tigertoy

I used to post reviews of all the books I read, but at some point it became a chore; I would put it off, until I accumulated a stack of books I hadn't reviewed that I had trouble remembering the details of, which cluttered my desk and made me feel like a heel.  So I stopped doing it, and just put books I finished away on the shelf.

But I just finished George R. R. Martin's A Dance With Dragons, and I have to say something about it.  This is the long-awaited continuation of Martin's multi-volume epic A Song of Ice and Fire.  The first volume, A Game of Thrones, was amazing, and A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords followed soon and continued to be wonderful.  A Feast for Crows still had most of the magic scene to scene, but it was starting to drag, to become grim, and after plowing through to the end of it, not a whole lot had happened.  But still it left me wanting to know what happened in all of the stories that he left off in exciting places.  Then Martin suffered an epic case of writer's block, and we didn't see more for so long that I'd mostly forgotten about it, despite occasional tantalizing reminders in the form of short pieces set in the world that came out in some anthologies.  Then, fairly recently, a hit TV series came out based on the series.  Not being a TV watcher, I haven't seen it, but it's made more people aware of it than ever read the books originally.  So I became excited again at the prospect of reading A Dance With Dragons.

It's an even thicker tome than the previous four, nearly a thousand pages.  It took me weeks to plow through it.  The chapters were well written and evocative, but it was hard to remember what was going on in the multiple plot lines with the huge number of characters.  The story is grim, with lots of unpleasant stuff happening.  Some of the stuff we've been waiting to see is starting to take shape.  But at the end of the thing, most of the action is still poised waiting to happen, except for some things that seem to have ended badly.  (Though we're not entirely certain what's happened in a couple of the most important ones.)

I'm quite disappointed.  The world is wonderfully well imagined, and the writing continues to make me care about the characters, even as they suffer, despair, and die.  I still want to know how things turn out, but it's become more like a train wreck, I just can't look away.

6 out of 10.

The last of the stack of old book reviews is Redwall by Brian Jacques.

This is apparently the first book of a series, but it's reasonably complete.

I got this book from a dealer at iFC, who told me that it was a classic of furry fiction or some such.  I certainly hope that it doesn't get recommended that way to very many people, because if this had been the first furry fiction I'd read, I doubt I would ever have read any more.  It's a children's book, which is not in itself a bad thing.  I often like straightforward plots without a lot of confusing moral ambiguity.  And while I do like sex in my stories, I don't mind reading some stories that don't have any.  But there are some books where "this is for children" becomes an excuse for "it doesn't have to be written to an adult standard", and this was one of those books.  My big problem is that I had a very hard time imagining the world, because the basics of how things looked and worked didn't seem to be consistent from one scene to the next.  A major example is the scale of things.  The hero of the story is a mouse, but there are many other sorts of animals as well.  In some scenes, I get the impression that the animals, though they talk, are supposed to be the sizes of the real animals -- but in the next scene, the hero will be interacting with other animals who should be much larger than he, but the interactions imply that they're about the same size.  The story appears to take place in abandoned human buildings, and in some scenes the animals will appear to be human sized, while in other scenes, the mice seem to be mouse sized next to human buildings.  I could have easily accepted the story whatever size the characters were, but not with them apparently changing size to be whatever was most convenient for each scene.  Something else that bothered me is that the characters' personalities and moral qualities seemed to be very much determined by their species; some kinds of animals are good people and some kinds are bad.  Being able to get away from that sort of stereotyping is one of the things that makes me like furry stories in the first place.  (And I'll confess to a specific bit of shallowness, it ticked me off that foxes were one of the "bad guys" kinds of animals.)  The final complaint that I will make is that there's an awfully high body count, including a couple of rather nasty bits of graphic violence, especially for something that's supposed to be a wholesome kid's book.  There were a few characters that were engaging, and some of the individual scenes were charming; I just couldn't stay engaged from scene to scene.

4 out of 10.

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.

Today's book review is Silver Borne by Patricia Briggs.

This is Mercy Thompson book 5.  It's a complete story, but it does use established characters.  If you read it by itself it would probably make sense, but there are things you need to know about the characters that aren't fully spelled out to get the full impact.  Start at the beginning with Moon Called and read them in order.

I finished this last night, somewhat after I should have been asleep since I was getting up at 5:30 this morning.  If I put this off, I will be less tired, but I will also be likely to forget more, so I'm pushing myself to do it now.  I will also mention that this is the second of the two books that I was bad and bought in hardcover at InConJunction rather than waiting for paperback.

This series continues to be superb.  The plot has enough complexity to be compelling and not so much that it ties my brain in knots.  The world is illuminated a little more and continues to be consistent, believable once you've bought into the genre, and compelling.  And, as always, the characters are the key.  Briggs' heroes and supporting good guys leap out of the page and command attention and emotional involvement.  They are somewhat larger than life, yet they have flaws and weaknesses, and the way they manage to persevere and conquer their own weaknesses makes them shine.  I read the first half of this book quickly, and it was glorious.  Then I foolishly allowed myself to be distracted, in part out of a foolish desire to try to make it last.  This left me feeling that the rest of the book was merely great, not perfect, as I was not quite as fully immersed in it.  (Note to self: when a really good book demands your full attention, let it have it, even though it hastens the time you'll be reading a less good book.)  However, I do realize that about this time in the unfolding of the plot, the story did start unfolding in a way that was just a little more predictable and less compelling.

9 out of 10.

( plot summary )

Today's book review is Hunting Ground by Patricia Briggs.

This is book 2.5 in the Alpha and Omega series (it starts with the novella "Alpha and Omega" in On the Prowl, and then goes into Cry Wolf).  It's a complete episode, but it would be better to know the characters already.

Reading the first few chapters of this book, I was really in heaven.  It seemed so good that I was reluctant to actually read much at a time because it would be over too soon.  Then the plot really got rolling, and I couldn't put it down.  It actually got just a tiny bit less good; the level of power we were throwing around started to be a tiny bit too much.  But we did have an interesting tangle of villains, with some sort of expected, some somewhat surprising, and all really evil.  The main characters are strong, wonderful, and heroic, and their relationship is pretty close to the Platonic ideal of love.  (Which is not to say they have a Platonic relationship!)  It is not that everything is perfect for them, but that they have challenges and are able to meet them.

I have a little trouble rating these books; given the depth of my adoration for werewolves, I'm going to give any werewolf book that doesn't just plain suck a good rating, and Briggs definitely Does Not Suck.  I reserve 10 for books that I find no room for complaint at all, which means that this one gets another 9 out of 10 (because we get just a little too close to god-level to be perfect).

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Today's book review is Kitty Goes to War by Carrie Vaughn.

This is book 8 in the ongoing Kitty Norville series.  It's a complete episode; you could read it without having read the others, but it's a little richer for knowing the recurring characters.

Despite the title, this isn't a story about going to war, it's a story about the people who come back from war.  Although couched in a fluffy brain-candy werewolf story, it says something about what returning vets need and what we owe them that most of us probably ought to spend a little more time thinking about.  It also says something about being a good leader.  And it shows something else in answer to a common complaint about the genre -- a stable, healthy, long-term relationship that still has plenty of steamy moments and that sustains the main character through the action without having to be the action.  There are a couple of points that are a little less believable in human terms -- the CEO and the high-ranking military officer who seem to be overwhelmed by the plot imperative and not quite acting their roles.  And there are some lurking issues about the power level -- a villain who is presented as an occult dabbler, but who's apparently responsible for some really epic bad stuff.  Oh, right, it's about werewolves and vampires, I shouldn't be thinking too hard about the realism of the world.

I liked the last book in the series a lot less just because it was a slasher flick and I hate those.  This one is back to the solid fun that I like about this series.  8 out of 10.

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Today's book review is A Brother's Price by Wen Spencer.

This is a standalone novel, unrelated to any of Spencer's other works.

I had thought that I'd read all of Spencer's published novels, but I'd somehow missed this one.  It's sort of a fantasy, in that it takes place on an alternate earth.  There's no magic, but technology roughly that of America in the early 1800s.  There seems to be a very stable society that's built up hundreds of years of history with all of the social fabric tied to the fact that in this world there are about 10 women for every man.  The resulting society is laid out in detail and is internally consistent enough to be very believable.  It reverses every traditional assumption in our society about gender roles; obviously, it's intended to force the reader to think about how society treats women.  I think a lot of people would find it annoyingly heavy-handed.  I also think that it would make a lot of people squirm when they realized how uncomfortable the gender role assumptions feel when they're reversed, because they probably realize that they wouldn't find any of the situations anywhere near so uncomfortable if they weren't reversed.

The plot is a little thin -- some things just fall perfectly into place after they're suggested, without really working for them -- but it's a pretty fair adventure and the characters are likable.  One huge, glaring physics-violation plot hole that I'll mention under the cut.  A fun read, but the story is too shallow to be great.  The gender role speculation is interesting, but again doesn't rise to the level of great.

8 out of 10.

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Today's book review (the book I finished earlier today; the last post was the one I'd blown off) is Changeless by Gail Carriger.

This is book 2 of the Alexia Tarabotti series which started with Soulless.  It relies on the characters established in the first book, tells a fairly neat and well contained story, and then, instead of ending, hits us with a huge plot bomb, producing a really horrible cliffhanger.  Seriously, the author's website says that book 3, Blameless, is scheduled for release Sept. 1, and you might want to wait.  (Of course, we're not guaranteed that that one will offer a less annoying place to stop reading, but it can't be more annoying.)

The first few chapters of this one didn't have quite as much zing as the first book, but it was entertaining.  We start to dig into the world building a little bit more, with some half-interesting, half-amusing explanations of just how different the book world is from the one we live in.  It makes it clear that it's farther from reality as we know it, but it's actually a little more believable for it; it seems to be consistent and we can clearly stop worrying about some of the science issues because we've clearly explained that this world has some very different rules.

A fun book, not quite as wonderful as the first, but still solid.  The rude ending definitely lops a full point off the rating.

7 out of 10.

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Today's book review is Shift by Rachel Vincent.

This is book 5 of the ongoing werecat series.  It tells a fairly complete story, but actually understanding the characters would be difficult without reading the earlier books.  This episode is fairly well tied up, but the ongoing story is still frustratingly unresolved.

I just finished this book a few minutes before I started writing this, and I'm arguing with myself about what I want to write.  Perhaps this is a signal that I should sit on it for a couple of days, but if I do, I am likely to put it off until I forget a lot.

This book introduces a new species of shifters.  Since they come in in the first chapter, I'm going to decide that I'm within my own spoiler limits to mention them, because my initial reaction to them was sour.  Up to now, the shifters in this world have been sort of believable as heretofore unknown biology, but the new race challenges physics a little more aggressively, and forces me to push my perception of the world from almost scientifically viable (despite a couple of howlers in the earlier books) to an almost Harry Potter level of "it's magic; either you just go with it, or you can't read this book".  But after a couple hundred pages of letting that settle in, I realized that Vincent has created a culture for the new shifters that's quite a bit different from the werecats or from my own culture, but that is fairly internally consistent and roughly as ethically defensible as the werecats -- but the two are alien enough to create a messy conflict, from which we get a lot of our story, and it's well handled.  It's the most original and thought provoking thing in the series so far.

We also spend a lot of time continuing to worry at the main romantic plot of the series.  We started out the book in a very uncomfortable place (for the characters, and because the characters work, for me), and we've stayed true to the characters and not gone for the cop out that I was afraid I saw coming.  Which means that by the end we've had a lot of pain and made a little bit of progress, we're still in a really uncomfortable place, I hate it, and I have to admire the author for capturing the human condition (even if the characters aren't quite human), because people really do act this way.

There are certainly flaws.  There are bits of the plot that feel contrived.  But somehow, despite their considerable moral ambiguity, I'm still pulling for the characters, and they make it worth the ride.  8 out of 10.

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Today's half-assed review is The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente.

This is the first of a two book series, but I don't think it ends in a bad place.

I took several weeks to read this book because I was very distracted.  I enjoyed the story as I poured it out, usually only a few pages at a time, a couple of times for longer chunks.  Wonderful fairy tale material, poetic language and imagery.  But it's a really complicated web of stories, little stories leading one into another, and as much as I loved them as they washed over me, they just weren't sticking with me.  I can't remember enough of the details to write a plot summary, or to remember how the little pieces really fit together to tell a bigger story.  I know the bigger story is there.  Usually, if I feel like I came away from the book without really getting the point, I blame the book, but in this case, I really think the problem is mine.  This book needed and deserved my full attention and I just didn't provide it.

It's recognizably by the same author as Palimpsest (which a fair number of people seem to like since it's up for a Hugo, and I did read it but it apparently fell into the black hole where I wasn't writing reviews); I think the writing has the same good things as Palimpsest but it's less weird, more mentally comfortable for me.

8 out of 10.  I think, if I'd read this book with better focus and really remembered it, I'd rate it higher.  But I can't be completely certain that the mental fog I experienced it through didn't hide things I wouldn't like.