Author: katenepveu

Posted on

Jemisin, N.K.: (02-03) The Broken Kingdoms, The Kingdom of Gods

I was extremely enthused about N.K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms when I first read it, but only finished the trilogy recently.

I actually read the sequel, The Broken Kingdoms, fairly soon after it was published, but I never wrote it up. This book has a lot of really good things: I love the look at how the changes in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms are affecting the lives of people on the ground (literally), the POV character Oree is great, and there’s some lovely creepy inventiveness in the fantastical elements. But I wasn’t convinced by an emotional development late in the book (only partly, I think, because it happened to involve a plot pattern that I am allergic to), and there’s some things that trouble me about the way the book treats Oree’s blindness (see lightreads and the author) and about a major spoiler (discussed obliquely, but still in spoiler terms, by sanguinity). So a very mixed reaction.

I actually beta-read the third book, The Kingdom of Gods, and then took literally years to read the final version. Coming back to it after quite a while, again, there’s much to like: the narration, as before in this series; the continuing ramifications of events in the first two books; the way it comes to a very satisfying conclusion. But it’s a tough book for me to get a grip on, for two reasons. First, I find Sieh a difficult narrator: I can admire the craft of his narration while finding it emotionally difficult to experience events through his perspective. This is entirely appropriate—trickster, after all—but it still affected how I related to the book. Second, the balance of the book feels off: it covers much more time than the other two, and while I can’t swear that it’s actually juggling more plot elements, that’s the impression I came away with.

You can read the first book by itself, and I still encourage people to. The rest of the series didn’t work as well for me, but that’s a high bar to clear. I don’t regret reading them, and I look forward to reading Jemisin’s other books—the Dreamblood duology (out now) and this summer’s The Fifth Season.

4 Comments

Posted on

Samatar, Sofia: Stranger in Olondria, A

Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria is part of my 2014 Hugo/Campbell voting homework and a difficult book for me to talk about, because I’m fairly sure I haven’t done it justice.

I’d seen a few reviews and purchased it before Samatar was nominated for a Campbell, but all I retained about it going in was that Samatar is also a poet and people spoke highly of the prose. So I was expecting it to be difficult, frankly, very densely written and requiring a lot of unpacking.

Fortunately, that turned out not to be the case. The prose is rich in its descriptions, true, but I had no trouble falling through the page. My lack of knowledge was more of a problem when it came to the plot: I had no idea what it might be, and as I read the first quarter of the book, I increasingly began to wonder whether there was a plot.

Well, there is, so I can say that much. But it’s hard for me to talk coherently about the book otherwise, partly because I read it in small chunks, which did neither me nor it any favors, and partly because I think the book is genuinely somewhat fragmented in structure—its twenty-one chapters are arranged in a full six books. My overall impression is that I’ve registered the plot and the most obvious theme, but that I suspect it’s doing more than I can really appreciate at the moment.

The plot is that the narrator, Jevick of Tyom, comes to Olondria and becomes haunted by the ghost of a young woman he met on the ship there. The haunting puts him in the middle of an existing political and religious conflict, but one that is ultimately secondary to Jevick’s personal experience. The major theme is different experiences and consequences of stories: how language choice, format, and storyteller influence not only individual experience but class structures (and, I suspect, gender structures as well, but my thoughts on that are much more tentative).

Yes, I am failing to do this justice. Let me try to cut to the chase: both Samatar and Max Gladstone are nominated for a Campbell this year. Right now, on the strength of this book and Gladstone’s first two books, I rank Samatar over Gladstone. Why? Well, even putting aside Gladstone’s second book, which I was pretty “meh” about, I think Three Parts Dead is more fun but this book is better: both are creating detailed secondary worlds and putting their characters in thematically-interesting plots, but Olondria‘s prose and control over narration is more assured.

More useful, though spoiler-filled, reviews by Abigail Nussbaum and Nic Clarke at Strange Horizons.

6 Comments

Posted on

Greenwood, Kerry: Cocaine Blues

More backlog clearing: Kerry Greenwood’s Cocaine Blues is the first in the Phryne Fisher mystery series, set in Australia in the 1920s. I got it one day when it was free from Amazon and heard it recommended by various people.

This was very fluffy and not very difficult, as mysteries go. I don’t mind the wish-fulfillment fantasies that are Phryne’s life, but I found the book’s head-hopping very distracting, and I am pretty dubious about the villain being (spoilers, ROT-13) rvgure na rivy nfrkhny be fbzrbar rkgerzryl genhzngvmrq ol frkhny nohfr, naq orvat riraghnyyl birepbzr ol ure bja erihyfvba gbjneq frk. So, not a successful book for me.

There is a TV show that people seem to enjoy, which would at least avoid the head-hopping problem, though I’ve so little time that I can’t imagine I’ll ever get around to it.

2 Comments

Posted on

Jordan, Robert, and Brandon Sanderson: (14) A Memory of Light

It’s Lunacon’s fault that I haven’t written up the last book in the Wheel of Time series, Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson’s A Memory of Light.

Well, no, it’s my own, but I couldn’t resist the exaggeration. I read the book when it came out, then I finished my re-read literally just in time for a panel at Lunacon last year discussing it . . . at which there was only one person in the audience, who hadn’t read it. But, regardless, I & the other panelists pretty thoroughly hashed out our thoughts back then, and it was hard to feel like I had anything else left to say about it after that, even though effectively no-one heard me say it.

At any rate. While I was upgrading the booklog, I started writing up some of my mental queue, which are both great reliefs of intangible-but-real burdens. So, what can I say about this book that makes sense outside of a spoiler cut?

I think it mostly stuck the landing. I have complaints about the distribution of deaths and some of the logistics, but on the whole it did feel like an effective and appropriate conclusion to what came before. However, the very end bothers me logistically and emotionally, not to “Harry Potter epilogue” or “Dark Tower coda” levels, but I don’t like it.

I don’t think I’ll re-read any bits of it the way I have the Egwene bits of The Gathering Storm or the Perrin bits of Towers of Midnight. There are memorable moments and scenes in this book, but nothing like the relatively self-contained and immensely satisfying arcs of those characters. That’s not a criticism—at this point, it makes sense that there wouldn’t be, it’s just a reader reaction. It’s kind of an overwhelming book and doesn’t lend itself to that kind of selective re-reading.

I think that Sanderson did an admirable job managing the completion of such an unwieldy project. Some of the things that I found unsatisfying were always going to be unsatisfying, given the way Jordan designed the series; at least one probably should’ve been concluded far earlier, because it really felt like part of the earlier conception of the series but Jordan didn’t know how to integrate it with what the series had become. And yes, I would have liked some of those deaths distributed differently and some of those characters to have been in different places at different times—even calibrating for fan expectations, I don’t think that would have been unreasonable, especially when I generally wanted more deaths! But I sniffled, and I stayed up way too late, and generally I’m glad that it was actually an ending.

(I’ve taken so long writing this up that in the interim the entire series was nominated for a Hugo in the Best Novel category. (I’m not going and tagging every book in the series as a Hugo nominee, however.) I don’t think that the entire series is a novel in any meaningful sense of the word, and even if it was, the saggy late-middle and the worst of the gender stuff would keep it from getting my top vote. As I write this I’m honestly leaning toward putting it under No Award, just because it’s so very much not a novel, but I’m still pondering.)

A minimal spoiler post follows.

No Comments

Posted on

Gladstone, Max: (02) Two Serpents Rise

The next book in Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence, Two Serpents Rise, is apparently set a couple years before Three Parts Dead, though that’s not evident from what’s on the pages so far. Unfortunately I didn’t like it as much, because it focuses fairly tightly on a guy, Caleb, who spends most of the book doing foolish things because he was instantly attracted to a mysterious and dangerous woman—who calls herself Mal, even—which I found pretty boring. Even the lampshading of his foolishness in the form of his awesome best friend pointing it out doesn’t help. (I love her, but I wish there hadn’t been a point where I thought, “Oh. That’s why she’s a lesbian,” because I liked it so much better when she just was for no particular reason other than that people are.)

So that was kind of hard on my engagement with the story. However, I do like that the books so far have focused, plot-wise, on city infrastructure (the problem here is water supply) and on different ways of dealing with religion, though I feel like the balance of the treatment of the latter was possibly not quite as strong as in the first book. Hard to say, though, when I freely concede that I wasn’t giving it my full attention.

I will definitely read the third one, however, which is out shortly, though probably not until after I finish the rest of my Hugo & Campbell voting homework (since it’s not being published during Gladstone’s eligibility period).

(Also: welcome to the latest iteration of this booklog, now running on WordPress instead of a two-versions-old Movable Type install. I hope that the shiny new digs will make it easier for me to actually post, as well as reducing the amount of spam I have to deal with. Please don’t hesitate to let me know if anything isn’t working or if anything could be improved. Thanks!)

(I will also now be announcing new posts on Twitter, if you’d prefer that to RSS.)

7 Comments

Posted on

Gladstone, Max: (01) Three Parts Dead

Three Parts Dead is Max Gladstone’s first book. It’s a secondary-world fantasy that melds magic and law in a way that does not actually make me twitch as a lawyer, because it takes some of the trappings (courtrooms, big firms, soul-sucking educational experiences) and puts them to use for quite different purposes (document review through the imaginary autopsy of a god’s body, necromancy, stealing someone’s face), while still keeping useful big-picture themes in mind (the importance of persuasive storytelling, the mutability of Justice).

Plus it’s just fun. It has a high density of cool worldbuilding things, which I will refrain from enumerating partly because the fun is in the discovery and partly because this is really a post to see if I’ve successfully upgraded Movable Type two entire whole numbers (update: no! I hate computers!). I should note, however, that the first few chapters are a little rocky in terms of pace and exposition, and things smooth out once most of the characters meet up, so hang in there.

I also should note that the cover is accurate and the book is refreshingly filled with women and lacking in romance. And though the ending may be a smidge rushed, it has a number of good payoffs on the mystery, worldbuilding, and personal fronts. Definitely recommended.

2 Comments

Posted on

Lynch, Scott: (03) The Republic of Thieves

The Republic of Thieves is the third book in Scott Lynch’s Gentlemen Bastard series. I’m glad to be able to say that it does indeed feel like a Gentlemen Bastard book, despite the long wait for it. Unfortunately, because it’s also the third of seven books, it’s hard for me to assess fully; even though the individual episode this book is concerned with is wrapped up, some major things are set up in this book that won’t shake out for a while, it seems.

This suffers from being a middle book in another way: it has to live with the prior decision to keep Sabetha off-screen until now. Since she is the woman who Locke has never gotten over, the anticipation of her arrival was moderately high. But because she was absent in the prior flashback portions, it’s hard to fit her into Locke and Jean’s past; and because a lot of her and Locke’s conflict then and now is about Locke not understanding her, it’s pretty hard work getting a full picture of her character when most of their interactions are from his point of view.

I enjoyed the shenanigans of the main plot just fine (influencing an election), though at one point the characters were forced to be very stupid in order to keep the plot moving, which is always regrettable. But I’m very dubious about the major elements this book introduces to resolve another day; they could be fine, or they could be stunningly awful, and my guess is that we may have to wait a long time to find out which (in terms of number of books, not years). That’s not the kind of narrative suspense that I personally favor, probably because I’m getting older and more cynical.

No Comments

Posted on

Vaughn, Carrie: (01-03) Kitty and the Midnight Hour, Kitty Goes to Washington, Kitty Takes a Holiday

I have a lot of other books in the queue, of course, but I seem to have started reading Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville series and I made a deal with myself that I would write it up no more than three books at a time, to keep from having everything completely blur together.

I knew very little about this when I started; I think I’d picked the first book up very cheap and knew it was popular and urban fantasy of the first-person, supernatural creature + romance variety. It caught my eye when I was scrolling my ereader looking for inspiration, and then I was off.

The first is Kitty and the Midnight Hour, and it’s actually considerably different than I expected. Yes, it’s first-person and it’s supernatural creatures living parallel lives in modern society. But the thing with werewolves is that I expect a lot of focus on the tropes of pack dominance and hierarchy, especially with regard to mating, in a fantasy/id-tastic/eroticized way. But Midnight Hour takes these elements and positions them as, at best, raising genuine questions about how werewolves live in a human society, and at worst, the mechanisms for abuse. In fact, the whole book is about Kitty learning to reclaim agency as a survivor of abuse of various kinds. This made it more emotionally tough going than I expected at times, but was also a welcome surprise.

The next book, Kitty Goes to Washington, deals with fallout from Kitty coming out as a werewolf on her radio show in the last book, as she’s subpoenaed by the Senate. Kitty meets other groups of weres and vampires and sees different ways of organizing and living, which is clearly going to be a major concern of the books. And the upshot is that magic in the form of supernatural creatures comes out in a big way, which is also a thing I enjoy exploring in these kinds of worlds.

The third book, Kitty Takes a Holiday, struck me as somewhat less strong, for two reasons. First, to the extent these books try to do mystery elements, they aren’t particularly successful; in both this book and the first I spotted those responsible for various acts almost immediately. Second, this book shakes up the personal side of Kitty’s life in a way I didn’t find very convincing; it may be that I’m not supposed to be convinced in the long-term, so we’ll see how that plays out. It does feature further conflicts as supernatural society and ordinary law enforcement interact, however, and like the others, was a fast and entertaining read.

There, now I can dive into the next one . . .

No Comments

Posted on

Wells, Martha: Stargate Atlantis: Reliquary; Stargate Atlantis: Entanglement

Finally for tonight, an entry written many moons ago and just unearthed; it appears to be complete, and I have no idea why I haven’t posted it before.

A while ago I watched Stargate Atlantis. In many ways it was not a very good show, but I watched 99% of it [*] because it was very undemanding material to stitch to, that is, I could listen and only need to look up occasionally.

[*] I skipped the season five clip show because, first, clip show, and second, its frame story sounded guaranteed to drive me up a wall.

I got into watching the show to provide context for fanfic that I more-or-less-randomly started reading, which also led me to Martha Wells’ two tie-in novels, Stargate Atlantis: Reliquary and Stargate Atlantis: Entanglement. These were terrific: the kind of exciting SFnal explorations that the show mostly did not manage on its own. Partly this is of course the greater scope a book allows, with no special effects budget or time limit, but also it’s a willingness to be more complicated and thorough that the show didn’t achieve even in multi-episode arcs. If you liked the idea of the show and the characters when they weren’t suffering from plot-induced stupidity, then it’s worth checking these out.

No Comments