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.)

Mini-Reviews 3: Three is Company

Anyone who guesses what the title is from wins some fake internet points and an imaginary medal that says "Person Who Guessed What The Title Is From."

 

 

The Sky-Liners by Louis L'Amour

It's been a while since I've reviewed a Louis L'Amour book on here. Time to rectify that.

This one is about two brothers, Flagan and Galloway Sackett, who get tasked with escorting a girl from Appalachia to Texas. This is complicated by the fact that a Bad Guy is chasing her to marry her for her money because she's rich, and she's currently nursing a major crush on said Bad Guy because she's unaware that, in addition to being a Guy, he is in fact Bad.

So they do attempt to escort the girl, and have a bunch of run-ins with the Bad Guy and his gang of assorted ne'er-do-wells along the way. And they meet up with Cap Rountree (one of the "other cool people" that I mentioned in my review of The Daybreakers) along the way, too, which was fun. I do like how random characters with their own Louis L'Amour books pop up in different ones.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for western violence and (I think) some bad language.

4 stars. This was decent.

Tags for this one: 4-star, adventure, Louis L'Amour, rated T, Western

Onyeka and the Academy of the Sun by Tolá Okogwu

 

Academy of Sun not actually on sun. Disappointed. DNF.

Videogame: IDK, didn't finish.

Stars: Insufficient data for meaningful answer.

Tags for this one: Modern setting, DNF'd

Changers no. 1: The Gathering Storm by H. K. Varian

 

It's about kids who can turn into mythological animals with superpowers.

 

I think that had I first discovered this series when I was like 11, it would have been my new favorite thing. However, I'm not 11, and this is too far below my general reading level nowadays for me to get as much enjoyment out of it as I would have back then.

That's not to say it's bad; it's just not my style anymore.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A soft E10+ for mild fantasy violence. This could make a decent videogame.

3 stars.

Tags for this one: 3-star, rated E10+, modern setting, urban fantasy

(Endnote: The names and surnames in Onyeka and the Academy of the Sun all have like five diacritics apiece. I get that it's foreign and all, but that's too many.)

"Bowdrie" by Louis L'Amour

This is basically a collection of short mysteries, which were published in adventure magazines. They're all about this one Texas Ranger named Chick Bowdrie, who rides around doing Texas Ranger things and solving crimes. 

There were eight stories in this collection, of which my two particular favorites were:

"Bowdrie Follows a Cold Trail," about Bowdrie happening upon an abandoned house where there's clearly been a murder and probably a kidnapping. He proceeds to dig up the titular cold trail, figure out who murdered the guy, and un-kidnap the kidnapped people.

"Bowdrie Passes Through," about Bowdrie happening upon a town gone bad under the thumb of the quintessential evil cattle bacon. It has a courtroom scene, and I happen to like those.

 

I don't have tons to say here.

 

My mom reviewed this too, so you can read her review if you want.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for western violence and a few traditional swearwords (not by good guys, I don't think).

I'm going to give Bowdrie (the book, not the person) 4 stars.

 

(Endnote: He's called "Chick" Bowdrie because his real name is Charles, but there was another Charles in his childhood school who was already "Chuck". This is revealed at the very end of the book.)

"The Daybreakers" and "High Lonesome" by Louis L'Amour

IMPORTANT NOTE that I'm reviewing TWO books here, because I don't have much to say about either.

Finally and at long last, we're to the Sackett books that are actually set (mostly) in the Old West. This one is about two guys who were in "the Sackett-Higgins feud", and the Sackett side won it. Because of course they did, the Sackett family is like the Chuck Norris of Louis L'Amour.

Buuuuuuuuut our main character's brother, Orrin, got shot at during his wedding, and the bullet killed his bride-to-be instead. So he and his brother Tyrel (the main character) go West.

They team up with other cool people and go have a bunch of adventures, most of which have something to do with Orrin's marriage to the daughter of a really annoying guy. And/or Tyrel's extended crush on the daughter of a not-annoying guy.

 

This book is more serious than the previous Sackett books, but not as serious as High Lonesome (see below).

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T to T15+, erring on the T side, for violence.

4 stars.

 

 

This isn't a Sackett book at all; it's about a serial bank robber named Considine. And also his sharked-up list of lawless resolutes, his crush Lennie, and her dad Dave. 

He attempts to rob the absurdly well-defended bank in a town sheriff-ed by a guy named Pete Runyon, who was Considine's BFF until they had a falling-out over a woman. |Considine succeeds in robbing the bank|. (Yeah, spoiler tags are dark grey now because it looks less dumb than the giant blank spaces.)

Then Considine and his sharked-up list of lawless resolutes |nope out of there, heading for the proverbial and literal hills|. Due to mild plot shenanigans and a bunch of murderous Apaches (not the helicopters), all the characters I mentioned at the beginning of the High Lonesome review end up in a defensible place: the titular High Lonesome.

They |hold off the attacking Apaches for a while, but Hardy, Dutch, and "the Kiowa"--Considine's lawless resolutes--all die. The Kiowa gets to have his moment to shine, though, stalking and killing a bunch of the enemy|.

|Then the posse, formed to catch Considine and take the gold back, shows up and rescues Dave and Lennie. They think Considine's dead. He's not. The end has him riding off into the sunset after Lennie, because they started being in looooooove|.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for violence. 

4 stars.

(Endnote: High Lonesome would make a decently fun wave-defense videogame. The Daybreakers would be more of a Fallout-like sandbox-game-with-a-story, I think.)