Category: Reviews

Once Upon a Time: “Save Henry”

I’ll be honest, I have mixed feelings about season 3 of Once Upon a Time. The Neverland plot has been plodding along at a glacial pace, and the persistent relegation of Regina to the background is rather annoying (seriously, taking one of the most interesting characters in the show and giving her one or two lines an episode doesn’t make for compelling TV). But in last Sunday’s episode, “Save Henry,” Regina finally gets to do something beyond occasional snark AND we finally get to leave Neverland behind. That’s definitely a win-win situation.

The flashback portion of the episode seems to answer one of the core mysteries of the show: why the hell did Regina decide to adopt Henry in the first place? To some extent, it’s always felt like something of an ass pull since the Regina we saw in the Enchanted Forest wasn’t exactly agonizing over the ticking of her biological clock, though season 2’s “Welcome to Storybrooke” helped lay the groundwork for the explanation by showing us how Regina bonded with Owen.

Maybe if I cast "Silence" on him...
Photo credit: ABC/Jack Rowland.

In “Save Henry,” we learn that Regina’s desire for a child is shown to be a side-effect of her decision to commit patricide in order to cast the Curse. That left her with a hole in her own heart, though it can’t be too vexing since she waits 18 years before deciding that a child might help fill the void. Rather than jump through the hoops of the standard adoption process, Regina decides to ask Mr. Gold for help (I have to admit that I snickered when he thought that Regina was asking him for some, ahem, biological help with obtaining a baby). Since this is Mr. Gold, he has no problem sourcing a baby in Boston.

After agreeing to a closed adoption, Regina now has her very own bouncing bundle of pain-in-the-ass, but it isn’t long until little Henry’s incessant crying is driving her up the fucking wall. She takes Henry to Dr. Whale, who suggests that it’s vaguely possible that Henry has some sort of genetic problem, which seems like a naked plot contrivance designed to give Regina a reason to send her lackey Sydney (remember him?) on a hunt for the identity of Henry’s birth mother.

When Regina finds out that Henry’s mother was discovered outside Storybrooke just after the Curse struck, she yells at Mr. Gold, accusing him of playing his own game. Although he feigns confusion, the show definitely gives the impression that he knows more than he lets on. If that is indeed the case, the writers have a problem on their hands. Previously, they said in an interview that Mr. Gold didn’t remember that he was Rumpelstiltskin until Emma came to Storybrooke. Although this has never been explicitly stated in the show itself, it’s been heavily implied.[end]Mr. Gold has an obvious reaction when learning Emma’s name in the first episode, and when Regina goes to see him in “Welcome to Storybrooke,” he seems oblivious to his past life as the Dark One.[/end] At this point, it’s hard to say whether this is a retcon or just careless writing.

Speaking of retcons, there’s an unambiguous one later on in this episode. After flirting with the idea of handing Henry back to the adoption agency, Regina decides that the best thing for her to do is take a magic roofie potion that will make her forget about Henry’s birth mother as well as Mr. Gold’s shady baby-procurement methods. But this causes all sorts of plot problems, since in the first season it’s clear that Regina remembers how she got Henry, and it’s also strongly implied that she knew who Emma was the moment she showed up in Storybrooke. So what happened to the magic roofie? Did it wear off? Did Emma’s arrival nullify it? It’s not at all clear, and the writers appear have created a rather nasty plot hole.

The present-time storyline is focused, as the title of the episode suggests, on saving Henry, who is now comatose after giving his heart to Peter Pan (literally) in the previous episode. They can’t revive him, so Regina casts a preservation spell on him to keep him fresh while they go after Pan. For some reason, this preservation spell will only last an hour even though Regina used a similar spell to keep her dead boyfriend on ice for years.

Although Regina wants to extract Pan’s whereabouts from the Lost Boys through torture, Emma manages to get them to spill the beans with nothing more than a liberal application of maternal love. Apparently, he’s at the “Thinking Tree” (which sounds like it’s the Giving Tree‘s more intellectual sibling). Emma, Regina, and Snow White go hunting for Pan and find Pandora’s Box waiting for them in a clearing. Because Snow is kind of an idiot, she immediately grabs it. Obviously, it’s a trap, and the three ladies are tied to the tree by CGI vines. Pan comes down to snark at them, telling them that the tree will feed off their regrets. At this point, I was afraid the show would give us a long, angsty scene where the three of them come to terms with their regrets, but instead, Regina points out that she doesn’t regret anything she’s done and bursts through the vines. She rips Henry’s heart out of Pan’s chest without further ado, and I rejoice at the welcome acceleration of the plot.

After Henry gets his heart back, everyone piles on board the Jolly Roger to go home. Rumpelstiltskin is reunited with his son (aww!) and good vibes abound. Regina is somehow able to tether the Evil Shadow that serves as the genus loci of Neverland to the Jolly Roger‘s sail (they trapped it in Neal’s coconut nightlight earlier in the season), which allows them to fly away. However, they inexplicably left Henry unguarded down below, and he’s attacked by Peter Pan. Pan can’t re-take Henry’s heart since Regina at least had the foresight to put the magical version of The Club on it, so he tries to tear Henry’s shadow away instead.

Up above, Rumpelstiltskin realizes that something’s wrong and runs downstairs to trap Pan in Pandora’s Box (turnabout is fair play, after all). But while Pan is struggling against the pull of the box, Henry’s eyes flash, which kind of telegraphs the last-minute plot twist. Pan and Henry have done a Freaky Friday, so Henry’s now trapped in the box and Pan is free to cause more mischief. The episode ends with Pan!Henry telling chief Lost Boy Felix that it’s “time to play.” Dun dun duuuuun…

Despite the retconning and some shaky aspects of the Henry Adoption Plot,[end]I find it a little hard to believe that the adoption agency would just let Regina change her mind about giving Henry back at the last minute, considering they already had another placement lined up. Speaking of which, the other placement turned out to be Wendy’s brothers, who wanted to hand Henry over to Pan. Somehow, I’m not sure that an adoption agency would see two seemingly college-aged brothers as ideal candidates for a baby’s new parents![/end] I liked this episode. I’m so glad to be out of Neverland at last. This season’s episodes have crawled along at a snail’s pace, and having everyone team up to search for Henry has really thrown the show’s dynamic off. 

Thoughts on finishing Merlin

The Physicist and I finished watching Merlin this evening, and I have to say, I wasn’t a fan of the series finale.

My biggest gripe is that so many people spent the finale holding the Idiot Ball. Why was Gwaine stupid enough to spill state secrets to some cheap doxy he’d just met? Why the hell didn’t Merlin ask the Dragon for help earlier? Why did Percival and Gwaine think that they had any hope of bringing down a powerful sorceress on their own? The answer, of course, is that they had to set up Arthur’s death, but they still made the characters seem woefully stupid.

I think it also sucks that we never got to see the promised golden age of Albion. Throughout the entire series, we’ve been told that Merlin is destined to help Arthur unite the kingdoms and bring about an age of wonder, but it never happens. All we get are some passing references to a few years of prosperity occur in between seasons 4 and 5, and the show ends with Merlin being consigned to a rather lonely existence as he waits for his boyfriend to come back from the dead. This makes the whole series seem futile.

It also doesn’t help that season 5 as a whole was rather lackluster. While it was nice that they finally moved away from the rigidly episodic format of the earlier seasons, they frittered away too much time on inane side plots like Evil!Gwen. I also missed the lighthearted tone of the earlier seasons. What is it with campy, fluffy shows going all dark and gritty as they go on? Xena and Buffy did the same thing, and I think it usually hurts the show.

I did appreciate the fact that Arthur’s character finally got to develop in season 5. In the early seasons, they had a nasty habit of hitting the Reset Button every time he learned a lesson, but towards the end he finally got to grow and mature. Sadly, the same can’t be said for Merlin. I suppose one could argue that he’s a bit harsher in season 5, but I would’ve liked to have seen more pronounced development. It was particularly annoying that, even at the very end, he was still blurbling about how his destiny was to serve Arthur. I think it would have been much cooler if Merlin had outed himself as a sorcerer before the final episode. It would have been neat to see Arthur come to grips with that in normal circumstances instead of the deathbed acceptance we got.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of season 5, I thought the way they handled Mordred’s betrayal sucked. Having him ragequit Camelot over some chick who’s never been seen or mentioned before was just stupid. In the episode, he kept claiming that they were besties from way back, but it would have been nice if they’d done a better job of working that particular relationship into the plot.

Despite my complaints about the end, I have to say that I enjoyed Merlin overall. It’s not going to go down as one of my all-time favorite shows, but it was fun to watch. Colin Morgan and Bradley James are both fine actors (Morgan did a particularly nice job in the finale—those were some heavy scenes, yet he never seemed overwrought or melodramatic) and they had great chemistry together. With any luck, they’ll collaborate again at some point.

Grammarly review

Recently, the good folks at Grammarly were kind enough to invite me to review their their product. In case you haven’t heard of it, Grammarly is an online “writing-enhancement platform” that offers proofreading and plagiarism-checking capabilities.

Grammarly is simple to use. You just paste or upload your text and click the review button (though you also have the option of choosing from several different standards of review, including business, technical, and casual). When it has finished its review, your writing is given a numerical score (100 is the best) and then it takes you through the piece line by line to show you where it thinks you goofed.

I spent a great deal of time playing around with Grammarly, and I used samples from many different sources. Unfortunately, I came to the conclusion that I can’t recommend Grammarly since it’s bedeviled by false positives and bizarre suggestions.

Grammarly’s commonly confused words checker is particularly inept. It wanted me to change ‘seat’ to ‘set’ in the following sentence: “The Green Party has given a seat to London Assembly member Jenny Jones….” It also thought that ‘culled’ should be ‘called,’ and ‘polity’ should be ‘policy.’

The spellchecker is similarly dodgy. It flagged ‘unbeliever’ and ‘China’ as misspelled words! I suspect punctuation might have had something to do with it: ‘unbeliever’ was originally in quotes, while ‘China’ originally had an apostrophe and an ‘s’ at the end. But a program that gets confused by basic punctuation doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

Grammarly’s grammar checker also got tripped up on a number of occasions. It flagged the word ‘have’ in the following sentence: “A total of 30 new peers have been appointed…” Grammarly argued that the subject of the sentence was a singular or uncountable noun and therefore it did not agree with the present tense verb ‘have.’ The original sentence was correct, however. ‘Total’ can take either a plural or a singular verb depending on context: if it’s preceded by ‘the,’ it’s singular; if it’s preceded by ‘a,’ it’s plural. Here endeth the lesson.

Grammarly is not without its benefits, though. Having multiple standards of review is helpful, although I wish that I had more control over what it was looking for. The ‘creative’ standard seemed to work best for fiction, but it’s a barebones evaluation. It doesn’t flag passive voice or sentences that begin with conjunctions, and while those things are arguably less of an issue in creative writing, it would be nice if you could choose to include them in a creative-level review.

Grammarly’s plagiarism checker also seems to work reasonably well. When I used articles that I’ve published online,  each one was flagged because of its similarities with the published version. One cool thing is that Grammarly will compose a citation in each of the standard styles (e.g. MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.) that you can use to cite the work. It’s a rather handy feature if, like me, you hate formatting bibliographies.

Alas, these pluses don’t outweigh the minuses. Wading through a slew of false positives and erroneous suggestions gets old fast. Even when Grammarly got things right, I didn’t find it all that helpful (I don’t need to spend $29.95 a month to find conjunctions at the beginnings of sentences!). Until they fine-tune things, you’re probably better off sticking with MS Word’s spelling and grammar checkers followed by old-fashioned human proofreading.

My new Kindle!

After weeks of hemming and hawing, I finally bought a new Kindle. My old Kindle Keyboard 3G bit the dust in a cat-related accident, so it was time for an upgrade.

Because I’m a cheap bastard, I went with the basic model with the special offers, though the Paperwhite was certainly tempting. Since the basic Kindle no longer has a physical keyboard, a touchscreen would have made the onscreen keyboard a bit easier to use. But I never did much typing on my old Kindle, so it seemed silly to spend an extra $50 for something I would rarely use (yeah, I know you also use the touchscreen to turn the pages, but I kinda like having the buttons for some reason).

Gompers better not break this one!
My new Kindle.

I think the new Kindle looks a lot nicer than the Kindle Keyboard. While the latter always reminded me of the PDAs my dad had in the late 90s, the former is much sleeker. It looks very tablet-like. It’s also a hell of a lot lighter than the older model.

The one annoying thing is that Amazon no longer includes a wall-socket adapter with their new Kindles. Fortunately, I still had the one that came with the Kindle Keyboard. Otherwise, Amazon would have charged me $14.99 for it (and that’s a discounted price that’s only good if you order it along with the Kindle; if I’d waited, the price would have gone up to $19.99!).

My first purchase on the new Kindle was a collection of short stories by Saladin Ahmed entitled Engraved on the Eye. I’m looking forward to starting it later this evening!

 

Reflections on Avatar: The Legend of Korra Book One

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!

Book One of Avatar: The Legend of Korra came to an end last month. I started watching the show with high expectations, but they swiftly took a nosedive as it progressed. Sadly, the season finale did nothing to shake me from my apathy.

I approached the show as a huge Avatar fan. I loved it so much that I purchased the boxed sets of all three seasons, which is something I rarely do since I’m such a cheapskate. I re-watch them regularly, and I can honestly say that I enjoy almost every episode (with the exception of “The Great Divide,” of course).

When I heard that they were going to make Korra, I was thrilled. I was a bit disappointed that we wouldn’t be seeing more of the original characters, but the steakmpunkesque setting looked intriguing. But after the first few episodes, my enthusiasm for the show all but vanished, and I continued watching out of a sense of duty rather than enjoyment.

Korra was originally intended as 12-episode miniseries, but that was eventually increased to 52 episodes divided into four ‘books,’ with each book having a different plot arc. The original series, on the other hand, had 61 episodes spread over three books. Because Korra has shorter books, the plot is forced to move along at a much faster pace, without any filler episodes. That could have been an asset, but instead it turned out to be a problem.

The show’s pacing struck me as woefully uneven. The first part of the book is dominated by the pro-bending storyline, which gets jettisoned midway through so the Amon storyline can take center stage. After a fairly sedate beginning, viewers are subjected to plot whiplash as the remaining episodes zoom from battle to battle.

I wish the pro-bending storyline had been pruned a bit because it really wasn’t all that interesting. The institutionalized nature of the combat managed to make bending boring. At their core, all the pro-bending scenes were the same. Two teams would meet in an arena and lob elements at each other. They were a poor substitute for the varied combat shown in the original series.

The Amon storyline is less repetitious, but things move so quickly that everything seems curiously devoid of impact. The finale contains some genuine drama when Amon manages to strip Korra of most of her bending skills. For a few moments, I thought that the second part of the season would focus on her struggle to regain her mastery of the other elements, and I was genuinely excited.

Alas, Avatar Aang comes along in the last few minutes of the episode and restores her bending while dispensing some pap about how her recent suffering has made her a true Avatar. Apparently, Korra can now tap into her spiritual side, but it’s kind of hard to see this as a momentous achievement when her lack of spirituality hasn’t been mentioned since the first episode.

Of course plot problems can be overlooked if the characters are sufficiently engaging. Sadly, Korra’s weren’t. I think the lack of filler episodes really hurt the characterization. The original series handled filler episodes very well because they often ended up being more character-driven. “Zuko Alone,” “The Tales of Ba Sing Se,” and “The Beach,” are all great examples of how the original series managed to flesh out the characters.

But there wasn’t room for anything like that in Korra, and so everyone remained pretty one-dimensional. Compared to Aang, Korra’s personality seemed pretty flat. She felt like a generic Strong Female Character, and I think it’s because we weren’t allowed to get to know her gradually. She also didn’t seem to face many interior struggles. True, she had problems with the spiritual side of being the Avatar, but that it’s not really a ‘struggle’ when it’s mentioned once at the beginning and then forgotten about until the finale.

Her relationship with Mako felt similarly flat. There was never really any chemistry or tension between them. True, Mako had the hots for Asami for a while, but she might as well have worn a nametag reading “Hi, my name’s Asami, and I’m a plot complication.” There was no reason to think of her as a credible rival to Korra.

And then there’s Amon, the main villain of the book. Although he gets points for having a plot that’s more sophisticated than the usual KILL, KILL, KILL!!!, he’s still rather bland until the finale fleshes out his backstory a bit more. He can’t really hold a candle to either Zuko or Azula from the first series.

I haven’t totally given up on Korra, and I’m willing to watch a bit of Book Two to see if things get better. But I certainly won’t be rushing out to buy Book One anytime soon.

Diablo 3 Beta: Patch 13

I know some of my readers follow Diablo III, so I thought I’d include a shameless plug for my review of Patch 13 over at the Toonari Post:

Part 1

Part 2

It has all sorts of juicy info about the new skill system (which, incidentally, is really cool, despite what the naysayers say).

In other Diablo-related news, it looks like we may actually have a release date before the sun dies. According to Jay Wilson, we’ll see a release date announcement “in the near future.”  Exciting as this news is, I’m trying not to get my hopes up. After all, Blizzard’s definition of ‘the near future’ may be radically different from that of the man on the Clapham omnibus. 🙂

The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss

I recently finished The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss, which is rather shameful since it’s been out for almost a year now and Rothfuss is one of my favorite authors. What can I say? Life intervened, as she so often does.

TWMF continues the story of Kvothe, the music-loving arcanist first introduced in 2007’s The Name of the Wind (which I keep mistyping as The Name of the Rose!). The whole series is actually a story-within-a-story. Kvothe (now masquerading as a simple innkeeper named Kote) is telling his life’s story to an itinerant scholar known as Chronicler. And it’s quite the story: in TNOTW, Kvothe was orphaned at a young age when his parents were killed by the mysterious Chandrian. After spending years begging on the streets, Kvothe finally enters the Arcanum, a school for the study of the arcane arts. Although Kvothe soon shows himself to be a talented arcanist, his temper often lands him in trouble, and he makes a lasting enemy of a young nobleman named Ambrose.

In TWMF, Kvothe’s feud with Ambrose takes a sinister turn when it looks like Ambrose is using ‘sympathy’ to try to hurt him. Sympathy involves forging magical links between objects, and Kvothe believes that Ambrose has used some of his blood to create a sort of voodoo doll. Eventually, Kvothe triumphs over his rival, but he is then arrested on charges stemming from the events in the first book. Although Kvothe escapes punishment, it is clear that Ambrose and his family hold a deep grudge, so Kvothe’s friends and instructors convince him to take a break from his studies until things have cooled down.

During his ‘vacation,’ Kvothe heads to Severen to gain the patronage of the local Maer. Kvothe is ultimately unsuccessful in obtaining full patronage, but along the way he foils a plot against the Maer, hunts bandits, has copious amounts of sex with a Fae woman, and learns a nifty new set of combat moves from a mysterious warrior race. By the time he returns to the Arcanum, he’s a much different person. Kvothe the boy is now Kvothe the man, and he has finally begun to learn how to effectively control his powers.

TWMF has received the same near-universal acclaim as its predecessor, but I’m afraid I’m going to be one of the few dissenting voices. Don’t get me wrong: TWMF is a very good book. I think Rothfuss is one of the best world-builders in fantasy, and I really, really like his prose. Like N.K. Jemisin or Genevieve Valentine, he writes elegantly yet simply, without the ponderous prolixity that often mars fantasy novels. Rothfuss has also done a wonderful job developing Kvothe’s character. He could have very easily become a ‘Marty Stu,’ but his flaws help keep him believable.

My biggest problem with TWMF is that it the story often bogs down. The scenes with Felurian (the uber-sexy fae woman who has a reputation for humping men to death) drag on and on. Interesting things do happen (such as his encounter with the Cthaeh), but they’re obscured by the repetitive sex talk. Similarly, Kvothe’s time among the Adem felt a lot longer than it really was. The Lethani is a cool concept, but I sometimes felt like I was being beat over the head with it.

There were also a few WTF? moments. Kvothe’s trial came out of left-field, and it sort of felt like that whole episode had originally been intended for the first book. It seemed strange that Ambrose’s family would have waited so long to have Kvothe brought before a judge. Maybe it just took them a while to grease enough palms.

Kvothe’s sudden decision to run after Felurian also struck me as odd. Granted, Kvothe can be the King of Bad Decisions at times, but his eager pursuit of her made me scratch my head. He’s supposed to be returning to the Maer’s court, yet he drops everything to make time with some Fae harlot. I suppose one could argue that Felurian’s supernatural allure combined with Kvothe’s natural brashness to make him cast reason aside, but it still seemed weird. I did not get the sense that Felurian’s appeal was impossible to resist; the other male members of Kvothe’s group managed to keep their distance from her.

Ultimately, the entire book felt like one big digression from the main plot. I would have liked to have learned more about the Chandrian and the Amyr, which have lurked at the margins of the plot since the beginning of the series. Given Rothfuss’ talent, the side road is still an attractive proposition, but I sure was glad when Kvothe returned to the Arcanum (and the main plotline) at the end.

 

 

A disappointing read

Few things are more frustrating than picking up a book by one of your favorite authors only to realize that it’s nowhere near as good as you were expecting. I experienced that very feeling when I finished House of Illusions by Pauline Gedge.

I’ve been a fan of Gedge ever since I read her Scroll of Saqqara, which is basically a retelling of the story of Prince Khaemwaset and the Book of Thoth. Her blend of history and fantasy made a huge impression on me, and it inspired me to write Evil in Thebes.

Unlike the Scroll of Saqqara, House of Illusions is a more traditional piece of historical fiction that is largely devoid of fantastic elements. Set during the reign of Ramesses III, it’s told from the perspective of three POV characters: Kamen, a young military officer; Kaha, a scribe who works for Kamen’s father; and Thu, a disgraced concubine living in exile.

Therein lies my biggest complaint about the book. As my regular readers know, I’m not a fan of multiple-POV characters to begin with, but the way it was handled here was particularly vexing. Even though the stories of Kamen, Kaha, and Thu do overlap, they seemed oddly isolated, despite the fact that they’re telling the same story. For example, in Kamen’s chapters, there’s a very interesting subplot wherein he starts to develop actual romantic feelings for Takhuru, the young lady to whom his father has betrothed him. She starts out as a spoiled little bitch, but she becomes much more sympathetic and interesting as the book proceeds. Unfortunately, once the narration switches to Kaha, she more or less vanishes from the story (though she continues to be mentioned in passing). The same thing happens to Kaha once it’s Thu’s turn to put on the narrator’s hat. I think it would have been a lot more satisfying if the reader had a chance to hear from each narrator throughout the course of the story instead of confining each one to a particular set of chapters.

The pacing also left something to be desired. There’s danger for the first 200 pages or so, but then it peters out and the last 200 pages are devoted to a long, drawn out resolution that’s more or less devoid of serious conflict. I also found that some of the ceremonial scenes dragged on and on, which is saying something since I usually have a high tolerance for such things!

Gedge excels, however, at bringing ancient Egypt to life. She does a great job of providing enough details to set the scene without deluging the reader with extraneous information. Even though Gedge uses first-person narrators, she manages to avoid having them give anachronistic descriptions of things that they wouldn’t have thought twice about in real life. For the most part, her depiction of Egypt is an accurate one, and she gets bonus points for using accurate names (though she does refer to the king by his modern name of ‘Ramesses the Third,’ which is slightly annoying). The only major research fail I saw was that she repeatedly mentions fountains. As far as I know, there’s no evidence for fountains of any kind in pharaonic Egypt.

Despite my disappointment, I’m still a fan of Pauline Gedge, and I’m still willing to read her other books. I just hope they’re more like Scroll of Saqqara!

The Man with the Golden Torc by Simon R. Green

This morning, I finished The Man with the Golden Torc by Simon R. Green.  It’s been on my To Read list for four years now, but it wasn’t until I got the Kindle that I finally got around to picking it up.  Oh well.  Better late than never, I suppose.

Edwin (“Eddie”) Drood is part of the Drood family.  Their family business is keeping the world safe from supernatural threats.  This is no rag-tag Scoobie Gang.  The Droods are equipped with the latest gadgetry (both scientific and magical) and they run their operation with all the slickness of the CIA or MI5.  Their greatest weapon is the golden torc that they wear around their necks.  When activated, the torc creates mystical golden armor that covers the entire body and makes the wearer well-nigh invulnerable.

Eddie is a reluctant participant in the family business and he prefers to keep his distance.  But when a special mission goes wrong, it emerges that Eddie has been declared rogue by the Drood Matriarch and he is forced to turn against his own family, who are now trying their best to kill him.  All kinds of hijinks ensue and Eddie ends up teaming up with former enemy Molly Metcalf (the wild witch of the woods) as he tries to bring his family down.  Along the way, he learns some pretty unpleasant things about the source of his family’s power, which leads him to question everything he’s been taught.

Although the book was enjoyable enough, I can’t say that it was an unqualified success.  My biggest gripe was that there were places where Green just went completely over the top.  Early on, Eddie is attacked by carnivorous automobiles, dragon-riding elves,  the ghosts of people who died on the motorway, and evil  techno-magicians with flying saucers.  All in the same scene.  Individually, there’s nothing wrong with these these foes, but it’s a bit much to have them all attack in the same scene.  That’s by far the most egregious example, but there are many other places where Green throws everything but the kitchen sink at the reader, making it harder and harder to suspend disbelief.

On the whole, the characters are dynamic and interesting (I especially liked Molly).  Sometimes, however, they behave in ways that defy common sense.  Toward the end of the book, when Eddie and Molly are infiltrating the Drood family home, she ends up “pouting rebelliously” because she’s not allowed to look at something in the house.  Rebellious pouting just doesn’t seem like a logical response when you’re behind enemy lines and could be killed at any moment.  There’s also a supernatural entity at the end of the book whose behavior just makes you scratch your head and go “huh?”

Green’s “Secret Histories” series is basically an homage to James Bond (Eddie’s secret agent moniker is actually “Shaman Bond”), so perhaps I would have appreciated this book more if I were a fan of 007.  I’ll probably read the other books in the series, but only when I have a gap in my To Read list.

 

The amazing clockwork circus

I can cross a book off of my summer reading list!  As you may have seen in my last post, I was unsure of what to read first, but I ended up settling on Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti.

It’s the story of a circus whose performers have all been turned into vaguely steampunkish creations: there’s a guy whose lungs have been replaced with clockwork bellows, the aerialists’ bones have been replaced by hollow copper facsimiles, and the strongman has a metal spine with a clock sticking out of his back.    The circus travels around a post-apocalyptic world where governments come and go and never control more than a tiny smidgeon of the map at any one time.  Eventually, a scheming government official (known only as “the government man,” which made me think of the G-Man from Half Life) takes an interest in the circus because he believes that the technology inside of the performers could be used to create an army of super soldiers.

I really shouldn’t have liked this story.  The plot zips forward and backward like a trapeze artist and there are multiple POV characters.  Although most of the narration is third person omniscient, it sometimes veers into first person.  But you know what?  It worked.  These are all things that I usually dislike, but they never irritated me in this story.  The writing is so strong and artful that you just get sucked in.

Even though the main plot comes to a satisfactory resolution, the reader is still left with a number of unanswered questions.  It’s never explained how Boss (the lady who runs the circus and does all the machining) got her strange power.  Nor is it explained why the world was apparently engulfed in chaos.  But it really doesn’t matter within the confines of the story.  All you need to know is that Boss has this power and that the world has fallen apart.  The details are irrelevant.  And the more details you give, the more you invite your readers to peer behind the illusion you’ve created.

A final note: if I didn’t have a Kindle, I probably wouldn’t have read this book.  I’m not all that into steampunk, and I would’ve been reluctant to shell out $14.95 for the paperback edition.  But the Kindle edition was just $4.95, so I was willing to take the risk.  And I’m sure glad I did.

Next in the reading queue: The Man With the Golden Torc.