A not very dauntless book reviewer abandons ship

I've decided to abandon ship on book reviews because I suck at them beyond all measure and the last thing I want to do is damn books with faint praise where they deserve more. For example, The Freak Observer by Blythe Woolston, which I just reviewed, is beautiful and compelling and I'm not sure I really got that across. Think I'll leave structured reviews to the experts.

What I really want to do, I think, is explore what interests me in the world building of books. For me, The Freak Observer raised all sorts of questions about poverty and universal health care. I love reading YA, but my thoughts often drift to the protagonist's parents.What must it be like to raise a child when you can't afford for them to get sick or injured, when it's that or food and utilities?

In Demon's Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan, Olivia was driven mad by something, which I won't mention because it is a huge spoiler if you haven't read it yet. She still had to hold herself together and get a job. What must that have been like, to have to go to work and be nice to your boss and your colleagues when your world has collapsed and you are living a nightmare which has you screaming inside your head? Olivia deserves a prequel book of her own one day.

A YA book with world building that just blew me away was Divergent by Veronica Roth. In my new approach of not doing a structured review, I will just say that Divergent was amazing; it completely de-railed my day yesterday because I couldn't put it down. She painted a powerful picture with very simple and straightforward prose.

It is when world building is this strong that I get the urge to explore it and think about other POVs than the protagonist's. In this case, what would it be like to be a Dauntless mother? We saw young Dauntless, including very young instructors, and we saw corrupt Dauntless leaders. We encountered one older woman, going by the streak of grey in her hair. Then again, I had some of those by the age of thirty. I don't think we saw any old Dauntless anywhere. It made me wonder, do they fade away, hand over the flag to their children and take no active part in society?

I am no stranger to the quest for adrenaline, but motherhood sucked it right out of me. How would you reconcile the motto of your faction with the bone-deep need to keep your child safe? The internal conflict would be acute. Would you fear for them so much that you would quietly encourage them to choose another faction? Would faction allegiance survive your concern for their life?

The picture painted was one of Dauntless youth, and it was an alluring one, even if few of us would survive it in real life. Given the little nugget in the book that the city gates are locked from the outside, there appears to be the foundation for more books in the Divergent universe. I would love the opportunity to find out more about the world Roth has built, including the eventual future of that youth, when I read them.

TBR challenge April - The Freak Observer by Blythe Woolston

Hardcover, Carolrhoda Books, 2010

Disclosure: I didn't buy this book, I won it in the draw for contributors to Maureen Johnson's Next Little Shelterbox campaign on twitter.

High school student Loa suffers a series of losses, one after the other. One of her few friends is killed in a road traffic accident, another leaves the country, her father loses his job, and most profoundly, her disabled sister dies. Caring for Loa's sister is the glue that binds the family together, and when she dies, grief affects them all.

The main thing that stood out for me in this book was Loa's voice. The author has nailed the sense of isolation and suppressed pain that carries Loa through her life not quite caring about anything that happens to her in the face of all the things that already have. Death is the Bony Guy, and he is never far away from her thoughts, which she expresses with a certain wryness. Despite this she never disconnects completely. She works to deal with her losses and keeps going using her own unique outlook on life.

Her family's new poverty makes even the simplest things difficult, and I found the lack of a safety net for the family quite shocking. This makes the book sound depressing, but it wasn't. Things get better for everyone, and I finished the book glad I had read it, even if I did wipe away a few tears in the middle. Loa felt very real.

Not my normal genre by any stretch, but a welcome change, and a book I would recommend for anyone wanting to read something a little different.

Review: A Madness of Angels by Kate Griffin

Paperback, Orbit Books, 2009

Not part of the TBR challenge this one, just one of those books you read and are desperate to tell people about. I've already bought a second copy and sent it off to the US as a gift to a friend.

While a-lurking on twitter recently I saw the campaign to help the Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green. Now Wood Green is not a million miles from me, and the BGB is probably the closest independent after the Chorleywood Bookshop, so it seemed only right to do something to help them stay afloat. I picked through their recommended reads and mail ordered this one and Weirdstone of Brisingham (haven't read that one yet - soon my pretty, soon).

Oh my. This is the point where I should give an accurate precis of the plot and say what I liked and what I didn't. However, I'm a lazy so-and-so and a terrible reviewer who just wants to immerse myself in a book without sitting outside it and noting what I liked and what I didn't. I'm just going to copy and paste the blurb at the end of the post and squeal, you have to read this book. London just pops off the page at you, the way it does in China Mieville's Kraken, even more so. It becomes a character itself, and if you have ever lived in London you will recognise it.

And now that I have got that out of my system maybe I do have a few little objective comments. Some of the sentences are huge and would earn a beginner writer like me a swift kick in the pants, but they work. The prose is dizzying; it drew me in and painted me a picture, and I found myself embracing the style and running with it, and so what if I'd be wheezing if I was reading it out loud. I loved Matthew Swift, who remained so very ordinary despite being anything but, and who made the very ordinariness of London work for him.

Most of all I loved that sense of place, the use of the real London and not just the shiny bits in the guidebooks. To me, books like this and Kraken are what urban fantasy is all about.

I think karma gave me a big kiss on the cheek with this one. Help an independent bookshop and be rewarded, because clearly those guys know their onions when it comes to recommending a good book. I'll be buying the next two books in the series from them too and reading them as soon as they get here.

A Madness of Angels, by Kate Griffin (as lifted from Amazon)
When a man is tired of London he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford - Samuel Johnson In fact, Dr Johnson was only half right. There is in London much more than life - there is power. It ebbs and flows with the rhythms of the city, makes runes from the alignments of ancient streets and hums with the rattle of trains and buses; it waxes and wanes with the patterns of the business day. It is a new kind of magic: urban magic. Enter a London where magicians ride the Last Train, implore favours of The Beggar King and interpret the insane wisdom of The Bag Lady. Enter a London where beings of power soar with the pigeons and scrabble with the rats, and seek insight in the half-whispered madness of the blue electric angels. Enter the London of Matthew Swift, where rival sorcerers, hidden in plain sight, do battle for the very soul of the city ...

TBR challenge March: Humans

Tor books, 2003

Humans is the middle book in a trilogy by Robert Sawyer, the others being Hominids and Hybrids. It tells the story of a parallel world to Earth, where Homo Sapiens was the human species to die out and the Neanderthals went on to become the dominant, technically advanced, species. In the first book, which I haven't read, an accident with an experimental machine on the Neanderthal world led to a Neanderthal scientist, Ponter Boddit, becoming stranded on our version of Earth.

In Humans, Ponter reopens the portal and revisits the friends he made in the first book. He also rekindles a friendship with Mary Vaughan which becomes a romance.

This is very much a hard sci-fi book. It spends a lot of time exploring the differences between the two worlds, and the Neanderthal world was fascinating. A world where you live apart from the men for most of the month then get together for a few days of  'Two Become One'. Hmm, I could live with it, as long as somebody was around to do the heavy lifting.

I found it a bit sermonising in places, and although I saw it described as a sci-fi romance in one amazon review, I don't think it was. The romance was more of a hook to hang any number of scientific and social observations on than what a romance reader would recognise as a romance.

Not a page-turner, but interesting, and aspects of the Neanderthal society have stayed with me and given me a certain amount of food for thought. Of course, that might just be the prospect of not having a husband under my feet for most of the month then the fun of squashing a month's worth of happies into a few days. On second thoughts, sons live with their fathers. Cancel that plan. I couldn't live without my Boy, even if he does borrow my computer when I want to write.

Hey, I was actually on theme this month. Robert Sawyer was a 'new to me' author. How 'bout that, go me! On to April.

TBR Challenge February: Kraken

Paperback, Pan, 2010

Deep in the research wing of the Natural History Museum is a prize specimen, something that comes along much less often than once in a lifetime: a perfect, and perfectly preserved, giant squid. But what does it mean when the creature suddenly and impossibly disappears?

For curator Billy Harrow it's the start of a headlong pitch into a London of warring cults, surreal magic, apostates and assassins. It might just be that the creature he's been preserving is more than a biological rarity: there are those who are sure it's a god.

A god that someone is hoping will end the world

I'm cheating a little. This book hasn't been languishing in my TBR pile because I forgot about it, or wasn't in the mood for it. It was sitting there as my reward for finishing a draft, because I knew that if I read it, I wouldn't be doing anything else until it was done.

I really don't know how Mieville comes up with his ideas. Billy disappears into another London populated by strange religions and mysterious characters. This London has talking tattoos and guardian angels, and horrors hiding below a paper-thin surface. Although Billy is the protagonist, for me, London is the hero of the book. Despite the craziness of what's going on, it doesn't feel like some alien city; it feels like London. Magic is called 'knack', and if Londoners had magic, that's exactly what they'd call it.

I found it easy to immerse myself in, but I struggled to understand the final twist of the plot. That meant that I felt a tiny bit unsatisfied at the end. If I read it again with the benefit of a little bit of foreknowledge, I think it would be easier, and I probably will read it again because the imagination of it just takes my breath away.

3.5/5 

TBR Challenge 2011 - January

Paperback, Arrow Books, 2007

Dr Temperance Brennan is on an archeological dig on Dewees Island when her students find a set of remains a lot fresher than the rest. She finds herself the de facto coroner for the investigation as she covers for her friend, Emma, who is fighting a life-threatening illness. Just to complicate matters, her ex-husband and her current lover turn up to share the house she is staying at in an uncomfortable triangle. One body becomes two, then three, and her suspicions turn to the local free health clinic and the doctor there. When her ex-husband is shot, the threats come close to home.

I like the older and wiser Tempe much more than her youthful TV counterpart, Bones. She is engaged with the world, with her grown up daughter and her endearing but unfaithful ex-husband, and with her tentative new relationship with a Montreal detective. Kathy Reichs kept the mystery cracking along while still giving plenty of time to Tempe's personal life and her struggle to put aside the affection she still feels for her husband despite the end of their marriage. The characters were interesting, although Boyd the dog stole every scene he was in, and I remained interested to the end.

I have read one other book by Reichs, Fatal Voyage, and I had a slight problem with the book in that I had a nagging suspicion through the first third that I might already have read it, when in fact it was Fatal Voyage I had read. I don't think I would want to read the whole series, because forensics only hold a certain amount of interest for me. I hope that Tempe and Ryan can make their relationship work, but I don't plan to buy more books to find out.

I give it a 3.5/5.

First one down. For February, release the Kraken.