The Bone Season - Samantha Shannon

So you all know I have A Thing about debut authors and how their books are generally... not so great. That's not to say that they won't get better, of course, and if your first novel is the best thing you ever produce and your name is neither Harper Lee or Margaret Mitchell, I'm going to be pretty sad for you.

Maybe the thing that irritates me the most about these debuts is the superlatives that are used on the dust jackets. If someone's first work is stunning, gorgeous, groundbreaking, and phenomenal; where do they go from there? That's a lot of pressure! Especially when people are calling you the next JK Rowling because you're young, English, blonde, and (to be fair)  a pretty talented wordsmith at 23.

Correlation vs. causation, my dear Watson.

Now, don't get me wrong: The Bone Season is a grand ol' time and I not only enjoyed it thoroughly, I also look forward to reading more of Ms. Shannon's work while I weep in the corner about how I've done nothing with my life and young whippersnappers are published authors. But she's no JK, and The Bone Season is not "the next Harry Potter," so kindly ignore all that stupid hype.

The world Shannon has created is a kind of neo-Victorian clairvoyant Brave New World (although that's also one of my favorite books so y'know - also not the next Aldous Huxley, yadda yadda). It's got a whiff of Neverwhere about it, as well as some Soylent Green.

Paige is a clairvoyant in a London that diverged from ours around 200 years ago, when Edward VII went crazy at a dinner table, killed 5 people, and thus unleashed the clairvoyant curse on some of the population. The government operates as something of a junta, and most voyants have either joined the underground crime syndicate or sold out to the government for safety and work as terriers, sniffing out the illegal voyants. And of course Paige's strain of voyancy is special if not unique, and of course she doesn't know exactly how to use it. Clearly she needs a mentor.

You could just use honey, Mr. Miyagi, but whatevs.

There are twists and turns and Shannon does an excellent job of doling out information in just the right doses to intrigue her readers. There are some inconsistencies, and the pacing isn't super-refined. But I expect that she'll develop into a pretty phenomenal author if she can avoid the trap of writing novels in order to make movies, and it's all pretty engaging, especially if you threw it into you library request list without knowing anything about it except a vague feeling of "I heard this was good and maybe saw it on my goodreads feed."

7.5 out of 11 Ribbons for Dangling from in a Circus Act that No One Watches

Missives from Mexico

Hellooooo! After seventeen only somewhat grueling hours of travel, I arrived in Cancun, Mexico, where my life was ROUGH, let me tell you.

So rough.

I had a bit of a family emergency in the days before I arrived and ended up taking a quick 4-day trip to rural Illinois, where my grandmother was suffering from septicemia (/shudder). Thank goodness we're not living in a post-antibiotic world... yet.

My brother and I are genetically incapable of taking a normal picture, but Grandma is doing fine! 

ANYWAY. I got home at 11:30pm on Monday and left again for work at 9am on Tuesday, so there wasn't a lot of time for the languid "what shall I take to read?" decisions I had been anticipating. So instead of making a decision, I just threw all of the library books I'd checked out to "test" into my suitcase and figured I'd sort it out when I got here:

 

It's moments like this that make me grateful that international flights often allow one free checked bag. No carrying 25# of books across four time zones for this girl! But I did manage to do quite a bit of knitting and listening to the third James Herriott book during my layovers, as well as to start and finish the utterly delightful The River of No Return by the Bee Ridgway.

Like Raych, I was somewhat disdainful of the idea that I could thoroughly enjoy a time travel book that didn't involve the plague or the Blitz. But this book was wonderful.

So, Nick is a lordling fighting for Wellington in Spain, and in the heat of battle gets jumped forward to 2003, where he is picked up by The Guild, whose job it is to monitor people who jump from one time into another. He spends 10 years settling in to rural Vermont on the Guild's dime, then gets a summons from his Alderwoman, who has some revelations for him.

Then there's Julia, who grew up (in 1815) with her craggy grandfather, the Earl of Dorchester. But he passes away, leaving her in the hands of his successor, who is a total dick and also probably nuts.

The Captain is pretty sure this is a terrible idea.

There are funny bits and surprising bits and a few naughty bits and the cover is gorgeous. Some of the characters that you think are for comic relief aren't, and the other way 'round. Ridgway leads the reader by the nose from one revelation to the next, and there were moments where I said, "HAH!" out loud in the airport or on the beach, then looked around furtively to see if anyone noticed.

A few people noticed.

The story spins out gorgeously. And it deals with cultural changes that we avid readers of historical fiction aren't always exposed to; I found myself thinking more carefully about my own assumptions and prejudices, and how they may seem absurd 200 years from now.

Good books make you think, regardless of what genre they get filed under.

I jumped straight from this to a Georgette Heyer and I'm disappointed in the Heyer because there's no time travel. That's how delightful this was.

10 out of 11 Secret Cupolas on Top of the Mansion

(Since I know you're all curious, I read 5.5 of the 12 books I took with me. /brushes off shoulders)

In Which I am Not Dead nor Disappeared

Ariel could use some highlights.

It's been awhile? I guess? Somehow this always happens to me in the fall. I've been reading and doing stuff but I haven't really had anything to SAY about it. Plus I talk to most of you via social media pretty much every day, so it's no like you MISSED me or anything. 

Y'anyway. In the last couple of weeks, my library queue has shrunk and I am left only with the Ambitious Non-fiction on my nightstand. I have every intention of reading it because Reza Aslan is an incredibly amazing historian and also a quite engaging writer. But every time I look at it, I get intimidated and think of him just mentioning in that interview with Fox News how he can't help but imagine that the interviewer did not read his book. 

So instead I combed my shelves for some comfortable sci-fi I haven't read in awhile, and since I finished C.S. Friedman's latest trilogy recently, I picked up the first book in her Coldfire trilogy (sensing a theme here, Friedman...), Black Sun Rising. There are several sci-fi/fantasy series that get an extra point from me because I've been reading them since I was a teenager, and this is one of them. It takes place in the far distant future after Terrans took to the stars, colonized a planet at the far edge of the galaxy, ran into some serious trouble because said planet is prone to serious earthquakes and those earthquakes let loose rivers of fae that manifest the strongest emotions of the people around them. So while you're happy, that's fantastic, but the moment you have a nightmare or are afraid, the planet will try to eat you. 

There's just one thing missing.

In other news, this post should be subtitled "But I Do Succumb to Peer Pressure," because Alice has been BADGERING me for over a week via gchat about joining this Saturday's readathon. She even invoked the California contingent and told me that Megs had already joined.

Which, by way of this post, I am doing. 

I am compelled to point out at this juncture that it was roughly this time last year that the GIF Admiration Society coalesced and decided that a whole 24 hours was FAR too many for us, and that we needed to establish a shorter period of time to work up to participating in the Dewey madness. Since then, we have done two mini-thons - complete with mini-snacks and the mini-theme - with varying degrees of success depending on what your measurement is (a plethora of snacks planned and consumed: success! reporting on said snacks to Twitter and other social media: success! reading of actual books: varying). 

Saturday's readathon probably starts waaaaay too early for me and there's definitely no way I'm going to be able to stay up for 24 hours straight - much less read for that long without going crazy - so my current plan is to set my alarm for a somewhat reasonable hour of a Saturday morning, read and eat until I need to do something else, then knit and listen to an audiobook and maybe take a walk, then probably meet a couple of girlfriends for sangria margaritas. Then I'll come home and stare at my book in confusion before giving up and eating more food. 

I'm anticipating a lot of success in the first two categories, is what I'm saying. 

Elantris - Brandon Sanderson

I’m on a kick with this guy lately; his work is interesting and I am amazed by the scope of his undertakings. And also, I’m waiting for him to finish all ten (10!) of his books in the Stormlight series, for which I will be waiting approximately another 15 years. At the rate I’m reading, I should run out of his previously published material in… a couple of weeks.

This isn’t looking good for the rest of the fantasy writing world.

I’m looking at you, Terry Goodkind and GRRM

Speaking of GRRM, I canNOT have been the only one who thoroughly enjoyed the Epic Internet Meltdown that happened a couple of weeks ago over the Red Wedding, can I? AT LAST my wide-eyed, slack-jawed reaction from 2002 is justified!

Ok, back to Brandon Sanderson.

This is his first novel, weighing in at a hefty 658 pages without too much infodumping, which in itself is pretty impressive. It’s something of a post-apocalyptic novel in that the world as the inhabitants know it changed cataclysmically 10 years ago and no one really knows why or what to do about it, and there are plenty of interesting characters.

I don’t know how to be funny about fantasy novels, you guys. No one but me seems to read them in our (really awesome) set, and I’m not generally a fan of the SF/F fandom – just the books.  And this isn’t the kind of SF/F that I’d recommend starting with (see above re. 658 pages), soooo…..

I’ll just be over here, reading cheerfully till 3am and talking to my cat about it.

7.5 of 11 Books You Didn't Write in Grad School, Haters

The Way of Kings - Brandon Sanderson

This is the tale of a teenaged girl who fell in love with books with dragons on the covers. One day, after having finished everything Melanie Rawn had written and also having been enraged about the ending of The Ruins of Ambrai, someone handed her a 500+ page mass-market paperback that said “Volume 1” on the spine.

Roughly four thousand pages later, she emerged from book six, blinked a bit, and groped around blindly for book seven.

But alas, book seven had yet to be published! And, as it happens, neither had books eight through twelve fourteen. On that day in a sunny bedroom in Alaska in a room with a strange-if-you’re-not-a-teen mixture of kittens and pop stars on the walls, she vowed that she would not read another word of the Wheel of Time series until it was finished, because Robert Jordan would probably die before the damn thing was done.

And thus it was with sorrow but also a small degree of

 that I heard of Robert Jordan’s death before the ending of The Wheel of Time. But lest you think I am too high on my horse, allow me to tell you that I’m current with A Song of Ice and Fire, and there’s no end in sight for that one either.

I love me some epic fantasy, is what I’m trying to say. For years it was the brain candy I used to take my mind off of studying, or in between stints worshipping at the feet of Anthony Trollope or Edith Wharton. These days, most of my book recommendations come from the other book blogs I read, and it’s safe to say that there are not a lot of dragons flying around the covers of their books.

My friend Jeremy also loves fantasy and sci-fi, and since we occasionally share a brain, he suggested I read The Way of Kings. What he neglected to tell me was that this is the first book of a series of ten, and that only this one has been published so far.

WILL SHE EVER LEARN NO I DON'T THINK SO.

You’d think the guy who was commissioned to write the end of Wheel of Time would be a little leery of planning at 10,000+ page series, wouldn’t you?  BUT NO. He cares not for fate and her wily ways.

Anywhatsis, if you like this kind of thing – that is, epic, world-building stories that could reasonably be used as weights and take a torturously long time to get written and published – this is pretty close to as good as it gets. 

8.5 of 11 Glowy Rocks to be Used as Currency

Sapphire Blue - Kerstin Gier

I want to kiss whoever designed these covers on the mouth.

Remember how I got all excitable about The Fire Chronicle being a Good Middle Book in a trilogy, and how that is rare? (Review of Book 1 here)

This is another example! I am tickled pink. I may like this one even better than the first book, but at the very least it’s a photo finish. 

So do you, David. So. Do. You.

All right. There have been 10 time travelers before Gwen (the Ruby) and Gideon (the... Diamond? I had to return the book to the library...), and two of them went rogue. They - Lucy and Paul who went rogue, not Gwen and Gideon - stole the chronograph with the blood samples of nearly all of the previous time travelers and disappeared with it into the past so that the final travelers couldn’t be “read” in - that is, put their blood in the machine - and complete the Circle of Twelve, which we learn could be a Very Bad Thing instead of the Goal of the Circle as we previously thought. Those of us who have read Justin Cronin's books will immediately recognize the number twelve as a very. bad. number. indeed.

There’s a page in the book where all the gemstones are attached to their correct people, along with their musical notes, spirit animals, and a VERY VAGUE reference to their specific magical power. I am lazy and forgot to mark it, but Gwen’s magical power is something about speaking with the voice of the raven, and I am like “I KNOW WHAT THAT POWER IS” because waaaaaay back at the beginning of book 1, Gwen reveals that she sees and interacts with ghosts. And ravens, in case you come from a different place where this is not canon, are messengers between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

This guy also saw ghosts!   

Ok, but lest we forget, Gwen is a teenager, so she is ALSO busy figuring out what on earth Gideon is doing, because he makes out with her one day and then berates her for not knowing how to properly gavotte the next – and really, who can blame him? Doesn’t everyone know how to gavotte? Silly Gwen.

I imagine it looks something like this.

And in the mean time, there is more time travel and more costuming and more creepy 18^th century shenanigans, along with the Drinking of Punch at a Ball! And Gwen gets adopted by the ghost of a gargoyle named Xemerius, who says things like this:

“Leave her alone, can’t you see she’s unhappy in love, bonehead? All because of you!”

I need one of these little guys to follow me around and yell hilarious things at bonehead dudes. Or just people in general, even if I'm the only one who can hear him.

I basically laid in bed for an entire Saturday and read this book, and I wasn't even sick! The pacing is brilliant, the Golden Rule of Show-Don't-Tell is followed scrupulously, and everything is brilliant. Book three can be published any time now. Do you hear me publishers? ANY. TIME.

8.5 out of 11 Glasses of 18th c. Punch - Alcohol Included for Fun! 

The Fire Chronicle - John Stephens

As you may recall, I thoroughly enjoyed the first Book of Beginning, The Emerald Atlas.  And when one is so charmed by he first book in a series, one is presented with an interesting dilemma: obviously one will read the next book, but how many sequels or second novels are as good as the first?

Each of the Books of Beginning follows one of the Wibberly children through their search for the three books… of… right. Three kids, three books.

The way Stephens tells Michael’s story while still weaving in a reason for Kate to be around (she’s already gotten her book, after all) is brilliant. There’s time travel and an Oliver-style band of orphan children and dwarves and their nemeses, elves.

And as much as I like the dwarves with their drinking and vaguely Scottish-inspired snark, you guys, I am so amused by elves. They are giddy and vain and just look:

“Oh, wonderful…you’ve already fallen in love with me!”
“I have not-“
“Don’t be silly! You should see the ridiculous look upon your face! By the way, have you noticed the way my hair moves?”

And then there’s this:

“And my father is well?” asked Wilamena … “Tell me captain, what is the state of his hair?”
“Not as lustrous since your captivity, but I’m sure it will regain its natural fullness and bounce once you are home.”

I just… I can’t even.

To paraphrase S. Morgenstern, there is a shortage of perfect sequels in this world. It would be a pity to miss this one. 

9.5 out of 11 Soulful, Big-Eyed Youths

The Age of Miracles - Karen Thompson Walker

There is this thing publishing has started doing in the last *mumblemumble* years where they call a first novel a debut novel. This always makes me think of débutantes dressed in white, swanning their way down stairs on their fathers' arms so they can be introduced to society, and I kind of hate it.

Firstly because there's suddenly all this pressure to make your début novel amazing, which only happens if you're Susanna Clarke or Harper Lee or Margaret Mitchell, which you are not. And secondly because it puts unrealistic expectations on the book to be HAAAA-mazing and flawless, which is hard enough for a seasoned writer, much less a débutante  And if there's one thing I will do when I'm expected to find a book to be flawless, it's... find a fuckton of flaws.

Julia is 11 when the world starts slowing on its axis. Days gain hours, and while it's kind of a thing, it's not really because she's eleven and has other stuff to worry about, like being the weird kid at the bus stop and liking the handsome skateboarder guy.

Now I'd like you to please pause and think about what you knew when you were eleven. If the answer is "almost nothing," then you are in the same boat as me and the rest of society. Julia, however, is outside of this boat. She's already made it to Adult Reflections Land, where people say things (to themselves) like,

"Carlotta's long gray hair swung near her waist, a ghost, I suspected, of its younger and sexier self" (p. 106).

Reeeeally.

Look, KT-Dubs, I dunno how long it's been since you were eleven, but I have a 12-year-old brother and I am here to tell you that considering the ghosts of people's formerly sexy hair is not on that age group's radar. AT ALL.

The narrator could have been 19, or 25, or 47 years 3 months and 7 days, because she's speaking through an adult mouthpiece - which I haaaaaaated. And I get that this is a coming-of-age novel, wherein the heroine Learns Lots of Things and Puts Away Childish Ideas, and that it's sad that she has to do that while the world is ending (slooooowly). And when there's a concept as fascinating as the Earth slowing its roll, it seems almost wasteful to overlay it with the everyday issues of a pre-teen girl, which to those of us who are no longer pre-teens are about as exciting and urgent as getting you car washed during the rainy season.

This would have been sooooooer much better as a short story or a novella. Cut 150 pages, throw a couple of other short stories on top about other people in this world, call it a collection and BOOM! Better.

Also because I don't read short stories, and thus wouldn't have read it or felt left out for skipping it.

4.5 of 11 Stockpiles of Apocalypse-Friendly Foodstuffs