like Steven Pacey's reading of the audiobook, especially his ever-surprisingly high voice for Orso’s herculean ex-hero bodyguard Gorst. Finally, the novel contains two prime surprises, and it ends with enough closure and enough juicy loose ends that although I don’t need to rush to the last volume in the trilogy, I will read it to find out how everything will end up. View all my reviews
Graceling by Kristin Cashore
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “Mercy was more frightening than murder because it was harder” Eighteen-year-old (or so) Katsa is a Graceling, possessed of a special gift (Grace) like a superpower in X-men or Heroes, in her case, a preternatural ability for killing. She is far less subject to fatigue, pain, hunger, thirst, cold, sickness, injury, and so on than normal (Graceless?) people and far quicker and stronger and more dexterous, resourceful, and creative etc. in fighting, hunting, swimming, etc. Not having any parents, she has been exploited for several years by her uncle King Randa as his attack dog-thug, being sent on missions to intimidate and physically punish any lord or commoner who dares cheat or diss the King. But lately she’s started chafing at that service, refusing to harm basically innocent people for Randa and starting the Council, a secret society spreading throughout the Seven Kingdoms to protect powerless people from the powerful. And such is the virtue of her cause that she has brought into the Council King Randa’s own spy master Oll, his own son Prince Raffin (a cool possibly gay guy into science, medicines, and his assistant Bann), and one of his most important young lords Gidden. When the first novel in Kristin Cashore’s Graceling Realm series, Graceling (2008), begins, Katsa is on a Council mission (unknown to King Randa) to rescue this Lienid grandfather prince from the dungeon of the King Murgon, so we get a good glimpse of her formidable fighting skills as she easily knocks out several dungeon guards and a dozen or so castle guards—until she almost meets her match in the person of Greening Grandemalion (call him Po), a handsome, be-ringed young Leinid prince not much older than she and apparently Graced with fighting ability (because he sure knows where each of her lightning-fast blows is going to land and act accordingly to avoid them…) The novel will develop the relationship between Katsa and Po in rather convincing, interesting, and moving ways as the plot (full of concise world building, exciting action, surprising reveals, complex romance, grueling adventure, and a boss villain with a scary Grace) puts them through the wringer and challenges Katsa’s understanding of herself, her Grace, and her lover. Interestingly, although the novel was published in 2008, the audio book version didn’t get made til 2022, so it is another example of a book that was first published before audio books were so popular and that has benefited from the popularity of audiobooks. Reader Xanthe Elbrick really enhances the story. The novel recalls Robin Hobb’s earlier Assassin’s Apprentice. A young highly trained, skilled, and effective killer for a king; the conflict between doing the dirty work for a demanding master and wanting to be free to live your life; the ethics of killing; etc. But of course Katsa is a she, and everyone knows what she is and what she can do, which is part of why they shun her, while in Fitz's case it's because they know he's a bastard without having any idea he's a highly trained spy assassin. And Fitz doesn't start his own "Council," but stays more a tool of the Farseers. It also reminds me a bit of The Murderbot Diaries, because although Katsa refers to herself as a monster, she’s really a human survivor-savior. Cashore’s novel indulges in a bit of YA Special Princess Heroine Overkill, in that Katsa is a beautiful orphan, she complains of having no friends but really has several good ones, she has a really cool love interest, she’s basically not one princess but two, she’s a great fighter (the best in her kingdom), and (so far) her unique Grace is countless Graces rolled into one. Because there is (so far) no explanation for the Grace system, where the abilities come from, how they actually work, who gets one, why it manifests as it does in a person, why Graced people have one eye one color and one eye another (apart from being cool), and so on. This permits Cashore to come up with any kind of Grace with any kind of rules needed to suit her plot. And the climax is over too quickly. However, I had such a great time listening to the audiobook, which was funny, exciting, suspenseful, moving, surprising, and so on (and has some great stuff re to marry and have kids or not and how it'd be to be close to someone who can basically read your thoughts), so that I really had to kind of flog myself to find flaws because I just wanted to enjoy the ride to the end. I also appreciate that apparently each Graceling book can stand by itself. Will I go on to listen to other books in the series? Hmmm…… View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
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