More Books than Time

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

To Hold the Bridge – Old Kingdom Novella and More by Garth Nix

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Garth Nix published Sabriel, the first novel in his Abhorsen fantasy trilogy in 1995, ending with Abhorsen in 2003.  Since then we fans had to subsist on a novella, Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case, published in Across the Wall in 2006.  The series is rich in world building, excellent characters, unusual use of fantasy themes, and quality of the writing.

To Hold the Bridge – Title Story

Nix used the same world but completely new characters in the novella To Hold the Bridge, published with other short stories in 2015.  We don’t see the royal family, Abhorsen or Clayrs.  The main character, Morghan, is a destitute orphan, bright, ambitious, tough and hard working.  He is handicapped with a bum arm but learned math, reading and some Charter magic by trading his work to an innkeeper in exchange for lessons.   The innkeeper was formerly a royal guard and thus educated and a minor Charter mage.

Morghan is taken on as an cadet in the Bridge Company, a firm that is building a great bridge that will increase trade and travel in the northern part of the Old Kingdom.  The company personnel combine engineering and magic and must be able to defend themselves against the semi-wild tribes people and Wild Magic practitioners.

Morghan worries about his future with the company, knowing he has nowhere else to go, and works hard for the Bridgemistress and his fellow engineers.  As often with Nix’s characters Morghan discovers unknown strength and character as he earns his place in the world.

This story was excellent.  It felt like a prequel to something else set in the same world but perhaps featuring regular Old Kingdom citizens.  My quibble with the novella was I wanted a map and there was none.  The newer E versions of the original Abhorsen include maps which I referred to a couple of times.

Other Stories in the Collection

A Handful of Ashes was my favorite.  It too featured young ladies coming of age, growing into their character and strength while defeating evil.

Infestation was an unusual twist on the vampire novel.  I was glad that these vamps were just plain icky, no glittering sparkling sexpots here!

An Unwelcome Guest was a funny take off on the Rapunzel story.

The other stories varied and I read two of them before.  Iron and Holly is a twist on the Saxon vs. Norman fight, and has been published elsewhere as was Old Friends.

This was categorized as YA fiction, mostly because several characters were 18 or so, just beginning their life’s path.  I’ve felt the Abhorsen books should have been categorized as adult fiction, although older teens will enjoy them too, and believe To Hold the Bridge also will appeal to adults.

Overall I recommend this collection of short stories and longer novellas.  Like all anthologies you may not like each story but will certainly enjoy some and likely find one or two that resonate in your heart.

4 Stars

 

Uprooted by Naomi Novik, Excellent Fantasy for Adults, Magic vs. Malevolence

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Uprooted by Naomi Novik is one of the best novels I’ve read in the past year.  It has the emotional depth that adults enjoy along with the straightforward story of good vs. evil, magic vs. despair with great characters.

Author Novik  sets Uprooted in the kingdom of Polnya, a standard late-medieval place threatened by the neighboring kingdom of Rosya on one side and the malevolent magic of the Wood on the other.  The Dragon, foremost wizard of Polnya, lives in the tower in the Spindle Valley to guard against the encroachment of the Wood.  When the Wood takes over people or animals they are corrupted, lost inside of themselves and a grave danger to everyone.

Characters

I loved Novik’s heroine, Agnieszka.  She has internal strength that even she doesn’t realize and she’s not afraid to put her life on the line for people, especially her friends.

The growing love affair between Agnieszka and the Dragon feels real.  When they work magic together they blend their hearts and work together intimately.  Agnieszka can see beneath the Dragon’s scowls and snide comments and she knows he loves beauty, whether in people, or things or magic.

Agnieszka’s magic is very different from the Dragon’s.  Hers is song and ad hoc, nothing formal while his is sharp, crisp, clean edged and powerful. They are stronger together than separate and the intimacy grows each time they combine magic.

I’m tired of books with girls who are strong in the sense of physically strong, or extra special strong in magic or whatever, standard kick-ass types.  I like reading books about people who are strong because they have strong characters.  Courage, determination, honor, love, cherishing people, generosity and stewardship are all qualities that make people strong, and Agnieszka and the Dragon have these.

Plot

The book begins when the Dragon selects Agnieszka to serve him for 10 years – but he forgets to tell her he selected her because she has magic.  Agnieszka and everyone else assumes he will choose her best friend, Kasia, and she can’t fathom why he took her.  After a couple days the Dragon begins teaching Agnieszka – but once more he doesn’t tell her that’s what he’s doing – and she hates it.  Doing magic the Dragon’s way leaves her exhausted.

Agnieszka realizes her magic is valuable when her home village summons the Dragon to stop corrupted cattle and wolves, but he has left to attend another monster.  She stumbles into the type of magic that she can do – ad hoc, more wandering and less of a highway – very powerful.  She and the Dragon begin working together in earnest.

The plot is excellent, fast moving, with lots of intrigue and blind alleys along the way.

Mood

Uprooted is excellent at conveying mood.  We feel Agnieszka’s fear and loathing early, then the ever-present threat of the Wood keeps a sense of worry and drives her and the Dragon to develop her skills. Novik does a great job with setting the Wood up as a dark, evil force that is just there, never goes away, never stops being a threat even when it is not overtly challenging.  We feel Agnieszka’s terror when she fights off the wolves, when she rescues Kasia, when she flees the capital with the royal children, when she and the Dragon fight the Wood together.

Then the Wood turns and becomes more a normal forest, still a bit scary with dangerous, hate-filled creatures, but not the malevolent entity it had been.  We feel lighter along with Agnieszka.

Uprooted isn’t all danger and fear.  It has love and even quiet humor.

Other Thoughts

Like many novels with younger characters, Uprooted is classified as YA Fiction.  It is not.  It is a novel for adults, one that older teens will love, but one that we older people will find richer and deeper.

Be aware there are 2 sex scenes.

Overall this is 5 stars.  Excellent book with deeply realistic characters and a memorable sense of mood and emotion.

Personal Note

Uprooted is going to stick with me a long, long time.  It spoke to something important.

Something about the relationship between Agnieszka and the Dragon reminded me of something I read long ago but cannot recall, perhaps something by Patricia McKillip.   I kept hearing an echo but cannot remember what it is an echo of, rather frustrating since I enjoyed whatever the earlier book was and would like to reread it.

Sower of Dreams by Debra Holland, Classic Fantasy with Romantic Touch

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The cover of Sower of Dreams (The Gods’ Dream Trilogy Book 1) includes an Andre Norton quote endorsing the novel as “outstanding and well presented fantasy” and the author credits Norton’s Witchworld series as inspiring her book. How could I not read it?

Sower of Dreams does not disappoint.  It reminded me of some Andre Norton stories with the enigmatic and never explained portals that terminate in ruined cities on different worlds, and the mood was reminiscent of Norton’s work too, a combination of dreaming, fear, running, love and standing up finally for one’s self and one’s loves.

I enjoyed the simplicity of the character set.  We have major players Khan, exiled from earth to flee his murderous half brother, Daria, princess of Seagem, Thaddis, newly crowned king of ally Ocean’s Glory, Amir, envious half brother to Khan, plus assorted friends and family members.  I appreciate books where the characters have reasonably short, memorable names (as opposed to those with lots of consonants and apostrophes).

Characters and setting were well done as was the romance between Daria and Khan and the tension and fear as they seek ways to build a life together.  I wasn’t altogether pleased with how easily Daria rejected her “god” Yadarius or her father’s charge to be the queen.  Her actions fit the story (better than the alternatives), they just sounded a sour note in the background.

True to the Andre Norton spirit author Holland constructs lovable creatures, monkey bats Shad and Shir, who become friends with Khan and Daria.  Also true to the Norton spirit, the author presents both villains with an opportunity to choose the wise and moral path and both villains spurn the choice.

Also like Norton author Holland left some dangling pieces to use in follow up novels, whether separate series or sequels.  One is Khan’s earth friend Jasmine escapes via the mysterious portal in the middle of the earth desert to a foggy, shadowed land.  Another is the political fallout and restitution between Ocean’s Glory and Seagem once Thaddis’s soldier Boerk takes Thaddis back to Ocean’s Glory.  The last string is the missing Pasinea, a nasty lady whose “power is temporarily depleted”.

The book is not complex nor challenging, a gentle, enjoyable read with interesting characters and familiar mood.

As the title notes, Sower of Dreams is the first in a trilogy.  The excerpt for book two, Reaper of Dreams, shows us that Daria’s beloved oldest brother Indaran still lives, a prisoner of an evil “god”.  It would be interesting to see how Holland ties the Jasmine and Pasinea strings into the Indaran story.

Four stars if you are in the mood, three stars if  you want something a bit meatier.

Fairytale Apocalypse The Verge #1 Jacqueline Patricks

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Fairytale Apocalypsetic Fantasy was good in parts, overall OK, while I was reading it, but I had to go back to the novel to refresh my memory to write this review. A really good book sticks in your mind more than a day or two.

The plot is complicated. Believing she is called to be the Lady of the Verge, Lauren crosses into the elven realm at the castle of Lord Kagan Donmall, the Protector of the Verge. Lauren’s twin sister, Tessa, has looked out for Lauren, or in Lauren’s mind, bossed and fussed and kept from having fun, follows in a panic. Tessa has to fight her way through the Verge, and reaches Lord Kagan’s castle just as Kagan and Lauren are sealing their engagement. Lauren’s arrival causes the castle to catastrophically fail, pushes Kagan, Lauren and Tessa back to earth. Lauren gets home just in time to see her parents and home burn in a fire. Kagan gets stuck at the crossing between elven lands and earth. Lauren gets home around the same tiem as Tessa.

Lauren’s home isn’t the only thing destroyed. Most of the earth is a wasteland; most people are shells and no one can have children any more. We next see Lauren and Tessa living in a bunker community, sheltering from the empty people and raiders. Kagan shows up, gets into fights, then Tessa gets kidnapped by raiders, Tessa and Kagan and others go to the rescue. And on. Of course everything ends up just as it should. Tessa and Kagan fall in love and the earth turns back to its green loveliness; Lauren goes back to the elves’ home to be Lady of the Verge.

The plot was far more complicated than this synopsis. I didn’t mention the many people who die or get introduced but we never see again, or the goddess-type creature who calls Lauren to the elven land or how the Verge has been losing its magic, or the agreement another elven lord, Damin, makes with a demon, or Laruen’s spurned lover or any of the other umpteen things that happen.

The plot is pretty good, although I thought the ending was ridiculous; the earth magically goes back itself because Kagan and Tessa stop being mad at each other. What about all the people and animals and plants that died? Did they come back too?

The setting was interesting. Kagan lives in the land of the Fae, which connects to our earth via a bridge. The Fae lands have declined and faded the last many years which worries Kagan and is the reason he is willing to marry Tessa when she arrives and announces she was sent by Danu to be the Lady of the Verge. The bunker on wasteland earth was sketched in enough we got a good idea of the miserable conditions.

Characters were predictable with few sidekicks who added humor or dark interest, like Stan the dim bunker guy and Damin the would-be villian. Tessa was a bit much. You would think after 5 years of wasteland earth she’d stop interfering and taking care of Lauren. Nope, even at the end she’s still fretting. Lauren was selfish and shallow. She was 16 at the beginning so selfish and shallow are the job description, but she didn’t grow out of it. Kagan was unpleasant and unattractive, convinced of his own wonderfulness and high status.

The Fae are unpleasant. Kagan remembers wars fought over an insult, bloodthirsty, overly proud people, just like he is.

I don’t know that I would have finished Fairytale Apocalypse – A Romance of Apocalyptic Proportions: Epic Romantic Fantasy (The Verge Book 1) had I not been given a copy with the expectation of a review. It was OK, not bad or boring. None of the characters were appealing or people I want to spend time with, the complicated plot seemed endless and I had to push myself to finish the last third. Overall I’d give this three stars, perfectly decent if you like fantasy.

Throne of Glass – Pretty Good; Crown of Midnight – Not

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I read Throne of Glass while on vacation and liked it a lot despite the unappealing main character. Unfortunately, the sequel, Crown of Midnight was boring and I did not finish it.

This review focuses on the first novel, Throne of Glass. The main character, Celaena Sardothien, is an assassin, trained since childhood to kill for money. She is 18 and has been imprisoned at hard labor for a year. With that background, she has very little choice when offered the chance to leave the prison to compete to be the king’s champion.

It’s obvious Calaena doesn’t like killing people but she is put out and angry when someone does not instantly recognize her or her lethal skill. We don’t know much about her, but from the broad hints she was the daughter of the murdered rulers or highborn nobles in the neighboring country that the King conquered. She did not have much choice but to learn the assassin trade, and once trained, was presented with a bill for 5000 marks for her training. It’s clear that it never occurred to her that she could have left the assassin guild once she paid back the 5000 marks – she could never have left before repaying – nor did she ever look for alternative employment.

That’s the main character. A rather stuck up assassin who doesn’t much like to kill but is very very good at it. Her main adversary is the King and her sidekicks are the King’s son Prince Dorian and Captain of the Guard Chaol. These two secondary characters are more likable but we don’t learn much about them.

The political background could be fascinating. Unfortunately we see hints of the politics, but nothing is built out. Calaena spends a lot of time getting dressed up, exploring secret passages, flirting with Chaol but she is a flat, lusterless character in a sketched out world.

Nonetheless, Throne of Glass was enjoyable enough that I was eager to read the sequel, hoping that Calaena would grow up a bit. However, after reading about 30 pages of Crown of Midnight I put it back in the library return bag. I could not read it.

From the reviews on Amazon, readers are split, either loving it or a little bored. This is another novel that was written for older teen girls who probably love it.

Wizards, Warriors and Zombies in the Minnesota Woods

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Wizard Dawning (The Battle Wizard Saga, No. 1) was a good book for one of those tired Sunday evenings when you don’t want to invest a lot of brain power in a novel. It is a wizard and warrior story featuring a seventeen year old Sig, his great grandfather Thor, mother Meredith and assorted bad guys and bit characters. There is a some coming-of-age actions (naturally given our teen aged hero) but there isn’t a lot of angst and misery or girl chasing.

Overall this was a pleasant, easy to enjoy book.  The characters were a bit flat but the dialogue was OK and the plot was fun and fast paced.  I don’t normally care much for wizard and warrior novels nor martial arts or dressage.  Author C. M. Lance used the martial arts and dressage as background, more setting and back story than as critical elements.  We did not have tedious explanations of “how things worked” either, which so often drags down a good story.

On the down side, I read this on my Nook.  The editor used poor rules for dividing words at the end of lines; for example, aren’t was often divided so one line ended with aren and the ‘t began the next line.  This was disconcerting.  (A pet peeve of mine is the fantasy writer who insists on using apostrophes for everything!  At least we were spared that.)

Another fun element was siting this story in a small town in Minnesota.  C. M. Lance didn’t belabor the location, but used it with a deft touch, incorporating the farm lands, hills, lakes, ice as backdrop.  It’s always a nice change when fantasies are not set in Central Park or California.  I enjoyed the way Lance used zombies, as story fodder, vs. making them a central element.

As indicated by the title, Wizard Dawning (The Battle Wizard Saga, No. 1) is meant to launch a series. The book had a logical beginning, middle and end, but there clearly is more story to come as Sig leaves for college and his mom is starting to learn about magic from an economist/gypsy.   We also need to find out how Sig will regain his own magic.

Wizard Dawning was the author’s first book and quite likely future ones will have richer characterizations. This first novel suffered from slightly wooden characters but was livened by an intriguing back story, well-done setting and fun plot.  To the positive Lance did not fill it with steamy romance scenes, explicit violence, boring martial arts or swear words!

Overall I recommend it if you want a fun story that doesn’t require a ton of deep thinking.

Like Armor? Fantasy Novel The Red Knight – Miles Cameron

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If you like armor or sword and sorcery or just fantasy / alternate history novel you’ll enjoy The Red Knight (The Traitor Son Cycle). The novel is billed as book one of The Traitor Son Cycle, with book two recently published.

The Red Knight is the first fantasy by Miles Cameron, who has written historical fiction under a different name. The Red Knight is heavy with medieval combat, armor, knighthood, set in Alba which is somewhat similar to England.  They are at odds with The Wild, a poorly defined bunch of humans and non-humans, many with magic.  The Wild wants to take back their former stronghold, which a religious order now owns and is using as a convent.  It is the Abbess of this convent who hires the Red Knight’s mercenary company for security.

The Red Knight is complicated and long, over 600 pages, with at least 6 main groups of characters and over 50 individually named people. When I finally got to about page 500 I started skimming a little since some of the character groups did not seem germane to the story and did not interest me.

This story sprawls over and could benefit from editing. Do we really need to know the Sossig bands? They are barbarians in conflict with the Kingdom of Alba who played a peripheral role in the story, yet we had a good 50 pages and another 10 or so characters. The drovers and their group also did not seem important and didn’t add much. The last episode where they visit the Wyrm is a set up for sequels, but again, adds little except word count.

Two big improvements would be a list of characters and a map to make it easier to keep track of the people and places. Some characters had the same last names or similar first names that made them hard to keep straight.

Another huge improvement would be to cut down on the armor and weapons descriptions. Over and over and over we get to read about the armor, how costly, how heavy, how time consuming to put on and take off. Rinse and repeat, and then do it all over again. Frankly, I’m not real interested in armor. Tell me once and I’m happy. The author says in his Afterword that he is involved in medieval re-enactments and the novel shows his expertise. But unless you are really interested in swords and bill hooks and gauntlets and and and, you won’t care and you’ll wish he just GOT ON WITH IT.

These are flaws that made reading longer and a bit tedious, but overall the book is good. There were a few surprises.

One odious character was the Galle (aka French?) pompous knight, who said with complete sincerity that his sword was all the justification he needed to exert low, middle and high justice. He killed two squires, burnt an inn and threw the town constable tied up into a stable. Why? Because the innkeeper and the squires’ knight didn’t immediately recognize his innate superiority and give him the best room.

I expected that this creep would take the Lancelot approach and try to win over the Queen, but that never happened.

Another was that the Queen and the Abbess both play prominent roles and are figures of power. And the Red Knight does not win his fair lady.

Besides adding a map and character list, editing out a few groups of characters, telling us only once about each piece of armor and weapon, there are a few other factors that limited my enjoyment.

  • We never learn much about the main character, the Red Knight. We get glimpses, but little background and very limited character development.
  • The world building is sketchy.   Alba is a land that is recovering from a massive fight with The Wild a generation ago. Clearly there should be a lot going on politically and personally, but we don’t see it.
  • There are allusions to political brangles and possibly traitorous vassals, but I’d have liked more meat as that would explain a great deal of the back story.
  • For some reason Alba has a major agricultural fair at the convent, even though it is implied to be out of the way.  That begs the question of why there?  What’s going on behind the scenes that keeps a convent and its territory as the prime destination for millions of gold pieces?
  • We don’t know much about The Wild. Some are monstrous, some are described as “guardians” or “just folks” yet will eat their human enemies alive.
  • The magic system is sketchy.

I enjoyed The Red Knight enough to look for the second book. But if The Fell Sword (Book 2 The Traitor Son Cycle) is another 600 page rehash of armor, weapons and irrelevant characters then I won’t finish it.

The Circle of Sorcerers, Mages of Bloodmyr Fantasy, Brian Kittrel

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About all I can say about The Circle of Sorcerers: A Mages of Bloodmyr Novel: Book #1 is that I managed to read it in a couple of hours.  My Nook said it had 629 pages, but each page was only one Nook screen; I’d guess this would be 300 pages in a real book.  It was a fast read but not a good read.

There wasn’t anything really wrong with this, just there wasn’t anything very good either. The world building was mediocre; characters were bland and dull; plot was interesting but sketchy.

The main characters are 16 year old men from a small village.  The hero Laedron is off to learn to be a sorcerer under the tutelage of Ismeralda. The backdrop to the story is a religious controversy that spills into war. Ismeralda is murdered by leaders of the Heraldan church, Laedron escapes and joins a militant order of mages and knights. He meets up again with his friends from his village who coincidentally also are in the same order and they are assigned to assassinate one of the church leaders.

The plot has promise but it never really works out and I could not get interested enough to care about the characters. The odd thing was Kittrel only sketched the plot and back story, but spent paragraphs describing the food they ate. I almost stopped reading after the first two page description of Leadron’s mom’s cooking. It felt like the author got paid by the word and it was easier to describe food than characters, setting or plot.

I got this after seeing many highly complimentary reviews on Barnes and Noble and Amazon.  In fact both sites have this at a 4 star rating. I would give this a 3, decent, not great. It was free of those obnoxious grammatical and spelling errors we see in so many free or low cost E books, and had been edited. The biggest disappointment was to get to page 629 and realize the book just stops. It is apparently the first of a trilogy (of course, what else). I don’t intend to read the other two books.

Couldn’t Finish These – Den of Thieves and Taming Fire – Fantasy Novels

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Have you ever had a book that you know is supposed to be good but you just can’t get into it?  These two books both came up in Amazon’s “Customers who bought this item also bought” which works for me about half the time.  Sadly these two both fell in the “didn’t work” half.

Den of Thieves: The Ancient Blades Trilogy: Book One struck me as trite. The main character is a thief in a city where thieves are executed and set in a land where a poor man is fair game for enslavement.

We all know how these books go, don’t we: Boy steals something he shouldn’t which kicks off a series of adventures and misadventures. That’s the plot here. I could see that the book could be good if I were able to get into it or was more in the mood. Or something.

Maybe part of the trouble is this is the first book in a trilogy. Sometimes authors take way too long to set up the story. All I know is I got to about page 50 and took it back to the library.

The second book, Taming Fire (The Dragonprince Trilogy, Vol. 1), has a more unusual premise and parts were quite good. The hero is the son of a now-dead thief, who hired himself as a shepherd to a noble. He taught himself to use a sword and knows a few small magics. A wizard finds him and takes him to the academy.

Yes this book has more promise and was far more interesting. Now that I think about it, maybe I’ll keep this one home a few more days and try once more to get past page 20.

Update:  Nope, still couldn’t get into Taming Fire.