Review: Witness For the Dead by Katherine Addison

 

Title: The Witness for the Dead

Author: Katherine Addison

Publisher: Tor

Publication Date: June 22, 2021

Series: The Cemeteries of Amalo, #1

Edition: Hardcover

Rating 5/5

 

What a wonderful little book this was! It has been sitting here for a year now, waiting to be read. As much as I loved The Goblin Emperor (and I loved it a lot), Thara Celehar was never one of my favorite characters so I wasn't chomping at the bit to read The Witness for the Dead the way I would have been had it been about, say, Csevet Aisava. I didn't dislike him, of course. I just didn't have a burning interest to learn more about him. That's probably why it's been in my TBR pile for over a year. I'm so glad I finally picked it up.

 

This follows Thara Celehar in his new post as a Witness for the Dead in the town of Amalo, after solving the mystery of who murdered the emperor's father and brothers in The Goblin Emperor. A little of his past was revealed in that book, and a lot of what is referred to in Witness for the Dead will make a lot more sense if you are familiar with The Goblin Emperor. Celehar seems to want more than anything to quietly go about his job and attract as little notice as possible. Which is unfortunate, as his sometimes tactless honesty and dedication to his work doesn't always allow for a quiet life.

We learn much more about the world now that we are away from the rigid formality of court life and find that the common people are not quite so bound by those customs as the royals, nobles, and those who surround them. We also learn a lot more about what someone like Thara Celehar actually does, and it's sometimes surprisingly dangerous. The bulk of the story is comprised of an investigation of two deaths, one definitely a murder and one more than likely a murder. For me though the real attraction of the book is the wonderfully drawn characters. As seems usually to be the case, Katherine Addison's "good guys" are genuinely good guys. Flawed but fundamentally decent people who are genuinely trying to do the right thing. That is a thing that is all too rare in fantasy these days, it seems. 

I am very much looking forward to the second installment.

Review: Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett

 

Title: Foundryside

Author: Robert Jackson Bennett

Publisher: Del Rey

Publication Date: August 21, 2018

Series: The Founders Trilogy Book 1

Edition: Kindle

Rating: 3/5

My only previous experience with Robert Jackson Bennett was City of Stairs, the first book in The Divine Cities series. I never finished that series as I recall not liking the main character very much even though I did overall like the book itself. So I was a little wary going into this one, enough so that I borrowed the ebook from the library rather than buying it.

At first I feared I'd be disappointed again. Maybe it's just me but centering a story on a thief seems a bit overdone these days. The thief in question here is Sancia, a young woman struggling to survive in the lawless Commons of Tevanne, where anyone not a part of or employed by the four main merchant house families limp along from day to day as best they can. She is hired to steal an item from the safe of one of the wealthy merchant families and in doing so sets off a chain of events that have dramatic consequences not only for her but for her whole society.

Honestly it took me about halfway through the book before I decided whether or not I actually liked it. Thieves as main characters are not generally a favorite of mine as I feel they have been overdone in recent years. It took a long time for Sancia to grow on me. But other characters were interesting enough, and the overall story was interesting enough, for me to keep reading.

There are some great characters in this thing. Clef is fantastic and unexpected. He did more to draw me into the story than just about anything else. Gregor Dandolo seems a bit wooden and without much depth at first, but it doesn't take long before you begin to understand him a little more and he becomes surprisingly sympathetic. 

The magic system is intriguing, though I have to say that they talk about the mechanics of it a lot. Like, a lot. It starts to feel very repetitive and gets way too into the details than really seems necessary. I have no doubt that Bennett spent a lot of time working out the mechanics of scriving and that it will really add to the story for some. I just got bored when the characters went on and on about how you can do this and this, but you can't do this, except someone figured out how you can do this if you just add this, but that's limited too because of this, and on and on. Like, using a sigil to make a wheel think it's rolling downhill so carriages can move without horses makes sense but once they got into trying to explain why devices that make people fly can or cannot work was so dense that I just sort of glazed over. Some people love detailed, intricate magic systems, but I just found it all a bit tedious.

I did like some of the scrived objects though. They all seem to have personalities of their own, usually very dramatic ones. They usually only think of their single purpose and talk non stop about it. A device meant to transcribe sounds with a needle speaks constantly of dancing with their "partner" which is the other part of the device that actually hears the sounds. When their are no sounds to hear it wistfully wonders when it will get to dance again. A pair of handcuffs talks of how desperate they are to remain holding each other (meaning, locked). A gravity device gets comically excited whenever it is given new directions.

There is an odd, almost buried element to the story that seemed a bit glossed over. Early on, it's mentioned that in recent years there had been a sudden shift in attitudes towards women working as scrivers, the people who create the magical items that the entire society depends on. There's nothing to suggest why.  I feel like if a point was made that this shift happened, there should be some reason behind it but no one seems to think much of it. Maybe this is a thread that will be picked up in later books and expanded on, otherwise it seems like a strange thing to include. 

The thing that really took it from 4 to 3 stars for me though, was the dialogue. It honestly drove me crazy.  Everyone sounds the same. Sancia is dirt poor former slave, but she has basically the same vocabulary as Gregor Dandolo, the son of the head of one of the four merchant houses. There is almost no real indication of dialects, or that the fabulously wealthy have access to better education than the poor. That stood out to me but what stood out even more is that everyone sounds like they just walked off the street in 2022 America. One character even uses the word "like" in that very particular modern way ("that's, like, the whole point!" etc). Just about every character says "anyways," which irritates me in any context but especially in the pages of a fantasy novel.  It's jarring. The voices of each character are not very distinct. Also if I never see the word "scrumming" again it will be too soon.

Generally speaking though, I really enjoyed this book far more than I expected to, enough that I'm planning on going out and actually buying the physical books. I am looking forward to reading the next volume in the trilogy.

 

 

Review: Circe by Madeline Miller

Title: Circe
Author: Madeline Miller
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Publication Date: April 2018
Edition: Kindle
Rating: 5/5


When I started reading this book, I had only a vague idea of who Circe was. Although I've always loved Greek mythology, I knew she was someone Odysseus encountered and that was more or less all. In Circe Madeline Miller has fleshed out her story to beautiful effect.

I think one of the reasons I always liked the stories of the Greek gods is how human they were. They had all the worst qualities of the humans who worshipped them. They cheated and lied and squabbled, they were jealous and spiteful and petty and arrogant. Humans could appease them by praising them and giving them gifts and the smallest slight could set them on the warpath against any unfortunate creature who angered them, no matter how much less powerful or threatening they were. Against their example, the humans in the stories are often tragic figures.

Circe is something of an exception. She is, almost from the first page, kinder and more compassionate than her brethren. Certainly not as vain and arrogant. But again she is, despite her immortality and the power that she only slowly begins to discover, almost painfully human. Scorned by her mother and siblings and only barely noticed by her father Helios, eventually falls in love with a human fisherman. Eventually, she uses her powers to give him immortality and then transform a rival into a monster, and is exiled for eternity to a lonely island for her crimes. There she develops her powers, turns wayward sailors into pigs when they cross her, has a child with Odysseus, and comes into her own as a woman of strength, power, and independence. It's something of a coming of age story on a scale of centuries.

Review: Into the Drowning Deep, by Mira Grant

Title: Into the Drowning Deep
Author: Mira Grant
Publication Date: November 2017
Publisher: Orbit Books
Edition: Hardcover
Rating: 3/5
Note: This review may contain spoilers.

I wasn't entirely sure what to expect going into this novel. The premise sounded terrific: an entertainment company's attempt to film a mockumentary on the existence of mermaids in the Mariana Trench ends with everyone on the ship brutally killed, complete with video footage that seems to suggest mermaids are real and responsible for the carnage. Some years later, the same company sends another boat to try to find out what exactly happened, and if the mermaids are in fact real. But my one previous encounter with Mira Grant's work made me hesitate. I'd listened to her novel Feed on audiobook some years earlier and while I hadn't disliked it, exactly, there was enough about it that I didn't like that I was wary. I'd never read a book about mermaids before though so I decided to give it a shot.


Overall, I'm glad I did. This is a terrific story. The main character is Victoria Stewart, a marine biologist graduate student whose older sister Anne was one of those killed on the original expedition. She's become obsessed with the incident. While the video footage is considered by most to be a hoax, or part of the mockumentary that was being filmed, she doesn't believe it and is driven by a need to find out precisely what happened to her sister and everyone else on that ship. Some years after the incident she is approached by an employee of Imagine, the company that funded the original expedition, and given the opportunity to be a part of the second trip and find out once and for all what happened, and not so incidentally, to prove that mermaids are real. Alongside her are a number of truly interesting and diverse characters, all of whom have signed on to the voyage for various reasons. One is Jillian, a former conservation activist and university professor who has spent her career advocating for the existence of mermaids; her estranged husband Theo, the Imagine representative whose main goal is to see that his company's interests are served; Olivia, the hostess for Imagine's hoped for coverage; and a whole host of scientists with different specialties, who may or may not believe in mermaids but who all want a chance to study the Mariana Trench. There's also a particularly sinister husband and wife big game hunting team, who only care that they might bring home the most legendary trophy ever.

The horror elements of the story build slowly but when they really start to fire up, it's intense. I couldn't help but think how fantastic this story would look on the big screen, or even as a television show. Any movie studio with any sense at all should be clamoring to be the ones to make it.

I didn't love everything about it.  I was often frustrated by the characters, who sometimes seemed so cheerfully oblivious to the reality of the situation. I could have accepted that in characters who might have signed on not believing in the creatures they were supposedly going to find, but not in characters who should have known better. Little things nagged at me. For example, the number of times a character said or thought about how some bit of information was "above their pay grade" was kind of ridiculous. There has to have been some other way to express this sentiment without repeating that phrase over and over. It's a small thing but 1/3 of the way through the book it really started to stand out. I feel like someone somewhere along the line did Grant a disservice by not pointing that out and suggesting at least some of those be rephrased. There was a lot of POV switching, too, and it could sometimes get confusing. As did the tendency to, seemingly randomly, refer to characters by their full names. It stood out because it didn't make sense. These characters had been introduced long ago and were well established. Sometimes this happened in the middle of a scene in which they'd been referred to by first name only already. These are little things but for me, they detract from the overall experience. Not enough that I wouldn't recommend the book, however.

Into the Drowning Deep is apparently book 1 of a series. I will be looking forward to book 2.

Review: Semiosis by Sue Burke

Title: Semiosis
Author: Sue Burke
Publication Date: February 2018
Publisher: Tor Books
Edition: Hardcover
Rating: ***/*****
Note: This review may contain spoilers.

Semiosis was not the sort of book I would normally have picked up. While I do like the occasional science fiction novel, I often find myself glazing over while reading them, lost in a maze of in depth scientific or technical stuff that I just can't find it in me to care about. And also, this novel spans a number of generations, so that every couple of chapters the timeline jumps forward and we're presented with an entirely new cast of characters. None of this sounded particularly promising to me. But on the recommendation of a relative, I gave it a try.

In brief, the book follows several generations of colonists who have left Earth to escape the encroaching environmental ruin and start a new life elsewhere. They find out quickly that they share the planet with sentient plants, and the first colonists, in keeping with their plan to live in harmony with the natural world and not repeat the mistakes made on Earth, find a mutually advantageous way of living with the plants.

There is a lot to like about this book. The original colonists start out with the best of intentions, but very quickly their colony turns into a grim and hopeless place, where any expression of art or creativity of any kind is discouraged as frivolous. When the young people of the second generation discover an abandoned city, surely the product of newcomers to the planet like themselves, they rebel and over the next few generations build a society that is far more like what the original colonists had in mind. They way I read it, the ones native to Earth never quite managed to stop thinking and behaving the way they had before they left.  They ran their colony with deception, corruption, and oppression. It was only those native to Pax who were able to truly implement the basic ideas of peace and harmony with nature that their parents instilled in them.

My biggest problem was that the episodic nature of the story, with a new generation taking center stage every chapter or two, made it very hard to really be invested in the characters, their community, and what happened to them. The only character that endures through the whole book (well, from the second generation on, anyway), is the sentient tree Stevland that sees the humans as his 'animals,' and who spends a great deal of time and effort 'training' them to take care of him, influencing their behavior, and eventually communicating with them directly. It feels strange to say that a tree had more of a character arc than any of the humans, but it's the truth. He goes from tending to the humans as if they were a flock of sheep to counting himself as a member of their community.  None of the human characters are particularly memorable, though, largely because we spend so little time with any of them. I don't think there would have been a way to tell the story with one generation or even two generations, but I ended up feeling a little disconnected, not really caring about the people or the community very much at all.

There are those who love, or at least aren't bothered by, that sort of episodic storytelling, and for those people this book is definitely worth a read.

Introduction

The idea behind this blog is to keep track of the books I read, and my thoughts on them. For now, it's just for me. If people start to read it eventually, that will be great, too.

I hope to have at least one new book to post per week. That of course depends on a lot of things, but it is my goal. Hopefully this will keep me reading even if I'm not particularly enjoying a book, and help me to better articulate why some books work for me and some don't.

My primary genre is fantasy, with the occasional science fiction thrown in. That is why I chose this blog title. I read other things, too, though, and will include those books as well.

My first real book post is coming up soon, a review of Semiosis by Sue Burke.