tigertoy

Tonight's book review is Werewolves: Dead Moon Rising, edited by Dave Ulanski.

I haven't been reading regular books very much lately, but I haven't been writing reviews for the ones I have read either, so I'm getting behind again.  So I'm going to get the first one off the pile before I forget everything about it.

I picked this up at InConJunction from C. J. Henderson, one of the contributors.  I like the werewolves that are currently popular in urban fantasy, so I thought I'd like a book of werewolf stories.  Unfortunately, most of the stories in this book are not the modern stories with the werewolves as nice guys; they go back to the older traditions where the werewolves are genuine monsters and the stories are about defeating them.  I want werewolves I can root for -- violent, flawed, misunderstood, and persecuted is OK, but truly evil is not what I want.  This really wasn't the book for me.  The stories varied a bit in quality, but they were mostly decently written.  And really, beyond that, I've mostly forgotten the stories, which partly reflect on my mental state, but partly suggests that they weren't that memorable...

5 out of 10.

A quick note about Under Cover of Darkness edited by Julie E. Czerneda and Jana Paniccia.

This is another book that had been sitting on my shelf long enough that I don't recall how it got there, and it wasn't quite the book that I thought it was as I frequently looked at the spine as it sat there.  It turns out that it's an anthology on the theme of grand conspiracies running the world from the shadows; no werewolves or vampires.  A couple of stories that ticked me off, for time travel themes or for pushing an objectionable political.  A Tanya Huff story (glee!) but one that I had already read in another collection (oh well), still enjoyable on re-reading.  A couple of stories that touched me, but mostly, kinda meh.

6 out of 10.

Next on the stack is Changing the World, edited by Mercedes Lackey.

This is the latest Valdemar anthology.  The stories are all pretty good, and mostly fit well into Valdemar as I know it.  Solid, but nothing deeply earthshaking; much as I would expect from having read earlier anthologies in the series.

7 out of 10.

I'm never going to catch up on my book reviews, but I'm going to try to get at least a few of the recent ones.  I'll start with The Dragon Book, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, an original anthology of stories about dragons.

Given how hopelessly smitten with large magical quasi-lizards of nearly every description I am, I figured this book must have been written just for me.  I'm afraid that I came away disappointed, though.  None of the stories were completely uninteresting.  Most of them were pretty good.  But none of them grabbed me the way I'm grabbed by most of the novels I read that feature dragons.  The most memorable thing in the whole book was the pun in the Tad Williams story, which I think makes my personal top 10 list but doesn't crack the top 3.  A couple of other lighthearted stories, but nothing else that I remember laughing (or groaning) aloud for.  Several stories that touched my heart lightly, but none more than that.  A couple that just left me shaking my head going "meh".

6 out of 10.

Today's book review is Moving Targets And Other Tales of Valdemar, edited by Mercedes Lackey.

This is the fourth official anthology of Valdemar stories.  The stories are all independent, though they do assume the reader is familiar with the world.  Someone who hasn't read any Valdemar and would rather not read a whole trilogy to dip a toe in the water might get a feel for the world this way.  Or they might just be confused, since it's sort of assumed that the reader knows what a Herald or a Companion or a Kyree is.

With dozens of novels and a lot of additional stories in the canon, it's getting harder to find original stuff to write about in Valdemar, but this book does a pretty good job of telling stories we haven't quite heard before, about different sorts of people or seeing things from a different angle.  The stories are good; most of them seem to really be in the universe, rather than just generic fantasy stories, and I didn't find any major continuity or consistency problems.  There are a couple of characters I just want to take home and hug and squeeze and call George, but mostly it's about a world I just don't get tired of.

8 out of 10.

Today's (actually Sunday's but I'm late) book review is Crossroads And Other Tales of Valdemar, edited by Mercedes Lackey.

I usually skip these "stories in the world" anthologies, even when they're worlds I'm a big fan of, but I made an exception because I know so many of the authors personally.  There's a Tanya Huff story -- I didn't know she did Valdemar.  There's a story by Michael Longcor -- I didn't know he wrote fiction at all, much less that he'd been published (though the introduction claims it's not his first Valdemar story).  There's a story by "Mad Mike" Williamson -- again, didn't know he did Valdemar.

All of these stories are at least pretty good.  Some of them don't seem to have much to do with Valdemar, but oddly enough the only one that struck me as troublingly inconsistent with the canon is the one by Larry Dixon (Lackey's husband and co-author on some of the newer books).  The stuff he does with magic doesn't feel right.  The Tanya Huff story is a lighthearted breath of fresh air that nonetheless provokes a little thought about authority relationships -- and the title "All the Ages of Man" does make sense, after you finish the story.  The Longcor is an interesting study of how some of the cool magic stuff we read about Valdemar for might really mix with the mundane reality of a battle.  The Williamson story seems to have no real connection with Valdemar at all, but it does tackle an interesting problem: fantasy (and SF) stories frequently include mercenaries who are good guys -- so what are they supposed to do if they end up in the employ of the bad guys?

For some reason, even though all of the individual stories are decent and some of them are definitely good, the book as a whole didn't leave me terribly excited.  7 out of 10.

Today's book review is Maiden, Matron, Crone edited by Kerrie Hughes and Martin H. Greenberg.

This is a theme anthology from DAW.  The front cover advertises "Thirteen original tales that deal with the many manifestations of the Triple Goddess."  It seemed like an interesting topic, and some of the stories are written by authors whose work I know and love, so it seemed worth a shot, despite the fact that in my limited exposure to the lore (it's not my religion), the three phases are Maiden, Mother, and Crone, and the word Matron sounds gratingly, fingernails-on-chalkbooardly wrong.  (I found that a couple of the stories themselves actually referred to the Matron, while several referred to the Mother.)

It is little surprise that the quality of the stories is rather varied.  Several of them are quite good; a couple are pretty weak.  They were all new to me except for Tanya Huff's "Choice of Ending", which I knew I'd encountered before, but I figured out that I hadn't actually seen it in print -- it was the story she read at one of the cons I heard her do a reading at (maybe FKO last year?).

I don't feel ambitious enough to do mini-reviews of all 13 stories, so I'll just say that as a whole, the book gave me some interesting new views of the Triple Goddess and was overall a good book.  8 out of 10.