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Book Reviews - Romance, Fantasy, Science Fiction - By an Adult for Adults

Second Book Doldrums – All That Lives Must Die: Book Two of the Mortal Coils Series, Eric Nylund

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Have you noticed that the second book in a series is often weak? I read Mortal Coils by Eric Nylund and enjoyed it enough to purchase the second book, All That Lives Must Die: Book Two of the Mortal Coils Series.

The premise is interesting, with enough twists to make the book readable and enjoyable and it includes most of the same characters.  Even so, All That Lives Must Die felt flat.  Book 1 was quirky, with oddball characters like Uncle Henry (aka Hermes), Grandmother’s strange rules, plus the ongoing sibling fights and vocabulary insults with Fiona and Eliot.  It was a fun read.

Book 2 still has a little but Uncle Henry is almost invisible, the Rules are undone and even Eliot and Fiona’s rivalry feels old.  Author Eric Nylund may have done the stale feeling on purpose, as it fits Eliot’s and Fiona’s moods and fears, but it didn’t make us readers feel anything except uneasy and a bit bored.

The premise of All That Lives Must Die is great.  Eliot and Fiona are going to a most unusual high school, Paxington University, where duels are common, where gym class consists of defying death while causing mayhem to the opposing teams, where the one class is about myths.  The students are from the Immortals, Infernals and long-time magical families.  Only about half will graduate and the remainder may fail due to being dead.

The school scenes are the best in the book.  I kept wanting to shake Fiona and Eliot and yell, “Are you insane?”, but of course that’s kind of hard to do with a novel.  The other students range from vicious to vacuous with a skew towards nasty and mean.  Kind of like everyone’s high school, right?  Except the death and injury here are real.

The weakest part of the novel is Eliot’s decision to follow his supposed lady love into hell, despite her continual rejection, despite him knowing it is Hell, as in real, true, infernal depths.  Before this we see him annoyed that no one recognizes him as Fiona’s equal, as a Hero, and he spends several boring pages sulking.  I gave up trying to tell him to stop being stupid!

The weakness is compounded by Fiona deciding to help him help his elusive girlfriend, in her case made even dumber because she sees her father as also in the mix.  (It is pretty clear that neither sibling ever learned Good from Evil as they continued to see choices in the present moment sprinkled with wishful thinking and ignored future consequences.)

Overall All That Lives Must Die: Book Two of the Mortal Coils Series is fairly good, a solid 3 star fantasy.  It simply isn’t as good, as enjoyable as the first novel in the series which was a solid 5.  The best part is high school, seeing Fiona and Eliot (mostly Fiona) deal with the murderous students and faculty and the weakest is Eliot and his gonadal-driven heroics.

By the way, this is not a book for kids.

 

Lightless – Artificial Intelligence, Spaceships and Terrorism

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I received a copy of Lightless in exchange for an honest review. I wanted to like the book but overall it left me cold.

In theory Lightless should have been good.  An advanced ship, interplanetary rebellion, suspense, good guys and bad guys, totalitarian government.  I found the story interesting and the main character, Althea, likeable at first.  About midway through the book turns plodding, unbelievable and the character loses my interest and sympathy.

The ending was particularly bad.  First it was a set up for more books (another trilogy??) which is annoying, but the plot had so many holes in it that I couldn’t take it seriously.

The System is repressive, willing to kill everyone who lives in a terraformed dome on one of the solar system moons or planets if enough of the folks in the habitat rebel or disobey.  That seems a bit much, even a ruthless government ought to be able to find a less destructive, less indiscriminate solution.

Of course the System spawns a revolutionary, the Mallt-y-Nos.  Her solution to free the outer solar system’s population from the System’s tyrrany?  Destroy the Earth.  Yes, that’s right, not only destroy government centers, but make the planet uninhabitable.  That’ll teach them all right.

Really.  Think a minute.  You have a bunch of moons, asteroids, planets that have artificial environments set up to house a few million people.  Do you really think these fragile habitats are self sufficient and will never, not in 2000 years, need something that only Earth has?  Putting aside moral questions, this “solution” makes no sense whatsoever.  It’s like the kid with the football who doesn’t take his ball home when he can’t win but instead blows up the field, the other team and his ball.

The other plot hole is even sillier.  Ananke is an advanced ship that converts chaos to usable energy (thus upturning the second law of thermodynamics) with an advanced computer.  Matthew manages to infect the ship’s computer with a virus that somehow makes it into a sentient artificial intelligence.  And he did this in just a few minutes!  The result is of course an AI that never heard of Asimov’s three laws, never learned about morality and ethics, and acts like a two year old that just happens to be all-powerful.

The characters, Althea, her ship-turned-sentient Ananke, captain Domitian, scientist Gagnon, nasty System intelligence agent and psychopath Ida Stays, plus criminals Ivan and Matthew, plus Ivan’s mom and Constance Harper (who turns out to be the Mallt-y-Nos herself), are uninteresting.  Domitian is driven by duty, Gagnon is a nonentity red shirt type.

The writing wasn’t bad, not great but better than some.  The ideas, people, setting and plot were either ridiculous or boring and the last third of the book was a chore to get through.  I won’t look for the sequel.

Hitler’s Last Secretary by Traudl Junge – Review

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This is a book review blog focusing on science fiction and fantasy, but I’ve been fascinated with why and how people followed such an evil man.  Hitler’s Last Secretary: A Firsthand Account of Life with Hitler helps answer the question.

Hitler’s Last Secretary: A Firsthand Account of Life with Hitler by Traudl Junge is unusual in that she wrote it in 1947-8, while her memories were fresh – and positive.  Junge doesn’t try to explain or justify, she remembers and describes what she saw and felt.

She spent hours in attendance with Hitler and his inner circle from 1942 until the very end, typing letters and speeches and providing pleasant companionship.  The book includes Junge’s comments from around 2000 regarding her thoughts when she re-read the manuscript years afterwards, after she had time to recognize the evil of the men she only thought she knew.

In her forward Junge says of the late 1940s, “At this period we were all looking to the future and trying – with remarkable success, incidentally – to repress and play down our past experiences.”  She comments that she didn’t know what was happening because she did not ask and she did not ask because she did not want to know.  She questioned only too late.

We see a portrait of Hitler as a kindly leader, warm, charismatic, fatherly to those he liked.  (It reminded me of watching the first Godfather movie.)  He even arranged/encouraged Junge’s marriage, a step she was reluctant to take.  (The cover photo shows her with her new husband and the two witnesses.)

Hitler clearly felt he was destined to rule, equated “Germany” with himself, thought he was always right and dramatically superior to everyone else.  He was the worst possible combination of an ideologue with a charismatic leader who thought of himself as invincible.  (I fear ideologues like Pol Pot, Mao, Hitler because they can justify everything they do on the basis of their distorted view of what should work vs. what does work.  They will sacrifice anyone and anything to make their vision real.)

Despite Junge’s overwhelmingly positive feelings there are chilling points.

  • The Jewish school friend whose family was once well-off but were later barred from working and eventually emigrated to America.
  • The dietitian friend and former co-worker who wrote Junge in the later part of the war that once the SS found her foundling great grandmother was Jewish that she and her family could not find work and were destitute.  Junge took the letter to Hitler who pushed through “Aryanization” for the dietitian and her family.
  • The wife of a colleague who asked Hitler whether he knew of the horrible conditions the Dutch Jews were in when transported to the camps.  Hitler left the room and the colleague and wife were not invited back.

All throughout Junge claims she kept her eyes out of politics, stayed away from the party, avoided thinking of anything other than the day-to-day work, her friends.  She worried about her family in Munich once the air raids started but even then believed Hitler when he said the setbacks were temporary.

She mentioned two times she saw cracks in the kindly facade.  First when Hitler stated he wouldn’t marry because he didn’t think it was fair to bring children into the world who were destined to fall short of his greatness.  Second when he decorated boys defending Berlin while planning suicide for himself.

Aside from the glimpses she could have seen into the ongoing persecutions, Junge provides other vignettes that are disturbing.

Hitler insisted on having his secretaries and other female staff spend time with him every evening.  But he did not like to hear them call it a “duty”.  He saw the fact he survived the assassination attempt in his military bunker as proving he was fated to lead the world.  She doesn’t mention the vicious hunt for the assassination plotters and all their friends and potential conspirators; it is difficult to believe she heard nothing about it.

But the most disturbing part of the book was Junge’s blind acceptance of whatever happened, whatever Hitler said.  She didn’t question, didn’t look for answers, didn’t even allow herself to think beyond the pleasantries of the day. Years after the fact we sometimes wonder how so many could so blindly accept what happened.  If this puzzles you, then read Hitler’s Last Secretary: A Firsthand Account of Life with Hitler.

 

Surveillance – Ghost Targets Futuristic Suspense and Crankiness

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Let’s get the crankiness over first.  Have you noticed the trend towards eliminating irregular verbs?  “Dived” instead of “dove”, “lighted” instead of “lit”, “shined” instead of “shone” and more?  I like irregular verbs.  They link our English back to its Anglo Saxon roots and it annoys me when authors don’t use them.

I’m also annoyed when authors uses the name of the Lord as a throwaway exclamation or curse.  This is wrong.

On to the book review…

Surveillance (Ghost Targets Book 1)

Surveillance is a near future suspense novel set in a world where everything is recorded and tracked.  Walk into a building?  It’s on the video record.  Speak in a public place?  Recorded, voice print identified to you and logged.  The basic system, called Hathor, handles everything and connects seamlessly to services like Hearth (housing) and Midas (finance).

The novel occurs about 20 years after the first systems were challenged on privacy grounds and after the benefits and relatively benign uses have made almost everyone accept them.  For example Katie was able to find, lease and decorate an apartment while walking out of work using the Hearth system. Most criminal trials now happen before a judge who uses the evidence collected by Jurisprudence and assembled by law enforcement into a coherent story virtually guaranteed to be accurate.

Katie Pratt is brand new to the FBI Ghost Targets group, assigned to a murder investigation on her first day.  The Ghost Targets group exists because some people have been able to ghost themselves right out of the records.  Since Jurisprudence cannot see the ghosts, the FBI team develops other methods.

Surveillance is interesting and somewhat thought provoking.  Would people really give up their privacy in exchange for great convenience and benign, almost invisible oversight?  And of course we have the perennial question.  If the watchers watch everything, who watches the watchers?

I enjoyed the idea and the plot but found the characters were a bit flat.  We never learn the connection between the murderer and his victim, why they were together.  Katie doesn’t show much personality and Martin Door, one of the original Hathor developers, is two-dimensional.

Overall this was an OK book, worth reading but not worth keeping.  I don’t plan to look for the sequels.

The Color of Water in July – Nora Carrol

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The Color of Water in July is set in Michigan, at the fictional Pine Lake, which is obviously Lake Charlevoix. We have spent many happy days in and around the area so I wanted to enjoy the story. Unfortunately it didn’t hold together for me.

There are several main characters, Jess Carpenter who inherits a lakeside cottage from her grandmother Mamie, Mamie herself who narrates about a third of the book, and Mamie’s sister Lila.  The story revolves around events in 1922 when Lila dies swimming across the lake and Mamie ends up with an illegitimate child, Jess’s mother Margaret.

Jess comes back to Michigan to sell the cottage when Mamie dies and brings her boyfriend Russ.  I could not find anything to grab onto with Jess.  She doesn’t love Russ but she lets him talk her into selling; she doesn’t want the cottage but she remembers wonderful times there; she wanted to be a doctor to help people but ended up a research librarian.  She didn’t have much personality.

Mamie had a strong personality but the pivotal event, her claiming Margaret as her own child made no sense whatsoever.  Margaret was really Lila’s child, abandoned in the woods.  In 1922 there would have been little shame for Mamie to identify Margaret as Lila’s, as Lila was married, and even Lila abandoning the baby could have been brushed off, especially once Lila died.

Mamie’s decision cost her fiance and eventually cost Jess the love she had for Daniel and (another) illegitimate child.  Do you see the plot complexities here?

The timeline was very difficult to follow.

1922  Margaret is born
Sometime between 1940 and 1965 Jess is born
18 years later Jess meets Daniel, gets pregnant, learns Daniel is her first cousin (supposedly) and loses one baby to miscarriage and the other to abortion.
15 years after this Jess is now 33 and comes back to Michigan to sell the cottage.

As near as I can figure, Jess would have been 33 sometime in the mid 1980s, yet the book mentions Russ using the internet, which was not exactly the internet we know today.  (Remember Compushare and AOL anyone?  That’s what we had in the mid 1980s.)

The setting in one of my favorite Michigan places was the best part of the novel.  It was interesting seeing the evolution of the exclusive lake association (basically like a homeowners’ association except with servants), and the surrounding towns and trying to match real with fictional places.

Other than the fun Michigan locale, this book left me lukewarm.  I won’t look for more by the author.

I read this courtesy of Net Galley and received the Kindle version for free in exchange for an honest review.  It’s telling that I just deleted the book from my tablet.

For Two Nights Only – Tom Holt – This Defines Snarky

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If the dictionary of slang needs to define “Snarky” they only need to point to this book, For Two Nights Only, an omnibus containing Overtime and Grailblazers.  I needed a book to take to the beach and this one has gathered dust ever since I bought it 8 years ago and couldn’t get past page 5, so it volunteered to be my read for the day.

This time I managed to finish both novels.  In fact I got mostly through Overtime that afternoon and enjoyed enough that I finished it later that week and read Grailblazers a couple weeks later.  These stories are reasonably funny but I don’t recommend a steady diet of them.  It’s entertainment that makes you feel a little crawly afterwards.

At one time I loved Tom Holt’s books, especially Who’s Afraid of Beowulf, but got tired of the endless feeling of sitting on a mountain watching the idiots go by while making smug little pokes and jabs.  Holt’s novels will not help you develop the virtues of kindness and charity.

The plots are convoluted with characters coming and going (sometimes simultaneously).  I read once that P. G. Wodehouse used to chart his plots out on big poster-sized papers all over the walls.  I wonder how Tom Holt does his since they get a bit tangled.

Overtime

Overtime is screwy.  We start off with Guy Goodlet, RAF pilot during WW2 losing fuel and altitude over France, but quickly bring in the main character, John De Nesle, who is really Blondel, the troubadour who found King Richard the Lion Hearted by singing under every castle in Europe.  Except this Blondel is under contract to the nefarious financiers at 32A Beaumont Street who have figured snazzy ways to avoid tax by shifting money between centuries.

The book gets confusing after this.  The Beaumont Street folks and Blondel are at odds and Blondel isn’t crazy about the endless concerts and wants to get on with finding King Richard.  He has managed to build a castle with a door that can access any era (or no era at all which is dangerous) and is alternately ducking from and running into the Beaumont Street team.

King Richard has been cooped up in a dank dark dungeon for the last 800 years or so but is almost done with his tunnel, needing only another 5 or 6 years to complete it (it takes time when you have to hide the excavated dirt and the only place to do so is in sacks woven from spider web (as noted, it’s complicated)) when his kind dungeon warden decides to move him to a better cell.  Meanwhile the Pope and Anti-Pope (same person, just separated by death and many centuries) are conspiring with the Beaumont Street gang to do something nefarious.

Needless to say we have lots of adventures and narrow escapes and eventually Blondel frees King Richard, Guy marries Blondel’s sister; we don’t know what happens to the Beaumont Street team or the Popes, but probably they make a fortune one more time.

This was entertaining but wacky and confusing.  If you read it just take it as it comes, ignore the nutty parts and confusing shifts in time, place, identity and motive, and enjoy it.  And remember, you do want to sell those Templar bonds for the 2nd Crusade in 1189, and not wait for 1190!

Grailblazers

Grailblazers started off lighthearted and funny but it quickly got all tangled up and sad and a bit pointless. It reminded me of the dreams you have that seem so real until you wake up and realize how disjointed and floppy they were.

The premise here is that the Knights of the Round Table who were charged to go find the Grail are still looking for it, just not very hard.  In fact they are more interested in delivering pizzas and in whose turn it is to drive the van.  The 32A Beaumont Street finance villains reappear except this time they are from Atlantis and are shysters.  (The 32A Beaumont Street people were on the up-and-up, at least in the sense that their clients kept their money and made more.  The Atlantis people sold securities in companies that magically went bankrupt the next hour.)

Besides the Knights and Atlantis crooks we have a dwarf, another dwarf in a cameo role, Santa Claus and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer (albeit both under different names), Merlin (also under different names), Joseph of Arimathea (mostly under his own name) and assorted other villains, fools and ambling-about-the-side-of-the-road people.

I liked this book at first but it got sad as it got goofy and the ending was not at all happy.  The good guys and villains are not so easy to tell apart and we have Simon Magus showing up to magically wrap everything up with a bow.  Overall not one of Holt’s better novels.

Review: The Scorpion Rule by Erin Bow Excellent Science Fiction

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Visualize a world of thirsty people, a world where wars and climate have caused billions of deaths, yet there are still viable countries, technology, civilization.  In this world Canada, augmented by the Great Lakes area of the US and parts of northern Europe, is a world super power called the Pan Polar Confederacy ruled by a queen.  The United States is now several smaller countries, including the newest, Cumberland, which is roughly the Ohio River watershed, parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky, also with its leaders.

The countries that have water, including the Pan Polar Confederacy, are strong but constantly under threat by those who do not, like Cumberland.

Setting and Back Story

400 Years before the story begins the United Nations turned to its first and best Artificial Intelligence, Talis, created by uploading a human mind, to solve the problem of bringing peace to countries warring over water.  Talis solved the problem in a unique manner:  He used the orbital platforms to destroy several cities, then gave each country an ultimatum.  Behave or else.  To reinforce the “or else” he required that the leaders of each country sent their heir or heiress to be hostages.  If the parents’ countries went to war the children died.  If the countries tried to attack him or the hostages or refused then he’d lop off another city.

This is “making it personal” and it worked.  There were still ongoing small wars but poor countries tended to demand less and the rich (i.e., had water) countries tended to agree to reasonable requests.  The title comes from Talis’ view that the only way to keep peace was to ensure that no one could go to war without loss, just like two scorpions in a bottle.

The story opens 400 years after this with Greta, Crown Princess of the Pan Polar Confederacy, living as  Child of Peace in the 4th Precepture somewhere in the Canadian Great Plains.  Greta with the other Children of Peace in the 4th Precepture is responsible to grow and harvest the food they eat, clean their own rooms.  A former human AI runs the Precepture and there are AI spies and teachers and controllers all throughout the facility.  There is no privacy or luxury.

Greta’s country is on the brink of war over access to Lake Ontario for drinking water.  Lake Erie is already dry, leaving a slightly mucky damp spot, and Greta’s mother cannot agree to give that much water from Lake Ontario since the requested amount was above the lake’s carrying capacity.

(Some facts to put the thirst in context. Lake Ontario today discharges 262,000 cubic feet per second into the St. Lawrence River, which works out to 189,800,000 acre feet per year.  The Cumberland requested 7800 acre feet per year was over the carrying capacity of the lake.  That is a big drop in water volume.)

The plot then involves Greta, Talis, Elian the hostage from the newly formed Cumberland, and the other hostage children of Greta’s age.  The plot is interesting with a few small twists, but the novel isn’t about the plot, it about the people and about the challenge that Talis faces.  Just what do you do, or what should you do, when there are more people than water?  When people with their normal human scheming and thirst for power want more and more?   How do you keep the peace and keep individuals and countries operating decently and sustainably?

Characters

Greta is a bit of a non entity in the beginning.  She expects to die as she is nearly certain her country eill be forced into war, and she is most concerned with doing it well, acting as a Crown Princess should when it came time to walk to her death, and in the meantime studies the classics.  Elian’s arrival changes things and she begins to seek an alternative to death.

Elian is a born rebel, raised far from power but the favored grandson of the new Cumberland’s leader.  He resists the entire notion of being a hostage and is most definitely not interested in dying well.  He doesn’t want to die at all.  The other hostage children play lesser roles and are more background than primary actors.

The most interesting character is Talis, the former human turned into AI.  What will Talis do with the Cumberland’s revolt?  How will he handle the death of his oldest friend the AI called the Abbot who runs Precepture #4?  How will he deal with Greta and with Elian?

Summary

The book is riveting but when I analyze each piece, plot, characters, back story, setting, the only parts that are remarkable are the back story with Talis and the eternal question of how to maintain peace in a world full of conflict.  Somehow Erin Bow manages to make these small elements into a big story, one that will stay with me for a very long time.

I hadn’t realized until writing this review that Erin Bow also wrote Plain Kate. The stories are completely different but both dig into your heart and stay there.

I was given an advanced copy by Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.

Review: The Human Division by John Scalzi, Vignettes in the Old Man’s War Series

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The Human Division is listed as the fifth book in the Old Man’s War series, but you can enjoy it even without having read the other books in the series.  John Scalzi does a good job filling you in on the background and who’s who while telling the story.  I’m speaking from personal experience here as I read only one of the other books and that was several years ago.  I didn’t recall the story except that it was good, and of course Scalzi is the same guy who wrote the wonderful Agent to the Stars. Those were good enough to make this book a must-read.

Scalzi is so talented a writer he was able to take 13 semi-related vignettes that seemed written for a television series, and turn them into a novel that flowed well.  That is not easy.  Each episode was loosely connected with most of the characters repeating and there was a loose time sequence.  (The introduction mentions the publisher released these as individual episodes electronically.

I enjoyed this book.  Each vignette was interesting and had characters with a few quirks and habits that added a bite of humor.  The plot was deadly serious.  The Colonial Union got found out for its bad habit of keeping Earth in the dark and using the home planet as a source of people for colonists and army.  At the same time several hundred other races banded together in a Conclave that detests the Colonial Union.  (Since I didn’t read the prior books I’m not sure what the CU did to these other races to warrant this ill will.  It’s clear the CU had a penchant for aggressive, in-your-face behavior and managed to come out on top in prior conflicts.)

The book focuses on the B diplomat team led by Abumwe and helped greatly by Harry Wilson, Colonial Defense Force (the CU military) liason and his good friend Hart Schmidt.  The CU leaders view Abumwe as a second tier diplomat but after her team performs heroically and brilliantly to save the Utche agreement the leadership decides to upgrade her – but doesn’t tell Ubumwe or anyone else.  Instead they will use her team for those miserable situations that need initiative and off-the-cuff solutions.

In the first episode one of the A teams is destroyed by an unknown force when it arrives early to meet with the Utche.  Ubumwe’s team is tossed in as back ups with virtually no notice.  Wilson discovers five missiles primed to attack the Utche upon their arrival.  Wilson manages to decoy four of them to attack his shuttle and the ship captain gets the last one to attack the ship.  This of course makes the Utche feel pretty good and the diplomacy succeeds.

Each episode was like the first.  Present a problem, let the characters deal with it the way they would, and pull victory from defeat.  By the end of the book it is still far from certain that the CU will survive and even more uncertain whether Earth and the CU will become buddies again.  But there is hope.

Scalzi left the stage wide open for future books, whether conventional novels or this type of episodic story.  No one is able to identify who the mystery attackers are that destroyed the first Utche mission team and that mystery enemy pops up in several later episodes.

If Scalzi decides to write more in this series I’d like to see the stories done in this vignette style.  It was a very successful way to show the situations and characters and most enjoyable.

 

Book Review: Charming by Elliott James, Urban Fantasy

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Charming (Pax Arcana) is a refreshing take on the fantasy theme of a secret society that protects the world from bugaboos, vampires, werewolves and things that are out to kill us.  The difference is that this secret society, the Knights Templar, isn’t trying to rid the world of dangerous supernatural predators; it is charged with keeping the rest of humanity oblivious to the creatures. The rule is called the Pax Arcana and it is a geas that compels the society to rid the bad guys that get too obvious, such as vampires that start serial killing young women in a rural town.  They are obsessive about maintaining secrecy – and the purity of their group.

The hero is John Charming.  By birth he is a member of the secret society, but he has one big problem.  A werewolf bit his mom when she was 9 months pregnant with John.  She died the first full moon but John was infected.  The society tolerated him until a few years before the story opens when apparently they decided he was too much at risk to turn wolf.  Now John watches his back while he lives in a small rural college town, tending bar under a different name.

World Building

Charming is Elliott James’s first novel and the first in the Pax Arcana series.  The book is set in our world, rural America, so the primary world building is the background for the Pax Arcana, the menagerie of supernatural folk, and making it clear that John Charming is not a supernatural cop nor a Harry Dresden type with plenty of magic power at his disposal.

James dis a great job laying out his world by showing it, with no long explanations.  John Charming narrates the book in the first person, so we see everything through his eyes, which must be a challenging way to describe a whole magic system.  I was impressed with how natural the flow was in the story.  The only part that was challenging to follow was the knights from whom John Charming is hiding; we learned little about how they operated or were organized.

Besides the usual vampires and werewolves we have Naga and Valkeries with other creatures suggested.  It was great to see that the vampires were sexy only if you liked corpse-dead looks and bad breath and that werewolves feel great pain when they transform and that Naga like heat but can burn if you work at it. These were refreshing, and even better, gave the book depth and authenticity.

Characters

Some fantasy novels are all action and setting and unpronouncable words with clip art characters who have zero personality. Charming delivers real people who suffer and feel and rejoice and fear.  Besides John Charming we have Sig, a Valkerie, Molly the Episcopal priest, Ted Cahill the snarky cop, Chauncey Choo, a pot smoking semi-normal guy who got into monster hunting doing his day job of professional exterminator, and Dvornik the Eastern European kresnik, similar to the Knights that John came from.

Let’s look at Choo.  A professional exterminator who got a few houses with more than mundane pests, he teamed up with Molly and Sig to hunt a vampire nest operating in John’s peaceful college town.  If you think about it, who better to see through the Pax Arcana illusion than a professional exterminator?  If you’re killing roaches and rats, focusing on removing icky critters, you will be less susceptible to the Pax Arcana illusion.  The novel is full of these innovative touches.

The villains are equally well done, from the nasty teen aged vampire Anne Marie working on developing a whole nest of vampires and vampire wannabes, to Ivan, to Dvornik and his nephews who played both sides.

Anne Marie has only a few lines but they are great:  “Do you know what it’s like being me?  I’m a damned corpse!  I can’t feel anything except cold, and I’m cold all the time.  Except when I’m drinking blood.”

Series Intro

Charming is the first in the series. Daring is book 2 followed by Fearless which is due out August 11.  This was a series with rich characters and back story and strong foundation for follow up novels.  I am off to reserve Daring now!

Down Where My Love Lives, Two Books by Charles Martin, The Dead Don’t Dance and Maggie

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First, know that Down Where My Love Lives is a compilation of two novels, The Dead Don’t Dance (Awakening Series #1)
and Maggie (Awakening Series #2). Also The Dead Don’t Dance was the first book Charles Martin published. I read these within a couple weeks of reading Where the River Ends, an excellent novel with many of the same themes.  Unfortunately Down Where My Love Lives felt like the rough draft.

Many reviewers describe Martin’s writings as sentimental, but I don’t agree with that assessment.  Martin includes emotion and he writes about love as the center point and reason for being.  Unfortunately this duology has a big dose of melodrama, but it is still good enough to be an enjoyable read.

The Dead Don’t Dance Book 1

The Dead Don’t Dance starts out with Dylan and Maggie, married for just a couple of years, expecting their first child.  Maggie seems compulsive, unrealistic and controlling, and Dylan’s devotion to her was puzzling.  She sure wouldn’t be my first choice of a spouse.

Dylan farms a large plot in South Carolina that he inherited from his grandparents, but they live on only $20,000 a year. Maggie spent several hundred on nice-but-not-essential baby things at the local baby store, far more than Dylan could afford, and freaked out when she found a black hair growing on her chin.

Their son is stillborn and Maggie hemorrhages and goes into a coma.  The novel alternates flashbacks to Dylan’s life before and with Maggie with his response to her long coma.  In the meantime Dylan starts a new job teaching English at the community college (which Maggie applied for unbeknownst to Dylan), delivers Amanda’s baby in the freezing rain, tries to make friends with Maggie’s pet pig Pinky, and tends Maggie every day.  He lets his farm go and loses his crop.

Throughout we see Dylan through his thoughts and actions and how others respond to him.  He is deeply committed to his wife, overall kind and thoughtful, caring, not terribly interested in money or worldly success.  He’s the type of guy you want to know and be friends with.

The exception was the episode that seemed completely pointless, cruel and had no place in the book, the raccoon hunt.  Raccoons can be vicious and pests in a city but the hunters went into a wild swamp to hunt the coons.  The raccoon in the swamp was surely no threat or pest.  Martin describes how Amos shot the coon – deliberately NOT killing it – so that it fell down through many feet of branches to get attacked and and eaten while alive by the coon dogs.   I don’t have a problem with hunting animals you plan to eat or to remove pests like the bazillion rabbits in our area, but first why would they hunt a wild raccoon they don’t plan to eat and second, why deliberately be that cruel?  And what was the possible reason to include this in the novel?  It gave no insight to Dylan or his friends except to make me dislike the bunch.

The Dead Don’t Dance was overall mediocre and had I read it before others by Charles Martin I would not have pursued any more of his novels.  It was OK at best.

Maggie

Martin wrote a sequel that picks up 17 months later, after Maggie awakens from her coma.  Dylan experienced serious emotional events while she was in the coma and finds it very hard to tell Maggie about them, partly because he doesn’t want to make her feel even worse than she already does about their stillborn child.  This part of the novel felt authentic to me.

Maggie had an intricate and ridiculous plot, picked up the story of Dylan’s love for Maggie and threw in the complication that Maggie may be unable to carry a child to term.  Oh, and throw in the fact that Dylan’s best friend and across-the-street neighbor married Amanda whose father’s enemies – former partners in crime – are after him and everyone close to him.  That leads to kidnapping Amanda, torching Dylan’s house, killing his dog, assaulting Maggie, burning down the father’s church.

The book is overly complex. Dylan and Maggie need to get acquainted in some sense; Dylan lived 4 months alone, buried their son alone, dealt with a new job alone.  Maggie missed all that and woke up with the fear for her child top of her mind.

Maggie gets pregnant but miscarries and she and Dylan decide to adopt.  However the agency looks askew at their finances, overall life style (truck instead of a mini van) and mostly at Maggie’s emotional health.  Dylan takes steps to become acceptable to them, borrowing $40,000 to finance the adoption, trading in his truck for a van, but Maggie is oblivious to the problems.

Now add the neighbor and best friend, Amos, whose father-in-law gave evidence that put his former partners in prison for years.  Those creeps are violent and want to destroy the father-in-law, his entire family, and for some reason, Dylan too.

The last plot point is about Bryce, a former US marine who is rich but lives in a trailer in a closed drive in movie theater.  Bryce is generous with time and money and likes Dylan and Maggie, and in return they take care of him to the extent he allows it.  The twist in Maggie is that Bryce changed; he is bathed, trailer picked up and repaired, he is back in shape.  Someone from the military comes to advise Bryce’s financial adviser and Dylan to keep away from him, that Bryce could snap.

Just like the first book, Dylan is interesting, someone you want to know.  Maggie seems selfish and controlling.  Amos is a great guy, Amanda too good to be true.  Characters are partially developed, not complete people.

Summary

Charles Martin shows flashes of the good writer he later proves to be.  He writes of the most ghastly places imaginable, swamps, South Carolina farms with swarms of mosquitoes, places where a “cool” evening is 78 degrees, and makes them almost seem desirable.  He emphasizes the heat and mugginess and bugs, that summer last 6 months or more, but you can tell that he loves it.  It’s home.  All of his books are set in these horrible places.

He writes of love, especially the committed love of true marriage, but from the husband’s perspective.  Most romance books are from the wife’s point of view and it is lovely to see a man confessing his love.

He used some similar elements in Maggie as in Where the River Ends.  Both have a sick wife, a disparate couple, committed marriage, no children, icky hot muggy swampy southern setting, lots of emotion.  In fact Martin uses the term “indomitable” to describe both Maggie and Abbie in Where the River Ends.  Martin learned to tidy up his plots and show his characters far better by the time he wrote Where the River Ends.

Overall I’d give this 2 or 3 stars.  A mediocre but tolerable first novel, ragged around the edges and not a good introduction to an excellent author.