Review: Well of Ascension, by Brandon Sanderson

I liked Mistborn. Wouldn’t go as far as to say I really liked it or anything, but I certainly enjoyed reading it. I figure the book has enough fans and twice as many reviews already without needing to add my thoughts to it, and in any case I’d rather talk about book two in Brandan Sanderson’s trilogy. Because while I liked Mistborn, I struggled to make it to the end of Well of Ascension.

And I mean really struggled. It’s not poorly written or offensive or anything like that, it’s just so boring. So unbelievable boring. And it shouldn’t be! If you take all the parts out of the book and look at them it sounds like a really awesome read. Tense political situations, siege warfare, families turned against each other and romances tested. Awesome, awesome, awesome. In theory.

But the problem is that all of the characters are just so good and noble and nice, it leaves the book almost wholly without tension. It’s not that I expect every fantasy novel to take inspiration from the gritty characters of Joe Abercrombie and his ilk, but I don’t think some shades of grey are too much to ask for. You would think for example, given their leader’s recent death, that there might be a power struggle amongst the old crew, or that some of them might choose to leave. Nope, they all continue to fight the fight because it’s the right thing to do. No conflict there.

Vin is having trouble with her role as Elend’s personal Mistborn, a situation that is only exacerbated by the Mistborn Zane who, despite working for the enemy, keeps saving her life. Lets set aside the fact that this entire plotline is a really annoying example of the whole ‘this-would-be-cleared-up-in-five-seconds-flat-if-characters-a-and-b-would-just-talk-to-other-for-crying-out-loud’ trope, it could have created tension. Nothing like a good old fashioned love triangle to liven things up, eh? Surely Vin would be torn between the man she thinks she loves and this mysterious Mistborn who already seems to know her better then Elend ever could? Nope. Her feelings for Elend never waver, the only doubt inside her comes from whether or not she’s good enough for him. Yawn.

And let’s talk about Vin and Elend’s relationship please. It’s a rare writer who can pull off a decent sex scene, so by all means feel free to leave them out. But don’t expect me to believe that two healthy, unsupervised, in love young adults living lives of extreme pressure and mortal danger aren’t doing it off page. Vin and Elend’s relationship is wholly chaste (and completely lacking in chemistry…) and there’s no reason for it to be so, other then they’re not married, (even though we see next to no evidence that society really gives a crap. And you know what? Even if they did realistic characters would still be doing it- or at least thinking about doing it…) Let’s be honest, the reason for this is the author’s personal religious beliefs, and it made it hard to “believe” in the world Sandersan was presenting. So no tension here, sexual or otherwise.

Elend was my favourite character in Mistorn. This slouching, rebellious, powerful young noble had the potential to be another Jimmy the Hand, or a fantasy Ferris Bueller. Never have I been more disappointed to get inside of a characters head. The kid is noble to the point of stupidity. And not in an interesting and thought provoking Ned Stark kind of way, just in a stupid and boring kind of way. And I also felt that Sanderson completely failed to explore the angst and tension that could have resulted from Elend’s own father laying siege to the city. The fact that his dad clearly wanted to kill him and destroy his idealistic dreams didn’t seem to bother Elend anymore than if it was a stranger camped outside his walls.

Bah! I could go on. Everyone is wholly good, except for the bad guys who are wholly bad. Was Mistborn like this? To a degree, I think it was. But it was saved by Kelsier who was such a complex and shaded character that he made up for it. The only character in the Well of Ascension who is at all complex is the leader of the other army (the one not led by Elend’s father), but he gets too little  page time to balance out the lack of complexity in everyone else.

I don’t see myself picking up Hero of Ages any time soon, nor anything else by Sanderson. There’s nothing wrong with being wholesome and nice, but it sure makes for some boring reading.

I bought this book 


 

Review: The Conqueror's Shadow, by Ari Marmell

Note: In case it's not clear in the body of the review, I did not finish this book. It has been suggested (via anonymous comment, don't you love the internet?) that one should not share their thoughts on an unfinished book. Fair enough opinion. But for me, personally, reading why someone didn't like or finish a book is just as informative as reading why someone loved a book. I rarely finish books I am not enjoying, and if I didn't comment on them for that reason this blog would be severely unbalanced. So the post is staying. Advance apologies for anyone who gets upset. End note



So like many, many others I read Mieville's Kraken. I don't have any thoughts on that one that others (many, many others) have not posted, so I don't think I'll add another review to the teeming pile. Let's just say that overall I enjoyed it but upon completion my brain felt like it had run a marathon. I decided to read something light and easy to recover.

And The Conqueror's Shadow seemed like it would fit that bill. Except that I barely made it a quarter of the way in before I gave up and found something else to read.

What happened? My suspension of belief is what happened. You know, that ability to believe what ever outlandishness the author is selling you in order to enjoy the story. I've been reading pretty much exclusive sci-fi and fantasy since I was nine years old. I thought my suspension of disbelief was made out of the same stuff as Wolverine's bones. Unbreakable.

Talking dragons? Sure. Secret world of magic? Ok. Zombie plague? Why the hell not? I mean come on, I just read a book about a god-Kraken and my biggest issue was an excess of wordplay, not the idea of a missing squid heralding the end of the world.
But I just couldn't get my head to accept the premise of The Conqueror's Shadow long enough to enjoy it.

You see, there's this evil dark lord character, Corvus. The Scourge of the East or some such. He wants to rule the kingdom and devoted a great deal of effort to the cause, recruiting an army of orcs and goblins to do his bidding. Cities fall, countless innocent people are murdered, you know the drill.
Then something goes wrong, he nabs a young, pretty hostage and abandons his army. Fast forward a whole bunch of years and he's living the quite life on a little farm with the hostage, who's now his loving wife.

Corvus is now a loving father and doting husband and all round nice guy. And here's where the book lost me. I just couldn't buy it. This guy caused countless people untold suffering, and all in all he seems pretty ok with it.

The premise of this book really intrigued me. A now retired dark lord has to return to his old ways to save the land from a new rising evil. I was expecting a kick ass anti hero. Not necessarily haunted by his past, but at least affected by it. Something akin to Lucifer from Gaiman's Sandman series. But honestly, Corvus does not read like an anti-hero. He reads like a hero-hero, and if you didn't already know about the things he'd done you wouldn't suspect it for a second. I'm sorry, but if you were responsible for the fall of a whole bunch of cities and the deaths of thousands of people, you don't get to be a hero-hero. It's a deal breaker.

It's as though the author was worried the reader wouldn't be able to sympathise with an evil mass murderer, so he goes too far in the other direction to make us like him. Oh, he didn't want to kill all those people, it was a necessary evil and so on. Honestly, it made me lose respect for Corvus. If he had have stood behind the things he'd done it would have made for an interesting and unique perspective. The fact that he was such a nice guy made me dislike more, and above all I just couldn't believe it.

So, I stopped reading. Which means that as the book progresses Corvus might have dropped the nice guy facade, I don't know. If he does, feel free to tell me in the comments and I might give the book enough shot. Because it was written well enough, with a whole bunch of genuinely funny one-liners. And if your suspension of disbelief can handle it you may well get more out of this one than I did.




I bought this book.

Review: Nights of Villjamur, by Mark Charan Newton

So if you buy a book solely because the cover is beautiful, or because the title is intriguing, then you accept the risk that the book might be not so good. But when you buy a book because you've seen it mentioned all over the place and because the plot sounds like ten different kinds of awesome, then you're your expectations might be somewhat higher. And yet, sometimes, the spur of the moment book will be fantastic and the anticipated one, well, let's turn our attention to Nights of Villjamur.


A city scrambling to prepare for a fast approaching ice age, masses of desperate refugees pushing at its walls, is left leaderless when the emperor commits suicide. Someone, or something, is killing of important council members, and a dark cult is making a grab for power. Zombie like creatures are shambling around the countryside and a war is brewing. Seriously, all that stuff happens in this book. All that stuff and then some. A plot like that, you might say its a bit too ambitious, maybe a bit too much action and excitement for one average sized book. But you almost certainly wouldn't look at that and say it sounds boring.


I went into Nights of Villjamur expected to be challenged, and challenged I was. But it wasn't because the plot was so complex, the prose so twistedly weird, no, the challenge was to finish the damn thing. A challenge I failed.


The problem, well, one of the problems, is that Mark Charan Newton is all tell and no show. I can't think of one examples in the three quarters of the book I made it through where Newton actually shows something. It's all, 'Bob walked down the stairs, he was tired and also a little hungry. He passed John, who he didn't like because four years ago he cheated at a game of poker.' Obviously that's not a dirct quote, but seriously you could open it to any page and find a quote not much better.


This telling over showing is particularly evident when we look the character Brynd. He's commander of the elite night guard, an albino, and a closeted homosexual. Everyone mistrusts him because he's an albino. I know this not because we ever actually see anyone mistrusting him, but because he, you guessed it, tells us. Or other characters will think, 'here come Brynd, I don't trust him because of his freaky white skin.' Another book I read recently had a character who, like Brynd, was an outcast because of their genetics. I'm referring to Jant Shira, from the excellent Castle trilogy. Throughout this books we see other characters too unnerved to meet Jant's eyes, obviously highly uncomfortable in his presence. He obviously makes people nervous. No one ever acts like Brynd bothers them, they just tell us he does.


Or there's an evil council member dude who wants to take control of the city, and to do that he wants to start a war. So he goes to the head armorer and says, 'tell everyone this arrow was made in our enemy nation.' And the armorer is all like 'uh, no.' And then the councilor says, 'do it or I'll beat the living shit out of you.' No, really, he's that subtle. And then later he thinks about how he's got to go do some more clever manipulating. Ah, excuse me? Straight up threats do not a master manipulator make...


The characters lack any real depth, and there's definitely no mystery to them. How can there be when they tell us everything? The telling is even worse when it's done in dialogue. 'How do you feel about your boss?' Asks character a. 'I used to like him but now I don't because he didn't promote me.' Who actually talks like that? It also feels like the characters interact only on a most superficial level. The emperor, for example, beat his wife and possibly also murdered her. And yet Brynd, his most trusted adviser, seems to have no opinion about it. Newton also has a some little writing quirks that he repeats a lot, most annoyingly in the dialogue of different characters, which makes them sound very similar. (Also, at one point some random character suddenly realises that he's never liked communal toilets. How do you suddenly realise something you've always known?)


Mostly I'm just really disappointed. This book had such crazy amounts of potential, and I felt like the character of Brynd in particular could have been pretty amazing. Could have been, would have been, but ultimately wasn't. Maybe the next books in this serious are better, but as I couldn't even finish this one I don't know if I'll ever find out.


How did I get this book? Bought it

Review: Edge, by Thomas Blackthorne

I’m not going to lie, I bought this book for the cover. I didn’t read the blurb, I didn’t read the first page, all of the little steps that bridge the gap between a book and my bookshelves flew out the window in the face of that cover. Knife fights! Blood! Duels! Sounds most excellent to me.

When the book arrived I dared to think I had been rewarded for my rash purchase. The back blurb promised a dystopic future Britain where knife fighting had been legalised and where a giant wall had been erected around the city. Sounds very awesome, yes? At the very least it sounds finishable, and yet I barely made it half way through.

Let start with the book’s main conceit: Knife fighting: it’s legal! Why? Pfft, we don’t need to know a silly little thing like that, do we? And honestly, I would have been happy with minimal explanation of why knife fighting (to the death, mind you) was legal, if we actually got to see some, you know, knife fighting. As I said, I made it to the midway point, and not once had anyone actually had a fight involving knives. There was a lot of posturing and ‘why sir, you have offended me! I demand satisfaction!’ going on, but actual knife fighting? Not so much. I’m not saying that nothing happened, but it did feel like Blackthorne (I vaguely recall that this is a well known author's alias, but can't for the life of me remember who...) completely wasted the potential of his world. Here’s this big brotherish dystopic future London, but not one of the events of the first half of the book couldn’t have taken place in a book set in current day London. What’s the point of cool futuristic setting if you don’t make the most of it? Or at least something of it?

And the giant wall surrounding Britain? Maybe the back cover was referring to a metaphorical giant wall, because no mention of such was made in the book, or at least no mention that I noticed. Admittedly, I could have missed it. Blackthorne's brand of worldbuilding seems to be offhand sentences like, “oh, yes, America has three presidents now” with no explanation or follow up or, worse of all, no real evidence that it effects the characters lives in any way. Or at another point he mentions that because knife fighting is legal hardly anyone owns or uses guns any more. Um, ok? More confusingly is the therapist character (always a sign of memorable characters when they have to be referred to by their profession...), who can possibly read minds or something. Maybe? She does this thing where she talks to her patients and somehow her words just fix whatever is wrong with them, or make them think in a whole new way, like magic. She'll say something like 'you are no longer shy' and bam! no more shyness. But for all intents and purposes Blackthorne has set his book in the “real” world and there are no other hints of supernatural happenings. It’s very strange.

I can accept magic therapy powers, but what I can’t accept is magic therapy powers that the author wants me to believe aren’t magic. Trying to figure it out kept pulling me out of the book. What also kept yanking me out was trying to get a handle on the moods of the characters. Scenes like this took place pretty much every time any of the character’s spoke:

Josh (or John. Possibly Jake) clenched his fists, a scowl crossing his lips, “um, yeah, ok I guess,” he said.

Do you see? His body language suggests angry alpha male, his words suggest meek submissive dude. The dialogue in this book was consistently like this, completely at odds with the context of the scene. It’s pretty much impossible to lose yourself in a book when your jarred out the story every couple of pages, you know?

Having not finished the book, I can not say if these faults are with it the whole way through. There’s a chance the last half is one long knife fighting blood bath, but even the possibility of that wasn’t enough to let me ignore its flaws and keep forcing myself through it.

Book was: purchased 

Review: Half of the Percheron Trilogy, by Fiona McIntosh

"Joreb, the zar (or ruler) of Percheron, is well served by his military leader, the handsome Lazar, who fought his way to freedom from slavery. When Joreb dies an untimely death, Boaz—Joreb's 15-year-old son by his beautiful, intelligent and ambitious first wife—becomes zar"
-amazon.com product page

First up, a disclaimer: I only made it through all of the first book and a bit of the second book of this trilogy. Which I guess give you a clue about what I thought of it.

Ah Fiona McIntosh, what do I do with you? Our relationship started out so well. I always love reading fantasy by Australian writers, partly because I’m as patriotic as the next gal, but also because it seems to a genre that Australian writers are good at. And certainty the first trilogy I read by McIntosh, The Quickening trio, was true to that. Those books put a nicely original spin on a reliable old fantasy story line, and the characters were complex and the plot well paced. The ending was a little to convenient for my liking, but not enough that it spoiled the books for me.

This was the second trilogy McIntosh had published, so of course I went out and got a hold of her first effort, The Trinity trilogy. It was… not so good. The characters were walking cliché’s and the plot treated logic like an untrustworthy stranger. But I was forgiving, there was such a difference in quality between The Quickening and these books that I simply assumed McIntosh was improving as a writer with every effort.

Having struggled though half the Percheron trilogy before giving up, I’m starting to think maybe The Quickening was a fluke. The Percheron trilogy, or at least the half I read, was terrible. The only positive thing I can think to say about them is that the cover art is truly spectacular. But then I just get all resentful that such poor books get to have such beautiful covers.

Let’s start with the most important element in a book: the characters. We have the Odalisque Ana, the beautiful girl with mysterious ancestry. Did I mention she was beautiful? Little chance of forgetting, as we are reminded almost every time she appears on stage, and other characters are forever stopping to marvel at just how gosh darn beautiful and captivating she is. She is also kind to small children and animals, and when she sees an old lady being ripped off in the street she immediately jumps in and helps her. (The old lady, natch, turns out to be a Goddess in disguise and gives Anna a magical trinket in exchange for her kindness).

We also have the head of the Zar’s security, Lazar (It's not a coincidence and not very clever that his name sounds so much Lazarus...). Lazar and Ana fall in love instantly, even though she’s barely a teenager and he’s well into his thirties when they first meet. Lazar is moody and mysterious and handsome, women want to be with him, men want to be him, etc. He’s also prone to self pity and petulance, but I think this angst is supposed to make us like him more. Spoiler: it does not.

The only character who is not two shades away from being a Mary Sue is Boaz, the young Zar. Unfortunately McIntosh devotes little time to Boez, and while I obviously don’t know how the book progresses it seems to me that we are supposed to dislike him because, gasp, he wants to have sex with Ana! How dare the Zar want to get it on with a member of his own harem, am I right?

And the plot? You could make an excellent drinking game out of it. Every time destiny gets mentioned, drink. I promise you’ll be seeing double before you’re half way through the first book. Characters who are meeting for the first time decide to trust each other because they sense it's destiny. They make huge leaps of understanding not because they uncover information but because they just know, somehow. It’s appallingly lazy writing. Oh, I can’t think of a reason why character A. would reveal his big secret to character B. I’ll just make it destiny!

In the end I announced to my boyfriend that if I read the word destiny one more time I was putting the book down for good. I barely made it another page.

Maybe the final book fully redeemed all of these flaws, but I doubt even Neil Gaiman could salvage something out of it. (I mean, I haven't even touched upon the the rampant Orientalism or Boaz's mother...)

How did I get these books? I bought them. (Yes, all three... Sigh)