"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.)

Mini-Reviews 13: It's Not Even Friday!

Playing with Fire by Derek Landy

Book 2 of Skulduggery Pleasant. (Book 1 is here.) In this one, some new (or possibly not so new?) bad guys show up and try to resurrect an evil giant monster thing. |They succeed, and the heroes have to fight it.|

It's been like a year since I read the last one, so I don't remember how many of the villains in this were mentioned in the first one.

Oh, and the Spring-Heeled Jack shows up, which was interesting.

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

4 stars. However, as previously mentioned, there are giant spiders; I can read past them, but if you hate giant spiders, you probably shouldn't read this.

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

The Wondrous World of Violet Barnaby by Jenny Lundquist

This is about a twelve-ish-year-old girl, Violet Barnaby, whose mom is dead and whose dad has recently remarried. She spends most of the book grieving for her mom and railing against the injustice of change.

She also spends most of the book repressing the urge to just snap and start shouting at everything. I, too, have repressed that urge, as probably have we all.

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

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, DRAMA!, modern setting, rated E

The Wolf of Cape Fen by Juliana Brandt

This book has a very twisty plot, and one that holds together in light of the new plot twists (I'm looking at you, Maximum Ride). Plus they're actually well-executed enough that I don't see them coming, which... either I've been reading books with untwisty plots or I've just gotten really good at spotting the plot twist.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for "deal-with-the-devil"-style magic (though not with the actual devil).

3 stars.

Tags for this one: 3-star, magical realism, modern setting, rated E10+

(Endnote: HALT IN THE NAME OF THE FRIDAY KNIGHT! Man, I really need to review Dragons at Crumbling Castle...)

"A Blink of the Screen" by Terry Pratchett

This is Terry Pratchett's collection of his short stories for adults, including:

"The Hades Business" -- Satan contacts a crooked businessman to renovate Hades into a tourist trap. It works too well. Not my favorite, and by the little author's note at the beginning, Pratchett seems to agree.

"Solution" -- an inspector stows away on a smuggler's plane to confront him about what, exactly, he's smuggling. It's |airplanes|. Short, but decent.

"The Picture" -- a mental patient keeps a horrifyingly wrong picture in his cell. I really liked the twist at the end of this one.

"The Prince and the Partridge" -- a prince meets the demands of his beloved princess's dad by reenacting the 12 Days of Christmas song. I could see what the end was going to be almost as soon as I started reading it.

"Rincemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor" -- the one that eventually became the Bromeliad Trilogy, which I'll read at some point.

"Kindly Breathe in Short, Thick Pants" -- poking fun at pointless governmental statutes with a ministry to counteract pollution by... nobody breathing as much.

"The Glastonbury Tales" -- sort of a retelling of The Canterbury Tales, but with a guy picking up hitchhikers.

"There's No Fool Like an Old Fool Found in an English Queue" -- another poking-fun-at-the-government one, this time being the Minister of Queues getting up on TV and ranting about people who take too long to check out.

"Coo, They've Given Me the Bird" -- Russia trains pigeons to do assembly line jobs in their factories, and one factory's sole remaining human employee--the janitor--writes them a sarcastic letter.

"And Mind the Monoliths" -- living history goes weird.

"The High Meggas" -- the one that became The Long Earth, which I'll also read at some point.

"Twenty Pence, with Envelope and Seasonal Greeting" -- a bunch of travelers get stuck in a Christmas card.

[REDACTED]

"Final Reward" -- a barbarian hero dies and goes to meet his maker. As in, the author who created him. It's an interesting concept.

"Turntables of the Night" -- this one was apparently published in an anthology edited by none other than Diana Wynne Jones. Now I want to read that anthology.

"#ifdefDEBUG + "world/enough" + "time"" -- someone dies in VR, and a repairman is called.

"Hollywood Chickens" -- a bunch of chickens get loose in Hollywood and develop an advanced civilization on one bank of the highway. Especially hilarious because of the reveal at the end.

"The Secret Book of the Dead" -- poem about dead pets.

"Once and Future" -- Merlin is actually Mervin, a time traveler from another world's future, who makes the Sword in the Stone work with... electromagnets.

"FTB" -- Santa Claus visits a bank mainframe because it Believes What It Is Told and someone told it about Santa Claus.

"Sir Joshua Easement: A Biographical Note" -- an extremely tongue-in-cheek biography of an unknown person from a painting.

[And of course, there are the Discworld stories, noted below.]

"Troll Bridge" -- Cohen the Barbarian gets annoyed/sad because the world is running out of adventures for barbarian heroes.

"Theater of Cruelty" -- Captain Carrot discovers a live-action (courtesy of the Discworld having gnomes) Punch and Judy show whose owner has been murdered. 

"The Sea and Little Fishes" -- Granny Weatherwax is told to stop freaking people out by being all spooky, so she decides to freak people out even more by being genuinely nice to them.

"The Ankh-Morpork National Anthem" -- exactly what it says on the tin. Pratchett wrote it because the BBC asked if the Discworld had one. According to the text, it is the only national anthem that "formally has a second verse consisting mainly of embarrassed mumbling."

"Medical Notes" -- about strange mental disorders found on the Discworld. Quite possibly the most hilarious story in this entire collection

"Thud: A Historical Perspective" -- apparently the actual origin of the game of Thud.

"A Few Words from Lord Havelock Vetinari" -- a speech Pratchett wrote for the twinning of Ankh-Morpork with a town in England.

"Death and What Comes Next" -- a philosopher attempts to use quantum uncertainty to convince Death that he's not going to die. It doesn't work.

"A Collegiate Casting-out of Devilish Devices" -- Lord Vetinari sends an inspector to the Unseen University to regulate it. The University faculty ignore him.

 

"Minutes of the Meeting to Form the Proposed Ankh-Morpork Federation of Scouts" -- what happens when you put Captain Carrot, Sergeant Detritus, Bashful Bashfulsson, Chrysoprase the Troll, and Lord Vetinari (among others) in a meeting about creating the Boy Scouts for Ankh-Morpork.

 

"The Ankh-Morpork Football Association Hall of Fame Playing Cards" -- baseball cards for Unseen Academicals.

 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for language and crude humor.

 

4 stars, for being hilarious. 

Favorite lines (this post wasn't long enough yet):

    It was a series Five, which in my opinion were a big mistake. The Fours were pretty near ideal, so why tinker? It's like saying, hey, we've invented the perfect bicycle so, next thing we'll do, we'll put thirteen more wheels on it--

    Page 121, from "#ifdefDEBUG + "world/enough" + "time""

 

    Annoia, or Paranoia Inversa

    The belief that you are out to get everyone.

    Page 240, from "Medical Notes"

 

    According to the trollish philosopher Plateau, "if you wants to understan' an enemy, you gotta walk a mile in his shoes. Den, if he's still your enemy, at least you're a mile away and he's got no shoes."

    Page 247, from "Thud: A Historical Perspective"

    In his opening remarks, Captain Carrot referred to the current problem of delinquency of young people in the city, which has recently been the subject of many articles in the Times.

    Miss Partleigh interjected that this was because there was nothing for them to do.

    Lord Vetinari observed that in fact there was a vast range of things for them to do, running from petty theft to armed gang warfare, and that therefore the question was one of finding something for them to do that, if at all possible, did not actually involve the death of innocent, or presumably innocent, bystanders.

    Page 264, from "Minutes of the Meeting to Form the Proposed Ankh-Morpork Federation of Scouts"

(Endnote: I'd just reprint the entire of "Medical Notes" in the favorite lines section, but A] it would spoil the enjoyment of anyone reading it for themselves, and B] it would probably also be some form of copyright infringement.)

"Mythical Doorways" anthology

This is getting out of hand, now there are two four of them! Actually there's like 12 of these anthologies, but I've only read four. [EDIT: no, there's actually six.]

"Everwild" by J. M. Hackman: An orphan gets too old for foster care, then discovers both he and the girl he has a crush on are actually fairies. This one's fairly good.

"Well of Fate" by Savannah Jezowski: Y'all remember Ratatosk from the Norse myths? This is him.

"Jericho and the Magician's Daughter" by H. L. Burke: The magic system is imaginative. The story is okay.

"Dragon's Oath" by Katy Huth Jones: Some kid has a terrible crush on a girl whose dad is set against it. He overreacts and leaves the village entirely. Apparently some sort of prequel to some other stuff this author's written.

"The Hallway of Three Doors" by D. G. Driver: Feels like it stumbles into allegory territory, takes a long look, and then nopes out of there to go start a village instead.

"Door Number Four" by Bokerah Brumley: No relation to the previous story. This one's about trainee interdimensional animal rescuers.

"Threshold" by Laurie Lucking: A girl has to choose between living in fairyland or the real world. Not as depressing as it sounds.

 

"Idiot's Graveyard" by Arthur Daigle: Dana Illwind and Sorcerer Lord Jayden are baaaaaaaack! My favorite story in this collection.

 

"Cosmic Cravings" by AJ Bakke: A mouse wizard attempts to create a dimensional portal to Earth in order to replenish her supply of chocolate, heedless of the fact that creating dimensional portals is stupidly dangerous.

 

"Dragon Ward" by Jenelle Leanne Schmidt: A girl is being chased by an angry dragon, then they both get isekai'd.

 

"What Lies Ahead" by Laurie Lynch: An ancient Roman escaped slave uses time travel to... change absolutely nothing about the past.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence. "Well of Fate", "Door Number Four", "Idiot's Graveyard", and "Cosmic Cravings" could all make fairly good videogames; I think "Well of Fate" would do quite well as an old-school text adventure. The others are either too character-based to have much player agency ("Everwild", "What Lies Ahead", "Dragon's Oath", and "Threshold"), too short ("Dragon Ward"), or too hard to translate effectively into mechanics ("The Hallway of Three Doors"). "Jericho and the Magician's Daughter" could do okay as a videogame, but I just don't like it enough to speculate much.

4 stars.

(Endnote: It appears this is the one where they stopped having objectionable content. Which is good.)

"Hall of Heroes" anthology

Behold the third (and, so far, longest) one of these collections that I've read!

"Alancia's Dance" by H. L. Burke: A technically-not-matador-but-only-because-this-isn't-Spain woman meets Totally Not Daedalus, then falls in love. The king disapproves. I didn't really like this one.

"The Hero Feat of Hannah Helstrom" by J. Philip Horne: Superheroes, including one whose power is regeneration and literally nothing else. This one is decent.

"In Plain Sight" by Arthur Daigle: A stage magician with animated (non-creepy) dolls |turns out to be a real magician slash mad scientist with animated objects that are a lot more dangerous|. One of the best ones in the collection.

"Finn MacRorie and the River Dragon" by Katy Huth Jones: Ireland/Scotland, [insert year]: A random knight-errant shows up at a village, fixes this one family's problems, and then leaves. It feels like something out of an Irish/Scottish-flavored King Arthur legend.

"Little Victories" by Karin De Havin: Local escaped-pet-whisperer accidentally discovers injured fairy. This one isn't anything terribly special, but it's a solid story.

"And Only the Eyes of Children" by Laura VanArendonk Baugh: Turns out the Fair Folk do not like {T15+ at least child sex trafficking}. Well-executed, if not very appropriate for young readers.

"The Demon Monkeys" by A. R. Silverberry: Medieval non-European-flavored village is terrorized by demon monkeys. |Who are actually just bandits carrying howler monkeys|. Then a wizard(ish person) shows up. This one is okay.

"Superhero Publicist" by Janeen Ippolito: Exactly what it sounds like. A publicist for superheroes/supervillains has to deal with a supervillain who abruptly became a superhero instead due to converting to Christianity. The premise is good. The story is okay.

"Sweet Basil" by Lea Doué: Magic Is Banned™. Our protagonist has magic. You can see where this is going.

"Darkness Follows the Light" by David Millican: I mean, if there were evil child-stealing monsters, they probably would hang around bad neighborhoods. This one is not appropriate for children.

"Presenting... The Steampendous Adventures of Josiah U. Bear and the Rubber Barons" by D. W. Frauenfelder: A vaguely turn-of-the-century-esque story involving a nation of talking bears. Requires a lot of suspension of disbelief.

"River's Edge Ransom" by Julie C. Gilbert: Apparently part of a larger series. Fantasy. It's okay, I guess.

"The Love Talker" by Deanna Fugett: There's an evil monster that goes around breaking girls' hearts for the heck of it. There are also some protagonists. This one is decent, but not my cup of cheese.

"Gem" by RJ Conte: An alternate-universe world is attempting to shake itself to pieces. Except: That world's God has given them psions that can hold it together with their brains. Except: They never actually get to be more than about seven before the world tries to shake itself to pieces again. Less depressing than it sounds.

"Leticia's Song" by Jessica L. Elliott: Sort of like that one fairytale with the guys who get turned into swans. Also somewhat involves Not!Pandora's Box. This one is decent.

"The Wooden Ruler" by David Millican: Turns out if you make sentient gnome dolls, they might get too sentient. And view you as eldritch horrors. This is definitely an interesting read.

"The Tale of Sir Ronan of Camelot" by Frank B. Luke: Strongly Camelot-flavored, with a pronounced secondary taste of allegory. Didn't like it much.

"A Fiery Gift" by A. J. Bakke: Adorable volcano otters! And some point it's trying to make, probably, but I'm just here for the adorable volcano otters.

"The Hero of Emoh: A Parent's Fairytale" by Sarah Ashwood: DNF'd this one because I could just taste the sappiness and the spelling-things-backwards and was not in the mood for that. I'm still not.

"Sacrifice to the Iara" by H. L. Burke: Sort of ancient-South-American-civilization-flavored. It's got the winged and feathered serpents for that, at least. Well-executed.

"Charla Visits Earth" by Diane Astle: Fish-out-of-water where the fish is actually a mermaid, making that phrase both metaphorical and literal for this case. This one is okay.

"Cry of the Cave Lion" by E. Kaiser Writes: Cave lions. And the hunter-gatherers who hunt them.

"Save the Day" by Page Zaplendam: Teenage superheroes. A fairly realistic take on that subgenre, in fact. This is one of the better stories in here.

"Boy of Sand and Sky" by Laura Matthias Bendoly: Ancient France! But with a kid who can do miracles, and who apparently factors into some other stuff this author's written.

"Teamwork" by Laura VanArendonk Baugh: Have you ever heard of the "Choking Doberman" urban legend? It's basically {T a dog starts mysteriously choking, and when taken to the vet, turns out to be choking on some severed human fingers}. This story is just that urban legend in short story form.

"The Ungifted Twin" by Tamie Dearen: Classic "girl with no magic power in universe where everyone has a magic power" story. This one is okay.

"Not Quite a Hero" by Arthur Daigle: The mayor's intrepid daughter and... how do I even begin to describe Sorcerer Lord Jayden? They meet for the first time in this, then fight a giant shapeshifting monster made of dead stuff. This is my favorite story in the entire collection.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for child abuse and sexual references.

On the low side of 4 stars; would have been 3, but "Not Quite a Hero" exists.

(Endnote: Arthur Daigle is fast rising in the ranks of my favorite authors. The nonexistent ranks, because I don't actually have a list.)

"Fantastic Creatures" anthology

This one isn't as good as the other one I reviewed, but I'm reviewing it anyway.

"Three Steaks and a Box of Chocolates" by A. R. Silverberry: Kind of boring, about a country doctor and a mountain man who has a mysterious monster friend. Its time period is somewhat ambiguous.

"Snapdragon" by Lea Doué: Local mom gets wronged by a man, overreacts, curses both daughters so they can technically never be wronged in that way but also their lives are super terrible now because the curses are poorly executed. Also kind of a retelling of Princess and the Frog.

 

"The Golden City Captives" by Julie C. Gilbert: A guy and his girlfriend get enslaved for the arena and then turn out to both be shapeshifters. Ended too abruptly for my taste.

 

"Seekers" by Intisar Khanani: A little girl has a knack for locating hidden things. |Turns out she's a selkie|. My synopsis is bad, but the story is decent.

"Mystery of Asgina Lake" by Caren Rich: Nobody believes the lake monster is real, except the sheriff's twin daughters. Who find the lake monster. It is not friendly. This one was fairly good.

"Skin Deep" by Morgan Smith: The first one that made me go "Welp, this is not as family-friendly as Tales of Ever After." Basically some girl has to get married to the prince, who's a horrific monster because fairies are jerks. And then {T15+ they play Strip Fantasy Dice Game}. There are so many other things that could have happened, my man! (well, woman, actually.) Did not love this one.

"The Last Chronicle of Pete Mersill" by David Millican: Evil life-draining beings have taken over the world and wrecked most of it. One guy murders a bunch of them. Then he dies (would spoiler tag that, but come on, look at the title.) Too bleak for my taste.

"Priscilla, the Magnificent, Flying Giant Squid" by L. Palmer: About a woman who honors her dead colleague by transporting a sentient kraken via dirigible, despite the fact that pretty much everyone else says A) sentient krakens don't exist and B) if they did, you couldn't transport them via dirigible. This one is okay.

"An Adventurer's Heart" by Nicole Zoltack: A vaguely Greek Mythology-flavored one with jewels that do magic stuff. Didn't love it, but it's not bad.

"Destiny's Flight" by Frank B. Luke: Needs more worldbuilding. Has a vaguely Old Testament flavor, but also a vaguely Medieval Crusades flavor. And some evil guys. Apparently written by a pastor, though I can't speak to what kind of pastor. This either needs to be more or less like Narnia.

 

"The Kappa" by Lelia Rose Foreman: Short, relatively pointless story that reads like a Japanese folktale (and may actually be one). It involves a kappa, because of course.

 

"Celebration" by Arthur Daigle: A king dies. Everyone's sad. Then a bunch of goblins steal the corpse, bury it, and celebrate because said king was actually decent to goblins (who aren't evil in this). This guy wrote my favorite story in the other one, and this story is similarly good.

 

"The Nether Lands" by David Millican: Yeesh. The one that involves demon hunting, and also 85% of the inappropriate-for-children content in the whole anthology. Did not like this one.

"Talori and the Shark" by Jessica L. Elliott: Feels like several fairy tales mashed into an unidentifiable paste and then formed back into a story. It's not my favorite, but definitely better than the previous one.

"Reviving the Sword" by Kandi J. Wyatt: A centaur attempts to re-empower her magic sword. Kind of boring.

"Mothers' Night Out" by D. G. Driver: Graphic violence! Basically the new hire at the daycare gets stuck babysitting all the employees' babies at night while their moms go do stuff. |Turns out they're all werewolves|. Did not like this one either.

"The Mage and the Spotted Wyvern" by Craig J. Price Jr.: A solid story, if not one with anything particularly special about it. Its plot is oddly hard to describe.

"The Very Last Dragon" by Katy Huth Jones: Imagine St. George and the Dragon, but told in a somewhat silly and satirical fashion. This one is okay.

 

"The Adventures of Zero: The Quest for Wormsroot" by Vincent Trigili: A kid attempts to go find a rare root so the village doctor/healer/alchemist will take him on as an apprentice. Fairly entertaining.

"Ishka's Garden" by Bokerah Brumley: A princess's fairy friend gets abducted, so the princess goes after her. Has a decent plot twist at the end.

"Absolutely True Facts about the Pacific Tree Octopus" by H. L. Burke: Little girl gets taken in by Internet hoax that turns out not to actually be hoax. Not great, not terrible.

 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for sexual references (I'm looking at you, The Nether Lands) and graphic violence ("Mothers' Night Out", anyone?)

3 stars, overall. Most of the stories are fairly okay, there's just a couple that are nyehhhhhh. I'm glad this is the first book in the series, as that means it improves as time goes on.

(Endnote: I'm willing to bet some fake internet points that there are very few other blog posts which use nyehhhhhh as a predicate adjective inside a dependent clause.)

"Steal the Morrow" by Jenelle Leanne Schmidt

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

4 stars.

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

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.)

"A Pocket Full of Murder" by R. J. Anderson

I was first introduced to this by Kittens, whose taste in books somewhat differs from mine.

This one is about a girl whose dad gets arrested (wrongly) for murdering a guy, so she goes on a giant investigation/mission/quest/thing to prove his innocence by finding out who did murder the guy.

Its worldbuilding is quite good. It's a fantasy book, but instead of being medieval Europe with fantasy elements, it's more like late Victorian Europe with fantasy elements. (Or possibly late Victorian America? I'm not sure.) So, there aren't really any wizards or magic-users around, replaced with people having figured out how to do "Common Magic" themselves via baking.

I've also read the sequel, A Little Taste of Poison, which focuses much more on "Sagery": basically the same as Common Magic, but more jewelcrafting instead of baking. (Many of the book's nobles would be very mad at me for saying Sagery is basically the same as Common Magic, but IT'S TRUE, FOLKS.) Sagery does factor into this one, but it's explained less.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for intense situations and themes of religious persecution (it's clearly based on historical anti-Semitism, and is portrayed as a bad thing). This would make a decent open-world game. (I say open-world because the only other city-based games I know of, the Grand Theft Auto series, also get labeled open-world. This is much tamer than GTA, as is pretty much every piece of media I consume.)

(To assuage any fears people may have, no, I haven't played Grand Theft Auto. Nor, in all likelihood, will I ever do so.)

4 stars. 

(Endnote: A Little Taste of Poison is a good sequel, in that it explains things that would have been obvious if you'd read this one.)

"The Mystwick School of Musicraft" by Jessica Khoury

I read this book in about 2 hours, which should give you some idea of how much I liked it. (Hint: a lot.)

So, the book is set in an alternate Earth where music is magic and you can play music to do magic. Different songs are different spells (so "The Itsy-Bitsy Spider" is a spell for drying stuff, Beethoven's 5th Symphony is a spell for making a force field, etc).

And seriously, they use magic for everything. Want to move a trolley? Play music at it. Want to move a train? Play music at it. Want to grow a plant? Play music at it. Want to deliver people's cafe food? Play music at it. Your apartment's too hot? Play music at it. Have a cold? I kid you not, get someone to play music at it. As long as you know a song that does what you want, and are competent enough to play that song, how do you solve your problem? Play music at it.

But anyway, enough exposition. The main character is a twelve-year-old named Amelia Jones, who auditions for the titular Mystwick School of Musicraft. (It's 'music craft', not 'music raft', and it's the music-magic-whatnot.) |She fails|, which is played for laughs at the time (|her sending a plant-growing spell at one of her audition-judge people, causing his moustache to grow super much instead of the plant|). Nevertheless, she still gets into Mystwick.

At first, The Mystwick School of Musicraft seemed like it was going to pull the "Your Leaders Are Secretly Evil" trope, especially when I learned about "black spells": spells that are banned. (Normal spells have colors, which are green, yellow, blue, and white; don't ask me how.) In actuality, the black spells are banned for a very simple and logical reason: they're necromancy, which never works and tends to have unpleasant consequences like you dying. Mystwick doesn't use the trope.

Favorite lines:

"Only sixteen people in the world are licensed to teleport anything bigger than a refrigerator."

  Page 65.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for mild jumpscares, a couple ghosts, and the main character accidentally burning herself on multiple occasions. Don't know how it would be a videogame, but I'm sure it could be made to work. Visual novel, maybe, or something more RPG-like. If someone managed it (and didn't royally mess it up), I'd play it.

This one joins Kiki's Delivery Service and The Adventurer's Guide to Successful Escapes in getting five stars. This also means I recommend it.

Link to the actual post.