Category :: Review :: Page 64

A good while ago, I had my first run at buying sushi. I’d sampled it before with friends and such, but had never purchased any myself. Apart from initially mistaking the twirl of wasabi for some tasty guacamole (How? Looking at it from this side of things, I honestly have no idea) it was a great experience. When I was finished, I decided to try the other interesting-looking thing on the plate. The one that looked like marinated flower petals. I found that it was sweet and actually pretty good, but then arose the over-powering taste of… soap? Later, a good friend told me what I had actually ingested.

The connection? My impression of this book in two words: candied ginger.
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I love Westerns. LOVE them. I grew up reading Louis L’Amour and watching John Wayne movies. When I got older I found I loved the more mature stories in the genre. You know, Unforgiven and the like. Can you even begin to imagine how excited I was when Joe Abercrombie announced his next novel would have Western themes in it? And it would be called RED COUNTRY? If that doesn’t scream Western-styled violence, I don’t know what does.
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Romance? I know. I can hear the tumult of the masses lurching in defiance from here.  Since when does EBR review romance novels?  Answer:  since King started writing them while his publisher was marketing them as otherwise.  There was nothing even remotely romance-related to this book that I came across prior to getting into its pages.  Not on the outer cover, not inside the cover, not in any official summary of the book.  Not anywhere.  In fact, despite everything that made my deductive reasoning lean toward the contrary, I didn’t even fully accept that the book was a romance until the very end.  Not until the last sentence of the book.

And did that bother me?  Immensely so.
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This is easily the most difficult review I have had the opportunity write.  I start it off much the same I way wrote the review for the previous WoT book.  It’s difficult to write a review solely on A MEMORY OF LIGHT (Amazon), without considering all that has come before.  Opening the cover of this book, and reading those first words, all the way to finishing the last words and closing the book, has been been an inevitability hurtling (sometimes crawling) at me for 17 years or so.
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It is with no small amount of irony and quite a large piece of humble pie that I finally sit down to write this review a full month after the book’s release.  With how much I harped on the poor treatment Mr. Abraham received surrounding the publication of his Long Price series and the single fact that I consider Daniel Abraham to be my current favorite fiction author today, you’d think that I’d be more on top of things when it came to the release of this book.  The U.S. trade omnibus paperback treatment of his story has been a long time coming–longer than I think it had any right to be–but I am supremely happy to see it finally happen.  In my mind, this is one of those stories that deserves all the praise and publicity that can be heaped upon it.
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PATHFINDER (EBR Review), the first book in Orson Scott Card’s Pathfinder series–of which RUINS (Amazon) is the second book–kind of blew me away. I am a big fan of Card’s older work. ENDER’S GAME (Amazon) is a classic. I loved the rest of the Ender series, (the Shadow series not so much) and I loved both WYRMS (Amazon) and TREASON (Amazon). But I have had a hard time getting into his work lately. This series however feels like a bit of that Old Card coming through.

The plot, for those of you who haven’t gotten on board, follows Rigg a boy who can see paths, the paths that humans have traveled in and how recently. To some extent it lets him see the past, who went where and when they did it. I’m gonna get all spoilery of the first book in a second so if you want you can just jump down to the bottom of the review where I will tell you if this is a good book or not (hint: it is).
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I don’t know if I can accurately describe just how excited I was to dive into this book. Mark Hodder’s Adventures of Burton and Swinburne were some of the most amazing books that I read in the last few years. Major anticipation in this corner. So the fact that this book was nothing like I thought it would be, AND ended up being Science Fiction, AND I still really liked it says something impressive about Mr. Hodder and his burgeoning array of great stories.

A RED SUN ALSO RISES (Amazon), to all appearances, is a stand-alone novel in the same vein as Hodder’s previous trilogy and definitely a not book that you’d find Arthur Krystal picking up at your local bookstore. Go ahead and check out the very fine book cover and tell me that it doesn’t make your mind just go, SPROING! Seriously great artwork there. And the story ain’t half bad either!
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Like the hair in your panna cotta, or the blow fly in your bisque, a bad salesman will most often destroy the goodness that surrounds it, no matter how much of that goodness may be available. At least, it will often destroy the idea of large-scale goodness for me. This single idea represents one of the most important reasons why I just couldn’t bring myself to love this most recent read. And yet, I will often pull the fly out and eat the soup anyhow. I mean, who can resist a good soup!

KOP KILLER by Warren Hammond (Amazon), is the third book in his Kop series, but is handled well-enough that it has little problem standing on its own. The story is set on the planet of Lagarto, where the long day and night cycles make for some interesting dynamics, and nearly every inhabitant living there understands that their lives can sink no further than this.
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Emma Bannon is a sorceress in the employ of the Queen herself, tasked with protecting Archibald Clare, an unregistered and failed mentath. Why? Because other mentaths all over Londinium are dying unexplainable and grisly deaths and there’s more to it than a serial killer.

Set in an alternative Victorian England, THE IRON WYRM AFFAIR (Amazon) blends magic and steampunk with enthusiasm. Known for her Urban Fantasy series, Lilith Saintcrow tries something different with a steam-sorcery-mystery tale that threatens Britannia herself.
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Do you know Repairman Jack? If you don’t, you’ve been missing out on a terrific series of books by F. Paul Wilson. The Repairman Jack series has, over the years, grown into one of my favorite series. It has a near perfect mix of horror and thriller elements while managing to inject humor here and there.

Through the series, I’ve always had questions in my mind about Jack. I know what happened to his mom (and his reaction to it), but what did he do after? How did he meet Julio and Abe? What events forged him into the man we meet in THE TOMB? (Amazon)

Those questions start to be answered in COLD CITY.
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