Book Review - The Magicians, by Lev Grossman

I picked this one up on a very enthusiastic recommendation from a friend. We all have books we like, books we love, and book about whic we become downright evangelical. For him, this bordered on the latter. I'm not evangelical about it by any stretch, and am not even quite sure that I love it, but did like it very much and am glad to have given Grossman a measure of my time.

The Magicians follows three well-worn fantasy tropes: the wizard school, the fantasy novel that ends up being real, and the secret history. The latter element is given disappointingly short shrift.  We're given hints that wizards among us quietly spread their influence, but all we see any of them doing outside the magic school is either recruiting new prospective wizards or idling their time away at a sinecure arranged by seemingly limitless magical influence and wealth. The description of the latter, somewhat late in the novel, felt as if it were written by someone ignorant of anything about the corporate world aside from surface appearances and, at first, felt like a very weak part of the novel. Looking more closely, it fits into one of Grossman's main themes: a deconstruction of the nerd author-insertion wish-fulfillment novel.

At first, the book appeared that it was going to be pure wish-fulfillment fantasy. We're introduced to Quentin, the oh so very smart seventeen year old with an Ivy-league future ahead of him, a headful of fantasy novels, but no real sense of belonging with his peers or any real plans or ambitions. So of course he'll end up at a wizarding school, of course they'll find something special about him there, and of course he'll end up a part of some epic quest the likes of which even the magical world has never seen. He'll eventually find expertise as a wizard, learn the truth about the much-beloved children's fantasy world of Fillory, and go on to have great adventures.  It's obvious and predictable, which is why I was pleased and impressed that it didn't follow formula.

Instead, we find Quentin where many top of their class wunderkinds find themselves. He's suddenly transported from a place where he was special to the place where all the special kids go, where to be a genius by any other measure is to be squarely average. Along the way we find a magic school which, while not as fantasical as Roke Island in Ursula Leguin's _A Wizard of Earthsea_ (for my money the best description of an education in magical arts I've ever read. If you've not read Leguin's Earthsea books, put this review down right now and go get them. If you haven't read them but watched the miniseries on the Sci-Fi channel, you might need to lobotomize yourself first), but it did a nice job injecting genuine wonder into something which should be wondrous; the sequence involving the students' taking part in the mysterious fourth year "disappearance" was both lyrical and fascinating.

What I found a touch disappointing and what grounded the book a bit too much for my taste is that Grossman's storytelling was strictly linear. Towards the end we get some marvelous set-pieces with magical battles that could have been beautifully fimled as a Peter Jackson epic followed by a culmination of several story threads, yet the nature of the book lead us to not really feel that these were threads we'd been following all along. For all of its import, we'd seen very little of the magical world of Fillory until we're ready to go there. There are hints, but never quite enough. Later still, when we learn secrets about time-travel, they do little to disorient the reader the way great time-travel or multiple-worlds novels can. Here I'm thinking of things like Hal Duncan's Vellum or even Neal Stephenson's Anathem. Still, not being a modernist experimental writer needn't be a strike against. It just felt to me like a missed opportunity.

Finally, I'll not spoil the ending here but offer an observation: the scene and language used made it appear to be a note of hope, yet I found it vaguely depressing. It appeared to me that Quentin hadn't really had a character arc, but ended in much the same place as he began; as a follower with no dreams or plans of his own, going along to the next thing because it seemed to inevitably come next. Your mileage, of course, may vary and I'd be quite interested in hearing from people who read this differently than I did.

Three stars.

Read More

Book Review: "Dreadful Beginnings", by Marty Shaw

Those watching the publishing industry know that this is an exciting time for those who want to take nontraditional routes; with the ease of e-publishing and increased availability of tablets and smartphones, more writers are taking to the virtual streets themselves, bypassing traditional publishing houses. I've joined with the independent author's support/promotion/marketing group Literary+ for the occaisonal review and perhaps another surprise or too; today I'm reviewing Marty Shaw's novella "Dreadful Beginnings", the first of his "Penny Dreadful" series. Enjoy!





Review: "Dreadful Beginnings", by Marty Shaw 

Marty Shaw's new novella "Dreadful Beginnings" promises to begin his new suburban fantasy series,  "Penny Dreadful". It's a face-paced and fun story, marred by overly broad characters and a bit of a simplistic, straight-forward plot. 

We first meet our heroine, recent high-school graduate Penny Dire, as she's quitting a telemarketing job after only two days.  The initial impression of Penny is of a carefree and immature for her age young teenager who doesn't seem to care that her friends all have jobs and doesn't see to have or want a plan for the future. She also has a gothic style befitting her name, an artistic bent, and an affinity for cemetaries.  In one early scene, Penny visits one of her favorite tombstones: 

One ancient stone looked especially photogenic, but looks could be deceiving. I 
had used up a whole memory card on this ancient rock, trying all kind of different filters and lighting angles. In real life, the tombstone called out to me and made my skin tingle whenever I was close to it. But it was just a dumb slab of granite in the photos. For some reason, I couldn’t capture its essence on film. I knelt down and brushed away some of the grime, feeling the familiar electric tingle on my hand when I made contact with the stone. Maybe a charcoal rubbing or possibly even a foil casting was needed to really capture the spirit of the piece. 

This painted a nice picture of how Penny sees the world, and shows rather than tells us about her budding talents. Sadly, this picture of Penny as a budding artist who sees things more deeply than others doesn't recur through the story, nor does it figure in Penny's eventual training as a demon hunter. Her irresponsibility and shortsightedness don't factor either, leaving her eventual demon-hunting persona feeling somewhat generic. 

The initial buildup to the paranormal events is nicely done, with small magical effects giving the reader - and characters - hints that the world doesn't function quite normally before leading us to the climactic battle with a demon. There's just enough tragedy to make the threat seem real without letting the story sink into real "horror". When the final battle comes, it is exciting and suspenseful, with real stakes and a satisfying conclusion. 

Shaw's biggest weakness is that his reliance on archetypes makes it hard to really care about the characters. Penny's artistic talents and ambitions are forgotten, leaving us with a sassy demon-hunting teenage girl. She meets a mentor - the improbably named Doctor Horror -  who tells her just as much as she needs to know, with cryptic riddling hints before literally vanishing. An overprotective mother. A gruff magic-shop owner with a hidden heart of gold. I couldn't  escape the feeling that, even if I hadn't met all of these people before, I knew someone just like them from another book. It ends on a promisng note, with hints about the identity and nature of her mentor. 

In conclusion, while there isn't as much depth as one might hope for, "Penny Dreadful" is an entertaining, quick read with promises for more as the series continues. It is available from Amazon for your Kindle



Three stars

Read More

S is for Snuff

It's been nearly three decades since Sir Terry Pratchett graced us with the first of his Discworld books, a series of humorous fantasy novels poking affectionate fun at common fantasy tropes while engaging in various levels of satire and social commentary. The books often have one real-world topic and one or more fantasy element. Pratchett has taken on vampires and modernity, witches and the Phantom of the Opera, wizards and shopping malls, dwarve werewolves and racism, dwarves troll and ethnic conflicts. Snuff, the thirty-ninth of the Discworld books, takes city watch commander Sam Vimes and his wife the lady Sybil out of the metropolis of Ankh-Morpork and into the countryside for a yarn involving goblins, racism, and slavery.
It has elements of a classic fish-out-of-water type of tale, but with Pratchett's keen understanding of relationships and social structures. And, or course, it wouldn't be much of a book if Vimes didn't find crime, old secrets to uncover, and wrongs to right against the poverty-stricken, much-abused goblin race. We end with the beginning of a new understanding as Vimes and Sybil lead  people to the realization that there is more to the goblins than people had imagined. It's a positive enough message, even if a bit heavy-handed and obvious.  What disappointed me is that Pratchett dealt with the same issues of racism and prejudice to much better effect in earlier works, most notably in Thud, which forced Vimes to reexamine his own prejudice against the silicon-based troll race. In Snuff we get very little of this kind of thing from any of the viewpoin characters; those we've come to know as "good guys" through the series remain good, and on the side of rightiousness. Any setbacks or obstacles are quickly and easily set aside, giving the whole book a quick, breezy feel.
There was one moment in which Snuff appeared to reach to be something deeper; while questioning a crime suspect, Vimes called upon something called the Summoning Dark - a malevolent presence which had lodged inside of him since events in the aforementioned Thud. In the earlier book there was real tension as to how this would effect Vimes and a bit of a surprise - although a satisfying one - in how he escaped it. Here there's no real repercussion or even a credible temptation. The Discword series is inccreasingly feeling like a series in which the author has too much affection for his supercompetent, super-honorable characters and is no longer willing to see them do anything wrong or have anything bad happen to them.
Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed the book while I was reading it. Pratchett remains as funny as ever, and as much fun. This one was just a bit of a letdown after the stellar highs we got near the middle of the Discworld series.

Three stars.

Read More

R is for Recommended Reading List (speculative fiction, grrls edition)

With only nine of these leftit appears that we're to make it through the whole alphabet. I wanted to do "recommended reading" today, and chose to focus on women after a conversation I had with Chloe (age 5.5) about the upcoming "Take your children to work day". I'll be taking her to AVI-SPL to see the excciting world of commercial audiovisual integration. She asked about my office (which she's seen once), what my boss looks lile, who my office-mate is. Then:
"Are there any girls, or is it all boys?"
We do have a few women in coordination and administrative positions and one female CAD technician, but that's all. All of the technicians, engineers, salespeople, and programmers are men.
The programming class I just took for Crestron had fifteen students, all men.
The class Biamp gave on their Audio DSP products had about fifteen students, all men.
Extron's AV technologies class had one female student out of about a dozen.
It becomes a self-perpetuationg cycle, that young girls who see certain fields dominated by men never picture themselves there, so the next generation is dominated by men, leaving a lack of role-models for the following generation of girls.  Sometimes speculative fiction literature falls into the same "boy's club" mentality, in which the big names are all men. So, to remind us all that the world can be a more diverse place if we let it, I'll give recommend three female fantasy authors and highlight one work from each.


The Orphan's Tales, by Cathrynne M Valente (In the Night Garden and Cities of Coin and Spice)


Those who know me shouldn't be surprised to see Cat Valente topping this list; I find her to be one of the most compelling and original voices in modern fantasy fiction. She has a poet's ear for language and can weave intricate and complex plots. I could have picked many of her books - her middle-grade novel The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Boat of Her Own Making, her Russian fairy-tale interpretation Deathless, or her in-progress A Dirge for Prestor John trilogy, but The Orphan's Tales were the books that first introduce me to her.  The story is about a young girl with a series of stories tattooed in tiny, tiny writing across her eyelids and in the creases of her eyes. After slowly and laboriously reading them with a magnifying glass and a mirror, she tells them to a young boy. One story leads into the next, like the tales in 1001 Arabian Nights, but they weave in and out of eachother with more complex interconnections. We sometimes see the same story from different perspectives, sometimes realize that what we think we knew was wrong. There's also a feminist subtext to the book, but not in an agressive or didactic manner. It's more that, although there are male protagonists, the stories are very largely women's stories. This is one of those books I cannot recommend strongly enough.


The Edda of Burdens, by Elizabeth Bear
(All the Windwracked Stars, Under Mountain Bound, The Sea Thy Mistress)

Again I was faced with a difficult choice of which of many very strong works by a talented author. I could have chosen her more science-fiction-y Jacobs Ladder or the surprisingly ambitious and  clever Promethean Age novels. The latter contail a veritable laundry list of the most compelling fantasy tropes: wizards, secret histories, fairies, dragons, and some familiar figures from history and myth (from King Arthur to Marlowe). The Edda of Burdens took a little more effort to get into; we get norse mythology, apolcalyptic battles, failures, sacrifice, and romance. The first book, All the Windwracked Stars, opens with the aftermath of a great battle in which Waelcyrge (Valkyries) have been defeated and slain by the forces of darkness - save for the historian and poet Muire who broke ranks and fled from the battle. We follow her to a distant, post-apolcalyptic future in which dying technology shares the stage with the stuff of myth and legend - including the immortal Muire, and suneater Mingan the Grey Wolf. That's right, we get a far-future in which one character has eaten the sun. It doesn't sound as if it should work, but it somehow does.




Shades of Milk and Honey
Glamour in Glass
Without a Summer (forthcoming) by Mary Robinette Kowal
Kowal doesn't have the impressive body of work that either Bear or Valente does (at least not yet - unless there are a whole stack of novels which I missed), but the trilogy beginning with Shades of Milk and Honey is an impressive effort worthy of a place on anyone's reading list. This trilogy starts off as Kowal's take on a Jane Austin-style regency romance. It's full of all the things that make such a book fun; secret agendas, love triangles, mysteries and, of course, literal magic in the form of illusionary "glamours" which can be used as performance, decoration, or misdirection. I discussed the second book, Glamour in Glass, earlier in this blog. The forthcoming Without a Summer will wrap up the tale, and take on the social and political upheaval of the early industrial revolution as well as focusing on the remaining family conflicts. I eagerly look forward to it.



The challenge of this sort of thing is that there are so many great writers I missed. I'll give an honorable mention to Jacqueline Carey's BDSM-tinged Kushiel's Legacy series (taking place in a sort of alternate France in which houses of courtesans worship the angels who walked the earth with the son of Yeshua and the Magdalene), and Kelly Link's brilliant short-fiction. I was also tempted to go back in time to the earlier work of the incomprably brilliant Ursula K Leguin, way back to the short fiction of James Tiptree, Jr or back a whole century to Mary Shelly's Frankenstein - which reads very well today for a hundred year old novel. Check them out. And the next time someone tells you that speculative fiction is a boys' club, club them over the head with a hardback copy of one of these.


See you tomorrow with another book review for 'S'

Read More

G is for Glamour in Glass

Today I have another book review for you, of Glamour in Glass Mary Robinette Kowal's sequel to World Fantasy Award winner Shades of Milk and Honey.
For those who've forgotten, Shades of Milk and Honey is, in brief, a regency romance with a touch of magic. The fantastical element lies mainly in the creation of glamours - illusions and other effects formed by a kind of psychic manipulation of the aether (which, in this world, appears to be a real thing). There were multiple suitors, misunderstandings, love-triangles, secret pasts, and a beautifuly written relationship between the sharp, independent Jane and her more beautiful but less wordly younger sister, Melody. They were sometimes competitive, sometimes dismissive of eachother, sometimes jealous, sometimes supportive, and sometimes just don't quite understand eachother. Shades of Milk and Honey also introduced Vincent, a sometimes troubled, sometimes moody but brilliant glamourist with both an artistic eye and a drive towards technical innovation.  It is a romance, and by the novel's end Jane and Vincent are wed.
Glamour in Glass begins not far from where Shades of Milk and Honey ended - with the Vincents newly married, much in demand for their artistic talents (they aren't merely glamourists, but some of the world's best glamourists). There's a lovely moment when, after feeling slighted by her husband's not including her in some element of their work, Jane immediately confronts him and tells him her feelings. It's a sign that Kowal knows how to let her characters act like real, reasonable people and that any misunderstandings won't come from people not telling eachother things  just so the author can create tension. It also tells us that we're reading about smart, reasonable people.

Tensions do come (it wouldn't be much of a book without them, now would it?) during the trip Vincent and a newly-pregnant Jane take to the continent to visit Vincent's old mentor. Napolean has just escaped from Elba to begin his ill-fated attempt to reclaim his empire, leaving a populace divided between those loyal to the current regime and those who long for Napolean's return. Add a mysterious long-term assignment for Vincent, Jane's inability to travel because of her delicate condition, and we get a feeling of real trouble.

Another thread winding through this part of the novel are the couple's attempt to record a glamour using the glass prisms suggested by the title. The experimentation was a fascinating picture of bright, talented people struggling at the edges  of a new and poorly understood science. There were setbacks, but ultimately triumphs. 

And, of course, it wouldn't fit into the period without some intrigue. Without giving too much away, know that there are hidden agendas, conflicting loyalties, and an actual surprise or two.

All of the narrative threads - the secret goals, the experiments in glamour, and the looming war - come together for a dramatic climax in which a victory is won, but at a steep cost. I'll not spoil it here, but that cost - and the characters' different reactions to it - were beautifully written and felt quite real.
I'll close with a word about language in this book; Kowal took the effort to painstakingly cross-reference all of the words she used here with actual works written in the nineteenth century so, even more so than with Shades of Milk and Honey, this book is of its time. This effort gives the book a wonderful feel of authenticity.
Highly recommended. Four stars.

Read More

B is for (independent) Book Review: Nails Jane by Trista Guiseppe

I encountered Trista Guiseppe on the Google+ social networking site shortly after the completion of her first novel. Following it the first of what I expect to be three short book-reviews in the a-to-z month. Look for more reviews at "G" and "L".

In her debut novel, Nails Jane, Trista Guiseppe gives us an action-packed blend of new space opera, weird-tale, and philosophical meditation. Even if her reach sometimes exceeds her grasp (which it does), and the disparate pieces don't fit together perfectly (which they don't), it's still an entertaining, fast-paced read.

It opens as the story of Eva, a woman in present-day realistic Earth with a job she hates, a troubled marriage, and enigmatic dreams hinting of another world beyond this one and another identity. When she is approached by a mysterious stranger with apparently supernatural powers and more knowledge about her than he should reasonably posess, it feels like well-tread familiar ground. Then the narrative breaks into the first part of a counterfactual secret history regarding a malign entity which has been manipulating the human race for the purpose of keeping us from fulfilling our potential and becoming a threat. There's a strong anti-religion message in much of this,  but the work embraces the supernatural in a way that makes it far more than - and far different from -  a rationalist screed.

The book then dances from military SF to fable and back again in a dizzying series of tonal shifts. We meet  Ati, an apparent doppleganger of Eva. We briefly learn of - but see little of - aliens. We're told myths of a creator of worlds and his battles with a destructive beast, of a Death figure who shirked his duties, of archetypical artists and scuptures. Some of these stories don't all fit thematically with the rest of the novel, and can sometimes feel like an author's attempt to clarify a philosophical point. Others - most notably the segments with death - tie into the rest of the work beautifuly in a blending of science and fantasy vaguely reminiscent of Elizabeth Bear's All the Windwracked Stars.

 There's a paramilitary organization dedicated to fighting the threat of Versinon, a world-spanning evil. There are conflicts with powerful beings capable of destroying worlds, encounters with gods or creatures close to it, and a final conflict in which there are challenges, threats, sacrifices. I very much enjoyed the ride, but at the end felt that there was something missing. THe world-destroying evil? Really a greate evil. Those military commanders who seemed to be treasonous or corrupt? Really treasonous or corrupt. Great speculative literature is perhaps better than anything at turning your world upside-down, at telling you that everything you thought you knew was wrong. Think of moments in Dan Simmons' Hyperion series when we first see the world from the perspective of the Ousters or we learn what this faster-than-light travel really costs. In a much smaller way, there's a moment in Mary Robinette Kowal's forthcoming Without a Summer in which the point-of-view character's entire perception of someone - a perception which the reader likely took for granted - is wrong. Here we don't get any of that; yes, there are philosophical trimmings, but they end up being window-dressing in a story which, for all of its scope and grandeur is surprisingly linear and simple.

So, I'll give this three out of five stars with a recommendation to pick it up for some light, enjoyable reading in hopes that Guiseppe's next effort will take us just a little bit deeper.




 Tomorrow we'll stay with books and bring you C for Characters, then move back to pixels with D for digital.

Read More