Just like the first novel by Tony Bertauski, The Socket Greeny Saga, The Drayton Chronicles reaches in, grabs your heart, and makes you care for the title character. Drayton is an immortal who feeds on the life essence of a dying person. He began as a savage creature, killing as he wished, but learned to be human and to care centuries ago. Now he thanks the people who give him their dying breath and he takes on their unfinished business.

The Drayton Chronicles is a collection of five novellas, each moving one after the other. There is a narrative break between each story, but there are references back and it would be best to read in sequence. The first novella, Drayton The Taker, is a good example. Drayton finds Blake Barnes freezing to death on Mt. Hood and takes his dying breath along with his aching need to apologize to his family. Drayton makes his way to South Carolina where he finds the family and resolves Blake’s true burning regret. He also finds the bully who is making Blake’s family miserable and resolves that problem too.

We are steadily drawn into Drayton by seeing him through the eyes and feelings of the people around him, those that he is helping to pay back the final breath he took from their loved one. One of Tony Bertauski’s gifts is developing strong characters that you care about. With The Drayton Chronicles we seldom venture into Drayton’s minds but see inside the minds of those he is with. With The Socket Greeny Saga, also by Bertauski, we see the main character, Socket, through his own thoughts. Both are powerful, but I found Drayton even more compelling and with more interesting, fully drawn side characters.

The plot was reasonably good as was the setting. The novellas had varied locations and intricate layers of trouble that Drayton had to work his way through before finding the true nugget at the heart of the misery and anguish he came to solve. I found the first novella, Drayton The Taker the best, with Swift the Current and Numbers creepy. Bearing the Cross and Yellow were compelling.

This is not a long novel as all five novellas together are only about 260 pages and is a fast read. I got mine through the author’s generosity as he offered anyone who signed up for his newsletter their choice of a free E book from him. Thank you, Mr. Bertauski for your offer and for the beautifully done characters and story.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel has gotten almost overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics and readers. And rightly so. It is a good story, well written, interesting characters. The narrator is a seven year old boy caught in a frightening, bewildering series of events begun when his parents’ border, an Australian opal miner, commits suicide. The boy wakes up choking on a shilling and others in his neighborhood experience stangeness all related to money.

The boy visits the neighbors at the end of the lane, an eleven year old girl, her mother and grandmother. The girl takes him with her to remove the “flea”, a supernatural creature, that is causing the problems. She thinks she bound the flea to its current location but in fact it sent a piece of itself into the boy.

The boy’s mother hires a new housekeeper, Ursala Monkton, whom the boy recognizes immediately as the flea. The creature wants to make everyone happy, at least at first, but fears the boy and influences the father to nearly drown him in the tub.

Summary, The Good and Not So Good

I got caught up in this and enjoyed it very much while reading the story, but once done it raised nagging questions. The story is sold as a novel but in fact is more a novella; with plenty of white space it is 178 pages, That caused several flaws.

• The Hempstock ladies were never explained.  The story alludes to them being older than the big bang and immortal, but what they actually are and why they live as they do is never explained.  That’s not uncommon in fantasies where we really don’t want a detailed, technical explanation of every magical element, but it left me wondering what they were for.  A longer book would have given more opportunity to explain.
• The ending was strange.  The boy revisits his old home after a funeral and wanders down to the Hempstock farm where he remembers the entire story.  Grandma Hempstock tells him he has been there before but as he leaves the memories fade immediately.  We never learn who the funeral was for, nor why the character cannot remember anything once he leaves the farm.
• Ursala Monkton had immense power, yet was controlled by the Lettie Hempstock and destroyed by the hunger birds.  Yet neither Lettie nor her mother could control the hunger birds when they attacked the boy.
• The boy gets a cat that becomes his dearest companion yet cannot remember what happened to her.  Nor does he even remember her until he begins to remember that summer he was seven.  If you love a cat you remember it.

These are minor points.  You would expect unexplained characters and events in a short story, not so much in a novel.  Yet the book did not strike me as one that would have benefited had Gaiman written more.  This fit his style and allowed the mood to swing from somber to fearful to contentment.

I read through a few of the reviews on Amazon and noticed that the negative ones either found the book boring or felt cheated by the extreme short length.  I did not find it boring and the length probably fit the story and Gaiman’s style better than a full-fledged novel.

Overall I found The Ocean at the End of the Lane excellent, one of the more enjoyable books by Neil Gaiman that I have read.  Although the main characters are children this is not a children’s book.  Teens would enjoy it but it is written for adults.    Five stars.

Crewel is dystopian with a young heroine in a world where women must fit tiny, narrow roles.  Our heroine, Adelice, has a rare talent to manipulate the form of her world and has been forcibly enlisted as a Spinster.

We don’t quite see how the Crewel world works until quite late in the story.  The first part of Crewel is taken up with Adelice being hauled out of the escape tunnel her parents built in their basement, then punished for attempting to run, and finally being brought into the training group.

Spinsters are the female leaders who use their unusual abilities to touch and manipulate the world via looms. They are not allowed to marry and are forbidden any sexual activities due to stringent purity laws. The Guild leaders are men who govern and decide. Guild is dependent on the Spinsters to keep Arras functional, but the men are careful to not allow the women power or control.

Adelice has love interests in two young men but since she has had zero exposure to men she doesn’t quite know what to think about them. She is intrigued but fears the retribution should she be discovered in a compromising scene.

About two thirds through the book Adelice learns that Arras is truly woven above and separate from Earth, separated during a time when war threatened and leaders of twelve countries decided to set up the separate world. It is not clear exactly how Arras works. It is physical, with special Thread that forms the physical reality and individual people. Yet it is connected somehow to Earth.

The Creweler – and there is only one – is able to create new Threads and to use Thread to create new places within Arras. The current Creweler is old and wants no part of further renewals.

Adelice is appalled when she learns that the Threads that represent individual people can be cleaned, or even remapped. People who have memories that threaten the Guild or illness or are rebellious or inconvenient are either Cleaned or if severe, Ripped. Adelice learns a new technique to Remap individuals has much promise to leave most of the person’s skills intact. Even worse. Adelice has questioned once too often. Now she faces Remapping.

Adelice has to choose whether to take up her assigned role as the next Creweler, to be Remapped, or to somehow escape. Escape seems impossible. Is it?

Crewel is shown as the first book in the new series Crewel World and ends on a cliffhanger.

3 Stars

Flowers by Scott Nicholson contains ten short stories that are labeled as “dark fiction”.

I liked the first story, “The Vampire Shortstop” the best. The characters were good and the plot was excellent. Short stories must make their point quickly and move on and “Vampire Shortstop” touches on acceptance, toleration, importance of winning vs. fair play and sportsmanship. We don’t learn much about the kid vampire who plays shortstop on a Little League team except that baseball matters and he’s really good at it. The story is narrated through the eyes of the team coach.

“Scarecrow Boy” is the only story that is truly horror. A young teen is living with his grandfather on a small farm and is terrified of the scarecrow that stalks him. We learn he was wise to fear the scarecrow, too bad he wasn’t wise enough to latch the gate!

“Invisible Friend” and “In the Heart of November” feature best friends Margaret and Ellen. Ellen lives in a trailer park with her mom and Margaret lives in her graveyard. Both stories are good but neither made a deep impression on me.

“Thirst”, “The Night the Wind Died”, “Luminosity” and “The Boy Who Saw Fire” all use the same magic theme, that it is by human (human like anyway) efforts that the rains fall, the wind blows, the moon rises and the sun sets. These all were reasonably good, enjoyable reads.

I was intrigued that Flowers features young characters – except the baseball coach everyone is in their early teens – yet is not classified as “Young Adult”. All too often excellent books with themes and ideas that appeal to adults are misclassified as “YA Fiction” because the characters are young.

I will look for more by Scott Nicholson.

3 Stars