The Dresden Files: Fool Moon by: Jim Butcher

 

After Jim Butcher gave The Dresden Files a strong start, the follow up dropped the ball.  Fool Moon is a sequel which feels like Jim Butcher had no clue what he wanted his series to be but had to write quickly or else he wouldn’t be published.  There is really nothing which substantiates that claim, except how Fool Moon fills its 400 pages with little substance until a climax which wraps nearly everything the book laid as potential series changing in a nice little bow, bar some hints about the past of Harry’s mother and father which are clearly hooks for future stories.  The pulpy atmosphere of Storm Front is still there and is great, however, Fool Moon as a story follows the basic structure of setting up every twist and turn, signposted as the most blatant Chekov’s gun within pages of each other makes the climax (and several other action scenes) incredibly predictable.  The tension is no longer there and Butcher doesn’t show any signs of understanding just why Fool Moon’s climax doesn’t work because of these several scenes.  There is also an attempt to connect every possible thread to the worldbuilding of the book so nothing feels left out and it makes the book feel cluttered with far too many plotlines to really end on a satisfying note.

 

Fool Moon deals with werewolves, drawing on several myths from around the world on how someone can become a werewolf, from being cursed into a loups garou or putting on a belt to be a hexenwolf or to be brought into the fold by a being of magic, though not by passing it on through bites.  While this adds to the mystery early on as to what Harry is dealing with when asked to investigate werewolf like deaths, eventually revealing it to be a combination of several types of werewolves as well as fakers makes the entire thing more convoluted than it needed to be.  Add in an ending that just doesn’t actually conclude makes Fool Moon weaker on the whole.  Tera as a character is also far too look at me, I’m mysterious when being outright would have moved things along much better. That isn’t to say there is anything great about the book.  Once again Harry’s narration is incredibly fun as he is such a stubborn character which gets those around him killed, placing a lot of blame right on our main character.  Kim Delaney, while essentially a woman in refrigerators trope in the book, does have an obviously coming death which does show how bad of a person Dresden can be, as he is a protagonist who may act like the perfect person, but actually leaves a trail of death.  There is also a sweetish romance between Harry and Susan Rodriguez who basically enters his world, though the midpoint has a really awkward sex scene that kind of comes out of nowhere.  The plot with Johnny Marcone is also excellent, building on his presence in Storm Front and tendrils of Dresden being wrapped around his fingers can be seen here.

 

Overall, Fool Moon is very disappointing after Storm Front started the series off so well, however, the potential for a great story is there.  The pulp is fun along with Dresden’s perspective on the world.  This is a series which clearly has places to go as it has lasted eighteen books with two short story collections, and although this is a bump in a road, Butcher has to have something in mind to improve.  As it stands, this one is kind of a dud and honestly completely skippable in the grand scheme of things.  4/10.

The Heroes of Olympus: The Son of Neptune by: Rick Riordan

 

Going back to Percy Jackson as the main character for the second book in The Heroes of Olympus series was to be expected, but was more risky than fans may have realized.  The Last Olympian had essentially ended Percy’s story: he had fulfilled his prophecy, gotten the girl, and finished everything he needed to do.  But The Lost Hero had him kidnapped by Hera as an emissary to the Roman demigod camp implying that that perfect ending wasn’t the final ending.  Rick Riordan, however, avoids making Percy’s story feel unnecessary through a number of things.  Like Jason he has amnesia throughout The Son of Neptune, though he does recover his memory throughout, and The Son of Neptune isn’t about Percy Jackson.  Sure, he is a major viewpoint character and the audience cipher for the segments at Camp Jupiter, the Roman demigod camp, and the title refers to him, but the book isn’t actually about him. Instead, like The Lost Hero was about deeper themes of identity, The Son of Neptune is about coming to terms with death in all its forms.  First, is the death associated with being forgotten, which is where Percy Jackson actually figures into the narrative proper.

 

Percy starts the novel as a homeless team just trying to find his way to Camp Jupiter with a sword in his pocket and no memory except the name Annabeth.  Riordan shows Percy in a truly desperate and animalistic state, just trying to survive a world where the monsters don’t die and every normal person spits on the less fortunate.  It only lasts a few very early chapters, but there is a lot of groundwork laid for just how Percy has changed by the loss of his memories.  He has to confront past mistakes throughout this novel with events of The Sea of Monsters catching up to him in unexpected ways.  Riordan also gives Percy a power downgrade upon entering Camp Jupiter by stripping him of the invulnerability which, while done slightly clunkily, shows a knowledge of how to keep Percy’s story going in future installments of The Heroes of Olympus without making it feel artificially extended.  Camp Jupiter itself is markedly different from Camp Half-Blood, as Roman society was markedly different from Greek.  It is run by the campers themselves as they are all guided to its location by the wolf Lupa, with a Senate made up of full centurions.  Percy is placed in the Fifth Cohort on probatio, having to wait a year before ranking up to a centurion (until godly intervention sends him on a quest).  It’s a harsh, but not uncaring, operation, with the one Praetor Reyna knowing Percy from her own past on Circe’s island.  Reyna is an interesting character, a leader in battles, but not the best when it comes to political machinations, trying to keep Jason Grace’s Praetorship open and free of Octavian, a sniveling little wretch who’s far too prideful for his own good.  The political machinations and secrets become the main thrust for the early part of the novel, including a surprise appearance from Nico di Angelo who is an honored guest.  By the end of the novel Nico’s goals aren’t ever quite explained, but he does go missing implying he was in over his head.

 

The actual conflict of The Son of Neptune involves Thanatos, the god of death, being chained in Alaska and the Doors of Death being forced opened.  Nothing that dies is staying dead and the Roman god of war Mars demands a quest for his un-Marslike son Frank Zheng with Percy and daughter of Pluto Hazel Levesque to kill the giant Alcyoneus and returning glory to the Legion and the Fifth Cohort.  There isn’t some grand prophecy which Riordan can twist into character motivation, just a feeling of dread of the consequences of death no longer occurring while Frank and Hazel both have links to death itself.  Frank Zheng’s life is tied to a piece of firewood, which if burned will kill him completely and his journey is one of growing to accept his parentage and being willing to die to save the world.  At the climax of the novel, Frank comes to burn the stick near to the end right as he comes into his own.  As a descendent of Poseidon he was given the gift of shapeshifting in his family line, something which is obvious to the reader from the first mention of who his family is.  Frank as a character is a fascinating parallel to the rest of the Roman legion and the idea of someone in war.  While he shows a proficiency for tactics in battle, Frank wants peace throughout and is more of a softy who loves his family, has a crush on Hazel, and really doesn’t want to get caught up in war.  There’s also this real insecurity in his own ability and self-worth which he must work to overcome throughout the book, once finding this he is given the strength to put his life on the line, only surviving due to a fluke.

 

Hazel Levesque should be dead.  She is the one responsible for giving Alcyoneus and Gaea the ability to even rise in the first place and it killed her, but once the Doors of Death opened she escaped the Underworld with Nico.  Hazel comes from the 1940s and is black, which Riordan mostly portrays well: there’s that sense of displacement with Hazel and genuine guilt that she has caused the problem, but the reaction to how racism has changed since the 1940s isn’t really touched on which I feel is probably for the best as this is aimed at younger readers.  Hazel already has to come to accept that freeing Thanatos may mean that she will be sent back.  She’s also someone who’s life was taken away at an early age: her mother was greedy and wished for wealth so Hazel was cursed with the ability to make precious gemstones and metals rise from the depths of the Earth and it was this power that attracted Gaea.  Her mother manipulated her into raising Gaea, which would give her mother eternal punishment, but it was Hazel’s sacrifice in the Underworld which gave them both a settlement in Asphodel.  Hazel, while scared, is incredibly brave to go on the quest and actually succeed.  Yes, a blind eye is turned as she’s part of the Prophecy of Seven, but if that wasn’t the case, she would be dead.  She is also a horse girl who has a crush on Frank.  Frank and Hazel’s romance throughout The Son of Neptune is a perfect example of two people who love each other, but are far too scared to actually admit it.  Wrapping that around Thanatos, who is portrayed as closely linked to love, adds an interesting depth to the book.

 

Overall, The Son of Neptune is a far more mature book than it has any right to be.  It sets up Camp Jupiter and the rest of the series as it ends with the cliffhanger of Camp Half-Blood coming to find them due to a harpy who knows prophecies being sent to Tyson.  There is a sense of uneasiness as the conclusion isn’t quite as happily ever after as other books Riordan has written, though there are a few stumbling blocks along the way with some of the middle feeling a bit too long and maybe one two many moving pieces.  The themes of death and identity seem to be the prevailing themes for The Heroes of Olympus going forward and it seems that this could outlast even the first series.  9/10.

Last of the Gaderene by: Mark Gatiss

In his introduction to the 2013 edition of Last of the Gaderene author Mark Gatiss spends some time on the Target novels and what they meant to him.  He spent several days as a child when sick reading through his Jon Pertwee novelizations including Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks.  It is these periods of his life which largely inspired the writing of Last of the Gaderene and as such much of its style and plot harkens back to those small novelizations, just in the format of a full-length Doctor Who novel.  And as stated above, it was one of the Past Doctor Adventures given a reprint in 2013 to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of Doctor Who.  Of these books, I have already written reviews for Dreams of Empire and Players, but it is Last of the Gaderene which best represents the style of the Doctor’s era it was used to represent.  Gatiss’ prose is simple: actions are performed succinctly moving the plot along quickly in the book’s 300 page count and sentences are short, flowing rapidly through the chapters.  There are several nods to the Target novelization range such as one chapter being aptly titled ‘Escape to Danger’ and several textual callbacks are included as well, namechecking Metabelis Three, the fact that the Doctor has recently had his TARDIS restored, and that the Doctor is now free to travel as a Time Lord.  While other Doctor Who novels try to push the envelope in storytelling, Last of the Gaderene is content to tell a traditional Third Doctor and UNIT story, trapping itself firmly in the era and striving to be a novelization of an unseen adventure.  This is not a bad thing, by any means, but it is something that a potential reader should be aware of if they were to pick this book up.

 

The plot invokes several previous UNIT stories, most obviously The Daemons and The Green Death, by sending the Doctor, Jo, and UNIT to the village of Culverton where an old friend of the Brigadier’s has called for help and Legion International has taken up the space of an RAF aerodrome in the city.  People are disappearing and reappearing as if they never left, and of course everything is really a front for an alien invasion orchestrated by the Master.  The Gaderene are a parasitic species which take over the minds of their hosts as embryos, leaving them as happy husks of themselves which is where Mark Gatiss uses his style to inject some pulpy horror into the novel.  Their plan is a simple “invade the Earth so they can survive” affair, and the Doctor, as he would, wishes to help them, but as they are only interested in taking over from humanity, there is nothing else he can do.  The Master’s involvement, post-Frontier in Space, is largely confined to the final third of the novel which helps to evoke the atmosphere of a Season 10 story (apparently Gatiss took some inspiration from the unmade The Final Game for this book) where an ill advised alliance does not end well for the Master.  Where the Master’s character is lacking here, however, is that the interactions with the Doctor, which is what made the Delgado incarnation especially brilliant, are lacking with really only one final confrontation at the end.  That confrontation is fine and good, the Doctor and the Master being characterized well, and the final line of the book summarizing their relationship really well as just old friends from school, but it does leave the reader really wanting more from Gatiss and the book itself.

 

The actual villain of the book when the Master isn’t there (so the first two-thirds) is the aptly named Bliss, whom Gatiss characterizes as a woman stuck in this haze.  Bliss is essentially a human agent who has been taken over first by the Gaderene who can’t really keep her story straight and is teetering on the edge of a fit of laughter.  It’s one of two places where the Gaderene parasites are really characterized well and the horror implicit in the parasite is actually there.  The other place is the moments where a woman’s husband is taken over and she goes nearly catatonic as her world has been raptured.  The Doctor’s first meeting with Bliss is excellent as UNIT watches on and Bliss is caught in a lie about geography which reveals much more about what Legion International is doing.  The Gaderene themselves pull from Stoker’s The Lair of the White Worm for their form and the only living adult lives in the marsh, attacking people and Jo Grant, who is just as spunky and proactive as ever in this novel.  It becomes the standard Doctor Who monster in these scenes, think like the Primords from Inferno.

 

While Jo Grant is excellent here, reflecting on how her relationship with the Doctor has changed now that The Three Doctors has happened and some foreshadowing of her departure in The Green Death is included, the rest of the UNIT family doesn’t fair as well.  Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart is fine, but is relegated to the role of standard UNIT commander and without the performance from Nicholas Courtney, he feels more like a character for the Doctor and Jo to simply explain things to.  Sergeant Benton and Mike Yates are both served even less well, being pushed to the background where they really don’t get a lot of characterization.  This is at least in keeping with Season 10 and the style of story that Letts and Dicks were telling at that point, though is disappointing when compared to the other books to feature UNIT in much more depth.  The supporting cast are also stock characters from stories like The Daemons and The Green Death with a priest, the evil corporate overlord, the dottering old woman who helps everyone out, and several children.  Because of this they are all more memorable than they have any real right to be.

 

Overall, Last of the Gaderene reads like a love letter to Mark Gatiss’ childhood reading Target novels, and as that is what the book was meant to do it is a success.  The book falls slightly by not doing much outside of providing a standard Season 10 Doctor Who story, making it fall below some other Third Doctor novels which are just leaps and bounds better.  It still makes an enjoyable read and is worth a look, but you shouldn’t go in expecting something absolutely groundbreaking and brilliant.  8/10.

Hogfather by: Terry Pratchett

 

I’m sitting here, writing this review, six days before Christmas on a Saturday morning where there was nothing better for me to do than to read a book.  Because it is nearly Christmas and it had been far too long and I had read (though not reviewed) Feet of Clay, Hogfather came across my path.  Hogfather is one of those books that has kept itself in my mind since I first read it back in 2015 after the death of Terry Pratchett.  It’s a book that sticks in your mind as do all of the Discworld books because of how Pratchett implements his ideas wrapped in a premise that Kyle Martin (aka KrimsonRogue of The Book Was Better) described as “Death saves Christmas”.  While that descriptor is accurate, it does Hogfather a slight disservice as with all of Pratchett’s work there is much more to the book than meets the eye.  The plot involves the Auditors of Reality, extradimensional beings obsessed with keeping order and undoing entropy, hiring a childlike assassin called Teatime to dispose of the Hogfather (basically Santa Claus).  Doing this would end the world as the Hogfather evolved out of a sacrificial pig which became a god that helped guide humanity out of winter, something that Death takes considerable issue with as he is rather fond of humanity.  Finding the Hogfather dead, Death takes his clothes and takes over his job for the evening while not sending his granddaughter Susan to deal with Teatime.  This plot sounds absolutely absurd like all of the Discworld books, but Hogfather is one of those books which drives home just what it means to be human and what Christmas is all about.

 

The book’s most powerful passages reflect on why people celebrate holidays like this, not because of some superficial or religious belief, but because it makes us people.  The capstone of the book involves lines about how people believe in the little lies, the fantasies like the Hogfather, so they can believe the big ones later on.  It is clearly stated that there is no one right way to celebrate a holiday, and Pratchett scoffs at the cynicism of criticizing Christmas as a pure example of commercialism gone mad.  There are scenes which critique commercialism: the entire sequence in the toyshop which takes up quite a bit of the middle of the book is one giant critique on commercialism and capitalism weaponizing the idea of Santa as an excuse for parents to buy presents, with Death actually giving things away and ending with the City Watch not actually doing anything because you can’t arrest someone for giving away their own property.  Death in the role of the Hogfather, while clearly having a skeletal visage to children, as they don’t have any sense of what death means, still succeeds in convincing them.  They don’t question him as the Hogfather.  Death is the loose cannon in Teatime’s plans, the one who never actually breaks the rules of the universe, only giving his own granddaughter hints at what she should do to help save the Hogfather.

 

While this book is one which is advertised as being about Death, Hogfather really is a story about Susan Sto Helit, introduced in Soul Music and spending her time at the beginning of the book as a governess trying to be normal.  She is the one who actually has to go with Quoth the Raven and the Death of Rats to find a way to defeat Teatime and save the Hogfather.  Susan is a character who takes this no nonsense attitude on just about everything.  She tells the children she’s looking after not to put on a lisp because it makes you seem cuter and more likely, not to be afraid of the monsters because they can be easily dispatched with a kitchen poker, and that everything will eventually be worked out if the right people work on it and things can be put to an end.  This isn’t exactly a story where she learns something about the spirit of Hogswatch, but learns more about other people and herself.  The final scenes with her and Death are better left untouched as they are where the book really hits the reader with one punch.  This is a book about building the relationship between Death and Susan after Soul Music established it as something rather odd.  Overall, Hogfather is a book which knows exactly what it wants to be and is the perfect read for this month, especially as an awful year draws to a close.  10/10.

The Heroes of Olympus: The Lost Hero by: Rick Riordan

 

Let’s be honest, setting up for a sequel series at the end of Percy Jackson and the Olympians was a bit of a risky move.  The Last Olympian closed the threads and wrapped everything up nicely, but with a new Great Prophecy being given and The Kane Chronicles being set in the same universe, readers were quick to respond to the announcement of a new series.  The Heroes of Olympus starts only a few months after The Last Olympian and opens in a way that can only be described as frustrating for fans.  And by frustrating I do not mean bad, the opening of this book is brilliant and plays well into the idea that there is already a fanbase reading so the reader can move right into the story quickly, but frustrating for those expecting to see a new story with Percy Jackson.  Percy Jackson does not appear in The Lost Hero, though he is referred to by name several times, other known characters appear, and there is a presence felt that he is important to the plot.  Rick Riordan makes this bold move and pulls it off brilliantly.  The first three chapters saddle the reader with Jason, a sixteen year old with amnesia put in the position of an unreliable narrator.  He wakes up on a bus from a school for troubled kids with a girlfriend and best friend and is immediately attacked at the Grand Canyon by storm spirits.  He’s obviously a half-blood with his two friends, also demigods.  The mystery about Jason and his identity becomes a driving force through this book, underlying the main quest to free a captured Hera and stop ancient giants from waking.

 

While The Lost Hero is a book which follows the standard formula for the Percy Jackson and the Olympians books, there is something markedly different about the way Riordan presents the story.  Outside of moving right along at the start, making it to Camp Half-Blood by the third chapter, there is an attempt to set this book apart as the first in an epic.  Like The Kane Chronicles before it, The Lost Hero switches between narrators between chapters, allowing each of the three heroes to have their time in the spotlight and being given equal characterization.  It feels like a vast improvement over the issues of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, though as this ties into the second Great Prophecy (called the Prophecy of Seven) it makes sense to have more characters getting the points of view.  Like The Lightning Thief there is a pattern to the characters of the hero, the guide best friend, and the romantic interest (though in The Lightning Thief Annabeth would really only develop into this in later books), but getting to see the quest through each of the characters’ eyes with the main theme of the novel being that of discovering and being comfortable with one’s own identity.  Riordan also makes each of the protagonists distinct from Percy, Grover, and Annabeth which becomes the drive of the book: because Jason has amnesia and apparently has this relationship with these two others, much of the book for him is trying to discover what of the relationship is real and what his past was.  As he is the character with perhaps the most focus, and the character who’s arc requires at least a few spoilers in this review, I will be saving analysis of his character for last.

 

Piper McLean and Leo Valdez are our other two point of view characters and protagonists, both demigods with troubled pasts.  Of course, they do not know they are demigods at the beginning of the novel and have had their own lives interfered with by the gods to keep them hidden.  While both of their stories are interesting, Piper’s is the one with the most stake in the plot.  Piper is the daughter of a movie star and Aphrodite, something much of her arc revolves around coming to terms with that and various other aspects of her identity.  Piper already felt split between several worlds: her father is Cherokee and a world famous movie star and adding a literal divine parent into the mix whose entire domain is love and beauty only makes that identity feel completely wrong.  Her father has also disappeared, being captured by the giant’s forces who have captured Hera and Piper is expected to betray her friends.  Add to that the fact that her love for Jason is most likely an implanted memory that has no basis in reality and the fact that her demigod siblings embody the ideal of love as a weapon, Piper is a character whose entire story revolves around accepting her love life and own abilities to manipulate others with her voice.  It’s a journey of self-acceptance and explores themes of what love means, putting her against human and mythological forces.  For instance, Medea is a character who manipulates Jason and Leo with her charm into attraction (well it’s really lust but this is a young adult novel so that word doesn’t come up) and Piper has the power to do so as well, and it revolts her.  It’s a dark side to her own being and something she eventually stops suppressing and accepts at the end.  Her interactions with her mother both stated and implied are also great as it gives Aphrodite a chance to be shown as having more depth, as love has more depth, than in her initial appearance in The Titan’s Curse.

 

Leo Valdez also deals with identity not through suppressing it but running away from it.  Riordan writes him as the third wheel in the trio as a way to continuously place Leo as the outsider.  He doesn’t really fit in and is an orphan who places himself as responsible for his own mother’s death, and has a babysitter who tormented him as a child revealed to be Hera.  Placing him as a son of Hephaestus also puts him as an outcast: Hephaestus was thrown off Olympus by Hera as a baby because he was deformed.  He feels like an outcast from his own siblings and is hurt by the thought that his best friend may be a lie.  Leo’s siblings are suffering under a curse since the events of The Last Olympian where there crafting skills bear disaster.  Leo is also one of two demigods directly mentioned in the Prophecy of Seven, as the fire that the world must fall to (he can manipulate and create fire).  He runs away from his problems and buries himself in humor until the very end of the book: he is the one who repairs the dragon on the cover, he’s the one who figures out why Jason has amnesia, and he’s the one who actually breaks the curse on his cabinmates.  Leo’s identity comes from his own mind.  He pushes it away and it isn’t until he confronted it that he is able to reveal that he can in fact create fire and with Piper is responsible for saving the day.  The humor he uses is all a mask which becomes apparent from his first viewpoint chapter, though Riordan implies that this aspect of his arc is far from over.

 

Jason Grace is the closest thing we have to a main character and he has had his identity stolen, with only three clues to his past (and here’s where spoilers come in): a tattoo with an eagle, the letters SPQR, and 12 tally marks on his arm; a tendency to use the Roman names for the gods; and a memory of his older sister Thalia Grace.  Jason is a character written as someone who has already done great things and stands for something, but that something has been taken right away from him.  While Percy Jackson is The Lost Hero, Jason also fits that bill as he has lost everything that he knows about himself, truly being lost in an unfamiliar world.  His story is one of inner turmoil.  When he meets Thalia in the middle of the novel and gets to at least learn his childhood life there is an emotional catharsis as Jason has an internal breakdown.  Jason expects Thalia to love him like a brother with open arms, but she comes across as cold which is an understandable reaction after she was told that he was dead.  Thalia’s reactions are very human and Jason being allowed to break down, even though subtle, make him feel immediately more complex than Percy did in The Lightning Thief.  Jason also has the added responsibility of being Hera’s champion and being a natural leader who puts everyone else’s safety above his own.  The big reveal is that there is another camp for demigods, those who come from the Roman aspects of the gods, kept separate from Camp Half-Blood as they clash, but Hera/Juno must bring them together to defeat Gaia, the mother of the gods and goddess of the Earth who is essentially a Lovecraftian threat waking.  His memory may be coming back at the end of The Lost Hero, but there is enough to know that both the Greek and Roman demigods must come together to defeat a common threat.

 

While the actual quest to find Hera has plenty of twists and turns with the extended page count used to make each encounter filled with action and character development, the few returning characters from Percy Jackson and the Olympians become a treat.  Riordan relegates it to a desperate Annabeth Chase and a serene Rachel Elizabeth Dare.  Annabeth has been running herself ragged in the search for Percy, but still has time to try and make Jason, Piper, and Leo feel at home while Rachel has found herself slipping right into her role as Oracle of Delphi.  For fans they are a great treat, but are essentially cameos with Thalia’s involvement being much larger.  The only other major character which hasn’t been discussed is Gleeson Hedge a satyr who provides the most overt comic relief.  The supporting characters and monsters are all excellent with the glimpse into the Roman world of demigods leaving enough of a hook for the sequels with the added promise of the dead coming back to life and a great evil rising.  It makes The Lost Hero the perfect start to what might be Riordan’s first real epic.  10/10.

Parallel 59 by: Natalie Dallaire and Stephen Cole

 

Parallel 59 is a book.  There are words on each page which eventually come together in a sequence of events that tell a story.  Yet, reading Parallel 59 there is this distinct feeling that the story isn’t going anywhere or doing anything.  Natalie Dallaire and Stephen Cole pitched a Doctor Who novel that is essentially the standard rebellion against a fascist government that the show is known for, and there are great attempts to inject something new into the formula here that all fall flat.  The plot of Parallel 59 spans 282 pages and for great stretches very little actually happens.  Now this does not always mean that a story where little plot happens is bad: under the right author these types of stories can be brilliant and leave the reader with a greater understanding of the world and how everything works.  Dallaire and Cole do attempt to hone in on characterization, which in the case of Fitz and Compassion does work, but the Doctor here is bland and we spend a lot of time away from Fitz and Compassion in an attempt to worldbuild, but that worlbuilding doesn’t do much of anything.  The idea of the several “Parallels” on this planet which is supposed to be a utopia could be interesting, playing on themes of isolation from one another and competition, but these themes aren’t really played out in any way that is interesting.  It’s implied to all be some sort of experiment, which would thematically link to Compassion’s arc, if that was ever the intention.  The rebellion in the novel is your standard revolution as seen through Compassion’s eyes, but you never really get the sense that these rebels are supposed to be good.  It feels like The Space Museum, but not actually played as a subtle comedy.

 

The Doctor is a nonentity throughout the novel, though not without some very minor highlights.  His reaction to being separated from Fitz, and then almost immediately thereafter being separated from Compassion, is to shrug it off.  He is perfectly fine being locked up, but does ask for some of the comforts and humanities to make the wait bearable.  This is a semi-interesting reflection on Seeing I, but it doesn’t really amount to much.  He doesn’t worry about his companions being away from him as there’s the confidence there that everyone is going to be fine.  This doesn’t make the reader feel any stakes in the novel and feels a bit like there was no idea of what to do with the Doctor in this novel.  Fitz’s plotline of the book is really where all of the action is.  It’s not one where an actual story happens, as this is still a book where very little happens, but Dallaire and Cole spend pages upon pages exploring how Fitz has been coping.  Fitz has found a place where he can belong (or at least a place where he feels he can belong), yet is still making several decisions indicative of self-destructive behavior.  Fitz has not one, not two, but three relationships throughout Parallel 59, all at the same time.  This is one of those things where the reader gets a real sense that Fitz doesn’t understand just what he wants in life.  There’s this great idea where he thinks that it’s time to leave the Doctor, but really is just unsure.  Meanwhile Compassion is spending a lot of her time leading a revolution and honestly this is the book where she shines.  She’s got snark and takes no time for incompetent revolutionaries, although not really trusting what’s happening to her.  She is becoming something not quite human, even less so and seems to be addicted to her earpiece once again.

 

Overall, Parallel 59 is one of those books where there are things to latch onto, but really it doesn’t do much in terms of writing or giving the reader an enjoyable experience.  It's an example of a painfully average story just leaving you with a hollow feeling in the end.  4/10.

Malazan: House of Chains by: Steven Erikson

 

Deadhouse Gates may have been a difficult novel for me to read due to illness, but it was a book which showed a clear direction for Malazan Book of the Fallen.  The series would not be following characters, but following a world, and House of Chains, the fourth book in the sequence, follows up that second book’s plot concurrently with Memories of Ice.  These are essentially two stories being told in parallel, and as such understanding Memories of Ice helps a great deal in understanding House of Chains.  The book is the longest entry in the series yet, clocking in at 1,017 pages, and begins in a rather interesting way.  Like the previous novels, there are several parties all having their connections, too many to fully detail in a review, but what House of Chains feels like more than anything is setting up of several chess pieces on a board where there is only one player, the evil player, the Crippled God.  The Crippled God doesn’t appear here, but his presence is felt, especially by the climax.  Steven Erikson devotes the first part of the narrative, over 200 pages, to chronicling a single character.  Apparently, this choice was made on a bet that he couldn’t follow a single character.  This may do this section an injustice, as going past that first section into the standard jumping between characters and plotlines doesn’t actually cause any sort of non-linear sequences.  The first part of the book leads right up to the point where the second part begins, and so on and so forth.  Erikson also doesn’t fall into the trap of making this part of the novel feel separate like a novella: the character it follows does have a large part to play in House of Chains proper and the events do have bearing on the plot of the rest of the novel.

 

Karsa Orlong is the character whom we follow throughout the first part of the novel.  Orlong is a warrior from Teblor and his story is one of a child attempting to grow up.  He is not a literal child, however, he is inexperienced and had an upbringing in a tribe of warriors.  He sets out with a crew to rape and pillage the area.  Now these topics are difficult to discuss and include in any book, and I have already discussed several stories where they were included, but not well, often mishandling them.  Steven Erikson doesn’t really do this, making the horrors Karsa Orlong performs throughout this section and the rest of the novel hold the weight of such actions.  This is not a character that is meant to be liked: this is a character who was cast out from his own family and does not hesitate to murder those he comes across.  There is an entire chapter devoted to these horrendous acts so the reader really can sink in just who this person is and what he means.  The rest of his appearances are rarely from his perspective, but the point of this first 200 or so pages is to watch Karsa Orlong cement himself as among the worst people in the Malazan world, before showing him fall.  Giving this character such a big fall, like Erikson does here, pulls a switch for the reader.  The reader can see that Karsa Orlong has a chance at redemption, which he doesn’t take, but (and this is a big but) he is a character who will continue to grow and make blunders.  It makes him a fascinating character to follow and honestly the standout of a very long novel where an uneven pace makes certain points difficult.  Coming right off Memories of Ice you would expect Erikson to keep that amazing pace going, however, each part of House of Chains feels fairly uneven, almost as if Erikson didn’t quite know how much he wanted to reveal here before changing his mind.  This is one of the factors which made reading this book take such a long undertaking.

 

The other “new” element brought to light in House of Chains really isn’t a new element.  Tavore Paran, Adjunct to the Empress, has appeared in each of the previous entries, however, it is here where the audience can really see what makes her tick.  She is power hungry and trying to crush several rebellions.  She also genuinely thinks what she is doing is right, but doesn’t know that the Sha’ik Reborn is Felisin, her own sister.  Between Tavore and Felisin there is this tension mounting throughout the novel, playing on a theme for each of the Paran siblings.  The Paran siblings have stories all about building towards power: Tavore is the one actively seeking it and falling to evil acts in that quest, Ganeos has it thrust upon him and attempts to avoid it, while Felisin is ambivalent and accepts what becomes of her role after carving her own identity.  It’s a theme of siblings and having the two sisters appear here, Erikson can build to a climax that ends a story.  Felisin, as the Sha’ik Reborn comes completely into her own as a person and has grown to be one of my favorite characters, if only for her appearance here.  The end of her story is incredibly satisfying and will leave the reader with a tear in their eye, yet her legacy will live on and the influence will be felt for books to come.

 

The path to ascendency is another of Erikson’s overarching themes and plots, and in House of Chains Cotillion and Shadowthrone each have a part to play in this novel.  Shadowthrone again is often in the background of scenes as a contender for the other player in the above chess metaphor, and it is Cotillion who gets the most involvement.  Cotillion has evolved almost into a trickster figure, popping in here and there to put in advice and nudge things along, apparently because he feels like helping.  As Apsalar and Crokus (who dons the name Cutter) walk their path and make their decisions throughout this novel, Cotillion is almost always there to get a reflection on the characters’ thoughts and actions.  That relationship is something that is spread apart and eventually falls apart at the climax, as both characters make several choices.  It’s almost a toxic romance, minus any romance or abuse, as they are clearly close but have different aims that draw them apart.  There are several revelations in their plot about Anomander Rake and the Tiste Andii in some of the novel’s more surreal sections, as there is almost a dive into the warrens and the magic system of Malazan.  Their story ends with Apsalar going down a darker path, against what should have been something of her own morals.  This makes an interesting parallel for Fiddler, who finds himself in the Malazan army as ‘Strings’, a pseudonym which is lampshaded several times throughout the book in excellent ways.  Strings is in survival mode, and that means for quite a bit of the book going against his own principles and working with an enemy, but still working for himself.  The final chapter in particular, for every major character, is something that Erikson pulls off beautifully.  It’s perhaps the best bits of Malazan Book of the Fallen thus far.

 

Overall, House of Chains is most definitely a step down from Memories of Ice.  There are higher highs, but there are lower lows.  This is a book that is stuffed full with character and themes and honestly Erikson has lofty goals.  The book is dragged by several scenes and an uneven pacing which makes the middle of the book incredibly difficult to bear.  It is a book that feels almost like more setup in places for the next book (or apparently the book after the next as the next one starts on a third plotline).  The characters are there and there are definitely higher highs, but it’s only about as good as Deadhouse Gates.  8/10.

The Kane Chronicles: The Serpent's Shadow by: Rick Riordan

The Kane Chronicles ends with The Serpent’s Shadow which promises the end of the world and reigning chaos as Apophis has risen and is ready to destroy the world with a broken faction of magicians, and it’s up to Carter, Sadie, and a small team of friends to stop them.  Rick Riordan ends the trilogy in honestly one of the weirdest climaxes for a book, with a real sense that Riordan wanted to write an all out magic battle, but had implemented a magic system that really doesn’t lend itself well to a structured fight.  Instead, there is a final spell scroll which works as a McGuffin for the plot as the book becomes a fetch quest with a dead evil magician called Setne and plenty of character drama involving romances and the stress of trying to save the end of the world.  The magic system working on simple commands mean that magic battles end up being simplified, asking the question why someone doesn’t just use a hieroglyph for death, other than the fact that this is a young adult novel.  Riordan is unable to fully flesh out this magic system’s limits and really what it can do in combat, as in the previous two books it excelled at being used mainly for utility and the energy costs of the magic (especially in The Red Pyramid) could be felt by the reader.  Here it feels like Carter and Sadie have, not quite a mastery, but enough understanding of magic that the reader doesn’t ever get to see the other aspects of the system.  It is one major aspect in the book which makes the climax feel underwhelming, the spell scroll is found and Carter and Sadie just have to team up and read it out, defeating Apophis once and for all.

 

Apophis as a villain is also one of those major issues in the book.  The serpent really is a shadow throughout the book, only getting one or two monologues that are not nearly as effective as the chilling characterization in the short scenes in The Throne of Fire.  He is supposed to be an embodiment of chaos, but you really don’t see anything of chaos coming for the Kane’s from Apophis, the ghost Setne who is basically chaotic neutral causes more chaos and trouble.  It doesn’t help that Apophis doesn’t have a lieutenant that had been built up, instead his forces are lead by Sarah Jacobi who was a minor villain in The Throne of Fire, but she doesn’t really get characterization.  Her motivations are contradictory, believing the gods the cause of chaos and not the giant snake that fully admits for wanting chaos.  Riordan isn’t trying to make her seem naïve, she’s supposed to be this big villain, but there isn’t anything there for her to make an impression with the rest of the characters.  She’s also kind of disposed of rather quickly at one little point in the middle of the climax without any real ceremony.  The lackluster villains feel like Riordan had a deadline to meet, so he had to quickly get a villain in the book without any consideration.  Compare this to Percy Jackson and the Olympians where Kronos and Luke both served as an immortal and human villains, even when Kronos isn’t included as a physical presence until the final book.  There has been build up here, but that build up has lead to absolutely nothing in terms of catharsis, at least in this aspect.  It makes The Serpent’s Shadow a really difficult book to get into because the threat doesn’t actually seem real in this one.

 

Where Riordan at least succeeds is in wrapping up the personal stories of Carter and Sadie Kane, and their conflicts with the gods.  Both get their romantic shots which at least feel right for the endings, though Sadie’s is kind of odd as she doesn’t have to choose in the love triangle ending up in a sort of polycule thing that isn’t really a polycule, it’s weird.  As always, having their narration is fun and snappy with the sibling bickering being one of the few highlights of their relationship.  There’s also a real sense of conclusion with the estranged family aspects of the plot, especially after The Red Pyramid and The Throne of Fire made things incredibly complicated with their parental situation.  It feels like Riordan was attempting to use the Egyptian gods as analogues for their own problems and insecurities which actually works really well.  There’s also the general writing style that Riordan employs in  all of his books that make even the more unbearable portions of the plot at least readable.  There are far worse books out there, however of everything Riordan has put out that I have read, The Serpent’s Shadow is a weak entry and leaves The Kane Chronicles with a hasty and almost messy wrap up.  4/10.

Death in America: A Reflection on Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by: Caitlin Doughty

 The following essay is different from the normal content on the blog.  Instead of a review, the following is more an analysis of the major theme Doughty employs in her 2014 memoir, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory.  It is intended as an open ended discussion on the topic of death and how people react to it.

“Whether you loved or hated the book, you’ve faced your own mortality–and for that I commend you” (Doughty 256).  This is how author Caitlin Doughty approaches the supplemental material to her memoirs on her time working in a crematory, a lifechanging experience which refined her own already macabre outlook on life.  The book chronicles Doughty’s personal journey, starting with the inability to describe a corpse as a person or an object and ending with a reflection on how poorly society handles death.  Doughty intends to make readers face the fact that they are going to die: their life is going to end.  This is all wrapped in a humorous style, setting the tone from the start by opening the book with “A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves.  It is the only event in her life more awkward than her first kiss or the loss of her virginity. The hands of time will never move quite so slowly as when you are standing over the dead body of an elderly man with a pink plastic razor in your hand” (1).

            Doughty illuminates to an unsuspecting reader what cremation entails in the United States, and the general sterilization and commercialization of death.  Doughty writes with a sense of going behind the curtain of how death is essentially saying how “our relationship with death was fundamentally flawed…I felt naïve for having ever imagined putting the “fun” back in funerals. Holding “celebration of life” ceremonies with no dead bodies present or even realistic topic of death…seemed akin to putting not just any Band-Aid over a gunshot wound, but a Hello Kitty one” (64).  Society doesn’t talk about death as a natural process which is the destination for everyone in the end.  Parents give children euphemisms when their pets die and as Doughty says, there is an idea that fun must be some part of a funeral.  Several anecdotes included in Smoke Gets in Your Eyes are concerned with how the families of the dead react to death, often with grief, mourning, and denial about what has happened and what eventually will happened.  Doughty sympathizes with those she meets through the work but advocates for a death that is somehow more natural.  Making the dead look as close as they can to being alive is something that Doughty places at the center of her arguments towards accepting death.  On the topic of embalming she argues against the modern practice of embalming, contrasting it with the complex ancient Egyptian funeral rites:

“every step of the process—from removing the brain through the nose with a long iron hook to placing the internal organs in animal-head vases called Canopic jars to drying the body out for forty days with natron salt—had profound significance.  There are no brain hooks or organ-storage jars in modern North American embalming, which instead involves the removal of blood and fluids from the body cavity and replacing them with a mixture of strong preservative chemicals.  More important, modern embalming was born not from religion but from stronger forces altogether—marketing and consumerism” (Doughty, 73).

It is that “marketing and consumerism” which Doughty argues is the cause of America’s problems with acknowledging death.  The market increases prices on every option for dying, and attempts to make it a unique experience, offering various features for each coffin, or urns which have elaborate designs.  There is a sense that failing to make one’s death unique would be morally wrong, that those the dead leave behind do not love the individual in question.  It goes back to the question of if the body is an object or a person, corrupting what it means to be a person: that a person should somehow always be remembered, not allowed to be tainted by a natural process of death.  Doughty doesn’t suggest making death a religious experience, instead wanting a reclamation of mortality where people understand death and are living with that understanding (236).  Death must be treated as a simple fact of life, something that is to be faced, not by hiding it, but by acknowledging it.  Instead, America, and it is specifically America that creates this attitude.  Doughty’s follow-up to this memoir is From Here to Eternity: Travelling the World to Find the Good Death, exploring funeral practices outside of the United States of America.

There are discussions online which I have had about practices and even in an English-speaking country like the United Kingdom, death and funerals are treated differently.  The American death is one where every detail must be perfect: the body must be perfectly preserved and only decay long after those that knew the person are gone, the funeral must be elaborate and unique, nobody must actually talk about the death, and often become affairs where everybody is present and makes a show.  British and Scottish services, on the other hand, have a more reserved outlook on death, making it an affair for close family and friends to say goodbye.  There isn’t the sense that it must somehow be perfect, but it allows those involved to truly come to terms with mortality.  Americans, on the other hand, become preoccupied with celebrating the person, not the death, and taking the death out of the end of life.  As Doughty posits “Of course your anxious to get the whole thing over with and leave the funeral home” (113).  Death is something that should be confronted, not cheated by rushing through it.  Those affected should take the time to grieve and be prepared for the inevitable situation of everybody they know dying at any moment, and not fearing it as somehow an evil event.  Death is the culmination of life.

Corpse Marker by: Chris Boucher

The BBC Books range of Doctor Who novels started their Eighth Doctor Adventures with a run of six books that relied on returning faces to sell copies with mixed results.  The best of these first six were ones that used obscurer villains that wouldn’t be marketed heavily on the cover such as Vampire Science and Alien Bodies, while the more overt fanservice would bring the books down in quality, specifically with The Eight Doctors.  The Past Doctor Adventures, on the other hand, took four books before providing any fanservice with Business Unusual bringing back the Pale Man from the Virgin Missing Adventures range, and Illegal Alien bringing back the Cybermen.  The end of 1999 brought a trilogy of Past Doctor Adventures for the Fifth, Fourth, and Third Doctors, bringing back monsters from the past and serving as sequels to Classic stories.  Corpse Marker is the middle book in this trilogy, serving as a sequel to The Robots of Death, written once again by Chris Boucher.  Boucher is an interesting figure in Doctor Who history as he wrote three stories four the classic series, all of which are regarded as classics, creating the companion of Leela, and then writing four novels for the Past Doctor Adventures range.  Outside of Doctor Who, Croucher is most well-known for serving as the script editor for Blake’s 7, a four series science fiction show on the BBC which has the same status as Doctor Who in most fans’ eyes.  His first PDA, Last Man Running, could best be described as subpar, with plenty of good ideas, but not enough taken into the execution of the concepts and ideas for its length.

 

Corpse Marker is a book with similar problems to Last Man Running, partially being incredibly short read.  It’s a standard length of 280 pages, however, instead of the standard font, this book has a much larger typeface, meaning that I could read a majority of the book, sleep deprived, in an airport in about an hour and a half.  Boucher doesn’t require much attention for a story that is essentially fluff: the Doctor and Leela arrive in Kaldor City some time after the events of The Robots of Death where a cult has risen up around the death of Taren Capel and his anti-robot agenda.  The robots have expanded their abilities, including robots which mimic humans to be used for pleasure.  Poul suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, Toos has found herself back at the top of the food chain, and Uvanov has gone up in the world.  This trio of characters are the only interesting characters outside of the Doctor and Leela, but their plots are essentially repeats of The Robots of Death.  Repeating The Robots of Death really is a lot of what Corpse Marker does, from its structure of splitting the Doctor and Leela up and providing a mysterious figure (this time the same mysterious figure being Taren Capel), and not really giving much extra in the way of interest for the reader to follow.

 

Boucher succeeds in creating a few good ideas: the cult of Taren Capel is interesting and has the potential to reach heights as it delves into how religions form and operate, Leela accidentally being put on the wrong side could also be a very interesting yet very little is actually done with that plotline.  The Doctor is always characterized well and there is an attempt to go in depth with adult themes, but Boucher’s bland writing style simply is not able to make Corpse Marker anything above an average book that will quickly be forgotten as a nostalgia trip for The Robots of Death.  5/10.

Malazan: Memories of Ice by: Steven Erikson

 

The two things that I really liked about Deadhouse Gates was first that Steven Erikson’s writing style has improved and second was the nonstop action of the Chain of Dogs sequence, giving that book a great score of 8/10.  The third novel in the Malazan: Book of the Fallen is Memories of Ice and takes those two aspects of Deadhouse Gates and turns them up to eleven.  The plot takes place right after Gardens of the Moon, following many of the characters the reader was introduced to in that first novel as the war moves away from Pale and Darujhistan as the Malazan Empire and Bridgeburners with the uneasy and mistrustful allies.  Memories of Ice is at its core a quest to the besieged city of Capustan where further alliances can be pursued.  The siege of Capustan is the centerpiece of Memories of Ice and demonstrates Erikson’s improvement of writing style and plot: Gardens of the Moon had the Siege of Pale a centerpiece, but the reader never actually was privy to the Siege, instead only seeing the aftermath and the various parties endure.  The third part of Memories of Ice focuses exclusively on the forces converging on Capustan.  The besieged city as presented to the reader is a perfect example of Erikson’s skill with presenting imagery: the reader sees the squalor and devastation of Capustan, bodies pile in the streets while armies attempt to get in and everything is clearly coming to a head.  There are other parties involved, including an entity called the Crippled God, presented almost as the big bad, a chessmaster pulling the strings behind the scenes.  Characters ascend to godhood, a sleeping god wakes and makes a last stand, characters are reunited, lovers find each other and are lost, making Memories of Ice one of those fast moving books.

 

As Gardens of the Moon established, Tattersail has been reincarnated as Silverfox among a group of tribesmen called the Rhivi.  Silverfox shows just how to do a reincarnated character correctly: she is not Tattersail, although the soul and memories are there, instead is a child manipulating events and those around her.  She was born to the Mhybe, this young woman who over the course of the novel finds herself under Silverfox’s thumb both literally and figuratively.  The story of the Mhybe is one of tragedy, Silverfox is a parasite, taking the Mhybe’s life away from her, slowly aging her throughout the novel, which doesn’t cover a lot of time, and ending the novel dead.  Silverfox also manipulates Paran, pulling on the previous relationship in Gardens of the Moon.  Their reunion here and the big reveal that Silverfox is indeed Tattersail reborn, is incredibly tense, and Paran is suitably disgusted of this child acting as if she was his lover at some point in time.  Paran as a character is one of the few who seems to try for the moral high ground.  He’s gaining power throughout the novel, power that he really doesn’t wish to have, but the gods and other parties have plans.  The sequences in the warrens with Paran, especially regarding Dragnipur, Draconis, Annomander Rake, and becoming Master of the Deck, all in their own right bringing the drama and character development for this man who has already gone through hell and lost his family.  The dead Hounds of Shadow have been reincarnated and the Crippled God is set to be loosened on the world very soon.

 

Annomander Rake, the Tiste Andii, and their connection to the other Tiste races are brought back to the forefront in places here.  Rake is used sparingly, instead having Crone appear more often.  Crone is given more depth and seems to be scheming for her own gain, or possibly her master’s, it isn’t clear.  Crone has this wit and often provides some nice dry comedy into whatever scene it features in.  Once again a lot of the climax involves the Soletaken abilities of Rake, among others.  There are other Tiste Andii, including one who has a touching romance with Whiskeyjack.  Whiskeyjack and Korlat’s story becomes intertwined and like the romances in Gardens of the Moon ends poorly with a complete shakeup.  Caladan Brood is another of those very different characters who is trying to gain his own power, although this is one of those storylines that doesn’t quite end as he kind of becomes a background character.  The zombie T’lan Imass rise and become the main foe to fight, though the Jaghut contingent from Gardens of the Moon is subverted in several places (you’ll understand once you read the book.

 

There is also a party including Toc the Younger, a character I didn’t mention in Gardens of the Moon, deepening a friendship and being given a new name, witnessing the death of a god, and travelling with Lady Envy, a sorceress.  The way that this plot, and the plot of Quick Ben and necromancers Bauchelain and Korbal Broach (who have essentially their own spin-off novella series).  The necromancers are such a brilliant double act, again being a source of comedy, while Lady Envy is one of those characters that the reader will love to hate.  Everything builds up to the end of the novel leaving characters dead, a new Warren created, Quick Ben and Kruppe (both brilliant characters, Kruppe improving greatly over his characterization in Gardens of the Moon) each having their own plans, and the events of Deadhouse Gates brought to our characters, implying that things will be converging in the next few books.  Memories of Ice is one of those novels that makes the reader laugh and cry, and it feels like Steven Erikson really is getting into the groove of writing these.  Overall, if a reader was struggling with the first two Malazan Book of the Fallen novels, Memories of Ice might make them change their minds on the quality of the series.  It’s less obtuse, but still as dense as Erikson’s other work, but told in chronological order, and yes there are more questions than answers, but it is one of the best rides I’ve gone on. 10/10.