Review: The Murder Of Bindie Mackenzie, by Joclyn Moriarty

I read Joclyn Moriarty's first book, at the time her only book, back when I still fell into the YA demographic. Of all the many (many, many) YA books I read when I actually was a young adult, this is one that really stuck with me. It was called 'Feeling Sorry For Celia' and was about a long distance runner named Elizabeth and her troubled best friend, a new best friend, and, of course, boys.

I loved this book. It was insanely funny, (like, don’t read it somewhere were laughing aloud is frowned upon) but not at all lacking in feeling. Elizabeth starts the book with terribly low self esteem. She composes letters in her head from various departments (ie, the department of being a teenager, the department of being a daughter and so on) telling her how badly she's failing at everything, and perhaps she should just crawl into a refrigerator and stay there? Watching Elizabeth slowly learn to like herself is pretty awesome, and never falls into cliched, after school special kind of territory. And although I know that this does fall into after school special territory, it made YA me feel like I could maybe stop hating on myself so much too.

So you would think that, having loved 'Feeling Sorry For Celia' so much, that I would have kept on top of the author's later works? Well, uh, no. By the time she published more, I was starting university, and the thing is, around this time, I got the (stupid) idea into my head that I was now too old to read YA. Not because people would think I was lame if they saw me reading it, but for some bizarre reason I thought that I would no longer enjoy it. That I was too mature for it. I actually would get a little sad sometimes, thinking of all the awesome books I had read while in high school that I could never enjoy again.

It's only been in the last few months, since I've started keeping up with book review blogs, that I've realised that you're never too old to enjoy YA, and that my previously held opinions were pretty dumb. Hell, if anything, now that the subject matter of the books is not so painfully relevant I enjoy the books more. This resulted in mad re-readings of all the books I had loved, and the gleefull acquiring of the books my then favourite authors had published since.

Which brings us, finally, to the later books of Jocelyn Moriarty. (Or, as I like to think of them, the books of many names. Seriously, what kind of a book needs an entirely different name for it’s Australian, UK, and American releases? It’s madness!) There were three books following Feeling Sorry for Celia, featuring the same public and private school and overlapping many of the same characters, but which don’t really need to be read in order.

Let us first talk about the Murder of Bindie Mackenzie. If there was a museum somewhere were unsympathetic protagonists were put on display I am sure Bindie Mackenzie would feel right at home there among all the Logan Nine Fingers and Jamie Lannisters of the world. The girl is just not likable. She doesn’t murder innocent woman or kick puppies, she’s annoying in a much more uncool way. She’s smart, she knows it, and she doesn’t understand why people don’t seem to want her help. Think Hermione Granger, but turned up to eleven. Everyone has known someone in their life like Bindie Mackenzie. The high strung girl whose school uniform was always immaculate and who, if your teacher was late to class, would go and find her.

Man, didn’t you hate that girl? The other characters in the book certainty hates Bindie, and that’s how the story kicks off. Bindie, who had always believed herself universally liked and admired, learns that her classmates really can’t stand her. So, naturally, she seeks revenge. Hilarious, ineffective, revenge. The plot, and this is true of all the Moriarty books I’ve read, seems to be doing not much of anything until, BAM, everything comes together at once. It’s never boring, Moriarty has that skill of making the most mundane of activities interesting to read about, but you do start to wonder if it’s all going somewhere. Trust me, it is.

I’ve complained before about how Stephen King will sometimes take an awesome premise and then shoehorn some classic horror into it. Moriarty is a bit like this too. She writes awesome YA books that deal with stuff every single young adult deals with, but she just can’t stop herself from throwing something really out there into it. Like suicide pacts or ghosts or running away to in the circus or, in this case, dun dun dun, murder! Which annoys the ever living hell out of me when Stephen King does it, but this added larger than lifeness is something I really enjoy in Moriarty’s books.

Another author I think of when reading her books is J.K.Rowling. Like Rowling, Moriarty is a master at scattering offhand events throughout her books that later turn out to be of upmost importance, which is something I always enjoy. It make the whole book feel like a self contained puzzle, where everything has a purpose.

But Moriarty’s greatest skill has to be her characters. You see, you start the book agreeing with the mean things Bindie’s classmates say, and laughing at her failed attempts to get back at them, but as the book progresses we slowly start to learn more about Bindie Mackenzie, and while she doesn’t get less annoying, you certainty start to feel for her. Moriarty is a master at slowly revealing information. There are no shocking revelations that make you stop and go, ‘wow! Poor Bindie!’ but something is hinted at here, something peeks out from between the lines over there, and before you know Bindie is a three dimensional character and you’re hoping everything turns out alright for her.

And does it turn out alright for her? Well, uh, check out the title of the book…

This book? I bought it

Review: The Engineer Trilogy, by K.J. Parker

There was a time, years ago now, when literally all I read were fantasy trilogies. I enjoyed that the longer format allowed for a story of more epic scope and that there was more time to spend getting to know the characters. But I had this fear of buying the first part of a trilogy, and then not being able to get a hold of the next volumes. (This was before I was able to internet shop, you see). So, if I saw a trilogy that sounded cool more often then not I’d just buy all three books then and there. What can I say? I was still living at home and didn’t have bills to pay.

Which is how I came to own thee parts to K.J. Parker’s Engineer Trilogy, ‘Devices and Desires,’ ‘Evil for Evil,’ and ‘The Escapement.’ I read the first one and a bit of the second and then just kinda stopped, I think possibly uni got in the way? I don’t know, I had a habit of not finishing books back then, for no real reason. (The reading habits of past Megan makes now Megan shake her head). I remember the trilogy, what I read of it, being dense and hard to get through. But in a good way. Like an extremely rich chocolate cake of which you can only eat one sliver at a time. Certainly my memories were positive enough that I recently decided to finish the damn thing, even though it meant rereading the first part again. (This is the reason I doubt I’ll ever complete the Wheel of Time trilogy, I just can’t bring myself to reread 10 volumes…)

My memories were correct, these are not books that lend themselves a fast reading, but as I said, that’s not a bad thing. The books are set on what I would guess is a small continent. On one side we have close neighbours the Vadini and the Eremians, who have only recently ended a centuries long war. On the other side of the continent are the Perpetual Republic, a dark skinned race who settled on the continent relatively recently. These guys are pretty epic engineers and had established a firm monopoly of all metal worked goods. They’re also pretty anal when it comes to deviating from their established blueprints. Think the Church in dark ages if someone tried to deviate from the bible… One guy, Ziani, makes some little improvements on a doll for his daughter and is sentenced to death for it. Pretty harsh, no? So anyway, he escapes to Eremia and sets about crafting an insanely intricate plan to be reunited with his family, and never mind if thousands of bodies are left in his plan's wake.

This is the trilogy’s driving plot which constantly pushes events forwards, but there are a number of other plots which eddy around it. We have the young duke Valens, ruler of the Vadini people, and his technically innocent but really not correspondence with Vetriz, the wife of the Eremian duke, Orsea, who is himself crippled by his own perceived shortcomings. And there’s Psellus, the Perpetual Republic bureaucrat who becomes slowly obsessed with understanding Ziani. And we can’t forget Mikal, an important Eremian nobel who’s honour is so unbending it’s bound to shatter….

And this hasn’t even stretched the surface of it all! If meticulously crafted plots are your thing, than you can really look no further than this. Every event has a cause and effect, with both tragedies and triumphs occurring naturally and with a sense of inevitability. You will find no deux ex machinas in the pages of these books, which is fitting when you consider that the closest any of the main races come to religion is the Perpetual Republic's blind adherence to their specifications.

Which makes for a refreshing change, to read a fantasy trilogy without any gods. I do occasionally enjoy books where the gods take human form and wander about missing shit up (Jenniffer Fallon's 'Demon Child' trilogy being an excellent example), but too often the inclusion of gods/God can become a short cut for the author. In the godless Engineer trilogy each character is responsible for their own lives, with no fate or destiny to nudge them this way or that. It’s a theme that runs strongly throughout the text, questions of choice and how much blame a man (or woman) should take for the result of their actions. Do the ends justify the means, and should an eye be taken for an eye? As I said, without the interference of some all knowing omnipotent presence to offer easy answers, it offers up some fascinating questions. (Which, upon finishing the books, I have answers for).

But of course would what really makes this book appeal to me is the characters. They’re a flawed, three dimensional bunch, and I would be hard pressed to identify which of them are bad guys and which are good. There are no heroes and villains here, just people. My favourite character is easily Duke Valens. Forced to take command after the early death of his father, Valens is an extremely competent and well liked duke. But what we can see that his adoring people can not, is that the guy’s a little bit of a sociopath. I wish that more of the trilogy had been told from Valen’s unique point of view. I also enjoyed watching Psellus's slow transformation from a laughed at pen pusher to, well, I don’t want to give anything away…

I do have some minor quibbles with the ending of the triology. Considering how well rounded the other aspects of the book are I felt that the way the author handled the portrayal of a fourth race, a nomadic people who live beyond the desert, to be, well, I don’t want to say racist, but let’s just say I found it a little problematic. I also had a little trouble buying Ziani's plan, once the whole of it had been revealed, it seemed like some of the stuff he claimed to have figured out and done was just a little bit of a stretch. Lastly, while if you look at the three books as one very long tome is is all balanced perfectly, but if you take each book on its own merits then the second volume suffers from some pretty bad middle book blues.

All in all though I found this to a well written and extremely thought provoking trilogy which offers something very different to the plethora of other three book fantasy tales out there.

How did I get these books? Bought them

Review: The Replacement, by Brenna Yovanoff

From the moment I first heard about the premise of this book I was in love with it. A baby, Mackie, gets stolen from his crib, with a changeling put in his place. This changeling grows up and has to rescue a girl, Tate’s, little sister from the very murky place from whence he came. All of my buttons? They are pushed!

My intrigue at this plot was so strong that even the generic paranormal YA cover wasn’t enough to put me off. (Although the American cover is seven times more awesome...) It did make me a little nervous though, the fact that it was being pretty aggressively marketed as a paranormal, Twilight/Shiver-esque, read. I’m definitely not would you would call a fan of this genre. Girl meets mysterious boy who turns out to be a vampire/werewolf/fairy/leprechaun and they fall in love and save the world, but mostly fall in love. Definitely not my kind of scene.

And the Replacement does seem to tread the same path as it’s paranormal shelf mates, with a notable exception: It’s not told from the POV of the girl who's trying to figure out what’s up with the mysterious boy, it’s the mysterious boy himself who tells the tale.

I have to say this is my favourite aspect of this book. With a simple perspective swap , scenes that are as standard and played out as wacky misunderstandings in a sitcom take on new life. Watching Tate try and figure out what was up with Mackie was a hundred times more enjoyable when I was already in the loop. (Possibly this is why I found Meyer’s unfinished draft of Twilight from Edward’s point of view to be a bazillion times better than the actual published version told from Bella’s.)

There were other things I liked about the book. Unfortunately, what I did like was ultimately outweighed by what I didn’t. My biggest issue is that a lot of things just didn’t seem to add up. Mackie, being from some fey underworld (it's never entirely made clear), is allergic to a great many things. Steel, iron, blood… This I thought was cool. Little details like his mother having to keep the stainless steel knives hidden away, or his sister having to cut his hair with aluminum scissors really worked for me. But I spent the entire book wondering, if Mackie is allergic to blood (and we see several times the strong adverse reaction he has to it), then what the hell is pumping through his veins? It’s not that I wasn’t willing to believe he was running on something other than blood, it’s just the fact that the author never addressed the issue that drove me a little crazy.

So if he has blood, why isn’t he allergic to it? And if he doesn’t have blood, wouldn’t someone have noticed? I mean, wouldn't somebody, anybody, have noticed that this kid was a little odd? This was my second gripe with the book. The human Mackie was stolen from his crib, and the changeling Mackie left in his place. Upon discovering the swap Mackie’s parents decide to love and raise the changeling as their own. Um, ok. I can get on board with that. Even though it is never really made clear I can imagine that losing a child would be so painful that an itty bitty changeling to love would be better than nothing to love. Mackie’s parents raise Mackie to understand that if the townspeople ever learnt what he was they would go all mob justice on his ass and kill him.

Which makes sense, I had no questions about that. But as the book progresses… Well, firstly it becomes quickly clear that this swap-a-baby practice isn’t really that uncommon. So the townspeople are aware that it happens. Given Mackie’s pretty obvious ailments, wouldn’t someone, anyone, have noticed? I guess I just couldn’t believe that, given that the entire town is aware of the very real presence of the fey dudes, no one would think to question Mackie’s many very odd behaviors.

My last main gripe is that Mackie seems to lack any real curiosity about his own origins. He just wants to live his normal human life, which I get, but I just can’t buy that he wouldn’t have questions. He’s not human, he knows he’s not human, and yet he never really wonders about what he actually is. This could have added a really fascinating level to the book, and the whole narrative seems much shallower for its absence. And it turns out to be so easy for Mackie to get in touch with others like him that I have question that he’s never done it before. You might argue that Mackie wants to be human so badly that he has willfully blocked all thoughts of his mysterious origins, but such a stance would at least be an active choice on Mackie’s part. Instead he just comes across as kind apathetic about it, which I just can’t believe.

Which pretty much sums up my thoughts about the whole book; I just can’t believe it. I’ll jump on board with any kind of crazy idea an author wants to throw at me, but it has to make sense in the context of the books world and so much of The Replacement just doesn’t quite fit together.

This wasn’t a terrible read, not by any means. In fact I highly enjoyed the first half or so, but that was mostly because I figured all the things I felt were missing, or didn’t understand, would come into play in the last act. As it became increasingly clear that this wasn’t the case my enjoyment began to fall pretty rapidly. Still, I wouldn’t rule out reading anything else by Brenna Yovanoff, or a sequel to this novel (assuming there is one).

How did I get this book: Bought it (yay for Christmas book vouchers!)

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: Book of Tongues, by Gemma Files

"A Pinkerton detective infiltrates a Wild West gang led by a spell-casting preacher in this boundary-busting horror–fantasy debut." -amazon.com

I follow and read a lot of book review blogs. Like, a lot. Sometimes I feel like I read more book reviews then, you know, actual books. Some people question the worth of reading reviews, because after all books are highly subjective and what one person likes you might not and so on. But I think you have to approach reading reviews in the right way. I mean, if there’s a reviewer whose tastes always line up with yours then you might avoid a book just because they didn’t like it, but I think any good reviewer provides enough information that even if they didn’t like the book, you can take their review and make up your own mind.

Which brings me to Gemma Files’ “Book of Tongues.” A book I had never heard of until Calico Reaction posted a review of it. Now, Calico was not a fan of this book, indeed she didn’t even finish it. But she neatly outlines the things that didn’t work for her personally, and they kinda sounded like things that would work for me. So I tracked the book down, and I’m very glad I did.

I honestly don’t understand why this book is not getting more mentions across the reviewing corner of the blogosphere. Not because it’s necessarily fantastically awesome, (although I rather think it is), but because it’s hugely ambitious. I think it’s the kinda book that you have to feel strongly about, either love it or hate it, and it’s these kind of books I’m used to seeing discussions of.

It’s set right after the American civil war in an America where some people are “hex’s.” That is, men or women with some pretty trippy magical powers that manifest on the onset of menstruation (if you’re a women) or upon suffering serious bodly harm (if you’re a man). A really cool twist on the idea is that to hex’s can not spend any long length of time together as they will involuntarily suck the power out of each other until one is dead. When being hung for a crime he didn’t commit Reverend Asher Rook learns he has some serious power going on, and he turns outlaw along with the rest of his army regiment. (Regement? Unit? I don’t know, I’m not down with military lingo…)

This regiment includes one Chess Pargeter, also known as the reason I loved this book so very much. He’s a whore turned Reverend Rook’s fiercely loyal lover, he’s an indiscriminate murderer, he’s more than a little bit crazy and he definitely makes the book for me. The best character I can think of to compare Chess to is George R. R. Martin’s Jamie Lannister. You start out completely disgusted by him, and by the end he’s your absolute favourite (at least if you’re me). Not that I’m equating being gay with having an incestuous relationship with your sister! It’s more the way that Chess kills so freely and so gleefully, he seems wholly without empathy and it’s easy to dislike him. But by the time the novel ended my heart had broken for him ten times over, and I was cheering for him to come out on top. The transition is completely natural, I couldn’t even tell you the moment Chess went from zero to hero for me, and without changing the core of his character either.

It took George Martin four massive tomes to pull that off with Jamie, and Gemma Files does it in just a couple of hundred of too short pages. Impressive? Very. The other characters were just as skilfully crafted. The character arc of Reverend Rook was just as dramatic as Chess’s, and the skill it took to pull it off even more impressive. There is an almost complete lack of women, but given the setting and nature of the book I’m willing to forgive that. (And while the female hex Songbird felt a little flat to me, I loved Chess’s mother, so I’m confident in Files’ ability to write a female characer). The only character I was a little disappointed with is Ed Morrow, our main POV character. He spends most of his time observing and commenting upon Rook and Chess, so we don’t really get to see much of who he himself is. Files does hint at greater depths inside of him, so hopefully the honourable Mr. Morrow will grow a bit in the next books.

The writing style and structure is what I think will divide the people who read this book into those who like and those who don’t. It’s told in an odd mix of flash backs and present day scenes. I say odd because it feels uneven, like there will be three flashbacks and then a present scene and then a flash back and then five present scenes… Like when your iPod shuffle randomly throws up five songs out of ten by the same band? The flashbacks and present day scenes are not quite randomly placed, but not quite structured either, and it sticks out. The writing itself is highly stylised. I think Files definitely captured the voice of the setting. Think the southern twang that leaps of every page of a Sookie Stackhouse novel, or the British manners of Naomi’s Novik’s Temeraire books. If by the end of a novel I’m reading it in my head with an accent, then the author has been effective.

I will say that some of it got a little confusing for me. All of the Aztec names started to run together, but that’s probably because I am entirely unfamiliar with Aztec legends beyond what I’ve learnt from Mountain Goats albums. And there is a lot of religion. Like, A LOT. Rook’s powers come from the bible, like he reads a phrase and havoc is wrought. (Think turned people into pillars of salt, plagues of locusts, ect). Actually, and this coming from a die hard atheist, I found it be pretty unique and interesting. Normally I can’t stop yawning when reading about characters struggling with their religion and god and what have you, but Files definitely handled it pretty well. And she couldn’t very well have avoided it, with Rook being a once pious Reverend now killing people left and right and enthusiastically sodomising his boyfriend every chance he gets.

It is the first part in a trilogy, and the ending is definitely a first part of a trilogy kind of ending. So if you have the patience you might want to wait until they’re all out, but if you’re anything like me you’ll be snapping the next one up as soon is you can!

How did I get this book? Bought it

Review: Day By Day Armagedon: Beyond Exile, by J.L. Bourne

Hmmmmm. Did I enjoy this book as much as it’s predecessor, Day By Day Armageddon? Short answer: No. Long answer: also no. Shall I elaborate?

From a technical standpoint you have to concede that Beyond Exile is Day By Day’s superior. Technically. A lot of the “flaws” of the first book are absent here. The problem is, as you may have guessed by my quote marks. Is that I never thought of Day By Day’s flaws as, well, flaws. Did the plot tend to meander, which sudden narrative events coming out of nowhere? Yep. Was the majority of the action described to the reader after it had already happened? Yep again. But as I said in my review of that book, these things gave the novel a uniquely authentic feel. The plot and structure did not adhere to what one would expect from a novel, and as such the book felt like a genuine diary, instead of a book in diary form. This, for me anyway, lent to the book a level of suspense that it might otherwise have lacked.

Beyond Exile, however, reads like somebody took Bourne aside and explained that if he was going to be writing books then he’d best start learning the rules. The result feels very forced. Day by Day meandered, yes, but it felt natural, things happened randomly just like they do in real life. But Beyond Exile has a rather more structured plot, and when reading the book you can feel the author pushing his characters here and there. This neatly robs the book of the genuine diary charm, and without that the story definitely suffers.

And despite all this talk of structured plotting, I actually doubt that Bourne sat down beforehand and plotted this book out. Obviously I don’t know how it went down, but I’d bet money that both books were written in one go with no structured plan, but with Day by Day he was maybe ignorant of the “rules,” and with his sophomore effort a little bit too aware of them.

For example, early in the book a metric crap tonne of new characters (metric crap tonne being the academic term) are introduced and through a few highly coincidental plot twists our still unnamed narrator is put in charge of all of them. But you can practically hear the cogs turning in Bourne’s mind, realising that a man in command of many lives, who orders others to go do dangerous things instead of doing them himself, maybe isn’t the best POV character. But instead of rewriting the plot, he just twists it around until the problem is solved. As I’ve said already, it feels very forced.

But the book is not wholly flawed. A new character is introduced who I found very interesting, an Arab man who teams up with our Hero. Bourne skilfully toys with the reader, making us wonder “is he a terrorist? Isn’t he?” Which, I know, sounds like is could be awful and more than a little offensive, but works really well. I also like how the Hero’s relationship with a character from the first book develops into more, but almost entirely off screen. It gives the impression that there’s a lot more going on in his life than what he puts down on paper.

The ending? Pretty much as non existent as the first, neatly setting up the third book. Will I be reading that book? Yes. But I hope that Bourne develops a little confidence in his writing to write what he wants, and all “rules” be dammed.

How did I get this book? Bought it

Review: The Castle Omnibus, by Steph Swainston

Ah, the omnibus. Many trilogies I would never had read if they'd not been released in omnibus form. It's three books for the price of one and a bit! Frankly, you'd be losing money if you didn't buy it! (Or so I tell I tell my boyfriend when yet another parcel of books appears on the doorstep...) If I'd had to have purchased the three books in the Castle trilogy, The Year of Our War, No Present Like Time and The Modern World, I know I never would have.

I mean, the plot sounded intriguing enough. An emperor dude has the power to make people immortal, but he grants the gift only to the man or woman that proves themselves to be the indisputable best at something. But you can't, like, be the best at ribbon curling, your skill has to be relevant to the centuries long war the emporer's been waging against an invading swarm of bugs. Jant is the best messenger at the world, because he's pretty good at learning new languages and diplomacy, but mostly its because he can fly and no one else can. Which seems a bit like an unfair advantage to me but there you go.

Sounds pretty cool, yes? But there were several things that turned me off. Firstly, Jant is a drug addict, hooked on a hallucinogenic called Cat. Man, I hate reading about drug addiction. Partly because I find books (and movies too) that deal with addiction tend to be too dark for my liking but mostly, having never been a drug addicit myself and therefor having no understanding of what it feels like, I get really frustrated. 'Hey, character x, have you tried just, you know, not taking drugs?' Also, the trilogy has garnered some pretty average reviews, the most troubling being that the characters are shallow and boring.

But, omnibus! So I bought, I read and, friends, I loved it. Loved it like my niece loves pink. (And believe me, the kid loves pink). Are the secondary characters somewhat 2d? Well, yes, but, but, I think that's the point. Because Jant, our erstwhile first POV narrator, is just a wee bit self centered. If the people around him seem to lack depth its because he's too busy checking out his reflection in the mirror to notice their depths. It obvious that Swainston is capable of writing fleshed out and complex character because that's exactly what Jant is.

There are three races in the book, humans and "Awains" (who are pretty much people with wings (who can't fly)) are the two who co-exsist quite happily and who we see the most of. But then there are the Rhydainne, (I may be getting the spelling wrong here, my book is out of arms reach), an odd race who live way up in the snowy mountains. They are extemely fast and insanely self serving. Their language doesn't actually have a word for "we," but it does have over fifty for drunk. (Jant says this is because it gets too cold they need to drink to stop their blood from freezing, but Jant says a lot of things...) Humans and Awains are very distrustful of Rhydainne, and so Jant often gets treated with suspicion or fear, on account of he's half Rhydainne half Awain. (This is how he can fly, super light Rhydainne bones combined with Awain wings).

Jant is a fascinating mix of both cultures. He craves acceptance and love, but at the same time his solitary Rhydainne nature shines through. He has a wife, for instance, but the only time he seems to think about her when she's not with him is when she's having an affair. And then it's only about how Jant feels, and not at all about her. He constantly twists situations around to serve himself, and has a constant stream of excuses ready to explain why he's never wrong, especially when he's taking drugs, and he's kinda always taking drugs. Dugs which, I haven't yet mentiond, teleport him to another world which reads like something China Mieville wrote and then decided was too weierd. The drug taking didn't bore as much as I expected it too, or even at all. I think Jants wicked sense of humour played a huge part in it, he kept taking drugs and screwng up and I just kept on forgiving him. Plus, Swainstone's descriptions of flying make it sound like just the coolest thing ever. There's something vicariously enjoyable about the constant envy Jant receives because he can fly.

The plot? Hmmm,well, ok. A lot seems to happen, but then you stop and think and realise that actually, nothing has happned. It also gets a little confusing at times, and story elements are set up to be important and then kind of go no where. But I can gaurantee that it will be different from any fantasy you've read before. And honestly, he plot could have been Jant goes to the market to by fruit but buys socks instead and I'd read it, solely because of Jant's voice. He made the whole trilogy for me, and is the reason I can't wait to get my hands of the prequel and I'm hoping like crazy that Swainston writes a sequel.

This book, I got it how? I bought it! (Long live the omnibus!)