“If you are interested in reading a story filled with thrillingly good times, I am sorry to inform you that you are most certainly reading the wron“If you are interested in reading a story filled with thrillingly good times, I am sorry to inform you that you are most certainly reading the wrong book”
Count Olaf’s nefarious plans for a marriage with Violet Baudelaire and the theft of the children’s inherited wealth were foiled in A BAD BEGINNING and THE REPTILE ROOM, BOOK THE SECOND. Mr Poe remains blind and hopelessly insensitive to the children’s danger and Count Olaf proves that, while he was down, he most certainly isn’t out. He continues to lust for the children’s bankroll. The children’s hopes for a safe and comfortable life with an elderly aunt who is a relentlessly pedantic grammar Nazi aunt terrified of everything from doorknobs to telephones are, of course, dashed on the rocks of continuing “unfortunate events” including, for goodness’ sake, being handed over to the “guardianship” of the Count.
Snicket’s unique, dare I say bizarre, stylistic hook, the interminable offerings of doom and gloom to a most delightful family of children continues to work and exudes a very puzzling kind of charm. The children’s love for one another and their endearing ability to squirm their way through the tiniest of holes and the tightest of fixes is quite heartwarming.
A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS is definitely recommended for both children and for young at heart adult readers who enjoy dipping their toes into lighter fare from to time. On an even more positive note, I will commend Snicket’s writing style as being very “grown-up” in tone, never patronizing or condescending to young readers for even a microsecond and, in the bargain, quite educational and useful for building a young person’s vocabulary of more “adult” words.
Not quite the stuff of bedtime reading for your infant -
but very much a good quality primer for science-phobic or science-uninformed readers at virtuNot quite the stuff of bedtime reading for your infant -
but very much a good quality primer for science-phobic or science-uninformed readers at virtually any level of the basic tenets that underlie Einstein's General Theory of Relativity (which is generally anything BUT easy reading).
“The worth [of anything we do] is in the act. Your worth halts when you surrender the will to change and experience life”
Eragon found the blue stone i“The worth [of anything we do] is in the act. Your worth halts when you surrender the will to change and experience life”
Eragon found the blue stone in the forest and brought it home thinking that perhaps it might have been worth a few coins to help his impoverished family buy some food for the coming winter. How could he possibly have known that the stone was, in fact, a long-lost dragon egg?
If Christopher Paolini ever suggested that he wasn’t influenced by Tokien and THE LORD OF THE RINGS in the youthful imaginative creation of his extraordinary debut, I’m afraid I’d have to call him a liar. ERAGON didn’t have a Ring of Power to launch Frodo on his quest to Mordor but the parallels are obvious. Saphira, the as yet unhatched resident of the wondrous blue egg, chose Eragon to become a Dragon Rider, in fact, the ONLY one extant in all of the known lands. The game, as Sherlock would have quickly noted, was afoot and Eragon was summarily launched on a marathon multi-novel good versus evil quest against the megalomaniacal aspirations of Galbatorix to dominate the world.
Dwarves, elves, magic spells, runes, endless underground cities and cavernous passages, and slaves abound. Tolkien’s orcs stand against the dwarves, the elves and the forces of good in the form of repellent Urgals and Ra’zac while his terrifying Ringwraiths are represented by the powerful Shade, a creature with all but insurmountable tenacity and fighting skills. Murtagh is Samwise to Eragon's Frodo. And, if you’re going to emulate Tolkien and THE LORD OF THE RINGS, one might as well go all in and create a Gandalf as well – Brom, a wise old man with an apparently endless fount of knowledge of magic, its Language of Power, and simple bon mots of good sense and survival.
Paolini did craft a couple of his own creations that added to the character of his version of “the fellowship” – Angela, a “witch” with the ability to read the future even if it was rather foggy and had to be couched in interpretations that seemed to be more riddle than sensible prognostications; and Solembum, a wickedly humorous werecat with a very feline personality and someone who you would definitely want to be on your side.
If Paolini matches Tolkien’s success in maintaining the thrills, spills, chills, lumps, and bumps promised in ERAGON through a three novel trilogy, then this lover of the fantasy genre will be one happy camper. ERAGON is an astonishing debut novel and an easy novel to recommend as a 5-star start to THE INHERITANCE CYCLE.
“He will be the destruction of the crown and the ruination of the throne.”
THE QUEEN OF NOTHING is a worthy 5-star ending to a brilliant trilogy that “He will be the destruction of the crown and the ruination of the throne.”
THE QUEEN OF NOTHING is a worthy 5-star ending to a brilliant trilogy that can comfortably and proudly stand with the best in the crowded fantasy genre. But make no mistake. Despite its characterization as young adult fantasy, THE QUEEN OF NOTHING, like its predecessors in the story of the fairies of Elfhame, is harsh, graphic in its depiction of violence, murder, and death, and plain speaking in its portrayal of treachery, betrayal, the self-serving attitudes of wealth and privilege, xenophobia and misogyny.
Jude, despite her erstwhile elevation to the lofty position of Queen of Faerie by virtue of her marriage to Prince Cardan, has been exiled to an indefinite exile in the land of her fellow mortals to bide her time, to guard the life of Oak, the ultimate heir to the throne, and to worry about the future of her Fae sisters, Vivienne and her twin Taryn, whose life is now at risk in the turbulent aftermath of the murder of her husband. A curse has threatened the death of Cardan, now the crowned king, and war seems imminent in the magic land to which Jude knows she must return.
It is with a sigh of the deepest satisfaction at the turn of the last page that I realize that the FOLK OF THE AIR series has not only earned 5-stars and the highest recommendation as a series but it has earned that status in each of its three parts considered as individual novels. Now that is a serious achievement. Well done, Ms Black, and here’s hoping that you will treat your fans to further tales in your powerful and fabulously entertaining Elfhame fairy universe.
“No matter how much he disliked me when we were in school, that was a guttering candle to the steady flame of his hatred now.”
THE WICKED KING, des“No matter how much he disliked me when we were in school, that was a guttering candle to the steady flame of his hatred now.”
THE WICKED KING, despite its characterization as young adult fantasy, is a harsh story, graphic in its depiction of violence, murder, and death, and plain speaking in its depiction of treachery, betrayal, the self-serving attitudes of wealth and privilege, xenophobia and misogyny. Picking up precisely where the story in THE CRUEL PRINCE ended, Jude begins her life as an empowered kingmaker, a guardian of the life of the heir apparent to the fairy high throne, a spymaster, a conniving statesman, and seneschal to the sitting king who would be a proud daughter to a hypothetical mating of Machiavelli and Mata Hari.
If Jude is to ensure that her brother Oak ascends to the throne when he comes of age, if Jude is to deal with her burgeoning complicated feelings towards the wicked king, Cardan, if Jude is to successfully deal with the machinations of an enemy within her circle of trust who will betray her, then she must be at the top of her game and use every weapon available to her. But the sad reality is that her arsenal of mortal weapons and skills is sadly lacking in the face of the magic of the world of fae.
My rather breathless 5-star rating of THE CRUEL PRINCE left me with the fear that high expectations for THE WICKED KING would be dashed on the rocky shores of second-novel-in-a-trilogy blues. No worries! Holly Black delivered the goods … in spades! THE WICKED KING was a gripping fantasy thriller that kept me in a solid reading stranglehold from first page to last. Now I can cross my fingers, raise my eyebrows, and hold my breath waiting to dig into the final novel in the series THE QUEEN OF NOTHING.
On a side note, I’ll admit that I smiled as I read what I think Ms Black intended to be a brief homage to England’s greatest bard and playwright, William Shakespeare, when she puts some epic words into the mouth of a hag “old and powerful enough that the air around her seems to crackle with the force of her magic.” Shakespeare would definitely have seen her as a witch. And those epic words? “We three will meet again.” Well played, Ms Black.
“Why did he come back here? Why couldn’t he just leave us alone?”
As a young boy, Finn suffered a loss that no boy should have to endure – the loss“Why did he come back here? Why couldn’t he just leave us alone?”
As a young boy, Finn suffered a loss that no boy should have to endure – the loss of his mother to murder. Years later, as his stepmother is gunned down by the same murderer and his father reacts and kills the gunman, Finn witnesses the event in shocked silence. During subsequent visits to the police station, Finn meets Lila, the daughter of his mother’s convicted murderer, and unknowingly strikes up a friendship.
GUILTY is a brilliant young adult mystery told in alternating chapters of first person narrative from Finn’s and Lila’s dramatically diverging points of view. Friendship, growth, loyalty, coming of age, regret, sorrow, and forgiveness all make their appearance in a gripping novel which doesn’t slip into sappiness or melodrama for even an instant.
Definitely recommended. And kudos to a Canadian author whose work I’ll be looking for in the months to come.
“… just like the old ones the government stole us away to, where they conducted experiments, where the“I was in one of the new residential schools, …”
“… just like the old ones the government stole us away to, where they conducted experiments, where they tried to kill the Indian in the child.”
HUNTING BY STARS, a sequel to THE MARROW THIEVES, posits a mid-21st century dystopian world, caused by the ravages of global climate warming, in which non-aboriginal white people have somehow lost the ability to dream. The scientific reasons for this devastating neurological deficit in white people and the fact that its cure rests in the bone marrow of aboriginal people are not explored. Nor are those explanations necessary for Dimaline’s story - aboriginal people are hunted down, their bone marrow is harvested, and the marrow donor is summarily killed. Aboriginal lives are meaningless and expendable in the drive to rescue whites from the plague and pandemic madness caused by the loss of dreaming. Even worse yet, with a terrifying program of indoctrination and brain-washing (in a manner much like Rick Yancey hypothesized for his extraterrestrial invasion in his young adult sci-fi novel, THE 5TH WAVE), some aboriginals, having been captured by the marauding whites, are absorbed and re-inserted into their communities as secret agents to assist with the “recruiting and harvesting” of healthy young aboriginals for their marrow.
The narrative stands, fully exposed in its naked reality, as an extended metaphor for the cultural and actual genocide of aboriginal people in Canada by the white non-native population, their government and its tools, the Roman Catholic and other Christian churches.
Highly recommended with the added hope that THE MARROW THIEVES and its sequel HUNTING BY STARS make it onto the curriculum for younger school readers. Perhaps if young readers, who are undoubtedly innocent of Canada’s past offenses, become shocked and angry, they will become adamant activists in the fight to ensure the problem is repaired and subsequently relegated to history. (Dare I say that we might hope to swell the ranks of the “woke”?) Like the first step in AA’s Twelve Step Program to recovery from alcoholism, the white community’s acknowledgement of the existence of this problem, as shameful and as embarrassing as it is (and note carefully that this is couched in the present tense), is the first necessary step to a meeting of the minds with aboriginal people, to the adoption of some of the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and to the elevation of aboriginal people to a recognized, important status in the future of a compassionate, tolerant, forward-thinking Canada.
“Forget about flying saucers and little green men and giant mechanical spiders spitting out death ray“The truth is, once they found us, we were toast”
“Forget about flying saucers and little green men and giant mechanical spiders spitting out death rays. Forget about epic battles with tanks and fighter jets and the final victory of us scrappy, unbroken, intrepid humans over the bug-eyed swarm. That’s about as far from the truth as their dying planet was from our living one.”
THE 5TH WAVE is a gripping young adult tale of courage and survival in the face of an extraterrestrial invasion that knocks the intellectual stuffing out of the likes of INDEPENDENCE DAY, a much loved classics like THE WAR OF THE WORLDS or even the best that the STAR WARS franchise has to offer. This invasion was not meant for mere planetary conquest. This was all-out total genocide of humankind that had been planned over centuries and would be carefully executed in five stages – first, EMP or electromagnetic pulse; second, artificially generated coastal tsunamis on a global scale; third, a devastating plague; fourth, the silent hunting down and execution of remaining pockets of humanity … and the fifth? Well, you’re just going to have to read the story, aren’t you?
Aside from telling a fascinating tale of survival, romance, high-tech horror and gruesome dystopia, I have no doubt that Rick Yancey was also making a profound political comment. He was leaving intellectual thinking room for the conclusion that his story was an extended metaphor for the possible destruction of the USA or even world from within by current right-wing elements, gun worship, and even evangelical Christianity. A literary, book-length version of Walt Kelly’s oft-repeated Pogo aphorism, “We have met the enemy and he is us”.
Consider these rather interesting hints that might lead a reader to that interpretation:
‘ “Twigs” … street for “thugs with guns”, murderers, rapists, black marketers, kidnappers, and just your general punks who showed up midway through the 3rd wave … it wasn’t the aliens that first made us gear up for war; it was our fellow humans.”
“Dad had a thing about guns. Never liked them. Said guns might not kill people, but they sure made it easier. Now he didn’t think they were dangerous so much as he thought they were ridiculously lame.”
‘ “Now I lay me down to sleep …” to me, just random noise. Gibberish. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but I felt that, when it came to God, there was a broken promise in there somewhere.”
Maybe there’s a message and maybe there’s only a story. But, if you put your nose down to where the rubber hits the road, that story is pretty damned exciting. Definitely recommended.
Shadowblack – be it curse, disease, power, magic or conduit to a demonic nation - is hated with all-consuming passion
SOULBINDER describes it as not
"siShadowblack – be it curse, disease, power, magic or conduit to a demonic nation - is hated with all-consuming passion
SOULBINDER describes it as not
"simply a form of energy; it is potential life devoid of consciousness.
Kellen’s family, indeed his entire Jan’Tep people, consider it to be
“a conduit by which demons will one day manifest themselves into our world and use the power of the mages they’ve infected to bring untold horrors upon us all.”
Whatever explanation best suits a reader’s interpretation of the fantasy underpinnings of de Castell’s magnificent, gripping world, contemplative, more analytical readers will see it as the metaphorical stand in for the source of a two way all-consuming xenophobic hatred. In our embattled day-to-day world, it might be skin colour, sexual orientation, language and culture, appearance, or religion. In Kellen’s world, it’s Shadowblack.
Those afflicted with Shadowblack “know” that their survival is dependent on the elimination of the mages who hunt them and those mages, in turn, are commanded by their own “clarity of mind” and their “dominion over the six esoteric forces of reality” to eliminate Shadowblack and its corruption from their world.
Kellen’s relationship with his familiar, the smart-aleck, wise-cracking Reichis, a mercurial flying fur-ball squirrel cat with a murderous chip on its shoulder reminiscent of Shrek’s donkey equipped with an attitude and the fangs and claws to back it up blossoms from friendship into an unbreakable, endearing, and heartwarming loving partnership. The humour, the adventure, the fantasy camaraderie, the rootin’, tootin’, high-falutin’ cowpokes versus the bad guys theme, and the swaggering self-important mannerisms of de Castell’s heroes and anti-heroes continue unabated. But readers may rest easy. Despite concerns that this lighthearted, at times frivolous, approach to such serious themes and moral messages might have become overdone or tiresome, de Castell manages to hold it all at a perfect level.
SOULBINDER is definitely the best of the series thus far and an easy novel to gush with enthusiasm about. And that is a rather astounding accomplishment. It’s the fourth entry in a continuing series and I’ve rated every single novel in the series so far at an easily awarded 5 stars. Everything about this novel and the series is SO good – pacing; plot; characters; exceptionally creative world-building; humour; dialogue; innovative use of typical fantasy themes such as magic, good vs evil, romance, coming of age; use of appropriate allegories to consider deeper moral messages such as violence, warfare, xenophobia, racism; and so on. And, once again, I put my hands together and clap extra loudly about the fact that Mr de Castell is a Canadian author! Woot, woot!
I can’t tell you how eager I am to get my copy of #5 QUEENSLAYER.
“I don’t suppose you’ve considered being less munificent with your love.” “Would you marry me, Fire, if I slept in no one’s bed but yours?”
Hard on “I don’t suppose you’ve considered being less munificent with your love.” “Would you marry me, Fire, if I slept in no one’s bed but yours?”
Hard on the heels of GRACELING, the debut novel in the Graceling Realm series, FIRE is definitely a strong sequel from the point of view of compelling plot, strong well-developed characterization, and catchy, credible dialogue. But it falls seriously short when it comes to the world-building that is necessary to understand that plot and the character’s motivations.
Young King Nash’s throne and his rule over the people of the Dells may be said to be under siege from two rebel armies – one to the north and one to the south. The countryside outside of King’s City is filled with spies, thieves and cutthroats. The skies are awash with bloodthirsty monsters who mercilessly swarm and attack at the slightest whiff of a traveler’s blood. Fire happens to be one of those monsters – the last human one, in fact – and, endowed with the power to read and even control the minds of living creatures around her, both human and animals, she is doing her best to avert what seems to be an inevitable war.
Her Machiavellian diplomatic efforts, motivated by her understanding of her opponents’ minds, seem to be moving in the right direction until she encounters Leck, a psychopathic and distinctly unpleasant Graceling who has found his way into the Dells across the forbidding Gray Mountains. Leck’s powers are ominous in their own right – he too can guide and pervert the minds of those around him but he must do so hampered by his inability to read those minds and know what they are thinking.
But then there’s the issue of that missing back story?? Why is Fire the LAST human monster? What happened to the others who must have existed at one time? Where did they come from? Where did that awesome power of telepathy and mind control come from? Do the non-human monsters have other powers as well? Why was Leck so clearly mentally disturbed and evil? Why did he kill his father? How did he find his way across the Gray Mountains when obviously nobody else has managed the same feat in either direction? What is the relationship between Gracelings and Monsters – I mean, c'mon, there just has to be one!?
The failure to answer these questions (or to even give some sort of indication that they WERE questions to be considered and answered) lowered my enjoyment of FIRE. But, that said, it is my hope that the next installment in the series, BITTERBLUE, will move in the direction of filling in some of that background void.
“Cal and I are not in the Silver world anymore … we have escaped.”
When I reviewed RED QUEEN, I characterized it as
“a timely and thrilling dystopia“Cal and I are not in the Silver world anymore … we have escaped.”
When I reviewed RED QUEEN, I characterized it as
“a timely and thrilling dystopian young adult tale of revolution in the face of authoritarian rule by a patriarchal royal family and a right-wing population that see privilege and rule as their right by virtue of their physical superiority (endowed, of course, by no more than the coincidence of their birth genes)”
set in a world
“populated by two peoples separated by their DNA and their blood – red (effectively like yours and mine and our fellow normal and human readers) or silver, that comes with a bewildering variety of fantastic and near magical powers.”
I praised the novel for its commentary on a variety of disparate themes –
“coming of age and young love (including, of course, the almost mandatory love triangle); family; war and death; slavery, totalitarianism, and revolution; courage and heroism, loyalty, and friendship; compassion contrasted with anything that a reader might consider its opposites; government; hereditary royalty, and more.”
GLASS SWORD not only failed to clear the expectations set by this fabulous opening novel, it tripped and fell before it even got to the point of attempting to jump over the bar!
While I was happy to give RED QUEEN a 5-star rating and a place on my Top 10 Reads of 2022 list, its sequel, GLASS SWORD (which I was anticipating with a world of high expectations) on the other hand is a classic example of fall-flat-on-your-face crash and burn! The plot, such as it is, includes only an endless pointless search for Aveyard’s mental vision of a Legion of Super Heroes – those other folks in Cal Calore’s and Mare Barrow’s world who were inexplicably born with the hybrid gene that gifts them unimaginable (and unexplained) super powers. In short, she’s accumulating a revolutionary army of red-silver hybrid X-men. The meandering search and Mare Barrow’s perpetual introspection questioning her abilities, her motives, her judgment, and whether, in fact, Cal is to be trusted any more than his evil brother Maven becomes a flat, boring trudge that actually escalates into aggravating and pushes the reader into a “GET ON WITH IT!!” mental state.
Sorry, Ms Aveyard. This reader simply lost interest and endurance waiting for something meaningful to happen. GLASS SWORD was, regrettably, set aside as a 1-star DNF and KING’S CAGE or any subsequent novels in the series were permanently removed from my TBR list.
As nothing has fundamentally changed my opinion, it's worth repeating the entire review that I prepared for A series going downhill on a shallow slope
As nothing has fundamentally changed my opinion, it's worth repeating the entire review that I prepared for THE RUNAWAY KING.
In THE FALSE PRINCE, the opening novel in THE ASCENDANCE TRILOGY, Jaron Eckbert was characterized as a raffish, picaresque, young rogue with an attitude and a comical mouth that often wrote cheques coming disastrously close to being dishonored. But for all that, he was both loving and lovable and there couldn’t possibly have been a reader who wasn’t rooting for him to set aside his disguise as an impoverished orphan, to adopt his true identity, and to claim the throne of Carthya as its rightful king. In THE RUNAWAY KING, as Jaron assumes that rightful identity and expects to be crowned the king, he now faces stern opposition - a council of regents unwilling to accept the coronation of such a youthful king. Indeed, he even has to survive an assassination attempt.
Unfortunately as the story unfolds, Jaron’s hopelessly optimistic and apparently unrealistic, unexpected, and often opposed decision-making ( for the affected adults around him and, I dare say, for an adult reader) become simply unreasonable and irritating. It seems even more grating when Nielsen allows the outcomes to get steadily luckier and to constantly justify Jaron’s decisions. As a predictable result, the story simply becomes less and less credible. On the plus side, there are outstanding moments of convincing and heart-warming personal growth, friendship, loyalty and emotion that preserve THE RUNAWAY KING’s status as a 3- or 4- star story for an adult reader. So it seems sensible to err on the higher side of that rating given that the intended audience is young adult.
Given that the credibility factor in THE SHADOW THRONE is stretched even more tightly as Jaron, on occasion, presumes to stand alone in the face of entire armies AND that one particular event in a battle seems like a flat-out snitch from a scene in A GAME OF THRONES, I'd lower my rating as an adult reader to no more than 2 stars. But, once again, given that the audience is middle grade young adult readers, I'll allow it to stretch to a begrudging 3-stars.
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