Author: Scott Lynch

2006, Bantam Spectra

Filed under: Fantasy,  Sci-Fi

Follow it on Goodreads.

In The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch has created an incredibly unique world, populated it with engaging characters, and orchestrated a driving, action-filled plot.

This book features one of the best, and most pertinent, prologues written in the fantasy genre. We get introduced to the protagonist from the eyes of two very different thieves—Chains and the Thiefmaker. Most prologues are written from incredible distance and only give a sense of pre-destiny, myth, and/or a generic world setting. Lynch delivers main character backstory while simultaneously introducing us to his world. After exiting the prologue, I was aching to know more about Locke Lamora and what thievery and mischief has got him into so much trouble.

Locke Lamora is an unassuming master thief operating in a corrupt and violent society dominated by a ruling elite class and a gang-filled criminal underworld. Locke needs every bit of his skill, and cunning, and luck to survive. From the very onset, each of Lynch’s characters is in a state of jeopardy and one can’t help but wonder if someone will perish at the turn of the next page.

Lynch possesses a good sense of timing and an awareness of reader’s expectations as well. The slow initial development of the Lockes’s latest ploy, which dipped a little to near a paean of how great a thief he is, is righted when Lynch deftly turns the story. Locke (along with his gang of Gentleman Bastards) is not, in fact, too smart by half. Lynch raises his characters only so far before putting the screws to them. He thrusts them into a near impossible scenario whose unfolding propels the reader through the remainder of the book.

Locke Lamora is told in the third person omniscient. The knowledge possessed by the narrator manages to broaden our understanding of the world while showing restraint from peering too deeply into any particular character’s motive, thus avoiding the sloppy narration that too-often plagues fantasy novels by giving away what is about to happen and cheapening the unfolding drama. The “he would later learn that” crutch is rarely employed, sustaining the reader’s fear for the characters’ survival. By interweaving the backstory of both the characters and the world throughout the chapters, the exposition is inserted in a way that never feels forced or shoehorned. Never is an interlude disruptive, irrelevant, or something you’d rather skim past.

Lynch also writes setting well. He teases out his wonderfully realized city of Camoor in a way that immediately grasps the reader’s attention. There are no spoon-fed explanations for the details of the world, he instead places his trust in the reader, allowing for a world of greater depth to grow in the reader’s imagination.  Lynch’s world is one that has eked out an existence from the ruins of a former great society. The former civilization possessed a technology and science well beyond the reach of the current society and the evidence is in the architecture and lighting of the main city, Camoor.

Magic, too, is uniquely handled in this story. It is predominantly alchemical. That’s not to say that there aren’t mages in Lynch’s fantasy though. There are, and one in particular–the Bondsmage–plays a pivotal role. Mostly about mind and body control rather than more than the traditional sorcery of lightning bolts and fireballs, the magic in Lock Lamora is a combination of witchcraft and voodoo. Despite the absence of “flair” in this type of magic, the Bondsmage in this story is incredibly menacing.

Unlike many of its fantasy contemporaries, The Lies of Locke Lamora is a stand alone novel. It doesn’t need to be part of a series: rich characters, an immersive world, and strong plot puts Lynch in the elite company of George R.R. Martin and the like. I recommend this to anyone seeking a rewarding break from the sweeping fantasy epic form.

Similar Reads: Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch, The Black Company by Glen Cook, The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny

Reviewer’s Note: I read this book based on a friend’s recommendation. Thank you, Todd!

2011, Putnam Juvenile

Filed under: Thriller, Fantasy, Young Adult

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.)

The odd facet has to do with Meloy’s chosen system of magic. It begins as herbology, a muddled herb in a cup of tea that makes the drinker tell the truth. But it quickly becomes proper magic, as Janie and co. receive a potion that will transmogrify them, temporarily, into birds.

The recipe for that potion, and for every other potion the apothecary can concoct, comes from a massive, centuries-old tome called the Pharmacoepia. That innocent detail makes a world of difference: it means that the magic contained in the Pharmacoepia is available to anyone who can read Latin. It means that Janie and Benjamin are not unique.

This means that the world of The Apothecary, and its magic, is more democratic. It also highlights the fact that one of the great pleasures of this brand of YA book comes from being included, which means, it comes from excluding people. When you read Harry Potter, you get to be a wizard, instead of some frumpy old muggle. And not only that, you get to be among the most famous, most important wizards in the world. If everyone could use magic, the thrill of inclusion would wane significantly.

To make it more palatable, authors ensure that the exclusive group is oppressed somehow, or that they don’t want to be part of the exclusive group. Katniss Everdeen hates fighting in the Hunger Games, but without the status the Games afford her, she’s nothing but a gruntwork drone, slowly starving to death in backwater Appalachia.

There is no such status, and no exclusivity, in The Apothecary. The knowledge of the Pharmacoepia comes from millenia of tireless study on the parts of a long line of apothecaries and alchemists. The Pharmacoepia itself is nothing but a glorified cookbook. Without it, a few people might remember a few potions, but the bulk of the knowledge, the bulk of the magic, will be lost.

Similarly, the users of the Pharmacoepia are interchangeable. If it falls into the wrong hands, the bad guys can use it just as well as the good guys. If Janie and Benjamin get lost or die, two other children could easily take their places. Any two children, from anywhere. They don’t even really need the children.

This makes for some uncomfortable moments. For example, at the end of the book (it’s also mentioned on the very first page), Benjamin slips Janie an alchemical roofie that makes her forget the previous three weeks, which is how long she’s been in London. She forgets all about the good guys and their fight against the bad guys. More unnervingly, she drops out of the alchemical brotherhood and instantly she’s just a regular girl again.

Knowledge of the Pharmacoepia is the only thing that ever makes her special, and because that knowledge can so easily be erased, so too can her specialness. It’s a weird, slippery philosophy for a YA book to be founded on. Meloy, for better or worse, never puts the replaceability of her heroes at the novel’s center, so it can easily be forgotten or ignored. But without it, The Apothecary is a fun but forgettable novel.

Similar books: The Hunger Games series, by Suzanne Collins; the Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling; the Unfortunate Events series, by Lemony Snicket; the Flavia de Luce series, by Alan Bradley

2011, Doubleday

Filed under: Mystery, Fantasy

Get this book

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.

The Warden’s team includes an old army buddy and a savvy street kid who’s a natural thief—it’s unclear why either shows the Warden the loyalty they do, as he repeatedly rejects their help, often with vicious and unnecessary meanness. He prefers to soldier on alone, ostensibly to protect his friends, but it’s an unconvincing and ultimately much less fun way to do things.

Also problematic is the bone-thin plot, especially when Polansky makes the Warden do inscrutable things to fill pages because there are no more clues to chase down. In one scene, after the Warden’s ex-partner is killed, he finds a spot on a roof and drinks himself stupid while he watches the hoax work the scene. For hours. This is not even an act of grief, as the best the Warden can muster is mild annoyance at the man’s death. It’s just a scene that takes up words.

When the plot has some bends to take, Polansky’s talent for writing hints at how good this book could’ve been. The Warden’s way of working revolves around his mouth and his connections. He has an insolent, insulting way of mocking those he sees as harmful to Low Town, which include the police, the guard, and the federal agents investigating the child’s murder.

This is generally good stuff, especially when he lays into a righteous kill like a vile noble with depraved hobbies. And while the patois of Polansky’s dialogue takes a bit of getting used to, it makes for a sometimes fun (though sometimes grating) read.

The Warden has a habit of using his fists when his mouth doesn’t work, and the ensuing action scenes are some of the best in the novel. Also, the end of the mystery is well done, even if the Warden seizes on a single suspect for far too long before the final turns.

Ultimately, though, the Warden’s unlikeable characterization soured me on this promising novel. I’m not usually one to complain about an unlikeable character. One of my favorite characters of all time is Parker, Richard Stark’s ruthless expert criminal. But even Parker knew when to accept help, and Parker’s best scenes were when he had to deal with other people.

Because, after all, that’s what novels are about: people dealing with people. A shame that this one didn’t strike gold, but I’ll be keeping an eye on Polansky in the future.

Similar books: Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith; The Manual of Detection, by Jedediah Berry; The Dresden Files series, by Jim Butcher

2011, Viking Adult

Filed Under: Fantasy.

Get the book.

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.

The story (which more or less requires you read the first book) begins where its predecessor left off, with Quentin, Eliot, Janet, and Julia lording over Fillory (an obvious Narnia analogue) as kings and queens. Again bored with his life, Quentin goes off on in search of a quest and stumbles upon a magic door that flings him and Julia on a one-way trip back to Massachusetts. The two travel the Earth (oddly enough doing very little magic–they steal multiple cars instead of flying for some reason) in search of a way back. Friends are made and lost, dimensions are traveled between, sex is had, people die, universes are threatened.

Quentin is a very good anti-hero. Much of the strength of both books in this series is the success they find in centering on an interesting antagonist who is a bit of an asshole. Quentin is selfish, impulsive, and occasionally obtuse. He’s often more pitiable than he is likable. I don’t want to divulge too much of the plot, because once it gets started it’s really the most the book has going for it. Magician King takes a while to get past the overly-long exposition of Quentin’s malaise and establish the book’s place in the larger world, but once the main plot arc finally gets rolling–about a third of the way in–things get much more trans-dimensional and entertaining.

Magician King also does more to flesh out Julia’s character. Not only does Julia (a hedge-witch reject of the same magic school the others attended) play an integral part of he book’s primary plot line, but she’s more interesting than just about everyone else, maybe even including Quentin. (Although, as with much of rest of the book, her story isn’t the most original thing out there.)

Also troubling is the land of Fillory, where much of the book takes place. It’s still not a felt-out enough world:

“Hi!” It was what Fillorians said instead of “hey.”

Now even in full context of the book, it’s hard to tell here if Quentin is being sarcastic or not. Nonetheless, it speaks to how non-specific much of Fillory is. It also brings up the book’s sense of humor. In general, the humor is a touch difficult to evaluate. Much like in the first book, I was put off at first by the self-aware jokes and sarcasm comparing the subject matter at hand with the broader fantasy genre, a Fellowship of the Ring quip here, a Hogwarts reference there. The constant breaking of the wall between fantasy and reality can be tough, but after awhile, it grows on you, and is much easier to appreciate. At some point something in your mind clicks, and stops trying to read the book as parody or pastiche, and takes it for what it is. Once that happens, lines like this are funny:

Nothing made you look like more of a dick than standing there trying to find the end of your scabbard with the tip of your sword.

As a fan (if not an admirer) of the first book, I found The Magician King to be very enjoyable. It’s not much more than a sequel, but it’s a solid one. If you liked The Magicians, Magician King is probably worth your time. If you think it sounds like something you might like, check out my review of the first one, then go get that (I saw it on a remainder shelf the other day, so it won’t set you back much) and give it a whirl first.

Similar Reads: The Magicians (Grossman), The Book of Lost Things (Connolly)

Author: Félix. J. Palma

2011, Atria Books

Filed Under: Literary, Historical, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Romance.

Get the book.

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.

It’s not perfectly clear that time travel actually exists in this novel. There’s evidence for it, but also evidence against. The reader, much like the 19th century London depicted in Palma’s excellent novel, gets taken in by an elaborate scam. How deep the scam goes remains debatable–perhaps it’s only superficial and H.G. Wells (the primary protagonist) is nothing more than a character embroiled in a twisting murder mystery spanning a multiverse, or perhaps it goes far deeper.

Whatever the truth is, The Map of Time is full of hoaxsters. You will find youself tricked more than once. Yet each time the wool is pulled, you’ll rush to replace it, or begin looking elsewhere for the otherworldy. The twists are never cheap. I continually found myself feeling self-satisfied as I figured out what was going on, just to be wrong again (in fact, I had to rewrite this whole review, because I unwisely began it before finishing the book). Palma sets a meticulous stage, and the readers will see what we want to see, despite any indication to the contrary–I understand how vague that is, but it’s difficult to be spoiler-wary.

The basic plot follows a few main storylines, each twisting from a center plot featuring Wells himself. First there’s Andrew Harrington. He’s a meloncholy rich kid who falls deeply in love with an alcoholic prostitute. On the very night he renounces his family fortune for his love, he finds her skinned and filleted in a Whitechapel boarding room. After despairing for 8 years, Andrew decides to kill himself, but his cousin intervenes with a plan. All of London is talking about Gilliam Murray, who has been leading London’s wealthy elite on expeditions to the year 2000. They turn to him to send Andrew into the past, where he will kill his love’s killer (none other than Jack the Ripper) before her murder can occur.

For complicated reasons, Murray cannot help. But he directs the cousins to the science fiction writer H.G. Wells, who, he surmises, probably has a time machine upon which he based his novel, The Time Machine.

The second storyline features young Claire Haggarty, who falls in love with the savior of the future on one of Murray’s expeditions. After witnessing him destroy the leader of the robot army amongst the ruins of London in an epic sword duel, she swoons. Tom Blunt, a seemingly goodhearted simpleton in Murray’s employ, manages to convince Claire that he’s the savior of the human race, traveled through time to bed her. When this coercion effects life-threatening consequences for the girl, he turns to Wells for help.

Then there’s Inspector Garret of Scotland Yard, who gets a warrant to travel to Murray’s future in order to arrest a suspect for a murder in order to prevent it from occurring in the first place. There are time guardians and pan-dimensional thieves, glimpses into the future and libraries hidden in prehistory. Some of it is real, and perhaps all of it isn’t. Through Wells, everything intertwines brilliantly. And, I should note, the stentorian and somewhat playful narrator–an omnipotent showman of sorts–adds a whole lot of charm to the story.

Palma is not a perfect writer, there are a few smudges on the polish. Occasional bits of dialogue feel stodgy, and the mostly airtight plot has the occasional minor leak in plausibility–namely, characters too often jump to conclusions with too much conviction, a technique that services the plot but hurts the tension and characterization. But as a whole, The Map of Time is an example of a wonderfully planned and crafted novel. Palma keeps a lot of balls in the air, continually adding more; it really is a spectacle.

I was very much looking forward to this book. A steampunk vengeance story about a Victorian time traveler sounds ridiculously awesome to me. Even when I first suspected a hoax, I wasn’t disappointed, not for a moment. I was a sucker spectator eager for what I believed I was being offered. I kept thinking that maybe, just maybe, the illusion was real.

Offering such immersion and such satisfaction is the sign of a top-notch novel. Even when you know its secrets, The Map of Time is very much a Great Read and well worth your time.

Similar Reads: The Time Machine (Wells), The Chess Machine (Löhr), The Resurrectionist (Bradley), The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Wilder)

1994, Ace Books

Filed Under: Fantasy, Young Adult.

Get a copy at Powell’s.

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.

These books are full of high adventure and comedy, scores of wonderful characters, and, as many who read them will remember, long and mouthwatering descriptions of epic feasts full of creative foods. They’re also filled with death and loss.

Like many of the others in the series, Salamandastron concerns peaceful anthropomorphic critters (mice, squirrels, hares, moles, otters, badgers) besieged by a horde of villainous vermin (rats, weasels, stoats, foxes). A few unlikely heroes emerge: Samkin, a young squirrel from Redwall Abbey, quests after the treasured sword of Martin the Warrior which has been stolen by rogue stoats; Mara, a recalcitrant badger girl, storms out of the mountain fortress Salamandastron only to be captured by the horde of plunderers and murderers led by Ferahgo the Assassin , an infamous weasel brigand; Thrugg the otter and Dumble the baby dormouse trek to the mountains of the north in a race against death.

Jacques is an excellent story teller: the plots of his books are always crisp and perfectly succinct but take just enough detours and twists to keep the story exciting. Everything ties up perfectly. The two stoats who stole the sword (deserters of Ferahgo’s army) manage to infect the inhabitants of peaceful Redwall with a plague called Dryditch Fever. Samkin takes off after them while Thrugg and Dumble seek medicinal flowers from the dangerous mountains to the north to save the dying residents of Redwall.

Meanwhile, Ferahgo’s clan has surrounded Salamandastron, convinced it houses great stores of badger treasure. They take Mara hostage, but she escapes and seeks help for her embattled friends. Salamandastron is lead by the great badger warrior Urthstripe (presumably it’s him featured on the cover), and inhabited by a battalion of fighting hares. (Every species has its own idiosyncrasies and the hares, who speak like Tommy Atkinses and have bottomless appetites, are my personal favorites.) The plot follows the various characters’ paths and ultimately winds into satisfying crescendo.

Jacques’s ken for creating dynamic characters despite being completely polarized to either good or evil is testament to his ability as a storyteller. Ferahgo is wonderfully villainous. He has no redeeming qualities, yet he’s one of my favorite characters. Other creatures are so purely good you’d either hate them in real life or at least assume them Mormon. But it all fits perfectly in the world he creates. There is a balance to Jacques’s world, there are rules.

But, done right, that’s exactly what makes a great children’s story. You know from page one that the good guys will be knocked down, almost lose, then win in as heroic a fashion as possible. The fun is in the ride, in getting caught up in the excitement and adventure. Turns out that 18 years later, I still found myself able to do just that. Thanks, Brian Jacques.

Similar Reads: Redwall (Jacques), Mouse Guard 1152 (Petersen), Watership Down (Adams)

Author: Justin Cronin

2010, Ballantine

Filed under: Fantasy, Sci-Fi (vampires)

Get The Passage, in paperback, at Powell’s

[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.

First of all, it’s a poorly structured book. The first 300 pages have to do with the origin of the vampire virus, as if Cronin is trying to convince us that vampires could really happen. It’s not a poorly written section, but it’s entirely tangential to the bulk of the story, except for a few comeback details—like the fact that the original experiment victims become the elders of the vampire society. Still, Cronin wastes far, far too many words on this, and then he flashes forward ninety years and wastes another 200 pages describing the fortress that a smallish group of humans have built to keep the vampires out.

Cronin sold the movie rights to this book before it even came out last year, which made me wonder, as I read, how much time the movie version would need to tell the same amount of story. My guess: the first 500 pages of book would translate to roughly 20 minutes of screen time. Here, let me try to do it in a paragraph:

The army tried to make supersoldiers, but instead created a virus that turns people into vampires. The vampires are mean (think I Am Legend), and the U.S. bombed itself to try to destroy them but that didn’t work and almost everybody died or turned into vampires. Now a few dozen people are barricaded in a small fort, where they give each other weird titles and capitalize everything. The bright lights that keep the vampires away are slowly failing. Then they find a young half-vampire girl and pick up a radio signal that says to bring her to Colorado and six of them go to take her there. Well, more than six at first but the others die fast, so we’ll say six.

That’s the plot of literally the first 500 pages. While those pages have their moments, they’re not good enough to justify the massive word count, and it becomes pretty clear that Cronin doesn’t know what to include in his story and what to leave out.

Even in the third section, the novel’s best by far, Cronin often skips compelling scenes and details, in fact he skips weeks and even months of the trip to Colorado with journal entries. (He skips an entire relationship with the entry, “Day 49 I have decided to marry Hollis Wilson.“)

Even more frustrating: when the vampires overwhelm the humans’ fortress in a big climactic fight, Cronin suddenly ends the chapter this way:

“Sign, we have sign! Holy shit, they’re everywhere!”

But he spoke these words into the darkness. The lights had all gone out.

The next chapter begins:

The meeting was called for half-day, under a sky bulging with rain that would not fall.

That’s right, Cronin skips the pivotal vampire fight and catches you up with a tactical meeting where somebody stands up and blandly tells us what happened. Just a bit earlier, Cronin was willing to include the full text of the One Law of the fort that gets destroyed (it goes like this “We, the HOUSEHOLD, in order to safeguard DOMESTIC ORDER; provide for the EQUAL SHARE; promote …” for four pages).

Lopsided structure is not the only magilla in this gorilla, there’s also the problem that The Passage is not believable. That might sound weird, describing a book about vampires in post-apocalyptic America as unbelievable. But since Cronin tries so hard to make his novel realistic, it stings ever more when he abandons every ounce of realism after writing himself into a corner.

For example, when the group stumbles into Las Vegas, they have no idea what Las Vegas is, or what casinos are, or gambling (despite the fact that they have cards)—but when they see the fake Eiffel Tower, they know that it belongs in Paris, France.

A more troubling episode: the six travellers stumble upon a 90-year-old Humvee, which their battery mechanic—who kept the fort lights running but has never seen a car—gets running. It takes him 19 days to fix the car, and on the 19th, the vampires arrive to kill them, just as they’re able to drive off in the nick of time, along with the half-vampire girl, who can sometimes call off attacking vampires with her mind, but this time can’t.

It’s a wretchedly disappointing scene, that not only breaks the rules of the material world in which it ostensibly takes place, but also the cardinal rule of satisfying action sequences, which states: “Thou shalt never take the shortcut.” But, since Cronin makes his vampires into supervillains, even well-armed humans have no chance against them, which means our heroes’ victories must be a series of miracles, each less believable than the last. Being saved by strangers with perfect timing, or stealing a train to get away just as the walls come crashing down—it gets old, no matter how many minor characters die for the sake of making it feel less perfect.

It’s even more annoying when Cronin keeps cutting away from certain doom—a viral standing over an unarmed human; a man about to mercy-kill a wounded woman who’s been in a coma for days—and then the next chapter features everybody hale and hearty, inexplicably alive. I mean that “inexplicably” literally: Cronin often doesn’t bother to explain how these people survive, instead shrugging off the latest miracle with a line like, “How they had survived the attack in the barn was nothing [they] could wholly explain.” That, friends, is the definition of a shortcut.

Underneath all these gripes, the real undoing of The Passage is that Cronin simply isn’t inventive enough to justify the length and depth of this massive novel. It starts with vampires, about as cliched a villain as there is, and never adds enough originality. They’re allergic to light, they suck blood. You’ve read this story before.

While Cronin writes not-terrible prose, it’s nothing to write home about (or, say, quote for this review). He’s good with characters in small numbers. That first 300-page section focuses primarily on one man, and his relationship with a girl in danger. The characters there are well done, even if the section itself is a cloying way to start a vampire book.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of The Passage is that the third act, the big adventure, is right in Cronin’s wheelhouse. There are few characters and more depth, solid episodes, one set piece that’s nearly great, and, let’s face it, the details of the Time Before (yes, he really capitalizes it) are best served up as brief flashbacks. Most of that third act is at least better than your average vampire book, except for Cronin’s incessantly miraculous plot, and a stupid ending that serves only to set up the sequels. Still, with better editing and a tighter frame, this might have been the excellent genre work it was purported to be.

As it is, The Passage would be a decent vacation book, if you’re a patient reader, you can look past lapses of logic, and you don’t mind meandering for several hundred pages. For most others, don’t fret if you miss it. It certainly wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Similar reads: The Strain, by Guillermo del Toro, for another books about boring vampires. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson, for another overhyped book in bad need of an editor.

2011, Harper

Filed Under: Historical, Fantasy.

Get a copy at Powell’s.

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.

When her father dies in a boat bombing, orphaned Eleonora is left in the care of her father’s friend, a Turkish Bey (chieftain) living in Stamboul. She’s tutored in the classics by an American theologian, and she quickly reveals a polyglot aptitude for language. This is despite the fact that she ceases speaking after her father’s death–a twist that serves no purpose given that she communicates with characters freely by pen and paper, then starts speaking again. It could have been intended to signify some sort of chrysalis-like metamorphosis into an oracle, but if that’s the case, Lukas handles it as meekly as the rest of the book’s scattered magical elements.

In any case, as her knowledge increases, politics swirl around her. The Bey is suspected of plotting the bombing; the tutor is a spy of sorts. Eleanora finds herself caught up in machinations that aren’t quite as over-her-head as the adults around her think.

At this point in the review it may not come as a surprise, but I didn’t like the tinges of the fantastical that dot the novel, despite my normal enjoyment of that sort of thing. Perhaps this is because it’s never clear exactly what is fantastical about Eleonora. The Sultan, when he catches wind of her aptitude, surely sees her as something special: he invites her to his palace, shares secret documents with her, and asks her for political advice. But he’s interested in her memory and capacity for history and language (her study of the classics allowed her to find historical parallels to the stratagems of the Russians and Germans), and shows no interest in whether she is in any way mystical. Although mysterious midwives claim her birth fulfills a prophesy by the oracles of Delphi, no important character, including Eleonora, believes she’s actually an oracle.

If only Lukas had taken the same tack.

There’s a flock of purple hoopoes (good thing I read my Ovid) that follow her around everywhere, pointing to her supposed specialness like the Star of Bethlehem. And then there are the midwives/guardians that also follow her around, all too strongly confirming the presence of the supernatural. All that would be fine if it became relevant, but Lukas never connects these signs to anything. Whether or not she’s got ESP or Asperger’s is inconsequential to not only the plot, but to the tale as a whole.  By peppering this stuff throughout his book, then ramping it up in the very final pages, Lukas seems to be trying to inject a little oomph of wonderment at his somewhat flagging ending. For me, it had the opposite effect.

Magical realism can be a great tool when authors use it to manipulate characters and plots in otherwise impossible or unbelievable ways. It doesn’t work when it’s flicked on a story like a splash of paint. If it’s not organic to the plot or setting or theme, then it’s superfluous, as it is here. Oracle would be better if the fabulism around this special girl had been left to the characters to navigate, rather than used as a signpost for the reader by an intrusive narrator.

Despite its shortcomings, the writing shows promise. This is an endearing book and a good candidate for a beach or train read. If Lukas’s next book is written with a lighter hand, it could be very good.

Similar Reads: The Chess Machine (Löhr), The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (Akroyd)

Random House, 2011

Filed Under: Literary, Historical, Fantasy.

Get a copy at Powell’s.

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.

“Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories,” Natalia tells us, “the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man.” These two stories and how she comes to know them comprise the bulk of the novel. The story of the tiger’s wife concerns an escaped tiger that takes up residence in the woods around her grandfather’s childhood home. As a boy in love with The Jungle Book, set on befriending the tiger, he finds himself on the wrong side of his small town’s superstitions. What happens will shape his view of love and the pursuit of knowledge for the rest of his life.

The story of the deathless man concerns a series of chance meetings between Natalia’s grandfather and a mysterious patient. She learns the story in episodes throughout her youth, during peaks and lulls in the Balkan Wars. These chapters were the most powerful, conflating Natalia’s upbringing during wartime with her grandfather’s confrontation with the unknown. Each of these sections showcases Obreht’s talent for handling diverse material while giving each its due, tailoring voice and pacing to both realistic and fabulist subjects.

In general, the writing is stellar. Obreht’s prose is effortless and evocative, beautiful without stealing the show from the story. In one of my favorite passages, she describes a group of orphans coloring:

Fra Antun’s kids sat hunched over wooden benches in the middle of the room. There were glasses of pencils and crayons scattered over the tables, and the color rose up in a glaring mess from the pages the kids were writing on, sitting on, sneezing on, folding into paper airplanes or birds.

I love the image of the color rising above the table “in a glaring mess,” which to me conveys all the activity and excesses of children absorbed in their art.

The worst I can say about The Tiger’s Wife is that the present narrative, the story of Natalia’s medical mission and her trip to Zdrevkov, feels thin in places. Sometimes it seems little more than an excuse for revealing the back story, and it grows thinner as the narrative progresses with the tiger’s wife and the deathless man consuming more and more space. But dwelling too much on the present for its own sake misses the point. The Tiger’s Wife isn’t really about Natalia or the present moment so much as finding the past alive in the present, an idea embodied in her grandfather, the novel’s true main character.

Natalia’s grandfather is a compelling curmudgeon, an aging doctor of high regard in the medical community who still carries his old copy of The Jungle Book with him wherever he goes. But we see him as a child, too, and then as a young man finding his way in the world, and finally as an absence around which the rest of the story turns. In the end, The Tiger’s Wife rises and falls on his shoulders, on his faith, his doubt, and his wonder. That the novel works so well is largely a testament to his character and the questions raised by his past, questions about belief in the face of the unknowable and making sense of the unbelievable.

Similar Reads: The Lazarus Project (Aleksandar Hemon), The Life of Pi (Yann Martel), City of Thieves (David Benioff)