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annelyle's reviews
128 reviews
A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas
emotional
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
I was in the mood for some light holiday reading and ACOTAR did not disappoint. A cross between Beauty & the Beast and The Ballad of Tam Lin, it was different enough from its sources to keep me guessing.
I’d seen reviews that said Feyre was unlikeable, but I didn’t find that - she seemed to me like a decent young woman who’d been dealt a crappy hand in life and was prickly for good reason - she even reminded me a little of one of my favourite fictional heroines, Anne Elliot from Persuasion, keeping the household running despite her useless father and sisters. Will almost certainly pick up the sequel next time I need a fix!
I’d seen reviews that said Feyre was unlikeable, but I didn’t find that - she seemed to me like a decent young woman who’d been dealt a crappy hand in life and was prickly for good reason - she even reminded me a little of one of my favourite fictional heroines, Anne Elliot from Persuasion, keeping the household running despite her useless father and sisters. Will almost certainly pick up the sequel next time I need a fix!
The Sword of Albion by Mark Chadbourn
4.0
The Sword of Albion is the tale of Will Swyfte: swordsman, adventurer, rake, and England’s greatest spy. He is famed throughout the kingdom, thanks to ballads and pamphlets – so how can he work in secret when everyone knows who he is? The truth is that his real work is against an Enemy who have long known his identity, and his fight against them requires more than stealth and a ready rapier.
The story ranges from London to Edinburgh and down into the Iberian Peninsula, culminating in the attempted invasion of England by the Spanish – the famous armada of 1588. The action moves relentlessly from set-piece to set-piece, dragging the reader along in Swyfte’s wake as he is repeatedly captured and makes another dramatic escape. Think James Bond meets Pirates of the Caribbean; not only would this make a great movie, but since Chadbourn is a scriptwriter as well, it reads like a great movie.
Will Swyfte is not an arrogant mysogynist like Bond, however. OK, so he indulges in wine and women (sometimes to excess) to blot out the memories of the terrible things he has to do for Queen and country, but at heart he is a romantic, haunted by the memory of his lost love. His companions, though getting much less of the limelight, are also complex, well-drawn characters with believable motivations, though some are decidedly less sympathetic than Will.
The historical setting is well-drawn, with enough detail to satisfy the Elizabethan buffs amongst us without slowing down the action. The filthiness and smelliness of London is sometimes laid on a little heavily, but it does provide a contrast with the elegant, blossom-fragrant citadels of Spain.
I have only a few small quibbles, mostly the nitpicking of a fellow writer that will probably go unnoticed by other readers. There are a few places where information is repeated, or spelt out in narrative immediately after it has been explained in dialogue. And in one scene, Will somehow manages to hold a rapier to a bad guy’s throat and simultaneously whisper in his ear – pretty impressive with a blade that was normally around 36-40 inches! (I assume he is using the tip, since rapiers were not terribly sharp near the hilt). My attention did start to drift a little during the sea-battle, but that sort of thing is always hard to do in a novel. It wasn’t badly written – quite the contrary – but every time the action shifted away from Will towards ships in combat, I just wanted to skip ahead to the next bit of derring-do :)
I was also a little disappointed that the Enemy resorted to mundane physical torture, when they are so good at the psychological kind, but I guess it had to be clear that they were capable of inflicting horrible torments on those Will cares about. On the other hand, kudos to Chadbourn for writing torture scenes that didn’t give me nightmares. He sensibly focuses on the interrogation that is the point of the scene, rather than gratuitous descriptions of the torture itself. Books being so much more intimate a medium than film, it takes very little to make a strong impact on the engaged reader.
In summary, this is an entertaining page-turner with strong, sympathetic characters and a fascinating, terrifying setting – what more could one want from a fantasy novel? I for one am eagerly looking forward to reading more of Will’s adventures…
The story ranges from London to Edinburgh and down into the Iberian Peninsula, culminating in the attempted invasion of England by the Spanish – the famous armada of 1588. The action moves relentlessly from set-piece to set-piece, dragging the reader along in Swyfte’s wake as he is repeatedly captured and makes another dramatic escape. Think James Bond meets Pirates of the Caribbean; not only would this make a great movie, but since Chadbourn is a scriptwriter as well, it reads like a great movie.
Will Swyfte is not an arrogant mysogynist like Bond, however. OK, so he indulges in wine and women (sometimes to excess) to blot out the memories of the terrible things he has to do for Queen and country, but at heart he is a romantic, haunted by the memory of his lost love. His companions, though getting much less of the limelight, are also complex, well-drawn characters with believable motivations, though some are decidedly less sympathetic than Will.
The historical setting is well-drawn, with enough detail to satisfy the Elizabethan buffs amongst us without slowing down the action. The filthiness and smelliness of London is sometimes laid on a little heavily, but it does provide a contrast with the elegant, blossom-fragrant citadels of Spain.
I have only a few small quibbles, mostly the nitpicking of a fellow writer that will probably go unnoticed by other readers. There are a few places where information is repeated, or spelt out in narrative immediately after it has been explained in dialogue. And in one scene, Will somehow manages to hold a rapier to a bad guy’s throat and simultaneously whisper in his ear – pretty impressive with a blade that was normally around 36-40 inches! (I assume he is using the tip, since rapiers were not terribly sharp near the hilt). My attention did start to drift a little during the sea-battle, but that sort of thing is always hard to do in a novel. It wasn’t badly written – quite the contrary – but every time the action shifted away from Will towards ships in combat, I just wanted to skip ahead to the next bit of derring-do :)
I was also a little disappointed that the Enemy resorted to mundane physical torture, when they are so good at the psychological kind, but I guess it had to be clear that they were capable of inflicting horrible torments on those Will cares about. On the other hand, kudos to Chadbourn for writing torture scenes that didn’t give me nightmares. He sensibly focuses on the interrogation that is the point of the scene, rather than gratuitous descriptions of the torture itself. Books being so much more intimate a medium than film, it takes very little to make a strong impact on the engaged reader.
In summary, this is an entertaining page-turner with strong, sympathetic characters and a fascinating, terrifying setting – what more could one want from a fantasy novel? I for one am eagerly looking forward to reading more of Will’s adventures…
On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers
4.0
On Stranger Tides was first published in 1987, and is the third (and most American-based) of Powers' historical fantasies. It is set in the Caribbean in the early eighteenth century, where magic still survives on the remote fringes of civilisation. Penniless puppeteer John Chandagnac sets out from Europe to reclaim the family estate in Haiti from his usurping uncle, but en route the ship is boarded by pirates and John is forced to join their crew. Dubbed "Jack Shandy" by his new shipmates, he harbours dreams of completing his quest (and rescuing his fellow passenger, the lovely Beth Hurwood, who was taken captive in the raid), but he runs afoul of Blackbeard, who is searching for the fabled Fountain of Youth, the key to immortality. In true swashbuckling pirate fashion, Shandy learns to fight and sail a ship, kills the bad guys and gets the girl, facing European sorcerors, voodoo bocors, zombies and even Baron Samedi himself along the way - no wonder Disney wanted to steal the best bits!
In fact this book's plot has so much in common with the very first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, The Curse of the Black Pearl, that the inspiration is clear. The protagonist's pirate name is awfully close to that of Jack Sparrow, his quest to rescue (Eliza)beth from a sorcerous pirate captain mirrors that of Will Turner, and like Sparrow, Shandy does indeed become captain of his own small ship and spend a couple of long spells getting blind drunk on rum (or red wine if he can get it) on beaches. There's even a character who could have stepped out of the original movie, a black pirate called Mr Bird who periodically shouts "I am not a dog!" for no apparent reason.
In some respects this is a very old-fashioned book: there is no strong language (beyond an occasional "damn" or "bloody"), with any actual swearing being referred to obliquely, and any feminist readers are likely to be disappointed by the passivity of the female characters. Beth Hurwood exists purely to be threatened by the bad guys and rescued by the hero, and the one potentially interesting young woman (a teenage Ann Bonny) makes only a couple of brief appearances. However all this is very true to the genre's swashbuckling, "Boy's Own" roots and detracted very little from this reader's enjoyment, perhaps because the hero himself is a complex, well-rounded character: likeably naive to begin with, gradually coming to enjoy his new adventurous life but with a moral core that prevents him from descending into the savagery displayed by the other pirates.
Overall, I can heartily recommend this book to anyone who loves a good adventure story. It's darker than the movies, but comedy is much harder to pull off on the page than on-screen, and Powers' rich imagination more than compensates.
In fact this book's plot has so much in common with the very first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, The Curse of the Black Pearl, that the inspiration is clear. The protagonist's pirate name is awfully close to that of Jack Sparrow, his quest to rescue (Eliza)beth from a sorcerous pirate captain mirrors that of Will Turner, and like Sparrow, Shandy does indeed become captain of his own small ship and spend a couple of long spells getting blind drunk on rum (or red wine if he can get it) on beaches. There's even a character who could have stepped out of the original movie, a black pirate called Mr Bird who periodically shouts "I am not a dog!" for no apparent reason.
In some respects this is a very old-fashioned book: there is no strong language (beyond an occasional "damn" or "bloody"), with any actual swearing being referred to obliquely, and any feminist readers are likely to be disappointed by the passivity of the female characters. Beth Hurwood exists purely to be threatened by the bad guys and rescued by the hero, and the one potentially interesting young woman (a teenage Ann Bonny) makes only a couple of brief appearances. However all this is very true to the genre's swashbuckling, "Boy's Own" roots and detracted very little from this reader's enjoyment, perhaps because the hero himself is a complex, well-rounded character: likeably naive to begin with, gradually coming to enjoy his new adventurous life but with a moral core that prevents him from descending into the savagery displayed by the other pirates.
Overall, I can heartily recommend this book to anyone who loves a good adventure story. It's darker than the movies, but comedy is much harder to pull off on the page than on-screen, and Powers' rich imagination more than compensates.
Shadows Return by Lynn Flewelling
5.0
I first came across the Nightrunner series some years ago, after the US paperback edition of Luck in the Shadows found its way across the Atlantic, and was immediately taken by the protagonists, gentleman-thief “Lord” Seregil of Rhiminee and his young protégé Alec. They were one of the first realistic gay couples I had encountered in fantasy, their slow-burning romance grounding but never overwhelming the stories of intrigue and magic. I was therefore slightly disappointed when Flewelling put aside her rogueish heroes to concentrate on her other trilogy set in the same world, and it’s taken me a while to get around to reading this fourth installment. It doesn’t help that I read some reviews beforehand that were less than favourable. Caveat lector!
Shadows Return picks up the story some months after the end of Traitor’s Moon, and finds Seregil and Alec back in Rhiminee and up to their old tricks again. However the past few years’ unhappy experiences have left Seregil a more sombre man who can no longer take delight in midnight adventures across the roofs of the city. When the opportunity arises to travel to his homeland and escort Princess Klia back to Rhiminee, therefore, he is more than happy to abandon his life of crime. However the past is never far away, and soon the two men find themselves facing old enemies – and new ones.
I can understand why some readers might find this book a little unsatisfying. After the opening scene involving a “nightrunner” mission from which Seregil and Alec barely escape with their skins – and reputations – intact, the story does rather slow down, focusing on the political machinations within Rhiminee. The writing is also a bit clumsy in places, with repetitive sentences and maybe a few too many attempts to remind readers of events in previous books. The latter is always a problem with series, however, and no solution is ever going to please all readers. In my opinion it’s worth pressing on to the meat of the story, where Flewelling racks up the tension with gradual – and sometimes shocking – revelations about who the bad guys are and what they’re up to.
Another minor frustration is that, like Luck in the Shadows, this book is more of a setup for its sequel than a standalone novel. My impression is that Flewelling prefers writing long, long novels which then get cut into two volumes by her publisher. Unlike The Bone Doll’s Twin, however, this one doesn’t end on a frustrating cliffhanger, for which I was heartily grateful! On the other hand it does end somewhat abruptly, with a brief tie-up of the main plot and an even briefer epilogue that hints strongly at what the next book will be about.
In some respects, Shadows Return is a retread of Stalking Darkness; once again Alec is the helpless victim of a Plenimaran sorceror, humiliated and tortured for arcane purposes whilst his friends desperately seek to rescue him. However this time the familiar story is interwoven with a more powerful one about revenge, jealousy and forgiveness that pulls the previous three books neatly together before leading towards what promises to be a thrilling fifth installment. Far from being the “filler” episode that some reviews had led me to expect, I enjoyed Shadows Return much more than the rather slow-paced Traitor’s Moon, as evidenced by the fact that I read the entire book in a weekend, despite pauses to work on my own manuscript.
If you enjoy cloak-and-dagger fantasy with a dash of gay romance and haven’t read the three previous books – go and do so now, then come back for this one. I won’t say that they’re the best books you’ll ever read, but the central characters are engaging and as the series progresses Flewelling balances light and dark moods with increasing assurance. Having spent a very enjoyable weekend in the company of Alec and Seregil, I can’t wait to read Book 5, The White Road; expect a review of that here very soon!
Shadows Return picks up the story some months after the end of Traitor’s Moon, and finds Seregil and Alec back in Rhiminee and up to their old tricks again. However the past few years’ unhappy experiences have left Seregil a more sombre man who can no longer take delight in midnight adventures across the roofs of the city. When the opportunity arises to travel to his homeland and escort Princess Klia back to Rhiminee, therefore, he is more than happy to abandon his life of crime. However the past is never far away, and soon the two men find themselves facing old enemies – and new ones.
I can understand why some readers might find this book a little unsatisfying. After the opening scene involving a “nightrunner” mission from which Seregil and Alec barely escape with their skins – and reputations – intact, the story does rather slow down, focusing on the political machinations within Rhiminee. The writing is also a bit clumsy in places, with repetitive sentences and maybe a few too many attempts to remind readers of events in previous books. The latter is always a problem with series, however, and no solution is ever going to please all readers. In my opinion it’s worth pressing on to the meat of the story, where Flewelling racks up the tension with gradual – and sometimes shocking – revelations about who the bad guys are and what they’re up to.
Another minor frustration is that, like Luck in the Shadows, this book is more of a setup for its sequel than a standalone novel. My impression is that Flewelling prefers writing long, long novels which then get cut into two volumes by her publisher. Unlike The Bone Doll’s Twin, however, this one doesn’t end on a frustrating cliffhanger, for which I was heartily grateful! On the other hand it does end somewhat abruptly, with a brief tie-up of the main plot and an even briefer epilogue that hints strongly at what the next book will be about.
In some respects, Shadows Return is a retread of Stalking Darkness; once again Alec is the helpless victim of a Plenimaran sorceror, humiliated and tortured for arcane purposes whilst his friends desperately seek to rescue him. However this time the familiar story is interwoven with a more powerful one about revenge, jealousy and forgiveness that pulls the previous three books neatly together before leading towards what promises to be a thrilling fifth installment. Far from being the “filler” episode that some reviews had led me to expect, I enjoyed Shadows Return much more than the rather slow-paced Traitor’s Moon, as evidenced by the fact that I read the entire book in a weekend, despite pauses to work on my own manuscript.
If you enjoy cloak-and-dagger fantasy with a dash of gay romance and haven’t read the three previous books – go and do so now, then come back for this one. I won’t say that they’re the best books you’ll ever read, but the central characters are engaging and as the series progresses Flewelling balances light and dark moods with increasing assurance. Having spent a very enjoyable weekend in the company of Alec and Seregil, I can’t wait to read Book 5, The White Road; expect a review of that here very soon!
Servant of the Underworld by Aliette de Bodard
4.0
One of my favourite genres outside fantasy is historical crime, so a series that combines both is an irresistible lure to me. I was very glad, therefore, to come across de Bodard's Obsidian and Blood series, set in the pre-Columbian Aztec Empire.
Disclaimer: Aliette and I share both a publisher and an agent. I take this, not so much as bias, as an indication that our tastes are similar and attract a similar audience. It should not surprise anyone, therefore, if I enjoyed this book!
Servant of the Underworld is de Bodard's debut novel and the first in her series about Acatl, High Priest of the Dead in the city of Tenochtitlan. In it, Acatl finds himself embroiled in the case of a missing priestess when his brother, a knight of the prestigious Order of the Jaguar, is found in her room covered in blood. Acatl has always been jealous of his more successful brother, but concern for his sister-in-law and her children, as well as a dogged sense of honour, drive him to pursue the case despite his misgivings.
By choosing to set a novel in the Mexica Empire, de Bodard has a tough task on her hands. Most readers will probably have some basic ideas about the Aztecs, thanks to Indiana Jones and similar sources--cue mental images of step pyramids, crystal skulls, and of course human sacrifice!--but the details of daily life are less familiar and, thanks to a fragmentary archaeological record, incomplete in any case. Writing fiction in such a setting therefore requires a mixture of historical research and fantasy-style world-building, not to mention the ability to present this world in an easy-to-absorb fashion.
Take the matter of names, for starters. The language of the Mexica Empire, Nahuatl, is agglutinative, meaning it produces long polysyllabic words. Add to that a Spanish-derived orthography and you end up with names that are difficult for any English-speaking reader to parse and remember: Ceyaxochitl, Neutemoc, Quiyahuayo. Thankfully de Bodard is careful not to introduce too many characters at once, and her protagonist at least has a short name, but added to the unfamiliar culture it makes this a hard book to get into at first. Unfortunately there's no real way around this unless one resorts to translations of names, and not all names translate into English in any case. I suspect this is one reason why non-Eurocentric real-world fantasy is relatively rare. An Anglophone writer creating a secondary world is free to invent names that are easily comprehensible to an English-speaking audience--Gandalf, Elric, Rincewind--whereas one writing about a real, historical culture has no such option.
The second difficulty de Bodard faces is the reality of the religion of this period, notorious for mass sacrifices (of humans as well as animals) which presents a real barrier to reader sympathy. Characters slit the throats of animals to power their spells, or speak casually of the deaths of men, women and children that are required to placate their gods. De Bodard softens this impact by never dwelling on the gory details--which is appropriate, since to her characters this is all very normal and unremarkable--but it is an ever-present shadow nonetheless.
What holds the story together and keeps the reader turning pages is the steady presence of the amateur detective, Acatl, who is himself a fish out of water: an unambitious parish priest promoted higher than he feels competent to deal with. Acatl's humility and caution also help to balance the fact that he wields powerful magics; powers that could all too easily overwhelm the plot in the hands of a more assertive character (or a less skillful author!). Occasionally I felt that Acatl went a little too far in the direction of humility, and his constant fretting about his relationship with his brother became a little repetitive, but this was a minor detraction from the pleasure of spending time with him.
One advantage of writing a crime story in an unfamiliar setting is that the reader knows too little to be able to guess the ending, and yet the challenge to the writer is that the identity of the killer still has to make sense. I felt this was handled pretty well in Servant of the Underworld, with the escalation from an apparently simple murder to a major conspiracy at the highest levels of the Mexica world presented in digestible chunks. I confess that I'm not a terribly analytical reader, however, so it's quite easy to slip clues past me under cover of an exciting storyline!
The book is not quite as long as its page count would lead one to believe. In true epic fantasy tradition there are several appendices, including a dramatis personae, an Aztec glossary, and an essay about the background to writing the book. This latter gives some interesting insights into de Bodard's writing process, as well as explaining how much fact vs fiction has gone into the novel. The one thing I felt was lacking was a pronunciation guide for the names; I was driven to search the web for guides to Nahuatl, but finding a reliable one that adequately covered the names used in the book proved a difficult task.
Overall I enjoyed this book a great deal, and will definitely be reading the second volume, which is already waiting on my iPad!
Disclaimer: Aliette and I share both a publisher and an agent. I take this, not so much as bias, as an indication that our tastes are similar and attract a similar audience. It should not surprise anyone, therefore, if I enjoyed this book!
Servant of the Underworld is de Bodard's debut novel and the first in her series about Acatl, High Priest of the Dead in the city of Tenochtitlan. In it, Acatl finds himself embroiled in the case of a missing priestess when his brother, a knight of the prestigious Order of the Jaguar, is found in her room covered in blood. Acatl has always been jealous of his more successful brother, but concern for his sister-in-law and her children, as well as a dogged sense of honour, drive him to pursue the case despite his misgivings.
By choosing to set a novel in the Mexica Empire, de Bodard has a tough task on her hands. Most readers will probably have some basic ideas about the Aztecs, thanks to Indiana Jones and similar sources--cue mental images of step pyramids, crystal skulls, and of course human sacrifice!--but the details of daily life are less familiar and, thanks to a fragmentary archaeological record, incomplete in any case. Writing fiction in such a setting therefore requires a mixture of historical research and fantasy-style world-building, not to mention the ability to present this world in an easy-to-absorb fashion.
Take the matter of names, for starters. The language of the Mexica Empire, Nahuatl, is agglutinative, meaning it produces long polysyllabic words. Add to that a Spanish-derived orthography and you end up with names that are difficult for any English-speaking reader to parse and remember: Ceyaxochitl, Neutemoc, Quiyahuayo. Thankfully de Bodard is careful not to introduce too many characters at once, and her protagonist at least has a short name, but added to the unfamiliar culture it makes this a hard book to get into at first. Unfortunately there's no real way around this unless one resorts to translations of names, and not all names translate into English in any case. I suspect this is one reason why non-Eurocentric real-world fantasy is relatively rare. An Anglophone writer creating a secondary world is free to invent names that are easily comprehensible to an English-speaking audience--Gandalf, Elric, Rincewind--whereas one writing about a real, historical culture has no such option.
The second difficulty de Bodard faces is the reality of the religion of this period, notorious for mass sacrifices (of humans as well as animals) which presents a real barrier to reader sympathy. Characters slit the throats of animals to power their spells, or speak casually of the deaths of men, women and children that are required to placate their gods. De Bodard softens this impact by never dwelling on the gory details--which is appropriate, since to her characters this is all very normal and unremarkable--but it is an ever-present shadow nonetheless.
What holds the story together and keeps the reader turning pages is the steady presence of the amateur detective, Acatl, who is himself a fish out of water: an unambitious parish priest promoted higher than he feels competent to deal with. Acatl's humility and caution also help to balance the fact that he wields powerful magics; powers that could all too easily overwhelm the plot in the hands of a more assertive character (or a less skillful author!). Occasionally I felt that Acatl went a little too far in the direction of humility, and his constant fretting about his relationship with his brother became a little repetitive, but this was a minor detraction from the pleasure of spending time with him.
One advantage of writing a crime story in an unfamiliar setting is that the reader knows too little to be able to guess the ending, and yet the challenge to the writer is that the identity of the killer still has to make sense. I felt this was handled pretty well in Servant of the Underworld, with the escalation from an apparently simple murder to a major conspiracy at the highest levels of the Mexica world presented in digestible chunks. I confess that I'm not a terribly analytical reader, however, so it's quite easy to slip clues past me under cover of an exciting storyline!
The book is not quite as long as its page count would lead one to believe. In true epic fantasy tradition there are several appendices, including a dramatis personae, an Aztec glossary, and an essay about the background to writing the book. This latter gives some interesting insights into de Bodard's writing process, as well as explaining how much fact vs fiction has gone into the novel. The one thing I felt was lacking was a pronunciation guide for the names; I was driven to search the web for guides to Nahuatl, but finding a reliable one that adequately covered the names used in the book proved a difficult task.
Overall I enjoyed this book a great deal, and will definitely be reading the second volume, which is already waiting on my iPad!
Ten Ruby Trick by Julia Knight
4.0
Black into white into blue into grey into black. Order and pattern are the way of Holden’s life, buffering his mind from the reality that he is mage-bonded to the Master of the Archipelago, with no choice but to obey his every whim or die in agony. So when the Master commands him to capture the notorious privateer Andor Van Gast, Holden has no qualms about using his former lover Josie to do it. Josie, herself a pirate captain of no mean repute, is well known to be Van Gast’s worst enemy, so surely she will be happy to help Holden? In fact Josie and Van Gast are secret lovers, using their famed rivalry to fool their victims into siding with one or the other in elaborate confidence tricks–and Josie intends Holden to be next. This time, though, the stakes are higher than money or treasure. If anything goes wrong, both she and Van Gast could end up dead–or worse.
Ten Ruby Trick is in many ways the perfect swashbuckling romance. Van Gast is the quintessential rogue-with-a-heart-of-gold, always ready to do the stupid-but-exciting thing; Josie is cunning as a bag of foxes and stubborn as all hell. There are sea battles, storms, chases (lots of chases!) and a really nasty villain to boo – what’s not to like?
This is no bland medieval fantasy world, however. The majority of the inhabitants are dark-skinned, apart from the Viking-like Gan, and gunpowder weapons sit comfortably alongside magic that can quell storms or erect forcefields against cannonades. Most intriguing of all is the magic of the Archipelago, which crystallises on its users’ skins, turning them into helpless grotesques, barely able to move and reliant on their slaves for everything. This is nasty, dark magic at its most imaginative.
I began my review with Holden, as does the book, because although Van Gast is undeniably the hero of the story, Holden is the anti-hero. He’s the guy we want to fail – and yet whose struggles against the vile magics that hold him in thrall cannot help but engage the reader’s sympathy. The theme of this book is freedom, and no character embodies that theme better than Holden.
If you enjoyed Pirates of the Caribbean or Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar books and don’t mind a dash of unsoppy romance with your fantasy, I recommend you give Ten Ruby Trick a whirl!
Ten Ruby Trick is in many ways the perfect swashbuckling romance. Van Gast is the quintessential rogue-with-a-heart-of-gold, always ready to do the stupid-but-exciting thing; Josie is cunning as a bag of foxes and stubborn as all hell. There are sea battles, storms, chases (lots of chases!) and a really nasty villain to boo – what’s not to like?
This is no bland medieval fantasy world, however. The majority of the inhabitants are dark-skinned, apart from the Viking-like Gan, and gunpowder weapons sit comfortably alongside magic that can quell storms or erect forcefields against cannonades. Most intriguing of all is the magic of the Archipelago, which crystallises on its users’ skins, turning them into helpless grotesques, barely able to move and reliant on their slaves for everything. This is nasty, dark magic at its most imaginative.
I began my review with Holden, as does the book, because although Van Gast is undeniably the hero of the story, Holden is the anti-hero. He’s the guy we want to fail – and yet whose struggles against the vile magics that hold him in thrall cannot help but engage the reader’s sympathy. The theme of this book is freedom, and no character embodies that theme better than Holden.
If you enjoyed Pirates of the Caribbean or Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar books and don’t mind a dash of unsoppy romance with your fantasy, I recommend you give Ten Ruby Trick a whirl!
A Shadow in Summer by Daniel Abraham
4.0
It’s not often that a debut novel blows me away, but A Shadow in Summer did just that. I came across this book a few months ago on Fantasy Faction, where it was getting great word-of-mouth, and was surprised I had not heard of Abraham before; unlike contemporary debuts by Scott Lynch, Joe Abercrombie, etc, this one had totally slipped under my radar.
The novel is set in Saraykeht, an Oriental-like city in an apparently pre-industrial fantasy world. It’s hard to say who is the protagonist, since the book follows several characters involved on different sides of a complex political intrigue*, but my favourite is Amat Kyaan, the elderly chief accountant of a foreign merchant. Amat is what is generally described as “a tough old bird”; she refuses to take life lying down, despite the pain and fragility of her years, and is, to my mind, the most sympathetic and well-rounded character in the book.
What really sets this world apart is not just the Japanese-inspired culture, but the magic used by the poets of Saraykeht. Not wizards, mind; the poets themselves have no magic apart from the gift of being able to capture an abstract concept in words and thus transform it into a sentient being, an andat. These beautiful, djinn-like beings are enslaved to their poet-masters, and have the power to perform any magic that can be encompassed by the concept they embody. Thus the andat in this book, Seedless, is used to instantly remove the seeds from the cotton harvest, thus giving Saraykeht’s textile-workers a huge advantage over other nations who must card their cotton by hand. However this is not the only possible use of his abilities – anything that involves the removal of seed (in its widest biological meaning) can be done with ease by the andat – and the story revolves around a plot to abuse that power.
This brings me around to my one criticism of the book, which is that sometimes Abraham is too subtle for his own good. The intrigue hinges around an event which is described so obliquely, with litte explanation either before or after, that the reader is left scratching her head for several chapters, trying to work out what the heck just happened. I did come to some conclusions eventually, but my enjoyment of the book would have been greatly improved by just a little hand-holding from the author.
A Shadow in Summer is beautifully written, complex and subtle, and some may find the languorous pace of the narrative boring, but my experience was one of being drawn slowly but inexorably into a fascinating world that has all the elegance of a tea ceremony with the undercurrent of menace of an ukiyo-e woodcut. This is a seductive novel that I think will bear re-reading; if it’s helter-skelter action you want, look elsewhere!
* I was not surprised to discover that he has occasionally collaborated with George R R Martin; whilst their books are very dissimilar in many respects, their politically complex, morally grey fantasy worlds have a lot in common.
The novel is set in Saraykeht, an Oriental-like city in an apparently pre-industrial fantasy world. It’s hard to say who is the protagonist, since the book follows several characters involved on different sides of a complex political intrigue*, but my favourite is Amat Kyaan, the elderly chief accountant of a foreign merchant. Amat is what is generally described as “a tough old bird”; she refuses to take life lying down, despite the pain and fragility of her years, and is, to my mind, the most sympathetic and well-rounded character in the book.
What really sets this world apart is not just the Japanese-inspired culture, but the magic used by the poets of Saraykeht. Not wizards, mind; the poets themselves have no magic apart from the gift of being able to capture an abstract concept in words and thus transform it into a sentient being, an andat. These beautiful, djinn-like beings are enslaved to their poet-masters, and have the power to perform any magic that can be encompassed by the concept they embody. Thus the andat in this book, Seedless, is used to instantly remove the seeds from the cotton harvest, thus giving Saraykeht’s textile-workers a huge advantage over other nations who must card their cotton by hand. However this is not the only possible use of his abilities – anything that involves the removal of seed (in its widest biological meaning) can be done with ease by the andat – and the story revolves around a plot to abuse that power.
This brings me around to my one criticism of the book, which is that sometimes Abraham is too subtle for his own good. The intrigue hinges around an event which is described so obliquely, with litte explanation either before or after, that the reader is left scratching her head for several chapters, trying to work out what the heck just happened. I did come to some conclusions eventually, but my enjoyment of the book would have been greatly improved by just a little hand-holding from the author.
A Shadow in Summer is beautifully written, complex and subtle, and some may find the languorous pace of the narrative boring, but my experience was one of being drawn slowly but inexorably into a fascinating world that has all the elegance of a tea ceremony with the undercurrent of menace of an ukiyo-e woodcut. This is a seductive novel that I think will bear re-reading; if it’s helter-skelter action you want, look elsewhere!
* I was not surprised to discover that he has occasionally collaborated with George R R Martin; whilst their books are very dissimilar in many respects, their politically complex, morally grey fantasy worlds have a lot in common.