The Archived

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The Archived
Victoria Schwab

Goodreads Blurb:

Imagine a place where the dead rest on shelves like books.

Each body has a story to tell, a life seen in pictures that only Librarians can read. The dead are called Histories, and the vast realm in which they rest is the Archive.

Da first brought Mackenzie Bishop here four years ago, when she was twelve years old, frightened but determined to prove herself. Now Da is dead, and Mac has grown into what he once was, a ruthless Keeper, tasked with stopping often-violent Histories from waking up and getting out. Because of her job, she lies to the people she loves, and she knows fear for what it is: a useful tool for staying alive.

Being a Keeper isn’t just dangerous—it’s a constant reminder of those Mac has lost. Da’s death was hard enough, but now her little brother is gone too. Mac starts to wonder about the boundary between living and dying, sleeping and waking. In the Archive, the dead must never be disturbed. And yet, someone is deliberately altering Histories, erasing essential chapters. Unless Mac can piece together what remains, the Archive itself might crumble and fall.

In this haunting, richly imagined novel, Victoria Schwab reveals the thin lines between past and present, love and pain, trust and deceit, unbearable loss and hard-won redemption.

It’s rare that as a writer, I’m left breathlessly wordless, but I’ve been waiting to write this review for a few days now because I couldn’t quite figure out how to describe how much I loved it.  Here’s what I’ve come up with:  after reading this book, I will forever be classifying Schwab with Neil Gaiman in my mind.  They both manage to create these dark, haunting worlds that somehow manage to capture hope and love in ways that are truer that one can usually see in real life.  They embrace the creepiness of a dark hallway and the echoes of humming and yet the way each of the characters clings to the importance of life, it adds that tiny flicker of light that makes the story enthralling.  In some ways this book reminds me a little of The Graveyard Book, in that she took this place that can be really quite scary and made it into a place where people live at least part of their lives.

Now, to the reason for why exactly this book is so thoroughly compelling:  Schwab has this uncanny ability to write protagonist who are heart-wrenchingly endearing.  She writes them so well that it won’t matter if you can relate to them on a meta level, whether you’ve lost a sibling, because you’ll be able to feel what they’re feeling.  It’s not hard to imagine the compulsion to keep things that were important to the brother you lost.  I’d prefer not to because it’s far too painful to imagine my life without my goof of a brother in it, but Schwab made it so that I didn’t have to.  She wrote it so that the pain was there on the page so that I didn’t have to look inside myself to figure out what the character was experiencing.  Oddly, the icing on the cake, the one thing that made wish she was real, was the fact that she can read the history of any place, so she, of course, would read the history of her room.  That one moment of curiosity made her into a real human being for me.   If you could see all the people who had lived where you live, wouldn’t you?  I know I would.

Chiaroscuro by Caravaggio. From here.

Schwab, of course, wrote this book in the same way as The Near Witch, by which I mean that it’s vibrant and evocative.  She really does use words as if they’re paint.  I compared The Near Witch to a Caravaggio painting, but after reading The Archived, I realize that this is the book that more aptly resembles the master.  You see, Caravaggio was the first to use chiaroscuro, which is the use of light and dark to create high contrasts.  In The Archived, Schwab does this to sublime effect.  Whether it’s in the Narrows, where the only light comes from the cracks around the doors or when her mom’s cleaning the floor and you get the contrast of the brilliantly clean and sparkling inlaid rose against the dust clogged marble surrounding it, Schwab has no problem using contrast to bring an her work to life.  These images all stand out in my mind still, a week later because they’re so incredibly easy to see.  Schwab creates this vibrant tapestry on which her characters play and it feels more like watching a movie than it does reading a book because I’m not reading everything and imagining it.  No, I’m watching it happen and it’s amazing.

This book will be coming out on January 22, 2013 and you really should pick it up.  It’s entirely worth it.

4.5 ink bottles.
Character Believability:  5 Buffys
Character Investibility:  5 Doctors
Pacing/Urgency/Tension:  4.5 Dresdens
Worldbilding: 5 Snyders
Language: 5 Feegles
Mystery:  4 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads

Breaking Dawn

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Breaking Dawn (Twilight Saga, Book 4)
Stephanie Meyer

Publisher’s Blurb:

The astonishing conclusion to the Twilight Saga, Breaking Dawn, illuminates the secrets and mysteries of this spellbinding romantic epic that has entranced millions. Now that Bella has made her decision to join the dark but seductive world of immortals, a startling chain of unprecedented events is about to unfold with potentially devastating, and unfathomable, consequences. Just when the frayed strands of Bella’s life-first discovered in Twilight, then scattered and torn in New Moon and Eclipse-seem ready to heal and knit together, could they be destroyed.

I wish I could say that I was pleasantly surprised by this book.  I wish I could say that I enjoyed it far more than…say New Moon or Eclipse, but I can’t.  Allow me to explain why:

Item the first: I found Bella’s miraculous skipping of the whole inconvenient new vampire emotions to be hard to believe at best.  We won’t go into what it is at worst.  Here’s the thing:  it’s never really explained.  You’re just handed this bizarre platter of oh-it’s-okay-she-has-more-emotions-than-just-raw-unrepentent-hunger.  It’s made out like it’s some secret power she has, but then Meyer never really goes into what that would mean as a power.  Also, if a vampire’s power comes from latent skills they had prior to changing (which I know because it’s been said throughout the series over and over and over…) the one thing that Bella has not been noted for has been her self-restraint.  If anything, I would imagine that she would be the most out of control new vampire given her rather consistent need to made crappy life decisions.

Item the second:  telling me that everything’s hunky dory now that Bella’s a vampire is one dimensional.  Saying that she was clearly made to be a vampire multiple times is ham-handed (surprising, I know.)  Sure, it’s nice that she has all kinds of crazy awesome skills and that she’s no longer klutzy, but painting her as this bizarre super-vampire who’s somehow more powerful and slightly smarter than everyone is not believable.  I’ll admit that a girl who reads a lot that learns that her boyfriend is a vampire and doesn’t immediately put a stake through his heart is extraordinary, but not necessarily in a good way.  It seemed weird for a person who spends oh… let’s say 80% of the series in immediate danger whether from herself or from the supernatural beings she chooses to surround herself with.  This is the girl who was destined to be a vampire.  Sure, and I’m the Pope.  Oh, and literally spelling out the exact fraction of the second it took her to respond to anything is a few steps beyond ham-handed.  I get that Meyer was trying to really show me just how fast that is, but unfortunately my measly human mind reads 1/64^th of a second and immediately rounds up to just really fast.  The fact that it happened early and often didn’t help me stay in the book.

Item the third:  this is a small point, admittedly, but it was galling to the extreme.  Now, keep in mind that I’ve read books wherein there are so many characters that it gets confusing.  This is not one of those books.  Why?  Because there aren’t two Georges who are absurdly similar in mentality.  That’s why.  In fact, Meyer seemed to go out of her way to select intentionally odd and distinctive names for her secondary characters.  There’s really no mistaking Garret with Benjamin.  Oddly, she wrote them too well.  This is why when I read a sentence about Jacob grumbling, saying that there were so many people in the house that someone should give him a list, I willingly followed the footnote to the bottom of the page.  I looked down to see a different page reference, with no context as to what I might find when I flipped forward.  Yeah, shockingly, I flipped forward into the exact list that Jacob had just requested.  While I understand that Meyer is writing for a younger demographic, even they aren’t stupid enough to need a freaking index.  In fact, let’s make a rule, we’ll call it the Jacob Index rule.  It is:  if you feel compelled to compile a listing of your characters anywhere other than where that traditionally goes, then you probably haven’t written your characters well enough.  Go back and fill in the gaps without an index.  Trust me, readers know a shortcut when they see them.

Now, if you’ve read the other three books, you might as well finish out the series with this book.  It’s entertaining, but only to the eleven year old in me.  The adult is standing behind that eleven year old shaking her head in disappointment the entire time.

2 ink bottles.
Character Believability: 1.5 Buffys
Character Investibility: 2 Doctors
Pacing/Urgency/Tension: 1.5 Dresdens
Worldbuilding:  3 Snyders
Language: 2 Feegles
Mystery: 1.5 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

Eclipse

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Eclipse (Twilight Saga, Book 3)
Stephenie Meyer

Publisher’s Blurb:

Readers captivated by Twilight and New Moon will eagerly devour the paperback edition Eclipse, the third book in Stephenie Meyer’s riveting vampire love saga. As Seattle is ravaged by a string of mysterious killings and a malicious vampire continues her quest for revenge, Bella once again finds herself surrounded by danger. In the midst of it all, she is forced to choose between her love for Edward and her friendship with Jacob — knowing that her decision has the potential to ignite the ageless struggle between vampire and werewolf.

Here’s the thing with this book, I would have been just as happy with it if it had only consisted of the last 300 pages.  I found the first half to be entirely too tedious and angsty.  I understand that it’s easy to use a love triangle to amplify tension in a book, but that’s why it’s boring.  The fact that the apparent subplot doesn’t really coalesce into something compelling until well into the second half of the book was galling to say the least.  That was by far the most interesting part of the story.  The entire first half of the book wherein people were stubborn teenagers who waffled about how they really felt and bullshit like that made me want to hurl the book across the room.  (In re-reading that sentence it occurs to me that there were several times in reading this book when I just flat out wanted to hurl as well, but that had more to do with the syrupy platitudes that anything else.)

I really wish I could say that the characters had any redeeming qualities in this book, but this really did seem to be the one book wherein every single character becomes unlikeable, which makes it a bit of a slog.  The only person who is even remotely likeable is Edward and that’s not even all of the time, though it is for much longer than anyone else.  I get that we’re talking about kids that are in their late teens, but I spent most of the book wanting to smack one of them with the accompanying message of “stop making stupid decisions.”

Meyer once again came across as ham-handed with the Wuthering Heights theme, with direct quotations from the books to prove her points.  There’s a part of me that wonders if I’m just crazy from seeing these things and wanting for them to be better.  It’s not that I object to an author giving me the metaphor.  What I want is a more dexterous use of it.  Using direct quotations from the book to highlight a character’s feelings that are already egregiously heightened comes across as inexperience.  It’s entirely possible for a reader to gather information and come to conclusions without the author saying “look, look, this is exactly what’s going on in the character’s mind and it’s exactly like this other thing that you already know about.”  I get referencing something that’s already in the reader’s mind to make the story more personal, but it’s not necessary to go so over the top with it.

I know that I’m in the minority in my opinion of these books.  My problem is that they hold a fair bit of potential, but since everything is so over the top it makes it work to read it.  You’re probably questioning my intelligence at this point, but here’s what happened to me.  Every 30-50 pages, I would read something that would pull me out of the story.  Whether it was yet another description of Bella’s panic or perhaps a senseless emotional switch by Jacob/Edward, I had to put the book down for a few moments every time and give my brain a little time to move past it.  These books could have been so very compelling for me.  I could have read all 617 pages in less than a day if I didn’t have to put it down so often.

In the end, it’s entertaining again, but it’s a little on the egregious side when it comes to pretty much everything.

2 ink bottles
Character Believability: 2 Buffys
Character Investibility: 2 Doctors
Pacing/Tension/Urgency:  2.5 Dresdens
Worldbuilding: 3 Snyders
Language: 3 Feegles
Mystery: 2 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

New Moon

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New Moon (Twilight Saga, Book 2)
Stephenie Meyer

Publisher’s Blurb:

In New Moon, Stephenie Meyer delivers another irresistible combination of romance and suspense with a supernatural twist. The “star-crossed” lovers theme continues as Bella and Edward find themselves facing new obstacles, including a devastating separation, the mysterious appearance of dangerous wolves roaming the forest in Forks, a terrifying threat of revenge from a female vampire and a deliciously sinister encounter with Italy’s reigning royal family of vampires, the Volturi.

I’m just going to jump right into this.  There’s really no sense in sugar coating it.

The writing is still ham-handed.  There really aren’t many subtleties to the characters’ feelings or expressions.  Throughout this book it feels like Bella is either ecstatically happy, completely numb to the point of only interacting to people when they ask a direct question, writhing in pain, or in outright panic.  That’s it.  Those are the only emotions she’s allowed for 563 pages.  I remember being that age and I remember that things had a sharper edge; things were more important or more outrageous.  However, it wasn’t always the case.  Just because you’re eighteen doesn’t mean that you spend every second of every day in a high dither about this or that.  It feels to me like Meyer uses excessive emotion in her characters to falsely elevate the tension in the story, only it doesn’t do that for me.  It just wears me out.

I was warned that the Romeo and Juliet theme was over-wrought, however, in spite of that, I had assumed that it would consist of subtle references woven in over the course of the book.  What I found were direct references that were ham-handed to the point of being downright irritating.  Edward saying that he would never critique Romeo again made me want to throw the book across the room.  You’re probably thinking that I’m over-reacting, but here’s the thing, I’m not stupid.  Most readers aren’t.  We don’t need to be beaten over the head with the fact that Bella is clearly Juliet and, even though it was a self-imposed exile, Edward is obviously Romeo.  Meyer even lays out who the Paris analog is.  It was distracting to say the least.

However, Meyer’s Romeo and Juliet triangle falls short of the original.  One of the things that bothered me as I read through this series is how remarkably one dimensional Bella and Edward’s relationship is.  There’s no rational evaluation of it, no true questioning of it, just raw (mildly nauseating) need.  There’s not even the slightest hint of a sense of humor.  When you’re eighteen, I get that it’s possible that that’s all you’re capable of feeling, but Edward is nearly 100.  He’s had time to grow passed his hormones.  In fact, as a vampire, I’m reasonably sure that he doesn’t have any hormones.  He should be old enough to look at things with a more level head, but he takes part in the relationship as if the additional 70 years didn’t exist.  I’m not sure if this kind of raw love is really feasible.  In fact, the more I think about it, the more it sounds like something an extremely immature couple would say…right before they flame out.  This isn’t the kind of love that lasts forever.  This is the kind of love that lasts until they walk down the hall and the guy says something stupid leading to a spectacular breakup, which although temporarily sad, is 100% survivable.

There was one aspect that I thought was well done for what it was and that was the Edward appearances.  I liked that it was just a voice in her head and not a visual image of Edward.  I loved that it’s not really confirmed whether it was really Edward talking to her or if it was simply a manifestation of her subconscious.  I still think it’s completely ridiculous for someone to be so obsessed with someone else that they would knowingly put themselves in severe danger just to hear their voice.  If nothing else, it sets a truly crappy example to the twelve year olds who are reading this. I’m not really over the moon about telling young women that it’s totally okay to be laid out by a guy leaving them, but I understand that one doesn’t always write books with the thought of what kind of example it sets.  (Okay, the cane waving is over for now.)

Once again, I found the book to be superficially entertaining if you turn off your brain a little bit.  I certainly read it in about a day, but I firmly maintain that if the writing had been tightened up and toned down (i.e., there’s no way this needed to be 563 pages), it had the potential to be so much better.  It falls short of compelling.

2.5 ink bottles.
Character Believability:  3 Buffys
Character Investibility: 2.5 Doctors
Pacing/Tension/Urgency: 2.5 Dresdens
Worldbuilding: 3 Snyders
Language:  3 Feegles
Mystery:  2 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

Twilight

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Twilight (Twilight Saga, Book 1)
Stephenie Meyer

Update:  Apologies for the incorrectly spelled author’s name.  It’s been corrected.

Publisher’s Blurb:

Bella Swan’s move to Forks, a small, perpetually rainy town in Washington, could have been the most boring move she ever made. But once she meets the mysterious and alluring Edward Cullen, Bella’s life takes a thrilling and terrifying turn. Up until now, Edward has managed to keep his vampire identity a secret in the small community he lives in, but now nobody is safe, especially Bella, the person Edward holds most dear.

A short preface before I go into the review.  I know that thousands of reviews of have been written for this series and I also understand that my take is not in the majority.  I’ve been putting off reading this series for a long time because I know I’m not the ideal reader.  I went through my formative years watching Buffy beat the living daylights out of vampires who only glittered as they burst into to flames.  That having been said, if you are a diehard Twilight fan (specifically phrased that way because Twihard is not an acceptable use of the English language), you should probably go ahead and move along.  You’re not going to want to hear anything I have to say and I don’t want to have to moderate the indignant comments of the true believers.  Now, onto the meat of the review…

We’ll start with the bad and move to the good.  My primary complaint about the book is that Meyer is more than a little hamhanded when it comes to pretty much everything.  Whether it was the fifty different words for brown (sienna, umber, topaz, cinnamon, etc,) or emphasizing over and over how very much Bella should stay away from Edward, it made it impossible to stay sunk in the story.  Throughout the book, I felt like I was being beaten over the head with the Very Important Things that Meyer really wanted to make sure that I understand.  Here’s the thing, while I’ll admit that I’m not smart all the time, I’m not that stupid.  It’s pretty insulting to everyone, including Meyer’s target demographic. When an author emphasizes that the protagonist needs to stay away from the leading guy so many times, it actually serves to make me want her to stay away from him.  It’s excessive and counterproductive.  Instead of creating a compelling tale and amping up the tension, it adds fat to the story that needs desperately to be cut out.

In fact, as far as the writing goes it really vacillates between over-wrought and under-thought-out.  Here’s an example of a sentence that I had to work to get passed:  “The bouquets of brilliant anemones undulated ceaselessly in the invisible current, twisted shells scurried around the edges, obscuring the crabs within them, starfish stuck motionlessly to rocks and each other, while one black eel with black racing stripes wove through the green weeds, waiting for the sea to return.”  That is more than a little over done.  I would have expected it in something written for an English class, not a young adult fantasy novel.

The remaining complaints come in the form of character believability.  I was more than a little doubtful that a person as responsible as Bella would develop such a dangerous obsession.  She was responsible for paying her mother’s mortgage, but ZOMG cute boy.  It doesn’t sync up.  I’ll admit that every responsible kid has the periodic lapse, but this one is kind of monumental for the kind of person Bella is purported to be.  Oh, and as a klutz, I can personally tell you that if a person is as pathologically clumsy as Bella, you eventually get to be good at it, so that you aren’t slicing your fingers off every other week.  That was extremely distracting.  I understand that Meyer needed for Bella to have a handy excuse whenever something vampire-related happened, but it struck me as lazy writing.

Now, I will admit that I found Meyer’s depiction of Bella to be much more investible than the film version (which admittedly has more to do with Kristen Stewart’s depiction than the actual character).  I enjoyed that Meyer took the time to lay out how Bella read her English assignments ahead of time because she simply enjoyed reading and the way she took care of her dad.  I loved the fact that she included that Bella preferred the company of people who weren’t compelled to fill in the silence.  In short, I found the Bella in this book to be surprisingly easy to identify with in spite of her odd lapse in character.  As evidenced by the ridiculous number of books I review, it’s not hard for me to sympathize with an average looking book nerd, which probably explains why I find it so difficult to match up the responsible Bella with the head-over-heels Bella.

In the end, once I got past the beginning, I found the story entertaining if irritating from time to time.  The twelve year old in me who spent her Saturdays with her nose in a book was happy to sink into the superficiality of the book, but the adult in me was the one kept on putting it down in exasperation.

3 ink bottles.
Character Believability:  2 Buffys
Character Investibility:  3 Doctors
Pacing/Tension/Urgency: 3 Dresdens
Worldbuilding:  3.5 Snyders
Language:  3.5 Feegles
Mystery:  3 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag

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I must have lost my mind last week.  I read these books in order, but for some reason went ahead and posted the third book before the second.  I don’t even know.  Oh well.  Without further ado, the second book in the Flavia de Luce series:

The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag (Flavia de Luce #2)
Alan Bradley

Publisher’s Blurb:

Flavia de Luce, a dangerously smart eleven-year-old with a passion for chemistry and a genius for solving murders, thinks that her days of crime-solving in the bucolic English hamlet of Bishop’s Lacey are over—until beloved puppeteer Rupert Porson has his own strings sizzled in an unfortunate rendezvous with electricity. But who’d do such a thing, and why? Does the madwoman who lives in Gibbet Wood know more than she’s letting on? What about Porson’s charming but erratic assistant? All clues point toward a suspicious death years earlier and a case the local constables can’t solve—without Flavia’s help. But in getting so close to who’s secretly pulling the strings of this dance of death, has our precocious heroine finally gotten in way over her head?

I wasn’t sure how Bradley would continue on with Flavia’s story, since the murder in The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie was so tidily tied up, but he did it and he did it magnificently.  I was more than a little surprised when he didn’t immediately open with a dead body, but instead allowed me to get to know the victim for a little while.  That being said, I loved that I was allowed that space of time to come to my own conclusions about Rupert Porson and the people who surrounded him.  Sure he was kind of horrible in that he clearly beat his travelling companion/mother to his unborn child, but Bradley also gave you glimpses of why Nialla would have been attracted to him in the first place, his showmanship.  Having all of this context on the victim made the murder all the more intriguing.  It’s brilliantly done.

Flavia is still completely adorable.  Her love of chemistry continues unabated and I still maintain that it’s chemistry presented in the most fascinating way possible.  Her fascination with poisons is both understandable and completely endearing.  That being said, the fact that she can manufacture them is minorly concerning, especially knowing that she’s faced with two older sisters who frequently tell her that she was adopted and that her dead mother tried to give her back, but they wouldn’t take her back.  However, although Flavia periodically falls into mildly morose moods, she still remains the same plucky young woman that we left at the end of Sweetness.  When she covers for the fact that she was examining a dead body by slowly rising from a crouch, loudly proclaiming “Amen”, elaborately crossing herself, and then dabbing at her eyes, I laughed out loud.  She might be sneaky and underhanded, but she’s delightfully sneaky and underhanded in all of the ways that an eleven year old investigating murder should be.  I particularly enjoyed the effect she has on the detectives at the end of the novel.  I can completely understand it since I was wearing the same look on my face as I was reading it.

I really can’t recommend this book enough.  It’s brilliantly written.  For a mystery that takes place in the quiet stuffiness of the British countryside, Bradley writes them with a unique balance of humor and urgency.  They are exceedingly entertaining.

4.5 ink bottles.
Character Believability:  5 Buffys
Character Investibility:  5 Doctors
Pacing/Tension/Urgency:  4.5 Dresdens
Worldbuilding:  4.5 Snyders
Language:  5 Feegles
Mystery:  4 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

The Enchantress

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The Enchantress (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, Book 6)
Michael Scott

Publisher’s Blurb:

The two that are one must become the one that is all. One to save the world, one to destroy it.

San Francisco:

Nicholas and Perenelle Flamel have one day left to live, and one job left to do. They must defend San Francisco. The monsters gathered on Alcatraz Island have been released and are heading toward the city. If they are not stopped, they will destroy everyone and everything in their path.

But even with the help of two of the greatest warriors from history and myth, will the Sorceress and the legendary Alchemyst be able to defend the city? Or is it the beginning of the end of the human race?

Danu Talis:

Sophie and Josh Newman traveled ten thousand years into the past to Danu Talis when they followed Dr. John Dee and Virginia Dare. And it’s on this legendary island that the battle for the world begins and ends.

Scathach, Prometheus, Palamedes, Shakespeare, Saint-Germain, and Joan of Arc are also on the island. And no one is sure what—or who—the twins will be fighting for.

Today the battle for Danu Talis will be won or lost.

But will the twins of legend stand together?

Or will they stand apart—

one to save the world and one to destroy it?

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this story, given the number of parallel plotlines that we left off with in Book 5.  And while I can’t say that my socks were completely knocked off, I will unreservedly say that this is my favorite book of the entire series, hands down.  Josh isn’t whiny at all, you guys.  In fact, he’s kind of awesome, but that’s not what makes this the best book.  No, in this story, Scott uses the parallel plotlines to build tension.  Everyone in one place is about to die? Yeah, let’s jump over here to this other place where other important things are happening.  And something important is happening everywhere.  Every page of this book feels like a dead sprint.  The characters are constantly moving with every ounce of their strength and being and it makes for such a compelling tale.

However, it’s not all hair-raising action.  Scott wove in humor here and there and it ratcheted to book up from really good to great.  The redshirts reference had me grinning from ear to ear and the fifteen year old in me laughed out loud at the thought of hearing the Imperial March when parents walk into the room.  Also, you don’t often get Sci Fi references in Fantasy, but after this, I want it to happen more often because it works.  Boy howdy, does it work.

The time travel dimension to the story had a part of my brain working overtime.  I realized at one point the number of decisions Scott would have had to have made in writing this book given the complexity of having people from the present going in the past, interacting with people they had known and loved in the future.  You see, even that sentence is muddled.  I would give you an example, but I don’t want to spoil anything.  Rest assured, where my writing is failing, Scott’s came through with flying colors.  There was never a doubt of who was where and with whom.  It’s astoundingly clear and without the use of any qualifiers.

The one thing I take issue with is when an Elder says that humans are essentially good.  While I’ve always hoped for that to be true, I know it isn’t universally true.  Stalin was not essentially good.  There’s no doubt in my mind that he thought what he was doing was for the greater good, but the truth is that you cannot be “essentially good” and be responsible for the brutal deaths of millions of innocent people.  It’s a nice sentiment, to imagine that we as a race are essentially good and I still like to think that the majority of human beings are, but the reality is that there are outliers.  It’s just too big of a generalization.  It exceeds the truth.

In the end, however, this story is a fast paced roller coaster ride of action, magic, and monsters.  I highly recommend it.

4.5 ink bottles.
Character Believability:  4.5 Buffys
Character Investibilty: 4.5 Doctors
Pacing/Tension/Urgency: 4.5 Dresdens
Worldbuilding: 4 Snyders
Language: 4.5 Feegles
Mystery: 5 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

The Invaders

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The Invaders (The Brotherband Chronicles, Book 2)
John Flanagan

Publisher’s Blurb:

Hal and the Herons have done the impossible. This group of outsiders has beaten out the strongest, most skilled young warriors in all of Skandia to win the Brotherband competition. But their celebration comes to an abrupt end when the Skandians’ most sacred artifact, the Andomal, is stolen–and the Herons are to blame.

To find redemption they must track down the thief Zavac and recover the Andomal. But that means traversing stormy seas, surviving a bitter winter, and battling a group of deadly pirates willing to protect their prize at all costs. Even Brotherband training and the help of Skandia’s greatest warrior may not be enough to ensure that Hal and his friends return home with the Andomal–or their lives.

I know I’ve said this before, but I’m not sure if it’s possible for me to dislike Flanagan’s books.  He has this brilliant ability to strike just the right tone of earnest effort in his characters combined with genuine humor overlaid upon a bed of grave danger that makes it impossible to do anything but flip page after page after page.  And I’ll give you that that’s probably why I love it so much.  His stories are driven by his characters in the way that life is driven by people.  Nothing’s going to happen in the greater world outside of basic survival unless someone stands up and starts building houses or, in this case, takes the ship that he built with his own hands and the handful of peers that he solidified into a crew and leaves home to fight to return what was stolen.  Flanagan’s characters have the uncanny ability to grow into everything that I want them to be.  Sure, he’s kind of falling into a pattern of who the brains of the operation is versus who the amazingly skilled warrior is, but it doesn’t come off as contrived, but rather an acknowledgment that some of us are better at some things and others at other things.  It simply acknowledges the diversity of human skill and it’s done in a way that is subtle.  I never once stopped and thought “oh, har, har.  I see what you did there.” No, instead I stayed in the story, 100% focused on what was going to happen next.

As to the story, I can’t lie, Thorn kind of stole it for me.  His form of dry humor and his indignation over losing a battered old sheepskin were fantastically endearing.  Let’s be honest, the story of this book would have floundered had Thorn not been there to quietly steer it from the background.  The boys of this tale are delightful and smile-inducing, but they would have devolved into bickering children if Thorn hadn’t stepped in to focus them and bring them back to task.  Granted, I was hooked as of the first word on page one, Thorn or no Thorn, but he lent the story an edge of quiet humor that kept not just my eyes glued to the page, but my heart as well.

There’s not much more I can say except for this; this story is a classic Flanagan tale of growing up, honor, courage, friendship, and loyalty.  It’s harrowing at times, but in a good way, making the words disappear and instead building a world for you to live in, at least for 430 pages. Compelling doesn’t quite do it justice.  It’s enthralling.

5 ink bottles.
Character Believability: 5 Buffys
Character Investibility:  5 Doctors
Pacing/Tension/Urgency: 5 Dresdens
Worldbuilding: 5 Snyders
Language: 5 Feegles
Mystery:  4.5 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

The Serpent’s Shadow

Image via Goodreads

The Serpent’s Shadow (Kane Chronicles, Book 3)
Rick Riordan

Author’s Blurb:

When young magicians Carter and Sadie Kane learned how to follow the path of the ancient Egyptian gods, they knew they would have to play an important role in restoring Ma’at—order—to the world. What they didn’t know is how chaotic the world would become. The Chaos snake Apophis is loose and threatening to destroy the earth in three days’ time. The magicians are divided. The gods are disappearing, and those that remain are weak. Walt, one of Carter and Sadie’s most gifted initiates, is doomed and can already feel his life force ebbing. Zia is too busy babysitting the senile sun god, Ra, to be of much help. What are a couple of teenagers and a handful of young trainees to do?

There is, possibly, one way to stop Apophis, but it is so difficult that it might cost Carter and Sadie their lives, if it even works at all. It involves trusting the ghost of a psychotic magician not to betray them, or worse, kill them. They’d have to be crazy to try. Well, call them crazy.

With hilarious asides, memorable monsters, and an ever-changing crew of friends and foes, the excitement never lets up in The Serpent’s Shadow, a thoroughly entertaining and satisfying conclusion to the Kane Chronicles trilogy.

It’s taken me a long time to get around to writing this review because this is the first time I’ve ever been even remotely ambivalent about a Riordan book.  Ordinarily I eat them for lunch, but this book was a little slow to get rolling.  And by a little slow, I mean I was more than a little surprised when the action started.  So many Important Plot Points in this book seemed to be arbitrary and accidental.  The most compelling plot line was Sadie’s quest to re-call Bes’s ba, but this plotline was mired down by the other plotlines all of which were comparatively tedious and seemingly pointless in comparison.  While these stories typically have multiple plotlines that only coalesce in the end, this one seems more like a torrent of chaos (no pun intended) that makes it hard to glean the golden plotlines in the center.

The love interest plotlines were galling to a certain extent in that, while I remember a fair portion of my teenage years being spent mindlessly thinking about boys, I do remember that there were other cogent thoughts going through my head at the time.  Riordan reduces his characters to lovelorn simpletons and if they’re not pining away for professed loves then they are drowning in doubts with regards to their ability to save the world/humanity/their loved ones, etc, etc, etc. I will grant you that it’s important to build a bit of weakness into a character, but the amount of time Sadie and Carter spend doubting themselves is a little ham-handed.

HOWEVER, that being said, while the first half of the book is mired in toil, the second half is more typical Riordan fair.  It moves at a pace that certainly qualifies as break neck.  And although I’m more than a little wishy washy on the way in which Carter and Sadie save the day, I still enjoyed reading it, which is saying something.  The bickering between Sadie and Carter was still endearing and periodically comical, though I’ll stop short of saying hilarious.

You know, this is really coming off as if I hated the book and that’s not accurate.  I enjoyed this book, but I’m left with this feeling of disappointment that can’t be entirely explained away with the fact that it’s the last book in the series.  I do mean it when I say that my favorite part of the story is Bes’s subplot.  It was charming and endearing to know that Sadie would try to do a small act of good in the face of an overwhelming one.  It made her more human in a very real way.  Outside of this storyline, however, this book failed to truly connect in a way that I’ve grown used to with Riordan books. I know that the majority of fans will be willing to look past it, but I’m finding it difficult to do so.

I’ve heard that his next project will be Norse gods and I can’t lie, I’m excited about that.  I’m just hoping that whatever was missing from this book goes into that series because I kind of love Norse mythology and I’m very interested to see what Riordan does with it.

3.5 ink bottles.
Character Believability: 4 Buffys
Character Investibility: 3.5 Doctors
Pacing/Urgency/Tension: 3.5 Dresdens
Worldbuilding: 4 Snyders
Language: 4.5 Feegles
Mystery: 2 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

Book Trailer:

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Spy Glass

Image via Goodreads

Spy Glass
Maria V. Snyder

Snyder has, once again, crafted a spellbinding story that held me in a thrall until the very end. I couldn’t put it down, you guys.  Sure, Opal is doing her unique version of crashing through life, but she does it with such a genuine heart that it becomes this eloquent tale of heroism in the face of doubt.  In this book, in particular, Opal truly transforms into the person that we all hoped for.  I’m impressed by Snyder’s capacity to both hold all of those loose ends in her mind throughout three books and to tie them up so tidily in this one.  The things Opal has to live through in this book are uniquely horrifying, but she trudges through in typical Opal fashion, which is what makes Snyder’s books so uniquely delightful.  She knows her characters on a level that few are able to reach and it really comes through in the stories.  There are no inconsistencies character-wise.  The characters have flaws, sure, but they’re consistent flaws.

Publisher’s Blurb:

After siphoning her own blood magic in the showdown at Hubal, Opal Cowan has lost her powers. She can no longer create glass magic. More, she’s immune to the effects of magic. Opal is now an outsider looking in, spying through the glass on those with the powers she once had, powers that make a difference in the world.

Until spying through the glass becomes her new power. Suddenly, the beautiful pieces she makes flash in the presence of magic. And then she discovers that someone has stolen some of her blood—and that finding it might let her regain her powers. Or learn if they’re lost forever…

One thing in particular that stuck out for me was how Snyder handled the subplot of redemption that wound its way through the story.    It’s not hard for stories of redemption to fall into the world of sugarcoating and sappy platitudes.  Snyder, unsurprisingly, never allows this subplot to fall into that world.  She holds it up, keeping it firmly steadfast, oddly comforting, and astonishingly resilient.  Never once did I gag on Devlin’s words.  They seem to be spoken in the quiet of the night as if they weren’t expecting to be heard and for me, there’s a strength there that isn’t often sought after or seen, but holds a deeper level of resonance than words shouted into a crowded auditorium.  In the hands of a different author, Devlin could have come off as insincere, overconfident, or too filled with bravado.  In Snyder’s hands, she made him into the character that this story needed him to be and that is the true mark of why this story rings true.

As to the story, it swirls with action and drama, but in typical Snyder fashion, it’s the characters who drive the tension and the urgency, of which there is plenty.  The question of Kade or Devlin comes to a head in this story and I don’t mind telling you that there was still a small part of my brain that was undecided as to which way I wanted it to go when the decision finally comes.  However, that being said, Snyder wraps this series up is the most satisfying way possible, but to get to that wrap up, the things Opal has to go through will set you on the edge of your chair.  I know I’ve said it’s action packed, but the more I think about it the more my brain goes, oh, and then this happened.  And it’s not just generic action, it’s action dipped in magic, sprinkled with diamonds, thrown through fire, and tossed through a hurricane.  Add in the fact that it’s Opal who’s charging through it all and you get an addictingly compelling story of love and loss that will be impossible to put down.

5 ink bottles.
Character Believability:  5 Buffys
Character Investibility:  5 Doctors
Pacing/Urgency/Tension:  5 Dresdens
Worldbuilding:  5 Snyders
Language:  5 Feegles
Mystery:  5 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher