Thorin's Review - Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Title: Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Series: Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Author: Susanna Clarke
Genre:Fantasy
Publisher: Tor Books      
Received: Purchased
Release Date: August 2006   
Pages:1024
Rating:


What is it About?
The book is set in England around the Napoleonic wars. England used to be bathed in magic, with most of its northern regions ruled by a Faerie-raised human magician named the Raven King who ruled with an army of dark faeries. But that was then, and now magic has mostly left English magicians. No one knows why. All current "magicians" can do is study the histories of the phenomenal magic magicians used to wield.

However, two men emerge who can do real magic. The first is a taciturn, professorial, unpleasant and meek man named Mr. Norrell, who is able at one point to bring a young noble woman back from the dead. He is desperate to study magic, but at the same time so fearful that whenever he finds other "magicians," he drives them out of business. The other is a charismatic but absent minded, fickle and reckless man named Johnathan strange.

My Thoughts

This is the best book I've read in a long time. The funny thing is, I had an unsolicited review copy sitting around for several years but it didn't look interesting. Shannon got another copy when the paperback came out, and as you can see, I'm ecstatic that I gave it a chance.

Like all the best books, this one is really about the characters, and those characters are fascinating. It also covers a wide stretch of time, so a lot happens and the characters are really evolving over the course of it. Norrell emerges as the first real magician anyone has seen in centuries, creates a stir, revives the noble woman with the help of a dangerous fairy who then begins kidnapping people to come to his nightly nightmarish balls, and eventually sees Strange as a rival, then student, then peer. Strange is a young nobleman who discovers magic just after he marries a beautiful bride. His magic takes him into Norell's tutelage, but then into the Napoleonic wars in Europe where he fights with under Wellington. Eventually the fairy mentioned above fakes his wife's death and steals her, and Strange goes further into magic and madness than anyone has in centuries to confront him, even though he never bother to wonder about his wife's suspicious death,

The book is just magical and fascinating all the time, with a great mix of typically fantastical plot points, but also intricate human interactions. Clarke is said to write in a pastiche of victorian styles--borrowing a little Dickens, a little Austen--and I liked it. It flirts with Victorian romance, but never so long that the book becomes boring or mawkish, it always maintains that Harry Potter aura of discovering the secrets and powers of magic. A great read for anyone who liked Harry Potter, but is a little older now and wants to read about the themes from a more adult point of view.

Website:
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Thorin's Review - Blood Oath by Christopher Farnsworth

Title: Blood Oath
Series: The President's Vampire
Author(s): Christopher Farnsworth
Genre: Supernatural Thriller
Publisher: G. P. Putnam's Sons
Received: Received from ...
Release Date: May 18, 2010
Finished: May 1, 2010
Pages: 390
Challenges: None
Rating:

 


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My Thoughts: In 1867 the President pardoned a vampire. No, for real. Andrew Johnson, elevated to president after Lincoln's assassination, did pardon a sailor who killed two of his crew-mates and claimed to be a vampire. The man spent the rest of his days in a mental institution. Or, as Blood Oath posits, at least that's the cover story.
Blood Oath is the story of how that Vampire, Nathaniel Cade, was actually bound to the will of the President of the United States by a blood oath and became a super-powered secret agent fighting supernatural threats to the U.S. The story picks up as he gets a new liaison, Zach Barrows, a young politico go-getter from the new president's campaign staff who was caught in a "decidedly non-procreative act" with the president's 19-year old daughter; this lifetime assignment is his career exile. Before long they're on the trail of Dr. Frankenstein, a chemist/surgeon/alchemist who has all the dark gravitas of Hellboy's Rasputin, and clashing with a black ops arm of the government that's under even darker cover than Cade. The plot is a potpourri of terrorists, defiled corpses of U.S. soldiers, immortality and the apocalypse.
Blood Oath reads like Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets James Bond (or Supernatural, 24 and Fringe to bring this reference into the new Millennium). It's got a good story, good twists, and Farnsworth makes about half a dozen characters come to life. Backstories and appetizing facts are sprinkled throughout to give everyone depth without slowing anything down. Just a really solid piece of storytelling.
Nothing in the book is necessarily new ground, but it's put together in new ways with a lot of polish (Farnsworth is a career journalist and scriptwriter, and it shows). The vampires, especially Cade, have an undercurrent of inhuman predator just beneath the almost human veneer that gives them more flavor than the parade of cry baby blood-addicts they pass of as vampires all over pop culture. Dr. Frankenstein is one of those characters I usually hate seeing resurrected, but again Farnsworth builds him just right: A creepy, immortal, mad scientist Nazi who's merged genetics and alchemy to horrifying biowarfare effects and is now working with Muslim terrorists. It taps right into your worst fears of what a supernatural terrorist could do. The below-secret government organization helping him drops as many tantalizing hints as an episode of Fringe.
So why not give the book five stars? The writing really moves, it's characters are interesting, the dialog is good and the action is huge. But I couldn't quote you a single line from it, and it didn't leave me thinking of anything. Shannon got the book, I devoured it, I put it down and its done, nothing really stuck with me; it doesn't hit that next level. Blood Oath also suffers from super-creep: Guy X is indestructible and super powerful. Oh, but THESE GUYS are even indestructibler and super powerful. Frankenstein's monsters are just bigger, badder, tougher ... but you don't really get why. It's the sort of thing you dismiss to enjoy the story, but great genre stories don't put quite that much strain on disbelief. Put it this way: If I geek-holed Frankenstein's monsters, taking apart their fake "realism" for argument's sake, the conversation would be over in five seconds: Frankenstein did it. To do a supernatural thriller right, there should be more
meat on the geeky bones. It's not the difference between a good and bad story, but it is the difference between good and great genre fiction.
Having said that, Blood Oath is as good a summer read as you're going to find, and would make one heck of a comic book or movie. It's a good thing Cade was turned after that bad ass vampire hunter Abe Lincoln bit it.
 
About the Author: Christopher Farnsworth was an investigative and business reporter until he sold a script, THE ACADEMY, to MGM. Blood Oath is his first novel. Find him at http://www.chrisfarnsworth.com, and read more about Blood Oath at http://www.presidentsvampire.com


 

Thorin's Review - To Reign in Hell by Steven Brust

To Reign in Hell: A Novel

Synopsis: "His classic novel of the revolt in Heaven," is what the book cover says. However, this is no biblical account. Like Milton in Paradise Lost, Brust tells a fictional story (perhaps heresy, from certain viewpoints) of what went on in heaven to cause the famous Fall.

Seven beings created themselves by battling against a ravaging chaos called "cocoastrum" -- the angels Yahweh, Satan, Belial, Raphael, Leviathan, Lucifer and Michael. They, specifically Yahweh, raise heaven as a haven from this chaos, but waves of cocoastrum overcome its walls at irregular intervals. While they battle to hold it off, more angles are created in their wake -- each generation far more numerous than the last, but equally less powerful. The waves destroy many angels and maim many more. Each wave is a war, and each war is a tragedy.

Yahweh hatches “The Plan” to create a place the cocoastrum cannot penetrate. But to do so, they must effectively cause the fourth wave, and all the angels must help hold it back or build this new place (yes, it's Earth). But if the angels do not help, it won't be possible. And some may choose not to. So is it right to make them all work on the plan for the greater good, even if they don't wish to risk their own lives?

Yahweh asks Satan to be responsible for making these angels comply, but Satan's not comfortable doing so. Not knowing if his friends, the first wave angels, will help, Yahweh gets nervous. More, a later wave angel, Abdiel, is terrified that he may have to die to execute the plan. So Abdiel begins manipulating Yahweh, Satan and the others to foment revolt, forcing Yahweh to create his own army, which Abdiel puts himself in position to lead. Events speed into full war, the creation of Yeshua (Jesus) and the sundering of Heaven.

My Thoughts

This is like reading a train wreck. Immensely interesting, but you know by the names (Yahweh, Michael, Raphael and Satan, Lucifer, Leviathan, Belial, Lilith, Asmodai...) that it cannot end well.

Brust does a great job of unfolding a very personal story of misunderstandings, betrayals, lies and stubbornness that's a portrait of crumbling group dynamics. This is not a story of good and evil or the typical huge egos. It's immensely personal and takes pains to show each player in their own light. Some, like Abdiel, work in their own interests, but for understandable reasons (Abdiel is a coward). Others, like the loving Lilith or the crippled Belial and Leviathan (forever maimed into the shapes of a dragon and sea serpent, respectively, thanks to their last brush with cocoastrum), tug on your emotions. Satan reads like George Washington with his faithful friend Beelzebub, who is himself maimed into the shape of a golden retriever. Yahweh is the kindly builder who wants nothing more than the safety of the friends he loves, but can bear the death of thousands to save millions in the future.

You watch as the disagreement over The Plan balloons into the most cataclysmic rift at the hands of selfish manipulators. The whole time you hope the first angels will just sit down and talk and understand each other. But, again, you know those names... The universe does explode over one angel's lie. (Whose lie is very interesting.)

The setting lets Brust get away with a few things he couldn't otherwise. For example, treachery has never been invented. There's never been a murder. The few lies told have only been mischievous… So when Abdiel -- aghast that he may die himself and more than willing to have others take his place -- begins manipulating the situation, you accept that Yahweh and the other angels are naive of such wiles. Likewise, when characters do foolish things in rage, you understand that this is a rage unseen before in Heaven. Brust uses a gentle touch, seldom straining your suspension of disbelief, but the setting makes certain aspects of the plot possible. It also adds an element of children's naiveté, of innocence, that solidifies your sympathy for the characters.

The overall effect is a very good read. But the end's a train wreck in its own right: a sudden stop that doesn't get where it was going. The final battle is too abrupt, nothing is resolved (which is expected), and it's unclear what the heck happened to half the angels you've come to care about. There is an epilogue, but it's equally opaque, as if the book were setting up a sequel that never happened. I also feel like Brust's writing style is a little too steeped in modern American English, a little too conversational, which makes the writing a little breezy. That's not a bad thing for readability, but it undermines the atmosphere. While the characters come to life, their universe does not; it feels like this story could just as easily be set in a Wal-Mart. That makes this "classic" less so than books like The Lord of the Rings, or contemporaries such as American Gods or the Harry Potter series. (On the book cover, Tad Williams says Brust "just might be America's best fantasy writer." Perhaps the Brits just do fantasy better?)

About the Author

To Reign in Hell was the second book of Steven Brust, who has so far written 19 novels -- including 13 books of the Vlad Taltos series, the Alexander Dumas-tribute Khaavren Romances, and a Firefly novel available for free on his home page (http://dreamcafe.com). He lives in Nevada, has recorded a solo album, and is an open “Trotskyist sympathizer.” He was also a member of the Scribblies, thinks of it as Minnesota’s equivalent of the J.R.R. Tolkien’s/C.S. Lewis’ Oxford Inklings.

Thorin's Review - Nation by Terry Pratchett

Summary: The fire god became angry, and in his rage he unleashed a wave that destroyed the world. But Mau, a boy who’d journeyed away to become a man, survived. He returns to find everything he loved wiped from the earth, the wreckage of giant ship, and a little girl, Daphne, who may be the princess of England. “When much is taken, something is returned.”

My Thoughts: Nation is about change. First about the change of becoming an adult and learning that you have no choice but to exert your judgment and power on the world around you. But it’s also about change forced upon Mau and Daphne, and the other survivors who begin trickling to the island. It’s about upheaval, and keeping your history and culture without being a slave to the past and outmoded ideas, i.e., moving forward on your own terms. And it’s about actually going through those things. This isn’t some self-help book that says ‘people must do X.’ It’s a good story in which you will see yourself, and question whether or not you’d be willing to suckle milk from a wild pig in order to save a baby’s life.

The book is also fairly entertaining. I don’t think anything about the plot was exceptional, but Pratchet is a great writer, and it shows throughout the book. For example, all the characters are written with distinctive, memorable voices that you will remember after the book is done. When Mau has a desperate plan to save the day, you aren’t able to figure out what it is until it happens. You see the twists coming, but I wasn’t able to figure out what the twist was until it turned, and I usually have twists figured out 100 pages in advance. This is one of those book I considered giving 4 stars to, but it’s not as good as Anathem or Raw Shark Text, my past 4s, so I’m going to go with 3 stars. Still a good read, though.

About the Author: You’ve heard of Terry Pratchet. Discworld … Good Omens was a collaboration between him and Neil Gaiman that’s a legitimate 5-star read … He’s sold 55 million books and hopefully we’ll see another 50 million sold before he calls it a career.

READ SHANNON'S REVIEW OF NATION

Thorin's Review - Meeting The Other Crowd

Summary: Eddie Lenihan’s collection of authentic, oral-history fairy tales from the last of southwest Ireland’s elder storytellers. Meeting the Other Crowd is a glimpse into the original world of fairies as remembered by a generation of Irish who recall horse-drawn wagons, candlelight, chamber pots, and an invisible realm of “the other crowd” that was never more than a misstep away. An invisible nation intersecting theirs in a maze of dangerous interactions, threatening great harm to any who ran afoul of their ubiquitous fairy forts (hillocks ringed by Hawthorne trees that dot the land) or mysterious plans. There are 72 stories in all divided by subject into “who they are and what they want,” “fairy places and signs of their presence” and the “gifts punishments and other outcomes of fairy encounters.”

My thoughts: Meeting the Other Crowd can be read two ways. As a source book of authentic Irish folklore and the history of fairy lore, it’s good. Lenihan is a folklore preserver who’s combed his chosen habitat (southwest Ireland) for all the legends, fairy-tales and pub talk about Ireland’s mystic beliefs he could harvest, and this collection reads like no other book on fairies. It’s all about what neighbors have heard from neighbors and other relations, the real heart of fairy stories, and there ain’t no Tinkerbell. The Irish fairies were dangerous, their stories often fitting the framework of American ghost stories with added dangers of abduction like you’d find in demon lore (which some thought the fairies may actually be) and deformity and general misfortune if you crossed them. From this point of view it’s a 4-star book. The heart of traditional Ireland, a lost land whose memory is slipping away, thunders in every tale. The world revealed is fascinating. The only drawback is Lenihan’s heavy-handed analysis, which repetitiously warns of the dangers of disrespecting ancient traditions.

As a pure storybook, though, Meeting the Other Crowd is slaved to its oral roots. The fully formed stories of 6 or more pages are very satisfying, but many of them are not fully formed stories. Most of the 72 tales are just bare outlines of stories: ‘I once heard of a man who cut a tree from a fairy fort and don’t you know he died the next week.’ As a representation of Irish culture, that’s satisfying; as a story it’s not. So between that and Lenihan’s commentary, as a storybook I have to give this 2 stars. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad book, but it’s not an entertaining read on the strength of its stories alone (which are admittedly meant to be told, not read). You have to be interested in the culture they capture to be entertained, and then it’s more of a history book.

About the Author: Folklorist Eddie Lenihan is the author of 16 books, 11 audiotapes, a double CD and a video of traditional Irish stories. His Ten Minute Tales and Storyteller shows on Irish national television launched an international career, and he now visits many countries to tell traditional Irish tales.

Thorin's Review - Anathem

Summary: From the ARC’s summary page:

Since childhood, Raz has lived behind the walls of a 3,400-year-old monastery, a sanctuary for scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians. There, he and his cohorts are sealed off from the illiterate, irrational, unpredictable “saecular” world, an endless landscape of casinos and megastores that is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, dark ages and renaissances, world wars and climate change. Until the day that a higher power, driven by fear, decides it is only these cloistered scholars who have the abilities to avert an impending catastrophe. And, one by one, Raz and his friends, mentors, and teachers are summoned forth without warning into the unknown."

My Thoughts: Many stories end with the action heroes saving the day thanks to some world’s-last-only-hope-McGuffin-weapon that the world’s best scientists had been working round the clock throughout the story, albeit completely unbeknownst to the reader. This book shows you those scientists. And you quickly realize that what they’re working on, the ideas they’re debating and developing, are a lot more exciting and important than whatever Mr. and Mrs. Action Hero are up to. And frankly, they’re more fun to read about, the wizards of Stephenson’s recognizably futuristic world.

That summary above makes this book sound boring, but it’s not. It is very, very smart, though. This is the first thing I’ve read by Neal Stephenson, and now I know what I’ve been missing. He’s a modern-day science fiction writer in the metascience tradition of Aasimov and Bradbury. He’s not afraid of introducing readers to some huge ideas—you’ll come away with a better understanding of quantum mechanics, guaranteed—and incorporating them into an epic plot with characters who understand and use them.

Most of the conflict in Anathem takes place in conversations. But one of the more subtle tricks in writing is that conflict is conflict, whether it’s fought with words or nuclear bombs. If you write it well and provide some stakes, readers can be just a wrapped up in a televised debate that will decide a course of action—and therefore the fate of the world—as they are in a fight scene. More so, perhaps, because in your life, when has a punch mattered more than an interview or argument? (psst: The answer is never. The real question is, have you come to realize it?) Stephenson understands this and uses it well, which keeps Anathem very exciting. It’s riddles, revelations and ideas. And yes, there’s plenty of action in the end, but after so much intellectual combat it’s a little disappointing.

The other thing Anathem is is long, but not unrewardingly so because it’s the kind of book that another author might have done as three separate books. The first part takes place in a cloistered, academic “conscent” (think of a monastery/university campus that only lets its professors out every 10, 100 or even 1,000 years). The second part is a slow trip across half the “saecular” globe. Then you’re back in a math, and then in space. It’s one of those books that covers so much ground that many of your old questions become irrelevant as new twists are revealed, only to come up again later when you’d forgotten about them, which is rewarding as a reader. It’s seldom slow, although the 900-ish page book probably would have been better and just as complete if it shed about 200 pages.

So 4 stars. It’s a bit indulgent and there are some parts I found ended a little too conveniently happy, but I really liked Anathem. It made me think, made me remember why it’s good to be smart, to have real debates about things that matter more than sports, and to read things that give you new ideas that are worth some work to understand. Plus, how many books come with a CD of original music from an alien world and 25 pages of geometry lessons? (OK, you have to be a nerd to appreciate that last part… But any reader can appreciate the author wise enough to pull it out of his story and sequester the math course in an appendix.)

About the Author: Seattle-based Neal Stephenson has written seven books of “speculative fiction” (that’s the old fogey term for real science fiction, not space-opera sci-fi) including Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle. Anathem should be available in book stores September 9.

Thorin's Review - The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

Hope everyone will give a warm welcome to our first Guest Reviewer (who is also my husband)--take it away Thorin.

Summary: This book begins as the matrix, and ends as the Matrix 2.

No, wait, that won’t make sense yet…

Eric Sanderson wakes from mostly dead with no memory of who he is. He has a home that’s been stripped of all personal effects, the number of a good psychiatrist, and the first in a series of letters signed, “with regret and also hope, the First Eric Sanderson,” as if he’d somehow thrown his memories away. Also, Eric Sanderson is being hunted by an unimaginable monster from an environment that he doesn’t even know exists.

Who was the first Eric Sanderson? The one who wrote and planned hundreds of letters describing how to camouflage himself from the “ludovician” and its strange world? Why does he keep saying he’s “so very sorry”? And who was Clio Aimes, the girl he did “it” for? Those are all immediate mysteries.

SPOILER WARNING But Shark Text is built on an even bigger mystery: If I describe to you a lake—complete with crystal clear water, stretched shadows of sunset, and the little boat in which you float upon it flaccid surface—something amazing happens. That lake that was in my head … Steven hall’s head, more accurately … is now in your head. It’s flowed into your brain through those bits of shared information, a new puddle in a constantly expanding torrent of images and concepts that spread like oceans and rivers and streams and brooks across the collective human consciousness and the works it’s created.

This world of communication is a living, breathing environment in Shark Texts, and it has spawned its own forms of life. Conceptual fish that live in the time stream and information flows of our communication. There could be schools of them in this very text, passing from my mind to yours, your mind to the next reader’s, sitting here and multiplying until a new flow of information takes them elsewhere. Bait fish, bottom feeders, predators… all swimming in our shared information, breathing, breeding and hunting.

That’s the world our Eric Sanderson must discover to find the first.

My Thoughts: The Raw Shark Texts reads like the bastard love child of The Matrix, Jaws and The Da Vinci Code. That’s already been noted, right on the official website in fact, but those comparisons are inescapable. It wraps the reader in one mystery after another, always leading you on to the next revelation. Conceptual fish is a surprisingly strong premise, and it hooked me right away. But even before I knew what they were, before I’d considered that the Shark Text’s monsters may be a mystery in themselves, I was already wrapped up by the tone of the first Eric Sanderson’s first letter and the personal mystery of what the hell happened to him. The secrets come layered and braided together, and excellent tapestry woven into a thrilling adventure. And they're punctuated by cool text images throughout the book, including one 50-page stretch that makes a sort of flip book without using a single actual picture. I've seen other reviewers who thought these were distracting. But to me, the visual puzzle of figuring out why that "Distance" is in such a funny font, then realizing it's actually a shark, adds a lot to the atmosphere of the book.

However, it’s good there’s more to the book, because the difficult idea of conceptual fish doesn’t hold together for the entire book. In fact, after an excellent and terrifying first encounter, the mystery of the conceptual fish devolves becomes secondary, slaved to the more essential mysteries of the first Eric Sanderson, and that’s where this book goes from first The Matrix—a brilliant concept that at first makes you set the book aside to consider its implications with Keanu Reeves’ “whoa” on your lips—into The Matrix 2—where all that cool stuff boils down to Neo can fly, here’s a lot of heart-pounding action.

By the end of the book, conceptual fish has gone from a brain-stretching idea to, “here are some fish that can move through air and land too, and they’re all really bad for you.” They’re little different from any other noncorporeal threat in any horror or fantasy book. That disappointed me. But at the same time, the heart-pounding action and ever deepening mysteries of Eric Sanderson were getting much stronger, so the read was still good.

There is one other flaw to the book: the climax is an homage to a very famous movie you have almost certainly seen, and that sometimes takes the element of “what’s gonna happen next” out of the equation. And this scene happens to be the climax, which plays out over several; chapters.

In short, the book moves quickly from what you could call speculative fiction, to something that’s much more thriller and mystery focused, and in the end somewhat cliché. But all in all, I still tore through the end of the book. I came away wanting to know more about conceptual fish, the new Eric Sanderson, and exactly what was swimming deep in these words I’m spilling into you.

4 stars out of 5, and I’m a harder grader then Shannon. ;-)

About the author: Steven Hall was born in Derbyshire, England—you’ll notice that in the book, too—in 1975. This is his first novel, and it’s beginning to pick up steam. The paperback version should be appearing in stores about now, and there’s talk of a film in the distant future.