As the end of the year approaches, my stack of
to-be-reviewed books grows ever taller. I realized to my horror that I am
rapidly approaching the point of not being able to remember what I liked or
disliked about each story. So here are reviews of varying lengths for your
amusement – and hopefully a few will pique your interest enough to check out
the books themselves.
The Soul Mirror by
Carol Berg (Roc, 2011). I’m an unabashed Carol Berg fan. I love her
world-building, her characters, and the way she puts a story together. This
series is new to me, and I inadvertently started with the second “Collegia
Magica” book – and had no difficulty at all, so seamlessly did Berg weave in
all the backstory I needed. Sometimes, I find a biiiiig book daunting, but in
Carol Berg’s case, it’s fantastic because I want to spend a long time in her
world. This is Renaissance/Gothic/romance/fantasy with echoes of Jane Eyre and Hamlet (a young woman with a great deal of common sense and without
morbid self-doubt, with lots of skeletons in the family closet, but determined
to solve her sister’s murder). Oh, and ghosts. Complex like dark chocolate.
Addictive.
The Specific Gravity
of Grief, by Jay Lake (Fairwood, 2010). Written when Jay was still
struggling
with metastatic colon cancer, this fictionalized version follows
another cancer patient as his life disintegrates. “Long ago, when he was fat,
happy and colorful, the ragged man used to joke that perhaps it was his purpose
in life to serve as an example to others. While he still believes that might be
true, these days he is more inclined to think that his purpose in life is to
absorb the pain of others. A modern day sin-eater, with cancer the bread of
error.” Wise, passionate, generous – just like Jay. Cancer sucks.
Fortune Made His Sword,
by Martha Rofheart. A well-done, absorbing fictional account of the rise of
Henry V. The cool thing is that the author was a theatrical actress, well
versed in Shakespeare’s “Chronicle” plays. I can imagine her going, “There’s a
lot more to say about this king – I’ll write a novel!” What could have been
drek turned out quite lively, filled with colorful settings and interesting
characters. Check it out if you enjoy historical fiction.
The Silvered, by
Tanya Huff. Huff is one of my favorite writers, one I gleefully follow
across genre lines. Sexy vampire mysteries, check. Kick ass women military
science fiction, check. Urban fantasy, with or without cats, check. So when I
saw The Silvered had been released –
steampunk werewolves! – my reader’s little heart went all pitter-pat. I will
now proceed to gush – nobody does it better: world-building, a believable and
intricately executed system of magic, action, romance, characters I care
passionately about, silliness and heart-wrenching sadness. Tanya Huff was Guest
of Honor at Convolution 2014, and I attended her small group discussion. I
asked if there would be any more books set in this world and everyone laughed.
I’d come in late and had not realized
that just about everyone there had the same question. The answer, alas, is no.
This is, in Huff’s words, a “one-off.” So treasure every page!
Rashi’s Daughters:
Joheved, by Maggie Anton (Plume
2005). This is straight historical fiction, subtitled A Novel of Love and The Talmud in Medieval France. I found out
about the series (Joheved has two younger daughters, and there’s another series
about Rav Hisda’s daughters, too) from an old school friend. Rashi (Salomon ben
Isaac or Shlomo Yitzchaki –1040-1105)
was one of the greatest Talmudic scholars of all time. His common name is an
acronym based on RAbbi SHlomo Itzhaki. He lived mostly in
Troyes, France, during a time of relative calm for Jews, and wrote and taught
extensively. His only children were three remarkable daughters, all of whom
married Talmudic scholars and undoubtedly were learned as well. Anton has taken
an amalgam of documented history, legend, and her own imagination to create a
novelization of the life of Rashi’s oldest daughter. She portrays a world that
parallels the medieval Christian society that is so much better known to us,
and does so with remarkably vivid detail. While there are no fantastical
elements as such, any lover of historical fiction, historical genre fiction,
will discover many delights here. Among my favorites were the portrayal of
growing grapes and turning them into wine, a community event.
Maplecroft, by Cherie Priest (Roc, 2014). Lesbian Lizzie Borden and her axe take on
horrors out of
Lovecraft! What’s not to love, especially in the capable hands
of Cherie Priest? I confess, I liked her earlier work better than her steampunk
novels, but it seems to me that her skill at storytelling increases with each
change of genre. I suppose Maplecroft
could be considered steampunk, given the time (1893-4), but the focus is not on
gadgetry. No tentacles, but lots of weird transformations and hanging on to
sanity with the flimsiest threads. I would expect, given the success of her Boneshaker, that this book would be
extensively reviewed, and I have not much to add beyond that the concept got me
to buy the book, and the book itself grabbed me from the first page and
wouldn’t let go.
Pen Pal, by Francesca Forrest (CreateSpace, 2013). How does an excellent
self-published book finds its way to readers? In this case, I found Pen Pal through a direct contact with
the author (I’d edited her short story for one of my anthologies) and a strong
recommendation from a fellow author whose opinion I trust. Otherwise, I almost
never buy a self-published book, but I was delighted with this one. As the
title suggests, the book is comprised of letters from one friend to another.
I’m old enough to remember having pen
pals, letter-friends I never met in person, some of them on different
continents. I’d feel a particular thrill at the sight of an envelope with
foreign postmark and colorful stamps. I never met any of these pen pals, and
with time, the correspondences dwindled. Forrest has taken this phenomenon – a
friendship through letters between two people of wildly diverse cultures – and
shaped it as good fiction. There’s a beginning, when teenaged Em, who lives in
a floating town called Mermaid’s Hands and may or may not be of selkie folk,
puts a message in a bottle and it’s picked by by Kaya, a
student-turned-unwitting-activist who is imprisoned over a volcanic caldera
called Ruby Lake. Through a series of fortuitous connections and a little magic
(or trained birds, as the case may be), the two manage to answer one other, to
exchange stories, and to try to help one another. The story development is handled
with great skill, the voices are clear and distinct, and the entire reading
experience was a pleasure cover to cover. I love stories that have deeper
meaning but let me discover it, and this is one. Themes of family,
self-reliance, growing up, political repression, the difficulties of being
“other” in a conformist society, are all there to be explored or let lie, as
the reader wishes. I particularly suggest this book for families with teens as
a way of opening up discussions of important topics. And who knows, you might
end up with pen pal of your own!
The Warded Man by
Peter V. Brett (Del Rey, 2010) This came to me through the freebie bag at the
Nebula Award Weekend. The author’s name rang a bell, but nothing more specific.
To begin with, I’m underwhelmed by covers featuring a man in a hooded cloak –
so overused as to be a cliché for me. But I believe in at least giving a free
book a try. This one is a debut novel with an interesting premise: in this
fantasy world, every evening, demons arise from the “Core,” meaning underground
– wood demons, fire demons, wind demons, the like. Their only motivation seems
to be killing (and eating) people (and their animals). Various youthful characters
join together to fight them and have adventures. It’s fairly well done, and the
depiction of the human settlements struggling against ever increasing
fatalities is especially poignant. The action moved right along and never lost
my interest. My judgment is that this opening to a series will hit the right
notes with certain readers. While I kept turning the pages, something in it was
a little off for me. Maybe it was the relentless hatred of the demons and how
easy it is to justify violence when your opponent is not human and therefore
impossible to have empathy for – they deserve no compassion, as they are
completely evil. I prefer more complex adversaries and explorations of how we
deal with “the other,” whether it’s Brett’s demons, Peter Jackson’s depiction
of Tolkien’s orcs, or what I see in the popular news every day. One small thing
that niggled at me was the way Brett changed the spelling of common names; my
favorites were Lakton for Laketown (another echo of Tolkien), or Rojer instead of Roger, the kind of
pretentiousness found in amateurish writing. Yes, names change over time, but
they change organically as part of the evolution of the language. This might
not bother another reader, and as I said, I’m sure Brett’s work will find an
enthusiastic audience, eager for the next installment of the story.
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