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Brandon Sanderson - Words of Radiance

Book 2 of The Stormlight Archive

Like The Way of Kings, Words of Radiance is in two volumes, each of which is long enough to be two novels in its own right. In the editions I read there were 1200 pages in total. Sprawling epic fantasy is not my preferred genre, and I'm glad that this series was not my introduction to Sanderson's work.

I had no problems with any one viewpoint character, but I found the jumps between them gave me the feeling of lots of tiny cliffhangers throughout the book and made the experience more compelling than enjoyable. The story is far too long to be read in a single sitting (or even a single day) but it was hard to find points where I was able to stop reading without worrying about what would happen next.

Overall I would class the book(s) as interesting, but I still haven't decided whether or not I like it/them. It's a complicated story and I can see that there's a lot of depth to explore, but that also means that it's hard to keep track of what's happening and I don't want to have to take notes when reading fiction. I imagine it would be clearer if I read it a second time, but also I didn't enjoy it enough to want to read it twice. Perhaps I will feel differently when I finish the series.

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Katherine Addison - The Angel of the Crows

This is a Sherlock Holmes retelling set in a universe where angels and other magical beings are commonplace. Although it is called The Angel of the Crows, it is about an angel called Crow, and I did not notice any crows at any point in the book.

The writing style is a reasonable match for the original, with the exception of a few more modern sentences that stood out as clunky in contrast to the rest of the book. Although I found the characters to be pretty believable, I thought their ethics lined up a little too closely with modern sensibilities to be entirely plausible in a gaslamp fantasy setting. On the other end of the spectrum, Fallen angels are only mentioned in the context of Afghanistan, whereas regular angels are commonplace in Britain, giving the worrying implication that the British Empire is righteous or holy in some way.

The book is divided into nine parts in a way that echos the episodic structure of the original stories. I recognised a number of the cases, but the changes in plot and addition of fantasy elements added an extra layer that stopped it from seeming too familiar.

An interesting book, but not one of my favourites.

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Talia Hibbert - A Girl Like Her

This is a republication of one of Hibbert's earlier books with minor updates. Between the cover and the sprayed edges it is very pink.

The book is a small town romance with a fair amount of cynicism about what small town life is like, particularly if you are Black and autistic and raised by a single mum. There is also a good bit of humour, and loving family relationships, and mostly this is a book about healing from past pain rather than enduring new problems. There are quite a few explicit sex scenes - whether this is a positive or a negative will depend on your own preferences.

Overall I enjoyed the book, but not as much as the books in Hibbert's Brown Sisters series.

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Diana Wynne Jones - Cart and Cwidder

Book 1 in the Dalemark Quartet. First published in 1975.

Cart and Cwidder is told from the point of view of Moril, an 11 year old boy in a family family of travelling musicians. It follows their journey through the oppressed South to the free North of what used to the be same country. There is some magic in the story, particularly towards the end, but most of the plot takes place in a feudal northern European setting.

I thought the book held up well, despite having been published 50 years ago. I liked the variety of personalities and the way that even the adults were allowed to have their characteristic strengths and weaknesses. The pacing drew me through the book without it feeling like a breathless rush, and the writing flowed nicely and was full of understated humour. I also liked the way that reminders of the dangers of speaking freely in the South were woven through the story.

There are a few bits that stand out as awkward now in a way that I don't think they would have at the time it was published. The North seemed a little too perfect for a feudal country even if it isn't as oppressed as the South, the use of parental death as a plot device to launch children on adventures was rather clichéd, there are three boys in the group and just one girl and there is a period-typical lack of diversity on other fronts as well.

Overall, though, I still found it a thoroughly enjoyable read, and one I'm sure I will revisit again.

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Sarah Rees Brennan - All Hail Chaos

Book 2 in the Time of Iron series

I had very strong feelings when reading this book, but they changed significantly depending on what part of the book I was reading. I cackled along happily to the first half of it, nodded knowingly at the title during the chaos of the second half, and then got my heart broken in the last 15% and I'm really not sure how the series is going to wrap up, and whether any of the heartbreak will be undone.

When I read Long Live Evil, I assumed it was a stand-alone, albeit one that ended quite abruptly. This book picks up where Long Live Evil leaves off, and for a while I thought that the characters 'from our world' had succeeded in switching the genre of the book they have entered from grimdark fantasy to a gothic romantic comedy. (There's only so fluffy things can get when the romantic lead has an army of zombie soldiers under his control.) There are some sweet moments, there are some funny bits, and there are some beautifully unsubtle references including someone saying the line 'somehow the Emperor has returned.'

As the book continues there are more and more threats that weren't in the 'original' story, and everything becomes as chaotic as the title suggests. It also becomes clear that stories are harder to steer than the characters believe and efforts to avert crises and save lives often create bigger problems which will claim more lives. I managed to cling on to hope that these would all be resolved in the nick of time until one of my favourite minor characters from Long Live Evil was killed by the Emperor in a very definite way.

It is still possible that the third book will somehow fix everything. This is a series about a story being rewritten, and hints that the story has been rewritten many times before make me think that perhaps the past can be fixed as well as the future. The book ends on a cliff-hanger, which is normally something I criticise, but stopping the book at any point in the second half would have counted as a cliff-hanger, so in this case I will allow it.

Recommended, but start from book 1, and be prepared for some devastation along the way.

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Katherine Addison - The Tomb of Dragons

Book 3 in the Cemeteries of Amalo series

I enjoyed this book a lot. The Cemeteries of Amalo is a fantasy detective series, but Celehar lost his ability to speak with the dead at the end of the previous book, so the start of this book deals with him training his successor as Witness for the Dead and getting assigned to unstick non-functioning bureaucracy instead of investigating a murder.

It had been some time since I read the previous book so it took me a little while to get used to the language again and I could have done with a pronunciation guide, but it didn't interfere with my overall understanding of the story.

There were many delightful moments. I would like to go back to refresh my memory, but that would run the risk of me re-reading the book instead of writing this review, which is probably a sign of a well paced book - there is always something interesting around the next corner.

I liked the way it's revealed that Celehar's depression is making him an unreliable narrator, such as when he goes to tell the sole person that he counts as a friend that he's returned from being kidnapped and finds out that about a dozen people have been worried about him and are glad to see that he's still alive.

I loved the depiction of Celehar with a crush, and I loved that the book allowed him a close friend as well as a relationship, and that both of them felt real and important. The use of a language with layers of formality meant there was a risk associated with choosing to change from we to I, or you to thou which I found more compelling than a more conventional declaration of love.

I appreciated the inclusion of the dragon genocide as a past act of corporate greed for which reparations must be made. It seemed both plausible in-universe, and has real world parallels which I have not seen reflected in fantasy books before. The book's solution felt a bit too neat to be completely plausible, but it did make for a happy ending without too many dangling threads.

Recommended. Can be read as a stand-alone but contains spoilers for earlier books in the series.

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Naomi Novik - The Summer War

The Summer War is a novella, which I was worried might mean that the story was less well developed than some of Novik's other works. Instead, it's written very efficiently, whether that's in the exact wording of a curse, an oath or a prophecy, or in the dry humour of the history illustrating Celia's father's ruthlessness and ambition.

Novik's work often has themes, and I would say that the main theme of this book is love, or the lack of it. Some of that love is romantic, but most of it is familial - between siblings and parents and children.

The book is set in Prosper, a feudal society that borders onto the Summerlands with it's immortal inhabitants, magic, stories and endless summer. As a reader the Summerlands is recognisable as a fairy land, but it is never called that in the book itself. Between the wars and the duels there is a lot of death in these books, often at the hands of Celia's father, or Argent, her brother. Celia's father is a morally grey character, but Argent is seen as a noble and heroic figure. The summerlings seem not to mind dying if they are to be remembered as part of a grand story, but this made them feel less plausible as a society, or at least less comprehensible.

The story has a small cast, and most of them are men. Whether it passes the Bechdel Test depends on whether you allow a short exchange of letters to count as a conversation. Normally I would criticise this, but Novik's other work shows she is capable of writing stories filled with women when she choses to, and I do not think you could swap any of the men for women without changing the distribution of power and the shape of the story being told.

Overall, this is a short but good book from Novik - intricately written and full of foreshadowing. Recommended.

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T. Kingfisher - Wolf Worm

Unlike Snake Eater, which I described as cosy horror, Wolf Worm is a much more classic form of horror. It has an isolated house, parasitic insects, wild animals acting strangely, possibly vampires, a predecessor who has vanished leaving behind her belongings, an unpleasant employer who may also be a murderer, a lack of available jobs elsewhere, and a highly suspicious locked shed.

The book has fairly gothic tropes, but is written in Kingfisher's characteristic easy to read prose, instead of the more ornate and stilted language I associate with the genre. It has some deaths and a few bloody moments, but these are described in little enough detail that I was able to read them without it being too much for my low tolerance for gore. It also didn't give me nightmares, despite being sufficiently scary when reading it, possibly because none of the horror elements are things I encounter in daily life. Importantly to me, the book has a happy ending and all the characters I was attached to were still alive at the end of the book.

I did struggle to suspend my disbelief in parts - not due to the more supernatural elements, but at the idea that mind-controlling parasites could give animals high levels of skill at interacting with human houses and the humans within them. I was expecting some revelation that something else was controlling the parasites, but there wasn't one, so they must have been highly intelligent parasites.

Overall, though, I enjoyed the book and would happily recommend it to other people.

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Brandon Sanderson - The Way of Kings, Part 2

Part 2 of book 1 of The Stormlight Archive. Part 1 reviewed here.

I enjoyed the second half of this book. Unfortunately I had to get through the first half of the book (about 300 pages) to get there. No one part of it is badly written, but all of the viewpoint characters are suffering, and as with part 1, I didn't want to return to reading the book because I didn't want to spend my time in a world where everything is miserable all of the time.

In the second half, things become more positive - people are rescued, alliances are formed, and trust is cautiously extended. The themes from part 1 continue, particularly around ethics and leadership, with a little story about taking responsibility for your actions to drive the point home. As the book draws to a close, our main viewpoint characters (Shallan, Dalinar and Kaladin) all deliberately choose paths that seem right to them, and although there are some ominous things happening in the background, it felt to me like like it ended on a hopeful note.

Following up my questions from part 1:

Is the assassin compelled by duty or magic? This is still unclear, but I'm leaning towards magic, or at least magical consequences for not doing as ordered.

What about the Parshmen whose viewpoints we never get to see? Still unclear. They may have lost or become detached from the music that the Parshendi share. They may be enslaved Voidbringers. They have been identified as a potential threat, but they are embedded throughout Alethi society as they are currently seen as harmless.

What are all the gaps in Kaladin's story? Some of these gaps are filled. Kaladin seems very good at simultaneously taking too much responsibility for things while not believing that anything is under his control. Fascinating man.

Why is Kaladin so skilled at things and also staying alive? The staying alive is definitely magic powers. The being skilled at things may be related to the magic powers, but it's unclear.

Is Shallan failing a loyalty test? Technically no, but that was a decoy that she stole, which explains why it wasn't more closely guarded.

What is up with the brother who pulls the legs off crustaceans for stress relief? We have not revisited this brother, but he may be part of the society of ominous evil guys.

There is a Hoid mention. Is this the first book with him in, or is that in another book I haven't read yet? Apparently Hoid first appears in Elantris. It appears he is here to annoy people and prod them into doing the right thing. Also moonlighting as the King's Wit. He reminds me of Robin Hobb's Fool, although less obviously tortured.

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Greer Stothers - Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die

Sir Cameron is a knight who does not want to die, to the extent that he spends a lot of time finding out when and where battles are going to be in order that he can be somewhere else instead. When a prophecy foretells that Sir Cameron's death is the thing that will bring about the Mad Sorcerer's defeat, Sir Cameron finds refuge with the one person who wants him to stay alive - the Mad Sorcerer himself.

This is probably a very funny book if you have the right sort of humour for it. I don't think I have, but I'm struggling to identify what about it didn't work for me. Most of the characters aren't particularly good or noble, but they aren't terrible people either (with the possible exception of the elf, and even she's terrible in a 'really annoying person who who fails at self-reflection' sort of way, rather than a mass-murderer sort of way). One of the characters I liked got killed off shortly before the book ended, and didn't seem to be mourned by anyone, which seemed a bit rough. And the universe itself turns out to be post-apocalyptic, in that billions of people died, but long enough ago that no-one is personally affected any more, which is horrific if you think about it too deeply, so it's probably best not to.

Reasonably entertaining, but not a book I expect to re-read.

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T. Kingfisher - Nine Goblins

This is one of Kingfisher's earlier books, previously self-published, and now republished by Titan.

The book has two viewpoint characters - Sergeant Nessilka who is responsible for an unruly group of soldiers in the goblin army, and Sings-to-Trees an elf vet who is introduced doing his best to help a pregnant unicorn with a breech birth.

It's generally funny despite being set during a war, and although it does have some horrific events towards the end, Kingfisher describes them in less detail than she would in her books for adults.

The pacing is more uneven than her later works, with the vet chapters being much calmer and therefore slower than the chaos of the goblin chapters, and I was a bit sad that [SPOILERS] the animal-loving goblin didn't end up staying with the elven vet as an apprentice, but I still found it an enjoyable read.

Recommended for the sort of child that enjoys scatological humour and won't be too traumatised by mind-controlling wizards or piles of decaying corpses.

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Brandon Sanderson - The Way of Kings, Part 1

Part 1 of book 1 of The Stormlight Archive

This is a long book (almost 600 pages), and it's only half a book. Different parts are written from different viewpoints, some of which are just a brief glimpse into a life, and some of which we return to throughout the book.

Overall I found it interesting, but a touch depressing. I have faith that Sanderson will bring things round to a happy ending by the end of the series, but much of this book is pretty bleak so I was slower to finish reading it than I might have been.

There are themes around ethics, religion, duty and leadership but I'm not sure where they're going yet, or even if they're going anywhere beyond 'there are no easy answers, choose for yourself'.

I have a lot of questions that will probably be answered later in the series, but for now [spoilers ahead]:

Is the assassin compelled by duty or magic - could he refuse orders if he decided to, or is he physically unable?

What about the Parshmen whose viewpoints we never get to see? Do they have human level intelligence and something compelling them, or are they really the automatons the viewpoint characters tread them as? Why aren't they treated more seriously as a potential spy network?

What are all the gaps in Kaladin's story? How did he become a slave? What happened to his brother?

Why is Kaladin so skilled at things and also staying alive? Does this universe have reincarnation? Is he some sort of chosen one?

Is Shallan failing a loyalty test? Surely someone has done background checks on her. Her opportunity at the end of the book feels suspiciously like a set up to me.

What is up with the brother who pulls the legs off crustaceans (or the approximate equivalent) for stress relief? Why are we being told his story?

There is a Hoid mention. I've met him in other books! Is this the first book with him in, or is that in another book I haven't read yet?

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Tamsyn Muir - Gideon the Ninth

Book 1 in the Locked Tomb series

I have mostly seen this book described as 'Lesbian necromancers in space!' which, whilst mostly accurate (Gideon is a lesbian but not a necromancer, and many of the necromancers are not lesbians), wasn't particularly helpful to me in deciding if I wanted to read the book.

The story is part deadly competition, and part murder mystery. The setting is a multi-planetary necromantic empire but the action only takes place on two planets, both of which are in a state of decay. There are three types of horror - the visible signs of necromancy with its animated corpses and monstrous bone constructs, the deaths required to power the more dramatic acts of necromancy, and the horror of an empire with ceaseless wars and frequent abuses of power.

I found the book had too many characters for me to keep track of who was who, with two representatives from each of eight different necromantic Houses, as well as a few extras. Some of them did get killed off over the course of the book, but somehow this didn't make the problem much easier.

I also found some of the writing confused me, with words where I couldn't grasp what was meant from the context and didn't seem to fit their dictionary definitions and sentences where someone did something but I couldn't figure out who was being referred to.

I did enjoy the book, and Muir has some interesting worldbuilding and ideas that I imagine will be explored further throughout the series, but I felt that it was let down by the number of characters and quality of the writing.

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C. J. Cherryh - Rimrunners

A standalone novel in Cherryh's Alliance-Union universe, first published in 1990.

One of the things I like about Cherryh's work is her refusal to let you simply divide the world into Good Guys and Bad Guys - everyone involved is human, and although there are some terrible people in her books, there is no allegiance that you can have that means you are intrinsically a bad person. This book pushes that to the limit, by giving us a heroine who is a former member of Earth Company, the corporation turned pirates that have been the terrifying threat in previous books.

Bet Yeager is desperate. She's an unemployed spacer on a run-down station, sleeping rough and slowly starving to death, trying to keep out of the way of authorities who might connect her to her past and hoping to get a job on an outgoing ship before anything catches up with her. Anything including two counts of murder which, while arguably in self-defence, would put her under just the sort of scrutiny she's been trying to avoid.

Bet is not a likeable protagonist. She uses sex as a currency, has zero qualms about killing people, and it took me a while to warm up to her. However, as the book goes on she makes friends and defends them with the same ruthlessness that she defends herself, and that combined with Cherryh's close viewpoint and economical writing style had me on her side and the edge of my seat by the end of the book.

Recommended, but contains mild spoilers for books earlier in the series.

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Olivia Atwater - Half a Soul

I enjoyed this book a lot more than I expected to. The cover is bad (whoever designed it doesn't seem to have seen a pair of decorative embroidery scissors or know that iron is more likely to be dark grey or black than shiny silver) and the tagline ("Howl's Moving Castle meets Bridgerton in this cosy Regency fantasy romance") made me expect a book that was heavy on the Regency Romance tropes and wish-fulfilment, and light on realism.

I was therefore pleasantly surprised to find a book with engaging characters, an understanding of the price of dresses (expensive), the grimness of Workhouses and wars with the French (it's unclear whether Napoleon exists in this universe, but the Napoleonic wars still do), and a Faerie that is horrifying in its Alice in Wonderland mimicry of the English upper classes.

I particularly liked that Dora (the heroine) was under-emotional rather than over-emotional, as I'm far more used to books with heroines who have grand impulses and interests, and I found her easier to identify with as a result.

I also found the romance very compelling and enjoyed the way it emerged gradually from the pursuit of shared goals. Dora is a little oblivious, but it's clear she has been regarded as lesser by society in general and her aunt in particular for long enough that she has started to believe it, so perhaps a little obliviousness can be allowed. I also liked Dora's relationship with her cousin, and the way the two of them are clearly friends who do their best to look out for each other.

Recommended, although the cover will continue to annoy me.

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Susanna Clarke - The Wood at Midwinter

This is an illustrated short story set in the Jonathan Strange universe, published as a stand-alone book.

This is a universe with magic and fairy-lands that can be reached by humans, so having visions of the future and conversing with woods and animals isn't necessarily a sign of becoming detached from reality, but it's written in an ambiguous way so you can't rule out either option.

There's a lot of atmosphere, and nothing terrible happens on-page, but it's hard for me to tell if the ending is hopeful or doomed. It's a strange and slightly creepy story, and it's definitely interesting but I don't think it quite works for me.

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Heather Fawcett - Agnes Aubert's Mystical Cat Shelter

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. I've read other books by this author, and really enjoyed them, but I found this one dragged in the middle, to the extent that I would recommend giving it a miss.

The books starts with Agnes looking for a new shop to use as a cat shelter / adoption agency, after her previous location was badly damaged in a battle between magicians. I enjoyed this part of the book, as the search for a shop that is willing to rent to her and the suspicious nature of the location she eventually finds were enough to keep me interested in what happened next.

After that, there was a long period where I didn't really care about anything happening in the book, and there wasn't much to drag the plot along. The cat shelter is doing well, as is the tidying and organisation, and although the words told me that a romance was occurring, I didn't get the feeling that the characters involved liked each other as anything more than friends or co-workers.

The last quarter of the book was back to being interesting again, with magical battles and police entanglements, and trying to avert more magical destruction, but it wasn't enough to save my opinion of the book as a whole.

A promising beginning and a good end; a pity about the rest of the book. Fawcett has written better - read one of them instead.