Author: George R.R. Martin

2005, Bantam

Filed Under: Fantasy

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“Disappointing” best summarizes the fourth installment in A Song of Ice and Fire. I was thrilled by the previous book and delighted to see that Martin was finally starting to tighten up the plot lines. He focused his story within the broad boundaries that he’d established and poised the reader for a strident and exciting resolution. The forces of fire and ice were drawn together in what promised to be the burgeoning climax.

Instead, A Feast for Crows is predominantly an unwelcome tangent. New characters are introduced in the prologue, which is Martin’s normal pattern. However, where previous prologues have served to heighten and focus the main story line, this one opens a doorway to a continuously expanding world and endless possibilities.

Martin’s style has never lent itself to a riveting pace. He usually advances his story incrementally and adjusts the pacing to heighten the drama in certain moments. However, this book is flat. Very little advancement occurs along the main plot. He ties up a few loose ends from previous installments, but generally he just plods along, focusing on characters that have been to-date mainly incidental. I assume some of these characters will  play bigger roles in future installments, but that’s not enough to satisfy the readers anxious to follow their favorite characters.

Almost in recognition of the shortcomings in this book, Martin’s letter drafted in 2005 indicates the material he drew from to create A Feast for Crows derived from something so sprawling it would have to be delivered in two tomes. He sought some balance that was never achieved. An attempt was made to provide a cohesive structure to the book, but it only goes so far. The symmetry between the beginning and ending of the book provides only the illusion of structure and the wandering nature of the material between only exacerbates the sense that this symmetry was contrived.

Worst of all, the principal characters are left out entirely: Jon Snow, Daenerys, Stannis, Melisandre, Varis, and, yes, even Tyrion. (With the previous installment ending so dramatically, leaving out Tyrion in this story is simply criminal.)

Overall this is a story of Martin’s women: Arya, Alanye (Sansa), Arianne Martell, Brienne, and Cersei Lannister. Samwell is given a fair amount of attention and Martin devotes numerous chapters to the internal fighting for leadership among the Ironborn. This latter story would have likely been better received had it been woven into the context of advancing the main story line.

Alayne Martell, the ambitious princess from Dorne has a compelling story. But much like Martin’s attention to the Ironborn, one can’t help but wonder if her story is yet another tangent. We follow Brienne, who while unique as a character, is never really developed. Brienne’s issues and struggles remain constant. The reader merely follows her on her quest, which is an unsatisfying one at best. Arya Stark is given a good deal of attention, and while Martin continues to develop her character successfully, her story line advances only marginally over the length of this book.

Cersei dominates this story; however, despite all the time invested, she never is developed into a complicated character. Instead she remains a flat, evil queen. Granted, Martin does a great job of portraying her follies and setting her along a course of ruin, but the fact that she remains such a shallow character detracts from any satisfaction we may feel as she gets her just desserts. Jamie Lannister, her brother, plays a much bigger role in this story and he’s really the only saving grace in this otherwise dull installment. Martin finally starts to put some meat and depth into his character. The more  I read his story the more conflicted I feel about his cruel actions against young Bran in the original installment.

Still, it’s a shame Martin faltered with this volume after delivering so many pages of solid entertainment in the build up. But hope remains for the next book. In the same 2005 letter, Martin’s indicated much of the second part of this two-part volume was already written. So, why then, would it take six years to deliver the next installment? I can only hope Martin learned from the folly of A Feast for Crows (or a stern developmental editor was brought on board).  All the excitement that I carried from the end of A Storm of Swords rots on the vine in this book.

Most readers who have invested the time will likely read this story. So, in a sense this review may serve only as a means to temper the expectations of the loyal fan. I certainly wish mine were tempered. A Dance of Dragons will benefit from my expectations being low, but if the story line doesn’t find better direction, then I fear his readers may start to fade as once did the dragons of Westeros.

Similar Reads: A Game of Thrones and A Clash of  Kings(Martin); The Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien); Eye of the World(Robert Jordan)

Author: John Connolly

2011 Atria Books

Filed Under: Young Adult, Humor, Fantasy, Horror

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A direct follow-up to Connolly’s wonderful 2009 book, The Gates, Infernals delivers everything you could want from a sequel. It’s another great adventure, and delivers all the wacky characters and narratorial humor that made the first book so exceptional.

After helping to save the world from an invasion from Hell, Samuel Johnson, with his trusty dog Boswell by his side, is trying to get back to a normal life. It doesn’t last long. The leader of the failed invasion, Mrs. Abernathy (formerly the demon Ba’al before he was trapped in the possessed body of Samuel’s elderly neighbor), seethes in Hell. The Great Malevolence–Satan–has fallen into a weepy melancholy following the defeat, leaving the underworld open to a tumultuous civil war.

Abernathy, in an attempt to restore her standing as Hell’s #2 demon, as well as save her own hide by preventing the traitorous demon Abignor from usurping rule, manages to open a small portal to Earth long enough to capture poor Samuel and Boswell. They will be an offering to restore the spirits of The Great Malevolence.

Mrs. Abernathy’s shot goes awry though—she hits Samuel and his dog, but also two policemen, an ice cream man, and a van full of drunken midgets who travel around reenacting fairytales in shopping malls. At first, these drunken midgets (Angry, Jolly, Dozy, and Mumbles–known collectively as “Mr. Merryweather’s Dwarfs”), threaten to steal the show. It’s not often I find myself laughing out loud when I read, but these crass little characters did the trick.

As the characters traipse across the sprawling and desolate underworld in search of a way home, however, the spotlight is shared. Samuel’s timid bravery, the demon Nurd’s newly found humanity, along with a large cast of inventive and often funny support characters each have truly great moments from which the story draws strength. Indeed, what sets this book apart from lots of other YA is Connolly’s balanced and skillful writing. He’s a captivating storyteller, and moreover he’s developed a real knack for breathing life into his world through a sharp yet subtle wit.

As with its predecessor, Infernals is littered with footnotes. These are often informative, explaining, for instance, a certain lineage of popes, what the Higgs boson is, or the definition of the word “truculent.” Yet they are all filled with jokes, jokes usually just juvenile enough to be silly but not so infantile as to be unworthy of your time. Though the narrator is not named, and has no plot of his own, his constant presence and sense of humor is crucial to the experience.

Here’s the ending to a footnote explaining Ivan Pavlov’s famous experiments on dogs:

This is known as “conditioning.” You have to wonder, though, if the dogs eventually got a bit tired of the shocks and the bells and the absence of food, and made their unhappiness known to Pavlov. This is known as “biting.”

On top of it though, he manages to sneak in clever, even insightful lines:

the past is a nice country to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

Then, occasionally, it dips into downright good advice, revealing a motive on the part of the narrator that touches on endearing.

Most people will spend their lives doing jobs that they don’t particularly enjoy, and will eventually save up enough money to stop doing those jobs just in time to start dying instead. Don’t be one of those people. There’s a difference between living, and just surviving. Do something that you love, and find someone to love who loves that you love what you do.

It really is that simple.

And that hard.

(That was a footnote to a line about two reformed demons brewing cheap ale in the basement of a chemical weapons plant.)

These footnotes and asides build upon each other to give the book a sense of character and purpose that’s pretty rare in YA books lately. And beneath it all is still a charming adventure that strikes a perfect balance between childish fun and maturity of theme and emotion. If you haven’t read The Gates, give it a read first. But be sure to have this book at the ready; you’ll probably want to try and read them both in one sitting.

Similar Reads: The Gates (Connolly), The Mysterious Benedict Society (Stewart), pretty much anything by Terry Pratchett.

2012, Graywolf

Filed under: Literary, Fantasy

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Kevin Barry is a wonderful stylist, a rare talent in the prose department. He writes City of Bohane in a gritty patois largely of his own making, halfway between Dashiell Hammett and A Clockwork Orange. Even so, it never gets too precious or contrived, and it never feels like Barry is reaching. That’s a very difficult feat, and the fact that Barry manages it for the entire novel without missing a beat, well, that’s nothing short of remarkable.

It’s a shame, then, that once you delve into the rich prose, there’s nothing inside worth getting to.

The setting, like the prose, is beautiful and mostly pointless. It’s 2053 in the west of Ireland, but it might as well be 1930s Chicago, or 1880s South Dakota, or a noir Narnia (Noirnia?). It feels vaguely post-apocalyptic and fairly Irish, but neither of those facts are essential to the story Barry tells.

That story goes like this: the city of Bohane is run by gangsters. The biggest, baddest gangster is Logan Hartnett, called the Albino, the boss of the self-named Hartnett Fancy (“fancy” being slang for a violent, murderous gang). Twenty-five years before the action starts, Logan exiled his dear friend and business partner, the Gant, and he stole the Gant’s girlfriend, Macu, and married her. Now, the Gant is back for his city and his girl, and his return sparks a gang war.

That’s not a particularly original premise, but it could be good in the right hands, especially when played out with rambunctious style. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen here. When the narrator expounds on the love triangle, it becomes fairly ridiculous. The Gant, it turns out, only dated Macu for three weeks before Logan broke them up. Over the two and a half decades of the Gant’s absence, he writes her hundreds and hundreds of letters, sending her only one. She thinks even that single missive was kind of silly, because they are not star-crossed lovers—she has no feelings for him, and he soon realizes that he doesn’t even like her. Even so, for some reason, the Gant proceeds with his war against Logan.

The motivations of these various characters never add up, and Barry’s colorful prose doesn’t help. It’s the novel’s most enjoyable facet, by far, but too often it obscures the differences between characters or the action happening.

For example, here’s a sparkling scene-setting line:

In the dawn haze, the brewery lads were dreamy-eyed from hopsfume, while the slaughterhouse boys had been all the silver and shade of night up to their oxters in the corpses of beasts, filling the wagons for the butchers’ slabs at the arcade market in the Trace, and the wagons rolled out now across the greasy cobbles, and it was a gorey cargo they hauled

It’s an evocative, masterful style when applied to anonymous scenes like this, but when characters interact, they all do so in this style, which means they sound so similar as to be almost indistinguishable.

Like this conversation between two of Logan’s lieutenants, Wolfie and Fucker:

Narky look off the Wolfie-boy, Fucker reckoned, and rightly.

“Was lookin’ for ya, Wolf.”

“I been lookin’ for Jenni, ain’t I? You seen fuckin’ Jenni, yuh?”

“Ain’t, Wolf.”

“Said y’seen Jenni anywhere about, Fuck?”

Mad eyes swivellin’ in the Wolfie-boy puss.

“Said I ain’t seen her, Wolf.”

“Fuck she ai ‘n’ all, like?”

Taint of badness on the Bohane air had its various strands and jealousy was not the least among them.

Barry’s slangy prose is so distinctive that the characters blur together, and the nameless narrator with them. That weakness, though, would still be forgiveable if the story at the center were worth the effort of following it—but it leaves too much to be desired. After tensions build, Logan and the Gant choose up sides and the whole city erupts into war. That takes about five pages, slightly less page-space than Barry gives to in-depth descriptions of what everybody’s wearing during the fight.

That big fight happens less than halfway through the narrative. The rest of the book gives over to the particulars of the aftermath, especially how each side’s compromises come back to bite them, or at least mildly inconvenience them.

The fight itself? Nobody really wins. One side kind of does, but nobody central dies, and nobody even moves away. If this is a morality tale about pacifism, its primary lesson seems to be that even violence can be super boring.

The problem here is that Barry’s style overflows with panache and daring and plain old awesomeness… but his plot never grows past mundane. I’ll be waiting for Barry’s next novel, but this one is a miss.

Similar reads: Noir, by Robert Coover; A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess; The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon

Author: George R.R. Martin

2003, Bantam Spectra

Filed Under: Fantasy

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Martin’s third installment in A Song of Ice and Fire is phenomenal. The set-up of the first two books finally begins to really deliver, and the reader, who’s already invested numerous hours in this story, is rewarded for his adherence. At around halfway through this installment, much of the tension that has been mounting swiftly comes to a head. Although the reader may not be too pleased with the fate of some characters, the excitement is undeniable.

Martin’s timing accounts for much of his success. He pushes the fastidious depiction of his world and vision to the tipping point of being wearisome, then reins in his characters and his plots deftly, drawing the unfurled plot lines of A Storm of Swords together like fingers in a gauntleted fist.  In what has been heretofore an increasingly vast world of “endless” characters, the players start to gravitate toward the same locations–even if they don’t yet meet.

These intersections finally reify the world Martin’s has been building, placing fixed limits on what had previously seemed ever-expanding. And there is beauty and craftsmanship in how Martin closes down the story lines he does. As the clashing kings of the previous book continue to battle (and fall), the greater threat facing the world begins to take form: the forces of fire and ice. The reader can’t help but to anticipate that if these forces, that have slowly gathered their strength on the periphery, should strike amidst all the squabbling and infighting for the throne, then the entire realm will surely fall.

In the first book, the motif of fire and ice seems little more than bardic lyricism attached to the name of this sprawling epic. Sure, there is a sword called Ice and the people of the frozen north are at odds with the those of the warmer south, but this is rather superficial. As the greater story progresses, we see the elemental forces as not merely metaphorical: there are supernatural forces at work representing both elements. The force of fire being dragons that have returned to the world, invading from the south. The forces of ice being the undead army of wights threatening to destroy from the north.

Much as I’d hoped he would, Martin takes the opportunity in this installment to flesh out some of his shallower characters. For example, it took 3 books, but Jaime Lannister really comes to life in this story. Up until this point he was basically a flat, evil character, reviled for committing two unforgivable despicable acts, and driven by some rather base desires.  In A Storm of Swords, Jaime is finally given complexity, and the reader is invited to understand and then empathize with his motivations.

Much of the allure of these books is this kind of divergence from the typical tropes and themes found in the fantasy genre. Martin wants plenty of grit and tarnish on his world, and therefore creates a story that is, in a sense, a ballad of the misfits: bastards, tomboys, murderers, bandits, smugglers, cripples, hags, and usurpers.

For all the greatness in these books, there’s one thing I’ve been loath to embrace–the living dead. By the end this story there are two characters who seem either unable to die, or have returned from the dead. These undead characters are not like the wights of the north. They are grisly incarnations of characters whose gambits failed. The undead characters are by far the weakest aspect of the story, and one, I hope Martin doesn’t invest too much time in going forward.

Despite these misgivings, the next book in this series will undoubtedly prove an exciting installment. A Storm of Swords leaves the reader on another cliffhanger whose plot implications promise ever heightened conflict and drama.

Similar Reads: A Game of Thrones and A Clash of  Kings (Martin); The Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien); Eye of the World (Robert Jordan)

Author: George R.R. Martin

2000, Bantam Spectra

Filed Under: Fantasy

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On March 6, HBO is going to release the first season of  “A Game of Thrones” on disc. As Sean stated, the book was better. I’d like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that there is so much more to be had from this author than a derivative film depiction. The books are a phenomenal series and in A Clash of Kings Martin does a terrific job of picking up where he left off in the original installment.

A Game of Thrones is in many ways an introduction to Martin’s world and a vehicle to set the plots in motion; A Clash of Kings is a continuation of introductions. This is by no means a negative criticism though, despite the two books together representing 1,600 pages of “introduction,” there is a broadening of our understanding of the characters and the world they inhabit. More resolution is afoot in this second book than the first, but by the end of A Clash of Kings, the stage is set for what promises to be some very exciting plot closures.

Right from the get-go we get a greater sense of the broadest conflict. Much like Tolkien’s best sense of magic (not the wizards, elves and dwarves, magical weapons, or even Sauron), the forces of ice and fire are ancient: at once remote and yet always looming and influencing the world.

True to its title, the thrust of this story centers on the conflicting kings that seek to rule and govern the realm. While clearly portraying one of the factions as more evil than the rest, he does a great job of establishing a level of legitimacy to each of the claims, and attaches that legitimacy nicely to the drives and motivations of his characters.

Nearly all of the characters are complicated. Martin may not render each character sympathetic, but he makes them empathetic. Given the number of characters the reader is asked to follow, this makes for great storytelling.

But Martin is not perfect in this regard. A handful of the characters are flatter than the others, particularly amongst the Lannisters (the more evil faction). A pattern I observed about Martin is that he sometimes starts his characters purposefully flat and then fleshes them out slowly over time. One can only hope that characters such as Joffrey, Tywin, and Cersei will be rounded out in the next installment.

Martin’s world is dark, dangerous, and rife with political–as well as physical–dangers. Honor is often at odds with survival and the quest for power. And any sense of future, whether from the point of view of the victor or the loser is often bleak. Beauty and hope are not absent in this story, they are simply fragile and too often fleeting things. Frankly, this is one my favorite aspects of this series.

The writing style fits the nature of the world. The writing is simple and straight-forward and it compliments the gritty and dark setting. The wording is not often embellished and the only aspect that approaches the lyrical is the bardic reference: A Song of Ice and Fire.

While I applaud Martin’s dedication to successfully immerse his readers in the world and characters he has created, there are some drawbacks. In an effort to establish a deep culture and long history, he sometimes lingers a bit too long on names and history. His penchant for this is showcased in the appendices, where he shows family lines and provides character guides. This is tedious and frustrating because you can’t skim ahead. There is a chance a significant character may be introduced in these detail ridden passages.

The same level of excessive detail goes into the description of the characters, in particular the male ones. Martin’s attention to crests, sigils, armament, and clothing of his male characters borders on the bit obsessive. One feels like he’s employing the blazon to introduce them. For me, this approach results in a more muddled conjuration of character.

The narrative style the author employs is part of the sagas success. The chapters are organized by character. Each section is brief and advances each plot and sub-plot forward. Tangents have no place in this form of storytelling and Martin does an admirable job of not including any substantial superfluity. The pacing works well to keep the reader engaged throughout the entire installment, which is very impressive given the number of pages in his books.

Since the story has moved along in increments like this from the onset, the reader gets used to these small steps. It makes the pacing feel masterful.  You never know when he’s going to move the story forward significantly. These changes in pace heighten the drama; and when he chooses to introduce a turning point or a cliffhanger, he defies the reader to try and put the book down.

Much like the first volume, Martin keeps the reader guessing at what is going to happen next and who is going to survive or perish. No one is safe and, without giving anything away, he drives this point home (yet again) in A Clash of Kings. These moments are deeply affecting–the impressions left on the reader unforgettable. Martin readily embraces Faulker’s famous advice: “kill your darlings,” and his stories are better for it.

Similar Reads: A Game of Thrones and A Storm of Swords (Martin); The Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien); Eye of the World (Robert Jordan)

Author: Scott Lynch

2006, Bantam Spectra

Filed under: Fantasy,  Sci-Fi

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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

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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.

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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.

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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)