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3.57 AVERAGE
3.57 AVERAGE
adventurous
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
adventurous
dark
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
dark
sad
slow-paced
Strong character development:
No
maybe this is the male version of a beach read? mario-style quest to defeat the bosses and rescue princess peach at the end of the quest
adventurous
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This book had a "Western" sticker on the spine, maybe the first book I've ever read in that genre! It had some elements I'm assuming are classic to Westerns - violence, guns, etc - but it also seemed to add some new elements, like racism and some mystical stuff. I was into it, and really respect that the author took me somewhere new and did something different.
This was tagged as Cormac McCarthy (whose The Road is one of my favorite novels) and Ted Chiang (whose short stories are some of my favorites). To me, this was a bit of a let down. It was much more like Stephen King’s Gunslinger series. Writes with his penis, has inconsequential and sexually defined women.
The thing that sets McCarthy’s writing apart for me is that his language is exceptional—beautiful, PRECISE, elegant, and spare. It felt a bit like this novel tried to emulate that style, but fell short. Really—Gunslinger. I swear.
The thing that sets McCarthy’s writing apart for me is that his language is exceptional—beautiful, PRECISE, elegant, and spare. It felt a bit like this novel tried to emulate that style, but fell short. Really—Gunslinger. I swear.
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The thing about this debut novel by Tom Lin is that it isn’t trying to be anything more than a fun, gritty, rollicking adventure story set in the 19th century, with a pulpy, magical twist that doesn’t take itself all too seriously.
At the centre of the story is Ming Tsu, a Chinese assassin who’s on a warpath to find his kidnapped wife and murder those responsible. As he travels through the desert, he meets a crew of sideshow misfits, each with magical powers of their own.
Ming’s characterisation is pretty straightforward, and the writing reflects that. Lin does away with the fluff and cuts to the chase. It’s one plot point to the next at a good cadence, with character beats filling in the gaps. It may not win any literary awards, but there’s a likable cast and some bloody good fun — and maybe that’s all we really need.
This book is not without flaws. For one, one of Ming’s companions has the gift of foresight, and he informs Ming everything that’s going to happen: is the horse going to die? Will we find water soon? Will I find the man I want to kill? Will I die in the gunfight? Yes, yes, yes and no — so much for narrative tension.
Also, after the third gunfight, the rest just blend together like a blob of dried, coagulated gum. The bad guys, too, are carbon copies of one another like NPCs in a video game. Instead of Tarantino-esque confrontations, each is done away with within a page or two. Finally, it’s strange to introduce a cast of magical companions, but not have their powers contribute in any way to the plot.
Oh, and there are two women. One is a damsel in distress, and the other is a love interest. So.
If you need a quick read to cap out your 2021, this is a good one to pick up. Otherwise, I literally docked a star while writing this review. Its flaws became more pronounced in writing.
The thing about this debut novel by Tom Lin is that it isn’t trying to be anything more than a fun, gritty, rollicking adventure story set in the 19th century, with a pulpy, magical twist that doesn’t take itself all too seriously.
At the centre of the story is Ming Tsu, a Chinese assassin who’s on a warpath to find his kidnapped wife and murder those responsible. As he travels through the desert, he meets a crew of sideshow misfits, each with magical powers of their own.
Ming’s characterisation is pretty straightforward, and the writing reflects that. Lin does away with the fluff and cuts to the chase. It’s one plot point to the next at a good cadence, with character beats filling in the gaps. It may not win any literary awards, but there’s a likable cast and some bloody good fun — and maybe that’s all we really need.
This book is not without flaws. For one, one of Ming’s companions has the gift of foresight, and he informs Ming everything that’s going to happen: is the horse going to die? Will we find water soon? Will I find the man I want to kill? Will I die in the gunfight? Yes, yes, yes and no — so much for narrative tension.
Also, after the third gunfight, the rest just blend together like a blob of dried, coagulated gum. The bad guys, too, are carbon copies of one another like NPCs in a video game. Instead of Tarantino-esque confrontations, each is done away with within a page or two. Finally, it’s strange to introduce a cast of magical companions, but not have their powers contribute in any way to the plot.
Oh, and there are two women. One is a damsel in distress, and the other is a love interest. So.
If you need a quick read to cap out your 2021, this is a good one to pick up. Otherwise, I literally docked a star while writing this review. Its flaws became more pronounced in writing.
This is a book with a lot of potential. It's also a book a tad too much in love with its own effusiveness for how much it clings to the standard structures of Eurocentric narrative: the rise, the fall, the revelation, the archetype, the man, the woman, and the child. Certainly not unexpected when it comes to a debut novel, but given the phantasmagorical landscape laid out and the author names dropped (one does not throw around Cormac McCarthy's name lightly), it's not hard to get one's hopes up about something that promises to deliver on the thrill of the "wild wild" west without mincing on the historical realities. As it stands, I can't rate this any higher than rather middling, but I wouldn't mind having Lin pop up in my view somewhere down the line once he's come out with something special. He's got a lot of good raw material when it comes to the intersection of China with the indigenous lands of the western US and a whole wealth of initiative judging by his choices in diction and world building; he just needs to do a bit more throwing himself off the authorial cliff in order to fly.
It's been a long, long time since I voluntarily dealt with this particular genre. The simplistic label would be 'western', but as I said when I began this work, this reminded me of nothing so much as King's 'The Dark Tower' series, which remains the work I would return to if I ever got the urge to revisit that particular bombastically prolific author. It's the certain sense of stoic grandeur to the writing, where refraining from spilling out a bevy of details provides that much more room for the imagination to soar, coupled to the "Western expanse", where the concept of the gunslinger, however choked in Eurocentric insipidities and chauvinistic horseshit, still instinctively holds me in thrall. Much has changed, however, since I last read that series so avidly, and so what it would take for the same verbiage and theme to engage me to that degree is something I haven't bothered to figure out. This book certainly had its moments, but as I said, it was loosey goosey where it could have committed and straight-laced where it should have pushed the limit, and the fact that it managed, despite having an ethnic Chinese protagonist, to flash over both the immensity of China and the realities of the indigenous lands that the mercenary hunted his prey upon as so much unneeded context was more than a little disappointing. So, wham, bang, sex, throw in a little bit of larger than life folktale turned reality, sure, whatever. Do the bare minimum of work required to differentiate it from the standard white boy self-insert Western fanfiction in the age of the Internet? Not what I came for.
My area's suffering the hugest power outage that it probably has in the time I've been alive, and I'm kipping over at the boss' place doing whatever semblance of work I can when nearly webpage goes down in the eternally spinning wheel of loading death. So, now's as good a time to finish this review as while my boss' pet rabbits gambol about me and my wrist recovers from bouts of Excel spreadsheets. As I intimated earlier, this is neither the best nor the worst book I've ever encountered, but a first start that, in the end, feels very much like a first start. I've no idea where the author is going to go from here, but I'd hope that he continues experimenting in the supernatural/western and supernatural/western-adjacent dramas, if only for the selfish reason that I'd like to have another reason to voluntarily engage with that corner of reading. I'm certainly better about not being a genre snob now that I've veered off from the outside challenges and focused a lot more on my own collection, but I still have a hard time not picturing an easily disgruntled white boy when I think about the typical representatives of all those sci-fis and mysteries and whatnot that I tend to easily pass on by. In any case, if you're a longtime connoisseur of whatever genre Lin is gunning for, I doubt you're going to be very impressed. Me, I've read better, but I have no doubt that this author is going to do something grand when the time is right, enough that I'll be keeping an eye on future publications until further notice.
It's been a long, long time since I voluntarily dealt with this particular genre. The simplistic label would be 'western', but as I said when I began this work, this reminded me of nothing so much as King's 'The Dark Tower' series, which remains the work I would return to if I ever got the urge to revisit that particular bombastically prolific author. It's the certain sense of stoic grandeur to the writing, where refraining from spilling out a bevy of details provides that much more room for the imagination to soar, coupled to the "Western expanse", where the concept of the gunslinger, however choked in Eurocentric insipidities and chauvinistic horseshit, still instinctively holds me in thrall. Much has changed, however, since I last read that series so avidly, and so what it would take for the same verbiage and theme to engage me to that degree is something I haven't bothered to figure out. This book certainly had its moments, but as I said, it was loosey goosey where it could have committed and straight-laced where it should have pushed the limit, and the fact that it managed, despite having an ethnic Chinese protagonist, to flash over both the immensity of China and the realities of the indigenous lands that the mercenary hunted his prey upon as so much unneeded context was more than a little disappointing. So, wham, bang, sex, throw in a little bit of larger than life folktale turned reality, sure, whatever. Do the bare minimum of work required to differentiate it from the standard white boy self-insert Western fanfiction in the age of the Internet? Not what I came for.
My area's suffering the hugest power outage that it probably has in the time I've been alive, and I'm kipping over at the boss' place doing whatever semblance of work I can when nearly webpage goes down in the eternally spinning wheel of loading death. So, now's as good a time to finish this review as while my boss' pet rabbits gambol about me and my wrist recovers from bouts of Excel spreadsheets. As I intimated earlier, this is neither the best nor the worst book I've ever encountered, but a first start that, in the end, feels very much like a first start. I've no idea where the author is going to go from here, but I'd hope that he continues experimenting in the supernatural/western and supernatural/western-adjacent dramas, if only for the selfish reason that I'd like to have another reason to voluntarily engage with that corner of reading. I'm certainly better about not being a genre snob now that I've veered off from the outside challenges and focused a lot more on my own collection, but I still have a hard time not picturing an easily disgruntled white boy when I think about the typical representatives of all those sci-fis and mysteries and whatnot that I tend to easily pass on by. In any case, if you're a longtime connoisseur of whatever genre Lin is gunning for, I doubt you're going to be very impressed. Me, I've read better, but I have no doubt that this author is going to do something grand when the time is right, enough that I'll be keeping an eye on future publications until further notice.
adventurous
dark
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes