"Steal the Morrow" by Jenelle Leanne Schmidt

This is a retelling of Oliver Twist, except not every side character is a total jerk. It's also mixed with some Robin Hood, which may explain that.

Basically, some kid's parents are murdered by some bandits. He gets picked up by a bunch of Totally Not Robin Hood's Merry Men, with whom he lives for a while until Totally Not Robin Hood gets sick--sorry, becomes ill. So Some Kid (whose name is Olifur) goes to the city to earn enough money to get a doctor to look at Totally Not Robin Hood (whose name is actually Fritjof).

Olifur gets a job cleaning magic trains, randomly stumbles into Totally Bill Fagin/Sikes (whose name is Bale), and gets |strongarmed into helping Bale with a battery heist|. Because the trains run on magic batteries, apparently. (Everyone insists the magic batteries aren't actually magic, but most things in pseudo-fantasy books that "aren't actually magic" are totally magic and you just don't want to call it that. I'm looking at you, Keeper of the Lost Cities.)

 

[Edit: I have been informed that Bill Sikes is a separate person from Fagin. However, in my opinion, Bale is both of them, hence why I just added  "/Sikes" onto "Totally Bill Fagin".]

And then it turns out Bale |is one of the bandits who murdered Olifur's parents. And then he stabs his girlfriend so she'll stop trying to stop his battery heist. And then the cops show up|.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for criiiiiiiiiiime and jerkfaces.

4 stars.

(Endnote: Yes, I know that Oliver Twist also has a couple of side characters who aren't total jerks. But there's only like two of them.)

"The Dreadnoughts" by David Howarth

(Image is a bit small because this is like the only picture of this book I could find, and it looks weird if I scale it up. Sorry about that.)

This is part of a series about seafarers and ships throughout history. I will most likely not review the other books, but I'm doing this one, because I like dreadnoughts. (I know they're not the largest warships--WWII destroyers were actually bigger--but they have the coolest name, and they were the first warships to be super overpowered compared to everything else. They basically rendered all the other warships at the time obsolete.)

 

[EDIT: They actually weren't the first to way outclass all the others. That honor goes to the ironclads.]

The book is fairly dense, but it's not a bad density, if that makes sense. It's not dense because of overly flowery language or not getting to the point, it just has a lot of information per cubic meter. (What units would that even use? Fact/m^3?)

My favorite anecdote from this is when the British were building a new dreadnought and a bunch of British nerds (including Virginia Woolf) (I think the book called them "literati," so basically nerds) pretended to be the king of Abyssinia and his entourage and tried to get a tour. They got one, too, and convinced everyone until a few days later when someone figured out it was a hoax. At which point the British realized they should probably keep secrecy a bit tighter.

Were this a videogame, its subject matter would get rated: T15+ for violence (people getting explodified by artillery--it does talk about the Battle of Jutland).

However, the book handles it in a way that's more: T. 

4 stars.

(Endnote: The dreadnoughts' purpose in WWI was basically to stop the enemy's dreadnoughts from stopping your dreadnoughts from stopping the enemy's dreadnoughts from marauding all your puny other boats. Even at Jutland, none of them ever sank each other.)

"Earthsea" series by Ursula K. Le Guin

(A picture at the top has been added now that I have access to a computer with MS Paint again.)

I thought this series was going to just be okay. Thankfully, it exceeded my expectations as to quality. (Well, until book 4, which is why I'm only reviewing the first 3 books. The series was basically complete at the end of book 3, and book 4 wasn't as good. It was kind of just more.)

Book 1: A Wizard of Earthsea

This has its own unique flavor, which isn't the case with many fantasy books. It's more down-to-earth than most of them, and the only sapient beings are humans and dragons (well, and some |ancient evil things|). It retains the feel of a low-magic series like Ranger's Apprentice while still having actually rather a lot of magic. 

Magic somewhat works by names here: if you know something's name, you can control it. It's pretty well-thought-out system, honestly. Names have power, illusions don't affect the real world, death magic is something you shouldn't even touch (pretty much every single problem in the entire series is caused by people messing with it), and there's various other isolated things like magelight and magewind.

According to the afterword-thing at the end of The Tombs of Atuan, this wasn't supposed to be a series. All the sequel hooks were apparently just put in by the author to assure the reader that |Ged| (he only tells like 8 people his actual name, so I'm putting it behind spoiler tags even though it's not technically a spoiler) does get cool eventually. When I read that, it suddenly made a lot more sense how his character arc is basically complete in this one.

Book 2: The Tombs of Atuan

Since |Ged|'s character arc is complete in book 1, and we need to have someone have one, this is mostly narrated by a new character. A girl this time. Which could have been lame, but Le Guin made it work. She's actually at least as much my favorite character as |Ged| is. (Mostly because they're the only two characters we ever see much of. |Ged| spends most of his time wandering off into parts unknown.)

She (Tenar/Arha/Tenar; she gets renamed a couple times) is a good mix of "pretty sure I'm cooler than you" and "what the heck is going on here" when |Ged| shows up in the tomb-city (guess its name?) of which she is the high priestess. And then starts freaking out when |the spooky death god beings that inhabit the tombs| don't do anything about him, even though he doesn't seem that powerful. (Except it turns out |he's using basically all his magic to keep them from noticing him|. Which plot point I liked.

Book 3: The Farthest Shore

Unfortunately, we don't go to Valinor in this book. We do, however, sail off into the Far Lands the unknown regions at the end of the world, where magic as we know it breaks down and stops working. So, basically the Far Lands.

With, again, a new character. Because someone has to have a character arc. Basically, something is causing magic to suddenly quit doing what it's supposed to, and also we're having issues with people taking drugs. |Ged| and the new kid wander off to go find out what's going on.

And they do. (Spoiler alert, except there are three books after this one.) But |you can't save the world without a price; in this case, it's Ged burning through all his magic to shunt himself and the new kid back out of the afterlife|, where they'd ventured to fight the guy causing all the problems. As much as I would have liked to |put the world back how it was| with no consequences, this makes it seem more realistic. And also feel like the end of the series. (And honestly, in my somewhat humble opinion, it should have been. Le Guin actually left Earthsea alone for like seventeen years before writing Tehanu, the next book. Which I have also read, and which wasn't nearly as good.)

Were this series a videogame, I'd rate it: A hard T for violence, swearing, and some drug use.

So, 4 stars for this half of the series. As I haven't finished the other half (and don't plan to), I can't rate it.

(Endnote: Apparently the second book triad was adult books instead of YA, which explains some things.)

"Ember Rising" by S. D. Smith

You've had The Empire Strikes Back (not a link to anything about the actual movie), now get ready for... Nazi-occupied France! The rabbit edition.

They still don't have any of the things I suggested in my Ember Falls review, but at least they did make ballistae. (With, again, exploding ammunition. Even if you don't have heavy enough industry to build a cannon or a mortar, some land mines would be nice, they're not that high-tech. We came up with cannons in the 1100s, and invented exploding shells somewhere in the 1200s, about a hundred years later.)

[EDIT, June 2, 2025: It's possible I may be wrong in the above paragraph; the Mongols apparently had exploding catapult ammunition in their attempted invasion of Japan.]

Also, apparently the birds of prey have hand grenades? Which makes one wonder why the rabbits don't also have hand grenades, especially as they require much less heavy industry than, y'know, cannons. The gunpowder use in this series is very inconsistent.

Despite being the rabbit edition of Nazi-occupied France, this isn't a completely depressing book; it's only mostly depressing. No, I'm kidding; it does end on an uplifting note (albeit one that implies the next book is going to be Leningrad: The Rabbit Edition).

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for some violence.

4 stars. The |battle for the First Warren| at the end was extremely cathartic.

(Endnote: I kind of want to ship these rabbits a modern hand grenade or two and let them marvel at its destructive power. And then launch it out of a catapult or something because it would be like as big as they are. Now I'm imagining a war movie where instead of grenades, everyone's throwing rabbits.)

Mini-Reviews 5: For Fighting

Actual descriptions of these books are available upon request.

 

Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy

Welcome to Snark: The Book. It has a better explanation than most books of how the main character is able to sneak out under her parents' noses and go on adventures, and the explanation is: creating a semiautonomous mirror clone which basically goes about her life on autopilot.

Also the deuteragonist is a skeleton.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for violence. It could be made into a decent videogame.

4 stars. I could see this series (it's super long, like fourteen books at last count) being really good. I could also see it becoming really lame, but without reading the rest of them, I don't really know.

Tags for this one: 4-star, cool magic, modern setting, rated T, series component, urban fantasy

City of Gold by Will Hobbs

Having now read two of this guy's books (the other one is Never Say Die, which I didn't review), I think I can reasonably say that his work is okay.

On a whole, I liked CoG better than NSD. On the one hand, CoG has an annoying younger brother; on the other hand, NSD's unrealistic parts are handwaved by climate change. (It is my principle that anything that talks about climate change could reasonably have talked about other, more scientifically sound environmental causes--coughpollutioncough--instead, and been less annoying.)

The guy in this has his family's mules stolen, tracks down the mule thief, repeatedly tries to get the mules back, |runs into Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch|, and gets a crush on a girl. Not necessarily in that order.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for western violence.

On the high end of 3 stars. (It's afforded some extra points because its hero is older than 12. I am very tired of reading books about 12-year-olds.)

Tags for this one: 3-star, adventure, rated E10+, Western

Rise of the Dragon Moon by Gabrielle K. Byrne

This is a fantasy book set in a world that's been yeeted farther away from its sun by angry gods; this caused it to become covered in ice. |Except it's actually not. It's just that these guys are all living in the frozen north and have forgotten that other guys also exist and the world isn't actually entirely covered in ice.| Which... I would have |preferred if they stuck with it being all full of ice|.

(Tangent: Can we just have a straightforward dragon-slaying mission for once? Like in The Hobbit, where the goal is to slay the dragon and we do slay the dragon. But no, we always have to talk to the dragons, or feel bad about killing the dragons, or discover that the dragons are the good guys and we're the bad guys, or some stupid thing like that. I guess this is why we have the Monster Hunter videogames.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A hard E10+ for fantasy violence.

3 stars.

Tags for this one: 3-star, adventure, rated E10+, fantasy

 

(Endnote: The day may come when I run out of things to reference in the titles of these posts, but today is not that day.)

"Balefire" by Deborah Koren

Is it weird that my favorite character is the BBEG's second-in-command? I mean, he does have like the best character arc out of all of the characters, so... maybe?

He's also my new favorite example of "high-magic character in low-magic setting": not wielding apocalypse-tier magic or anything, but what he does have outmatches basically anything he comes up against. (Until it's revealed that this |isn't a low-magic setting|, it's just |a high-magic setting where the country we're in has been forcibly de-magicked|. And then he has some trouble.)

Anyway, I digress. (I do that a lot. Most of my mini-reviews are just digressions sans their parent reviews. Hey, look, I'm digressing again!) The plot is basically: the BBEG is looking for an Illegal Magic Artifact (illegal because Magic Is Banned™), which is stolen by a homeless woman (one of our two main characters). She and the other main character (a captain in the royal guard) abscond with it. (And I fill this paragraph with parenthetical statements.)

The BBEG dispatches my favorite character to get it back. Plot ensues. The Mentor Figure |dies without finishing teaching his protégé how to do stuff, because he has to. It's the rule|.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for swearing and some graphic violence (thanks for that, Orin).

4 stars.

(Endnote: The Illegal Magic Artifact is called a valens. My brain helpfully took it upon itself to remind me about valence electrons every single time I read its name.)