The Falcoln Throne

It's rare that I read a book and don't really know what to think about it, but that's the case with The Falcon Throne. I've enjoyed other books by Karen Miller, and I certainly didn't dislike this book. It just seems like this book was written to cash in on the popularity of Game of Thrones.

Both works have Throne in the title. Both books are fantasies set in pseudo-medieval kingdoms. Both works are about politics with lots of treachery and backstabbing and power-hungry lunatics who want to seize a throne at all costs. Both works have large numbers of major characters. Both works keep magic more or less in the background. Both works tell fairly dark stories.

I'm not saying that Falcon is a copy of Game, because it clearly isn't. It is, however, very much the same sort of story. If you enjoy Game of Thrones, the books or the TV show, you'll probably enjoy this. Unfortunately, its also long, fairly depressing, and you will see bad things happen to characters you like.

Personally, I will probably pick up the rest of the series when it's written.

The Ghost Bride

Yangsze Choo's The Ghost Bride is certainly not the sort of book I normally read. Yes, it is essentially a historical fantasy, but it's labelled as simply fiction to appeal to a wider audience. This is a good thing, since it is the sort of book that is likely to be enjoyed by non-fantasy fans, but it's also a bad thing, since that means fantasy fans are less likely to be aware of it, and I think they'd enjoy it too. I know I did.

The Ghost Bride is the story of Li Lan, a young,  19th century Malaysian woman. Her father tells her that a wealthy family has expressed interest in having her marry their recently deceased son. Naturally, she doesn't want to do it, especially after she encounters the ghost of said son, and he proves to be annoyingly self-centered. Soon Li Lan is traveling through the world of the spirits, investigating corruption in the court of Hell (and the alleged murder of her would-be groom).

There is some good adventure. There's romance. There are demons and hungry ghosts. There's a good bit of Chinese folklore. It all makes for a very entertaining read.

City of Stairs

City of Stairs is definitely not your typical otherworldly fantasy. For one thing, it eschews the typical pseudo-medieval setting in favor of something closer to the late 19th/early20th century. The world has trains, guns, gas lighting, cameras, and telegraphs. It is not a steampunk novel though (if you were wondering).

Besides having a fairly distinctive setting, this book also draws a good bit from the mystery and spy thriller genres. The main character is a spy who goes to the city of Bulikov to investigate the murder of a professor who she greatly admired. Along the way she finds rebellion, political intrigue, and gods.

The gods are what makes this book a fantasy. Long ago, the gods led the people of the continent to conquer the world.  Two generation before this story began, a man called the Kaj led a rebellion against the continentals and killed their gods. Of course as you can guess, it turns out that some of the gods survived and their followers are causing trouble.

This was a really great book. Besides being a fantasy/mystery/thriller, it also deals with issues of colonialism, religious fanatacism, and the nature of divinity. This was a really great book.

The Serpent of Venice

I read my first Christopher Moore novel in the 90s when I picked up a remaindered copy of Coyote Blue for cheap. I loved it, but for some reason or another it was more than a decade until I picked up another one of his novels. Lately I've been slowly reading his other books, including his most recent work,  The Serpent of Venice, which I was lucky enough to get a review copy of.

Serpent of Venice is a sequel to the novel Fool.  Fool was a parody of King Lear, starring Pocket, Lear's fool. This book also stars Pocket, and as the title suggests is (partly) a parody of The Merchant of Venice. It's also a parody of Othello with a dash of Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" thrown in.

Being a Shakespearean parody, the book is fairly bawdy and uses a good bit of  archaic language. Being a Christopher Moore novel, there is a lot of humor. There is also some fool on dragon sex, for the sort of people who get turned on by that sort of thing.

I don't think this is Moore's best book, but it's good, and it's funny enough that I laughed out loud at several points. It's well worth reading.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite writers, so when I was given the opportunity to get a review copy of The Ocean at the End of the Lane,I jumped at the chance. This book is awesome. In fact, I think it might be my new favorite Gaiman novel.

This is a story that manages to be both creepy and magical. It's about a young boy who discovers that one his parents' lodgers has committed suicide in the family car. This leads to a strange series of events involving the decidedly peculiar Hempstock family, a strange otherworldly being that tries to give people what they want, and some really nasty varmints.

I don't want to go into any specific details, because I want to keep this review as spoiler-free as possible. This book was very disturbing, especially some of the scenes between the young protagonist and his father. The villain was scary. The Hempstocks were wonderful.

This is a book that you shouldn't miss.

Stardust: The Gift Edition

I first read Stardust years ago in a cheap, paperback edition, and it is a great story. A few months ago, I was offered the opportunity to get a review copy of Stardust: The Gift Edition, which is a brand new hardcover edition of Neil Gaiman's classic tale. Naturally, I jumped on the opportunity as you can probably tell since I'm reviewing it.

For those who aren't familiar with the story, Stardust is a fairy tale for adults. The story starts off with the tale of Dunstan Thorn and how he fell in love with an imprisoned fairy princess and had a child named Tristran with her. Many years later, this child, now a young man, heads off into Fairy to find a fallen star after making a foolish promise to a young woman. While there, he has a bunch of adventures that would take far too long to explain in detail. It's a cool story that's well worth reading.

You may wonder what it is about the Gift Edition that's so special. Well, like I already said, it a hardcover. In fact, it's a very nice looking hardcover. The cover looks a lot like the sort of covers they had back before the invention of dust jackets. It's just the image of a falling star with the title and the author's name that has been (I assume) stamped on with some sort of goldish-looking foil. It's very classy, and if you want a nice looking copy to sit on your shelf, this is the one for you.

Besides that, it has some cool extras. There's a new introduction by Gaiman. There's an excerpt of an unfinished novel that Stardust was originally going to be a sort of prequel to. There are also some new illustrations by Charles Vess. All of this makes it a great book to by if you love Stardust, don't have the original heavily-illustrated DC comics version, and want an illustrated copy (or want to read the extras).

Sailor Twain

Mark Siegel's Sailor Twain has some nice artwork. It's not very often that you see a graphic novel, told entirely in charcoal. This makes for a nice change. There is one problem though; the story is very slow to get moving.

The book tells the story of a steamboat captain who finds a wounded mermaid in the Hudson. It takes four chapters before this actually happens. Then we spend about 200 pages where the captain falls in love with the mermaid at the expense of his marriage, the ships owner sleeps with every woman he can find, and we learn a lot about the mythology of mermaids thanks to a writer named C. G. Beaverton. After that we finally get a reasonably climactic conclusion.

Even the big chunk where nothing is really happening is kind of interesting. The parts detailing mermaid mythology were entertaining. The owner's budding relationship with C. G. Beaverton was cool. Even with that, this large hunk of story is kind of a drag.

It's not a bad book, but I do think it could have been better.

Shadow Show

I always find that I have a little trouble when writing reviews of anthologies. If I write about each story, the review ends up being way too long. If I only talk about the stories that stood out the most to me, then I feel like I've slighted the writers I don't mention. If I don't go into detail on any of the stories, then I feel like I'm not doing my job, even if it is a job that I'm not getting paid for. In the case of Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury, I think I'm going to fall somewhere between option 2 and option 3.

I suppose I should start off by saying that this is a really great collection. Usually when I read an anthology, there's at least one story where I wonder what the editors where thinking when they included it. Not this time, though. I enjoyed all the stories in this anthology.

Ray Bradbury was a genius. He was one of the best writers of the 20th century. I think that this book isn't great just because it's a collection of great stories inspired by Bradbury. It's also great because it shows how much Bradbury influenced the great writers who came after him, (and Harlan Ellison® who was a contemporary). It's also great to see that while Bradbury is most often thought of a science fiction writer, this book also includes stories by fantasy, horror, and more mainstream writers.


This book is a fitting to one of our best writers. Anyone who is a fan of Ray Bradbury should give it a try. Anyone who isn't a fan of Ray Bradbury, should pick up some of his books and become a fan.

DarkWalker

I loved John Urbancik's DarkWalker.This was a really cool, fun book that I had a hard time putting down. It's really a dark (or maybe urban) fantasy about a man who has the ability to see the creatures of the night--vampires, zombies, werewolves, etc.--and has some sort of supernatural protection from them, but he's only allowed to watch and can't interfere.  This causes some trouble when he falls in love and has to rescue his lover from an imp, which turns his protection into a sort of psychic signal advertising him as an all you can eat buffet for monsters.

There's all kinds of other stuff. There are lots of monsters of all sorts. There's a sexy vampire, who kidnaps the hero and tries to help him because she falls in love with him. There's a tough as nails vampire hunter who helps the hero because it gives him a chance to kill monsters. There's even a demon with a sinister agenda.

I wouldn't call it the most original thing ever, since books about people who are aware of a secret world of monsters that coexists with our own are a dime a dozen these days. Still, if you're a big fan of horror or fantasy, you should check this book out.

Enchanted

I love fantasy. That's why I was happy to pick up a copy of Alethea Kontis's Enchanted when she was doing a signing at my local bookstore last month. Since it's a fairly recent release, I figure I should try and write a review of it now that I read it.

This was a good book. It's one of the fairy tale-style fantasies, with the conceit that all (or almost all) of the great fairy tale adventures center around the members of the Woodcutter family. The book centers on the youngest Woodcutter, Sunday, who finds a talking frog in the woods and falls in love.

After that, you start getting fairy godmothers showing up, and there are balls and villains and heroes. At its heart, it's a story of family and love. I had a hard time putting this book down, and I hope there's going to be a sequel, because I really want to know what happened to the mysteriously vanished Jack Woodcutter. Yes, he's the Jack from all the fairy tales.

The Killing Moon

I love fantasy novels, but these days I don't really read that many of them any more. This is because most epic fantasy has been taken over by these large ever expanding series where you have to read a dozen books (and wait a decade or so if it's an ongoing series) before you finally get he whole story.

You don't have to worry about that with The Killing Moon. This is essentially a stand-alone epic fantasy. Yeah, it's part of the series, but this doesn't have one of those annoying cliff-hanger ending where you need to pick up book two to find out what happens next.

The story is interesting. It's set in a city with a priesthood that can siphon power from dreams to use in magic. In the process they often kill people, but that's usually reserved for the dying or those deemed corrupt.

The problem is that there is corruption in the leader of the priesthood and in the city's Prince. This leads to a nasty monster called a Reaper killing people.

I really liked this book. Even though I've been trying to avoid getting into any new series, I expect I'll pick up the sequel at some point.

The Spy Who Drank Blood by Gordon Linzer

The Spy Who Drank Blood is an interesting fantasy/horror/mystery type book from the mid-80s. As you can probably guess from the title, it's about a secret agent who is also a vampire. Since the book is from the 80s, it isn't one of those lame sparkly vampires, or a tragic, brooding antihero, or the love interest of some woman who secretly battles the forces of darkness. Being the protagonist means he isn't a crazed monster either, but he is more interesting than these pathetic vampires that infest the genre today.

Blood, as the hero is called, is a vampire mostly in the traditional mold; he drinks blood, casts no reflection, can turn into mist or a bat or a wolf, can control certain animals, has hypnotic eyes, and can't cross running water.  He works for a secret government agency called the Office.

His boss's daughter is a reporter for a supermarket tabloid and is in Florida investigating skunk ape sightings. She gets kidnapped by some domestic terrorists, and then kidnapped from them by the skunk ape. Blood gets sent in to sort the whole thing out.

This book combines action, humor, horror, and a little science fiction very well.  If you can dis up a copy of this out-of-print book, you should do so.

Lord of Souls: An Elder Scrolls Novel by Greg Keyes

Since I haven't been updating this blog very much at all, I have decided to try to go back to my original formula of attempting to write a review of every book I read, though there will be a few exceptions this time. I will skip reviewing books when all I can think to say is something along the lines of "great book, just like the rest of the books in this series that I've reviewed."  To get back into the reviewing, I will sart with a book that I got from LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program: Lord of Souls: An Elder Scrolls Novel by Greg Keyes.

This was one ER book that I probably shouldn't have requested. It's a direct sequel to another book, which I haven't read, and it's set in the world of a video game franchise that I haven't played. This made in very hard for me to get into the book.

The prologue is basically a recap of the events of the previous book, so I wasn't too lost. The main problem came with all the Elder Scrolls terminology that I didn't know. I know what elves and orcs are, but I did not know what any of the other races were and could only infer some of them from the text. Despite it being rather important to the plot, I still have no idea what Oblivion actually is except that that's where the bad guys came from. This leads me to believe that this is the sort of book that is primarily designed to appeal to fans of the video game franchise.

This made it rather difficult for me to get into the story. Once I did get into it, it was a fairly exciting tale, but really, unless your a fan of the Elder Scrolls games, you probably shouldn't bother with this book.

The Emerald Atlas by John Stephens

I got an advanced copy of The Emerald Atlas in the mail the other day. It's a young adult fantasy novel about three orphans who find a magic book.

My feelings on this novel are somewhat mixed. On the one hand, I enjoyed reading the book. The plot was reasonably exciting and fairly fast paced once it got moving. The premise was bit shaky in spots; in ancient times wizards made three super powerful magical books, any one of which could grant near god-like powers, but somehow their city was destroyed by Alexander the Great, and the books were lost. I know if I had those three books, it would take a lot more than Alexander the Great to stop me.

The main problem with the book is the language. I've read plenty of books written for teens and even children. For many of them, I wouldn't know they were written for younger people if it didn't say so in the book.  This is not one of those books. This is one of those books where the language is dumbed down, sometimes to an almost condescending level.

This isn't a bad book, but it's not all that great either. I might be tempted to pick up the rest of the series, but the author really needs to learn not to talk down to his readers.

Zombies vs. Unicorns Day 1: The Last Unicorn

I saw a contest for a book called Zombies vs. Unicorns on this blog here. Since I can get bonus points for hosting my own Zombies. vs. Unicorns week, I figured why not? I have plenty of zombie books lying around the house that I haven't reviewed, and even a couple of unicorn books. So to start off the week, I thought I'd write a quick review of one of my favorite fantasy novels of all time, The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle, which was also turned into one of my favorite animated films of all time, which I won't actually link to since the people who have the rights to it decided to be dicks and rip off Beagle.

It's the story of a unicorn who discovers that she is the last unicorn in the world. Despite the fact that unicorns are by nature solitary creatures, she decides to set out to discover the fate of her people. Along the way she meets a rather inept wizard and quite a few other people that I don't want to get into since I generally try to avoid spoilers.

This is a truely great story, full of magic, adventure, ill-fated romance, and heroism.  If you can find a copy, I'd recommend getting the deluxe edition, which includes the follow-up short story, "Two Hearts." "Two Hearts" is one of the best, saddest short stories I've ever read. This is the sort of book that I can't hesitate to give 5 yo-yos to.

The Gathering Storm

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from The Gathering Storm. I like the Wheel of Time series. I like Brandon Sanderson. However, I tend to be somewhat wary of these "posthumous collaborations," because usually they're only a step or two above fanfic (if that).

In the case of The Gathering Storm, mt worries were unfounded. This is a truly excellent continuation of the series. I think it's actually better than some of the middle of the series novels where Jordan let the plot lag a bit too much. The plot doesn't lag here, and Rand's character actually develops.

My only complaint, is a general complaint with the series: there are too damn many major characters. This means that many of the characters from the past who were interesting seem to either be given less time in the novel (Mat doesn't show up until halfway through) or disappear altogether (Elayne for instance doesn't get anything more than a few mentions). Even so, this is a good book.

The Warded Man

If you like reading fantasy, then you should pick up a copy of The Warded Man, by Peter V. Brett, when it comes out on March 10, 2009. I really think this is the best fantasy novel I've read since George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones.


The Warded Man has everything you need to make an excellent fantasy novel. It has strong characterization with interesting characters. It has an interesting plot. There's solid world building. Most of all, it's an original story.

It's the tale of a young man named Arlen, who witnesses the killing of his mother by demons. These demons arise every night and kill any human or animal they can find that isn't protected by magic wards. Arlen vows to find the ancient fighting wards that allowed men to fight the demons millennia ago.

Seriously, I liked this book. The sequel is definitely on my want list when it comes out.

For a Few Demons More, by Kim Harrison

For a Few Demons More is book five of the "The Hollows" series. This is the first book in the series that I haven't been able to get in an omnibus edition, but that doesn't mean I don't like it. I thought it was pretty good. (If you're wondering why I haven't reviewd any of the other books, it's because I've stopped reviewing book club omnibuses.)

I love the main characters in these books: Rachel, the gutsy and tough witch; Ivy, the seriously messed up lesbian vampire; and Jenks the fiesty and funny (male) pixie. Plus there's Trent (the Elf crime lord), Big Al (the demon), Kisten (Rachel's vampire boyfriend), and quite a few more. Besides the interesting characters, there's a lot of action, which I always like in my books.

The only problem I have with this book is the plot. It's all over the place. I really think it would be better off if the plot were divided between to books instead of one. I'll give you a synopsis, so maybe you can see what I mean.

A demon named Newt shows up Rachel's home looking for something. Rachel thinks it might be the cursed statue she picked up in the last book (it allows werewolves to turn humans into werewolves). Meanwhile someone is killing werewolves and Rachel gets involved in the investigation. Trent is getting married and Rachel is asked to provide security. At the wedding practice she sees Big Al (another demon), who she is known to have associated with in the past. Al goes on a rampage. The vampire lord Piscary is released from prison to deal with Al. Piscary kidnaps Ivy. Then ther's still more stuff that I won't reveal because it would be a spoiler.

While it is all tied together, I can't help but think the story would be better if the cursed statue/werewolf killer and Big Al/Piscary plotlines were in two seperate books so the could be fleshed out more. Even so, I don't think it was bad, and in fact I think it was a pretty good book.

I give For a Few Demons More four yo-yos.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

If you haven't at least started reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows yet, most likely your not a fan of the series of you're on the space station. I'm going to review it anyway, though.

In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the forces of evil are in ascendance. Voldemort's forces can do pretty much whatever they want, and pretty soon the Ministry of Magic is their puppet. Harry, Ron, and Hermione are on a quest to find and destroy the Horcruxes, which ultimately leads to the final battle with Lord Voldemort.

I though this was a very satisfying ending for the series. Most of the plot threads have been tied up. There's lots of good action and some character development. We learn something of the history of Dumbeldore and Snape. We learn what the heck a "Deathly Hallow" is. We find out who dies, and who Hermione hooks up with. We even get to see some of the less pleasant characters in a new light.

The only thing I didn't like was the epilogue. It's set (I believe) nineteen years after the main action, and shows some of the characters sending their children to Hogwarts. I won't get into details (to avoid spoiling it), but it didn't really add much to the story and was boring.

Despite that, this was a great book. I give Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows a full five yo-yos.

Blood & rust, by S. A. Swiniarski

Blood and Rust is a nice little omnibus. It contains two vampire dective stories. The first one, Raven, is about a man who is trying to figure out how he was killed and turned into a vampire. The second, The Flesh, the Blood, and the Fire, is about the hunt for the Cleveland Torso Killer.

I thought these books were great. Both of the stories feature vampiric antiheroes, but both avoid all that vampire sex appeal stuff. The vampires are still all to human, though some of them are monsters.

Anyway, I give Blood and Rust five yo-yos, and I'll have to look for some more of his stuff.