Posts from 2015 :: Page 3

EBR: Everyone welcome our newest reviewer, mtbikemom, a long-time reader and friend who’s agreed to help us work through the pile of books stacking up at EBR headquarters. We’re sure you’ll love her as much as we do.

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If a reader is looking for better-than-average female characters in a magically enhanced historical fiction novel with some ripping action scenes, D.B. Jackson’s DEAD MAN’S REACH (Amazon) will satisfy.

I need a bit more in a story than that, however.
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When I first heard that Joe Abercrombie was going to write a YA series, I was a little skeptical. My impression of his books at that time hadn’t exactly meshed with the ideals that YA raised in my mind. On the flip side, I was also kind of excited because sometimes the sheer mountain of content that came buried within each Abercrombie novel was frequently a major aspect of its own. Keeping within the relative boundaries of the YA genre, however, could give him a chance to really focus on the two aspects of writing that he really does best: character and story. The story thus far has been one that I’ve enjoyed. Based on what I’d seen in the first two, some aspects I thought were good but others not so much, I was cautiously optimistic when beginning this final novel that it’d all turn out amazing. I wish I could say that it had.
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Polyhemia is asleep and has been for three hundred years, until Luck wakes her up with a kiss. Only, he’s no prince, and it certainly wasn’t the kiss of True Love. Which would explain why she keeps falling asleep, why her memories are fuzzy, and why her dreams are so odd–the curse was only sorta broken. Luck, you see, is an enchanter, and uses his kiss/magic to wake up Poly and deliver her to the Council because they think she’s the princess.

Only she isn’t.
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In THE LEAGUE OF SEVEN (EBR Review), our young heroes Archie, Hachi, and Fergus (along with Archie’s trusty Tik Tok man Mr. Rivets) worked together to stop the Mangleborn monster from the Florida swamps. They discovered that these creatures are buried all over the Earth, waiting for the day when they will be freed from their prisons and can take over humanity. It is only a new League of Seven–a tinker, a law-bringer, a scientist, a trickster, a warrior, a strongman, and a hero–who can stop them.

Now, in THE DRAGON LANTERN (Amazon), with the first three members of new League discovered, they are sent on a quest by the Septemberist Society and Mrs. Moffitt to recover the Dragon Lantern. She believes this was the artifact that transformed Archie and may hold the answers to his past.

But immediately upon recovering the lantern it’s stolen.
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Archie Dent’s parents are members of a secret society that knows about the giant monsters who want to enslave humanity. He’s always known about the Mangleborn who were buried by past League of Seven members, aided by the Septemberist Society. The League is always seven: a tinker, a law-bringer, a scientist, a trickster, a warrior, a strongman, and a hero. And now that the Mangleborn are attempting to escape again, a new League will form.

But all Archie knows right now is that his parents have been brainwashed by Manglespawn and in order to save them, he needs help. Along the way he meets Hachi, a Seminole girl with impressive skills with a knife; Fergus, a Yankee with an aptitude for machines; and there’s the Tik Tok machine man named Mr. Rivets, owned by Archie’s parents and tasked to keep his young charge safe.

But it’s only by working together that they can stop Edison from waking the Mangleborn buried in the swamps of Florida.
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Recently, the dynamic duo of James S. A. Corey (Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) did a Q&A over at reddit. One of the questions that came up along the way was one that I thought was pretty astute and went something along the lines of this: In your books, why are there so many manned spacecraft and a surprising dearth of unmanned, likely more cost-effective, drones doing work in space? Their response was simple: bots are boring, humans are interesting. The story told in this book tries to take a somewhat opposite tack to that and tells a “science fiction” story where all of the space stuff is handled by bots, with the humans acting in the background. And how does it all turn out? Let’s just say that our boys from the Expanse series know what they’re talking about.
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When a novel is hyped beyond all reasonableness, I immediately dislike it on principle. Most of the time, this near-irrational dislike ends up justified when I finally get around to reading the story. But every now and then the hype is warranted.

Enter, THE MARTIAN by Andy Weir (Amazon).

Perhaps the most hyped novel in the last year or two—apart from READY PLAYER ONE—THE MARTIAN has a very simple premise. Mark Watney is stranded on Mars, and he needs to figure out a way to survive on that wasteland for years—that’s right, years—to even have a chance to be rescued.
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I had an argument with Mike Resnick once–okay, maybe it was only a complaint and response that found us on opposite sides of the coin–concerning what made a story a speculative (Fantasy or Science Fiction) story. I had just finished reading one of his short yarns and was frustrated because I didn’t think that any of the speculative elements had anything to do with the story and could have been left out completely without destroying the story at its core. In essence, the made up stuff was just window dressing. So the story didn’t feel like it was speculative to me and I was kinda miffed about it. I was reminded of that disagreement while I was reading this short story collection because it was quite impossible for me to disentangle the plot from the speculative elements in the slightest. They all relied completely and wholly upon the made up stuff. And I was really happy to find that.
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More than anything Kirit wants to be a trader like her mother. Instead of living her entire life on one tower, she would get to fly from tower to tower, helping the inhabitants of the city, and seeing everything the world has to offer.

But Kirit makes a terrible mistake and doesn’t return inside the tower during a dangerous migration warning, instead sitting on the terrace to watch her mother leave to take medicines to other towers. She attracts the attention of a skymouth–terrifying creatures that snatch and devour the unwary.

But Kirit survives, drawing the attention of the Singers, the city’s protectors. As a result, her plans to become a trader are threatened because the Singers have discovered Kirit’s ability to scare off skymouths–and they want her ability for their own use, even if it means threatening the people she loves.
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Karn is a gamer; his favorite game is Thrones and Bones (after which the series is named). When his best friend Thianna–half giant, half human–is kidnapped, he’s tasked by the dragon Orm to find her. Easier said than done, for he must travel far from his rural home to the city of Castlebriar, deal with duplicitous elves, and solve riddles. Thianna was on a quest to find a horn, much like the one they discovered in book one, FROSTBORN (Amazon)–these horns make it so the user can speak with and coerce magical beasts. And Orm isn’t the only one who wants to find the second horn.

Desstra is a dark elf, training to be a member of the Underhanded, a group of elite fighters. When an important test goes awry, she’s sent on a mission to prove she’s worthy. Part of that mission involves tricking Karn into thinking she’s something she isn’t. Because if she can’t get the horn before Karn does, then she will be outcast from the only home she’s ever known–even if she does think dark elves aren’t very nice.
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