NOPHEK GLOSS (The Graven #1), by Essa Hansen

I received this novel from Orbit Books through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review: my thanks to both of them for this opportunity.

It’s once again time for an unpopular opinion on a book that seems to mostly receive high accolades: I requested Nophek Gloss because of its promise of a space-faring adventure and revenge quest (I can never resist a good vengeance story), but found myself struggling to move forward – I set it aside twice, hoping that some distance might foster a different perspective, but once I reached the 58% mark and realized that I was forcing myself to read, I knew I had to admit defeat and walk away from it.

Nophek Gloss starts with an adrenaline-infused inciting incident: 14 year old Caiden and his family live on what looks like an artificial environment, raising cattle; his knowledge of life is quite limited, yet he feels the need to always question rules that have been there for a long time. A devastating epidemic, however, kills the cattle that the colonists are tending and their overseers load all the people on a huge transport with a vague promise of relocation to a new facility. What follows is instead the devastating, bloody end of all that Caiden knew and loved, so that the only thing fueling his will to survive is the burning need to find the ones responsible for his loss and make them pay.

I opened this book with great expectations – maybe too great – and at first it appeared to be all that I was looking forward to, but just as the story reached its first turning point for Caiden (i.e. his encounter with a diverse group of mercenaries who took him in, offering him the chance both to survive and to learn the skills he would need to reach his goal) everything became chaotic and I began to lose my grip on the narrative.  

The universe in which Nophek Gloss is set is rather a conglomeration of universes whose borders can be traversed, each one possessing unique qualities and endless life forms: the problem for me is that this kaleidoscope of worlds, aliens and technologies is offered in what to me amounted to a massive sensory overload – there is a LOT of it, all thrown at the reader with hardly any time to process it before more details are added to an already confused and confusing tapestry.  I don’t mind having to work my way through a story, visualizing or extrapolating what the author is keeping on the sidelines, but here most of it looks like a jumble of terms with no rhyme or reason to it – remember the worst moments of Star Trek’s so-called technobabble? Something like: “reroute the pre-ignition plasma from the impulse deck down to the auxiliary intake”… Well, a good portion of this novel made me feel that way, and it bothered me because it made little or no sense and kept me from forming a mental image of the world the author was trying to show.

Caiden is the other almost insurmountable problem I faced: granted, he’s a teenager and he undergoes a horribly traumatic experience, so it’s understandable that he would suffer from PTSD and survivor’s guilt and would be consumed by the need to exact his revenge on the ones responsible for the situation, but there is no space for anything else in Caiden’s psychological makeup, and that makes it very difficult to see the humanity – if any – behind that huge wall of mindless hate. And I don’t use the word ‘mindless’ carelessly, because Caiden never fails to bodily launch himself against those offenders as soon as he sees one: it doesn’t matter that his new friends advise caution, or that he keeps entering a fight he’s not equipped to win, because as soon as he sets his sights on them he charges like the proverbial bull shown the red cape. And he does that repeatedly, as if every encounter were followed by a complete memory erasure that made him forget past experiences, or – worse – as if he were unwilling to learn from his mistakes.

Worse, the 14 year old accepts a procedure that bestows six years of physical growth on him, together with the sum of knowledge his previously secluded life could not provide: this could have been an interesting way of bringing him to adulthood in a brief span of time, narratively speaking, but keeping his reactions those of a teenager – an unthinking teenager at that – makes that a moot point, because what use is a grown body when your emotions remain those of a child? Not to mention that this choice did little to endear Caiden’s character to me…

When all is said and done, I guess it all comes to personal preferences rather than authorial skills: Nophek Gloss is certainly an ambitious, imaginative story with a rich background, but sadly it’s not the kind of story I can bring myself to enjoy.

My Rating:

TO SLEEP IN A SEA OF STARS, by Christopher Paolini

I received this novel from Tor Books through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review: my thanks to both of them for this opportunity.

I was very curious to sample Christopher Paolini’s writing: although aware of his Inheritance fantasy cycle, I never read it, and the brief excerpt for To Sleep in a Sea of Stars that I found online, once the campaign for this book was launched, sounded very intriguing, sporting many of the elements I enjoy in Science Fiction. Unfortunately, after a promising and intriguing beginning, I felt myself progressively losing interest in the story and I had to abandon it at the 32% mark – namely at page 262 of its quite considerable 800+ pages run.

In short, the novel focuses on Kira Navarez, an exobiologist attached to a corporation conducting feasibility studies on planets marked for possible colonization. At the beginning of the story Kira and the rest of the team are preparing to leave their latest assignment when in the course of a last-minute survey Kira stumbles on an alien artifact: this encounter leaves her profoundly – even dangerously – changed and launches a series of events culminating in an alien invasion and a devastating intergalactic war.

Where the premise sounds intriguing – and there is no doubt that the inciting incident back at the base has a delightfully creepy Alien vibe – the execution did not meet my (admittedly fastidious) tastes. The novel leans heavily toward plot rather than characterization, and this for me is certainly a problem because I need to connect with characters to enjoy a story; moreover, what characterization there was – either concerning Kira or the secondary figures – felt flat and at times more in service of the plot than of the characters themselves.

Kira’s personality is very contradictory: she is presented as an exobiologist driven by the need to explore new worlds, to apply her knowledge to the expansion of humanity, and yet once she falls in love with one of her co-workers and he proposes marriage she’s ready to throw it all to the four winds in exchange for marital bliss, children and the dream of a white-fenced house.  Then she is subjected to a very traumatic loss and even more traumatic experiences of torture and experimentation, and yet none of this seems to leave her with any permanent scars, or the remotest hint of PTSD.  To top it all off, she evolves in a very, very short period of time from a mousy, lab-bound scientists into this super-hero, ass-kicking warrior without any perceivable hint of how the transformation took place.

Secondary characters fare little better, since they looked to me more formulaic than gifted with distinctive personalities, and so we have, for example, a lovably roguish ship captain; a stern, uncompromising XO; a kindly doctor; and the required gangly and goofy teenager. All of the above provided sometimes wooden, sometimes embarrassing dialogues that although set into a highly energetic but somewhat confused story made my progress through the novel an arduous slog, compounded by what looked like excessive wordiness.  Still, I tried to soldier on because the angle of the alien invasion, with its hordes of weird, scary creatures, is certainly intriguing, but I was also puzzled by the overall tone which at times seemed to veer toward YA standards, although the novel is labeled as adult fiction – a prime example being the description of shipboard pets which include a cat and a pig (yes, a pig, I kid you not), both of them provided with velcro-like adhesive pads so they could move in free fall….

While I can see the potential for this story, I have to acknowledge my disappointment in the way it is delivered: it is certainly a classic case of “it’s not you, it’s me” and I’m looking forward to learning what other fellow bloggers will think of this novel, particularly when I’m aware of the finicky personal tastes I quoted above. 

My Rating:

THE GREY BASTARDS, by Jonathan French (DNF)

 

This book sat for some time on my TBR before I finally picked it up, despite my curiosity to sample it given the many enthusiastic reviews from my fellow bloggers and the promise of a different kind of fantasy story, one where the proverbial bad guys – in this case half-orcs – were the heroes and not the villains.

The novel approach was indeed a welcome change from the usual narrative tracks, but unfortunately the delivery did not work for me: to be honest I kept trying to remember that with a debut work I should have given this book a wider latitude and exercised more patience, but when I reached the point of “too much is indeed too much” I saw no other option than to give up reading and move toward greener pastures.

The Lot Lands are a harsh, dangerous place where – after long conflicts and a devastating plague – a multitude of creatures has come to live: reclusive Elves, rampaging Centaurs, a smattering of Humans and the half-orcs, the product of a forced mating between humans and full-blooded orcs. The latter now and then still trespass into the area in search of plunder, and that’s where the half-orc bands – or hoofs – come into play as a defensive force, mounted on specially bred wild pigs called barbarians whose loyalty and intelligence are highly valued.

Jackal, Oats and Fetching (the only female of the Grey Bastards hoof – and probably the only female ever admitted into a band) are very close comrades, and at the very beginning of the book they clash with a troop of human soldiers killing one of them and setting in motion an unpredictable chain of events whose consequences might be ranging even farther than they can imagine, or that I could imagine, since I chose to desist at roughly one-third of the way.

As I said, the premise is an interesting one, even though the story went all over the place with no indication of a precise concatenation of events: it’s quite possible that the disparate situations DID come to a confluence at some point, but since I lacked the willpower to reach it I guess I will never know…. What turned me away from The Grey Bastards was a growing annoyance with two of its major components, one being the foul language used with irrepressible glee: granted, in the kind of background and company described in the book, profanity would be a major ingredient, but the frequency with which it was used went well beyond any reasonable narrative need and quickly turned into the kind of fixation for repeating a newly-learned four-letter word we see children indulge in, using and abusing it for its shock value. I am far from prudish and understand that harsh language and a harsh world go hand in hand, but the effectiveness of vulgarity is inversely proportional to its frequency, so that the profusion of f-bombs, crude sexual references and their many combinations quickly went from colorful to bothersome, and a distraction from the story itself. More than once I was reminded of something a wise friend told me once about the excessive use of coarse expletives in any conversation: that it’s a filler for the lack of appropriate language to express one’s thoughts, and ultimately the indication of a lack of thoughts as well. Not exactly the best endorsement for any story…

My other point of contention comes from the portrayal of women: again, I know that the chosen background is far from conducive to female agency, but why are the women in this story relegated to the roles of either caregiver (just one, as far as I went) or whore? No, that’s not right: there are also one woman warrior, with a chip on her shoulder that’s even bigger than the hog she rides on, and an elf who was the prisoner of a foul creature and the victim of orkish rape, which resulted in a pregnancy. Not the best kind of representation, from my point of view. The proverbial “oldest job” appears to be the only one ever considered for women, because in this world there seems to be no place for, I don’t know, a village baker or vegetable grower: if one does not find employment in the orphanage where youngsters are raised, all she has to look forward to is the brothel, or the bunk of a warrior as his personal bedwarmer. That’s all, and it’s a dismal summation, indeed – hopefully just an over-the-top description of this world and not the author’s view on life…

Before posting this review I re-read the ones from my fellow bloggers that compelled me to try The Grey Bastards, and came to the conclusion that this might be a classic case of “it’s not you, it’s me”. Not my kind of book, sorry.

 

My Rating:

Review: SOULKEEPER, by David Dalglish

 

I received this novel from Orbit Books through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review: my thanks to both of them for this opportunity.

It saddens me to acknowledge the fact that I could not manage to finish reading Soulkeeper: this story started in a very promising way and maybe it created too many expectations from that beginning, leading me on the path to disappointment.  This is NOT a bad book in any way, I want to make this clear up front, only it’s not a book that agrees with me. Sometimes it happens…

Devin Eveson is a Soulkeeper, a mix between a warrior and a priest called to solve dire emergencies all over the Cradle, the realm where the story is set, and to dispatch the souls of the deceased toward the heavens.  As we meet him, he has just reached a village where a terrible plague with an inexorable fatality rate is decimating the people.  The plague is only one of the terrifying portents happening all over the Cradle: a flood of unstoppable black water brings decay to the buildings and crops it flows over, and turns the people caught in it into something resembling ferocious zombies; creatures of the wild, like wolves, attack unwary travelers and show the ability to speak, expressing malicious intent; mountains move threatening anything on their path, and mythical creatures, that so far were relegated to the realm of fantasy, make themselves known.

Even in the city of Londheim, Devin’s home base, things are looking bleak, indeed: the looming mountain at its door is the first sign of the changing times, but other clues show that is only the beginning.  The roof gargoyles become night predators seeking human flesh, and gigantic owls fall from the skies on careless citizens, but the most terrible fiend comes in the guise of Janus, a twisted creature who names himself “artist”, one who carves his works not in stone or wood, but using human flesh that it transforms and twists with cruel delight.

Thankfully, there is a sort of balance to all these dire omens: some people find themselves able to wield magic, which for some gifted individuals turns into the ability to heal the most cruel injuries or the most lethal illnesses: it’s a sign that the three Goddesses who watch over the cradle still battle in favor of humanity as the old evil that was never truly vanquished tries to reassert its hold on the world.

All these elements should have been enough to keep me glued to the book and read on in a compulsive manner, but unfortunately the pacing of the story proved to be somewhat uneven, alternating moments of high dramatic suspense with others where lightness rules, but the transitions did not feel quite smooth and I often found myself wondering where the story truly wanted to go or what its overall tone was meant to be.  While it’s true that it’s quite impossible to maintain a constant sense of impending dread and that some “breathing room” is necessary in the flow of a story, I confess I found it quite impossible to accept, for example, the juxtaposition of Janus’ brutality, whose depiction often had me reeling in horror, with the airy demeanor of Tesmarie, an onyx fairy who strongly reminded me of Disney’s Tinkerbell, or the wordless, Baby-Groot-cuteness of Puffy, a flame creature who Devin meets on his travels.

Other elements are presented but never fully fleshed: a prime example of this is offered by the Soulless, people who are born – as the word indicates – without a soul, and therefore incapable of independent thought or will.  These unfortunates are either employed as cheap labor in factories or, much worse, used as playthings by the more depraved elements of society.  One of the manifestations of the changing times is the return of the soul to many – if not all – of the soulless, with what could have been an interesting character exploration, since a Soulless is one of the people we encounter in the course of the story and she finds herself suddenly able to exercise her own will for the first time in her life.  Once again, though, this character’s journey of discovery feels far too superficial to be truly interesting, or poignant – or maybe once again I set my expectations too high to be happy with what I read.

Once I started skipping through the novel in search of the true “meat” of this story, which proved quite elusive to me, I realized that my interest kept diminishing and I could not hope to find any true connection with either the book or the characters, and even though I was already at seventy percent through I decided to give up, not without a hint of regret for what felt like an unfulfilled promise.

 

My Rating:

Review: THE ROOK (The Checquy Files #1), by Daniel O’Malley

 

When a book starts with a character waking up in a public park with no memory of one’s own identity, and surrounded by corpses wearing latex gloves, you know the authorial promise underlying such a story is that of a thrilling adventure and a journey of discovery, and that’s what’s in store for Myfanwy Thomas as she comes to under a torrential rain, with only a letter in her pocket working as an anchor to what used to be her life.

Dazed and terrified, Myfanwy follows the instructions in the letter – a missive penned by her old self who knew that her memory would be wiped and took every step to insure that her newborn persona possessed all the elements to carry on as best as she could. Myfanwy Thomas is – or rather was – a member of the Checquy, a British secret organization that for centuries has collected and trained as operatives all the people who showed supernatural abilities, employing them against any equally supernatural threat against the country.

A timid, unassuming person, Myfanwy however rose to the position of Rook in the Checquy thanks to her superior administrative abilities, which acted as compensation for her reluctance to employ her power of controlling other people’s bodies through her mind.  For some reason, though, someone in the Checquy choose to mind-wipe her, so that Myfanwy – being forewarned by several sources gifted with precognition – decided to leave to her “successor” a thick file of information about her past life and her work, so that the new Myfanwy could step into the old one’s life and even try to uncover the identity and motives of the person who harmed her in such a way.

As a premise, this does sound quite intriguing, and for the initial chapters the story did prove fascinating, provided that I exerted some light suspension of disbelief, but after a while my objections started piling up in such a way that like the proverbial elephant in the room I could not ignore them anymore, and I had to acknowledge the fact that the execution of this story ended up ruining my enjoyment of it. The uneven pace, the improbable characterization and the overall mood – that seemed to hover uncertainly between suspenseful drama and snarky humor – all added up to a huge disappointment that would have made me stop reading there and then if I had not held to the slender thread of curiosity that required I learn how this convoluted scheme would be resolved.

First problem: the pacing. The foretold wiping of her memory allows old-Myfanwy to leave extensive notes for new-Myfanwy so she can have enough elements to more or less safely navigate through her life, and in the beginning this narrative choice looked like an interesting way of detailing some necessary background. That is, until it got completely out of hand: every time a situation warrants information that new-Myfanwy does not possess, a document in the huge purple binder that old-Myfanwy left her comes to the rescue, listing in often excruciating detail some past event or the personal data on Checquy officers she needs to work with.  When that happens in the middle of a dramatic episode, the change in narrative speed feels jarring and the information – as useful as it might be – just like an obstacle to be overcome before going back to the heat of the moment. Repeat this instance a sufficient number of times, and what used to be simply upsetting becomes monumentally annoying, especially since the level of detail provided is so burdened with useless trivia that the temptation of skipping ahead to the real meat of the story becomes irresistible.  Too much of a good, useful thing is not necessarily a good thing, and in this instance the author seemed to forget – or ignore – the fact that overloading the readers with a plethora of details would prove distracting, or worse.   And then there is one question that kept nagging at me: the infamous purple binder in which old-Myfanwy crammed her previous life is a prominent feature in the story, to the point that new-Myfanwy is always carrying it around and scanning it, even in the presence of other people, which might have raised some eyebrows or given away her little problem with amnesia – and yet it never happens, which to me seems improbable at best.

Problem number two: characterization. After the initial shock of being “born” again with no memory of self, Myfanwy comes across as something of a Mary Sue: armed only with the information in the letter left by her predecessor, she proceeds to step into old-Myfanwy’s shoes with apparent little or no difficulty.  What’s more, while her previous incarnation was a timid, self-effacing creature that garnered little respect from her peers, this new woman is decisive, assertive and quite proactive, especially where her job is concerned: she can make quick, effective decisions on the direst of situations and she has no qualms about employing her supernatural powers with a strength no one suspected she possessed or felt the desire to apply – and yet no one even bats an eyelash or comments on such amazing personality changes, which sounds eminently strange for anyone, let alone a secret organization where layered screenings and security measures against enemy infiltration abound.  On the other hand, the new Myfanwy (just like the old one) has problems with social interactions, so that when faced with official meetings she reverts back to her awkward girl persona who worries more about the state of her hair or the complexities of a daring dress than about the current problem, which led me to wonder whether it was a matter of inconsistent characterization or the usual glitch that occurs when a male author writes from a female perspective. Or maybe it’s just snarky old me…

And finally, the overall mood: more than once, while reading The Rook, I was reminded of one of my main contentions with Andy Weir’s The Martian, which was the light tone that often seemed inappropriate when applied to the situation being described.   Here I encountered the same problem, as if the author were undecided whether to keep this story in a playful vein or stress the dramatic side of it, which consists of scary manifestations that end in a high number of casualties, when not dealing with the political maneuvering inside the Checquy, which appears no less vicious than an enemy’s attack.  This uncertainty about what I was reading, which could be seen as either a dark thriller with fantasy elements or a humorous take on the genre, certainly did not help in my assessment of this story, or my enjoyment of it,  and the last pages, plagued by a lot of convoluted explanations and the mandatory Evil Guy Gloating Before Killing the Heroine sounded the… death knell for this story, and I stopped reading before reaching the end, because I could not bear to go on anymore – which is a pity since the premise had all the numbers to result into a compelling book.

 

My Rating: 

Review: YEAR ONE (Chronicles of the One #1), by Nora Roberts

Some time ago, a friend told me about the In Death series written by Nora Roberts under the pseudonym of J.D. Robb, and I decided to give it a try, but unfortunately the story did not work for me: I found that the author favored some telling over showing and often indulged in sudden changes of p.o.v., a technique I don’t exactly approve of.  Nothing wrong with either practice, granted, but to me they spoil the enjoyment of a story, so that I moved on – that is, until I saw this book mentioned on a fellow blogger’s post.

Post-apocalyptic scenarios always fascinated me, so I found the premise for Year One quite irresistible, enough to silence any residual misgivings coming from my previous experience.  Once again, though, I must give in to the realization that Ms. Roberts’ writing is not my cup of tea…

As I said the premise is intriguing and the novel starts with great momentum: what looks like a strain of avian flu sweeps like wildfire across the world, with a staggering mortality rate. The descriptions of the rapid spread of infection, aided by the worldwide transport network, reminded me of the initial scenes of the ’70s BBC classic Survivors, in my opinion one of the staples of the post-apocalyptic genre, and the ensuing, inevitable collapse of infrastructures all over the world is painted in dramatic flashes that focus on the main characters’ lives and the way they deal with the end of the world.

At some point, however, Ms. Roberts decided to introduce a magical element, something that literally came out of the blue with little or no explanation other than it was a by-product of the pandemic: people start to exhibit peculiar abilities – like lighting fires or flying – and those few who already possessed some, discover that these abilities are enhanced and growing every day.  It was somehow jarring, I’ll admit it, because in my opinion this element had little or no place in the description of the end of the world as we know it, but I decided to take it in stride and see how it would develop.   Sadly, it failed to integrate with the rest of the narrative, in my opinion, in great measure because I kept seeing it as a mashup of incompatible themes: as a civilization literally falls, the appearance of ladies riding unicorns or Tinkerbell-like pixies (I kid you not…) takes away the drama from the depicted events and becomes dangerously close to ludicrous, and just as unbelievable as character Lana, who “graduates” from lighting candles with her mind to shifting heavy objects (like a moving bridge) with no explanation whatsoever for this amazing escalation.

This alone should not have been enough to stop me from forging on, particularly because the few ominous mentions of immune people being rounded up and disappearing from the face of the Earth – probably being experimented on in search of a cure – added a new, scary facet to the overall drama, as did the mounting violence that always comes when social infrastructures weaken or cease to exist.  Still, problems kept piling up: for example, in this novel people seem to be divided into two groups, the ‘good guys’, who are unfailingly, immutably good; and the bad ones, who are irredeemably evil.  There is no space for gray areas, for people wavering between the brutal needs for survival and the tenets of humanity, and this robs characters of believability, transforming them into cardboard cutouts instead of the flesh-and-blood people I always want to care for (or even hate, why not?) in a book.

And again, some behavioral choices don’t add up when compared with the seriousness of the situation, so that they strike a jarring note I was unable to ignore. Some examples? Lovers Lana and Max are preparing to leave New York city, before it becomes to late for that, and they gather some necessary items for the road: when going out to procure a couple of backpacks, Max comes back with an appropriate camouflage-colored one for himself, and a pink-hued one for Lana, as a cute gesture – because of course if one wants to avoid calling attention to themselves, pink is the perfect choice, and you need to be cute when the end of the world draws near!  Or take the example of journalist Arlys and her intern Fred (i.e. Miss “Hey, I’m a pixie! Cool!”) who are leaving as well, knowing they might be hunted down for a number of reason I won’t list here: as they grab what supplies they can, Fred adds makeup items to their stores, as if unwilling to face the end of the world without looking at their best. Seriously?

Add to that a few obvious plot devices, or some dialogues that are at times quite cringe-worthy and you have the perfect recipe for a huge disappointment: I had tried very hard not to compare Year One to my favorite novels on this subject, Stephen King’s The Stand and Robert McCammon’s Swan Song, but at some point it was impossible not to, and this novel came up quite short of the mark, so I gave up the struggle at around 50% of the road.

 

My Rating: 

Review: REVENGER, by Alastair Reynolds

If someone had told me that I would not be able to finish a book by Alastair Reynolds, I would never have believed them: he’s one of my favorite SF authors, and I’ve always enjoyed what I read so far, so when I learned of this new novel I dived straight for it, only to be profoundly disappointed.

The story focuses on two sisters, Adrana and Arafura, and is told from Arafura’s point of view: they leave their home on Mazarile to join a crew of glorified scavengers searching through the relics of old civilizations for valuable objects.  There are many interesting details to this view of the universe: humanity has spread away from Earth (there are several mentions of the Old Sun and its failure) and created artificial homes on planets and habitats; the remnants of previous civilizations are to be found enclosed in baubles, that open at pre-arranged times to allow the treasure hunters to look for artifacts; there is a form of instantaneous communication/listening device that uses a sort of huge (alien?) skull to establish contact, or to eavesdrop, but only if the operators are young people, with a still-developing brain; and there are pirates, preying on the scavenger crews to get at the artifacts without doing the hard work.

Most of the above is often mentioned in passing, but never satisfactorily explored, especially on the subject of the baubles and how they came to be: I’m not in favor of massive info-dumps, on the contrary, but it seems… wasteful to give the readers a glimpse of something so intriguing, and never to offer enough information to make sense of it all.  I believe the roots of the problem lie with Arafura’s point of view, and for a variety of reasons: for starters, she knows little of the universe she lives in, and that makes sense up to a point, because of her secluded life on Mazarile. Yet, once she escapes the stifling confines of her life, she shows little interest in the “big picture” out there, accepting with irritating passivity the information provided by her crew-mates, without looking further than that: there is nothing of the hungry curiosity I would have expected from a teenager who is for the first time free of the constraints of her former existence, none of the wonder of being “out there” and living an adventure.  If I were to distill the sisters’ reactions to the new and intriguing vistas opening before them, I could do it with: “oh, um… yeah, ok”.

Even worse is the “voice” of the two young girls: their dialogue and inner thoughts sound… dumbed down, for want of a better word.  If this is meant to be Alastair Reynolds’ attempt at expanding into YA fiction, I find it more than inadequate: used as I am to his neat, incisive prose, what I found in Revenger was a writing style so careless that I often wondered if I was truly reading such a well-known author. And if Arafura’s very simplified expressive range is the means to reach out to the younger audiences this seems to be intended to, I find it somewhat insulting, because readers in this age target are much more articulate than that.

Another problem I encountered with this book was the inciting incident for the whole story: the decision of the two girls to leave their planet comes out of the blue, after a visit to a sort of carnival booth in which some lady happens to have a device that measures the ability to read bones, a very sought-after skill for a treasure-hunting crew.  Forgetting for a moment the presence of such a device outside of a lab, or the fact it’s in the hands of a charlatan, the ease with which the two – and Arafura in particular, since she seems the less flighty of the pair – choose to abandon their home and their father sounds contrived and far too convenient, just like their immediate recruitment by Captain Rackamore of the ship Monetta’s Mourn. In what looks like a matter of hours, the sisters are out in space, ready for a remunerative job that might help the family’s flagging finances, without a single apparent qualm about what and who they leave behind, or what kind of dangers they might face on the scavenger ship.  Moreover I want to reserve a special mention to a scene in which the carnival lady’s helper wrecks the girl’s guardian robot Paladin to keep it from interfering with the examination: it looks ludicrous, absurd, excessive and totally out of context with the rest of the story.  If it was meant as comic relief, I’m afraid it failed completely.

Faced with these difficulties, I would not have hesitated to abandon this book much earlier, had it been written by a less-respected author, so I struggled on, ignoring my own law about never reading something that feels like work rather than pleasure: still, the story remained un-engaging and after a while even the attempts at inserting peculiar words to show the changes in everyday language (“lungstuff” for air or oxygen; “lamps” for eyes; “coves” for persons, and so forth) became an irritant rather than background information.  When tragedy hit the crew of Monetta’s Mourn, with the assault by the pirate ship led by Bosa Sennen, I hoped that something would change, that I would see some strong reaction from Arafura, but once again my hopes were dashed: the girl’s lack of substantial emotional responses strengthened my impression of a cardboard character with no depth at all, one I could not be invested in.  Having lost what little interest I had gathered for the story up to that point, I gave up the struggle a little before the halfway mark.

What most troubled me with Revenger was that the potential for the story was there, but it remained untapped and was instead buried under uninspired writing and poor characterization.  Not at all what I’m used to from a Reynolds book.

My Rating:

Review: THE UNNOTICEABLES, by Robert Brockway

When a book starts as strongly as this one did, with a story that’s attention-grabbing from page one, the disappointment for its failed promises hurts twice as much: this is what happened to me with The Unnoticeables, whose narrative arc… imploded (for want of a better word) two thirds of the way in.

The story runs on two different time tracks, separated by 36 years: Carey, living in New York in 1977, is a young man reveling in the time’s punk scene, spending his days getting drunk, stoned – or both – and generally causing any kind of mayhem he can think of; Kaitlyn lives in Los Angeles, in 2013, as a part-time stuntwoman, part-time waitress trying, and so far failing, to bring her stunt work to the next level.  Both of them are confronted by something that is both inexplicable and terrifying, something that possesses all the markers of a slowly spreading invasion.

The first inkling that something terrible is going on happens when Carey sees a girl he’s interested in being attacked by what looks like a man-shaped oily mass: the thing acts like acid, consuming the unfortunate girl and leaving only bloody remains behind. Moreover, in the area where Carey and his friends prowl, some peculiar individuals start cropping up: they  all appear good-looking and attractive, but as soon as one’s eyes leave them, their features blur and no ones seems able to remember what they look like.  Worse, whenever these people – dubbed by Carey “the Empty Ones” – manage to attract any given individual, the unfortunates disappear without a trace.

Kaitlyn, on the other hand, suffers from a more close-and-personal confrontation: at a party she meets Marco, former sitcom star and her teenage years’ crush. Accepting a ride back home from the man, she’s first appalled by his reckless driving and uncaring attitude, which make her think Marco is somewhat deranged, then he forces himself on her. More shocking than the sexual assault is its modality: Kaitlyn feels something metallic slide down her throat, and her strength and willpower being drained away.  Saved by someone who bodily extracts her from Marco’s car, she makes Carey’s acquaintance: older, probably wiser but still tainted with his old recklessness, he’s living like a borderline homeless, but he has information on the Empty Ones – and is willing to help Kaitlyn trace her friend Jackie who disappeared after that fateful party.

The novel’s chapters alternate between Carey’s past and Kaitlyn’s present with a relentless pace that makes the book a compulsive read while we follow their scary journey of discovery: the two main characters are the best and strongest elements of the story, their voices persuasively true and their dialogue or thoughts evenly balanced between stark, dramatic reality and sarcastic humor. Carey comes across as the best defined one, though: the outrageous style of life he and his friends are pursuing should make them offensive, and yet there is a sort of wild abandon in Carey, tinged with the somewhat lucid awareness of what he is, that managed to endear him to me, and to make me root for him – especially when his rough attachment to his friends comes to the fore, almost belying his devil-may-care attitude.

Once Kaitlyn’s disbelief at her new friend’s revelations evaporates, the two decide to go on the offensive to try and save Jackie, and they pursue Marco’s car in a mad motorcycle dash through the congested traffic of Los Angeles. They follow him to a mansion where a party is in progress, and though realizing that the place must be crawling with Empty Ones like Marco they decide to go in: this is where the story started unraveling and making less and less sense to me.  For starters, I could not figure out what the two were trying to accomplish knowing they were vastly outnumbered by people (if one wanted to call them that…) who could not be hurt, harmed or stopped in any way. And then the real madness kicked in…

What had started as a horror story about strange beings preying on unsuspecting humanity, and the slow infiltration of the Empty Ones in various facets of society (the most chilling example being Kaitlyn’s trip to the police station to denounce Marco’s assault), suddenly morphed into something best defined as crazily grotesque: the dangerous environment of the hellish party is only the front for what happens in the closed back rooms, where blood-drenched orgies lead to every kind of imaginable (and  unimaginable…) sex perversion, give way to a frenzy of horrific mutilations and killings, all of which with no apparent rhyme or reason, except maybe the author’s penchant for imagining and depicting the most revolting and senseless acts of destruction.

At that point, only the desire for some sort of explanation kept me reading on, despite the appearance of even more gory weirdness in the form of a strange contraption to which the Empty Ones’ victims were being fed, all in the name of a nebulous fight against entropy.  Sadly, whatever form of explanation, or clue to understanding the bloody mess this story had turned into, was not enough to save this novel from the downward plunge it had taken in my consideration.   I’m not even certain I entirely grasped whatever passed for explanation: the only thing I’m sure about is that I will not pursue this series further.

 

My Rating:

TOP FIVE WEDNESDAY #12

This GoodReads group proposes a weekly meme whose aim is to give a list of Top Five… anything, as long as they are book related.

This week’s theme: SERIES THAT GOT WORSE WITH EACH BOOK/SEASON

This week’s topic is an interesting one, since it allows us to mix book and Tv series: we all had one or more experiences of quite promising series that started with the proverbial bang and then tapered out with the equally proverbial whimper. There is no malicious glee in pointing them out, because disappointments burn both ways…

I will start with Peter Brett’s Demon Cycle: the first book, The Warded Man, was an amazing, exciting discovery – imagine a world where the fall of darkness means that demonic creatures emerge from the very ground, bent on destroying the hapless humans they find on their way, unless people shelter behind wards, powerful symbols capable of keeping these hellish creatures at bay. I literally consumed the book, and went looking for more, although the second volume, The Desert Spear, suffered from a little repetition and a few instances of… characterization hiccups, for want of a better word. Still, the story managed to make me forget these small disturbances and move on to book 3 – and that’s where the trouble started in earnest: The Daylight War not only managed to retread old narrative paths (in some cases for the third time) but degraded toward a soap-opera-like style of storytelling that completely alienated me from what had started as a very promising tale. Not the kind of journey I had hoped to make…

I know that my next choice will prove highly unpopular, but I have to mention Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time: I received the first volume of this saga, The Eye of the World, as a birthday gift a couple of years after its initial publication and I remember enjoying this epic tale of the struggle between Good and Evil and its vast cast of characters.  Yes, there were a few similarities with Tolkien I had perceived, namely those creatures (I can’t remember their name, it’s been a few years…) whose mere presence caused paralyzing fear in their victims, and that strongly reminded me of the Ringwraiths; or the journey through The Ways, that seemed like a combination between Moria and the Paths of the Dead.    Sadly, with the following books, the narrative appeared more and more bloated with long, excruciating descriptions that left little room for plot advancement; there were constant repetitions of annoying characters’ behavior (after a few hundred braid-chewings by a particular character I was ready to scream in frustration), and what’s worse, those annoying similarities kept cropping up and waving at me: just as an example, I will mention the Aes Sedai, a women-only powerful order bent on shaping humanity through age-long intervention; and the Aiel, a desert-dwelling people whose combat skills are known and feared, waiting for the proverbial Chosen One to lead them to victory.  Dune fans, do they both remind you of something?
If the novels had been leaner, the pace swifter, I might have overlooked it all, but the combination of what I perceived like derivative elements with the glacial progression of the story made me abandon the saga midway through book 4.

Some time ago I read, and enjoyed, Ann Aguirre’s Sirantha Jax SF series, so when I learned she had started a new one, Razorland, I wasted no time in acquiring book 1, Enclave.  It possessed many of the elements I appreciate in a post-apocalyptic tale: humanity has been decimated by a plague whose surviving victims turn into feral creatures called Freaks.  What remains of humankind had to take shelter into underground tunnels, where life is short and brutal, and where most knowledge of the outside world has been lost or transformed into a myth. Young Deuce, a huntress for her clan, will have to face a dangerous journey on the surface in search of the hope for a better life.  So far, so good, despite the clear YA bent of this story: the first volume being more focused on the changed world outside of the tunnels, it made for a fascinating reading, and equally interesting were the changes in society and mentality brought on by the need to live in darkness.  But unfortunately with book 2, Outpost, the unavoidable (?) YA tropes kept cropping up at an alarming rate: love triangles, pouting teenagers who know better than more experienced adults, and so on.  Book 2 ended in the DNF pile, with my deep regrets for the many lost opportunities.

Moving from books to TV I’m going to express another unpopular opinion by mentioning the show Battlestar Galactica, the reboot that aired between 2004 and 2009 after a successful return with a short miniseries in 2003.

The miniseries was nothing short of amazing: after being almost wiped out by the Cylons, the cybernetic constructs they created, the survivors of the Twelve Colonies regroup aboard a handful of vessels, led by the capital ship Galactica, running away in search of a new home and relentlessly pursued by the murdering Cylons.  There was much to enjoy in this revival of an older, cheesy show of the ’80s: the Cylons were both robot-like creations and human-looking creatures, giving them the possibility of infiltrating the human survivor groups and therefore creating a constant atmosphere of suspicion on the vessels where the remnants of civilization tried to hold on day by day, with constant threat of annihilation and of the mechanical failures of old, overtaxed ships.  Older, less advanced technology had to be abandoned in favor of more primitive versions that could not be hacked or infiltrated by the Cylons, leading to a mix of space-age and WWII submarine warfare quality to the story being presented on screen, one of the most fascinating aspects of the reboot.
The first two seasons aired after the miniseries were on the same level of narrative quality and managed to keep the story flowing and the tension high, but with season 3 the first cracks started to appear: unlike the Cylons, who we were constantly told had a plan, the series’ creators seemed to meander as aimlessly as the hapless survivors (or maybe more…), and the moral and existential dilemmas that had made the beginning of this revisitation so appealing, were shifted to the side in favor of entanglements with quasi-religious myths and subplots that ended up twisting on themselves and ultimately ending nowhere.  Even though I struggled on to the very end, I had lost interest in the plight of the survivors, and kept watching only to see what it was all about: in this, as well, I was disappointed, because the ending made as little sense as what had preceded it; worse still, the sort of epilogue that rolled on the screen in the last few minutes managed to completely overshadow what I think would have been a fitting finale – that image of Admiral Adama sitting on a hill beside a grave (I’m not going to spoil whose, just in case…) and looking over the horizon of the new world, a poetic, poignant image that would at least have counterbalanced the nonsense before it.  Missed opportunities, indeed.

Vampires are one of the staunchest pillars of the horror genre, especially when they are bloody and mean – no sparklers needing to apply, thank you very much – so when I learned that Guillermo del Toro had contributed to the creation of this show, taken from a book trilogy penned by del Toro himself with Chuck Hogan, I was quite excited.  The Strain tells the tale of a vampire infestation starting in New York with the arrival of a plane with everyone on board dead; a mysterious casket from the plane’s hold is brought into the city and the horror begins, in an atmosphere and with a premise that both nod at and honor Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  At first the victims are believed to be prey to a mysterious illness, but soon it appears that something far more terrible than a mere virus is at work.
So far, so good, indeed: the vampires depicted here are quite scary, and the tension builds up to breathless levels, and if sometimes the scenes veer toward excessive levels of grossness, one could take it all in stride – after all we’re talking about blood-sucking creatures!  Where the show completely fails, though, is in characterization, especially with the protagonist Dr. Ephraim Goodweather: I can’t remember a less sympathetic, less endearing main character, one I constantly felt in need of slapping hard to try and put some sense and empathy into, or to move him to act with some sense instead of blundering around like a headless chicken.  His lines seem to be taken out of a bad B-movie and his actions make even less sense than his behavior: when I realized that I kept hoping that the “big bad guys” would remove him from the scene in a bloody, painful way, I understood there was something very wrong with the story, the writing, or both and therefore I did not go past the first season.

Review: TIME SALVAGER by Wesley Chu

Experience should have taught me by now there is no guarantee that a highly acclaimed book might automatically be right for me  – and yet there are times when widespread praise breeds high expectations, so that when a book falls short of those expectations, I’m bitterly disappointed.  Time Salvager is a case in point.

What adds a good measure of sadness to that disappointment is that this story possessed all the elements to be a good one, the kind of story I love: a fascinating premise, an intriguing journey and a promisingly complex main character. It’s a pity that such potential riches were squandered in such a way as to make it very difficult to go on, to the point I could not finish the book.

As I said, the premise sounded solid: humanity has discovered the secret of time travel but – and here is the brilliant twist that caught my attention at the beginning – uses it only to keep the present going, more or less. Earth has become a wasteland, except for a few cities and some wilderness settlements where people scrape up a miserly hand-to-mouth existence. Civilization has moved outward, colonizing other planets in the Solar System, but it’s not the kind of life one would expect from an advanced future: the overall impression is that of a dreary reality from which there is no escape, with failing technology few are able to maintain, and none to improve. The last resort of this future humanity is to cannibalize the past in the hope of shoring up the present, in a sad game of diminishing returns: it comes as no surprise that time agents – or chronmen – do not lead an adventurous, charmed life gallivanting all over the continuum, but fall prey to a lingering pall of depression that, combined with the inevitable after-effects of time travel, sooner or later brings them to rebellion or suicide.

James Griffin-Mars is one such chronman, toiling to repay the huge investment made for his training, but losing day by day the will to go on: he’s despondent, jaded, prone to heavy bouts of drinking. Every time he comes back from a mission, he finds it still more difficult to ignore the accumulated disillusionment and the guilt for the past lives he must consign to unescapable death. He’s plagued by nightmares about them and his younger sister, lost and probably dead in the turmoil that was their childhood, so that she has become the embodiment of all his failures and remorse.

While on a difficult retrieval, one whose importance will bring him and his handler very close to comfortable retirement, James unexpectedly breaks the rules, and brings back Elise, a scientist from the 21st Century, unable to abandon her to certain (and historically correct) death.  After being mildly annoyed by stilted dialogs and not enough showing as opposed to telling, here I hit the first major disturbance in this story: bringing someone from the past is forbidden, because it would both destabilize the time-line and cause the transportee’s death amid horrible sufferings. This last detail is shortly revealed as false information, but at the moment of his decision whether to leave Elise to die in a radiation-plagued ocean, or to bring her to the future where she will die nonetheless, James knows nothing about that deception, so what’s the motivation for his actions? A swift (and improbable) infatuation for Elise, which seems to be the reason, does not resonate with his personality as shown up to this point, nor does it make any sense, since she would be destined to die, one way or another – at least according to what James knows.

Accepting this development took some effort, but I chose to go along and see where it would lead: unfortunately it meant starting on a road increasingly paved with clichés – and here my trust in the story suffered some mortal blows. James and Elise must now hide from James’ former employers and from their main financer, a big corporation with evil goals – because of course every time a big corporation figures in fiction it has to be totally evil and corrupt.  After a few adventures, the two fugitives find shelter with a group of semi-savage people living in the wilderness: surprise, surprise, these are good-and-wise savages, who know how to live in harmony with poor, wounded Earth, and who inspire Elise to find a cure for the fatally ill planet.  Single-handedly and with scrounged, sub-standard equipment, the scientist from the past embarks on a monumental effort that has so far proved impossible for people with better means, while James hops through time in search of supplies, always managing to evade the search mounted by *two* organizations bent on finding him.

I’m aware that a work of fiction requires some suspension of disbelief – after all I find talking and walking trees perfectly acceptable, just to make an example – but this goes against any logic, to the point it becomes absurd, as does James’ handler’s equally successful help to his former colleague: no one keeps him under observation, no one questions his actions in an organization where everything and everyone is closely monitored. Sorry, but that makes no sense.  Even if, for the sake of adventure, I had been able to overlook all of the above, the arrival of Grace – another brilliant scientist from the past, enrolled to help Elise in her save-the-planet project – was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.  Grace is a wise, elderly lady of power, and yet she greets Elise with a string of spiteful repartees over James that seems to come straight from some teenage movie: the scene is not only incongruous (and again, groundless), but it transforms two brilliant scientific minds into a couple of shrews battling for a man’s affection – because that’s what women do, when they meet from across time, don’t they?  Another tired, overused cliché brought up to keep the previous ones company, in an ever-growing, noxious crowd…

There is an enlightening quote from Grace that gave me a definite perspective on this story: “We’re two scientists, an alcoholic (…) and a mud-wallowing tribe in the middle of a dystopian wasteland” – it sounded like the beginning of a joke about three people walking into a bar, and that was not what I was looking for in this book – or any book, for that matter.

Moving on to greener and better pastures….

 

My Rating: