chrisbiss's reviews
527 reviews

 I read Nghi Vo's The Empress Of Salt and Fortune back in December last year, and it immediately became one of my favourite books of the year.  I'm not sure why I haven't come back to them until now, but seeing the fourth book on the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize shortlist prompted me to pick them back up.

Going in to this second book I couldn't really remember much of the first, but it all came back to me as I started reading. Being a novella this is a very quick read, and unlike a lot of novellas I don't think either of these books end up feeling incomplete at the end. They're exactly as long as they need to be.

It's hard to say for sure, since my memories of the first book are fairly hazy, but I think I liked this even more than The Empress of Salt and Fortune despite it being a little more flawed. Vo's prose is beautiful and the world she's built is fascinating. The central conceit of the series - a cleric travelling around the world collecting stories from people - means that we get "fantasy worldbuilding" without feeling like we're sitting through exposition dumps. These books are, in many ways, entirely an exercise in worldbuilding, but the nature of the way the stories are delivered to us makes them person and meaningful. In this second book we see the stories varying depending on who's telling them, and we get to see how important those variances can become, and that's a real piece of magic. This is less worldbuilding than it is mythbuilding.

Where the first book was very passive and "cosy" this one has teeth. There's real threat from the tigers, and the telling of the stories has stakes and feels urgent. It's a very interesting framing device, and I found myself much more invested than I remember being in Empress.

My only criticism here is around the very brief fight scene. We didn't see any "action" in the first book, being allowed to wallow in Vo's almost dream-like prose. The fight scene breaks that gentleness, and I think it's the weakest writing in an otherwise beautiful book. It fell a little flat for me, and I was grateful that it was brief.

That said, this was a great read and again I think Nghi Vo has made the list of my favourite reads of the year. I'm very much looking forward to getting to book 4 to see why it's been so highly acclaimed. 

It's been a long time since I read an early King novel, and I'd almost forgotten how great he was in his peak cocaine era. He's still good now, but the books he produced in the late 1970s and early-mid 1980s have an energy that's completely unmatched. Where Rage didn't really read like a Stephen King book, Roadwork is so obviously King that I'm not at all surprised someone figured out that Richard Bachman was a pseudonym. 

King is the "master of horror" but I've always thought that really he's a thriller writer more than anything else, and Roadwork is a perfect example of that. This is a pure thriller with no horror element, and it's fantastic. It's very grounded in its time while still feeling modern - the tensions around unchecked capitalism, about the everyday person feeling crushed under the unstoppable onslaught of industry and government, are very well realised and feel a lot like Network (1976), but they also still resonate today. There's some weird horniness going on in here but I think that's just the '80s more than anything else.

Loved this, and I wish I hadn't waited so long to read it.

Longer review coming on the blog soon but I enjoyed this a lot, and completely see why King has chosen to keep it out of print. 

Despite being a big fan of westerns in film, I haven't read a huge number of them. And even though I love the idea of magic realism, similarly I've only dipped into the genre. So a magic realism western is both very much something I'd want to read but also not really the sort of thing I usually read. I'm glad I did because this was great, and I think it's a contender for one of my favourite reads this year. 

The novel charts the history of the Sonoro family over several generations. Our main exposure to them is through the eyes of Antonio Sonoro, who's trying to scratch out a living for his wife, children, and brother somewhere along the Mexico/Texas border in the 1890s. He's a ruthless, horrible bastard who leads a life of violence. When a train robbery goes wrong he finds himself morally wounded and being chased across Texas by a group of Texas Rangers who'll stop at nothing to see him dead. Antonio's sections are bloody and violent, tense and dark, and I loved them.

That main narrative is broken up by a couple of others, namely Antonio's grandson - a successful Mexican actor in the 1960s - and excerpts from a book from the 1700s, which chronicles the older history of the family. These sections are generally shorter than the main narrative, and if I'm being honest there were times in the novel when I didn't really care about what was going on in the 1960s and wanted to get back to Antonio.

I was wrong to think that, though it took reaching the end for me to realise it. Without any spoilers I'll say that the final chapters of the book were surprisingly tender, and that they pack a huge emotional punch that would have been lessened with the omission of the sections that don't follow Antonio.

In an author's note after the conclusion of the novel, the author explains that The Bullet Swallower is based in large part of her own family history. I didn't need to know that to have enjoyed the book, which stands on its own merits beautifully, but that extra layer somehow made it feel even more magical. I'll definitely be picking up Elizabeth Gonzalez James' first novel at some point.

A few years ago as I was trawling through a charity shop I came across a stack of paperback copies of the Redwall books, and upon opening them I discovered that most of them were signed by Brian Jacques. I had owned *Martin The Warrior* when I was a kid and for some reason never read it, but the aesthetic of Redwall has always appealed to me and I figured that for 50p each there was no reason not to buy them all and read them. In typical fashion those signed books have been sitting unread on my shelf for years and every now and then I think "I should read them". I'm generally a fan of anthropomorphic animal stories. As a kid I loved The Animals of Farthing Wood, and Watership Down is - I think - among the best novels ever written. Games like Mouse Guard and Mausritter get played regularly in my house. And yet for some reason I've never read Redwall. 

This past 12 months I've been reading lots of series in their entirety. I read all of Joe Abercrombie's First Law books, I am in the process of reading all of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, and I have slowly been working my way through all of Alaister Reynolds' novels, so this seemed like a good time to finally make a start on Redwall. 

This was a weird read and I'm not fully sure whether or not I enjoyed it. There were lots of moments in the course of reading this book, from about 30% of the way in, where I thought, "I don't want to finish this". And yet, despite my commitment this year to aggressively not finishing novels I'm not enjoying, I persevered with it. 

Redwall is ostensibly a children's series and at least for the first couple of chapters that seems true. The language in the opening chapters is fairly simplistic and lots of sentences are written as statements that end in exclamation marks to make it exciting! There's a focus on how small and cute the animals are, and there's lots of what people would probably describe as "cosiness" during the opening. But it doesn't take long for this to drop away and we end up reading a book that seems to straddle the line between adults fiction and what we'd categorise as YA these days. I was particularly surprised by the level of vocabulary used in the book and it made me wonder if modern children's and YA books are maybe a little condescending: or, if not condescending, that they assume a lower reading level or level of intellect on behalf of the reader than a children's book from 1986 does. I'm 38 years old (the same age as Redwall, funnily enough) and have been a voracious reader for over 30 years, I have an MA in English literature and make my career as a writer, and I still found myself having to look up unfamiliar words while reading. It didn't happen often, but that it happened at all is highly unusual for me and especially surprising to find in a children's book. 

The story itself is fairly compelling. An abbey populated by mice and other woodland creatures comes under siege from a rat warlord and his army of evil rats, ferrets, stoats, and weasels. A young mouse discovers that he is the reincarnation of an ancient hero and goes on a quest to recover his lost sword in order to help mount a defence of the abbey. During his quest, he befriends creatures who would traditionally be enemies of mice like sparrows, a cat, and a barn owl, and turns them into allies while helping to solve their various problems. In the process he learns what it means to be a hero. This is a very traditional, familiar fantasy narrative and one that I enjoy generally, and I think it was largely the familiarity of this story combined with the relative novelty of the setting and the cast of anthropomorphic animals that kept me reading even when the book itself was often a slog to get through. 

I can't even really put my finger on what made the book such a slog for me, but it definitely was. I found myself losing my concentration and my interest very regularly, so that a book that should have only taken me a few hours to read ended up taking a few days as I dipped into it a chapter or two at a time before getting bored and putting it down. But I still kept coming back to it even when I was debating whether I should finish it or go and read something else that I might actually enjoy. Despite feeling like it was often spinning its wheels and not going anywhere, and despite increasingly finding myself skimming chapters that weren't concerned with Matthias' quest for the sword towards the end of the novel, I nevertheless wanted to stick it out and finish the book rather than abandoning it.

It's definitely rough in places. One thing that really stuck out to me is that Jacques is very inconsistent about the scale of this world. (I'm very sure that I'm not the first person to make this observation). Our first site of Cluney and his army of 500 rats sees them on the back of a haywagon being pulled by a horse. All 500 rats in his army fit in the hay on the back of the wagon. This indicates to me that the wagon and the rats are scaled in a way that matches the real world. And yet, at the end of the novel, the rats construct a siege engine out of the wagon which they are able to lift using block and tackle in order that they can remove the axles and the wheels and drag them to the abbey. Similarly, at one point Matthias meets an army of shrews who live inside a hollowed out tree trunk. This tells me that the shrews and Matthias are the size of real shrews and mice. And yet a chapter later they cross a river by paddling on a tree trunk, which they are able to move by punting with poles in the water. This indicates that at this point in the novel the mice and shrews are now human-sized in relation to the trees. It's not important that the scale keeps changing and I'm sure that it's not something that most children would pick up on or care about, but it bothered me. I also sort of respected how little Jacques cared it, though.

All this is to say that I genuinely do not know whether I think this first Redwall book was good or not. I don't think I would be in a rush to recommend it to somebody, but likewise if somebody asked me "should I read Redwall?" I don't think I would immediately say no. I also find myself in a strange situation where I'm glad that I can now read something else other than this book, but I am still interested in reading at least the next book in the series. It's a weird place to be in.

Unrelated: at one point in my life I was a huge Harry Potter fan, though I no longer talk about those books because I vehemently disagree with the author's views about trans people and her behaviour surrounding this issue. It was very interesting to me to see a number of plot points and character details in this book that seem to have been lifted almost whole cloth for the Potter novels. I had always known that those books were at least a little derivative of other, earlier works, even when I was a huge, fanfic-writing fan, but this is the first time I've personally discoveredsomething that ends up being very significant in the Potter books that exists in work that predates them.

I requested this book on NetGalley last year and then hit a reading slump and never got round to downloading it. Then around a week ago I spotted it in my local bookshop and remembered that I'd wanted to read it, so I picked it up. Here's the blurb:

I love a good haunted house story, and combining that with a murder mystery sounded like it was going to be right up my street. Unfortunately that wasn't the case, and I ended up deciding not to finish reading the book at around 25%.

It's always immediately obvious when a book set in England is written by somebody who isn't from the UK, in a way that's hard to pin down precisely. I'm sure it's exactly the same when English writers set their work in other countries, too, but being English I found it hard to ignore the anachronisms here. They were mostly small things like the language people use, but also larger inaccuracies that speak to the research into the setting being a little lacking. The most jarring, for me, was the moment that Lina speaks about the library she worked at in London, which is named as Chetham's. Chetham's Library is the oldest surviving public library in Britain and is, famously, in Manchester (which happens to be where I'm from, so of course this jumped out at me immediately).

This is ostensibly an adult novel but to me it reads more like YA, and had it been marketed in that way I likely wouldn't have picked it up. I think there's likely an interesting plot hiding in here somewhere, but it's buried beneath a tangled layer of multiple other plots that feel a little too much, especially at the start. There is of course every chance that they all come together into a cohesive whole by the end of the novel, but initially it all felt a little messy and unfocused and nothing was compelling enough to override my irritation at the anachronistic setting and strange word choices in much of the writing.

Ultimately this just wasn't for me. No star rating, since it doesn't seem right to rate a book that I didn't actually finish

 People say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover but I'm not at all ashamed to say that I requested an ARC of this from the publisher entirely based on the cover art and the title. I don't think I even read the blurb before I asked for it, so let's read it together now:

I won't bury the lede here. I really loved Beartooth, and it's a strong contender for my favourite book so far this year.

I'm a very fast trader generally, and this is a relatively short book, so I expected to rattle through it. The blurb promises a "fast-paced tale" but I didn't find that to be the case (which sounds like a criticism, but it isn't). There's a quality to Wink's writing, and to the sprawling, verdant setting, that almost demands you slow down and drink it in. I found myself stopping for a few minutes after each section to sit and reflect on what I'd just read before carrying on, which is not something I generally do when I'm reading.

Despite being a novel about adult men this feels like a coming-of-age story in a lot of ways. Thad begins the novel as an elder brother acting almost as a surrogate father to his younger brother, their actual father dead and their mother absent. He's dealing with debts, with trying to keep the house standing, with making sure that they have enough money to eat, with making sure that they both keep working. But it's all too much, and he's on the verge of becoming "worn out", something his father always warned him against. After their heist doesn't pan out the way they expect it to he retreats into himself, shutting himself away from the world and entering a sort of hibernation that sees him almost regress to childhood. And it's through this regression that his brother is finally allowed to step out from under his shadow and to start carving his own path - a path that leads him away from Thad, ultimately. By the time Thad finally emerges from his hibernation it's as a transformed man who, maybe, is finally ready to join the world in ways he never has before.

Wink's prose is fantastic, painting his world in small details that add up to a much larger whole. His characters feel alive, ready to stride off the page, and the relationship between Thad and his brother feels real and complex and honest. We don't spend much time with Hazen but I really felt like I knew him and understood him - possibly better than his brother understood him - despite that.

The publisher lists this under "Mystery & Thrillers" and I suppose that that's true, in that the plot concerns itself with a criminal act and the subsequent fallout from it, including an act of extreme violence that the entire narrative hinges around. But we never actually see the violence, only the consequences of it, and the heist is slow and measured and undertaker in the depths of night with nobody else around. It's the quietest thriller I've ever read. Much like the relationships that Wink develops, much of what's important here happens off the page, but we understand enough to be able to piece it together ourselves.

This one doesn't come out until February next year, but I'll definitely be picking up a physical copy when it lands. 

Basilisk came across my NetGalley dashboard and I was intrigued enough by the concept to request it. I was hoping for some high-octane military SF with weird monsters and a strange conspiracy. And that's technically what I got, but unfortunately it was a failure to launch that I ultimately didn't finish reading.

The issues with Basilisk don't take their time to materialise. The prose is desperately in need of a second set of eyes on it. This reads like unedited first draft, and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that this is the first novel the author has written (not to be confused with the first novel published, which for most authors is the result of multiple failed manuscripts as they learn their craft). Take the action scene that the book starts with, which reads as little more than a list of events taking place:

"The first squad went down the passageway towards the hatch. Two marines had their guns pointed, and the other two had grenades. When they got to the hatch, a marine with a grenade managed to throw it inside before a blinding storm of blue streaks cut his arm off. Another marine with a grenade overexposed his body and got hit several times. The grenade fell beside him. Another marine saw the loose grenade, dropped his gun, and scrambled to reach it. He grabbed it and threw it just before being battered with streaks of blue.

The first grenade exploded, and then the other."

It's not compelling or thrilling in any way. This wants to be Starship Troopers-esque action, but it's entirely lacking.

Speaking of Starship Troopers, there was a moment early on when I wondered whether this is attempting to satirise military fetishism and right wing nationalism in the same way as the Starship Troppers movie. Unfortunately it seems like Basilisk may have more in common with Heinlein's novel. Our main character delivers several lectures about how important it is for a nation to have overwhelming military might in order to defend the freedom of its people, and how it was her patriotic duty to drop out of school and join the military to fight in a war she doesn't understand. As I read more of these diatribes it became clear that this viewpoint is not satirical but is in fact very sincere. Perhaps if I'd managed to finish the book I would have found this view challenged later in the narrative. Alas, I didn't, so I'll never know.

Part of my reason for not finishing is to do with this thread of conservatism that runs throughout every facet of the book. Take Skylar's characterisation. There's an attempt to deliver a romance sub-plot, but the only way I can describe it is as being deeply weird. In an early chapter we learn that Skylar has a crush on a man she's never met. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. but the weirdness comes as she explores this crush.

"Skylar spent much of her time wishing the man of her dreams would swoop her up into his arms and carry her away, or if that was too much to ask, at least notice she was alive. Men surrounded her, but she only had eyes for one. He was a corporal like her, slightly junior, but she was senior to all the corporals. Well, maybe not all, not Jackson, but most of them. Her man stood half a head taller than her, had a clean crew cut— like almost every other man on the ship— and familiar icy-blue eyes that captured every nerve in her body. His muscles were firm like a gladiator, but he was a true gentleman. She wasn’t sure about the last attribute because she’d never spoken to him. She couldn’t. Every time she got anywhere near him, she started to shake, and she knew if he ever talked to her, she’d melt and make a complete fool of herself, so she kept her distance."

While she's crushing on this nameless man, her friend Trudi is described as a "slut". We aren't told why this is, but we're also told that Skylar feels it would be a "mistake to trust her with her secret. No one could ever know. No one". Her secret, of course, is that she has a crush on someone. Later we're treated to a scene of a cartoon villain drug dealer attempting to "[set Skylar up] to be an addict". It's a weirdly juvenile view of drugs and drug users that made me laugh aloud when I read it, though it's clearly not meant to be funny and is instead deeply sincere.

Ultimately it was the constant thread of weird misogyny and the real "men write women" edge to the narrative combined with the 'action' sequences that get bogged down in listing the minutiae of every action taking place that made me give up.

In more capable hands I think this could have been interesting. The idea of massive mythological creatures existing in deep space is compelling, but the attempts to build some sense of mystery around them are ham-handed at best. The narrative itself is unfocused, punctuated by weird scenes that don't serve any purpose - a date with the mysterious man Skylar has a crush on who think she's her "slut" best friend, the scene with a drug dealer attempting to get her hooked on a free first hit - and jumping between point of view characters in a way that feels random rather than structured or intentional.

When it comes down to it, this just wasn't interesting or compelling enough for me to overlook its flaws.