A rather slight novel given the rather amazing magic system on display. I love the fact that magicians can manipulate man-made objects but bond to only one category, and thought the pseudo-Victorian era intriguing, but thought there was a lot of fast and loose played with the society’s rules. Ceony’s journey through the heart was pretty awesome (as was the entire scene that led up to and included the folding of the paper heart) but the romance felt a bit forced, tho maybe that was just my personal discomfort with the balance of power at play here. Perhaps I would have been more comfortable with it had it been paced better: as it was, everything happened so quickly that it was hard to suspend disbelief, particularly with Ceony’s magical skills, her photographic memory notwithstanding. An entertaining book, sure enough, but I’ve been told by a friend who’s read the rest of the series that the other books aren’t even as good as this, so I’ll likely pass on reading more.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/03/23/the-paper-magician-by-charlie-n-holmberg/
Mar 12 2016
Mike At Wrykyn by P. G. Wodehouse
Partway through reading this delightful romp of a boarding school tale, I realized that my entire consumption of the genre to date has been nearly exclusively female-centric, starring Enid Blyton’s St Clare’s and Mallory Towers series (of course,) with a side of Elinor Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School and a soupcon of American tales, including the delightful It Girl spinoff of the Gossip Girl series in addition to a 90s series I can’t for the life of me remember the name of or track down on the Internet (if anyone can help, it featured 4 roommates who became penpals with 4 boys from a nearby academy, but then people fell in love with each other’s penpals and jealousy ensued. And someone played tennis, but I suppose that’s a fairly boarding school thing to do.) So it was nice to see the experience from a boy’s (idealized) perspective, and to feel that certain nostalgia at the public school values that shaped my own upbringing, ironically before my own miserable boarding school experience.
Of course, the entire thing is infused with P. G. Wodehouse’s trademark wit. The only reservation I have against recommending this book whole-heartedly is that there is a lot of cricket discussed, and people with little patience for it will find the many pages devoted to the sport rather tough going. I’m personally rather ignorant of the rules of cricket, but I did enjoy the mood evoked, and I think I learned quite a bit. That aside, it was a nice evocation of a less complicated time, written with perhaps a younger target in mind than Sir Wodehouse’s usual audience.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/03/12/mike-at-wrykyn-by-p-g-wodehouse/
Mar 08 2016
The Beautiful Beaureaucrat by Helen Phillips
You’d think a book this slim wouldn’t be so hard to properly review. There were things I really, really liked about it, primary among them being the all too realistic depiction of frustration and desperation at joblessness and alienation in a city that should be providing opportunities but is, instead, serving primarily as an exhausting exercise in degradation and squalor. And I really enjoyed how Helen Phillips described Josephine’s sexual and procreative longings. But.
I suppose I ought to say that I’ve never really cared for the Haruki Murakami strain of surrealism, in which atmosphere this book is well-entrenched. It disconnects me as a reader from the very human, very real struggles of our protagonists, without then replacing it with anything interesting, as a whole-heartedly fantasy or sci-fi or even horror novel might. Call it a sort of Reader’s Uncanny Valley Syndrome: I can manage well with outright differences but not with things that are only an eighth step away from correct. It just seems unnecessary, and way too deus ex, if we’re being brutally frank. World-building is one of my favorite aspects of good genre novels: unfortunately, subtle surrealism is far more interested in world-bending for convenience’ sake, it feels to me.
As to the plot itself, one thing that really bothered me was how very run-of-the-mill I found the central conceit of the bureaucracy to be. I thought it was painfully obvious what Joseph’s secret was because, OMG, this is not a hard puzzle to solve (again, I was irritated as a genre stalwart with a conundrum in a “literary” novel that anyone with half a brain ought to be able to figure out quickly.) And I thought the denouement, while a minor tragedy, less compelling because at no point did you think Josephine would choose differently. She suffered no internal conflict, which surprised me as she was hardly the kind of character who never entertained a negative thought.
Anyway. I think it would have worked better if the conceit was finessed more and the feelings elided less. An interesting debut from a promising writer, but not a great novel.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/03/08/the-beautiful-beaureaucrat-by-helen-phillips/
Mar 08 2016
Nobody’s Home by Tim Powers
Nobody’s Home is subtitled An Anubis Gates Story, which helped to draw me towards reading this story because I had heard good things about The Anubis Gates, although I have not read it.
In an alternate nineteenth-century London, ghosts haunt the living, and some magics work, if not routinely then with a certain amount of reliability. The story follows Jacky Snapp, who apparently also plays a role in The Anubis Gates, and one of the first puzzles of the story is figuring out why Jacky spent the evening before the novella’s first scene “tracking down a beggar who was rumored to have fur growing all over him like an ape” but who had turned out, after Jacky cornered him and aimed a flintlock pistol at him, “to be only a very hairy old fellow with a prodigious beard—not the half-legendary man she had devoted her life to finding and killing.”
The rest of the novella reels out at a rapid pace; no sooner has she determined that the beggar is not her quarry than she rescues a woman from burning in the energies released by magic that hadn’t been as reliable as advertised. The story proceeds as a chase on several levels: the two women chasing the knowledge they need, ghosts chasing them, Jacky chasing her quarry, unsavory if mundane sorts chasing the women in rainy London streets. The final encounters are as chilling as the chases leading up to them as heart-pumping.
Nobody’s Home is one of two novellas I read in an afternoon. Good fun, and a reason to read the longer story that it precedes.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/03/08/nobodys-home-by-tim-powers/
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/03/07/the-king-in-yellow-by-robert-w-chambers/
Mar 04 2016
Rumpole And The Reign Of Terror by John Mortimer
Originally read this back in 2008, but picked it up to re-read before loaning it to my darling bff. Brilliant book: funny, topical, with a good mystery and courtroom/romantic drama to boot. There are several awfully convenient coincidences, but they don’t distract from the over-all worth of the story. I didn’t realize when I picked this book up at the thrift store that it was set in modern times (for some reason, I always thought the Rumpole novels to be more current with the Bertie Wooster milieu,) but it was a very pleasant surprise. If you thought the Patriot Act was absurdly fascistic, wait till you get a load of how the UK reacted to the London Underground bombings. Mortimer deals with this issue with all the good sense and humor that his creation, Rumpole, is known for.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/03/04/rumpole-and-the-reign-of-terror-by-john-mortimer/
Feb 29 2016
CyberStorm by Matthew Mather
At its heart, CyberStorm is a book about how the human condition unravels under intense external pressure. Here, the external pressure is a record-breaking blizzard that strikes Manhattan as the Internet, and the many essential services it controls, fall victim to mysterious cyber attacks (which are actually very cleverly explained in the book’s denouement.) There are quite a few interesting ideas in this book, but I’m pretty sure I’d have liked it better as a speculative essay, mostly because as a human-interest novel, it was incredibly terrible. The characterization was almost uniformly awful, with my biggest problem being the narrator. Purportedly an average American, he’s so incredibly privileged and annoying that it’s hard to take him seriously. He does show the occasional flash of self-awareness, but I could hardly even muster the barest human sympathy at his plight, much less his flaws, which is a huge problem when dealing with an unreliable first person narrator.
And then the fucking cholera. Given how it’s a very easy thing to research, not only by the author but also by the protagonists (as the Internet was available to them when it became a problem!) I was hugely disappointed that it was used as a bogeyman not only on a micro but also a macro level. It makes me question the validity of the rest of the author’s technological suppositions. I powered through CyberStorm because of book club but ugh, can’t recommend this to anyone wanting intelligent disaster fiction.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/29/cyberstorm-by-matthew-mather/
Feb 28 2016
Cauldron by Jack McDevitt
Cauldron is the sixth novel in Jack McDevitt’s series of novels featuring Priscilla Hutchins as a protagonist, and is not a good place to begin reading the series. In fact, it’s chronologically the last novel (to date) in the series, as the seventh book goes back to the very beginning of Hutchins’ career to show how everything got started.
The universe that McDevitt has shown through Hutch’s — to use her nickname from the books — eyes is a grand one: enough faster-than-light travel to make the space opera work, but enough of the limitations of lightspeed, the immensity of the galaxy, and the implacability of deep time to show that even an earth-based civilization capable of sending ships regularly through interstellar distances is a mere speck in space and time. One of the recurring motifs of the series is that intelligent life and civilizations, even those that reach the stars, don’t last long on a galactic scale. Xenoarchaeologists appear in several books, and some of the most affecting scenes involve civilizations that have been and gone by the time that humans show up. Not all of the civilizations that the archaeologists explore died natural deaths, however; over the course of the series, evidence mounts of something (or rather, somethings) moving through our part of the galaxy at a significant fraction of c, and laying waste to any place with sufficiently high technology.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/28/cauldron-by-jack-mcdevitt/
Feb 23 2016
Mistborn: Secret History by Brandon Sanderson
Immediately upon finishing Bands Of Mourning, I went to Amazon and purchased this novella. Now, everyone will warn you that you can’t read this book without having read the entirety of the first Mistborn trilogy, and I am no different. But I will further recommend that you read this soon after reading those books, because if your memory holds primarily to impressions as opposed to details as mine does, a lot of the relevance may be lost for you.
There isn’t much to say about the book itself except that it is not at all accessible if you haven’t read the trilogy. In fact, it’s a rather disjointed work, because it fits around the narrative of the trilogy instead of working at all as a standalone. That said, if you enjoy Brandon Sanderson’s work, and if you enjoy indulging in the occasional ugly cry (dat ending yo,) you will enjoy this secret history.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/23/mistborn-secret-history-by-brandon-sanderson/
Feb 22 2016
Bands Of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson
Just Goddamnit, Brandon Sanderson, why are you so good?!?! HOW are you so good?! I spent far too much time yelling at the book like it was an Arsenal match, it was that engaging. At one point, I pounded my fists on the table with rage. Really terrific installment. The Mistborn series just gets better and better and I have no idea how that could possibly happen!
And let me tell you, I’ve been Team Steris from the start, but she’s really terrific here, and I super love her relationship with Wax. Everything about this book is awesome. Even when I thought I’d figured out the plot twist with Telsin, there was more plot twist. Also, I’m betting the spike in the statue’s eye (still) has some significance. But no more, because I do not want even a breath of spoiler to get close to you, dear reader. Just go get the book and read it already.
One other thing: I was thinking, that if I had to boil my life philosophy down to a single author, it might be Sanderson. Not necessarily in the details of cosmological belief, but in the humanity and underlying tenets of faith and goodness. And his work ethic and humility just blow me away. He is a god among writers.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/22/bands-of-mourning-by-brandon-sanderson/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire