"Dragon Thief" by Blake & Raven Penn

To be clear, the titular Dragon Thief is a thief who steals dragons, not a thief who is also a dragon.

This may be the only book in which I've ever seen someone use the "reckless and flirtatious protagonist" trope and actually pull it off. I think it helps that Asher (the dragon thief in question) is funny, and he does have some character depth to work with. His various crushes do get a bit annoying at times, but it's not constantly, and he's not an annoying person overall. Plus he does prove himself able to crush on only one person at a time.

It also helps that Asher never does anything outright stupid. And whenever he does things that would seem to be outright stupid, he usually can almost make them work through sheer Asherness.

Oh, and Asher isn't an orphan! One (1) of his parents is still alive! It's his dad. And his dad isn't even the annoying kind of parent who doesn't want the kid/teen protagonist to do the plot. He's just as invested in the plot as Asher is, albeit also a bit more cautious.

Dragon Thief's setting is basically a fantasy world trying to be a Western. Sort of. It uses a lot of the Wild West tropes; no trains :<, but there's random tumbleweeds and things, and there's one character (Boone) who would absolutely be a cowboy except he's in a fantasy world.

But the setting is also full of dragons, to the point that most of the animals are replaced with dragon versions of those animals. So jackalopes exist but they're drakalopes instead, their buffalo are replaced by dragon buffalo, raccoons are replaced by draccoons, et cetera. Also people ride kirin instead of horses. And there are, y'know, actual dragons.

The magic system in this is very well thought out. And you don't need to flip back to the setting guide every time they mention something (coughHandofSteelcough), which means they did the worldbuilding naturally. And there isn't a single "as you know, Bob" to be seen!

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

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    "Ha!" The newer Mage Hunter pointed at me. "Caught you. Who ever said the Keeper's treasure was dragon eggs?"

    There was a moment of silence as I blinked back at him.

    "Um... you did," I said.

    "That's true, you did," Dad added.

    "Did I?" the Mage Hunter looked at his older companion.

    "Yes, you did. Come on Lothar," she grumbled.

    Page 77. Lothar is Dragon Thief's resident Comic Relief Villain.

(Endnote: There's a character in this whose name is Solrac. "Solrac" is "Carlos" spelled backwards. I have no idea whether or not this is intentional, but it's funny either way.)

"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.)

"Starsight" by Brandon Sanderson

Y'know what, I think I like this better than the alternative. "This" being: |not all of the aliens are evil! Unfortunately, some of the aliens are evil, and they're taking over the alien government.|

We get a lot of tasty lore in this book. In particular, we learn why |the humans are stuck on this one planet|, and also more about how |the protagonist Spensa's (non-unique) ability to teleport and do pseudo-psionics| works. There are also |the delvers|.

Speaking of which. |Delvers| are |giant extradimensional beings| that |live in hyperspace [not called hyperspace but it's basically hyperspace]| and |don't like realspace people. And especially don't like it when realspace people mess around with hyperspace|. Apparently |it's painful and annoying to them, or something. So if you do too much hyperspace, they might decide to go into realspace for a bit and delete your planet|. But it's |revealed at the end of the book| that |they also don't realize the people whose planets they're deleting are sentient, and when one does realize that (via Spensa doing telepathy stuff at it during the climax), it immediately nopes back into hyperspace|.

Also, there's a plot twist in here that genuinely shocked me. That doesn't happen often.

One thing I do not like is that, because we |do a lot of interacting with aliens|, we |see bits of alien biology|. Many of these |aliens do not conform to the human "male and female and nothing else" pattern|, and while that could just be worldbuilding, it also smacks of {T-ish the whole gender ideology thing}. But it's not applied to humans, so there's that at least.

One thing I do like is how Spensa's character arc went from "|let's murder all the aliens!|" to "|let's murder all the aliens except the ones I'm friends with!|" to "|let's only fight the evil aliens and leave the rest of them alone!|". I also liked that |her disguise as an alien who totally isn't a human trust me on this| isn't |foolproof; multiple characters see through it to some degree or other. However, this doesn't lead to the inevitable "we found out you're a human, now go to jail" arc, because A) both of these characters have their own agendas which would be jeapordized by a "there are human spies everywhere" furor, and B) both of them draw somewhat wrong conclusions|.

|If you didn't highlight the spoiler tags, the fact that I said| potato soup |in this paragraph will be confusing to you. Or it might not be, if you read enough of my blog and know that I do this sort of thing on heavily redacted posts.|

My shipping was correct! It is now canon! Sort of.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: ...probably still T for sci-fi violence. A harder T, though, for the stuff mentioned in the paragraph with the content warning tag.

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    "Keep them distracted."

    "Resigned sigh."

    I looped us after an enemy ship. "Did you just say the words resigned sigh?"

    Page 10. It's Spensa, talking with her robot copilot.

    Cobb folded his arms where he stood near the door. "I asked my command staff, scientists, and engineers to tackle the hyperdrive problem. How do we find a way off this planet? All the ideas I got back were wildly implausible, except one. It's only mildly implausible."

    Page 49.

(Endnote: Did I mention the |samurai fox-gerbils|?)

"Skyward" by Brandon Sanderson

Finally, actually villainous aliens! Ones that aren't a heavy-handed metaphor for colonialism! I rejoice!

The protagonist of this book somewhat reminded me of the protagonist of Apprentice, in that they're both perpetually angry teenage girls with slightly strange names. However, I liked Spensa from Skyward much better than Kerr from Apprentice, because A) Spensa is rather smarter, and B) Skyward's setting, not being a dystopia where you can get imprisoned for snapping at the wrong person, is more suited to this sort of character.

Spensa also has habit of making hilariously over-the-top threats whenever she wants to yell at someone, which I found amusing.

I really liked that this flips a lot of the standard tropes on their heads. For one thing, we have the actually villainous aliens. There are other examples, albeit ones that require major spoilers:

The |"clearing your family's name"| trope. |Spensa's dead father was branded as a coward for running away during the initial battle against the aliens, and Spensa spends much of the book trying to prove that he wasn't a coward. And she does discover evidence that he wasn't a coward, but unfortunately that comes in the form of evidence that instead of running away, he turned traitor, fired on his own allies, and had to be shot down. Later evidence proves that he did this because he was (sort of) mind-controlled by the aliens, but it's still a nice subversion.|

The |"person in authority who hates you for no reason"| trope. |There's an admiral who is seemingly dead set against letting Spensa achieve her dream of being a space fighter pilot and fighting the aliens. As it happens, this is because she's pretty sure that Spensa inherited from her dad the trait that lets you be mind-controlled by the aliens, and she really doesn't want a repeat of the "pilot goes insane and shoots down three of his comrades before being shot down himself" incident.|

Brandon Sanderson does not hesitate to |kill characters off| in this book. It pretty effectively hammers home the |"these aliens are dangerous and we're on the back foot fighting them"| aspect of the story.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for sci-fi violence. No actual swearing, though there is repeated and vehement swearing with made-up swear words (the best kind of swear words).

4 stars.

(Endnote: Now is the time for all good men (and women) to get in a spaceship and fight some aliens.)

"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.)

"Project Hail Mary" (2026)

I went to see this in the theater during... I think its last week in theaters. And I really, really liked it, despite my general dislike for seeing movies with more than like two other people around me.

Despite not being Roman Catholic, I do know what the Hail Mary is, and I also know that the title isn't referring to the prayer; it's referring to what's called a "Hail Mary pass". Basically "this probably won't work, but there's a chance that it might, and we're going to lose anyway, so we may as well try." Which pretty well summarizes the plot of this movie. As Cave Johnson from Portal 2 said, they're throwing science at the wall to see what sticks.

(If you don't know the plot, I shall direct you to my mom's review.)

I really liked that they kept the technobabble to a minimum. It helps that we don't know how the astrophage works, and we're trying to find out. But thanks to that, the movie's science seems like something we could realistically do. (Well, the Earth science, at least. How does |the alien Rocky| make |solid xenon|? I don't know, and neither does the protagonist. But |it's aliens|, so it doesn't have to make sense.)

Incidentally, the protagonist's name is a pun. His name is Dr. Ryland Grace. Now think about the text of the Catholic prayer.

I actually cried multiple times while watching this. And this is me; I don't often cry from fiction.

This is a movie, and it's rated PG-13.

5 stars. This has probably earned a spot in my top three favorite movies.

(Endnote: Spaceship!)

"Apprentice" by Kristen Young

This book is weird. Not in necessarily a bad way, but also not really in a good way either.

It's dystopian. The premise of the book involves a government called the Love Collective (are you weirded out yet?) who claim to promote love and peace and harmony, unlike all the "Haters" who don't constantly promote love and peace and harmony. They also brainwash people, because they're dystopian.

Allow me to point something out. When you're living in a dystopia and you suddenly realize "hey, this is a dystopia" and want to get out, the expected course of action is to, y'know, not tell anyone while you try to figure out how to escape. It builds tension quite easily. Such is the plot of Fahrenheit 451, The Giver, The Sky Inside, the first book of Vega Jane, everybody's lives in Nazi Germany and the USSR... In fact, the one thing you don't do is go around saying seditious things to people.

Our main character, Kerr Flick (these people have the strangest names), is seemingly unable to keep her mouth shut. She goes around saying seditious things to people, which is not generally a quality you want in a dystopia. |It very nearly gets her arrested and brainwashed near the end of the book; she's only saved by Underground Resistance Members Ex Machina.| She's also constantly angry, which does not contribute to fitting in with the other dystopia people.

For whatever reason, the Love Collective has decided that normal names are for other people. We have people named things like "Buff" and "Pim" and "Freb". I think the most normal name in the entire book is "Lee".

My pseudonymous acquaintance Kittens warned me that this book was really weird. Having read it, I can now confirm that she told me so.

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

2 stars. It's not that the book is bad, exactly, it's just really weird and I don't like the protagonist very much, and I mostly finished it because I wanted to find out what the heck was up with this universe. Which, hey, that did keep me reading, so the author must have done something right. I was originally going to give it three stars until I failed to force myself to read the second book, and realized that I actually disliked reading it. Hence, two stars.

(Endnote: No, monsieur. For loooooooove.)

"The Schwa Was Here" by Neal Shusterman

A schwa is the upside-down "e" symbol. It's used pretty much exclusively in phonetics, and it makes a sort of "uh" sound.

Don't worry, this isn't a book about typography. It's actually about Calvin "the Schwa" Schwa, a teenager who makes you forget about him. Not on purpose, it just sort of happens. Unless he's pointed out to you, or he points himself out to you, it's really hard to remember him. He's just so eminently forgettable, so much so that people will often forget he's there in the middle of talking to him. Or talking about him. Or writing about him.

He's not the main character, though. That honor goes to

The Schwa Was Here isn't actually a book about the Schwa. Well, it is and it isn't; he's definitely prominent, but he's not the protagonist. The protagonist is Anthony "Antsy" Bonano, a normal and non-forgetfulness-inducing teenager. There's also an incredibly curmudgeonly old dude, the old dude's blind granddaughter who accidentally induces a love triangle, and various minor characters.

Speaking of the love triangle. Love triangles just fill me with a certain je ne sais quoi... I think it's called "annoyance"? This one does at least get resolved fairly quickly, unlike some I could mention (coughKeeperoftheLostCitiescough), in that it doesn't take like ten books and counting. But it still annoyed me while I was reading

This book seemed like it was going to end unsatisfactorily, and then it didn't. The ending, originally bittersweet and somewhat hollow, is made abruptly better by the final two pages.

The chapter titles are quite funny. I like them.

Did you notice that |on the cover, the author's last name is spelled with a schwa where the schwa sound is|? I didn't until |I was like a third of the way through the book|, and I think it's a neat detail. Especially how |you miss it at first, but then you notice it and it was there all along|... it just ties in so nicely with the story.

How many times have I started writing this post? Somehow I keep forgetting about

So yeah, the book was good enough and interesting enough that it inspired... *gestures vaguely at the above post* this from me. It's sort of the blogging version of performance art, I guess?

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A stern T for some crude humor and a veiled sexual reference or two.

4 stars.

(Endnote: I think I've cracked the code. The Schwa is actually Kilroy. They were both Here.)

"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain

First, I would like to say that all the written-out dialect does get easier to read eventually. A little easier. But you still do have to translate things like "I 'uz mos' to de foot er de islan' b'fo' I foun' a good place" into "I was almost to the foot of the island before I found a good place" in your head, which can get rather tedious.

Second, I would like to make another note about the racial slurs. Yes, they're in there. Yes, there are more of them than there were in Tom Sawyer. In modern times, we shouldn't say them; they shouldn't have said them back then either. However, the book was written in a time when they were commonly used, and set in a time when they were even more commonly used, so it wouldn't make sense for people not to use them.

And also! It should be obvious to anyone who's read it that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a deeply anti-slavery book. As my mom said in her review of the Manga Classics version, the racial slurs are in there for a purpose: "to show the cruel thoughtlessness of racism." That said, they are offensive to black people today (and almost certainly were back then as well), so let the reader be aware.

This concludes my note about the racial slurs. Now we can get to the rest of the review.

I wish we hadn't spend quite so long with the king and the duke. Really I wish we hadn't spend any time with them, but if we had to, I'd rather it have just been a couple chapters. They annoyed me. I'm pretty sure they annoy everyone.

I do like Huckleberry Finn as a narrator. I just... like how he narrates, and I like him as a character. He's an oddly endearing combination of cynical and innocent.

The ending, which can be described as "Tom Sawyer tries to turn this into an adventure novel while everyone else stands there looking bewildered," was one of my favorite parts. Tom Sawyer clearly knows that Jim |has already been freed|, but he can't resist the temptation to make rescuing him as dramatic as possible. Meanwhile, Huckleberry is taking this seriously, and being increasingly confused as to why Tom wants to do things like saw through the table leg holding Jim's ankle chain when it would be much easier to just lift the table and take the chain off. That, I think, is what really sold me on Huckleberry Finn as a character.

However, I suspect that if I hadn't known beforehand how the ending went, I'd have liked it a lot less.

This review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T, probably, for some violence and all the racial slurs. It would be a good thing for a child to read with parental guidance, so the parent can explain things to them.

3 stars. I liked the ending, but the ending being good does not, in my mind, outweigh the chore that is reading the rest of the book.

Favorite lines:

    ...and I'll think of you a many and a many a time, and I'll pray for you, too!' -- and she was gone.

    Pray for me! I reckoned if she knowed me she'd take a job that was more nearer her size.

    Page 200.

(Endnote: Despite Tom's insistence to the contrary, Sid does not appear in this.)

"The Hidden Staircase" by Carolyn Keene

This book is less of a "mystery" and more of a "how will Nancy Drew figure out what the audience already knows?" And that's entirely due to its title. If the title is The Hidden Staircase, it stands to reason that the book will involve a hidden staircase, and it's not that much of a leap of logic to conclude that "miscreants using said staircase" is probably the reason a house is suddenly supposedly haunted. Ah, metagaming.

("Miscreants on the hidden staircase", by the way, is exactly the reason why the house suddenly seems haunted. I'd spoiler-tag that, but I firmly maintain that anything I saw coming by page 3 isn't exactly a spoiler.)

There are some oddly credulous police in this town. Unlike the police in most young-detective books, they take Nancy Drew seriously... but almost a bit too seriously. She is an 18-year-old girl with no actual qualifications. Maybe not much goes on in this town, so they have nothing better to do than wholeheartedly believe Nancy Drew when she tells them something weird is going on.

Granted, she's right, but so are all the other detective book protagonists who get ignored because they haven't actually got any evidence. Or who at least have to work a bit harder to convince the police that they're telling the truth.

For me, the most shocking part of this book was that on page 122, Nancy actually said "become ill" in cold blood. (I should explain that, shouldn't I. My grade school grammar textbooks were always weirdly insistent that you should never use "took sick" for anything ever, and that you should instead use "became ill". We mocked this relentlessly, because we customarily use neither of those--we tend to say "get sick" or "come down with [insert illness]"--and we thought "become ill" was clunky and so overly formal that nobody would ever actually say it.)

The staircase is not actually as M. C. Escher as it appears on the cover.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for scary scenes, a "haunted" house, and kidnapping (not of the protagonist).

3 stars. I suspect that if I'd started reading these when I was like thirteen, I would have loved them; however, I'm not thirteen, and so I'm indifferent to them.

(Endnote: "shh i'm hiding" -the staircase)

"A Cast of Stones" by Patrick W. Carr

This book's cover does it no favors.

Seriously, it looks dark and creepy. And also, weirdly, kind of low-effort. I actually put off reading it for a while because the cover pushed me away so much. (Yeah, I know, don't judge a book by its cover and all that, but on some level you're kind of supposed to. That's the point of the cover. If the cover played no part in people's assessment of a book, then there's no real reason aside from "it looks pretty" for books to have cover art at all.)

Okay, mini-rant over. Despite what the cover would seem to indicate, this book is actually pretty good.

Plot summary: In a world where casting lots to decide things actually works, the king is dying without an heir. So we have to pick a new one, or else the magic barrier protecting the kingdom from the demons will fall apart and the kingdom will get overrun by demons. And because casting lots to decide things actually works, that's how we're going to do it. Also there's Fantasy Christianity involved.

Except |the demons don't want us to choose a new king, because they want the magic barrier to fall apart so they can overrun the kingdom|. At least, I'm pretty sure that's who's behind all the problems we keep having.

I've noticed (from my incredibly large sample size of exactly two) that whenever you have Fantasy Christianity, things tend to be named in some sort of butchered approximation of Latin. Granted, I've only encountered Fantasy Christianity twice, in this and in Deathless Beast, so I may be missing the vast array of Fantasy Christianity that's named in a butchered approximation of Swedish or Swahili or something. But the Latin is probably thanks to the Roman Catholics and their historical insistence on Latin for everything.

(Granted, most of my knowledge of Roman Catholicism dates to roughly the sixteenth century, so they may have changed significantly since them.)

I really liked that the main character |isn't the Chosen One|. That honor goes to the side character who could have been really annoying if he were actually annoying at all, and who's still slightly residually annoying because the main character is envious of him.

And speaking of our main character, he has issues. Mainly alcoholism. I'm not an alcoholic myself, and I don't know any, so I can't speak to how accurate the portrayal is. He's also not instantly good at everything (he is, in fact, bad at most of things), but he gets better at some of them after a good training montage or two.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for alcohol abuse and fantasy violence. Also some veiled sexual references, but those are veiled, as they should be.

4 stars. 

(Endnote: This is the book that inspired my previous post.)

"Behemoth" by Scott Westerfeld

Plot summary: The bioengineered living airship Leviathan, after escaping German land ironclads in the mountains, travels to Istanbul (not Constantinople) to deliver a gift to the Ottoman Empire so they'll stop being as mad at Britain for stealing the Erin (formerly Reşadiye) and the Agincourt (formerly Osman I (formerly Rio de Janeiro)) from them. And hopefully prevent the Ottoman Empire from siding with the Central Powers in alternate-universe-World-War-I. It doesn't work.

Our female (but pretending to be a boy so she can be in the sort-of-RAF) protagonist Deryn has developed a bit of a crush on our male protagonest Alek. This is complicated somewhat by the fact that Alek still thinks she's a boy and is like "finally, someone my own age I can hang out with who won't make things weird because I'm a prince!"

Tesla's death ray also makes an appearance. Sort of. Not really. The Germans have "Tesla cannons", which are basically giant reverse lightning rods for shooting down airships with. That's not how Tesla's death ray was purported to work, but it's a neat little detail nonetheless.

Pretty much the entire book takes place in Istanbul, not Constantinople (Istanbul was Constantinople) (now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople) (been a long time gone, Constantinople) (Why did Constantinaple get the works?) (That's nobody's business but the Turks') anyway where was I? Ah yes. As you can see, whenever anyone mentioned either of those names, it set me to singing the They Might Be Giants song.

The titular "Behemoth" refers to a |giant ship-eating sea monster| that goes along with |one of the ships the British confiscated|. To be honest, that seems like |more of a Leviathan| to me, but eh, we already |used that for the title of| the last book.

I actually know quite a bit about the theft/confiscation/what-have-you of the Reşadiye/Erin and Osman I/Agincourt, thanks to my research when I was trying to write a story about them.

4 stars.

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

(Endnote: Given the title, I thought this was going to involve |a giant dinosaur thing|.)

"The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England" by Brandon Sanderson

This book was a Christmas gift from a relative for whom I have no suitable pseudonym.

It's about a guy from |what's eventually revealed to be a sci-fi universe|, who lands in a field in medieval England (hence the title) (well, it's |actually an alternate dimension's version of medieval England|) with no memory. And, thus, no idea why he's here, what he's supposed to be doing, or who he even is.

He actually reminds me a lot of Guy from Minecraft: The Island. They're both amnesiac guys who get portal-fantasied into another world, for one. And for another, they're confident in themselves, mostly, despite not really having the competence to back up that confidence.

(They also both annoy me to varying degrees throughout the earlier parts of their respective books.)

Amnesia is a good way to avoid having to lore dump about your original world, while also being able to integrate the lore about your fantasy world in a fairly natural way. It's really a very useful plot device, especially for portal fantasy.

Our main character is not actually a wizard, though |he does have nanobot augments. And there is magic, of a sort, just not used by him|.

The "frugal" part of the title is an artifact of an earlier book concept of Sanderson's, entitled The Frugal Wizard's Guide to London, which he rejected for being "too Harry Potter". In this, "Frugal Wizard" is a brand name. Frugality really has nothing to do with the plot.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T, probably, for fantasy |and sci-fi| violence. I don't recall anything objectionable. It could be a pretty decent videogame.

4 stars.

(Endnote: Personally, if I got portal-fantasied, I'd rather have a copy of the Adventurer's Guide. That in-universe book is more useful and less of a marketing brochure.)

"The Legendary Scarlett and Browne" by Jonathan Stroud

This guy knows how to end a series.

I mean, think about it. How should a series end? In my opinion, it's as follows: the author should tie up the outstanding plot threads (but not too neatly), the villains shouldn't get away with it, and the characters should finish their quests and get closure. And that's exactly what happens.

Scarlett |finds her missing brother|. Albert |gets to visit the ruins of the evil science institute he used to be imprisoned in|. I |redact a bunch of stuff behind spoiler bars|. The bad guys, |while not entirely defeated (this is not the sort of series where one topples an entire government), have at least been roundly smacked about|.

Oh, and we also get enough hints dropped about what happened before the apocalypse to figure out that it was probably |a nuclear war but with post-nuclear sci-fi weapons|. And honestly, that's all we need to know; it would have kind of messed with the book's pacing to suddenly get a giant lore dump on the subject.

I don't like this cover as much as I like the covers of the other two. It makes them look like kids. (Which I guess is because it is a middle-grade-to-YA series, but in the book, they're both like 18.) If there were an extant cover for this book that matched those, I'd use it; however, there doesn't seem to be, or if there is I can't find it.

As it turns out, I'm a bit of a sucker for post-apocalyptic things where |the old civilization had sci-fi tech and used it in a war, destroying itself|. Like, I even wrote one (that's the basic lore behind the world of my Ward-verse videogames).

There are some new villains in this. Well, I say "new"; they're really more like new enforcers for the old villains. They wear white bowler hats and are thus somewhat ironically called the White Hats, and they're somehow preternaturally good at fighting (like, snatch-a-throwing-knife-out-of-the-air good) and tough (like, survive-|getting-telekinetically-yeeted-halfway-across-a-city| tough). Plus they're armed with |pre-apocalypse weaponry| salvaged from |a pre-apocalypse bunker complex| the villains found.

The |previous book's villain|, Mallory, also |returns in this|; this may be due to Jonathan Stroud's seeming difficulty with |killing off characters|. Thankfully, despite |Mallory's edgy-psionic-boy| status, the narrative doesn't bend over backward to |accomodate him and make him look cool; he's lost most of his telepathic and telekinetic powers| thanks to getting |roundly defeated by Albert| in the previous book, and |he's actually kind of helpless| compared to Scarlett |(who's been surviving in the wilderness for years and knows how the world works)| and Albert |(who hasn't, but he has had two whole books of character development)|.

I could probably exposit for a while about how good a writer Jonathan Stroud is. He can plot. He has a way with words, especially dialogue, especially snappy and sarcastic dialog. He subverts expectations. And -- and this is probably the most important bit -- he doesn't put inappropriate content into his books.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T, probably, for fight scenes and some bad language.

4 stars.

(Endnote: If I had a nickel for every time I've read a YA or YA-ish series where the villains wore bowler hats and were named after them, I'd have two nickels, one from this and one from Vega Jane. That isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.)

"The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne" by Jonathan Stroud

So you know how I reviewed The Notorious Scarlett and Browne back in February of 2024? That was actually book two of a trilogy. This is the first book.

The evil organized universalists aren't as prevalant in this; neither are the not-Mafia. The plot mostly focuses on the evil science organization (mostly evil, not a lot of science) that Albert escaped from, and their attempts to recapture him. Both the evil organized universalists and the not-Mafia are present in this one, though, and the evil science organization is still a part of the next one.

Albert is rather useless in this. I suppose someone must have a character arc. He does get better over time, though.

 

I'd actually read this before, but I never reviewed it, and I'm not sure why I didn't. Maybe I wasn't in a reviewing mood. I do know that I read it before I had my collected series posts page, which means I wouldn't have been prompted to review it by the desire to see the series all nicely lined up on there. 

Jonathan Stroud has a knack for writing snappy dialogue.

I'm not entirely sure how old these characters are, in part because they aren't either. My best guess is eighteenish.

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

4 stars. I like this one's villain better than that of TNSaB, but I like Albert better in that one. He's less useless.

(Endnote: There's also a third book, The Legendary Scarlett and Browne. It was never released with a cover that matches the covers I've used in these reviews, which is somewhat of a shame, because I like this style of cover better.)

"Deathless Beast" by Andrew D. Meredith

This book is long as nouns.

(Now, I should qualify that statement. I read this piecemeal whenever I had time. I'm not sure if that was because it's too long to read in a few long sittings, or if it felt long because I read it in small bits.)

But yes. It's really long. It also takes forever to actually get started with the plot; I recall looking up from it once and declaring to my family, "It's page 373 and the main villain has finally put in an appearance."

For all that, though, it's not bad. The author decided to forgo the usual fantasy races (elves, dwarves, etc.) in favor of making up all new ones such as hrelgren and qavyl. They're mostly rather weird. He's also äddicted tö ümlauts when naming pläces (one of them even includes the capital Œ [or OE], which I'm not sure I've ever seen before).

The book contains something I really like, as well: your Fantasy Organized Religion that isn't evil, or even antagonistic. Sure, there are bad guys within the church, but they're bad guys because they're a sort of evil cult trying to bring it down and/or take it over, not because they're in the church. It stands against oppression, its paladins and clerics are the Good Guys (for the most part, although as in any organization there are some jerkfaces), and its patron deity genuinely wants the best for humanity. Every fantasy church should be like these guys, and I say that with absolute certainty.

There are a bunch of glossaries at the back if you want to know how all these ümlaut-läden nämes are actually pronounced. I didn't know those were there. I just took potshots at the pronunciation, and I probably got 50%-70% of it wrong.

This is a low-magic high fantasy. It's set in an extremely original world, but there's barely any magic involved. Most of what magic there is is thanks to the world's pantheon, though there's also this weird seed pod thing one of the main characters has that doesn't seem to have ties to any of them. Yet. That may change.

(Oh, did I mention there are four main characters? One of them is a paladin, one of them is the girl version of a cleric, and we also have a brother-and-sister duo of mercenaries from Morally Greyish Mercenaries Incorporated -- also known as the Black Sentinels.)

Probably my favorite part of this book is |the battle between the nonagenarian paladin leader and the giant evil werewolf king. The werewolf king gets wrecked. It's the first actual magic we see in the book, and it's glorious|.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A hard T for fantasy violence and some sexual references.

4 stars.

(Endnote: Technically, I am also deathless. I have experienced zero deaths.)

"The Empty Grave" by Jonathan Stroud

Well, that was a fitting conclusion to the series.

Basically, |the leader of the premier ghostbusting agency, who's supposed to be the granddaughter of one of the first ghost-hunters, is suspected to actually just be the original one who's somehow used spooky stuff to keep herself alive. So we break into her tomb to see if she's actually inside it or if she's somewhere else|.

The second part involves the main characters |using the afterlife-that's-probably-actually-an-in-between-life (the character George agrees with me on that point) as a fast travel system to escape their house/base, which is under siege. Except it turns out that time goes slower in the inbetweenlife, so it's really just a slow travel system. And they have to leave via the only other exit they know of: the one in the villain's house|.

So our protagonists get to confront the main villain who's behind all this (which, yeah, technically spoilers, but this is the final book so it would be kind of weird if they didn't.) And the series actually ends really satisfactorily; |the villain is defeated, but that doesn't automatically radically alter the world I've come to know and enjoy. There are still ghosts, but it's implied they're going to start going away. And, wonder of wonders, all our main characters are still alive! Despite Lockwood's suspected death wish and some grievous bodily harm to some of the others. (Lucy's Sarcastic Talking Skull of Mild Spookiness is not fine, but he was already dead.)|

Some series would end this by |having all the ghosts just magically go away when the BBEG dies|. And while that would |probably be better for the people in the series's universe|, it would also |feel really weird and out-of-place and not mesh with the tone of the rest of the series|. So all things considered, I prefer the somewhat open ending of this book.

The series as a whole is... probably pretty scary? I've been tagging it as "horror" all this time, but it honestly reads more like an urban fantasy where the fantasy happens to be angry ghost monsters. Maybe it's actually utterly terrifying and I've just somehow gotten desensitized to that.

It also doesn't shy away from adding new primary characters as the series goes on (the skull is added in The Whispering Skull, Holly Munro arrives in The Hollow Boy, and |longtime antagonist Quill Kipps joins the protagonists in The Creeping Shadow|). Granted, it doesn't |kill anyone important off|, but I don't think anybody minds. (Although I did read that the author meant for |Quill Kipps to die|, but changed it because it didn't quite mesh with how the series was going.)

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

4 stars.

(Endnote: This has been Spooky Books with Sam. Tune in next time to hear Kittens say, "What? I haven't read it.")

"The Creeping Shadow" by Jonathan Stroud

Unlike the previous three title entities, the Creeping Shadow is |not actually a ghost. Instead, it's the realspace manifestation of the nearby Research Facility of Extreme Spookiness doing experiments with temporarily sending people into the afterlife|. However, it is the main spookiness again.

(Though, |it's not really the afterlife, per se; it's more like the between-life|.)

There was an exchange in this one that went basically:

Bad guy: "Don't pry into my secrets, or you'll regret it."

*bad guy leaves*

Lockwood: "So, show of hands, who thinks we should pry into his secrets?"

And I thought that was funny. It also exemplifies Lockwood's possible |growing borderline-suicidal overconfidence and throwing himself into dangerous situations, which has been a plot point since the last book--Lucy, the protagonist, actually left at the end of that one because she was worried he'd get himself killed trying to protect her. So she's technically an independent at the beginning of this one, but she's teaming up with Lockwood & Co. because the premier ghostbusting agency's leader asked her to|.

The |afterlife| in this, which |the Research Facility of Extreme Spookiness is sending people in iron not-quite-EVA-suits into (and which Lockwood and Lucy also enter to get away from the bad guy)|, may not actually be |the afterlife proper|. I don't think it is; it's more like an |in-between-life|.

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

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    "Lucy, I'm a malevolent skull, without an ounce of compassion. You've got to be worried if I'm feeling sorry for you."

    Page 49. It's Lucy's Sarcastic Talking Skull of Mild Spookiness.

(Endnote: This is the first time I've seen any real red herrings in these books.)

"The Nest" by Kenneth Oppel

This is rather a creepy book.

Its villain wouldn't be out of place in the Hollow Knight universe, because the villain is bugs. More specifically, supernatural wasps led by a wasp queen who would slot right into the Hollow Knight pantheon.

Basically, our protagonist's baby sibling has birth defects and keeps being about to die. But then some angels visit the protagonist in a dream and tell him that if he agrees to let them help, they can fix the baby. Except they're actually evil supernatural wasps whose method of fixing the baby is to kill it and replace it with a changeling.

There's also a Spookyman who keeps wandering around offering to sharpen people's knives, and a different Spookyman who calls the protagonist's younger sister on her toy phone. |Actually, they're the same Spookyman, who's apparently either one of the wasp changelings or one of the babies the wasps killed. Or possibly someone who had a sibling killed and replaced by the wasps, tried to stop it, and died in the attempt? It's definitely one of those, but I don't know exactly which one|.

The cover of the hardcover book does this cool thing where the words are written on a lower layer than the dustjacket, so they're barely visible normally (at least to me; I got this from the library so it has one of those transparent plastic covers) but if you push the dustjacket back down onto them you can see the words properly. I thought that was cool.

The titular "Nest" refers to the wasp nest that the evil supernatural wasps are growing the replacement baby in.

Kenneth Oppel writes a lot of very unique stuff. So far I've reviewed a steampunkish airship book, a graphic novel about bats, and now... whatever this is. And I know he's also written at least a book about Frankenstein (the doctor, not the monster), not to mention all the other stuff I assume he's written that I don't know about.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for some body horror and entirely too many wasps.

3 stars. 

(Endnote: Everything I come up with for this endnote seems like it would go better in the main body of the review.)

"The Hollow Boy" by Jonathan Stroud

The titles of these are starting to refer to less and less major plot points as the series progresses. First we had the Screaming Staircase (which was the main spookiness of its book), then the Whispering Skull (not the main spookiness, but it was a decently big plot point in its book), and now... the Hollow Boy. It |only shows up at the end, and though it's probably going to have a decent impact on later books, it's only in a small slice of this one before getting unceremoniously stabbed by Lockwood|.

The actual main plot of the book revolves around an outbreak of ghosts in Chelsea (I had to look up what that was; it's a district thing in London), which is eventually revealed to be because Chelsea contains a Department Store of Extreme Spookiness. (Granted, the only reason the department store is Of Extreme Spookiness is that it's |built over an Abandoned Medieval Prison of Extreme Spookiness|, but the characters didn't know that at the time.)

This book demonstrates that the best way to stop being enemies with someone is to save each other's lives several times. (I'm not sure if that's actually true in real life, but it seems to work out in books.)

Oh, y'know the |mirror that was supposed to let you see into the afterlife but actually just kills you| from the last book? Someone's |trying to make another one of those, or so it's implied|. Glorious.

I don't actually know what the mask on the cover is supposed to be.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for being a horror book. 

4 stars.

(Endnote: As far as I can tell, the Hollow Boy has nothing to do with the Hollow Knight.)