frumiousb

I periodically reread this trilogy. More specifically, I frequently reread A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind At the Door. Even as a child, I had the most mixed feelings about A Swiftly Tilting Planet. I was curious how I would experience it now.

And the answer is: I still don't love it. At least not in the same way. Meg is very incidental here, and despite Charles Wallace's specialness throughout the book I (kind of obviously) preferred Meg. I also missed having Calvin as a character, although his mother makes for an interested addition. I like that L'Engle felt the need to question the way that she drew his family as trailer trash in the earlier books.

Mostly, I'm uncomfortable with the biology as destiny side of the novel. The notion that the wrong father = a bad baby sits wrongly with me. Even as a child, I felt some uncomfortable sympathy with the "bad" siblings and cousins in this book. That feeling got worse as an adult.

My passion for the trilogy as a whole remains what it is. Even in my least favorite installment I still remembered it well enough to recite large passages word for word from memory. This just isn't my favorite of the three.

(Note: I'm aware that she eventually wrote two more books in the world of these three. But I haven't read the last two. A trilogy it was to me as a kid, and a trilogy it remains to me, I'm afraid.)

A lot to say about this book. It returns to the world of The Iron Dragon's Daughter. This is a happy thing for me, since that is and remains one of my favorite fantasy novels. I wish I had more adjectives to convey "dark" and "original". Those words are overused, aren't they? But they apply here, both of them.

The story, as is usual for Swanwick, weaves together a number of plot threads. Think of it more as a rope with many strands than as a single clear plot line. There's something about power and how it corrupts, and something else about the pros and cons of terrorism. There are magical creatures of many kinds, all inventive and lovingly detailed. There's a lost king plot too-- but I would wager it is different than you have seen that old chestnut cooked before.

There is some chaos here with all these elements cooked together. I didn't mind it at all-- I was carried along by the energy of the book itself. If you like your fantasy very neat and simple, this may not appeal to you. Also be aware that the only "young" part of this book is the original age of the main character-- I would not mistake either this or The Iron Dragon's Daughter for young adult reading. At least not typical young adult reading; I suspect that there would be rather too much adult for many parents here.

One my pet peeves (& yes, I am peevish) in a science fiction novel is when the book prefaces itself with a quotation from some kind of prophecy/historic text written from the future/news article which delivers the backstory that the reader is going to need to enjoy the book. It can be used well as a device-- mostly when it delivers atmosphere instead of information. But to my mind it generally represents sloppy plotting or an overly intrusive editor.

Anyhow. At Winter's End begins with just such a preface, and it put me in the mind to be irritated. Also, while Silverberg is one of my long-term favorite authors in the genre, I'm well aware that his work can often be uneven. There were also a couple of seemingly predictable elements in the first part of the book-- tribes, rules, long history, dream dreamers-- bla bla bla. So I was kind of expecting not to like the book very much.

But, you know, in the end I did. It grew on me by moments, until by the end I really had a difficult time to put it down. It starts off in one very typical way, and seems to end up as something else again. Silverberg doesn't give himself an easy way out-- no easy quests, no Great Lord of Darkness to slay. It becomes a little book about being human and about starting again. The world building is very good, and I liked it very much.

I noticed with amusement that many of the reviewers of this book had exactly the opposite journey. They were very happy with the beginning when they thought it would be a more typical book, but became annoyed when it started to meander and became more philosophical. Consider both points of view if weighing this as a purchase.

Okay-- let me begin with what I liked. Britain retains her ability to work within genre without giving in to cliche. She injects smart characters and politics into a pretty standard fantasy set up. It is a combination that continues to charm (this reader, at least).

This said, The High King's Tomb was a disappointment compared to the first two books in the series. It is a very long book, first. That would matter less if it was action packed, but it meanders-- frankly. It takes hundreds of pages to get to the main elements that separate this piece of time in the Green Rider world into a novel. Several of the plot points-- "harmless" errand, etc., were predictable to the point of eye rolling. I also wasn't fond of the magical horse farm a la Tom Bombadil. None of these sins would have been unforgivable by themselves. But given how long the book took to get to the point, they rubbed me the wrong way.

I also had the vain hope-- disappointed hope-- that this series was going to be a trilogy. But it isn't. This is just book three. So much remains unresolved, including some of the most interesting character aspects. And given Britain's track record, this means another three plus years of waiting before we get to book four. (And yes, I do completely respect the right of a writer to work at their own pace and yadda yadda yadda-- but it *does* take some of the continuity away for the reader when you need to wait 3+ years between each book. Just saying.)

Please *do* note that I wouldn't be nearly this cranky if I didn't like the earlier books so much. Britain is still writing some of the smartest epic fantasy books out there. Many will not be disappointed with The High King's Tomb. Some, like me, probably will be. I'll give Britain a pass and see what happens with book four.

In the Cities of Coin and Spice gives us The Book of the Storm and The Book of the Scald, completing The Orphan's Tales.

Probably nothing Valente could have done would have matched the impact that In The Night Garden made on me. I read it at a personally very difficult time, when for a few brief days her prose lifted me out of my grief and gave me something new to consider. That book was a blessing for me-- execution and timing interacting perfectly.

Even if it cannot (for me) match the first, In the Cities of Coin and Spice would still be something that I would very much recommend. The Orphan's Tales deserve to be read as a whole. The achievement is impressive-- fractured fairy tales, seemingly completely new; nested stories; characters and motivations both dark and strange. I have not been a fan of Valente's other work, to be honest, but these volumes are just wonderful. Fairy tales written for grown-ups that still capture the experience of being a child.

I loved this volume just a little bit less. The gap was largely seated in the Tale of the Scald. It felt just a touch too long-- somehow did not catch me as much as the other three sections. But this is a minor quarrel.

Valente is such a good writer. Her style doesn't always work for me, but in these books, it works perfectly. If you haven't read anything in the series, then begin at the beginning.

I think I have said this before. Several times before, even. Sean Stewart is a *wonderful* writer. His characters have great sensitivity and depth. His humor is subtle, but effective.

I have not always found his plotting skills were as good as the rest of the package. I thought the first few books I read by him were slight and a little bit easy to forget. Then I read Mockingbird, and it was an astonishing novel. Everything good combined to be something great-- I still really recommend it.

Perfect Circle is not, to my mind, quite as good as Mockingbird, but it is awfully close. Ostensibly about ghosts (at least according to the cover), it is more about a man trying to fix his life in the face of unusual talents and the usual handicaps. There was something about the plot that reminded me oddly of Douglas Coupland's novels. I suspect neither author would appreciate the comparison, but there you go.

When I look back on the book, I find the ending has melted away from my memory. I can discover it back again quickly. Still, there is something a little unfinished about the ending which makes it slightly less strong than Mockingbird. At least for me.

Meet William "Dead" Kennedy and find out for yourself.

I loved The Lies of Locke Lamora. It had a sparkle and an energy that carried me plain past the fact that it is not the kind of fantasy book that I typically enjoy.

Unfortunately, Red Seas Under Red Skies kept the parts I normally do not like and lost much of the crisp fire that had delighted me so much in the first book.

I'm not sure I can fully analyze what doesn't work, but it has something to do with pace and structure. The structure was really odd, somehow. I was deeply bored in the middle section of the book. I also found myself staring in disbelief at aspects of the plot. In The Lies of Locke Lamora, Lynch asked us to give him the benefit of the doubt in a few key unrealistic places. I didn't mind that. But he asked too much of me here. I had many more "what?!" moments than "cool!!" moments in this book.

There are still some good things in the book. It wasn't entirely a waste of time. But, honestly, if the third book is more like Red Seas than like Locke Lamora then I will not be reading forward to the fourth.

p.s. I'm getting tired of pirates. Pirates are the new black, and I'm discovering there are precious few writers who can pull them off.

A Novel of the Minnipins

B. got really sick of this book by the time I was done reading it-- I kept poking him to read passages out loud. This has a specific context. Since my husband is Dutch and I live in the Netherlands The Gammage Cup has some particular resonances. Most particularly, one of the things that I *always* choke on here is the (in my opinion) neurotic insistence that All Houses Should Look Just Like All Other Houses-- in the name of harmony. An acquaintance of ours was involved with a long-standing battle with the city since he repainted his house its original historical color, but it turned out not to be in the list of approved colors and oh-- it was just so incredibly ridiculous. He had to change the color, in the end, history be damned.

Anyhow, one of the big points of The Gammage Cup is that things that look different are Not Evil. Part of the basic premise is that there is a little town with a few rebels in it, and these rebels do Shocking Things. One of the Shocking Things is that they keep insisting on painting their door the wrong color. For which they are exiled. This part of my review probably doesn't help anyone, but if I had a million dollars I would have this book translated into Dutch with brightly colored illustrations and pass it out to all school age children for free.

This is one of those children's classics that I never read as a child, and at the urging of an online acquaintance got around to doing so now. It is a Newbery Honor Book and deserves to be one. Muggles, Gummy, and Walter have aged well since the book's release in 1959. I'm really glad that I got to know them here.

Perhaps not a perfect book-- the lurking menace wasn't very well fleshed out, and at times Kendall was a *bit* too heavy-handed with her message. Still, probably worth reading for grown-ups and younger readers alike. Enjoy.

I believe that I first read about Imaro via marthawells, so thanks for that. When a writer I really admire recommends another writer as really worth admiring, it generally sends me looking for the wishlist button. (Or even a paper and pen.)

Imaro is really worth reading, even if these kinds of fantasy/adventure tales are not your cup of tea. They aren't really mine, but I liked this book. I hear it compared to the Tarzan books quite a bit, but I would actually say that it reminded me more of the John Carter/Mars novels. That may simply be because I like Barsoom and was never really able to dive into Tarzan. In any case, Imaro is a book in a similar genre-- using African myth and legend to tell the story of an above-average hero who is somehow unable to find a safe home even as he conquers his enemies and grows in strength and skills. These kind of books seem to be less character-driven and more built around the idea of a central superior character whose traits give him the perspective to interact with all the exceptional elements of the world around him. Imaro is just that little bit stronger for the fact that Saunders also gave his character some depth. There's something of the Clint Eastwood cowboy in Imaro-- always alone, always haunted by violence, always set apart from his peers.

This book is really a collection of short stories which are woven together in a narrative. As noted in other reviews, some elements of the book have been altered since their original publication 30 years ago.

I enjoyed it, and I also enjoyed something different from this type of book than the typical golden age white adventurer lost in savage lands. Imaro is special in that the project is in itself important. I can imagine that this is a much needed book for parents of young children with an African heritage. Finally a view on African myth and history that tells a different story than the usual exotic perspective.

I was sorry to read that Nightshade Books, who brought Imaro back into print, stopped publishing the series with the second book. I do have to say that I wasn't terribly impressed with the quality of the book itself-- the pages were starting to fall out before I was halfway through the book. I have no idea if this is typical of Nightshade or not. The introduction was by Charles De Lint.

Recommended.

*conversation with self*

(self puts down book-- "sexist jerk!" she mumbles.)
self2 lifts an eyebrow. "aren't you overreacting to a light-hearted genre spoof?", she asks.
(self sulks. "he has the conveniently groin-sized femme fatale stripped and spanked publicly when she tries to kill him. Jerk. That never happened in the Travis McGee novels.")
self2 looks up "parody" in the dictionary. She then looks up "genre conventions" and "hard boiled detectives"
(self: sexist!)
self2: parody!

I dunno. I'll say that it *may* be a serious guy book and that it *may* be aimed at your average teenage boy and leave it at that. I'll also admit that I *may* be lacking in a sense of humor and that I *may* occasionally let my buttons get pushed by this kind of genre foray.

The "spanking uppity chicks" issue aside, there were some genuine moments of cleverness and entertainment in this Cook novel. thisc0rrosion lent it to me after I confessed that I simply choked on the Black Band books. He thought that it might be something by Cook more up my alley. And that's true. I like hard-boiled detectives a lot, and I do enjoy seeing the genre turned on its head within fantasy or science fiction. So some definitely good points here. If this is your thing, then you may find that it is really your thing.

For me, I didn't find it more than sort of entertaining. I missed any feeling for nuance-- more Micky Spillane than Raymond Chandler. I'll grant you that I might be expecting too much from a genre half-parody, but there you go.

I am a little bit annoyed at myself that I waited so long to read this book. I always really like Wells' novels, but there is something unassuming about them in that I often find that too long goes between reading one book and the next. Before this I've read The Death of the Necromancer, The Element of Fire and The Wheel of the Infinite.

This book is the first installment in a series called The Fall of Ile-Rien, but it isn't the first visit Wells has made to that world. I was delighted to come back to the world and the Valiarde family, and even though it has been a while, I found it easy to swim right back into the text.

Wells has a particular way of combining steampunk elements with high fantasy to create easily digestible and fun stories that don't have as many sharp edges as some of the more pure steampunk writers. Whether this is a good or bad thing depends entirely on the reader's mood and what they would like to get out of the book. She is also quite a skilled writer, and has a vivid way with character and world-building that I particularly enjoy.

I had one major quarrel with this book, and that has to do with the set-up of Tremaine Valiard's character arc.

(I don't actually think that it's a spoiler to reveal something from the first paragraph of the book, but if you don't want to know *anything* about the plot, then don't read below this sentence, please.)

The book opens with Tremaine contemplating suicide and this is a character element that is supposed to carry her change arc and internal struggle. I found it nearly wholly unbelievable and not well-grounded in the back story that we are given. This alone made it very difficult for me to get into the book in the early part of the novel. I will admit, however, that I lack a sense of humor about suicidal tendencies and ideation so perhaps I was simply too sensitive to the subject to like the way that Wells used it as a device.

All in all, very much looking forward to reading The Ships of Air.

To say that a book is a "promising first novel" is to use shorthand for: uneven, interesting, fun, forgivably flawed.

This is a promising first novel. Which is to say that if Pratt's fifth book (or even third) doesn't fix some of the more glaring inconsistencies and enthusiastic sloppiness then I am not going to be interested in giving him any more chances. But there is still enough here for a fun read and for me to keep him in mind as an author to watch.

Think Jack Chalker arm-wrestling with Charles de Lint with KJ Bishop looking on with interest and you'll kind of get the flavor of the book. Notable elements include other worlds, urban fantasy markers, cool cultural references, and the desert/wild west.

Not at all bad.

A Darkover novel, and at least at the first time that I read it, a fan favorite. The Free Amazons of Darkover were always one of the most interesting aspects of Darkover, in part because of how Bradley worked to turn the idea of Amazons on their head. The Shattered Chain brings together the Free Amazons, Terrans, Dry Town women, and the Comyn into a series entry which does a fine job of examining the life of Darkover women from many angles.

It may be that the interest Bradley has in the lives of women here comes to some degree at the expense of a broader plot. While it was decent, and kept me reading, it was also a little bit disjointed in time and character. The pacing also had its odd moments.

Flawed but still interesting Darkover book. Still by far my favorite body of work by MZB.

This is one of the books which I read countless times as a child between the ages of 8 and 12. I have no idea where I picked it up or what I found so fascinating about it. It shares its special category with several of the more normal children's books as well as other equally puzzling obsessions like Legend of the Seventh Virgin by Victoria Holt.

I no longer own my original copy of the book-- probably got rid of it in a fit of shame somewhere around college, and so I was delighted when I saw a copy second hand. Even so many years later, I could probably write the opening chapters from memory-- up to and including the point where the aliens are brought back to earth. The book, read as an adult, is an odd pastiche of many things-- space-faring vampires, weird science that points to latent vampirism in all life forms, an explicit sex-vampirism link, and some half interesting notions of justice and rehabilitation. The first 70 or so pages are genuinely gripping and still pretty interesting. Unfortunately, after they meet Fallada and once the characters start exploring his backstory for more than illumination of the nature of the aliens, the pace of the book starts to drop. By the time that they end up at the Sekret Lair of Count Geijerstam and his benevolent vampirism, the book is fully mired in a soft porn S&M philosophy mush pie. Midway through the book it seems clear to me that Wilson was much more interested in his ideas than he was interested in his plot or, possibly, his readers.

Wilson himself is an interesting character, as a little bit of research proves. He was one of writers most identified with the Angry Young Men and he started his career doing philosophy/lit crit with a special interest in the role of the outsider. (Somewhere out there, I'm sure that there is someone smarter than me who is horrified that I heard about Wilson as a result of reading The Space Vampires, but there you go.) After that point, he apparently got more and more involved in mysticism and different states of consciousness and started with the first footsteps on the path that would lead him towards writing sexy supernatural supermarket potboilers.

There is apparently also a film based on this book, which I can (somewhat thankfully) say that I haven't seen. Amusingly, on a Colin Wilson fan website, there is also an outline for Space Vampires 2 which gives you some idea what the problem was in the second half of the first installment.

I'm not sure that I could recommend this to someone who doesn't have the same shared history with the novel. It might make an interesting digression for a reader interested in the vampire in all its forms. Probably one of the best things about the book is the meaning that Wilson attempts to beat out of the myth. It probably also has some reasonable kitsch value, if you like that sort of thing.