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By Nico Vreeland, on December 29th, 2011  Author: Maile Meloy
2011, Putnam Juvenile
Filed under: Thriller, Fantasy, Young Adult
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
It’s 1952. Janie is a regular 14-year-old American girl, living in Los Angeles… until she discovers that her parents are Communists, about to be arrested for un-American activities. The family flees to London.
Once there, Janie starts flirting with a boy in her class named Benjamin, and they embark on a mission to spy on a man that Benjamin thinks is a Russian agent. Only, the man he meets is Benjamin’s own father, the apothecary of the title.
From there, Benjamin and Janie begin a fairly typical young-adult-novel adventure: they follow clues, use newfound powers, and become embroiled in a massive conflict with no less than the world at stake.
It’s a familiar arc, and while Meloy writes it well, it’s a relatively forgettable novel. Except, that is, for one aspect, a facet of the mythos of The Apothecary that’s fairly original, but also quite uncomfortable. (Minor spoilers ahead. If you want to go in fresh, skip the rest of this. If you like Harry Potter and the Lemony Snicket books, you’ll probably like this one, as well.) …
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By Nico Vreeland, on November 11th, 2011  Author: Daniel Polansky
2011, Doubleday
Filed under: Mystery, Fantasy
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
6 |
| Depth..... |
5 |
Low Town is a genre mashup the likes of which I’m not sure I’ve ever read before. It combines the world of a gritty fantasy novel—and its attendant medieval melee and magic—with the plot of a mystery novel. The hero of the novel (though “hero” is a loose description of him) is the Warden. It’s unclear exactly what that title means, but it’s certain that the Warden is the primary drug dealer in Low Town, the nickname for the slums of a large city in Polansky’s fantastical Thirteen Lands.
When the Warden stumbles upon the gruesome murder of a child, he gets drawn into a mystery that involves cruel nobles, twisted magicians, and his own dark past as both a scarred army hero and a disgraced detective.
On paper, this looks like an easy home run, but the reality is not quite as successful. It’s a bit of a mystery itself as to why it doesn’t work as well as it should: my complaints are relatively small, and Polansky is quite skilled at the things he does well. For one thing, the fantasy side of this novel draws a lot more water than the mystery does. Low Town (the place) is well-detailed and intricately imagined, down to its smallest details, like the tidy tidbit that an incompetent branch of the city’s law enforcement is ruefully nicknamed “the hoax.”
The mystery side of things isn’t quite as enjoyable, mostly because it’s too simple for my taste. I prefer a nuanced, multilayered mystery; Low Town offers something closer to an adventure, the plot points coming in the form of logistical problems rather than secrets or lies to uncover. …
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By Sean Clark, on August 16th, 2011 Author: Lev Grossman
 2011, Viking Adult
Filed Under: Fantasy.
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
This is the sequel to 2009′s The Magicians, a flawed but very enjoyable book that I awarded an Honorable Mention for our Best Books of 2009. The strength of The Magicians was its ability to flip convention on its head. The story began like a Harry Potter clone completely aware of its position in the fantasy genre and its similarities with C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books. Then it took a good idea and ran with it: what if, instead of saving the world, the wizard students endowed with all sorts of power and advantage over normal humans merely graduated and had nothing to do? Quentin and friends fell into a black hole of hedonism, only managing to pull themselves out when they create a quest for themselves–one that almost harmed a world more than it helped it.
In The Magician King we get something much different, in part because it’s much of the same over again, just rearranged a bit. …
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By Sean Clark, on July 21st, 2011 [This time-travel-focused genre buster is a C4 Great Read. Find it and other C4 favorites on our Great Reads shelf at Powell's.]
 Author: Félix. J. Palma
2011, Atria Books
Filed Under: Literary, Historical, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Romance.
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
There’s very little I can say about this book without spoiling something. So I’m going to try something a little different to start. Let’s do word association. Take a look at this list and see how many things you think could help make for a good story:
Victorian romance. Parasols. Hoodwinks. Murder. Historical figures in fictional situations. Meticulous plotting. Vengeance. Paradoxes. Bawdiness. Secret societies. Blackmail. The Terminator. Drunk British whores. Jack the Ripper slaughtering drunk British whores. Minority Report. Tribal magic. The time machine in H.G. Wells’s attic. Street brawls. Apocalyptic robot battles. Dimensional rifts. Time travel. Henry James and Bram Stoker having a sleepover. Time Cop. Lava guns. Immortal dogs. Naive girls easily coerced into sex. Parallel universes. Steam powered automatons. Fourth dimensional dragon-like beasts. Sword fights.
Pretty good odds for an entertaining book right? Right. In any case, if that piqued your interest sufficiently, go ahead and skip the rest of the review, pick up this book, and enjoy. Read on and I’ll try and explain a little more substantively, but be aware that while I’ll try to limit them, there will be spoilers after the break. If you already think you want to read the book, do so, then return to my review in the future (oooooh).
Last chance to avoid SPOILERS. Okay, you’ve been warned. …
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By Sean Clark, on May 26th, 2011 Author: Brian Jaques
1994, Ace Books
Filed Under: Fantasy, Young Adult.
Get a copy at Powell’s.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
10 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
The Redwall books were among my favorites when I was actually a young adult reading YA books. Salamandastron stands out in my memory because it was the first I ever read. I remember first seeing the cover with the badger holding the spear, and just lighting up. I was a pudgy little dork who really liked Watership Down and the Final Fantasy games, so this book screamed awesomeness to me. I wasn’t let down, and I devoured the rest of Jacques’s books with ever-increasing voracity.
I still have all my Redwall books. The covers are worn, the pages yellow and tattered. They’ve survived moves from apartment to apartment, been lent out and miraculously returned more than once. I’ve always said I would revisit them at some point but never did. When Brian Jacques died in February, I finally decided to return to them. My initial thought was to hit the three core books (Redwall, Mossflower, Mattimeo), but then I saw that cover again and knew it had to be Salamandastron. Just look at that badger –he’s not some goofy Looney Toon. He stands there in armor, holding his pike and helmet and seeming, well, somber. …
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By Sean Clark, on May 19th, 2011 Author: Scott Westerfeld
2010, Simon Pulse
Filed Under: Young Adult, Historical, Sci-Fi, Fantasy
Get a copy at Powell’s.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
| Illustrations... |
8 |
My biggest gripe with Westerfeld’s Leviathan was that it was too much a set-up for a trilogy and not as satisfying a standalone story as the lead entry in a series ought to be. Seeing as Behemoth is the second entry of said planned trilogy, that problem is no longer as glaring. Still, this too acts as a build up for a larger conflict, but rather than leaving us at the precipice, it–as a good middle segment should–aligns the plot’s working pieces then sets things in motions for a hefty conflict in book three. All that aside, this novel features all the aspects that made the first book intriguing, as well as an arguably tighter story arc.
Behemoth picks up with Deryn, the girl posing as a male in order to be British midshipman, and Alek, the Hapsburg prince on the lam, aboard the great flying whale dirigible following the escape at the end of Leviathan. They head for Istanbul, where the majority of the story unfolds.
(I gave a breakdown of the basic conceits of the series in my review of Leviathan, so if you haven’t read it go check out that first–but in brief, this is a steampunk retelling of World War One, where the machinist “Clanker” Eastern Europeans are in conflict with the “Darwinist” Western Europeans’ army, which is built around giant creatures created by manipulating evolution into complex living vehicles and biological weapons. So by whale dirigible, I mean it’s literally a huge, floating, armored whale.)  …
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By Nico Vreeland, on May 18th, 2011  Author: Justin Cronin
2010, Ballantine
Filed under: Fantasy, Sci-Fi (vampires)
Get The Passage, in paperback, at Powell’s
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
| Compared to Hype... |
2 |
[Minor spoiler alert: this book came out last year, and this review contains a few small details from relatively late in the book.]
I don’t know why I keep believing that a modern vampire book could be good. I believed it when The Strain came out, and I believed it about The Passage, too. Color me shamed, because that’s twice I’ve been fooled.
The Passage is not a good book. It’s a literary author’s attempt to write a genre novel without much experience or skill at writing plot. If plot holes or inconsistencies make you mad, avoid it. If however, you need a single book to get you through a weeklong vacation, it just came out in paperback and, at nearly 800 pages, it’ll give you some bang for your buck.
Let’s get into the details. …
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By Sean Clark, on May 12th, 2011 Author: Michael David Lukas
2011, Harper
Filed Under: Historical, Fantasy.
Get a copy at Powell’s.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
5 |
The Oracle of Stamboul is a competent and at times engrossing bit of historical fiction, but it’s also a case of magical realism that wants the magic to matter more than it ultimately does. For the majority of the book, the fantastical elements are not present; sadly, when they do crop up, they aren’t crucial to anything. That’s a shame, because Lukas spins a good yarn, balancing characters, plot, and tension nicely.
Almost right away, Oracle reveals itself as a somewhat picaresque late-19th century adventure story set in a particularly volatile part of the world. Eleonora Cohen is the precocious daughter of a Jewish carpet seller. When her father, Yakob, travels from their home near the Black Sea to the great city Stamboul (Istanbul) in order to sell off some textile stock, Eleonora stows away. Turns out to be a good idea, as their home town is sacked not long after the departure.
…
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By Eric Markowsky, on April 13th, 2011 Author: Téa Obreht
Random House, 2011
Filed Under: Literary, Historical, Fantasy.
Get a copy at Powell’s.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
With all the hype about the New Yorker’s 20 under 40, it’s nice to read a debut novel by one of their young authors that lives up to the marketing. The Tiger’s Wife is a captivating combination of history and fable. In her own life and in her grandfather’s stories, the narrator confronts questions of belief in the face of desire for understanding, for relief, and for release. Rather than resolving the world of the novel into one ruled by magic beyond human comprehension, the book’s fairytale elements only accentuate the challenges inherent in faith and doubt.
Natalia is on her way to a medical mission at an orphanage across the border when she receives news of the strange circumstances surrounding her grandfather’s death. Having lied to his wife about going to meet Natalia on her mission, he dies from an illness he’d long concealed, alone in the small town of Zdrevkov near the coast. Figuring out why he chose to slip away from his family to die among strangers drives his granddaughter out to the coast and into his past, into one story she knows and one she will learn. …
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By Sean Clark, on February 18th, 2011 [This clever YA fantasy is a C4 Great Read.]
Author: John Connolly
2009, Washington Square Press
Filed Under: Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Young Adult
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
I stumbled upon Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things a few years ago and really loved it. At some point I’ll go back and reread it for review, then probably crown it a Great Read too. That book was engrossing, surprisingly deep, and quite dark. Despite being about demons trying to incite Armageddon and annihilate the human race through a trans-dimensional wormhole, The Gates is not a dark book. It provides levity with cheeky humor and a colorful cast of characters (both demonic and not).
Samuel Johnson, who is 11, and his personable dachshund, Boswell, while staying out past their curfew, espy a weird Satanic ritual take place in a neighbor’s basement. The neighbors are possessed by demons and set about opening a gate to Hell in order to allow The Great Malfeasance to lead his army through and destroy the planet. How did the first demons get through? Because of a tiny particle that escaped the CERN hadron collider. …
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