Collected Miscellany

Cover via Amazon

I will fully admit that I can be far too derivative in my reviews. I think that I can write some thoughtful and detailed reviews when I have the time and energy.  But I also post a number of “here is the publishers blurb and here is my reaction” type posts.

This doesn’t bother me too much because one function of this blog is simply to track what I read; and not every review is, or has to be, a thoughtful masterpiece.

I bring this up, because I would be hard pressed to add much to Heidi Broadhead’s Amazon.com review of The Sorceress by Michael Scott:

The third book in Michael Scott’s “Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel” series, The Sorceress, kicks the action up to a whole new level. Adding to the series’ menagerie of immortal humans (“humani”) and mythological beasts, the book picks up where The Magician left off: the immortal Nicholas Flamel (of The Alchemyst) and the twins, Sophie and Josh, have just arrived at St. Pancras international train station in London. Almost immediately, they’re confronted with a demonic bounty hunter that immortal magician John Dee has sent their way. At the same time, Dee’s occasional cohort, Niccolo Machiavelli, decides to focus his energy on Perenelle Flamel, the Alchemyst’s wife, who has been imprisoned at Alcatraz since the beginning of the series. In this book, Perenelle gets a chance to show off her sorcery and resourcefulness, fighting and forging alliances with ghosts, beasts, and the occasional Elder to try and find a way out of her predicament and back to Flamel.

Scott is as playful as ever, introducing new immortals–famous figures from history who (surprise!) are still alive. He also adds to the roster of fantastical beasts, which already includes such intriguing foes as Bastet, the Egyptian cat goddess, and the Morrigan, or Crow Goddess. Raising the stakes with each installment, Scott deftly manages multiple story lines and keeps everything moving pretty quickly, making this third book a real page-turner. More than just another piece in the puzzle of the whole series, The Sorceress is an adventure in its own right, and will certainly leave series fans wanting more.

I wasn’t blown away by The Alchemyst but each book since has ratcheted up the intensity.  The Amazon review matches my reaction perfectly.  The action is kicked up a notch, the pacing is great, and the characters – both old and new – are fun and well done.

If you have been living in a cave and haven’t stumbled on this series yet, and you like fantasy adventure, I highly recommend it.

This is one of those great series where each book seems to get better and each wait for the next one to come up seems more intolerable.

Timothy and the Dragon’s Gate is an interesting take on a sequel.  One that I confess I can’t recall reading before.  It isn’t until nearly half-way into the book that the central character from Alex and the Ironic Gentleman enters the story.

Instead the first half, as you might expect, focuses on the titular Timothy.  From the publisher’s blurb:

Timothy Freshwater’s father can’t control him, his mother is always out of town, and now the boy too smart for his own good has been expelled from the last school in the city. After he meets Mr. Shen, a mysterious Chinese mailroom clerk at his father’s office, Timothy winds up in more trouble than he has ever gotten himself into.

It turns out the diminutive Mr. Shen is a dragon. Forced to take human shape for a thousand years, Mr. Shen cannot resume his true form until he scales an ancient Dragon’s Gate during a festival for the 125th year of the dragon. Now Timothy finds himself Mr. Shen’s latest keeper: stalked by a ninja, and chased by a menacing trio of black taxicabs.

And therin lies the rub, as they say (do they really say that?).  Allow me to cowardly pass of my own critism on to someone else by quoting Kirkus:

Sporting a chip on his shoulder the size of a sequoia while being prone to both snotty behavior and fits of rage, Timothy makes an annoying protagonist.

Yes, I too found Timothy to be an annoying protagonist but Kirkus said it better in one sentence.

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One of the drawbacks of the chaos of my life lately, is that I haven’t been able to participate in as many conversations about books and reading as I would like.  I read far too few book/literary blogs and only catch a small sliver of Twitter discussions, etc.

But I benefit from the little I am able to catch; often finding new authors and interesting books along the way.  Once such example is LitChat – “a fun, fast, and friendly way for booklovers to talk about books on Twitter.”

I try to catch their chats when I can and earlier this year I participated in a chat on young adult fiction (I think) and won an autographed copy of Timothy and the Dragon’s Gate by Adrienne Kress.  It seemed a good idea to read the first book in this series so I grabbed Alex and the Ironic Gentleman for my Kindle.  But I only got around to reading both books recently.

I clearly should have read them earlier as they are fun, imaginative and entertaining reads full of wit and adventure.

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Like so many, a big part of my becoming a devoted reader at a young age was the magical books of fantasy writers like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.  I jumped from these “classics” to many others (magical worlds like the humorous  Xanth and the adventurous Pern).  And I still read fantasy; even young adult fantasy like Harry Potter and the explosion of works that followed in the wake of that phenomenon.

So when The Magicians by Lev Grossman was released it seemed a must read.  Here is the publishers blurb:

Quentin Coldwater is brilliant but miserable. A senior in high school, he’s still secretly preoccupied with a series of fantasy novels he read as a child, set in a magical land called Fillory. Imagine his surprise when he finds himself unexpectedly admitted to a very secret, very exclusive college of magic in upstate New York, where he receives a thorough and rigorous education in the craft of modern sorcery.

He also discovers all the other things people learn in college: friendship, love, sex, booze, and boredom. Something is missing, though. Magic doesn’t bring Quentin the happiness and adventure he dreamed it would. After graduation he and his friends make a stunning discovery: Fillory is real. But the land of Quentin’s fantasies turns out to be much darker and more dangerous than he could have imagined. His childhood dream becomes a nightmare with a shocking truth at its heart.

I read the book in August but haven’t had a chance to put my thoughts down.  What follows is an attempt to rectify that.

What Lev Grossman attempts to do in The Magicians is both bring this shared love of childhood fantasy adventures into a more adult-like world but also ask the question: “What if something like Narnia really existed?”  These two concepts make up the bulk of the book but they do not always work together.

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Cover via Amazon

Never one to pass up free books, I downloaded a Kindle version of The Alchemyst: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel for free.  But it was far down the TBR list.  My wife, however, read it and enjoyed it.  This piqued my interest and one night I started reading it to “see what it was all about.”

It turned out to be a grand adventure.  Not the most believable story, for sure, but imaginative and entertaining.

Here is the PW review to give you a flavor:

Twin 15-year-old siblings Sophie and Josh Newman take summer jobs in San Francisco across the street from one another: she at a coffee shop, he at a bookstore owned by Nick and Perry Fleming. In the vey first chapter, armed goons garbed in black with “dead-looking skin and… marble eyes” (actually Golems) storm the bookshop, take Perry hostage and swipe a rare Book (but not before Josh snatches its two most important pages). The stolen volume is the Codex, an ancient text of magical wisdom. Nick Fleming is really Nicholas Flamel, the 14th-century alchemist who could turn base metal into gold, and make a potion that ensures immortality. Sophie and Josh learn that they are mentioned in the Codex’s prophecies: “The two that are one will come either to save or to destroy the world.” Mayhem ensues, as Irish author Scott draws on a wide knowledge of world mythology to stage a battle between the Dark Elders and their hired gun—Dr. John Dee—against the forces of good, led by Flamel and the twins (Sophie’s powers are “awakened” by the goddess Hekate, who’d been living in an elaborate treehouse north of San Francisco). Not only do they need the Codex back to stop Dee and company, but the immortality potion must be brewed afresh every month. Time is running out, literally, for the Flamels. Proceeding at a breakneck pace, and populated by the likes of werewolves and vampires, the novel ends on a precipice, presumably to be picked up in volume two.

To me this was not one of those works where the author creates an amazingly complex and believable world or worldview that sucks you in.  Instead, it was an imaginative conceit – the existence of Elders, the truth of alchemy, etc. – that set up and action adventure series.  The hook works because you don’t think about it too much; you just accept it and follow where the action leads.

The battle between good and evil is interesting and keeps the story moving at a nice pace.  And there is just enough mystery and new characters to keep the reader wanting to know more.  And if you enjoy mythology it is fun to see how Scott ties it all together.

This kind of young adult adventure series is perfect for bedtime reading after a stressful day.  I have already started The Magician and plan to read the whole series.  If, like me, you were not aware of it I recommend it as a fun read.

I am not sure I am an “objective” critic of Richard Lewis and his writing.  I have been a fan since his first book The Flame Tree and enjoyed his subsequent work (see here and here).  I have interviewed him via email and over the phone and found him to be an interesting person and a creative writer.

But I think I am honest enough that had his latest book, Monster’s Proof, been a stinker I could admit that it “wasn’t his best work” or something to that effect.

I didn’t find that to be the case and so was struck by the vehemence of one particularly review.

First, here is the publisher’s plot summation:

Livey Ell is the only normal person in a family of geniuses. She’s a cheerleader with an absentminded professor father and a math genius of a little brother, and she’s sure that life couldn’t get any weirder than it already is.

But when her little brother, Darby, brings his childhood imaginary friend Bob to life through a mathematical proof, things start to get really strange. Bob, a creature of pure math, hates chaos and disorder in any form. And as his power grows stronger, he becomes determined to fix our disorderly world in any way possible.

But that’s not the only danger. People know that Bob is in our world — including a top-secret government organization that wants to control him, and a cult of Pythagoreans who worship him.

Now Livey and Darby will need all the help they can get to stop him — before the world as we know it is changed forever.

I found this to be an interesting plot hook.  I personally stink at math, and have never progressed beyond balancing the check book let alone abstract math, but the plot struck me as a unique take on young adult action adventure type stories.

But Kirkus obviously felt differently.  To see just how much, keep reading.

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It must be Christian fiction week here at CM as today we have another example; although very different from the Shack.  The Vanishing Sculptor is not theology thinly disguised as a novel but rather a novel with a subtle theological point.

Here is the description from the publishers:

Donita K. Paul’s 250,000-plus-selling DragonKeeper Chronicles series has attracted a wide spectrum of dedicated fans–and they’re sure to fall in love with the new characters and adventures in her latest superbly-crafted novel for all ages. It’s a mind-boggling fantasy that inhabits the same world as the DragonKeeper Chronicles, but in a different country and an earlier time, where the people know little of Wulder and nothing of Paladin.

In The Vanishing Sculptor, readers will meet Tipper, a young emerlindian who’s responsible for the upkeep of her family’s estate during her sculptor father’s absence. Tipper soon discovers that her actions have unbalanced the whole foundation of her world, and she must act quickly to undo the calamitous threat. But how can she save her father and her world on her own? The task is too huge for one person, so she gathers the help of some unlikely companions–including the nearly five-foot tall parrot Beccaroon–and eventually witnesses the loving care and miraculous resources of Wulder. Through Tipper’s breathtaking story, readers will discover the beauty of knowing and serving God.

Interestingly enough, the first and last sentences above are points worth discussing. I missed the strong connection to the Dragon Keeper Chronicles when I first started reading and I think this had an impact on my experience.  And I also think the last sentence (re: the beauty of knowing and serving God) over-states things a bit.

More on those issues, and more, below. Read the rest of this entry »