Category Archives: Books

Very much enjoyed Devlin’s Luck by Patricia Bray ().

Like many fantasy novels, this one follows a somewhat reluctant normal guy who is chosen by the gods to save the kingdom. What’s unusual is that Devlin, a former farmer and metalsmith, sought the post as a way of commiting suicide out of guilt over his families’ deaths. Unfortunately for him (but fortunately for the kingdom), he keeps managing to survive.

The plot was a little too simple for my taste, with an unknown enemy who is too easy to guess (although it seemed reasonable for the characters not to figure it out, as they didn’t know they were in a novel). Whenever a new character appears, it’s pretty obvious whether they are going to be good or bad based on what the plot needs. Despite that, it wasn’t ever boring or slow, and it wasn’t quite clear how it all tied together. There are still some questions (and two sequels).

For the most part, the characters themselves are well-done, and didn’t fall too badly into fantasy cliches. (Exceptions being the king and the Duke, who were weak-willed and arrogant, respectively, and without particular reason.) Even Devlin’s depression seems reasonable and is not annoying.

The prose is at times a little lengthy for the content, reemphasizing what was already clear, and the beginning seemed a bit slow, but it picked up fairly quickly.

It’s the first of a trilogy, and I plan to pick up the other two, as well as her latest. Nice thing about being years behind in my reading is that by the time I start a trilogy, all the books are out.

This book belongs to my favorite subgenre of fantasy [1], and the one which I’ve been reading the least of lately, so reading it was like coming home after a long vacation – happy to have seen new sights, but glad to return to my own bed.

[1] Dunno how it’s defined. Pick some amalgam of epic, heroic, and sword & sorcery without lots of action.

[Amazon link]

For the most part I enjoyed the book. Kitty, a werewolf, accidentally starts a call-in radio advice show for werewolves and vampires, which kicks off some pack politics. Vaughn did a nice job at making the werewolf part of Kitty seem understandable and alien, but none of the other characters seemed more than quickly sketched, and the plot was at times too convenient and not high-stakes enough to really interest me. The radio show, however, was delightful.

This was a freebie at some con last year; otherwise I’d have been unlikely to pick it up, as I’ve never been a werewolf fan.

Tall, Dark & Dead is a very fun urban fantasy/romance that I was unable to put down.

The plot moves at a rapid clip as Garnet, a witch who works at a magic store, tries to help Sebastian, a dead guy being hunted by Vatican witch-killers. There’s a host of other colorful characters to help and/or hinder her efforts. The characters make this book: even the minor ones are vividly drawn. I especially liked the sarcastic Matyas and William, who has been looking for magic without any success.

A few of the characters didn’t quite ring true (and one minor character seems to be forgotten about part way through), and Garnet’s growth as a person is pretty lightly sketched, but the rest of the story is entertaining and funny enough that those aren’t really distracting enough to be called problems.

I bought this book after the author read at Wiscon, but if I’d picked it up in the store and read the first few pages, I might have put it right back down again. It begins with a big chunk of backstory, and I didn’t really get interested until the dead guy walked into the magic store and asked for mandrake, which also happens to be the bit the author chose for the reading. At that point the plot started and I was hooked.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, though I did have several gripes about some of the plot elements towards the end.

I’ve never read Bram Stoker’s Dracula or any history about Vlad Tepes; it’s simply not a huge interest of mine, so I don’t know how different or new or accurate Kostova’s version of the story is from everything else that’s been done. All I know is that it’s entertaining and well-written. Her descriptions are vivid, if overlong for my taste (if I’d been reading instead of listening, I’d have skimmed them), and the characters for the most part seemed to have realistic and consistent personalities. And there’s an “evil librarian.”

The audiobook version of this is delightfully well-done. The story is told by a series of first-person narrators, many of them in letters, and every character (including the non-pov characters) is voiced by a different person. (This means there are no dialogue tags in the audiobook; I want to go look at the paper book to see how different the conversations are.)

The story begins with a 16-year-old girl, whose name I forget who is never named, finding a strange book and mysterious letters in her father’s library, which leads to a hunt for Dracula. Her father tells her his story in bits and pieces (and I kind of wanted to thwap him, especially later on, since it would have made more sense to give the girl a synopsis of his whole past at the beginning, and then fill in the details. But that would have been less interesting plot-wise). We also hear from the father’s teacher, Rossi, via his letters. I was very glad the audiobook had been recorded with several readers, or it would have been impossible for me to remember as each scene changed whether I was with the girl, the father, or the teacher, watching events 15-20ish years apart.

The plot had a few coincidences and unecessary bits. The characters seemed to meet too many other people who just happened to have mysterious books of their own, at least one of whom scarcely seemed worth the mention. Too, there’s a minor character who shows up at the (rather anti-climactic) climax who was barely mentioned before and isn’t necessary for the events of the scene. (That is, he’s necessary as it’s written, but it could have been written differently.) [1]

Worse, there are some unfortunate out-of-character actions towards the end. It almost struck me as if Kostova realized she needed to bring all her plot threads together, so she made the characters do things they wouldn’t have otherwise. [2,3]

Random thing that amused me #1: All the times a character would start off a letter with something like “I don’t have much time to write…” and then go on for what must have been pages giving details of history or archtecture or setting. They must have aced their timed essays in school.

Random thing that amused me #2: The dramatic music at the end of the chapters. Many times, it was appropriate. (“He had a mysterious book!” DaDummmm!) Others…not so much. (“Then we went into the parlor and ate a delightful dinner.” DaDummmm!)

Spoilers follow.

Continue reading →

Very enjoyable. It was fun to watch all the quirky ideas come together. Every little detail seemed to have a reason for being, especially all the weird habits of the minor characters. They were enjoyable to watch, even though most of them felt like they were there to serve the plot rather than the other way around (which is my personal preference). But it was a good plot, lots of fun, and everything fit neatly into place.

I almost didn’t buy this when I saw it was about artists (I am burned out on urban fantasies about artists). I’m glad I picked this one up.

Good book. This, along with the book I’m currently reading (Tim Pratt’s The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl), gives me another reason to not write urban fantasy: my ideas just aren’t weird enough.

And now my book posts are all caught up.

(belated post. spoilers behind cuts.)

This is the second book, following Ghosts in the Snow, in Tamara Siler Jones‘ medieval-type fantasy forensic mystery series. It’s a lot more gruesome than the first one, and just as much fun. The mystery plot was interesting, the various subplots fit in well, and the characters come across as very real people.

One of her names drove me nuts: Braoin, or Bray for short. Except I’d pronounce Braoin like “Breen”, so the short version would be Brie like the cheese. Not a big deal, and it didn’t come up much in the book anyway.

I did suffer a slight mental disconnect when the identity of the killer was revealed, because the visual image I’d had of the person turned out to be completely wrong. There were scenes with the killer in them doing the killing, and there were scenes with the killer in his normal life (not identified as the killer). The mental picture I’d built up in my head of those people was *completely* different, so that when I found they were the same person, I first had a moment of disbelief and then had to try to wrench my mental images into agreement.

Some time I’d like to go back through the book to the various scenes with those two personas, and look at what was actually described to see where my imagination had gone wrong. Or perhaps the characters hadn’t been described as vividly as I’d pictured them, allowing my brain to insert its own, incorrect, images. There’s a very interesting description lesson in there somewhere.

One minor quibble: I really didn’t think it very likely that the killer would have an adopted son, given that he’s torturing and sexually abusing teenage boys.

There was one plot event that I really felt was unnecessary.

Continue reading →

(Belated post. No spoilers, but there might be some in the comments.)

I enjoyed this, though it’s not the sort of thing I usually read. Once I got into it, I kept going to find out how the world had gotten into the state it was in, rather than to find out what would happen to it or to the characters.

The world was quite refreshing: it’s not a white American based setting, and it felt very real.

As with most multi-POV books, there were some I didn’t enjoy as much as the others. I didn’t really get into the book at all until I hit the first “repeat” chapter (the first time there was a POV who had already had a chapter). I enjoyed deBrun and Oaxyctl (esp. the way O.’s plotline ended). The scenes with Dihana, the government’s leader, seemed important to the plot, or at least the background, but I didn’t enjoy reading them. The son’s chapters could have been left out entirely, in my opinion.

I am curious to get another peek at the world in about 50 years.