"Hand of Steel" by Jessi L. Roberts

Hey look, more Christian science fiction! Not particularly good Christian science fiction, but it's there nonetheless!

I would like to note that Hand of Steel's protagonist is like Spensa from Skyward if you took out all the parts that made her likeable. She's another perpetually angry teenage girl, and both she and Spensa live in sci-fi space universes, but Spensa is somehow much more fun to read about.

(Actually, if I had a nickel for every time this summer I read a book whose protagonist was a perpetually angry teenage girl, I'd have three nickels: one from Apprentice, one from Skyward, and one from this. That isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened thrice.)

This book seems to assume that you already have the entire setting in your head before you read it. Or something. It'll just tell you "oh, this guy's an elba," without ever bothering to first introduce you to the concept of elbas or what the heck they look like. It does have a brief setting guide in the back, but having to constantly refer to that in order to be like "wait, which of the six alien races was that again?" is really immersion-breaking and doesn't actually help me envision anything.

You can't see it from the cover image, but this book is not very thick. I suppose that goes some way toward explaining why it feels the need to just explain everything in the setting guide, but... surely there could have been space for some grand sweeping descriptions of planets and aliens so readers (like me) don't have such a hard time envisioning everything.

Also, this author has some of the shortest paragraphs I've ever seen.

It's like one sentence to a paragraph. Maybe two if we're lucky.

And this is the entire book.

And while I fully know and understand that giving a sentence its own paragraph can be a way to give that sentence force, it manifestly doesn't work if you do it approximately twelve times a page. All that does is make your prose really choppy. 

Plus, thanks to a combination of this and the author's lack of concrete descriptions, half the fight scenes read more like outlines than actual scenes.

I suppose I might have liked this book a bit more if Skyward and Starsight weren't fresh in my mind to compare it to. The trouble is, those books are really good, and this has enough similarities that I can't help comparing them.

And now to compare it to something else! Specifically The Beast Player. Like that book's author, this one seems to like putting her protagonist through moral dilemmas. But unlike in The Beast Player, it's glaringly obvious to an outside observer (i.e. the reader) what the right thing to do in most of Hand of Steel's dilemmas are. So really they're just the protagonist getting confronted with the fact that she's wrong and not believing it.

Most of those revolve around the Ultimate Ruling Space Corporation Government's habit of using enslavement as a punishment for crimes, coupled with its rather loose definition of what a "crime" actually is. This makes it glaringly obvious to an outside observer (reading this book) that Your Leaders Are Totally Evil. Which, one, the evil government is not my favorite trope, and two, it gets a tad annoying when the protagonist repeatedly fails to realize something that's glaringly obvious to readers.

As I mentioned above, this is Christian science fiction. Sort of. The Christianity feels like it gets lost in the rest of the book, which is not really what one tends to want in Christian fiction. That said, it is still a plot point when it does manage to surface, so that's better than just being set dressing.

In conclusion, I think that Carthage must be destroyed this book needed a better editor.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for sci-fi violence and a lot of slavery. Those, together, only really merit an E10+, except that there is also {T exactly one mention of slaves being sold to a brothel, which feels like it was just thrown in there to be edgy}. And that pushed the rating up.

2 stars.

(Endnote: Did I mention it takes like three chapters for the protagonist to actually get her cybernetic hand? That doesn't seem like a lot, but the book only has fourteen.)

"Dracula" by Bram Stoker

I do wish there was more horror that was also Christian fiction. I do occasionally enjoy a spot of horror fiction, and I feel like also being Christian fiction would put a damper on anything too outright scary. Which is good, because I like to sleep at night.

But! Dracula exists. It's exactly the sort of horror that I like. It's suspenseful, it's spooky, and it's not going to keep me up at night from how horrifying it is. (Horror has occasionally been known to do that to me, as proven when I first stumbled onto a small piece of SCP Foundation several years ago.)

It's honestly impressive how well the suspense is done. I hadn't read the actual book before, but I'd read the Manga Classics version, so I knew the basic plot. And yet, the sense of impending doom and "something is very wrong here" still gripped me throughout the opening arc of the book. Also I practically inhaled the last forty pages or so, which should tell you something.

The afterword in the edition I read points out that the titular vampire is basically the embodiment of everything Victorian society was afraid of (but also secretly fascinated with because humans are like that). And, yeah, he really is.

I think that the "What if we just shot him?" mentality would do wonders for a lot of other horror fiction. Granted, most of the horror fiction I read is for kids and thus doesn't make a lot of sense, but still. Having the idea to try defeating the horror monster by sheer force of arms makes your protagonists look competent, and if it doesn't end up working, if you handle it right it can make the horror monster even scarier. (If you don't handle it right, you end up just looking like "oh niuuu the bad guys are so scary how can we possibly fight them?" and killing suspension of disbelief.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for violence, blood (this is the archetypal vampire novel), and some suggestive themes. And also for Renfield.

4 stars.

(Endnote: I wonder how the book would have gone had Jonathan succeeded in bonking Dracula with a shovel.)

"The Last Battle" by C. S. Lewis

Sing it with me now: "🎵It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine...🎵"

Well, it's the end of Narnia as we know it, and I only feel fine because I'm not actually in Narnia. For the people in Narnia, it's pretty bad.

If The Magician's Nephew is the Book of Genesis, then The Last Battle is the Book of Revalation. It has all the crazy eschatology and giant monsters and things. Also there's a pretty cool description of the Narnian version of Judgment Day nearish the end.

Eustace, Jill, and the last king of Narnia are the main characters of this, though |pretty much every POV character except Susan shows up near the end|.

I don't have much to say about this; end-of-the-world fiction isn't generally my thing. If you're going to do it, it should be grand and cataclysmic and tragic, and this hits all of those beats very well. It's a fitting conclusion to the Narnia series.

I find it darkly funny whenever the bad guys declare that they serve an even bigger bad guy, but don't actually believe in it, only to discover that the even bigger bad guy actually is real.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A soft T for scenes of violence.

4 stars.

(Endnote: This is some of the least final end-of-the-world fiction I've ever read, because it's a Judgment Day allegory, which means it ends with |everybody going to the Narnian equivalent of Heaven|. Well, not everybody everybody, but you know what I mean.)

"The Magician's Nephew" by C. S. Lewis

Behold, it's the Creation story of the world of Narnia.

I was always oddly fascinated by Charn and the Deplorable Word. Jadis herself is just okay as a character (I'm kind of used to her existence thanks to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe), but I always get the sense that there's so much more going on with Charn that we just don't see.

The big bad of The Silver Chair is described by some owls as being "some of the same crew" as the White Witch. It's never really elaborated as to what that means, but with the reveal of the White Witch as former Deplorable-Word-using empress of Charn with no living relatives, that doesn't make much sense; the Deplorable Word killed everyone except Jadis in her entire universe, so how could the Lady of the Green Kirtle be the same kind of thing?

One theory is that she's just Jadis reincarnated, but I don't hold to that theory, because I don't think Lewis would trivialize the White Witch's defeat in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by bringing her back, only for her to be defeated again without Aslan's direct help. My theory is that she's either A) a former apprentice of the White Witch, explaining the "crew" remark because they would have worked together for a time, or B) the same sort of thing as Jadis (i.e. a powerful evil sorceress from another dimension), just not from Charn.

This book is the best argument against reading Narnia in the chronological order, because it's not a very start-of-series kind of book. Honestly, until you've read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe through at least The Horse and His Boy, it doesn't make much sense. I didn't, and it actually put me off the rest of Narnia for a while when I first tried the series years ago.

[EDIT: I forgot to mention that I really liked how this explains why there's a random lamppost in the middle of a forest in Narnia for Lucy to encounter in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.]

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence. It would be pretty hard to make this into a videogame that holds onto your attention for any length of time; the main characters are there as observers for much of the story.

4 stars.

(Endnote: I missed another day in my posting schedule. Oh, the horror.)

"The Silver Chair" by C. S. Lewis

If you assemble the Silver Chair, the Bronze Bow, and the Golden Compass, the ultimate power will be yours: Platinum, Alaska.

(I'm joking. Platinum, Alaska is actually a real town, though; as of 2020, it was inhabited by a whopping 55 people.)

For being the book's namesake, the Silver Chair is actually not in very much of the book. It appears in like one scene.

This book introduces Jill Pole, who's also in The Last Battle. I think she's the first female character to have POV for a majority of a book; there were bits from Susan's, Lucy's, and Aravis's POVs in the others, but it was mostly the guys.

Does anybody know if C. S. Lewis ever said what happens if you dig to the bottom of Narnia? We know from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader that it's flat, but to the best of my knowledge nothing ever says how far down it goes. There's the Land of Bism mentioned here, which is supposedly the underground of the underground, but what if they went down further? Would they find even more underground kingdoms--is it underground kingdoms all the way down? Does it eventually just start being infinite solid rock? Do you fall out the bottom if you go too far? Does Aslan show up and tell you to knock it off?

I don't know, and I don't know if anybody else does, either.

This was one of my least favorite Narnia books when I was younger. I think that's partially because it's relatively unlike the others in both plot and tone, partially because it's harder than the others to take as a single narrative, and partially my own fault.

Basically, a short way into the book, I decided I wanted to know how it was going to end, so I flipped to the last page and read that. Except if you don't have the context from the rest of the book, the last page will make approximately zero sense, and I got very confused. That sense of confusion then lasted for pretty much my entire initial readthrough.

(The moral of the story: don't read the last page first, it won't make any sense.)

I think this is one of the most mature of the Narnia books. There's not any inappropriate content or anything, but it just has older vibes. I don't know if anyone else gets that out of it, but I do.

Oh, and I should mention Puddleglum! He's extremely dour, but also hilarious, and he's one of my favorite characters.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence and some child abuse. It could be a reasonably good videogame in sort of the style of the newer Zelda releases.

4 stars.

(Endnote: This has a lot of allegorical-ish elements, but I can't for the life of me figure out whether it is one, and if so, what for.)

"The Horse and His Boy" by C. S. Lewis

This review is part of my first completed quest, although I'm not entirely sure why.

Basically, the puzzle that started it all has two of the Narnia books on it: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Horse and His Boy. Why whoever assembled it picked those two out of the list, I don't know. (Although, if I were assembling that puzzle and had to pick two Narnia books, I'd probably pick either this or Prince Caspian for the second one.)

This is the one set in Calormen. Now I can stop mentioning it every review.

Basically, a Calormene slave boy (named Shasta, who's actually from some nebulous somewhere else; he's not Calormene by birth) meets a talking horse from Narnia and decides to run away to Narnia rather than get sold to a jerkface. Along the way, he meets a Calormene noble girl (named Aravis) and her talking horse from Narnia, who's also currently running away to Narnia. So they run away to Narnia.

Along the way, Shasta runs into some of the Pevensies, and Aravis runs into the absolute ditziest character I think I've ever seen in fiction: Lasaraleen Tarkheena, who's somewhat irritating but also hilarious. Then they find out that |the Calormene prince Radabash is going to sneak attack Narnia and Archenland because he has a crush on Susan who doesn't like him back (because he's a total jerk), and they rush to get there before the invading army so they can warn everyone about it|.

Oh, and |Shasta is actually a long-lost prince of Archenland|.

I'm not entirely sure how old anyone is in this, but I don't think they're twelve.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence. I think it could be quite a good videogame, actually; it has a mostly linear plot and a clear sense of direction, which lends itself to a linear videogame (thus removing the problem I've seen with making less linear books into imaginary videogames: the dilemma of either "railroad the player into retracing the steps the original protagonist took through the story" or "make it truly open-world, necessitating making up a bunch of stuff that wasn't in the book to fill out the game.") Honestly, this book would probably make a better videogame than most of the ones I've reviewed recently.

5 stars. This is probably the Narnia book I've read the most often, and I really do like it.

Favorite lines:

    People who know a lot of the same things can hardly help talking about them.

    Page 44.

    "I say, is there anything to drink?"

    "No, I drank it," said Shasta.

    Page 80. This is Prince Cor of Archenland returning to the apartments housing the Narnians, after a long day of getting into fights and having Shasta mistaken for him. (Hence why Shasta is also there; the Pevensies picked him up thinking he was Cor.)

    "And anyone I catch talking about this young lady will be first beaten to death and then burned alive and after that be kept on bread and water for six weeks. There."

    Page 99. This is Lasaraleen, the total ditz character I mentioned earlier, threatening her servants into not revealing Aravis's escape.

    "Beware! Beware! Beware! The bolt of Tash falls from above!"

    "Does it ever get caught on a hook halfway?" asked Corin.

    Pages 215-216. (For context, Rabadash, who's saying this, is threatening everyone with the bolt of Tash. Which falls from above. He also, in the preceding battle, tried to jump down on someone and ended up getting his chainmail shirt stuck on a hook, leaving him hanging there looking silly and yelling at everyone.)

    Aravis and Cor prepared themselves to be bored.

    Page 221. I laughed so hard over that phrasing.

(Endnote: I have taken a few artistic liberties with the punctuation of the favorite lines. This is for readability and so I can truncate the line into the actual favorite part, rather than having the favorite bit and then everything around it.)

"The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" by C. S. Lewis

The one where everyone's on a ship. 

 

Also the one to introduce Eustace Clarence Scrubb, Candidate for Governor the annoying kid who does eventually get better.

 

And the first one without Peter and Susan in it.

 

And the one where it turns out that Aslan isn't just an allegory for Jesus, he is Jesus. 

 

I thought it was a neat little detail that when they find a mysterious magic feast, the one to caution against eating it is none other than Edmund. Which actually makes a lot of sense when you consider his role in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

 

I honestly don't have much to say about this one. It does some more worldbuilding, we find out more about Calormen (which Lewis first invented as just a random mention in Prince Caspian), there's lore introduced... good stuff, but I can't really turn all that somewhat piecemeal plot into a review without delving deep into the infinite possibilities of minutae. And I don't have the energy to do that right now.

 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+, like the others, for fantasy violence and for part of the plot involving slavery.

4 stars.

(Endnote: The Dawn Treader, being a ship whose name should get italicized, causes me some existential confusion when its name is nested inside a book title--which should also get italicized.)

"Prince Caspian" by C. S. Lewis

Behold, book 2 of the Chronicles of Narnia, no matter what number it says on the cover.

Now that I'm doing the whole series, I should probably explain the thing about the reading order. Basically, there are two different schools of thought regarding the proper order to read the Narnia books in, and they are a matter of some debate.

The one most collections use is the internal chronological order, namely "The Magician's Nephew / The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe / The Horse and His Boy / Prince Caspian / The Voyage of the Dawn Treader / The Silver Chair / The Last Battle." There are several problems with that one, most notably that if you haven't read any of the other books, The Magician's Nephew is hard to understand and kind of boring.

The other one is the publication order, which goes in "2 4 5 3 6 1 7" or "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe / Prince Caspian / The Voyage of the Dawn Treader / The Horse and His Boy / The Silver Chair / The Magician's Nephew / The Last Battle." That's the order people following the books for the first time would have read them in, it's the order in which Lewis wrote them, and while it doesn't get rid of the continuity errors it makes them less jarring. This one is the order I personally prefer, and the one I'll be doing this review series in.

(Wait, I just ended a sentence with a preposition! *cue screams of horror*)

Anyway, enough minutae. Time to talk about the actual book.

I'm not sure it's actually an allegory, unlike the first one. If you have any idea what (if anything) it's supposed to be allegorizing, please let me know, because I don't.

Here we are introduced to the Telmarines, who weren't originally in Narnia. They're actually pirates who came through a portal to Narnia "a long time ago", and yet somehow arrived in the 1300ish years between the first book and this one... time in Narnia is weird, man. We also have our first mention of the country of Calormen, which won't properly show up until The Horse and His Boy.

There's a bit in this where some side characters show up and attempt to summon the White Witch to get rid of the evil king. The character who introduces them uses the logic of "any port in a storm and we're losing pretty bad right now, plus she might not have been as bad as the legends make her out to be, right?", while the characters doing the summoning use the logic of "haha we're evil." They get smacked down pretty much instantly in the book, but in the movie version they partially succeed; I mostly mentioned this so I could point out how good a job the special effects people did at making that scene look intrinsically wrong.

You can see Lewis fleshing out the lore as you get farther along in the series.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence. There actually was a videogame of the movie of the book; it was rated T and apparently wasn't very good. I think it could be possible to make a good videogame of this, though I'm not sure who you'd play as (maybe a Lego The Hobbit-like system of swapping between characters?) and a fairly significant chunk of the book would probably have to be reduced to cutscenes.

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    "Certainly, Lu. Whatever you like," said Peter unexpectedly. This was encouraging, but as Peter instantly rolled round and went to sleep again it wasn't much use.

    Page 144.

(Endnote: I can neither confirm nor deny that the title character is named after the Caspian Sea. Nothing I can find has a definitive answer.)

"The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" by C. S. Lewis

This is another one of those books so classic it feels weird to review them. Like, sure I've *read* Pride and Prejudice, but I'm not going to review it.

Except I have this lovely thing called my first completed quest (which wasn't really ongoing for a while but now it is again), and The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe happens to be part of it. So... here we go.

Again, this is so classic that pretty much everyone knows the basic story (and if you don't, read the book, it's good and you'll suddenly get a lot of references). The Pevensie children go through a wardrobe into Narnia and go on an epic Aslan-assisted quest to stop the White Witch; also it's an allegory for Jesus. In this review I'm going to assume everybody knows the basic story and just expound at length about minutae.

Minutae, I choose you!

With 90% certainty C. S. Lewis didn't actually intend to make a whole series out of this. It's not like Tolkien, who I'm pretty sure had a mostly complete picture of the Legendarium's lore in his head even before he finished writing The Hobbit; there's bits of the lore in this that don't quite mesh with the rest of it, particularly The Horse and His Boy and The Magician's Nephew.

With The Horse and His Boy, I ask you: What's going on in Archenland and Calormen while all this is going on? The White Witch's paranoia about humans and surprised reaction to the Pevensies showing up would be kind of weird if she had two entire nations of humans within army-sending distance of Narnia. So I'm going to guess that Lewis hadn't come up with Calormen or Archenland when he wrote this one.

(Actually I do have a diegetic theory about what's going on with those two countries, and it boils down to: She's waging a border war with Archenland, and she and Tash [the evil god of Calormen] have a mutual thing where they stay the heck away from each other because neither is sure who'd win if they fought. That would explain why Archenland has a reasonably good standing army despite not having been invaded by Calormen for a while, explain why Calormen the Imperialist hasn't invaded Narnia already, and provide a reason other than "sheer overpowering paranoia" for why the White Which has maintained an anti-human police force all this time despite the Pevensies being the first humans to enter by portal since The Magician's Nephew.)

(Granted, I haven't read The Horse and His Boy in a while, so I may be remembering stuff wrong and have to revise my theory when I reread that one. Feel free to poke holes in it.)

The discrepancies with The Magician's Nephew are mostly to do with lore on the White Witch herself; her Magician's Nephew origin as Deplorable-Word-using Empress of Charn conflicts with Mr. Beaver's exposition of her origins here. My diegetic theory for that problem is that Mr. Beaver was just mistaken about it.

But enough about lore discrepancies.

Aside from being famous for, y'know, being Narnia, this book is also famous for being an allegory for Jesus. Unlike many allegories (coughPilgrim'sProgresscough), it can stand on its own merits as its own story without needing "Look at me I'm an allegory" to carry it. Not everything in it represents something, it's actually pretty light-handed as allegories go. It hits that sweet spot between the two extremes of "so subtle as to be unnoticeable" and "IN YOUR FACE".

The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe is the most obviously allegorical of all the Narnia books (except, perhaps, The Last Battle). You can tell what it's representing, whereas with some of the others I honestly have no idea if they even are allegories or if they're just their own books.

 

Lewis is quite insistent in the early parts of this that You Should Never Ever Shut Yourself Inside A Wardrobe. I assume this is to prevent adventurous children from deciding to imitate the book, shutting themselves inside wardrobes, and getting stuck.

 

Edmund is a pretty interesting character because his bad deeds and his bad personality traits are almost completely divorced from each other. He's a jerk, but he doesn't betray his siblings because he's a jerk, he betrays his siblings because the White Witch makes him.

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

4 stars.  

(Endnote: I may or may not ever review the rest of this series. If I did there would probably be a lot less minutae.)

"Steal Fire from the Gods" by Clint Hall

The Prometheus reference in the title doesn't make sense until the very end.

This is set in a world after robots acquired sentience, then acquired element magic, then acquired world domination. Over the course of the story they also acquire |blood magic| (despite not themselves having |blood|; they get it from |kidnapped babies|), then finally acquire |Satan|. I thought the robots were alien robots at first; they are not.

The plot follows a guy named Gunnar Graves, who's initially rather angstily self-centered and doesn't grow out of it for much of the book, not helped by everyone telling him he's some sort of chosen one. That usually tanks my enjoyment of a book (the "overpowered chosen one who angsts because he doesn't want to be the chosen one" trope is one of my least favorites, because it almost always feels like an emo teenager's self-insert), but in this case, it's redeemed. Mostly by the very end.

Speaking of which, ENDING SPOILERS. |The last two chapters elevate this from a kind of mediocre book to a pretty good one. The main character, Gunnar Graves, who's somehow acquired the title "The Immortal Gunnar Graves" over the course of the book... kinda dies. And by "kinda" I mean "permanently". This marks the first time I've seen any book do that; there's a couple famous series I've read that kill off their main characters, but both of them get brought back.|

|In my eyes, this makes up for the self-centeredness of the main character, as he goes from "it's all about me and my personal angst war against the robots" to sacrificing himself so everyone else can have a shot at the robots. The telepath kid NPC, who the main character had spent half the book being mad at for no good reason, proves to be quite good at his job. I like the telepath kid.|

The magic system in here isn't very explained. Possibly because the main character hates his magic lessons. 

This is, uh, sort of Christian magical realism? It's implied the magic is from God and the robots are just misusing it (this is possibly |Satan's fault|), and the book is written by a Christian. Eh, it can have the tag, it's better than A Song Called Home was.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A strong T for violence and harm to children.

4 stars. 

(Endnote: I have no idea what the promotional quote means by "compressed-epic".)

"Breath of Bones" by Tricia Goyer & Nathan Goyer

This book asks a very important question: What was the Golem of Prague doing during the Holocaust?

(Disclaimer: I know the Golem of Prague was probably not real.)

Anyway. This book revolves around what the Golem of Prague was doing during a fictionalized, steampunk version of World War Two. Also an angry resistance guy who builds things like flamethrower hammers (that eventually get reworked into |rocket hammers| because he |made the fire bit too big|) and a reporter girl who keeps trying to secretly expose the Nazis' evil deeds, only to |get shut down| by her father every time |for her own safety|.

Overall, I think the idea of a steampunk / urban fantasy version of WWII is pretty cool. "Fantasy but in a non-medieval time period" is such an underused genre, and it's also one I really enjoy (to the point that I actually wrote a couple things with that premise). Or, honestly, a different location as well; I get that the standard fantasy setting being medieval Eurasia is because it works well, but medieval Africa and the Americas also have promise and their own legends, as do most other time periods. Why can't we have the Civil War with dragons? Native Americans fighting the orc armies? Mayans and Incas and all their... actually let's not go there.

Anyway, that was a tangent and I should talk about the book itself.

The writing was good, except when the two leads were in proximity to each other and cognizant of the fact that the other one was attractive; one of the authors is a married woman (her co-author is her son) so I'd assume she knows something about love, but it read like she didn't really have much experience and was just writing what she thought it would be like. It was clunky. (Now, granted, I also don't have any romantic experience so I haven't got much idea either, but I've read less clunky 'wait a sec that person is hot' things.)

I really liked the golem itself. He's clearly just trying to protect the Jews in the city, and doesn't want to hurt anyone, but people keep telling him to murder Nazis. (Granted, the Nazis could use a little murdering, but it's really sad to see this really nice robot-clay-person just sort of... snap and go on an killing spree. I get that that's how the original legend kinda is, and it makes sense here, but still.)

Oh yeah, this is also Christian fiction! Sort of. One of the main characters is Christian and one is Jewish, and the writer seems to be a Christian as well.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A stern T for graphic violence and prominently involving the Holocaust.

4 stars. Ends on somewhat of a down note, but since that's also a hook to draw people into the next book in the series, I don't fault it too much.

(Endnote: I was hoping the later books in this series would feature similar little-considered legends and not-really-understood historical stuff and urban-legendy stuff from the countries involved in WWII, like the Antikythera Mechanism or Baba Yaga or Britain's Angels of Mons or that thing with King Arthur and his guys coming back in Britain's darkest hour. Unfortunately, from reading the synopsis of book 2, that doesn't seem to be the case.)

"Gemini's Key" by H. Halverstadt

Behold, Christian science fiction. And my first Christian fiction of the new year (actually, my first Christian fiction review of the new year; my backlog at the time of writing is like two months long, so I actually read this back in December 2024). 

Tangent: If Christian fantasy is a thing (albeit not one that, aside from Narnia, I've ever seen really done well), why isn't Christian science fiction more of a thing? I should write some, except I already have like 60 writing projects going on right now. One of which is a Christian urban fantasy 'verse, which will probably never take off.

Okay, back to the actual review. Unless I somehow missed it, we never actually learn what in the universe "Gemini's Key" is, so I'm not sure what's up with the title. I'd say it's a reference to other books in the series, except this is book 1.

When I started reading this, I was like "This is supposed to be Christian fiction, at least according to the multiple places on the cover that say that. So why is everyone being so hostile toward religion?" Then I realized conversion stories were a thing, which made that make a lot more sense. However, Halverstadt has mastered -- or at least understands -- the subtle art of not rushing such things. If you do rush a conversion arc, it just ends up looking like instead of integrating it, you got out your shoehorn.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for violence.

4 stars.

(Endnote: If Earth hadn't been at the center of the society in this one, I'd have thought it a perfect setting to send some Lancer players.)

"A Song Called Home" by Sara Zarr

I'm not completely sure what I was expecting, but this wasn't it.

It's Christian fiction, but there's nothing on the cover or anything to suggest that. And I was expecting actual serious drama, not drama caused by angst and by both of the main characters having Chronic Bad Decision Syndrone.

 

(Spoilers in the next couple of paragraphs, mild enough that I'm not going to bother tagging them.)

Basically, the entire book is about two girls, Louisa "Lou"/"Lu"/"El"/"Belle" (our protagonist) and Casey (her older sister) struggling to adjust to their mom getting remarried and to figure out what place their new stepdad has in their lives. Which they do, eventually. But not before Casey angsts a lot, Lou angsts to a lesser degree and learns to play the guitar, and various other things happen. Lots of drama, mostly, enough of which falls enough under "school drama" that it merited that post tag.

 

I was fairly happy that the main characters did warm up to their stepdad eventually, and that he was a genuinely nice person. The book wasn't my favorite, but that bit did give me the feels. (I think that's the first time I've ever said "the feels" on this blog.)

 

Of the two characters with Chronic Bad Decision Syndrome (you guessed it, Lu and Casey), Casey had it worse. And it only flared up occasionally in either of them, but it was consistent enough to meet the criteria.  And in fairness, they didn't cause all the problems for themselves. Only about half to two thirds.

(To have Chronic Bad Decision Syndrome, a character must repeatedly cause avoidable problems to happen anyway as a direct consequence of choices they make when they are mentally and situationally capable of making a non-problematic choice.)

 

I would like to give this book the Librarymouse Literary Award for Failing at Christian Fiction. Properties that qualify it for this award include theological quality (not great, there's prosperity gospel in there, but at least they do talk about forgiveness and other such concepts a couple times, and Louisa does pray occasionally), un-Christian behavior by characters (mostly minor ones, but come on, that {T-ish "non-binary" guy} was completely unnecessary) and a general lack of, y'know, presence of faith in the book. What I mean by that last one is that while it does get mentioned a couple times, the characters' Christian faith doesn't really factor into anything in the book. And while that's sadly true of some real people's faith, it's (to put it mildly) suboptimal.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for alcoholism (the two main characters' original dad), angst, and that guy in the content warning above (who would be easy to miss for younger people).

And this book can have 2 stars. I didn't like it much; the characters' Chronic Bad Decision Syndrome and all the angsting, combined with content warning tag guy and various other factors, make a rather unappetizing smoothie.

(Endnote: While reading this, I repeatedly yelled things like "There will be repercussions for that, I can hear them with my metagaming ears" and "Can you just make a good decision for once in your life?" and other such. This may have caused several of my family members to look askance at me when I yelled at a book at odd moments.)