ergative's reviews
925 reviews

Meh. I got it as part of a Humble Bundle fantasy promotion, and although I quite liked Jane Yolen's Pit Dragon books when I was in middle school, this felt a bit like a Message book, in which a young reader is encouraged to work through the death of a parent while also being introduce to Moby Dick. Props for casting shade on Ishmael as someone who never quits talking and can't get to the point, though.

Quite good illustrations, though, and I liked the Very Good Dog.

This was a charming delight of cosy hug. It has a lot in common with T. J. Klune's House on the Cerulean Sea: Orphaned magical children live in an idyllic paradise, which is under threat fro the outside, and our veiwpoint character enters the paradise, finds home and love and family, and saves them from the danger. Absolutely nothing bad happens in this book. There is a lot of description of gloriously comfortable houses and cottages and furniture and libraries and cosiness. There is good food. There is a Very Good Dog. There is never any sense of real danger. This is a book you read when you want a story, but you can't bear the thought of bad things happening to anyone. It's a bit limited, naturally, under those constraints, but for what it was, it was exactly right.

I definitely cast Ian and Ken as Ian McKellan and Patrick Stuart in my head.

 Damn, these books are so good! Reeve is really moving out of the YA genre, despite the playfulness of the language and world-building, and the focus on a teenage main character (sort of). Hester and Tom's relationship is being treated with a real attention to how the events of their past and the mismatched personalities in their present idyllic life in Vineland might actually play out. What, realistically speaking, would happen when two thirty-somethings, who are each other's first and only love interests, discover that there are fundamental differences of temperament that come to the fore when danger comes to their haven and forces them to take action? Hester discovers that she would rather be out having adventures and is quite good at killing people, and has been plagued by a growing resentment and boredom at the peace and contentment that surrounds her adult life, including, heartbreakingly, her daughter. But this leads her to act with appalling callousness towards other people, even when she's not outright murdering them, which horrifies Tom. And Tom is sweet and gentle and nurturing, but he has, as Hester sees it, lost the spark and adventurousness that she found so exciting in him when they were young. This growing friction between Tom and Hester, combined with their very real love and devotion to each other, and the creaking strain that results from it, adds a depth to the book that really lifts it well out of the domain of YA, despite the bits with Wren, which are entertaining romps about a teenage girl being extremely dumb and impulsive, as teenage girls are.

But despite this undercurrent of darkness, which is quite a bit darker, I think, than the earlier books, or at least more adult, Reeve's delightful attention to detail in the narrative, the characters, the names (Nimrod Pennyroyal and Nabisco Shkin are two excellent ones) and the running motif of aspiring artists being not terribly popular or successful in Brighton, make this an utter joy.

Be warned: It does end on a cliffhanger, so be prepared to dive right into Book IV! 

 I quite liked this. I felt like the plotting struggled a bit to force Talyen into circumstances where she was just some nobody on the street, while every so often allowing her to take up her queenly mantle and be recognized among enemies; but aside from that, the intrigue and world-building was great (loved the hints about dragons returning), and I was genuinely uncertain about what was going on with her missing husband: why he left, what he wanted, what the deal was with him and his handlers and so on. The structure of the main characters' relationships was set up to be some sort of love triangle, except it was nothing so tedious or predictable as that. People were multilayered, and their relationships had layers and complexity (and a solid dose of respect), and that kept me guessing at what would happen next. I'll happily read the rest of the series. 

 Gosh, I love these books so much. This had less of a traditional plot structure than the first (which introduced an antagonist and culminated with his final defeat), but that still worked, because what makes this world so engrossing is seeing how these magical creatures navigate an early 20th century New York that is so well portrayed: The Jewish community of the East Side, Little Syria in the south, a touch (but only a touch) of the high society, and the reactions of everyone to the developments as the city grew: Penn Station, the subway, the rise of skyscrapers. This is a very personal tale, of how the golem and the jinni got on when their immediate struggles of arrival in the first book are over, and they must live in the after world. How do they deal with aging and death of the humans around them? How does their own relationship change, as the years pass and the city changes and yet they are the only two people who can know the full truth of each other, entirely alone? And what happens, then, when other members of their own kind arrive in the city? 

The character work is superb: golem and jinni, for sure, but also the humans. A little girl, Kreindel, is sharp-pointed and arrogant and difficult, which turns her from a pathetic orphan (and isn't that harrowing) into someone much more interesting. Toby, a tiny baby introduced in the first book grows to become a Western Union messenger boy, which is convenient as far as the plot is concerned, but his own adventures in the city show that he's a fundamentally good kid, who's going to do his best to do the right thing in a tough situation, which is a good companion to his independence. Sophia, who was left in something of a bad way in the first book, takes herself off to Turkey where she spends fifteen years wandering the middle east looking for djinns and learning five languages, which is rather bad-ass. The stories of these people---golem, jinni, Sophia, Kreindel, Toby---intersect in elegant ways, none of them laboured or forced. They just weave around each other, coming to a final point with the grace of the jinni's wrought iron masterpiece that is the title of this book. 

What a delightful, weird, imaginative story! The world-building was surprisingly rich for a non-epic fantasy romance, and the touches of absurdity---like the nimkilims, especially, but also the amphibious cars and equines---felt charming, rather than arbitrary and odd. The characters meshed extremely well together (the friction points of Mercy's family in particular were really fun) the dialogue was entertaining, and everything about the business and politics and skullduggery around the Undertaking trade was very well-constructed. The romance plotline itself was a bit predictable, in part because it adhered closely to the genre conventions of romance, but also because it was so closely based on 'You've Got Mail' (except with competing undertakers rather than competing bookshops) that certain plot points were visible from the start, like skyscrapers soaring above the cloudbank on a foggy day. I knew they were there, and how they structured the cityscape, but it took nothing away from the pleasure of exploring the streets.

 I really enjoyed this! It started out a bit slow and a bit forced, with a rather frustrating sequence that gives the impression that a MUCH more interesting story is happening to other people off the page while our main character spends some weeks as a stone statue. But once Evangeline gets up north and plot starts happening to her--especially in the second half--I was fully engrossed. Very twisty turny events, with lots of false starts and clues and red herrings and revelations that fully and completely had me fooled, but which in retrospect were set up very well by previous events. It does end on a cliffhanger, though, and Goodreads tells me it's the first of a four book series. I'm not sure it's engrossing enough to keep me interested for four books, but if it were a two-book series I'd definitely pick up the second. Might do that anyway. 

 This felt odd to give such a low rating to, because it had all the parts that combine to make the sort of story I usually like. We have mature characters with a variety of skills and backstory (no longer young wunderkinds who must come of age and learn things in front of us); we have an imaginative world-building that made me work to understand it; we have a conflict  with an antagonist that comes down to a solution which does NOT involve fighting. We have WINDSHIPS and magic--both stage magic and also real magic. We have wandering scholars on a hopeless Cassandra-like quest; we have aging magicians and retired fighters and second chance love and friendship. I love these kind of things!

The problem is that I didn't feel any depth to the plot or emotional connection to any of this. I didn't care about the characters; I found their fumbling attempts at rapprochement frustrating, the repeated friction and reopening of old wounds unconvincing and irritating. I found the characterization shallow, too: the stage magician keeps being presented as using his unique magician talents because he's not a fighter and no longer a scholar and so cannot draw on any other special skills. But as far as I can tell he doesn't actually make much use of any of the clever gadgets he uses in his shows, and when push comes to shove the extent of his magician skills seem to come down to 'Ah, we must redirect people's attention elsewhere! Misdirection! The key is misdirection!' and so they make a decoy maguffin that misdirects the antagonist for like two seconds.

[nb: spoilers follow]
The plot felt shallow, too. The solution is literally a deus ex machina: they are in a hidden sactuary with a machine, and then the gods get involved and make everyone sit down and talk it out, like middle schoolers in detention for fighting.

The world-building had some elements of coolness to it. I liked the windships. I liked the hints of large-scale politics, how the Unity is trying to be a generalized government and the city of Farglade is trying to hold off Unity to build its own more socialist collective, but the ruling council is rotting from within. I thought the way the Raw gave Breck constant horrific hallucinations, sometimes as an attempt to warn him what to say and what not to say, but other times for no apparent reason other than to remind him of their power over him, was a stroke of genius. Not necessarily narrative genius, as the nature of their power over him was never quite clear, since they're supposed to be trapped in the dariss, but on a scene-level it was great. Every time he hallucinates something, I was caught by surprise.

Still, those flashes of excellence were too few and far between. It took me ages to slog through this book. Too bad. A valiant swing, but a miss all the same. 

 This was an easy, fluffy book that made use of an elegant conceit to tell a basic but endearing story: A woman starts living each year of her life out of order, jumping into a different year's future or past body every New Year at midnight. Nothing ever gets too dire, because her mother knows about it and is always there for her, and her out-of-order time memory means she gets to make a killing on the stock market and horse-racing, so she never has any money problems or lacks for a person who can help her when it all gets to be a bit too much. So the thrust of the book is not about deaing with the Conceit, but rather dealing with all the Relationships and Family and Feelings and Coming of Age Issues that are made more complicated by the Conceit. The story would not have been the kind of thing I was interested in were it not for the conceit, but because of that structural quirk I was able to swallow what were, on the whole, a set of awfully trivial events, because I enjoyed seeing how the whole plot got fit together.

If you like books about women coming to terms with Relationships and Family and Feelings and Coming of Age Issues (I refuse to use the term 'chicklit', but that is, fundamentally, how marketers would characterize this), then this would be quite a good instantiation of that genre, made all the richer by its clever construction. 

 Oof, what a SLOG. I'm very grateful to my book group for explaining to me the finer points of historical accuracy (Kennedy assassination references, for example), and the symbolic  past/present/future alignments of Katin/Mouse/Lorq, but I must say I remain utterly baffled as to why Jo Walton loves this book so much. The characters expressed their personality through speechifying; the world-building felt indicative rather than fully realized; the main antagonist had absolutely no reason for being a dick except that he's a complete psychopath--which, honestly, would have made a lot more sense than his speech about why the antagonism is personal. The insistence that Tarot is a perfectly rational way of having a conversatino with the universe, actually, and only backwards superstitious losers think it's nonsense, seemed almost like Delaney was making a joke, except that there's so little else about this book that's funny that I think maybe he actually subscribes to the Philip K Dickian school of 'let's write MYSTICAL science fiction!' None of it was convincing. Even the main plot arc, which is about obtaining some unobtanium from the center of a freaking NOVA, took a galaxy-changing quest that would affect the fundamental balance of power between workers and owners and star systems and migrants--a conversation that the book is interested in having--welded onto it a personal character motivation that was so puny and unconvincing compared to the actual scope of the real goal of the main team that its inclusion in the book just trivialized all of it. Not least because the character work was lousy and I didn't care about any of them anyway.