Joel Adamson

I was really disappointed with this magazine. I am a big fan of Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and Leigh Brackett, and so the pulp revival is of huge interest to me. Cirsova is one of the premier magazines of the pulp revival, so I had to read a whole issue. Issue #5 seemed to be about a particular setting, a themed issue, so I tried Issue #1 to get a better read of what the editor considers pulpy. The stories were just not of particularly good quality. It's disappointing because the authors and editor clearly want entertaining stories, and they clearly enjoy the work of a different era when short stories strived to be entertaining. Most stories in elite markets written by highly-skilled writers are not entertaining at all, so a publication like Cirsova has its heart in the right place. Sadly these stories, which do strive to be entertaining, are not well-written. As a celebration of the pulp era, this is okay. As literature, it's just not very good.

This is an excellent Depression-era story about an artist who is lucky enough to have a job doing what he loves. It's a quick read, not as intense as Cold Mountain.

My only complaint was the use of em-dashes and inline dialogue. I'm not sure why some authors think this is superior to quotation marks. It's distracting, distancing, and just comes off as stylistic affectation. But after a while you get used to it.

In Tim Akers' new epic fantasy book, a family goes through hell, literally, and comes up against dangerous demons. I don't know that I can quite summarize the cosmology of this book so soon after reading it, but the basic idea is that there are people who can bind their own souls to non-corporeal beings, including angels, demons, fae woodland creatures, and wraiths (hence the title). This is a very hard magic kind of a book, with the characters trying to figure out the laws of the world, and encountering people at various levels of understanding. It's a very scientific kind of fantasy, in a world that resembles eighteenth-century Europe, complete with flintlock weapons and the beginnings of industrialization.

The best thing about this book are the characters and their interactions. Right away I was hooked on how the main character Raelle (Rae for short) and his sister Lalette interact. It's not just believable, it's fun, from the way they snipe at each other to their complementary abilities and roles. It's sometimes funny, though not always as in Akers' Knight Watch series, never over-snarky, and never annoying. It would be quite engaging to read even if they were just being a family handling mundane struggles, but of course they're struggling to save the world. A side-effect of this (perhaps) is that there is plenty of modern language, which may irk some epic fantasy readers. I found it to be okay because the characters were so engaging and their interplay was irresistible.

The biggest thing keeping this from being a five star book was that it's a “mystery box” kind of a story. Rae and his sister are being pursued for the better part of the book before we really find out why. Indeed we don't find out the full why until the last few pages. This is okay, again because the interactions between the characters are so engaging. It's possible that if Akers had brought in the other perspectives necessary to spill the beans early on (as plenty of thrillers do), the book would have lost some of its charm. The entire book is told from one point of view (third person, with Rae as the viewpoint character at all times), and this means that there is a lot he's not going to know. I don't usually like stories told this way, but again it doesn't really matter all that much in this case. I highly recommend Wraithbound. It's a good book.

This book was a much more enjoyable read than [b:Kingdoms of Death 57443696 Kingdoms of Death (Sun Eater, #4) Christopher Ruocchio https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1616007067l/57443696.SY75.jpg 89939526], and I think does a much better job of delving into the personal turmoil of the main character, as well as relating that inner turmoil to the larger story. I did have to listen to Ruocchio's synopses of the previous books on Youtube to remind me of some of the crucial events, but that was no big deal. This is a great series and I can't imagine giving gup on it. The fun part is we already know how it's going to end, but we don't exactly know how it's going to end. This book just adds to Hadrian's motivation, adding a little piece of the puzzle, as to how Hadrian will be the hero/villain he's set himself up to be. Exciting and a fun read, with Ruocchio's trademark prose, this was a four-star book for me up until the very end, with an ending that I really wasn't expecting.

This book is both classic King and King clearly branching out. Teen protagonist + magical world just like in The Talisman, but not set in Maine, and with a fantasy style that still doesn't miss King's signature gross-outs or hideous details. It lives up to all three of the authors he thanks in the dedication: Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and H.P. Lovecraft. Although I love King's style (especially because it's unmistakably his), it is usually somewhat dry compared to my favorite fantasy authors. Not so here. I also like that although King did a great job of setting a story in the era of smartphones and YouTube, he still did it his way, and didn't make his protagonist as annoying as the real thing. As a commentary on fairy tales, this book was fun to read, with King not only mentioning Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, but himself, Piers Anthony, and R.L. Stine. Highly recommended.

Rating a middle book of a series is always hard. The Sun Eater/Sollan Empire series is a 5 star series, with great characters, incredible worldbuilding, and just all around coolness. A less than perfect book 4 from a really good writer is no reason not to pick up the series. Furthermore, this is not the book that Mr. Ruocchio actually wrote: it's the first half of a far more epic work that was split at the last minute due to paper shortages.

This probably accounts for the problems in pacing that somewhat bog this book down. A bogged down Sun Eater book is still pretty damned exciting, but the middle of this one was tough to get through. I found myself not really wanting to pick it up, which wasn't entirely the book's fault. I was just finding reading in general pretty difficult.

I may reread it some time, to see if it comes off differently. Perhaps some day this and Ashes of Man will be released in a single volume as intended. Still not bad, just not as exciting as the others. I repeat, not a reason to quit reading Sun Eater; not a reason to not get started.

I didn't dislike this book and I can see how plenty of people would like it, but after a certain point I was tortured by the question of whether I should bother to keep reading. The world is rich and full of characters despite being bleak. Just about everyone is a scumbag, even the somewhat sympathetic characters. I can see the attraction to that, but I think it makes it hard to read.

It's well written, but has two particular problems. First, the author makes some choices that are just hard to understand as far as construction goes. There is a character who is murdered early on, and this is supposedly the impetus for the protagonist's journey going forward. However, the guy who gets killed is a POV character early on...for what reason? This feels too much like a wink toward fans of Joe Abercrombie, Mark Lawrence, and A Song of Ice and Fire: “Hey, we killed someone you thought important! It's one of those books.” Except in terms of story, the character is useless as a character. Everything revealed through his point of view is repeated later through other points of view. The story could have started with his murder. That's just an example of this sort of winking at the reader, and I just don't get it.

Abraham also resorts to frequent flashbacks and perspective shifts, and the introduction of new POVs as if they're cheap. Again, I just don't get it. This doesn't help tell the story. It just confuses things. The plot is just not that interesting. Kind of pedestrian.

To sum up: engaging enough prose to keep me reading through a flight from Denver to New Orleans, but not an interesting enough plot or world to keep me reading when I have other books available. This feels like the grimdark version of midlist fantasy; kind of throwaway.

I've just finished reading through Baen's new short story anthology Sword and Planet edited by [a:Christopher Ruocchio 16917839 Christopher Ruocchio https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1532727288p2/16917839.jpg], his final project as an assistant editor at Baen Books.  The anthology contains a good collection of short stories and stories by a range of authors.  My personal favorites are “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Nakh-Maru” by [a:Jessica Cluess 6916708 Jessica Cluess https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1438304096p2/6916708.jpg] and Ruocchio's Sun Eater/Sollan Empire novella “Queen Amid Ashes.”  This is a story that starts out as a standard new adventure in an established world and takes a bizarre turn that really confronts the characters with an astounding moral dilemma.  I was really surprised, despite knowing that Ruocchio can absolutely pull this off (as he has in every other novel and short story I've read).  Other bright points include [a:Tim Akers 207694 Tim Akers https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1297362527p2/207694.jpg]' “A Murder of Knights” and Simon R. Green's “Saving the Emperor.”Also included is a witty and pointed introduction by the editor, wherein he points out his interest for the fiction part of science fiction, leaving science by the wayside.  This is just to say that a subtle genre distinction brings us Eric John Stark and John Carter instead of a plot that turns on scientific detail.  The stories in the anthology, that is, are fantasy in space: character-driven, adventurous, and, though not devoid of science, much more interested in honor and courage than in time dilation.Jess Cluess's story, for example, could be right out of a collection of Leigh Brackett stories, a tale of a shipwrecked soldier dragging an unwilling damsel across a desert, unwittingly caught up in the planet's politics.  He does this for honor, because it's the right thing to do to use his other-worldly strength to protect a strange woman in the desert.The other thing all these stories have in common is that they're good: even the ones I didn't like all that much were written with the goal of entertaining the reader and weaving an adventurous and exciting tale. Sword and Planet has renewed my faith in science fiction and fantasy short stories. Anthologies like this are the best place to read good short stories.  Most stories in the elite, Hugo-winning markets are boring, intentionally bizarre, blatantly agenda-driven (it's the “blatantly” part that is distracting; see Oscar Wilde). Often they don't qualify as science fiction; sometimes they don't qualify as fiction.  They certainly don't qualify as fun, entertaining, or even interesting.  They don't offer anything new, or anything nostalgic about good science fiction.  Most of them are not even good in literary terms.  I don't know why they get published, honestly, though I feel like the notoriety of particular names in the Readercon-attending community has a lot more to do with publishing than the quality of the stories.The only downside to relying on anthologies like Sword and Planet for short stories is that all the authors are established, novel-writing authors.  This is just a fact of life in today's publishing world, where you can't make a living writing for magazines.  You can discover new writers in places like [b:L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future 33 32332687 L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future 33 David Farland https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1487809157l/32332687.SY75.jpg 52969025], which is usually available in the anthology section at Barnes and Noble; but also check the magazine section, where I do regularly see The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov's, and sometimes Analog.  These magazines are better than the other elite markets, but they feature maybe one really good story out of ten.  They seem more interested in winning awards (i.e. serving the Hugo voting community, which is a very specific group of a few hundred people) than in publishing stories that are good by the typical reader's standards.  Lots of people on the internet talk about starting periodicals that will reinvigorate short stories and bring back the “glory days” of Lovecraft, Smith, and Howard, but I have trouble taking any of them seriously.  Most people writing short stories are writing them for other writers, not to appeal to people browsing Barnes and Noble.  I think that's sad, but it's good to know that some editors are putting together anthologies that do appeal to that audience.  Sword and Planet is one such anthology.

2.5 stars. Following the successful colonization of a far-off land, the Drenai army and its heroes head home, but things go totally whack when demons start infecting people and turning them totally nutty. The heroes must protect the pregnant queen and get her to safety before the demons close in, or else her child could be the third king to be sacrificed, the final ingredient to a demon spell for world domination.

I really wanted to love this book. It starts off great with Gemmell's trademark verge-of-retirement heroes, but it reads like a rough draft. The characters are great, the plot is interesting if a little cliche. The last 100 pages in particular are really exciting, and have some of Gemmell's trademark twists and turns and impossible situations turning out for the best. But in the end it just seems kind of haphazardly written. There's a lot of tell, stuff happening off-the-page, from the wrong points of view, and there are revelations bordering on deus ex machina. There is a really interesting plot underneath all of what's going on, but you don't really get what's actually happening until very late in the book. Again, this makes it seem like it was an early draft, and later revisions would have put that information further up at the front.

Lending credence to this argument, there are no chapters in the second half of the book. It's just one big chapter. The whole affair reminds me a bit of Cujo by Stephen King, a book written by a great author completely fried on cocaine. I'm not surmising what led to this unsatisfactory performance from Gemmell, but this one was just a little tough to get through. Luckily it's not very long.

Not Gemmell's fault, but I also had the feeling that I'd missed quite a bit by reading this Drenai book first. Several reviewers have said that you can read them in any order, but I definitely felt like I was watching Home Alone 2 without seeing the first one.

Hmmm...

I try to read “outside my genre” and I was intrigued by the setup on the back cover. I was also intrigued by how the back cover listed the author as a debut author, and then the About the Author caption listed her as the author of over five books that received wide acclaim. Perhaps she has a time machine.

The first scene pretty much sums up all the problems with this book. The MC wakes up after a casual hookup with a woman whose name she can't remember. A rich white woman whose name she can't remember. Every character is introduced as a “white woman” although men are merely mentioned and every character is white. The story proceeds from there into a fairly typical “beach house” sort of thing where the main character who isn't rich hangs out at country clubs and goes to brunch with people who are in a small town somewhere in the Pacific Northwest (it's either there or New England, right?). Except for the two people about to get married, everybody is trying to hook up like they're 24 years old. Even the people with kids. Even the single mom who right away is the love interest.

Other than the annoying habits the author has, such as the “white woman” mentioned above, and how all the characters are horribly irritating people, there is no tension in this story. The love interest is bisexual since her teenage years and everybody knows it, including the reader, including all the characters. There's no winning over of Claire, there's absolutely no doubt that they will at least hook up.

I picked up this book because I thought it would be an interesting window into the dynamics of lesbian relationships and expose some of the uniqueness of those relationships. Instead this is a caricature. I dare say it's a straight person's idea of what lesbians are like. Not that it's insensitive and not that I'm sensitive, but there's nothing to learn here. A more interesting story would have been these women as teenagers discovering themselves in this small town (where everybody is rich and drinks rose and has brunch every week). That's a story the author clearly thought of, but decided to write about them as adults, wherein everything is already determined and they can, honestly, do whatever they want.

So two stars because the author knows how to write. No higher because she chose to write the way she did.

Guy Gavriel Kay is an author who gets a lot of respect from writers. Brandon Sanderson has said that we're all just trying to be as good as Guy Gavriel Kay. If that's true, then after reading The Lions of Al-Rassan I'm starting to think he's the Bob Dylan of fantasy writers.That is to say he's a good writer, who knows how to build characters and put words together. The way he does it in this book has some serious flaws that left me dreading to pick it up, and with no real interest in the characters or what happened to them. This book gets three stars because it is a well-written piece of literature, with a plot that works, but it's nothing more than that. In terms of pacing and story structure, I also found it to be quite a bit off.Three major problems kept me from enjoying this book, and I'll start with the world. What Kay did with this book was to take Medieval Spain, with its well-known conflict between Christians, Muslim, and Jews, and change the names. Let me be clear: this is not Medieval Spain, it is not alternte history. This is a fantasy world with two moons and different constellations that just happens to have the exact same geography as Spain. So does the rest of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Gee, that's funny. The three sects are Asharites (Muslims), Jaddites (Christians), and the Kindath (Jews). If these were three groups that Kay had invented and come up with a good reason for them to be at odds, then it would be interesting. Unfortunately, he chose to have many of the same practices, beliefs, and prejudices that the real-world groups have. The biggest one is the blood libel, used against the Kindath.My question is that if the correspondence was going to be so strong, why didn't he just write about actual Christians, Jews, and Muslims in medieval Spain? I kept reading this thinking it was a very very very very thinly veiled, very nineties attack on Christians and their history (with enough attacks on Jews and Muslims to make it fair). This sort of thing was very popular in the eighties and nineties (as in [b:The Mists of Avalon 40605251 The Mists of Avalon (Avalon, #1) Marion Zimmer Bradley https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1529610467l/40605251.SX50.jpg 806813]), and Kay's choices don't make it hard to see it this way. As it was, it was either a not-very-creative fantasy world, or a bad historical fiction.Kay's characters also kept me from really getting into this book. There's a doctor, a few kings, and some concubines and courtesans, and a few young men learning their way in the world. And of course the poet. They'd be interesting if they didn't insist on acting in such implausible ways. The main point of implausibility is their sexual choices: the characters in this book just can't stop doinking. It's insane. There is a stretch of at least 60 pages in the mass-market paperback that is all people doing it. There's a lot of comparing breasts to pears and melons... . Much of the sex is completely inconsequential, which is really hard to believe in a population without established methods of birth control (yes, medieval birth control existed but it's never mentioned in this book). Not only is much of it meaningless to the plot, it's meaningless to the characters. I just don't believe in meaningless sex, I guess, but if it's meaningless pleasure that has no effect on the plot, why is it in the book?I just don't buy that a physician, a woman in her late twenties, who is portrayed as overly sensible would “take a young man into her bed” for some meaningless pleasure without thinking there would be any consequences in terms of their relationship. I'm having a hard time imagining this character doing that. And then he's just got a crush on her, from a distance...still? After having sex with her? He still just watches her from afar, thinking he can't have her...after he “had” her? What the...? I just don't get it. So sex is just meaningless to this women to the point where she'd have sex with a nineteen year-old boy just because she felt like it one night and then the rest of the book she's...what the hell, nevermind. I think I've made my point. Even if you do believe people can have sex without emotional or other consequences, you still have to question what's going on with this character. I'm just not buying it.The last thing I found annoying was the structure: constant back and forth, summary and rehash, and huge events just glossed over. That made it hard to follow.The overall effect of all this was that I didn't look forward to reading this book. The test of a four or five star book is that I think about the characters when I'm not reading the book. These characters were so implausible that I just didn't think about them. When I picked up the book, I was just thinking “what implausible thing are they going to do in the next chapter?” There were a few tense situations, and a few that I really enjoyed, but the whole book was not engaging.P.S.: Tigana was a much better book; more imaginative, better characters, actually compelling, but I still didn't think it was that great. I mean, what were those people doing it in the closet for? See, same problem.

Fun fun FUN. This book is a Percy-Jackson/Men in Black type of story, where you find out fantasy, fairy tale, and biblical creatures and heroes are REAL. Tim Akers handles this with not just great action, but humor that really hits the spot. He has produced a fun and original fantasy story and a good satire of Ren Faire, RPG, and LARP culture. While doing this, he manages not to talk down to or insult the people he satirizes. If you like a fun, quick read, I highly recommend KNIGHT WATCH.

This is a reasonably popular fantasy novel that ought to, in my opinion, be a lot more popular. I would honestly give it 3.389 stars rather than three because the good outweighs the bad. I think the bad parts can be attributed to reader (or editor?) expectations and not to any deep fault of the author. That's a nearly impossible judgment to make, but where this book fails in portraying human nature, it makes up for it in worldbuilding, readability, and plot.Brief summary: Gyre and his sister Maya were separated at a young age because of Maya's emerging abilities with deiat, one of the forms of “magic” (although, in good style, Wexler never uses the word “magic”) in this world. When they are young adults, Maya is a knight-in-training, fighting for the establishment, and Gyre is a career criminal who's fallen in with a group of local dissidents. Their paths will cross, and the way they do is surprising and fun to read.First and foremost, this is probably the most exciting world I've read about since [b:Twelve Kings in Sharakhai 24611565 Twelve Kings in Sharakhai (The Song of the Shattered Sands, #1) Bradley P. Beaulieu https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1434513419l/24611565.SY75.jpg 25652373], but for very different reasons. Whereas Sharakhai and the world it lives in are richly-imagined and lived-in, the world of Burningblade and Silvereye is really freakin' cool in a fantasy sense. This is definitely a fantasy setting, with palaces, fortresses, dirty cities full of sewage, ragged clothing, taverns, and all that crap in an imagined world (i.e. not Earth or Earth-future or Earth-past), but it's also hard to distinguish it from a sci-fi setting. There's all the cool fantasy stuff (people fighting with swords, villages, monsters), but there's also basically light sabres and blaster pistols, bombs, and “arcana.” What's so cool about the way this world is put together is that it's hard to pin it down: it is fantasy, but it's hard to pin it down as steampunk or whatever sort of subgenre you want to devise. It just is an original and fresh conception of what a fantasy world can be, without having to pin it down. It's also not dependent on recent or older genre conventions; it's not trendy, in other words. There are airships (the weirdest trend in fantasy worldbuilding, that I still cannot figure out), but they are crashed and discarded. This is a post-apocalyptic world, where the technology they have comes across more like ancient secrets that have been mastered only by a few individuals. I am pretty tired of people saying they're looking for something other than settings based on medieval Europe. People have only been saying that for SIXTY YEARS, and I can only conclude that people who say that today aren't going to bookstores, but are rather watching TV and playing video games. Medieval Europe is cool, for one thing, but it's also not the basis for most fantasy settings that are coming out now; fantasy's greatest influence is still Dungeons and Dragons, but a lot of fantasy these days is far more influenced by Asian mythology, anime/manga, and video games themselves. Ashes of the Sun shows that regardless of influences, an author can create a world that has a huge range of influences, isn't indeed based on any one particular culture (unlike many new books that are literally advertised as African-influenced, Asian-influenced, Florida-influenced, etc), and just comes off as totally original. And that is despite a powerful Star Wars influence that is acknowledged by the author and not hidden at all.What I'm saying is that this is just a really cool world to read about, even without the dynamic characters and the struggles they face. It reminds me of some books from the seventies, like [b:High Couch of Silistra 622866 High Couch of Silistra (Silistra, #1) Janet E. Morris https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1467327530l/622866.SY75.jpg 609230], where you can't really say whether it's fantasy or sci-fi. That's just cool. What's better, is that instead of dwelling on that world with heavy, monologue-requiring, comic-book style exposition, Wexler pays out the worldbuilding with a great plot and intense personal struggles for the characters, based on family. The characters here are a doubled-edged sword: they are well-rendered and believably written, grappling with their unique challenges alongside regular coming-0f-age stuff (starting a career, having a crush, losing a mentor, etc). But they are pretty young, and so they come off more as anime characters than as strong people who are capable. They read like teenagers, which I suppose is a good thing, but in some passages, I just felt like I was reading a YA book that couldn't be YA because of all the R-rated stuff in it. That is another plus: I like the hardcore, gritty nature of much of this book, even if it's delivered sometimes with action-movie intensity. That's just a reader preference. What kept this from being a four or five star book for me was Wexler's handling of sexuality, although honestly his handling of sensuality was really good. In this semi-technological world, where there are blasters and light sabres and all these layers of society, and libraries full of knowledge ancient and modern, birth control is never mentioned. And yet people are screwing left and right like “it's just sex.” Abortion is never mentioned either. There are characters saying “Hey, do you wanna fuck? Sure, let's fuck.” Men and women are treated as if they have identical sexual values: a male character is referred to as having been a whore, and female characters are accused of visiting a brothel. Staffed by women, or these mythical male whores? (Yes, I'm a grown-up, I know there are male prostitutes, but they're not patronized by women). A female character says she spent years doing nothing but “drinking and fucking.” Oh yeah? And no mention of all her pregnancies, miscarriages, and abortions she would have had as a result? The birth control that's never mentioned never went wrong? No impact on her values? She doesn't grow up at all after spending years “drinking and fucking?”Lastly is the handling of homosexuality, which seems to be all-out wish fulfillment (either on the part of the author, or perhaps in service to hypothetical readers; they could be the same thing). One of the main characters is gay. Great. Fantastic. I was really looking forward to how things would work out for her. I wanted to see how she would handle a relationship, how her crush would work out, how the other character would receive it, and what would happen if they got together (of course). All of that should be impacted by, or reflected in, the culture surrounding sexual values (i.e. culture) in this world. In other words, the obstacles the character experiences internally (her identity crisis) ought to be reflected or impacted by cultural attitudes regarding homosexuality or sex in general. This character, Maya, experiences a fair amount of knowing she is different, being unable to bring up her attractions, and so on. But every indication is given that homosexuality is not seen as morally divergent or even remarkable in this world. Characters are off-handedly mentioned as “his husband” and “her wife” with no sense that homosexuality denotes a subculture or that gay people are segregated from society in any way. These gay people aren't different in any way other than who they live with. Nor is there any mention of how these relationships are possible or desirable in a world that depends on children for labor (as indicated in the prologue). One character is referred to as “a family man” who loves his children despite being married to a man and being a career criminal. If you can be all those things, then why would anyone question their own feelings of same-sex attraction?The main character's mentor says to her “You might be attracted to men, women, both, or neither” and there's no moral attachment to any of these eventualities. I know this is the mom that a lot of people wish they had, but think about that for a minute: the mom they wish they had. The character has the mom people wish they had, and therefore she ought to have absolutely no struggle with her identity based on her sexuality; she has no conflict with her peers; no alienation; no reason to hesitate telling another girl she's got a crush on her. Wouldn't it be a lot more interesting if her mentor had only spoken about boys during the “facts of life” and then Maya has feelings she doesn't understand when she meets and finds herself attracted to girls?But then, she does seem to have conflicted feelings, and she does seem to know that it's different from other girls her age. But how does she know that? In this culture, people are going out of their way to be accepting. No one bats an eye at a man married to a man...and yet? There is no mention of the moral stance The Twilight Order (the organization Maya trains to be a part of) takes on homosexuality, although it seems like they could be portrayed as at least mildly homophobic and it would be pretty believable. Considering that they barely saved the world from utter destruction by a race of monsters and are the earthly messengers of semi-celestial, magical beings, I think they'd be pretty focused on reproduction and family values. But no, even within the Twilight Order, everybody's just screwing each other with no regard for how that's connected to reproduction or family. Yay! Consequence-free sex! Go!The only mention of any moral stance on anything sexuality-related is very late in the book when one character discovers a relationship between two others. But then...why does he care? Nobody else does. But they still hide it? I just don't get it.I honestly don't get this level of wish fulfillment; the society where these things are true is The Real World in North America and Europe in 2023. If you put it in a fantasy world, it simply makes for predictable (i.e. bad) relationship arcs, unbelievable behavior, and just nonsensical non-struggles for the characters. I mean really, if you are interested in reading about how a lesbian relationship would play out (which I am), from crush to acceptance to establishment to even HEA, why would you want to read about it happening in a culture where there is absolutely no resistance to it? Wouldn't you rather read about a lesbian relationship developing in Iran or Saudi Arabia, where it could get someone killed? In the lesbian fiction of the fifties and sixties, the primary barrier was family alienation, which is enough to make it interesting (the main characters were sometimes or often depicted living in Greenwich Village or in a subculture where lesbian relationships were accepted, but they'd have to deal with their parents). I wouldn't be interested in the depiction of a straight relationship where there isn't a war or a pestilence or some political barrier to the people getting together (think about it: if relationships are presented in fiction, they are either a complication or they are the goal; complications that don't complicate things aren't complications, and goals without complications aren't goals). So why have a lesbian relationship with absolutely no barriers? It's like freakin' fan fiction, man. The bright side of all this is that as I mentioned, Wexler's handling of sensual situations is actually really good. Once the characters do get together, they (somehow) seem to have actual feelings and the sex that happens is done with tenderness where appropriate and horniness where appropriate. And he does this without going into a lot of detail or having long sex scenes (I think the longest one is just a few lines). That makes it all the more confusing, since before getting into bed the people don't seem to care about each other at all. What happens once the main character gets together with her crush is handled well, even if it is useless as far as her personal struggle or identity crisis is concerned.

This book is weird, man. Even for a Stephen King book, it's weird. I suppose the weirdest thing about it is that if Stephen King hadn't written it, I wouldn't be reading it. It reads like a very long short story: there are few characters, the world is sparsely populated, and although the characters get through an ordeal, they don't truly make much progress. Well, they do and they don't. I suppose you could argue either way. A lot happens, but it doesn't get Roland much closer to The Tower.

The point is Stephen King did write it, so it's a lot of fun to read and hard to put down.

This is an interesting take on Beowulf. I think the author's heart is in the right place, but readers should know that in places her “translation” is absolutely not what the original says. I don't have any overall complaints. I think she accomplishes her goals, which are clearly stated in the introduction. However, once you've read the original, nothing can compete with it.

Two words: IN TENSE! This is the story of the end of the world as experienced by four young men, i.e. the extinction of ancestral Puebloan culture in the Chimney Rock/Chaco Canyon region. Sex and violence all around, done in the Gears' typical historical style.

I couldn't put it down. The only reason it isn't 5 stars is the frequent POV shifts (like a TV show) and the sheer number of characters and place names. I'm going to have to read it again to really get a detailed feel for the places and names.

Spoiler: Achilles dies!

This is a brutal, grim, and gritty retelling of the Iliad. Mostly from the perspective of Briseis, this novel pulls the glory off the epic and tells of the enslavement, rape, mass murder, torture, and human sacrifice of the Trojan War. NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART, but beautiful nonetheless.

Empire of Silence takes place in a far future of our civilization, where biotechnology and space travel have enabled the human race to establish a galactic empire. For centuries this empire has been under attack from another civilization that also discovered space travel, and Hadrian Marlowe has grown up as the elder (genetically-engineered) son of a minor lord on a minor world. He's rich, but not that politically powerful. Hadrian is, despite his militaristic upbringing, passionate about intellectual pursuits. He's an artist, an avid learner of languages, and quite clumsy with the ladies. Constantly in conflict with his younger brother, Hadrian assumes he will inherit his father's duchy, but things go astray when he is instead assigned to join the ruling guild of torturers and propaganda artists. Hadrian and his scheming mother find a way out, however, which results in Hadrian's first trip off-world. He escapes his father's plans only to find himself waking up from interstellar hibernation nowhere near where he expected, penniless, and unable to reveal his noble status.The story is told in retrospect as the narrator awaits his fate. Although this is not part of the story, at least not yet, the narrator (Hadrian) has done something horrible, and is rather notorious. This doesn't get in the way, but instead provides a great device by which the narrator introduces doubt and comments on events with information he learned later in the story. It's a really well-devised world, built in believable steps with believable technologies, that doesn't rely on stupid-sounding technobabble. It's not grimdark, but it's mature and intense, with no cutesy stuff, and well-formed relationships, romantic and otherwise. And underneath it all, there's some spooky stuff going on. I love that element of it.I would give this book four-and-a-half stars if I could. This is a well-written book, and Christopher Ruocchio is a knowledgeable, well-rounded and intellectual writer who knows what he is doing. Most importantly he doesn't shy away from real intellectual engagement in philosophical terms. I only give five stars to my absolute favorite books or established classics, so this one gets four, but this book is one of the best of the year, and surely one of the best contemporary series I've read. It's one that I'll keep up with, along with The Black Witch Chronicles and the Song of Shattered Sands. I don't mind making a few enemies saying this: a few people have called this “The Name of the Wind in space,” but I'd have to say the crucial difference here is that this book is actually interesting. It's better than that, though, mainly because it's written by someone with real taste, an author who isn't just pointing to cliches in order to establish rapport with the reader (note: I'm not saying that's what Patrick Rothfuss did, but many others do). Instead, Christopher Ruocchio has created a culture and world out of believable and sophisticated use of language. He's not just a Tolkien nerd who read a few books on how to create a language (although he's certainly fooled me if he hasn't), but rather someone who understands the interplay between language, culture, and biology to create a convincing future history. For example in the foundational mythology of the interstellar human culture of the empire, the story of King Arthur has been mixed with the story of The Buddha. I got a kick out of that. He also doesn't shy away from using technical grammatical jargon as exposition, or even as a plot point.He is also adept at creating romantic and plot tension. For the first time in a long time I was on the verge of shouting “Kiss her, damn it!” at a book. Yes, shouting at a book. There really is an excellent understanding of human relationships here, and the constant interplay between the main character's social standing and his naivete works up to produce plenty of interesting situations. It was fun to read a space opera where things on so many worlds have reverted to more medieval situations, and hence it reads a lot like a fantasy book.It is a long book, however, and I had to pick up something shorter afterward. I didn't find it exactly un-putdownable, but when I did get into reading it, I read it at long stretches, wanting to know what would happen next. This is the kind of book that traces a character's life across a long arc of his lifetime, and since his lifetime is over 900 years, there is a nice tension of whether the narrator is being honest. It reminds me more of Severian than Kvothe.I loved it, and I'm looking forward to reading the sequel, [b:Howling Dark 41564599 Howling Dark (Sun Eater, #2) Christopher Ruocchio https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1554659319l/41564599.SY75.jpg 64859822].

Disclosure: I am a colleague and friend of Laurie Forest as well as a devoted fan. If I didn't love the book, I wouldn't have read it, and I wouldn't leave this review. I paid full price for my hardback copy.

Laurie Forest's sequel to her 2017 debut The Black Witch extends the primary storyline and invokes new points of view to add to the epic scale of the conflict. Elloren Gardner is now firmly ensconced in the Verpacian resistance to encroaching Gardnerian rule. Her aunt has kept up the pressure for her to marry (wandfast) and the harassment of non-Gardnerians increases. Her small cadre of teen revolutionaries is secure and expanding, but Elloren finds herself caught between feelings for a boy she can't be with, and her duty to the resistance. If she fasts to Lukas Grey, she might be able to turn him to the resistance, and make him a powerful ally. But her true feelings lie with Yvan, a Kelt whose secrets become harder to hide.

The action really heats up when the Gardnerian military cadets refuse to hide their prejudice, start riots, and attack members of the other races. Everyone makes an escape plan, and Elloren plans to stay behind to help whoever she can.

This book is an incredibly complex epic fantasy with an original take on fantasy races. There are so many reasons I wouldn't like the Black Witch Chronicles: it's YA; it uses stereotypical fantasy races like elves, dragons, selkies, amazons and so on; it's overtly political, possibly even allegorical. But dig beneath the surface and you'll find a well-written story with a compelling character and a compelling conflict at its heart. Thanks to Elloren's hazy memories, we know she's powerful, but she cannot access her power, leaving her at a disadvantage and feeling useless. The Iron Flower traces Elloren's rise into her own power over the course of the Spring following the events of The Black Witch.

As for conflict, this is again, on the surface, the same conflict brought up by so many Tolkien-derived fantasy books of the nineteen-seventies and eighties, but Forest puts a twist on everything by introducing new races and giving unique qualities to the ones we've already heard of. At least two of the races, the icarals and the Gardnerians, are her own creations, and they are the most crucial. The final third of The Iron Flower reveals just how unique Forest's creation is, and how far she has come in introducing and maintaining tension.

Laurie Forest knows how to build suspense, specifically tension, and Elloren's growth to power is just one of the ways she does it. Other examples: what's going to happen with Lukas Grey? What is the deal with Yvan? You're going to find out. You may have your suspicions, but you'll be surprised. And you'll find all of that amid one of the most turbulent and troubling third acts I've read in a long time. Not predictable, not gentle. INTENSE.

The impression I had at the end of The Iron Flower (other than “WOW”) was this is an intense, complex epic masquerading as a YA fantasy drama. The choice of point of view gives an impression of the emotional intensity we expect for a teenage girl character (and yes, it verges on melodrama sometimes), but the conflict she's embroiled in is huge, and she won't be able to solve all these problems herself. At the end, we're left with a character who's embroiled further in the conflict, and further torn by the necessity of doing what's right.

Read the book. It's excellent.

This is the best summary of the subject of classic rock that I've read. Steven Hyden, author of [b:Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me: What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal About the Meaning of Life 26245024 Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal About the Meaning of Life Steven Hyden https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1458496509l/26245024.SX50.jpg 46238652] and former Onion A.V. Club rock critic, asks what the mythology of classic rock means to him and what will happen when the people who created it are gone. Many of them already are gone, and thus Hyden was inspired to write this book by a Who concert in 2012. How does Classic Rock fare in the age of streaming? What happened to it? Is Rock dead?These are all great questions, and I think most of all my similarities with the author make this a fun read. In other words, I already hate the author enough to know that he and I have a lot in common. This is a good book, with plenty of Classic Rock stories but without the author condescending to the audience by re-hashing all the old ones everybody knows (e.g. he mentions The Mudshark, but doesn't spend ten pages re-telling the story). He even mentions and recommends the best books that helped create the Classic Rock mythos. That's clearly something I have in common with the author: we both love music and love books. Best of all is Hyden's usage of mythology as a framing device: Classic Rock is a myth, in the best sense of the word, the way Der Ring or Mount Olympus or the founding of McDonald's have their own mythology. Classic Rock is a big story with a cast of characters that become godlike. Hyden tackles these characters in a series of topical chapters, e.g. about albums as an art form, drugs and alcohol, Satanism, and profile chapters where he goes in-depth on specific artists. In the topical chapters, he makes a lot of good points, especially the chapter about albums versus today's streaming playlist and “station” formats, which are oriented toward single songs. My favorite streaming service is unabashedly anti-album, which really pisses me off: I want to hear my favorite music from 35 years ago in the format it was meant to be heard in, not one song from here and one song from there. This book is recent enough that it captures the current contradictions and weirdness of remaining a Classic Rock fan with today's technology (which both I and the author certainly enjoy for its convenience), but it contributes to the demise of the Classic Rock mythos.The profile chapters are largely forgettable, telling about the author's predilections, or downright irritating. The profile chapter about The Eagles is funny, especially because Hyden is not afraid to say how much he hates that band. I'll forgive Hyden's ignorance of where The Eagles actually came from (most Classic Rock fans are unaware of it; it's esoteric knowledge reserved for bluegrass musicians like myself), and say he did a great job of hating The Eagles. The rest of the profile chapters, on Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Phish if you can believe it, just were useless to me. I think Dylan and Springsteen are great songwriters if you're into the Freudian Americana-Nonsense Axis, as I call it, but I just don't get the worship of these guys. I almost skipped both of these chapters in the audiobook. I did skip the chapter on Phish because I was screaming at the stereo in my car, reinforcing the author's point that people either love Phish or hate them. I hate them. I don't care if they reference Pink Floyd, Talking Heads, Genesis, and other bands I love. I hate Phish. Phish SUCKS.But the above just shows Hyden's different perspective, as does the way he talks about Pink Floyd. He's clearly a lyrics guy. When most people talk about “music,” they don't mean music at all. They can't even specify what they like about a particular song or artist. They like the artist's image or the artist herself or what she stands for. They might like some message in the artist's lyrics (which probably aren't hers). Still, they don't mean the particular sonic qualities of a recording or concert or the chord progressions employed by a particular song, or the way it was recorded. When people like Hyden say “music” they mean a particular aesthetic embodied by those artists. Hyden rarely actually talks about music. He doesn't talk about how Bob Dylan's songs changed after interacting with The Beatles, he talks about how The Beatles started dealing with new subject matter in their songs after interacting with Bob Dylan. Honestly, I'm not sure if this is because writing about music is a lot harder, though not impossible, and it's doubtful those in the audience who aren't musicians will understand what you're talking about, or because Hyden just doesn't care about the technical aspects of music. In my experience, most music critics don't know much about music or how it's created, and they really don't care because that's not what they're listening for. (Plenty of them don't give a shit about the facts of how musicians interact and how musical influence actually works; they just want to talk about people they find interesting)This mirrors the duality I encountered as soon as I became an impassioned Pink Floyd fan in high school. There are Gilmour fans and Waters fans (Rick Wright deserves his own fans and a lot more credit, but musicians who sit never get as much credit as those who stand). Gilmour fans are into the sonic textures, the clarity of the recordings, odd time signatures, the shape of the songs, and how they transition from one to the next. Waters fans talk about isolation, alienation, insanity, and the pressures of daily life. “All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be” is incredibly positive (because of how it scans in the context of the melody) to Gilmour fans and very cynical and negative to Waters fans. Furthermore, The Wall is the favorite album of Waters fans, while Gilmour fans, if they even bother with The Wall, point out that the songs credited as collaborations with Gilmour are the best songs on the album.Hyden is not a Pink Floyd fan, but he'd be a Waters-sided fan if he was. This means, I would argue, that he misses a few interesting facts that would affect his thesis or make it irrelevant. His thesis is, as best I can tell, that Classic Rock is a particular mythos that was created by radio programmers in the early 80s. He and I, as listeners in the 90s, didn't know this, and so Classic Rock, along with its mythology (including the interaction of band members and the antics of band members and road crew members along with the creation of the music) became a Real Thing. I agree with that basic idea, but what he misses in the creation of that myth has a lot to do with music sensu strictu, which is something that he misses entirely.For example, take Steely Dan and Pink Floyd, two bands that most listeners wouldn't group together. On musical terms, however, I would because both of them have a strong influence from jazz. The way they made music is totally different (Steely Dan was not really a band, but two songwriters with a revolving door of studio musicians; whereas Pink Floyd were four guys who met in school and continued making music together for almost 20 years), but their influences have a lot in common. They are both on Classic Rock radio. But what does either group have to do with Foreigner? Or Black Sabbath? Furthermore, what don't they have in common with Roxy Music, a band that is NEVER played on Classic Rock radio? Or Slade? Or Kate Bush, who has enough in common musically with Peter Gabriel and Elton John that she would fit right in, at least for some songs. The answer, which honestly reinforces Hyden's point, is that they all have enough in common musically, and in terms of “scene,” or tradition, that they make a good mix on the radio. But he never gets into the decisions made by those radio programmers, he simply resorts to the weakest of all arguments: racism, sexism, and homophobia.The idea that Classic Rock is “unbearably white” pervades Hyden's book to the point of irritation. He doesn't use that phrase, but he does say that the “whiteness” of Classic Rock is a problem that must be dealt with (or cannot be avoided). Oh really? Is the blackness of R&B, soul, and funk a problem that cannot be avoided? Or is it something to be enjoyed, just as the Englishness of Genesis, Yes, and Pink Floyd is? I definitely think the latter. Hyden kinda makes himself look ridiculous when he claims that James Brown, Parliament/Funkadelic, Earth, Wind, and Fire and other funk acts of the Seventies were playing rock music. Only someone who knows nothing about music would make try to make that point. MUSIC. Not a music scene, not the esthetics of rock bands. Music. Someone who understands music knows that funk and R&B are different musically from rock in terms of time signatures, chords, song structure, and even blatantly obvious things like the instruments employed (most rock bands wouldn't get away with having a horn section, whereas EWF without its horn section isn't EWF). The only big name artists who are credible as funk artists and rock artists are Prince and Rick James, and their particular songs always fit into one category or another. Furthermore, Hyden makes the point (basically) that only white males are permitted to be branded as Classic Rock, and yet doesn't deal with all the white males who were excluded. On musical grounds, Roxy Music belongs in Classic Rock if David Bowie does. Why not Leonard Cohen if Neil Young and Bob Dylan are on Classic Rock radio? Why not anything by Chicago after Terry Kath died? Why not Hall and Oates? Why not any KISS song other than “Rock and Roll All Nite?” Why not Mike Oldfield? Why were Asia, Journey, and REO Speedwagon immediately termed Classic Rock while still contemporary rock bands, and yet other bands more classic, such as Genesis were excluded (until they had such huge hits they couldn't be ignored)? I don't think the answer is that Journey were white men. There's some better explanation and yet Hyden never gets to it.If he can't hear that Dark Side of the Moon is a jazz album, then I'm not convinced that any argument he could make on the basis of musical technicalities would impress me. But that's okay because the book is still fun to read even if he doesn't get to the bottom of his point. Falling back on racism, sexism, and homophobia is really weak, but I don't think it detracts entirely too much from having a fun book about Classic Rock. Hyden at the very least props up the ethos, and talks about the feeling of being a Classic Rock fan. He recognizes that experience at the very least, even if he can't explain it. In his final chapter, in which he tries to say that artists are still carrying on the Classic Rock ethos, but some of them are gay men or lesbians, he makes another weak argument. The artists he mentions are so firmly within the Indie Rock scene that they have nothing to do with Classic Rock. But “that's progress,” he says, without noting the dissenting opinions about progress in art. I find the idea of progress in art to be totally vacuous and unintelligible, but Hyden is happy to just talk about what he wants to talk about, whether it makes sense or not. So all in all, I highly recommend this book, even if the author is just plain wrong about a lot of what he says.